Читать книгу Blessings - Mary Craig  - Страница 9

CHAPTER 1

‘YOU KNOW HE ISN’T NORMAL . . .’

In 1956 there were three of us: Frank, my husband, an industrial chemist whom I had met when we were both undergraduates at Oxford, Anthony, our year-old son and myself. We had just had a house build in a village a few miles outside of Derby, but we did not really belong to that part of the country, and the Midlands never felt like home. Home for Frank was Hampshire, whereas I had sprung from the smoke and soot of St Helens, a grey town in what was then called Lancashire. Nowadays it has been renamed Merseyside, much to the disgust of its inhabitants.

We spent quite a lot of time in St Helens, since my widowed mother lived there, and it was not such a very long haul from Derby in our tinny second-hand Morris Eight. Whenever we went there, a little spastic girl who lived lower down the road used to come in and play with Anthony. She was a nice child, very gentle and affectionate, and really very intelligent. But she filled me with horror simply because she was not normal, and I hated abnormality of any kind. I despised myself for it, but every time that M. came to my mother’s house, a wave of revulsion swept over me. I could not bear to see this malformed and inarticulate child play with my son; and I wished with all my heart that she would stay sway.

Where we lived in Derbyshire we had no Catholic church, but attended Mass every Sunday in a hired room above a local pub. Among the fairly small congregation was a woman who came along each week with her three tall sons. I no longer remember the names of the other two, but the middle one, I know, was called John, and he was learning-disabled. After Mass, the mother always made a fuss of this boy, taking his arm lovingly on the way home. Could she not see how repulsive he was? Did she, I wondered, see him as he really was, or were mothers of such children blinded by mother-love?

Like most people, I suppose, I was frightened by my rare encounters with the unthinkable. I cherished the belief that abnormality was something that happened to others. It couldn’t possibly happen to me. But it did.

My second pregnancy was unremarkable, except that I was sick rather a lot, and was unusually nervy and irrational. (On the day when two gipsy-women had called at the house selling clothes-pegs and heather, Frank found me sitting under the stairs, terrified to death, when he came home from work.) For the birth itself I went over to St Helens, where I had booked an amenity bed in a small teaching-hospital near my mother’s home. The night that I went into labour, I remember speaking to a friend on the telephone, and telling her that I was scared stiff, much more frightened than I had been the first time. And it wasn’t really the pain that I was afraid of; there was a deeper, free-floating anxiety which I was at a loss to explain.

It was, in fact, a very difficult labour, followed by a high forceps delivery and a breech birth. I lost an inordinate amount of blood, and afterwards felt exhausted and ill, with none of the elation which I had felt when Anthony was born. The baby, another boy, was large, about 8 lb 12 oz, and when they showed him to me, declaring that he was beautiful, I shivered. Flesh seemed to droop off him, like an overcoat several sizes too large. To my own dismay, I felt no urge to take him in my arms or cuddle him. Instead I found myself turning away.

But as the days passed the initial feeling of revulsion passed too. I stopped noticing that he looked odd, or perhaps I decided that the oddness was all in my imagination. The nurses seemed genuinely enthusiastic about him, so I began taking my cue from them.

The trouble really began when I took him home, to my mother’s , and tried to feed him myself, as I had done with Anthony enjoyably enough. He was insatiable, and although I had plenty of milk I was soon making up a bottle for him as well. First half-strength, then full-strength. It didn’t matter how much I gave him, he went on crying and looking for more. In the end I gave up trying to breast-feed and put him on to extra-strength powdered milk. Not that it made much difference, but it was less exhausting for me. In retrospect it seems to me that he didn’t stop crying for the next five years or so, but I suppose memory is playing me false. He must have slept sometimes.

We called him Paul Christopher. Friends assured us that once he had passed his first birthday he was bound to improve; and we waited longingly for that scarcely-to-be-believed-in day. Meanwhile he cried so long and so hard that he ruptured himself. He was only ten weeks old when our doctor discovered a hernia and decided that an immediate operation was called for. In a way, in spite of our obvious anxiety, the crisis was something of a relief. We thought that perhaps the mystery of his crying had been solved: he had had the hernia all the time without our suspecting it. Now perhaps he would stop crying. But the crisis came and went. Paul came out of hospital crying as hard as ever.

All that crying did not seem to affect his growth, and he was putting on weight fast. The sagging pockets of flesh were filling out, and in the foolish way that parents have we rather gloated over the phenomenal growth-rate. He was well ahead of the other babies at the local clinic, tipping the scales at a rate that caused eyebrows to rise. My mother-in-law spiked our complacency by hinting that this might be a cause for alarm rather than pride, but though we were both irritated by her seeming lack of perception we did not let it worry us for long.

Paul’s first birthday arrived, that magic day when the crying was to stop and peace be restored. Alas for our hope. On that day he excelled himself, bawling for the entire day and reducing us all to a frazzle. So much for the prophecies of our friends; we should have to go on waiting.

Memories become blurred. At some time during the year that followed, I suppose he must have improved, because I remember a brief happy period when he was large and cheerful, with big china-blue eyes and masses of golden curls. An attractive child, mistaken by almost everyone for a girl. But our friends were even then beginning to be uneasy; they were noticing what we were too close to see: that Paul’s blue eyes lacked intelligence, his nose was without a bridge, and the fingers on his chubby hands were disconcertingly spatula-shaped. He had done most of the expected things at the normal time – sitting up, cutting teeth, crawling, but one thing he had not yet done was talk. Instead of talking he made bizarre noises, rough, meaningless sounds which could not possibly be mistaken for speech. Unwittingly we joked about it. Anthony by this time was very advanced for his age and was bursting to go to school. Paul, we laughed, without any sense of foreboding, was certain to grace the bottom end of the class rather than the top. Perhaps he’d be good at football instead. A visiting social worker hinted that he might be deaf and suggested a hearing-test. But deafness was an unthinkable stigma, and I would not entertain the possibility of it.

About three months before Paul was two, I discovered, to my horror, that I was pregnant again. After the last experience, I could hardly welcome the prospect of another baby, but as I would not have considered having an abortion I had to get used to the idea. I was worried, though. With a restless three-year-old Anthony, and with Paul, my hands and days were completely full. And as if to underline the awkwardness of my new state, a few days later Paul was once again whipped off into hospital – again with a strangulating hernia.

In 1957 we had moved from Derbyshire to Hale, in Cheshire, which was much nearer to St Helens. Packing Anthony off to his grandmother’s , I was free to visit the hospital as often as I was allowed. But though I went down there each day, nobody was able to tell me what the programme was likely to be. Paul had a wheezy chest, and as long as this was in evidence, it was not likely that he would be given an anaesthetic. It began to look as though he would be sent home untouched by medical hand, strangulating hernia or not.

The night when everything fell apart was a Tuesday in February, 1958, and every detail is etched like poker-work into my mind. The previous evening, the Sister in charge of the children’s ward had asked if I would come early, as the house doctor would like a word with me. Somehow I presumed that the operation must be off, and I would be asked to bring Paul in each day as an outpatient.

Frank, who at this time was a manager with the Associated Octel Company in Northwich, was bringing a French colleague home to dinner, and fitting in the 6.30 visit to the hospital was a bit difficult. I had a mad scurry round before leaving, and at six o’clock put some sort of casserole into the oven. When I came back I should have to serve the meal immediately, and I wasn’t taking any chances. No instinct told me, as I closed the front door and stepped out into the chill February night, that the door was closing on everything I had been: that this night would mark a new and fearful beginning. It seemed a night like any other, except that I was worrying about the dinner-guest.

When I got to the hospital, I didn’t go to the ward, but asked the girl at the reception-desk to tell the house-doctor that I had arrived. I was directed into a small waiting-room on the ground-floor. Within a few minutes a white-coated doctor walked in, a sheaf of papers in his hand. He was a man of about thirty or so, recently arrived from some Middle Eastern country, with no more than a sketchy idea of the English language, and none at all of the language of diplomacy.

‘You are the mother of . . . -er, -er . . .’ He riffled idly through the papers in his hand. ‘Ah, yes, Paul Craig?’ I nodded.

‘Of course, you know he is not normal,’ he continued, in the same tone as before. His voice didn’t ask a question, it made a statement.

NOT NORMAL. I stared at him blankly, my world slowly dissolving, all reality crystallising into that one murderous phrase which a stranger had just uttered with such casual ease. Not normal, not normal. My mind struggled with this alien concept, but could not grasp it. I felt buffeted by meaningless words which were heavy with menace. The voice went on, as though the world was still the same; it was a voice that struggled with a language that wasn’t its own; a voice that lacked warmth and understanding. ‘He has Höhler’s Syndrome, a rare disease. In English you call it . . . er, gargoylism.’

Through the thickening fog in my head I heard him, and into my punch-drunk consciousness swam hideous figures, straight off the pages of Notre Dame de Paris – gargoyles. Monstrous creatures carved in stone, water gushing out of their leering mouths. Oh God, not that; anything but that. Not my son.

Like a drunk crazily determined to walk a straight line if it kills him, I managed to dredge up some words. Very slowly, and as though from an immense distance, I heard my own voice ask the question which was already tormenting me. ‘Will he be all right? I mean . . . his mind. Mentally?’ I can still see that doctor shrug away the question. It was more than his scanty English could cope with – and in any case, there was no answer. ‘I do not know. You must wait and see,’ he said impatiently. And walked out.

It seemed like hours that I sat there after he had gone, not even trying to collect my scattering wits. Then in a drug-like stupor I dragged myself to the telephone and rang Frank. I don’t think I did more than ask him to come for me. I wouldn’t have found words to tell him what had happened.

In a trance I walked up the stairs to the children’s ward, where I sat looking at Paul, with a heavy boulder where my heart had been. The scales fell from my eyes then with brutal suddenness. Self-deception was no longer possible; and I could see beyond doubting that Paul would never be as other children were. The stubby fingers, the too-thick lips, the flattened, bridge-less nose, the empty eyes, all pointed to this hateful but inescapable truth which we had gone on hiding from ourselves.

Frank came and took me home. It must have been terrible for him, but I was overwhelmed by my own misery and had no room for his. We had to go through the farce of a dinner-party, since our guest was a Frenchman who had nowhere else to go while waiting for his return flight from Ringway Airport, which was about five miles from where we lived. He knew something awful had happened, but we couldn’t trust ourselves to talk about it. There was a spectre at that feast, and both the food and the effort at conversation nearly choked us.

When he had gone, we packed a suitcase apiece, and drove silently to my mother’s . She had alerted her own doctor, an old family friend, and he had left a sedative for me. I took it with relief. It was a new product, which was just finding its way on to the market, and, because it was effective that first night and was easily available over the counter in chemists’ shops, Frank went and bought a new supply of tablets for me next day. I went on taking them for several weeks. It was not until nearly two years later that the name of this product, Distaval, came into a shocking prominence, as one of the names for thalidomide. I was two months’ pregnant and I took the tablets for at least a month. My blood runs cold at the thought of our narrow escape on this occasion: Mark, the child born in the December of that year, was a perfect baby.

There is a mental blank where the next few weeks must have been. All I remember is that after the first night I could shed no tears; a great freeze had descended on my emotional system. I was not, as some people believed, ‘being wonderfully brave’; I was merely in an extended state of shock, with all my capacity for feeling paralysed. Perhaps it was nature’s own kind of anaesthetic.

What triggered the change I don’t remember, but I can never forget the night when the anaesthesia wore off, and I was left to wrestle with my blinding, asphyxiating terrors in a foretaste of hell. Despair rolled through me in waves as I looked into the future I did not want to face, and found it full of grotesque images: of enlarged heads, swollen abdomens and drooling mouths. The dreadful word ‘gargoyle’ was working its evil in me, filling me with self-pity and panic. From now on, I felt sure, I would see myself and be seen as some kind of pariah, the mother of a monstrous child. Friends would avoid me, and Paul would be taken away. Oddly enough, in view of all this self-pity, the fear of Paul’s being dragged off to an institution was the blackest one of all. However agonising it might be to look after him, I could not face the prospect of letting him go.

It was the mother of an old school-friend who brought some sanity into my exhausted brain. ‘Look,’ she said briskly, ‘if you ever do come to send him away, you and Frank will have arrived at the decision yourselves. No one is going to drag Paul away screaming. For Heaven’s sake, stop worrying about something that may never happen!’ I knew she was right, and tried to cheer up. As I got up to leave, she came out with one of those pious clichés which at certain moments have tremendous force. ‘God makes the back for the burden,’ she offered, by way of consolation. The phrase impressed me, simply because it seemed so unlikely. God had picked a loser this time, one whose back was near to breaking under the strain.

Frank and I were both Catholics, conventional enough without being particularly enthusiastic. It didn’t bother us much one way or the other, and at this stage it would not have occurred to us to look for any comfort in God or our Catholic faith. But to the Lancashire Catholics among whom I grew up (especially those of my mother’s generation) life was nothing if not religion, and there were conventional pieties to cover almost any contingency. When things went wrong, God would put them right, though it must be admitted that, in their experience, he had rarely done so. Nothing troubled their faith that God was a kind and loving Father; and doubt was alien to them, a shameful thing. My mother, I am quite sure, had never allowed even a momentary doubt to cloud her faith. Her own life had contained almost an unfair share of tragedy – she too had had a handicapped son, her husband had died of killer pneumonia at the age of thirty-two, and as his body was brought from their home in Scotland by train to Leeds for burial in the family vault, her young son had fallen from the train and been killed. Father and son were buried on the same day, while she was six months’ pregnant with her second child, myself. When the time came for me to be born, she had quite plainly decided that she would die, because she left instructions that I was to be called Dolorosa, ‘child of grief’. (I had another narrow escape there.) But that was her only concession to despair, and she never doubted that God was a loving God. Still less did she doubt His existence. My mother went every morning to Mass, and was never happier than when she was in church. Religion was not only a consolation, it was her talisman against life. Say the right prayers, make the right Novena, speak to the right saint, and all would be well. It was a childlike, untroubled faith, shared by many of her friends; and though on many occasions it reduced me to fury, I think now that such calm certainty is to be envied.

When an uncle in Dublin offered to pay all expenses if we wanted to take Paul to Lourdes, my mother was sure that her prayers had been answered. She genuinely believed that it was only a matter of time before Paul would be cured, and she urged us to accept my uncle’s offer with all speed. We, of course, were much less sanguine, but, for reasons which were not the same as my mother’s, we decided that we would go to Lourdes with Paul. We saw it as a gesture of sorts, and some kind of gesture seemed to be called for. Some symbolic act which would underline the separation of past from future. Besides, though neither of us came within a million miles of my mother’s faith, we did believe that Lourdes had something to offer us. It was not the spring-water or the hope of miracles which drew us, but the feeling that in such a place we might be able to put our own problem in perspective. If nothing else, we would have visible proof that we were not alone.

There is in fact no better cure for self-pity than Lourdes. Where the sick and the maimed seem to pour together to proclaim their hope and their faith, or even just to share their fears, it is no longer possible to believe that one’s own pain is either unique or unbearable. The discovery holds at least a measure of comfort.

We pushed, pulled and heaved Paul in a wheel-chair up, down and around, missing nothing. We went to the torchlight procession in the evening, and as a matter of course joined the massive crowds in the afternoon for the ritual blessing of the sick. It had not occurred to me to ask if I could join the group of mothers of sick children who were in a special reserved area at the front, near the altar, and generally Frank and I, with Paul, were somewhere in the middle of the heaving throng. One afternoon we had gone there as usual, and, as the priest came by, the sacred monstrance raised in his hands for blessing, the crowd fell silent. And in that pin-dropping silence Paul began to laugh. It was the laugh of a mad creature, a spine-chilling cackle that froze me to the spot with horror and shame. Suddenly an old peasant woman in a black shawl elbowed her way to where we stood and, eyes streaming with tears, lifted Paul out of his wheel-chair and held him up in her arms for the priest to bless. Paul was so astonished that he stopped laughing. It was an agonised moment, the significance of which did not escape me even at the time. It was another woman who had wept for my child, and who had taken compassion on me. Instinctively she had done what the moment demanded.

The woman’s action pulled me up short. From that moment I shook myself out of my stupor, and scraped together some scraps of courage. I can’t claim to have been inspired by anything more noble than common-sense and the urge to self-preservation, but they were enough for a start. The alternatives stared me in the face: either I could go on wallowing, over-protecting myself from hurt, becoming more and more bitter each day as I played the insidious chorus of ‘why-should-this-happen-to-me?’ as the background music to my life. Or – I could face the fact that what had happened was not going to un-happen, and might as well be come to terms with. I had been drowning in self-pity for long enough now to see where it was likely to lead. There was no doubt in my mind that I needed to change course.

Anyway, I was beginning to look forward to the new baby. A number of people had expressed horror – ‘Surely you’re not going on with it?’ Relatives and friends were full of forebodings and fears, but somehow I knew with absolute certainty that their fears would be confounded. The new baby would be a consolation, not a fresh disaster. For once I was right. The birth was easy; the child, John Mark, everything I could have hoped for. With Paul at home, and Anthony a restless, energetic four-year-old, the new baby had to be propped up with a bottle and left to get on with it. He seemed to know from the start that he couldn’t expect anything better, and to the relief of us all, he seemed to thrive on the inevitable neglect.