Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 47

And I always shook my head, too scared to be thought a baby, fighting back the tears and just relieved it was over. This went gone on for years, long into the days when I was old enough to make my own choices and painkilling injections were available because there was always this voice in my head telling me only babies and girls had injections.

I think pain brought my mother closer to her God. For me, it just convinced me more and more that he didn’t exist. There were visits with no fillings and then there were visits where teeth were pulled out. And that was the worst of all, with the man in the black suit holding the gas mask over my face while I fought to stay alive. That is a terror you never forget. There was the pain afterwards too and a mouthful of blood and nothing to make it better because my mother didn’t believe children should take aspirins.

‘Don’t be such a baby,’ she would say. ‘They were only baby teeth.’

I was also six when they took my tonsils out. Once again, I fought the gasmask as the terror of death overtook me. This time my mother wasn’t there with her helpful advice. I’d been wheeled away into the operating theatre but she was sitting by my bed when I was back in a ward full of grown-up men because there were no spare beds in the children’s ward. I couldn’t stop coughing – the stitches in my throat came undone and I coughed blood.

‘Don’t be such a baby,’ she said. ‘It’s only a little bit of blood.’

But I was six, I only had a little bit.

This was the British way, remote and cold with a stiff upper lip that built your character. No good could ever come from showing your feelings or taking pain medication. That was the sort of thing foreigners did.