LEE CHILD

LEE CHILD

My only significant contact with the NHS started with a heavy leather football. My grandma bought it for me, brand-new, in the spring of 1962, when I was seven years old. It was an old-fashioned two-panel design, with a pink rubber inflation nipple nestled in an opening that did up with a square-sectioned leather lace, like you see today in a Sperry boat shoe. The first day I had the ball, I took it down to a patch of grass behind the Beauchamp Avenue shops, where I found a bunch of friends for a game. But that location was unsatisfactory, because the grass sloped at an angle of about thirty degrees. So we walked on down the hill, across the railway at Perry Barr, to a better spot. There we played all day, against all comers, shirts and skins, with the traditional piles of jumpers as goalposts. We quit when the light went and I walked all the way home. After supper, I started to feel lousy. I felt hot and achy, and I had a headache. Which was unusual for me. I was normally a healthy kid, solid and robust, who healed fast and was never laid up.

At this point I should introduce my mother. She was thirty-five at the time, the mother of three sons so far, and a hypochondriac, partly – I now realise – to get attention and to indulge a persistent martyrdom fantasy, but mostly because she loved doctors and surgeons and consultants in a giddy, girlish way. They were her movie stars. Her ambition was for us all to join the medical profession. (None of us did.) In the meantime, she took every opportunity to associate with her heroes in any way she could, either on her own behalf – or on ours. I hesitate to say Munchausen’s, and certainly not Munchausen’s-by-proxy, but any chance at all to be involved in the medical world was to be immediately seized upon, bright-eyed and eager and enthusiastic. Like phoning Clark Gable or Omar Sharif and having them show up at your house forty minutes later.

I remember the doctor well. He had sallow skin and a pattern of darker freckles on his face laid out as exactly as tribal markings. Initially he thought my aches and soreness were caused by a long walk to and from an eight-hour football game. He thought my headache was caused by repeatedly heading the heavy leather ball. Privately I agreed. I had scored some fine goals that day. But my mother, who had consulted her Reader’s Digest Family Health book, wanted to be sure. She wanted to explore alternative diagnoses. Could it be rheumatic fever? Should I be placed on bed rest? Should I be in the hospital for observation?

The doctor responded scientifically, by saying – part reluctantly, part conscientiously – that he supposed it couldn’t be ruled out. The result was I ended up in a bed on a ward in the Birmingham Children’s Hospital. The next morning I felt absolutely fine. But I was kept there four whole weeks. I loved every second of every one of them.

It was a long ward, with beds on either side, possibly twenty-four of them, but only twelve or so occupied, all at the end away from the corridor. The patients were half and half boys and girls, all about my age. Nothing much seemed to be wrong with them. We could listen to the BBC Light Programme from a device built into the bedhead. I remember hearing Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ over and over. It was just out in the UK. Thus began a vital month of education – or re-education. Immediately I realised that my family – any kid’s default definition of normal – was in fact not very. I suddenly understood that there were all kinds of different people in the world. I claim no deprivations or cruelties in my childhood, but it became instantly clear that I was trapped in a narrow, gray, repressed environment, desperately striving to join the respectable middle class. Now I was dumped into an entirely new family, made up of a dozen random Brummie kids, each with their own inherited beliefs and habits and norms. My eyes were opened, in all kinds of ways.

For instance, having only brothers, I knew little of girls. Certainly I had never seen one naked. That lacuna was quickly closed by the girl in the bed next to me. Her name was Jill. We cooperated. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine. After our mutual curiosity was satisfied, we talked about all kinds of stuff, back and forth, widening into a yelled conversation involving the whole ward. Every day was full of chatter and stories and pop music on the wireless. I hated the visiting hour. We all had to quiet down and look suitably grave, me especially, to act my part. Then the parents would leave, and we would start up again.

Most of all I learned about women. My mother and grandmothers and all our approved neighbours cleaved to be respectable Edwardian-era middle-class stay-at-home housewives. The nursing staff proved there was another possibility. This was still the old starched-uniform era, with a rigid and fearsome hierarchy stretching downward from the always-capitalised Matron, through the always-capitalised Sisters, to the nurses themselves, who I thought impossibly glamorous and competent and bustling. We gave them a hard time. (Although now I guess they were happy we were happy.) Our beds were old iron hospital cots, with feet on one end and wheels on the other. We learned that if we grabbed the frame and braced ourselves in a certain way, and jumped and jerked, we could scoot the beds around the floor. We had night-time races up the centre aisle, sometimes out the door. It’s where I learned to drive, really, at the age of seven.

It’s where I learned a lot of things, at the age of seven. Four weeks in an NHS hospital, with nothing wrong with me, receiving no treatment, but for the first time in my life, I was left alone outside of my own suffocating, cult-like bubble. The right place at the right time. I still remember my growing up as before and after. I went home a different person.

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