Where Did It All Go Right? (16 page)

On 28 March 1974, according to my diary,

I had a stuffed up nose and Mum gave me a Karvol capsule and some Vick.

I’m a card-carrying sceptic when it comes to the wonders of conventional medicine today, but I have a devout belief in the placebo effect and mind over matter, so if the very act of Mum administering (or threatening) potions and pills made us feel better, all power to her. Here’s a diary entry, also from 1974, which makes a good case for psychosomatic treatment:

I had a cold and a cough and I had an aspirin and now I feel better.

I bet. I was probably fooling myself so I wouldn’t have to take any more aspirins. The very thought of one, bitterly fizzing in the bottom of a glass, makes me nauseous even now.

Mum and Dad would secretly dissolve one in a hot drink of
squash
and tell us it was just a hot drink of squash. While you had to admire their optimism, they had overlooked the two giveaway signals that it was
not just squash
. One, they would stand over us while we drank it, which they never did with a non-medicinal drink. And two, it tasted of soluble aspirin.

‘There you go, a nice hot drink of orange. It’ll make you feel better.’

‘Has it got an aspirin in it?’

‘No.’

Takes sip
.
Gags
. ‘It tastes of aspirin.’

‘Don’t be silly. Now drink it all up.’

‘It’s got an aspirin in it.’

‘Of course it hasn’t.’

Takes second sip
.
Gags again
. ‘I’ve had enough now.’

‘You have to drink it all, Andrew.’

‘But there’s bits in the bottom.’

‘They’re bits of orange. Come on. It’ll do you good.’

‘But if it’s just an aspirin-free hot drink of squash, why will it do me good? Squash is full of sugar, additives and artificial colourings that will make me hyperactive and turn my skin yellow, especially in the Seventies, and hot water is no better for me
per se
than cold water. I detect subterfuge. If it’s just orange, I challenge
you
to drink it!’ (I never said that, of course – too busy gagging.)

They tried undercover aspirin, otherwise known as Lemsip, but that was no better, despite the so-called
lem
.

* * *

Don’t imagine we were poorly all the time, by the way. Ours was a pretty healthy household, despite all the chips and fizzy drink we kids consumed (
and
all the stagnant water we played in). I was hardy, full of energy and seemingly unbreakable. Never snapped a bone or knocked myself out, spent not a single night in hospital. I simply had a chill every now and again but this
was
the Seventies, the decade when oil kept running out. It was chilly.

I was, as they say, a slave to mouth ulcers. Had them so often they became the norm. A lot to do with the fact that I chewed my tongue as a kid – and ate all that sweet, acidic food – and not especially
newsworthy
(although Dr Randall did once tell me I had ‘a devil of an ulcer’).

I picked up all the once-only viral diseases on cue: measles, mumps, rubella (aka German measles) – although my body cruelly saved up chickenpox until I was 19 and really terribly vain. It was like collecting football stickers round our way: ‘Mumps – got it; measles – got it; rubella – haven’t …’ You could swap them as well. ‘I’ll give you swollen neck glands if you give me spots and a fever.’

I don’t recall being laid low or even inconvenienced by illness. It was just a fact of life: miss a bit of school, get better, go back to school, pick up where you left off. On Monday 26 May 1975, my diary reads, matter-of-factly:

I had German measles. Me and Simon stayed up till 10.00 to watch this brilliant war film called
The Longest Day
.

I didn’t even go to bed early. The day before I’d been gambolling around Salcey Forest and by Wednesday I was playing croquet in Carl Merrick’s back garden. Encephalitis? Bring it on.

Simon worked a bit harder. He managed to generate extra-curricular medical concern on two fronts. One, by being allergic to dogs, which took a battery of tests involving multiple needles in far-off Birmingham to establish; and two, by getting nosebleeds all the time. I don’t just mean getting one when accidentally hit in the face with a football; he could virtually bleed from the nose at will, like a haemoglobin stopcock. If he so much as stubbed his toe or got excited, blood would start pouring from his nostrils. All my life I’ve known the correct way to get bloodstains out of white hankies – there was always one soaking in cold water in the sink in our house, turning the water red the way Coco Pops turn the milk brown. Such gore was commonplace. He was always being ‘nipped down to casualty’ to have his nose bunged up.

Eventually it got so bad Simon had to go into hospital overnight to have his nose sewn up. Cauterised, they called it, which I thought meant cutting it up into quarters, although there was
no
evidence of that when we went to fetch him home from Northampton General and give him whatever big Action Man present his incapacity had earned him. Simon was now officially a man; walking wounded.

I couldn’t match that, although I did end up with stitches twice. The first time, when I was about three, I tripped over my toys – you couldn’t see the floor of the living room for scattered plastic bricks, train track and bendy Topo Gigios. Thinking on my feet, or off them, I broke my own fall using my forehead on the corner of a wall. I don’t remember it hurting much, but I do remember the colour draining out of Mum’s face like a Tom & Jerry cartoon when I went into the kitchen and asked, ‘Is it bleeding?’ Put it this way, she didn’t bother checking to see if I had a chill.

A bath towel was quickly applied to my split head – which
was
bleeding – and, it being a weekday, Geoff Edwards from next door drove me to casualty.
³
(What was Geoff doing at home in the middle of the day? Weren’t there pubs that needed refurbishing?) Two stitches; it was all over very quickly and I wasn’t old enough to be vain about – or proud of – the scar caused by the NHS needlework. You can still see it. Just there, above my right eyebrow. You have to look closely. I’m pretty certain I received a toy when I had the stitches out – as if a surfeit of toys hadn’t been my downfall. No irony in the Seventies.

A few years later I was messing about in the living room with Simon, wearing paper party hats, and mine slipped down over my eyes. Temporarily blinded I tripped, fell, bounced off the settee and pretty much popped my cheek on the sharp wooden corner of what was then called a music centre. It only needed one stitch (this time Chris Cater from over the road drove me to casualty) but once it had healed, the hole in my face formed a perfect dimple and, once again, it’s still with me. I may not be emotionally
scarred
but my face tells eight million stories. Alright, two, and now you’ve heard both of them.
⁴

I feel deprived that I never, say, broke my arm. Eddy did, and Paul Gregor, and countless others at school. What a crowd-puller that is. David Boulter broke his leg; so did Sarah who lived over the road. Someone was always in plaster, getting it signed. Not me. The day after my second stitch, people thought I had chocolate on my cheek and kept helpfully pointing it out. I’m sure the same happened to Action Man when he acquired his trademark cheek scar after – one assumes – hand-to-hand combat with a German.

‘You’ve got chocolate on your face.’

‘It’s a scar actually. You should see the other guy.’

* * *

Other guys had battle scars; I got a dimple. I often fell off high things – some sacks of pig pellets stacked at Paul Cockle’s farm, for instance – and I regularly nicked myself with darts and model knives, but nothing major, no war stories. I am like the outdone Chief Brody in that famous scene below deck in
Jaws
, except his appendix scar beats my dimple hands down. Until I started hanging round with medical students in the late Eighties, I only visited hospitals during visiting hours.

I recently sprained my left knee, aged 36. Don’t scoff, it was majorly debilitating: I developed a proper, foot-dragging limp and I was buying Tubigrip and Ibuleve gel and everything – sympathy and admiration at last! However, instead of being able to say it was a footballing injury or something sexy I had sustained at the gym, I had in fact pulled my knee shopping. Specifically, while striding purposefully to Borders. That’s the story of my life: an insult to injury.

So, no rickets, no fractures, no outpatients. If, however, childhood visits to the dentist were a badge of honour, I was well decorated. Records show that I’d had five teeth extracted at the
dentist’s
by the tender age of eight. (Is that a lot? It sounds a lot.) I had my first filling on my tenth birthday – Dad joked that it was my present from Mr Wright, our family dentist. How I laughed. Mr Wright, incidentally, had crooked teeth. So, coincidentally, did Mr Eagland, my orthodontist. Physicians, heal thyselves.

Yes, orthodontist. Be impressed. Here’s where we get to
my
equivalent of going to Birmingham for allergy tests – I had additional dentist’s appointments. Twice as many as the other kids. Not only were there regular check-ups, fillings and extractions with Mr Wright, Dad also took me to a
second
dentist – a specialist – because my teeth were crooked. I never had to stay in overnight obviously, but I did have to put up with extra pain and discomfort and, well, I guess it made a man of me.

Visits to Mr Eagland – whose surgery was actually situated opposite Northampton General Hospital as if to tantalise me – usually involved having impressions taken of my offending teeth (never had
those
at the regular dentist’s) and undergoing a whole atrocity exhibition of mouth X-rays. Not quite open-heart surgery but impressive nonetheless (after all, everybody leaves the room while you get X-rayed). Impressions meant having a cold metal U-shaped mould filled with rubber-tasting dental Polyfilla rammed on to my teeth and left there while it hardened like cavity wall insulation foam. Then it was levered off, with Eagland’s foot hard against my chest. The biggest threat to my health was from gagging to death: don’t swallow, the grinning Eagland would tell me. I wouldn’t grin quite so readily if I had teeth as crooked as his. (Actually, I did have teeth as crooked as his.)

The upshot of all these extra-curricular dental visits was a brace. How very American of me. Fortunately it wasn’t a brace that was spot-welded to the teeth on the outside like some first-grader at junior high, but one designed to push my wonky incisors out from behind. In other words, you couldn’t actually see my brace – all the work went on backstage. Well, you
could
see it, if you caught me rinsing the Golden Wonder residue out of it in the sink at school, but I didn’t exactly wave it around. Unlike a plaster cast or a bandage or even an inhaler, a brace was never cool. I’m not sure how I managed it but I once rather
humiliatingly
got my brace snagged on someone else’s school jumper and out it came, attached to this other kid like a pair of hungry false teeth.
He
saw it.

I wore my brace from the age of 11 till just before I turned 16, at which point Mr Eagland felt I was old enough to decide for myself whether or not I wished to continue with my orthodontic treatment. My decision was predictable.

It was like being allowed to vote or see an ‘AA’ film for the first time: I had made an important, unilateral decision about my own health. No more mouthfill for me. The brace was consigned to some medical incinerator, and my souvenir plaster teeth were stowed in a box of junk in my bedroom, occasionally whipped out to impress girls with. (They were a big hit, as you can imagine.) Perhaps I should have persevered with the brace. My teeth set to work as soon as it was obvious that the wire and plastic contraption would visit them no more – after four years of pressure they were free again to grow in whichever direction they felt like. And they did, like the little Union Jack arrows at the start of
Dad’s Army
.

I’ve always liked the Pam Ayres poem ‘Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth’ (I was a huge Pam Ayres fan in the mid-Seventies):

I wish I’d been that much more willin’

When I had more tooth there than fillin’

To pass up gobstoppers,

From respect to me choppers

And to buy something else with me shillin’
⁵

Pity I didn’t appreciate Pam’s message at the time. As I write I still have a full head of teeth, but they’re not much to look at. (I hated David Bowie and Martin Amis for getting theirs expensively fixed in America – two crooked-toothed role models lost in the space of a couple of years. Traitors.) Perhaps if I’d eaten less Fruit Salads
and
more fruit salad, and stuck with Mr Eagland’s treatment I’d be a TV presenter by now.

* * *

I had an ingrown toenail in 1979. I know, we’re clutching at straws now in the search for some romantic medical trauma, but for a kid who never tasted hospital food this was the closest I came to the electronic board game Operation. Although the chiropodist only used a local anaesthetic and it was all over in a matter of half an hour, having the offending shard of nail cut out of my big toe did involve Dr Costain and his nurse wearing surgical masks and gloves. I was too old for a toy afterwards, but I
was
very brave and I did feel faint back home when the anaesthetic wore off.

Remember how exciting Operation looked in the TV ads? For a start it took batteries, which knocked Cluedo into a cocked hat. Sam the patient’s nose flashed red if you touched the sides while removing his ‘funny bone’ with the metal tweezers – and it buzzed, which I think was supposed to be Sam screaming! And the look of horror on the actress playing Mum’s face when she heard one of the child actors say, ‘Now it’s my turn to operate!’

‘Operate?!?’

We never had Operation. Not because we were deprived, it was just the way the numbers fell in the birthday and Christmas present lottery – after all, you couldn’t have
everything
in the Kays mailorder catalogue. (Well, you could if you were cousin Dean, but he didn’t have any brothers and sisters, as we were constantly reminded.) For the record, of the heavily TV-advertised board games, neither did we have Buck-A-Roo, Ker-Plunk, Game of Life, Battlin’ Tops or Crossfire, and by the time I got Haunted House second-hand from Carl Merrick – he was, significantly, bored with it – the cardboard dividers were all bent. We had Mouse Trap, after much parental pestering – indeed, I solemnly
promised
Dad that I would
never
get bored with it. Well, it looked so complex and wondrous in the TV ads. And to be fair to MB Games, I didn’t get bored with it for ages. The day I took it out into the back garden at Nan Mabel’s and filled the tub into which the diver plunges with
real
water – to make it more exciting – was the day I had officially got bored with Mouse Trap.