Basil Street Blues by Michael Holroyd

Author:Michael Holroyd [Holroyd, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784971410
Publisher: Head of Zeus

15

Legal and Military

My first half-dozen years after leaving Eton were strikingly indecisive. They began with two minor operations. The first – to correct some complications in my right knee caused by squash-playing – was counted a success (though it actually masked an injury that led to more serious damage years later). I was given a general anaesthetic and stayed several days in hospital. It was the first time I had been in hospital since having my tonsils and adenoids out as a child, and I was taken aback by how much the experience disturbed me. In the ward men lay groaning, men lay dying. Between the rows of beds marched a starched army of nurses with glinting thermometers and watches, and among them moved a clattering rabble of cleaners and kitchen staff wheeling their trolleys. They looked exceedingly happy, often stopping and laughing among themselves, overcome with hilarity, as if unaware of the sounds of pain and fear all round them, as if they were somehow inhabiting a parallel world where these ranks of sick people were invisible. I could not believe what I was witnessing. I felt I was in hell. After my operation I told the ward sister that I wanted to discharge myself and complete my convalescence at home. But during those early years of the National Health Service, patients were not moved along like a fast-moving queue of ‘customers’ or treated as expensive ‘consumers’ to be ‘targeted’ with medicine; and the practice was to keep them in hospital until the doctors were confident they had fully recovered. The ward sister told me not to be so stupid and, as a precaution, hid my clothes. But I found them, dressed myself, hopped out into the night and took a taxi back to my bedroom at Wetherby Gardens where I felt much better.

It was in this bedroom that I went through my other operation – a succession of primitive and painful clearings of the nasal sinuses by an ear, nose and throat specialist called Miss Wadge. She would stick a thin metal instrument right up my nose, above my eye, and pump sterilised water through it for an hour. After half-a-dozen visits, I was cured of sinusitis. Not long afterwards I suffered the first of a long, though not frequent, series of migraines in the very place where Miss Wadge had been needling me. Perhaps unfairly, I have always associated my migraine attacks with her operations.

Around this time, and in the same bedroom one night, I had a frightening experience that enables me now to tell a miniature non-fiction ghost story.

It is a wild night, reader, and a storm has blown up slashing the sky with rents of lightning, with tremendous bangs and rumbles of thunder. I am at the top of the house and my attic window suddenly opens. The wind frantically agitates the glass panes, the curtains streaming in, and the commotion of the storm outside wakes me. I hear the window shivering, see the curtains flapping, the rain driving in, and feel a strange coldness in the room.

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