It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The week began with me in hospital, expecting to go home on Tuesday. However, as viewed from the perspective of Sunday night, several variables could have affected this. I had sort of painted myself into a corner in my dealings with the social workers about discharging myself. I could self discharge on Tuesday, but in doing so, I would be saying, in effect, that I had no need of the continuous care package – or at least that is what I had been told. I, however, had made not one, but two counter-proposals, the ideal one being that they should sign off my social care package before Tuesday. That would be my ideal solution; as an alternative, I told them that I had agreed with my family for them to stand in locus of the carers, until such time as the real carers became available. Who would have thought that leaving hospital could be so complicated.
That was the position on Sunday night, after a convivial visiting time (with added stout) and another meeting of the Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Club (aka Peter, Bernard and Myself). I knew I would be sad to leave these lads (actually both of them are older than me!) behind when I went, and I would be sad, in a way, to leave this rotunda, this strangely-shaped, circular ward, part of the old Halifax Poor People’s Hospital, having done service both for the wounded soldiers of World War 1 and also as a maternity ward, and now, finally, facing closure on December 21st, despite being chosen as Ward of the Year in the hospital’s internal awards for 2010.
As with any location though, it is always as much about the people as the venue, and I would also be sad to leave some of the people as well, the front-line staff who have coped so excellently with my many quirks and foibles. In an ideal world, I would have a door in the back of the wardrobe, like the one that led through to Narnia, and I would be able to travel through it at will and find myself back in Ward 10 with all my chums. But, sadly, that is not to be. On Monday night we had my “official” sendoff, the previous one on Sunday having been the dress rehearsal, and a good time was had by all.
Tuesday eventually dawned, as Tuesday always does, and I began the process of packing up my physical belongings, and my mental baggage as well, in readiness for the journey, which, although only ten or twelve physical miles, was also going to be the crossing of a vast gulf in terms of adjustment – of that I was sure. It was made worse for me, in some way I can’t really explain, by the fact that by the time the ambulance came to take me home, it was already after dark, and we were suddenly trundling through a freezing cold, dark winter’s night. A greater physical contrast to the safe, well-lit, massively-overheated hospital ward you could not imagine, and I have not been “too warm” since! We reached our house and the ambulance lady took one look at the sheet-ice rink along our garden path and outside the door, and called for backup. Eventually, a second ambulance person arrived in a jeep and between them they manouvered me into the house.
After 145 days in hospital, I was expecting it to be weird returning home, but I wasn’t anything like prepared for the sheer weight of the wave of “weird” that crashed over me as I sat there. For the first time, in some ways, my plight, which had seemed as unreal as the rest of life in hospital, was now confirmed. I was confined to a wheelchair. “Besieged” is the correct word, literally confined to a seat. My universe had shrunk to being in one of either three places: bed, wheelchair, or riser/recliner, spread across two rooms. I am pleased to be able to say I have never had a dark night of the soul, but on Tuesday night I certainly had a dark night of the body.
I had expected, also, that one of the manifold pleasures of coming home would be that the animals would be pleased to see me, and although I wasn’t expecting to be mobbed, I did perhaps anticipate the odd muzzle nuzzle or whiskery kiss. In fact, Tiggy briefly raised one doggy eyebrow in my direction in recognition, before going back to sleep with a huge sigh. Maybe it was relief that I was home, maybe not. Kitty was wandering round yowling for food, since I had arrived at feeding time, but I can at least report that she has subsequently sought out my lap in the chair (though perhaps merely as a source of body-warmth).
Since then, things have gradually improved, as we have worked out ways to do things which don’t involve either a) massive upheavals of furniture and/or b) Debbie having to do everything. Things have been moving on the followup/backup front as well, with visits from the Occupational Therapist and the Social Care team, and also a phone call from my GP. So, on this occasion at least I can’t fault the seamless transition of the NHS. Sometimes, however, the transfer of the information itself hasn’t been so seamless. As Debbie was showing the Social Care team into the house, through to the room where I am based, one of them asked if I was her Grandad! [Perhaps 145 days in hospital has aged me more than I know] and the GP sent me a sick note with my name spelt wrong which signed me off for two months with two things I don’t currently have [“neurological problems” and “bowel obstruction”] – all very odd. We have also had a letter from the “Community Accessibility Team” to say they will be getting round to coming out to look at our house with a view to fitting ramps in “approximately 14 weeks”. I love the use of the word “approximately”. My first thought was to write back and ask them to specify if it would be morning or afternoon, but I contented myself for now with merely asking if “weeks was a “typo” for days.
And so we come to Sunday. The snow has melted, and today, for the first Sunday for more than four weeks, I have not sat in the little Chapel, listening to Lily or Gordon pounding the keys to provide music for a well-known Advent hymn, or looking up at Dame Nelly Wallace and the Good Samaritan. It’s not as if all mention of Christmas has been excised from my life, though, far from it, because once more I am now being exposed to the delights, or horrors, of television advertising! God, what a farrago of conspicuous consumption, enticing people to spend more than they have on more than they need, gorge themselves and beggar-thy-neighbour. I like a good feast and a drink as much as the next fellow, but the sheer naked crassness of these awful products of some addled mind that would have you believe you aren’t a complete human being unless you open the latest version of “Donkey Kong” on Christmas morning really puts me in touch with my inner puritan. If I see just one more Marks and Spencer Christmas advert, I may just change my name to “PraiseGod Barebones” denounce the ungodly, and sail off to the New World – except of course, over there it is even worse. Anyway, I look like the bloke at the top of the page whenever it comes on.
I know that, in a capitalist society, Mr Marks and Mr Spencer do need to advertise their expensive chocolates, ready meals and underwear, and they are only doing what all other retailers do, participating in the annual festival of corporate and individual gluttony which Christmas has become for many. There has to be something wrong, not with them, but with the system, that allows them to do it, offering cashmere jumpers while homeless people are dying of hypothermia under bridges this winter. I always come back to Alan Hull [RIP]’s wonderfully cutting words in “Winter Song”
“When the turkey’s in the oven and the presents are all bought
And Santa’s in his capsule, he’s an American astronaut
Will you spare a thought for Jesus, who had nothing but his thoughts
Who got busted for just talking, and befriending the wrong sorts
When winter comes howling in...”
I’ve been attempting to counteract the corrosive effect of the likes of Morrisons, Aldi and M & S, by continuing my re-reading of Eliot’s Four Quartets as a spiritual exercise, and this week I am down to the last one, The Dry Salvages. The Dry Salvages is the only one of the locations written about by Eliot that I haven’t visited, which is not surprising since it is a group of rocks in the sea off the coast of New England. There is much in The Dry Salvages about the sea, but it starts off with a river.
“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god”
In Eliot’s case, it was the Missouri, of course, in mine, the Humber. The Humber is certainly a strong brown god, and like Marvell I have complained by its tides, and like Larkin I have travelled along its banks by train, “where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet”. One of the things I am most scared of about this whole wheelchair scenario is that I will never see Brough Haven and the Humber again, or Walney Island, or the Firth of Clyde, Lamlash Bay, or Kilbrannan Sound. Or even the Lake District. Whilever I am besieged by my own legs, there is always the chance that the mutant neurons will be victorious, and that instead of shedding the wheelchair like a chrysalis when I am strong enough to walk and drive again, I will be stuck here forever, “confined to a wheelchair” and massively dependent on others for the rest of my life, despite my pictures of Douglas Bader and Padre Pio, and my rosary beads, and my increasingly desperate prayers to Big G to give me my legs back.
I guess I am having a bad week. And I can’t settle to Eliot, with all these multifarious distractions. I can’t even settle to television. I have given up trying to watch Midsomer Murders just now because Debbie is hitting the boiler with a rubber mallet. I haven’t asked why. Not while she has the mallet in her hand. Mind you, Debbie hitting the boiler with a rubber mallet is probably preferable as Christmas viewing to “Kirstie and Phil’s Perfect Christmas”, River chuffing Cottage, or Nigella.
I think Eliot was having a bad week when he wrote The Dry Salvages as well, but then it has always been my least favourite of the Four Quartets, despite the nautical genes that must be somewhere in my makeup from Thomas Henry Rudd, Hull fisherman, who died off the coast of Portugal and was buried at sea off the coast of Morocco, in 1906:
“Also pray for those who were in ships, and
Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips
Or in the dark throat which will not reject them
Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell's
Perpetual angelus.”
Or indeed his brother, Great-great Uncle Ernie, who was a big shot in the Trawlermens’ Union, apparently. I don’t think his genes are a problem. I’ve got those, alright.
I realise that “confined to” can also be read as “liberated by” and everything is always comparitive. Compared to the alternative, I am, as my surgeon said to me after the operation, “a very lucky man”, after all. And it’s Sunday, Johnny Kingdom is on later, I am sitting by the stove, I have a cup of coffee at my elbow, I am warm (sort of, when the draught excluder remembers to do its job) and tonight there will be vegan sausages and rumbledeythumps for tea, cooked by yours truly, possibly with a small glass of red wine, since we sailors must always guard against scurvy by keeping up our vitamin C levels, especially in a maritime area such as The Holme Valley. I am not out in the cold, with nowhere to go and no hope of food or company. So maybe I should give up whingeing and do something with this unexpected Christmas gift, the rest of my life. If only I knew what:
“These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”
So, on the third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, I should be rejoicing at “The Lord who is now nigh and close at hand”, not that he’s answered my calls since Tuesday, but perhaps he’s busy elsewhere, and while I have been catching up on lost sleep, like Luke’s shepherds, he’s been catching up on lost sheep, people who need it more than I do, to be honest.
And if I do have to use this wheelchair for longer than anticipated then maybe I need to remember to do it in good heart, catch the end of the rope which life has thrown me, and sing the old sea-shanty that goes:
We’ll row the old chariot along,
We’ll row the old chariot along,
We’ll row the old chariot along,
And we’ll all hang on behind!
Bearing in mind, always, that
The chariots of God are twice ten thousand,
even thousands upon thousands;
the Lord is among them.
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