LIGHT IN AN EVENTIDE HOME
John Benedict Baignard on life
in a nursing home for clergymen awaiting the greatest adventure
OF COURSE it could all too easily be boring — deadly boring. That's up to the patient; so much is clear almost before they get you out of the car and wheel you into the front hall on arrival. The car pulls up and you realise that this is where you are going to die.
I arrived two years ago. There had been some thought of a Cheshire Home for a patient discharged from the National Hos- pital for Nervous Diseases after 'a slight operation on the back of your neck'. Cheshire Homes give you a room of your own, and there is some communal life diversified by patients from various walks of life; and that should suit a 'minister of religion', accustomed to a lifetime of being one on his own in a community. But multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease do have the appearance of lowering the IQ, however false that may be: what was bound to be a life sentence would have been unnecessarily more depressing; and so it was decided that the alternative would be better: a place in a ten-bedded ward in a 'Surely it's not that bad a newspaper.' home run for men of the same calling and denomination.
As a youngster in my first job after the war, I took note of the foresight of my ecclesiastical superiors in opening 'even- tide homes' for the elderly in need of care. In my neck of the woods in the North-East the Churches took the lead: we were all going to live much longer in future. They were the first; they were under-financed, and they were pretty awful. The one I live in now is a byword for up-to-date thinking. It is built on the conveyor belt system, and we are told that it is the only one in the country: that means that it is the only one in a large nationwide Church. Clerical couples or single men may apply to occupy one of the flats in a block built out on to the east side of a comfortable 19th-century house, which has an imposing entrance hall, with administrative offices upstairs.
Adjoining the house on the west is a nursing wing with four wards, one double and three single rooms. Conveniently, the chapel is at the front door, it being a large room adapted for worship in completely uninspired taste — something, one sus- pects, of an afterthought. The dwellers in the flats are squeamish about using it as a mortuary, and so it is not used for that purpose. When you become too infirm to live in the flats any longer, you are welcomed, God help you, into one of the wards, reminiscent of a school dormitory or barrack life; space and privacy are henceforth at a premium. People from both sides of the community meet together for worship in the chapel, and patients in nursing care would not at all object to its use as a mortuary. Death, it seems, must be banished from the mind if you can still walk on two feet.
Prisoners we may be, inmates if you must, but we are rightly termed patients, because we spend most of our time waiting — waiting for the next cup of tea, the next meal or the next visit to the lavatory. The queue for that shows up one of the builder's mistakes. If we are lucky we may be waiting for a visitor, or a friend to take us out in the car, if we are continent and can get into it. Once a fortnight the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul sends us a charabanc for a couple of hours' gentle spin at 15 m.p.h. round the country lanes, giving us time to take in the passing scene. The vehicle has a loft like an ambulance, and wheelchairs are bolted to the floor, taking half an hour to load us in: waiting again, and how distressing that can be to pelvic muscles failing for want of use by sitting all day.
Numerically we are a lopsided lot: a home for ministers or clergy, we are none the less outnumbered by other men's widows by four or five to one. There is no need to campaign for Women's Lib here: we are a woman-dominated society. Even the table napkins — unhygienic things -- are scarcely the size of a man's pocket handkerchief. The entire staff are women, except for an administrative warden, and the cook, and a handyman who gets rid of the refuse. About three women, out of about 60, are university graduates; my own wife would have made a fourth had she lived. The rest, octogenarians and older, are of an age when few indeed were the women who aspired to a university educa- tion, and come from a social milieu well suited to the people to whom their hus- bands ministered. They ran their women's meetings for them, and gave a hand with the Sunday schools. The liveliest mind by far among these ladies belongs to one who is still articulate past her 99th birthday, surrounded by the others, who sit in a circle round the walls of the sitting-room silently sucking barley sugar.
My faith is unshaken by what has befal- len me in my early sixties. It is difficult to know what one can do to contribute to the common life while suffering a severe hand- icap. The place is surrounded by several other nursing homes, all seeking to profit from their inmates' fees. Ours costs £11,000 a year, but capital has been hard to put by on our modest stipends, and almost all of us are subsidised. Our visiting doc- tors tell us that ours is by far the best found of those around us. Nonetheless it is a matter for regret that the funds available ruled out placing the building contract with Costain or Taylor Woodrow, and made it necessary to employ a local architect, who seems to have forgotten that the nurses need special baths to keep us clean, and that not all of us have to urinate or defecate in bed, so we need lavatories.
Twice in my time I have come close to death; on each occasion it was an exhilarat- ing experience, as I seem to have a strong taste for adventure. To die will be the greatest adventure of all; and now that for two years I have _watched good men disin- tegrate in mind and body I have done one thing with the firmest conviction. I have pledged my support to the Voluntary Euthanasia Society; but I am puzzled because every time I want to think of their name, the Anti-Vivisection Society crops up in my head. I think it must be because my body, I hope, is going to be dissected by medical students.
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