Authors: John Cornwell
T
HE FIRST DAY
passed in a painless routine of meals and blood tests. I had no recurrence of the pain and tightness in my chest, except for several isolated occasions when I strained, against advice, to reach things on my bedside locker. One afternoon, early in my hospital stay, I was tempted to stroke my penis. But I felt the palpitation coming on, and stopped. A male nurse named Eamon gave me a blanket bath later that day. When the flannel reached my private parts he said: ‘Right young fellah, you do that bit for yourself, I think.’
With nothing to read, I listened to the Light programme on the radio. Tony Bennett’s song ‘Stranger in Paradise’ was being played over and over. I felt especially isolated at visiting times as there was no one to visit me and the nurses seemed to vanish too. I thought to myself: this is what it must feel like to be a leper.
On the third day Father McCartie arrived bearing the autobiography of Saint Thérèse. He sat on a chair at the end of the bed. His face was expressionless. He talked about the weather at Cotton and how Father Piercy had got the swimming pool in operation, but he soon ran out of conversation. Then he looked at his watch and said that he had to get back. When he asked me if I needed anything, I said that I would like a rosary. He fished into his pocket and brought out a substantial black and silver one. ‘You can have this,’ he said. ‘Keep it.’ Before he gave it to me, he blessed it. I thought to myself that he was not so bad after all. It occurred to me that he hated being at Cotton and longed to have a parish.
The next day Father Doran appeared in the ward outside visiting hours. He set up two small candles and a crucifix and said prayers in Latin before giving me Holy Communion. We both sat in silence as I made my thanksgiving. Then he said
that the local Catholic hospital chaplain would bring me Communion regularly now. He told me that he had written to my mother and that she would come to see me, but there was a problem with funds. ‘Your bishop,’ said Father Doran with an edge of severity, ‘will arrange for a postal order to be sent to her to cover her expenses.’ I felt ashamed. I hated to think that I was being a cost to the diocese on account of my illness.
He fiddled with his hands a great deal, as if he was longing to smoke a cigarette. He was not looking at me, but gazing out of the window. At last he got up to go and shook my hand. ‘Now get yourself better and back to Cotton as soon as you can,’ he said.
A
T THE BEGINNING
of the second week, there was a new staff nurse on night duty. She was appealing without being pretty or beautiful; she had a neat figure and auburn hair done up in a bun under her little nurse’s cap. She was very pale and did not wear make-up. She went around the ward speaking to each of the patients in turn before going about her normal ward business. When she came to me, she spotted my copy of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux on the locker. She picked it up with a faint smile about her lips.
‘Oh, are you a Catholic?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m a Catholic, too. Where do you go to school?’
‘I’m at Cotton College.’
‘Oh, you’re a seminarian.’
‘Yes.’
She seemed embarrassed and yet pleased at the same time.
When she brought me my pills, she leant against the bed a
little. ‘How are you feeling, John?’ Most of the staff called me ‘laddie’ or ‘young man’ or ‘son’. This young woman, who seemed to be in her late twenties or even older, spoke to me directly as an equal. She told me that her name was Philomena, that she lived in Burslem, and that she would be working nights for several weeks.
I had not been sleeping well at night as I often dozed during the day. At eleven o’clock, after most of the patients had fallen asleep and the ward was in darkness, I was saying the Rosary. The beads lay outside the bedclothes. Philomena came by and stood for a while, as if trying to work out whether I was asleep in the semi-darkness. I gave a small wave with my free hand and she came over.
‘Still awake, John?’
‘Yes.’
‘Saying your Rosary?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t sleep?’
‘No.’
‘How would you like a hot milk drink?’
‘That would be nice.’
She came back several minutes later with a mug of cocoa and two biscuits.
She sat on the bed, smoothing out her apron. She seemed a little nervous. As I sipped the cocoa she asked me a lot of questions. Our conversation was conducted in whispers. When did I first have a desire to become a priest? What did my mother think? What did my father think? What about my siblings? I gave her carefully edited answers, designed to enhance an idealised picture of myself and my family. That’s what I thought she wanted; and I wanted her to like me and to stay talking with me.
She asked about my prayer life, and my favourite saints. She was curious about Cotton and the routine of the day, and the discipline, and how I liked it. As I answered all these things, I
was conscious of her gazing at me in the semi-darkness, her body and her face very taut and very close.
Eventually she looked at her watch and said that the night superintendent would be making her rounds. I must try to go to sleep and she would come and see me in the morning.
Several times in the night, Nurse Philomena came by the bed and stood looking at me. I watched her through half-shut eyes, pretending to sleep because I did not want her to be concerned about me.
One day Father Armishaw turned up. He had come to the hospital on his motorbike and was wearing his dashing leather flying jacket. He pretended to be gruff, almost unsympathetic, as if I were a malingerer. ‘So what’s all this, Cornwell? Decided to take a little holiday, eh?’ But I could tell that he was really concerned. He had brought me a book: Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Travels with a Donkey.
Instead of sitting on a chair some distance away, he sat on the bed quite close to me. He asked about my condition, how I felt, what sorts of drugs I was taking, and whether I slept at night. He told me that he had spent time in hospital when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. He had suffered, he told me, from a perforated ulcer. He gave a strange guffaw as he explained in detail what happened when the ulcer burst. ‘I had to have an operation,’ he said, ‘and they give you a drug that makes you feel completely at ease before you take the anaesthetic and go under the knife. When we came to the lift to go to the operating theatre, I remember thinking…I couldn’t care less if they threw me down the lift shaft. Now isn’t that strange! The power of drugs over the mind.’ When Hilda came around with the tea, he said that he would like nothing better than to try her cake, but he had to get back to duty. She looked at him awestruck, as if he was a film star.
He stood at the door of the ward and waved before he left. A moment later he appeared again, and waved once more. Then he did it again. It was a good joke, and I laughed. He
had a broad grin on his face. He gave me a big thumbs-up sign and really went.
My talks with Nurse Philomena had become a regular fixture: gentle, clandestine, whispered. Night after night, she came to my bedside. Eventually, she waited until the night superintendent had done her first round so that we had longer to talk. Our conversations would last for as long as two hours, and there would be cocoa, and more cocoa, and biscuits, and more biscuits.
I rarely saw her face clearly as we always talked in the halflight. She spoke rapidly and self-consciously. She shut her eyes frequently for a few moments as she spoke. He expression, as far as I could tell in the twilight, was usually bland; she did not smile much or laugh much. She did not use her hands when she spoke. They usually rested on her lap. She spoke in an earnest monotone.
One night she brought in a replica of an icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, which she placed on my bedside locker. On another evening she brought in the Miraculous Medal on a very fine silver chain. She asked me to wear it around my neck.
After she had satisfied herself with questions about every detail of my life and my vocation, she began to talk rather than question. She had a lot of stories about the power of prayer, patients brought back from the brink of death, patients relieved of incurable diseases, and brought out of comas. Then there were tales of saints and martyrs. She told me about a Franciscan friar in the South of Italy called Padre Pio who could tell penitents’ sins in confession before they had admitted to them. His advice to all Christians, she said, was: ‘Pray! Hope! And don’t worry!’
Every time she came to sit on my bed she started by saying that she had been praying for me. One day, after looking at me for a long time in silence, she said: ‘You are going to make a wonderful priest. I can tell.’
T
WO WEEKS INTO
my hospital stay, I had been sleeping after lunch and woke up to find Mum standing by the bed. She was dressed in a floral frock and had a peculiar flat hat pinned into her stiffly permed hair. She was wearing a lot of make-up and looked quite glamorous. She bent over and kissed me, her eyes smiling, and said: ‘Aren’t you the poor little soldier!’ I was overjoyed to see her, and I wept a little. She dried my eyes tenderly with a handkerchief that smelt of lavender water.
She sat on the bed talking, stroking me with one large, firm hand. Every so often she would plunge into her shopping bag to bring out another item. Apples, biscuits, comic books, a bottle of Lucozade. Each time she delved into the bag, she would say: ‘Oh yes, and I’ve brought you this…’ as if to stretch out the gift ritual. She talked about the adventure of her journey from Euston to Stoke-on-Trent, and the huge cost; then there was the latest saga of her job at Wanstead hospital; then she went through every member of the family one by one. When Hilda appeared with the trolley she offered Mum a cup of tea and a piece of cake, for which she was effusively thankful. She told Hilda that she worked in a hospital too, on nights.
Eventually she said she had to catch the train back to London, but she must see the consultant before leaving the hospital. She gave me a strong hug, and she was gone.
That evening Dr Gardiner appeared and said that I could get up and try to walk. At first my legs gave way under me, but I soon found my feet and began to stroll slowly up and down the ward in a hospital dressing gown under the watchful eye of the placid-faced sister. There was no recurrence of my chest pains.
That night Philomena was off duty and I began to read
Travels with a Donkey.
It seemed like a gate into an enchanted world, and yet the account of the author’s arrival at Our Lady of the Snows seemed familiar too: I could imagine every incident with an intensely tangible and visible reality. I became so gripped that I read by my night light until I fell asleep. I awoke briefly as a strange nurse took the book softly from my hands and turned out the light.
T
HE NEXT DAY
I was allowed to sit out in the early summer sunshine on a balcony at the end of the ward. A patient named Geoff, an ex-soldier suffering from kidney disease, was there smoking a cigarette. When one of the nurses, a short dark-haired trainee, came on to the balcony to take our temperatures, he addressed her to her face as ‘Gorgeous Gussie’. After she left, he said: ‘Has Gorgeous Gussie ever given you a blanket bath? I made ‘er blush. My prick stood up like a flagpole on a parade-ground.’ And he gave a wicked laugh. My heart missed a beat when he said this. Then another nurse appeared, a staff nurse I had always thought to be strict and prim in manner. ‘Oh,’ said Geoff, ‘here’s Sweetie Pie.’ To my surprise she smiled and blushed, then ruffled his hair and told him not to be cheeky. After so much isolation, I was reminded by his banter with ‘Sweetie Pie’ that I had watched the nurses coming and going with a quiet subterranean interest of my own. I felt a pang of jealousy when the staff nurse ruffled Geoff’s hair.
That afternoon I was taken down to Dr Gardiner’s clinic where I was put through a battery of tests. When I came back to the ward the man opposite was lying waxen-faced and asleep; he had undergone his operation and his mouth was wide open so that I could see all the metal fillings in his back
teeth. There was a small piece of plaster on his nose where his polyp had been.
I wanted to talk to somebody so I went back down to the balcony where Geoff was reading a magazine and smoking as usual. He began to speak about women again. He asked if I had ever had a girlfriend. I would never have girlfriends, I told him, because I was going to be a Catholic priest and I would never get married. He gawped at me in an exaggerated fashion. ‘Jesus H. Christ!’ he swore. ‘D’you mean to say you’re never going to have a fuck? Ever?’
I sat frozen, appalled, unsure what to do or what to say.
He said: ‘Listen, son, you obviously don’t know what you’re going to be missing. There’s nothing better in the whole of this wide world than a good fuck. It’s the whole point. That’s why we’re put on this earth. You tell me what’s better! Go on, tell me what’s better!’
At that moment an old dodderer, as Geoffrey called the elderly patients, appeared on the balcony, and there was a change of subject.
T
HAT EVENING
N
URSE
Philomena came back on duty. The evenings were getting lighter and I had a better look at her when she made her ward round. I noticed for the first time that she had nice legs, not particularly shapely, but slender; and I liked the way she walked, swinging her hips slightly as she moved with neat steps along the ward in her low-heeled shoes, looking from side to side. She gave me a private smile when she passed, as if to say we would be talking later. I felt the stirring, perhaps for the first time, of more than seminary-boy interest in Philomena. Yet I could not envisage anything other
than our just sitting close to each other in the depths of the night.
I lay in a reverie as the ward wound down and it got dark. I could see Philomena’s auburn head bent to her tasks at the nurses’ station. Her hair in the light, I noticed for the first time, was like burnished copper. At last the night superintendent came through and I pretended to be asleep. She stood for a while whispering with Philomena. Then she went, and I heard Philomena going into the kitchen.
At last she came, carrying cocoa and biscuits as usual. She sat on the bed and smoothed out her starched apron. She was looking at me intently.
‘Hello, John,’ she said. ‘I prayed for you again today.’
What got into me? What strange adolescent madness led me to say it? With a mouth full of biscuit, I said to her in a winsome voice: ‘Hello, Sweetie Pie!’
There were several moments of silence, long enough for me to realise that I had made a drastic miscalculation. She stood up. She was staring at me as if in shock.
She said, quite loudly: ‘How dare you!’ She took a sharp intake of breath, like a little sob.
‘You don’t ever speak to me like that! You little hypocrite! How dare you!’ She snatched the mug of cocoa from my hands, spilling some of it as she did so, and walked rapidly away up the ward towards the kitchen.
My head was raging with shame. I lay there, my heart pounding, although not with pericarditis now. I wondered whether I should get out of bed and go in search of her. I had to apologise, to make it all right again. But I was now afraid of her righteous anger, and her authority. She was the woman in charge of the ward.
As the night progressed I would fall asleep for a while, then wake up again. I was awake when the skyline over the houses became a wedge of sandy light at dawn. Still she had not come and I was distraught in my disgrace.
I was asleep when she came to take my temperature and pulse. She woke me up, but did not speak as she went through the routine. After she took the thermometer out of my mouth, with tears in my eyes, my voice breaking, I said: ‘Philomena, please listen. It was a just a joke. Please…?’
Shaking the thermometer vigorously, her face hard, she said: ‘I don’t want your apologies. I am just so disappointed in you. God help us if you ever become a priest. That’s all I can say.’ She walked away, her neck stiff. Then I noticed that the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour had disappeared from the bedside locker.
Later that morning, Dr Gardiner came to tell me that all my tests were good. I was better and I could go home to London. He confirmed that my illness had almost certainly been a bout of transient pericarditis.
I expressed surprise at being sent home as there were more than two months of the summer term left. He told me that my mother had been to see him on her recent visit and that she was insistent that I should not return to Cotton until the autumn; that she would look after me at home. As Dr Gardiner put it: ‘She wants to consolidate your convalescence.’
The news filled me with alarm. I tried to expostulate; but Dr Gardiner told me that it was out of his hands. It had been discussed with Father Doran and everything had been arranged. I was to be driven to the London hospital in Whitechapel, the closest teaching hospital to home, where I would be seen by a local consultant who would check me over before discharging me.
My last night in Stoke-on-Trent, Philomena came to take my temperature and pulse but she refused to speak to me. I felt aggrieved; and yet, I also felt guilty at having transformed so easily from the pious seminarian she had believed me to be into a cocky little flirt. Which was I?
Now one thing was certain: my mother still had a significant degree of power over me. Whatever Father Doran, in the name
of the bishop, had to say about the conduct of my vocation, Mum could legitimately step in and take control.
Early next morning I made my farewells to everyone on the ward, including Geoff who said with a wink: ‘You tell me what’s better, eh!’ Then the ward sister, cool and very collected, accompanied me down to a waiting ambulance. She shook my hand in a formal way and I wondered if Philomena had told her of my disgrace. I felt a spasm of resentment, and fear, at the controlling power of women. Then I got into an old-fashioned Daimler ambulance and was driven at a sedate speed down the A5 towards London.