The Diaries of Jane Somers

And then, once, I burst out laughing, it seemed so ridiculous, she there, stark naked, spitting anger at me, and I, rinsing off her shit and saying, ‘And what about your ears?’

She went silent and trembling. ‘Why are you laughing at me?’

‘I’m not, I’m laughing at us. Look at us, screaming at each other!’

She stepped back out of the basin she had been standing in, gazing at me, in angry appeal.

I put the big towel around her, that I’d brought from my bathroom, a pink cloud of a towel, and began gently drying her.

Tears finding their way through her wrinkles …

‘Come on, Maudie, for God’s sake, let’s laugh, better than crying.’

‘It’s terrible, terrible, terrible,’ she muttered, looking in front of her, eyes wide and bright. Trembling, shivering … ‘It’s terrible, terrible.’

These last three weeks I’ve thrown away all the new knickers I bought her, filthy and disgusting, bought two dozen more, and I’ve shown her how to fill them full of cotton wool as she puts them on.

So, she’s back in napkins.

Terrible, terrible, terrible …

It is the end of August.

I am lying in bed writing this with the diary propped on my chest.

Just after writing the last terrible, I woke in the night, and it was as if my lower back had a metal bar driven into it. I could not move at all from my waist down, the pain was so awful.

It was dark, the window showed confused dull light, and when I tried to shift my back I screamed. After that I lay still.

I lay thinking. I knew what it was, lumbago: Freddie had it once, and I knew what to expect. I did not nurse him, of course, we employed someone, and while I shut it out, or tried to, I knew he was in awful pain, for he could not move at all for a week.

I have not been ill since the children’s things, like measles. I have never been really ill. At the most a cold, a sore throat, and I never took any notice of those.

What I was coming to terms with is that I have no friends. No one I can ring up and say, Please help, I need help.

Once, it was Joyce: but a woman with children, a husband, a job, and a house … I am sure I would never have said, ‘Please come and nurse me.’ Of course not. I could not ring my sister – children, house, husband, good works, and anyway she doesn’t like me. Phyllis: I kept coming back to Phyllis, wondering why I was so reluctant, and thinking there is something wrong with me that I don’t want to ask her, she’s quite decent and nice really … But when I thought of Vera Rogers, then I knew Vera Rogers is the one person I know who I could say to, ‘Please come and help.’ But she has a husband, children, and a job, and the last thing she wants is an extra ‘case’.

I managed, after half an hour of agonized reaching and striving, to get the telephone off the bed table and on to my chest. The telephone book was out of reach, was on the floor, I could not get to it. I rang Inquiries, got the number of my doctors, got their night number, left a message. Meanwhile, I was working everything out. The one person who would be delighted – at last – to nurse me was Mrs Penny. Over my dead body. I am prepared to admit I am neurotic, anything you like, but I cannot admit her, will not …

I would have liked a private doctor, but Freddie was always a bit of a socialist, he wanted National Health. I didn’t care since I don’t get ill. I wasn’t looking forward to the doctor’s visit, but he wasn’t bad. Young, rather anxious, tentative. His first job, probably.

He got the key from the downstairs flat, waking Mrs M., but she was nice about it. He let himself in, came into my room, ‘Well, and what is wrong?’ I told him, lumbago; and what I wanted: he must organize a nurse, twice a day, I needed a bedpan, I needed a thermos – I told him exactly.

He sat on the bottom of my bed, looking at me, smiling a little. I was wondering if he was seeing: an old woman, an elderly woman, a middle-aged woman? I know now it depends entirely on the age of a person, what they see.

‘For all that, I think I’d better examine you,’ he said, and bent over, pulled back the clothes which I was clutching to my chin, and after one or two prods and pushes, to which I could not help responding by groaning, he said, ‘It’s lumbago all right, and as you know there’s nothing for it, it will get better in its own good time. And do you want pain-killers?’

‘Indeed I do,’ I said, ‘and soon, because I can’t stand it.’

He produced enough to go on with. He wrote out a prescription, and then said that it was unlikely he could get a nurse before evening, and what did I propose to do in the meantime? I said that if I didn’t pee soon I would wet the bed. He thought this over, then offered to catheterize me. He did – quickly, painlessly. He had to find a kilner jar in the kitchen, no pot of course, and as there seemed no end to the stream of pee, he ran into the kitchen and searched frantically for anything, came back with a mixing bowl, into which the end of the rubber tube was transferred. Just in time. ‘Goodness,’ said he, admiring the quarts of pee.

‘How are you going to manage,’ he asked, ‘if there’s no nurse? Isn’t there a neighbour? How about someone on this floor?’

‘No,’ I said. I recognized on his face the look I’ve seen on, for instance, Vera’s, and have felt on mine: toleration for unavoidable eccentricity, battiness.

‘I could get you into hospital …’

‘No, no, no,’ I moaned, sounding like Maudie.

‘Oh, very well.’

Off he went, cheerful, tired, professional. You’d not know he was a doctor at all, he could be an accountant or a technician. Once I would not have liked this, would have wanted bedside manner and authority – but now I see Freddie’s point.

From the door, he said, ‘You were a nurse, weren’t you?’

This made me laugh, and I said, ‘Oh, don’t make me laugh, I shall die.’

But if he can say that, then it is Maudie I have to thank for it.

What would Freddie think of me now?

A nurse came in about ten, and a routine was established – around the animal’s needs. The animal has to get rid of x pints of liquid and a half pound of shit; the animal has to ingest so much liquid and so much cellulose and calories. For two weeks, I was exactly like Maudie, exactly like all these old people, anxiously obsessively wondering, am I going to hold out, no, don’t have a cup of tea, the nurse might not come, I might wet the bed … At the end of the two weeks, when at last I could dispense with bedpans (twice a day) and drag myself to the loo, I knew that for two weeks I had experienced, but absolutely, their helplessness. I was saying to myself, like Maudie, Well, I never once wet the bed, that’s something.

Visitors: Vera Rogers, on the first day, for I rang her saying she had to get someone to Maudie. She came in first before going to Maudie. I looked at her from where I lay absolutely flat, my back in spasm, her gentle, humorous pleasant little face, her rather tired clothes, her hands – a bit grubby, but she had been dealing with some old biddy who won’t go into hospital, though she has flu.

I told her that I thought there is more wrong with Maudie than the runs, found myself telling her about her awful slimy smelly stools. And I said that it was no good expecting Maudie to go into hospital, she would die rather.

‘Then,’ said Vera, ‘that is probably what she will do.’

I saw she was anxious, because she had said that: sat watching my face. She made us some tea, though I didn’t dare drink more than a mouthful, and we talked. She talked. I could see, being tactful. Soon I understood she was warning me about something. Talking about how many of the old people she looks after die of cancer. It is an epidemic of cancer, she said – or that is what it feels like to her.

At last I said to her, ‘Do you think Maudie has cancer?’

‘I can’t say that, I’m not a doctor. But she’s so thin, she’s just bones. And sometimes she looks so yellow. And I’ve got to call in her doctor. I must, to cover myself, you see. They are always jumping on us, for neglect or something. If I didn’t have to consider that, I’d leave her alone. But I don’t want to find myself in the newspapers all of a sudden, Social Worker Leaves 90-Year-Old Woman to Die Alone of Cancer.’

‘Perhaps you could try a nurse again, to give her a wash? You could try her with a Home Help?’

‘If she’ll let us in at all,’ says Vera. And laughs. She says, ‘You have to laugh, or you’d go mad. They are their own worst enemies.’

‘And you must tell her I am ill, and that is why I can’t get in to her.’

Vera says, ‘You do realize she won’t believe it, she’ll think it is a plot?’

‘Oh no,’ I groan, for I couldn’t stop groaning, the pain was so dreadful (terrible, terrible, terrible!), ‘please, Vera, do try and get it into her head …’

And there I lie, with my back knotted, my back like iron, and me sweating and groaning, while Vera tells me that ‘they’ are all paranoid, in one way or another, always suspect plots, and always turn against their nearest and dearest. Since I am Maudie’s nearest, it seems, I can expect it.

‘You are very fond of her,’ announced Vera. ‘Well, I can understand it, she’s got something. Some of them have, even at their worst you can see it in them. Others of course …’ And she sighed, a real human, non-professional sigh. I’ve seen Vera Rogers, flying along the pavements between one ‘case’ and another, her hands full of files and papers, worried, frowning, harassed, and then Vera Rogers with a ‘case’, not a care in sight, smiling, listening, all the time in the world … and so she was with me, at least that first visit. But she has been in several times, and she stopped needing to cosset and reassure, we have been talking, really talking about her work, sometimes so funny I had to ask her to stop, I could not afford to laugh, laughing was so painful.