Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies

The only drawback was G Ward.

The hospital was famous across the nation for two things: burns and plastics. At a time (1971) when plastic surgery was still considered a wayward course of action for the terminally rich and achingly vain, Queen Mary’s specialised in it. Actresses came for face-lifts, little girls like Natasha came to have tiny disfigurements adjusted or concealed, a whole department specialised in prosthetic limbs for amputees. It was known as the Spare Parts Unit. (A sign outside the main door read, a little insensitively, ‘Out-Patients Must Assemble Before 10 a.m.’) And it also did burns. If a particularly bad motorway car crash or domestic fire was reported on the News, Queen Mary’s was where the burns victims would be taken. They had all the top technology of skin-grafts and maxillo-facial surgery. They could do anything – except stop some people looking absolutely terrible.

Sometimes, burns patients recovering from long-term treatments would find their way back to one of the ordinary-patient wards, which I visited with my porter’s trolley every day. Sometimes a screen would go back in C Ward, revealing the wrecked features of a poor man who had poured paraffin onto a Guy Fawkes bonfire and had the whole can explode in his face. Months of treatment later, he still looked, above the neck, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. When he tried to arrange his ravaged complexion into a smile, you felt like your heart would break. When he moved his lips – which were no longer lips but white horizontal smears below his nose and above his chin – and tried to talk to me, I would grip the cool metal rail of my trolley, look away and tell myself sternly, ‘You. Must. Not. Faint. You must not faint. It will only upset the patient.’

I could be weepingly sensitive and casually heartless about these patients at the same time, but I couldn’t help the way I responded to extreme disfigurement. I found myself wondering: if this is the way the poor man looks now, after months of ameliorative surgery, what in God’s name did he look like on the day they brought him in?

But I didn’t know, because new arrivals with severe burns went to G Ward, and I never went there. It was the only ward from which ordinary porters like me were excused duty. It had a dedicated porter of its own, a guy called Geoff. He was something of a legend for his bovine insensitivity. He was allowed, or invited, to do the G Ward runs because he didn’t seem to mind the awful conditions. He didn’t notice, or worry about, people whose faces and limbs had melted in a furnace. Once, they said, Geoff had been present at an operation where a patient’s burnt skin was being removed with a metal device like a spokeshave. He was standing too close to the operating table and a lump of charred skin, accompanied by globules of pus and blood, came flying off the patient and whacked him in the face. Geoff (other porters told me in awestruck tones) had registered no emotion whatsoever. He had simply removed his now-opaque spectacles, wiped the greeny-red gunk off the lenses, replaced them equably on his splattered countenance and gone back to the operation. He was the G Ward man. He presided over its mysteries. It was a mysterious place. You heard things about it, unsettling things. That, for instance, it smelt really bad – the authentic smell of human flesh which, according to rumour, smelt uncommonly like roast pork. I heard that it was uncomfortably, tropically, freakishly warm in there because the thermostat had to be turned right up, or the patients’ burnt skin would contract in the cool air. I heard that patients lay on their backs all the time, with a thin cotton sheet suspended above their recumbent frames, because if their flesh touched the sheet it would stick to the fabric and would have to be yanked off in screaming agony. I learned that this was why Geoff’s trolleys had to be lined with antiseptic paper, for the lumps of charred human being….

Thank God for Geoff, we used to agree. He was welcome to the battlefield of burns victims. Rather him than me, everyone used to say. I’d as soon shoot myself in the head as go near the burns patients …

G Ward stood by itself, a whole corridor’s width of Burns Hell. The entrance was at the far end of a side-corridor, up a long incline. The letter ‘G’ stuck out from the wall, like the sign over a concentration camp. Walking past (no, accelerating past) when one of its doors was being opened, you would occasionally get a stray whiff of roasted meat. You imagined the nursing sisters inside the swing doors, speaking in urgent whispers, a sisterhood of suffering, girls who had seen terrible sights, who’d become inured to human torches and Roman candles and people set on fire by their neighbours or co-religionists because of a minor difference of opinion. You imagined all the staff in G Ward moving about in tropical darkness because it was more restful that way, just as I used to think that horror films must be conducted all the way through in Stygian gloom.

One evening in July I was on late shift. I wasn’t due to knock off until 10 p.m. Things were quiet and I was sitting in the Porters’ Room at 9 o’clock, reading Kafka and waiting for the last hour to while itself away.

The phone rang. ‘Is Geoff there?’ said a voice.

‘I think he’s gone to the canteen,’ I said.

‘Tell him to ring G Ward, would you?’ drawled the voice. ‘Emergency theatre, fifteen minutes. OK?’

I promised I’d tell him, and went back to The Castle.

Three minutes went by. An anxious woman, a junior houseman, put her head round the door. ‘Where’s the porter, what’s his name, Geoffrey? They’re yelling for a porter in G Ward right now. Some patient has to go for surgery, pronto.’

‘Geoff’s in the canteen,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he’ll be back soon.’

‘We need him now, for God’s sake,’ said the woman. ‘We can’t have the operating theatre staff waiting around for a porter to finish drinking his tea.’

‘But I’m sure –’ I began.

‘You’ll have to do it,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to wear a mask. Do you know where Geoffrey keeps the disinfectant masks?’

‘I can’t do that,’ I said, a panicky tremor entering my voice. ‘I’m not going to G Ward.’

‘What do you mean, not going?’ asked the woman. ‘This is an emergency. You will go up there right now, collect the patient and transfer him to the operating theatre on the first floor for immediate surgery. And you’ll need a disinfectant sheet on the trolley, I hope you realise.’

‘I’m not trained,’ I said, having a sudden brainwave. ‘I’m not a burns porter because I haven’t had any training. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I’m sure Geoff will be back any moment and –’

‘Oh, training,’ she said nastily. ‘Is that it? Oh, I see, you feel you need some kind of degree in – what? – Advanced Portering Skills and Trolley Management before you can do a simple thing and help to save somebody’s life. Is that it?’

She all but said, ‘You stupid boy,’ and smacked me round the head.

‘You have been to school, I take it,’ she continued. ‘And you have got half a brain? And I know you can walk and talk, because I’ve seen you do both. Now get a trolley up to G Ward this minute, before I lose my temper.’

So I found some sheets of special skin-soothing paper and put it all over the trolley. I couldn’t find a mask anywhere. And I set off with a heavy heart on the nastiest journey I’d ever known.

I was going to have to go inside G Ward, into the fuggy, tropical, pork-smelling hell of the burned and damned, and I knew that, as I walked through the ward, the burnt patients would lift up their Night of the Living Dead faces and their Souls in Purgatory blackened limbs and I knew the minute I saw the special, just-arrived Emergency Case for which my trolley was meant, I would pass out with the horror of it, and everyone would get really upset.

I came out of the lift, pushing my paper-coated trolley before me. My legs were like lead. Though I was supposed to be helping out at an emergency, my reluctance and cowardice (though I liked to think it was a stubborn refusal to be pushed around) meant that I was walking slower and slower. There was nobody around, just the blankness of the horrible, custard-yellow NHS walls and the glaring, recessed lights overhead. Here was the corner of the corridor. Up a long incline, perhaps sixty yards away, the big, black-on-green sign read ‘G WARD’ like a ghastly threat.

I pushed the trolley into the side corridor. Fifty yards ahead, the great black ‘G’ wiggled and danced about in front of my vision. I had become a cinema-verité, hand-held camera and all the shots were jiggled and out of focus, as I blinked back tears of alarm and struggled to see clearly. But my destination was all too clear. I was going to the worst place in the world.

And it was because of the blasted windows that I felt so appalled. The doors of G Ward were always shut because of the need to keep the air temperature consistent and unwavering. Every other ward had its door open to visitors and passing medics and droppers-by; but not the ward from hell. I’d noticed, when furtively passing the doors, there were two little porthole windows at which you were supposed to present your face, to be identified before you’d be allowed in.

In thirty seconds, I told myself, I will have to present my face at the window and wait to see what unspeakable apparition gazes out at me …

I can’t do this, I said silently.

I am walking, I told myself, into the biggest horror film I’ve ever seen, and it’s all going to be real.

Something had changed about my relationship with windows. At home when I was small, they’d been the glass shelter that kept the outside world at bay. Then they were the screen through which awful people could come and look in at you, like Quint and the Snow Queen, as though inspecting your tortured soul. Now there were these round porthole windows, where I was the outsider looking in, but the people on the inside would have gargoyle faces. Everything had got all topsy-turvy. A crucifix on the wall brought back memories of St Mary’s, and the staring-eyed Maniac, my father’s crackpot patient, the asphyxiating Christ, the blood-boltered posters, the red-rimmed eyes of Dracula just before he pounces – all my most dreaded images. The big G loomed nearer. It began to take on a three-dimensional quality, like those monumental slabs of brick wall that spelt out the letters of Ben-Hur. I was about to be engulfed in heat, and the smell of cooked people, and the noisy whimperings of the dying and the muted groans of the ones whose skin had only recently started to tighten up and blacken.

Oh no, I kept whispering to myself. Please no. Let me not have to do this. I will be good and virtuous and behave myself for ever and ever (I seemed to be praying to some Higher Being, halfway between God and my mother). I could hear a foolish mewing noise, a pathetic whimpering, issuing from the corridor. Was it the noise of some unfortunate patient …? No, Goddammit, it was me. I was in the final throes of panic. ‘Eeeennnmmm,’ the little mewing noise went, ‘Eeeeeennnnnmmmmm …’

Suddenly I was there, G Ward. My Nemesis. My Golgotha. My Destination of No Return. The double doors were as firmly shut as if everybody inside were having a day off work. (If only.) The circular porthole windows lay before me, like two eyes looking at me.

I tapped on one of them. I waited, a palpitating wreck, for something resembling Quint’s saturnine visage or the Snow Queen’s glacial physiognomy to stare back at me. Then a curtain twitched and a senior orderly looked out, the lower half of his face covered with a green mask.

He opened the door and came out to where I was standing, gibbering with apprehension.

‘Ah, John,’ he said. ‘Good of you to do this. Geoff would normally have done it, but he’s in theatre at the moment, so I thought you wouldn’t mind …’

‘It’s OK,’ I said in a teeny-tiny voice, like Piglet in the Winnie the Pooh stories. ‘Where is the man with the terrible –’

‘No, no, the patient’s already been taken to theatre,’ he said, as though to a half-wit. ‘We rang down for another porter because we need to get a machine, a new respirator adapted for burns patients, to the operating theatre. It’s a bit heavy so we thought we’d send it by trolley, but you’ll have to take it along right now. Would you mind?’

‘I’d –’ I was almost incoherent with relief.

‘What?’ said the orderly.

‘I’d love to,’ I said with pathetic gratitude. ‘I’d absolutely love to.’

‘Well, it’s only a machine, old boy,’ said the orderly. ‘Of course we appreciate your enthusiasm for these, ah, menial tasks …’

‘Where is it?’ I asked, suddenly raring to go.

‘Just inside here on the floor in Sister’s office,’ he said, opening the door a couple of inches. ‘But I wouldn’t come too far into the ward itself, if I were you. It can seem a little, er, stifling if you’re not used to it.’

‘Doesn’t bother me,’ I said with airy confidence, and I pushed the trolley in through the awful doors of what was no longer necessarily Hell.

I picked up the machine, and plonked it on the trolley, and set off to the operating theatre with a spring in my step. Peter Quint and the Snow Queen never showed up at any point. They stayed somewhere at the back of the ward, having their macaroni cheese supper, apparently uninterested in ruining my life any more.

* (#ulink_4e620de6-e07f-5b38-a08a-24b7c663d2dc) Sex films occasionally featured in this weekly induction to the Real World, but they too hinted at bad times: Bitter Harvest, with its back view of the naked Janet Munn, seemed to promise that some poor girl would suffer undreamt-of agonies simply because she went around showing too much flesh. Love With the Proper Stranger had Natalie Wood lying in disarray, apparently in the street, in the arms of Steve McQueen – the victim, I innocently assumed, of some traffic accident.

* (#ulink_c21d9d85-2b64-5bf7-938e-dc96f55a8312) Children are famously conservative readers, but there was something positively neurotic about the way I preferred cosy set-ups to narrative complication. When reading Enid Blyton, I used to wish the Secret Seven could just stay having meetings and drinking ginger beer for ever, and not worry about the Mysterious Foreigner, the conveniently discovered Puzzling Clue, and the Light Out At Sea in Chapter 6 …

* (#ulink_ed5ef9dd-98fe-5a61-bb59-7d5bed64ab58) Discovering, much later, that this ghastly revenant was played by Peter Wyngarde, the actor who was to play the insufferably camp crime-fighter Jason King in the ATV series Department S, and enjoyed his own spin-off show, Jason King, deploying his twin affectations of rolled-back jacket sleeves and long coffee-coloured cheroots, until his career was sunk by revelations of gay cottaging, did nothing to assuage the memory of this most-frightening-ever movie moment.