Slowing Down (3 page)

A more cheerful episode showed a plump young man who volunteered for an experiment, a deliberate infestation, providing he was rid of it before his coming marriage. This was done, and he lay on the grass next to it. It was over six feet long, but he had lost several stone and was fitted for a most elegant wedding outfit he couldn’t have done up earlier.

This confirmed a story I heard long ago of yet another Regency doctor, apothecary or quack, who became famous for helping young women to lose weight. He sold them tapeworm eggs as slimming pills and they were all, for a time, fully satisfied. I myself have recently lost several stone, but no one has suggested I have a tapeworm. I just eat less.

This unpleasant creature, while the star of the show, was not the only member of the cast. There was a very sympathetic young rock singer whose left eye had been eaten away by some tiny horrors picked up in the Far East, and an admirable young woman who had spent a lot of time in Africa treating infested and starving village children and adults. Via an insect bite she had developed elephantiasis, as yet only in one leg. We had a good look at that too, hideously enlarged, grey and heavily wrinkled. They are trying a new cure on her, but won’t know if it works for several years. She was clearly of a sweet and courageous nature, but I couldn’t help recalling the cynical aphorism, ‘No good deed deserves to go unpunished.’

‘I am becoming a sleepaholic’

It is remarkable, however, that by now we are able, through exposure by the box, to watch almost anything without fainting or vomiting: operations, the slaughter and dismemberment of animals, extreme brutality and, of course, birth. I remember a Jewish comedienne (Maureen Lipman perhaps) complaining that you couldn’t turn on the TV any more without someone ‘having a baby in your face’. I don’t say it isn’t better that we should be able to accept what we are all of us in part responsible for, but I sometimes suspect an element of gloating, like the way a crowd materializes instantly around a bad car crash.

Perhaps it’s a constant in human nature. It wasn’t so long ago after all that we stopped publichangings, banned dog-fights, cock-fighting and bear-baiting; and, in secret, some people are still digging out badgers to watch them torn to pieces.

William Blake, always appalled by human cruelty – one of the reasons they thought he was mad – in one of his many jousts with God, or Old Nobodaddy as he sometimes called Him, asked Him how, on the one hand, He could create the ‘tyger’ and, on the other, the lamb. It’s even more puzzling why He should have invented the tapeworm. It’s one of the many reasons I find it impossible to believe in the possibility of a beneficent ‘personal’ deity, let alone a judgemental one.

‘Everything that is squint-eyed, doddering and grotesque is summed up for me in this one word, God.’
André Breton

Of course I watched the tapeworms writhing, wriggling and growing ever longer until the last frame, and fell into a deep sleep which lasted until midday.

*

I now take a cornucopia of pills, some once a week, most daily. Recognizing my increasing tendency to make a muddle, Diana or sometimes Desdemona (surely an odd choice of name for an African?) fill up a plastic blue or violet pill-box divided vertically into the time of day and horizontally the days of the week. This box looks rather like a tiny chicken’s battery system. The pills themselves are of many colours, sizes and shapes, like distorted Smarties. They are to fend off various threats. There are four tiny yellow ones, but only for Monday mornings. These are to suppress psoriasis, an unsightly disease in which an over-production of cells piles up on the surface of the skin and flakes off to leave patches of raw flesh (another example of God in a bad mood). I seem to have inherited this complaint from a great-uncle who developed it so badly that he never married because of the shock and repugnance it would cause his bride when, on their wedding night, he removed his combinations. As far as I know I was the only one among his nephews, nieces and a wide younger generation of cousins to inherit this grisly heirloom. In my case it did not surface until my early sixties, but from then on it never restrained itself. Happily it didn’t attack my face, but the rest of me was covered with it. Naked, not by then a pretty sight at the best of times, I looked like a plant-eating dinosaur who had survived an unsuccessful attack by prehistoric raptors. Luckily the yellow pills defeated the disease, except for a small sprinkling on my knees and elbows. They are, however, apparently very powerful and can affect the liver and/or kidneys.

My first skin specialist, the good Dr Fry at St Mary’s, Paddington, demanded regular blood tests. I don’t mind
these, although I am not fond of the needle and give an involuntary squeak when one pricks my skin (my father tended to faint). Once I was quite amused by a nurse, evidently a black humorist, who had covered the walls of her small room with Dracula posters, and hung a realistic imitation bat from the ceiling. She, alas, has gone, taking her bat and posters with her.

Dr Fry, who treated me during the disease’s heyday, never prescribed the yellow pills; perhaps they were not yet available. Instead he offered me a cream or ointment to rub on. It did no good except to alleviate the itching that led to inadvisable scratching (my bed at times resembled a butcher’s shop in which someone had spilt several packets of cornflakes). He told me there
was
a certain cure: a month or so on the shores of the Dead Sea and frequent immersion in its waters, so saturated in natural minerals and salts that it’s impossible to sink. (The Dead Sea provided the setting for one of my favourite pictures, Holman Hunt’s
The Scapegoat
, which hangs in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, opposite Liverpool.) He added, however, that on one’s return with skin like a baby’s bottom, almost immediately the psoriasis would erupt again with equal vigour. In consequence I decided it wasn’t worth it, and he agreed with me.

He did, however, propose I try another possible avenue of help, a twice-weekly visit to a department many floors up in another branch of the hospital. I warned him that, due to contracted singing engagements all over the British Isles and commissioned travel articles abroad, I might find it impossible to make every appointment. He said he quite understood.

What I had to undergo was exposure to ultra-violet light, brief at first, then building up gradually to around twenty minutes. He warned me that the nurse in charge had been there for many years, was in fact well past her official retiring age, but insisted on carrying on and was, he added with a twinkle in his eye for he was a drily humorous man, ‘of the old school’. And so she was.

She was tiny, with spectacles, and wore a spotless white coat. She spoke with the educated yet brisk accent of the headmistress of a posh girls’ school. Her shoes were white plimsoles. Her surgery was not especially large, but contained three separate cubicles side by side, the size and shape of police boxes and, to add to this comparison, the same dark blue. I always thought of the one I entered as Dr Who’s Tardis. Each had a small rectangular window let in to the door so she could, from time to time, check you were all right. There was also an individual switchboard to turn on the strip-lights inside, and a timer to make sure you were not exposed for too long or short a period.

At the other end of the room was a short square box where patients could sit, like the assassinated Marat (who also had psoriasis), if only their lower bodies were affected. Along one wall, at right angles to the police boxes, was a row of small compartments where you stripped behind floral curtains with hooks to hang up your clothes. On my first visit Miss Day told me always to bring dark glasses to protect my eyes.

The door to the room was between the Tardis and the compartments. On the outside was a stern warning: ‘Knock and wait!’ If she was busy, the wait could take some time and, on my first visit, I presumed she hadn’t heard and
knocked again. When she did respond, she snapped, ‘I always hear. You must be patient!’ I never knocked twice again.

On my many appointments, travelling up in a rather old-fashioned lift usually in the company of others en route to time and space travel – it was somehow comforting that they were all fellow sufferers to a greater or lesser degree – I got to know and grew fond of Miss Day. On arrival, before undressing, you stood at her desk while she filled in your details: how long since your last visit, the length of time you were due to stand in the Tardis and so on, into a large leather-bound book like those in which you register in old-fashioned hotels. Her writing was, somehow predictably, both small and neat.

At first, although my specialist had written her a note of explanation, she took my non-appearances rather amiss, but then, after I’d spent a fortnight in Kenya, she read my commissioned article in the
Evening Standard
and from then on (‘You write very well, Mr Melly’) became much friendlier and, while far from indiscreet, did let drop one or two facts about her life.

She lived, she told me, in a flat in Victoria and knew many of the people who travelled on the 7.30 bus, but not to talk to. She had worked in the psoriasis department for thirteen years but had no intention of retiring, although she’d been entitled to seven years earlier. Her work, she implied, was her life. I gathered no idea of her political bias or taste in any of the arts. Had she friends or relatives? What was her background, her history? One thing she did make clear was her admiration, almost idolatry, of the specialist, Dr Fry. She gave me the impression that, on his rare visits,
the Queen herself could not have been greeted with more reverence.

On her windowsill was an unexpected object, a small wireless set continuously tuned to Radio One, but very quietly. It stood next to the only other non-functional item in the room, a modest pot plant with very small, rather waxy red flowers. Was it hers? A present from a grateful patient? The former I doubt, the latter also. In my experience no one ever seemed to be cured; nor was her manner one to encourage a spontaneous gift. A mystery then.

She was not after all one to curb her tongue. I remember once a middle-aged man, old-style working class and not in the least aggressive, emerged from his cubicle as she passed by. She asked him tartly, ‘And when did you last have a bath?’ While she had a point, her question seemed to me both cruel and unnecessary.

Only once did I see her meet her match. A street-cred girl wearing tight jeans, T-shirt, leather jacket and clumpy shoes appeared quite late for her appointment and Miss Day predictably told her off. The girl looked at her with cool indifference and, in a strong Estuary accent peppered with numerous glottals and with every sentence ending with a question, explained that that morning (and I suspect many others) she hadn’t the fare for the bus, had been sussed and thrown off and had to walk the rest of the way, ‘Din’t I?’ Miss Day redirected her attack, telling her it was very wrong to get on the bus at all without her fare. The girl shrugged as though addressed by a lunatic and went into her cubicle to undress.

I thought Miss Day would be furious, but when she walked past me, I was surprised to see a suppressed smile.
She said, almost roguishly, ‘You can’t help laughing, can you?’

I quite enjoyed my appointments but not the treatment. It wasn’t too bad to start with, when five minutes was my limit, but, after many weeks, when half an hour was my lot, it became excruciatingly boring. Inside, ‘the Tardis’ was no time-ship but just a small space. You stood on a duckboard with your own paper mat over it, surrounded by the tubes of ultra-violet lights. It was impossible to read in your special dark glasses (she tested them to see they were adequate) and the only diversion was the occasional glimpse of Miss Day looking through the observation glass like a conscientious prison wardress.

I tried various ways to reduce the tedium: dreaming of hooking trout, coming across Van Gogh on a visit to Arles and buying his entire production, but none of them really worked for long. When your bell rang and she let you out it was indeed like being released from prison.

Nor did I get any better. The unsightly complaint swung slightly between frightful and marginally less frightful, but only one person thought it was an advantage. That was my step-granddaughter, Katie, aged five or so. We were in Kenya and visiting the Muthaiga Club – at the centre of the largely aristocratic ‘Happy Valley’ set famed for debauchery and drunkenness during the last war, which had been rocked by the murder of one of its members, Joss Erroll. With us was Petal Allen who, as a child in the forties, had known many of those concerned.

Much later this unsolved Agatha Christie-like mystery fascinated Cyril Connolly who began to investigate it with the writer James Fox. The Muthaiga Club, airy and luxuriously
sparse, remains largely as Fox described it in his fascinating book
White Mischief
, but, with the independence of Kenya, now has naturally enough a mixed membership.

Diana and I had with us Katie (later renamed Kezzie at her insistence). She was outside at the pool talking to a small group of black children. We crossed the lawn, Diana carrying a plate with chicken on it in case Katie/Kezzie was hungry, when a large kite swooped down and, seizing it in its claws, zoomed off again. Recovering from this shock we walked on and, as we approached the pool, I heard my step-grandchild boasting to her indifferent African audience, ‘My grandfather is
quite
famous, and has psoriasis.’