Slowing Down
VIKING
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2005
1
Copyright © George Melly, 2005
The moral right of the author has been asserted
‘The Old Fools’ from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber.
‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ and ‘Secrets’ from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden,
reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber.
‘East Coker III’ from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber.
Surrealist Games, edited by Mel Gooding, reprinted by permission of Redstone Press,
7a St Lawrence Terrace, London W10 5SU. http://www.redstonepress.co.uk/
Drawings of George Melly by Maggi Hambling, copyright © Maggi Hambling
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
EISBN: 978–0–141–90066–7
To most of my family and all my true friends
1 Old Fools’ Time
2 A Prisoner on Remand
3 A Fair Cop
4 The Oldest Living Surrealist in the World
5 One Last Disadvantage
6 The Fairies and the Goblins
7 ‘George Melly – God Help Us!’
8 Up at Ronnie’s
9 Ronnie
10 Discomforts and Pleasures
11 ‘Alas I Waver to and fro’
12 Treats
Envoi
Acknowledgements
What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and
drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all
night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some
September?
Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,
And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don’t (and they can’t) it’s
strange:
Why aren’t they screaming?
At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines –
How can they ignore it?
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-cased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give
An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end?
Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.
Well, ‘We shall find out.’ Only Larkin didn’t. Cancer, that ravenous shark, took him first. I only hope that before the end, they turned him into an instant junkie. His muse may have deserted him some time before, his views are hard to take, but unnecessary pain, if avoidable, is indefensible. He was without what they used to call, and perhaps still do, ‘the consolation of faith’.
… the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
As an almost life-long atheist myself, I find it reassuring to come across others, in this case whatever his shortcomings as a human being, as a prop to one’s own non-faith. Better cancer – not much better but better nevertheless – than to become a smelly old mindless cabbage dribbling at one end and leaking at the other.
Another man, whom, in this case, I admire unreservedly, is the late Spanish film-maker Luis Buñuel. I’ve just re-read his autobiography My Last Breath (My Last Sigh in ostrich-minded America) which, with the help of his friend and colleague Jean-Claude Carrière, he completed not long before his death in 1983. In it he made the following admirably sensible request: ‘Some doctors do help us to die, but most are only money-makers who live by the canons of an impersonal technology. If they would only let us die when the moment comes and help us to go more easily. Respect for human life becomes absurd when it leads to insufferable suffering.’
Ever honest, early in that same last testament he admits that in his seventies (he made his last film in 1976) he enjoyed what he called ‘playing at senility’, but became, as his final decade passed by, ‘increasingly conscious of my decrepitude’ and ‘only happy at home following my routine’, the twin peaks of his day being two dry martinis, always his favourite tipple, one before lunch, the other before dinner, although he admits to sometimes cheating and drinking the latter before its designated hour. Later anyway he was forced to substitute the martinis with red wine.
In my late seventies I am still able to play at senility, enjoying supportive friends, singing, albeit seated and wearing an eye-patch, drinking Irish whiskey, fly-fishing for trout, looking at works of art and listening to Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues. I imagine this last will be the last to go.
I have, however, put the block on my tendency to flirt. This is partly from observing others of my generation failing to recognize how pathetic they look ogling young women, and confirmed by watching myself on a video tape rolling my eyes at a pretty chat-show hostess. On the other hand I still look forward to what I think of as ‘treats’, the equivalent of a child anticipating a visit to a circus or pantomime (my choices here date me like the rings on a tree stump).
I have realized recently that I share some defects with most of my generation. This very morning I rang up two old friends. One, a few years older than I, couldn’t remember the title of a play he had seen quite recently (a general failing of mine also) and, as he struggled to find it in that jumbled
‘I have, however, put the block on my tendency to flirt’
filing cabinet we oldies call our brains, I recognized his mounting irritation. I would bet also that some time later, and for no logical reason, it surfaced.
The Frankenstein compulsion in scientists, angrily recognized by Buñuel, was confirmed for me on Waterloo station only a few weeks ago. Returning from the country and on my way to a friend’s sixtieth birthday party in NW1 (a treat), I went into a large stationer’s to buy him a card to accompany a bottle of malt whisky in its protective and decorative drum. As is usual these days, there were many cards designed for special recipients: the newborn, or at any rate their parents, toddlers, ‘cool’ teenagers, engaged couples (The longest sentence in the English language? ‘I do’), rose-cheeked grandparents on their retirement, but there wasn’t, and I’d half expected it, a card aimed specifically at anyone of sixty, today an unremarkable age. There were, on the other hand, several, mostly smothered in rose-clad cottages in low relief, for centenarians!
To justify these cards economically implies a substantial number of potential recipients, and they’ve promised us that soon a hundred and fifty to two hundred will be the norm, but why? What for? What will be, to use a fashionable cliché, ‘the quality’ of the double centenarians’ lives? One thing’s for sure: the Queen, famous for turning off lights at Buckingham Palace and having torn sheets repaired, will surely stop sending telegrams, or their more expensive modern equivalents, to those who have survived a mere century.
I bought one of these cards for my friend and wrote underneath the Patience Strong-like verse, the famous and refreshingly cynical and accurate riddle:
Q: Who wants to live to be a hundred?
A: Someone of ninety-nine.
Of course there are some people who enjoy life well into old fools’ territory. Like heavy smokers who can always cite an uncle who lived into his nineties on sixty full-strength Capstans a day, only to be eventually run over, when drunk, by a bus, most of us know or have known someone who kept all their marbles into their nineties, and enjoyed every day as it came.
In my case it was Eileen Agar, a witty and beautiful old painter who claimed to have one abstract leg and one surrealist, who had slept in the same bed (but not at the same time) as Picasso, who drank champagne every day, and whose funeral was conducted by a close friend who was a Catholic priest. As he knew that she was an atheist, there were no prayers or hymns. I bet he prayed for her in silence though.
In her autobiography, dictated like Buñuel’s towards the end of her life, she expressed the hope that she would ‘die at a sparkling moment’, and so she did. Her happy end was rare though. Not to be relied on.
Indeed not! My mother, for example, died in her nineties, in Shakespeare’s seventh age, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. My father had died aged sixty-one of a perforated ulcer. My mother and I were at his deathbed in a Liverpool hospital. The West Indian nurse knew exactly when he was going. I looked at his corpse, but his humorous lethargic spirit had left only a shell, an envelope. What surprised me, and later on my sister when she got there, was how calmly my mother took it. They’d been married for forty years, but she didn’t weep and all she said to the nurse was (embarrassing, as she often was), ‘My son has many coloured friends.’ A week later she even went on a fishing trip with me to a hotel in North Lancashire that my father had booked for us both some weeks before. I found out later that this calm interlude is by no means uncommon. Some block (chemical? psychological? both?) would seem to protect the bereaved from reacting immediately to the death. Maud was even in total control at the funeral.
A few weeks later the dam burst, the river broke its banks. She cried much of the time and reproached herself continually for sometimes criticizing Tom (not without reason) for drinking too much, all this interwoven with endless reminiscing about their life together.
Gradually she recovered. My sister, brother and I persuaded her, without too much difficulty, to sell the big house in Liverpool where she’d lived for twenty-six years and move to Brighton (we all lived in the south by then), and Andrée found her a big flat with a lift, on the front overlooking the wrinkled sea and the still splendid pavilion pier.
Her life seemed worth living again. There were grandchildren, visits to the theatre, family Christmas at one or the other of us in rotation, while, in Brighton itself, she kept up with several retired theatricals, most of them elderly gays.
She only revisited Liverpool once and came back to Brighton saying that she didn’t ‘care for it any more’, although, until she’d moved, she’d lived there all her life within a quarter of a mile. Too many ghosts, perhaps. Or, more likely, the fact that she was no longer at the centre of a mildly Bohemian circle, no longer the queen of queens?
Although eight years older than Tom she was to outlive him by over twenty years. She hadn’t drunk anything beyond the occasional ginger-beer shandy on very hot days, or, even more rarely, a Tia Maria, for she had a very sweet tooth. As for smoking, only very occasionally in the loo, if she felt it politic to mask the pong. Even so, and inevitably, true old age was beginning to growl quietly in its corner and show its yellow teeth.
Faced with various small accidents of a potentially dangerous nature, Andrée decided it was time to move Maud to somewhere where she could keep a closer eye on her and settled for a small flat in commuter-ridden Surrey. The flat was directly opposite a health-food store, somewhat ahead of its time, which Andrée and her husband, Oscar, had opened after their semi-retirement from the stage. This enabled Andrée to ‘pop across the road’, as Maud put it, to check she was all right. (‘Pop’ was a favourite word of my mother’s. Before it drew closer, she always referred to her own death as ‘popping off’.)
Andrée warned me after a time that Maud was beginning to lose her marbles, but I didn’t really take this in until, on one of my rather infrequent visits, I realized she was talking disconnected nonsense. Without ‘drawing breath’, an expression she used to describe non-stop verbalizers, she told me that footballers shouldn’t wear beards as it stopped them playing well (she had never shown the least interest in the game, but detested facial hair), that she couldn’t understand why she was so obsessed with Barry Manilow (she had always favoured thin, camp men) and finally asked what did Billie Jean King and her partner ‘do’. She had forgotten that during the forties she told me that she’d had several erotic dreams involving a very glamorous actress at the Liverpool Playhouse. I didn’t remind her of this except to say that surely she didn’t intend to come out in her late eighties? She would once have found this funny, but no longer. ‘No, of course not!’ she said, crossly.
There were several later eccentric conversations, by then confined to her family and a few visitors. Andrée and I, while realizing how sad it was, also became on occasion hysterical with laughter.
The most far-out demonstration of Maud’s gradual loss of reality was when she asked Andrée’s help to fill in a form. Knowing official forms can be difficult to fill in, Andrée asked to see it. It was an advertisement cut out, not too well, from the Daily Mail. ‘JOIN THE RAF AND LEARN TO FLY’ was the headline. Despite the fact that there was an age limit involved (18–25), Maud was convinced it was her duty. Her daughter reminded her that, apart from one childhood day-trip to the Isle of Man, she’d been too scared to go on a ship, let alone fly, and then there was the question of her age. So, finally, although it took some time, Maud relinquished her ‘duty’.
The thought of the old lady, very shrunken and bent by this time, doing her preliminary training on the parade ground, or putting on her goggles and leather helmet as she ran towards her fighter, really set us off. I laughed as if I’d been smoking too much dope.
It was sad, harmless and comic, but quite soon her growing dementia spread outside. The Cranley newsagent complained she had started to ring him up at two or three in the morning to ask why the papers hadn’t been delivered.
Not that she read them when they did arrive. At first she used to tick off, and later encircle, every word, article by article, until the whole issue was obliterated. Then, a few months later, she began to scrumple all the pages into a ball and staple everything together to retain its shape. I asked Andrée if she thought an avant-garde gallery might be interested. Today it would have won the Turner Prize (Maud Melly’s three periods: ticks, circles and scrumples).
It was Andrée who convinced her brothers, Bill and me, that it was essential Maudie went into a home. Andrée had already had a disturbing shock when, crossing the road from Nuts of Cranley to check on her, she found our mother apparently dead. Andrée’s pocket mirror failed to cloud over and she could find no pulse, so she sat down to think about what to do next. Whom should she ring first? My brother and me? Maudie’s doctor? An ambulance? Do you have to tell the police first? Suddenly the phone rang. Maudie reached for it and said, in a perfectly normal voice, ‘Maud Melly, here.’
Andrée is a brilliant raconteuse, and when she told us this story it seemed very funny. But then, only a comparatively short time later, she yet again crossed the road and opened the door to find Maudie lying at the bottom of a steep staircase leading up to her flat. She was unconscious, her limbs splayed out like those 1920s Pierrot dolls you sometimes used to find flopped over the round pale green tasselled cushions on the rather grubby settees of ageing flappers.
This time it was to the hospital, with sprains, bruises and, I think, several broken ribs. When Maud returned to her flat Andrée had already contacted a suitable and sympathetic home. She had naturally become alarmed that her postmodernist parent might have another fall and break something, scald herself or set herself on fire. Moving an aged parent into a home is considered a very cruel thing to do – and sometimes it may well be – but in Maudie’s case it was totally justified and besides she welcomed it. Having worked on the newspaper she had nothing to do before Andrée came over at lunchtime. In Liverpool she’d always read a great deal, mainly choice middle-brow novels with a pinch of what she called ‘spice’, but she couldn’t concentrate any more. She did spend a lot of time watching television, but it was difficult to say how much she took in. Among her favourite programmes was snooker, although as she obstinately refused to have a colour set she can’t have made much of it.
For her the old people’s home, despite being called Ally-blasters, a curiously aggressive name for a haven of rest, was a great improvement. She had a large room with a big picture window overlooking woods and fields and ‘her own things round her’, a condition for senile contentment supported by those who are not yet senile themselves. Who is to say?
The matron and staff were both helpful and attentive (it was after all a private nursing-home, although I recently visited a state institution in Hastings which, while less luxuriously appointed, seemed just as friendly). Maud had always gone out of her way to court popularity. She told me that at Allyblasters she was much the most popular inmate with the nurses. Perhaps she was, but I dare say her mixture of swanking (about us) and snobbery (about whom she’d known, preferably titled) must have tried their patience at times. Even so, once when I was leaving, one of the old ladies, as she invariably referred to her in some cases slightly younger contemporaries, ran out on to the landing and, leaning over the banisters, gave me a right earful of scatological and anatomical abuse. Having a great-aunt, a saintly figure for most of her long life who did the same towards the end of it, I was not too surprised, but in the hall matron apologized and told me that, of course, ‘Mrs Melly would never do that.’
Her ninetieth birthday was quite a success, although I don’t think she recognized many of those present. She certainly ate an enormous quantity of cake – apparently greed is a common trait among the very old – and seemed quite pleased to be the centre of attention even among people largely unknown to her.
From then on it was increasingly ‘Old Fools’ Time’.
My sister was with her when she died. Maud, she told me, looked at her intensely. She held on to her daughter’s finger like a vice. She didn’t let go until she let go. She seemed to remember nothing.
Maud was born into a world of cab-horses and died after people had walked on the moon. She’d ‘come out’, put her hair up and worn huge hats, cemeteries for dead birds, before the First World War. Admirers had written to her from the trenches. In the twenties she’d danced the Charleston, met and married my father, given birth to two boys and, unexpectedly, a daughter. She ‘went up to London’ once a year and ‘did’ several shows, mostly revues. She entertained a great deal and was a successful amateur actress. She sat out the Blitz and, although she always maintained her forties were her best decade, had quite a good time until Tom’s death. All forgotten. Nothing in the end but Andrée’s finger.
At her funeral in a Surrey crematorium, after we’d witnessed Maud’s boxed disappearance between the blue velvet, multi-screen cinema curtains and emerged into ‘the garden of remembrance’, my brother Bill said to me, ‘Death is a mysterious thing, isn’t it?’ It wasn’t a startling observation, nor yet an eloquent image, but it’s true enough.
It’s 6.35 on a January evening and I got up only about an hour ago. Increasingly I am becoming a sleepaholic, but this, coupled with wide-eyed insomnia between around 3 and 6 a.m., is temporary (at least I hope it’s temporary). The explanation is that quite recently I was appearing at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club and never in bed much before 4 a.m. (and then in a state of euphoric over-stimulation). I’m hoping my extended or disturbed sleep pattern is caused by this variation of jet-lag and not just old age. Since I got up I’ve eaten two bananas, swallowed a small Irish whiskey and watched an instalment of The Simpsons, my top-favourite programme.
It’s dark outside in Shepherd’s Bush and, it would seem, very cold. I’ve gathered this from my friend and lodger Desdemona, who comes from Zimbabwe. She has just got in from art school and put a freezing hand on my cheek. Her role here, in exchange for a rather small room and other advantages, is to make sure I’m on course, to sort my laundry and do some shopping if Diana’s away or in the country. She’s witty and chatty, although her high-pitched African accent and rapid delivery are sometimes difficult for me to understand. She’s not unique there, however. I find almost everybody difficult to understand due to my escalating deafness.
I ask Desdemona to show me how to insert, play and eject a DVD. As the twenty-first century’s Ned Ludd this took me some time to grasp and, as my memory is more and more like an old colander rusting away at the bottom of a polluted canal, I’ll no doubt need a refresher course almost immediately. Finally I get to sit at my desk and get on with this book, a New Year’s resolution after a long prevaricatory delay. At 1 a.m., after yet another banana and a glug of the Jameson, I climb wearily to bed. Was three bananas all I had to eat all day? Yes. Diana, who always cooks supper, was at the pictures with a friend and, although there is a small kitchen on this floor that I share with Desdemona, plenty of food in our fridge and a microwave I have finally mastered, I just couldn’t be bothered. In general in the last few years my appetite has become much less demanding.
People who know nothing of my set-up will wonder who Diana is and of course she will appear from now on, frequently, in the text. I’ve been married to her for over forty years and more or less take it for granted that everyone is aware of our situation, especially as I’ve written about our meeting and subsequent life in earlier books. This volume I don’t think would ever have been finished without her pressure. Our marriage began passionately and is finishing with compassion. She makes sure I do what I have to do, go where I’m meant to go, and I still love her very much.
10 January
Despite a sleeping pill, admittedly not a strong one, I woke at four and channel-jumped on my bedside television. On BBC 1 I found a riveting if repellent documentary on human parasites, giving pride of place to the tapeworm, a surprisingly recent discovery. It was partially dramatized, so I watched a rather unpleasant-looking Victorian hirsute doctor who, suspecting the existence of something of the sort, fed an egg to a condemned criminal six weeks before his execution. After this had been carried out, he was cut down, and an autopsy revealed the creature growing in his intestine. The doctor, explained the narrator, was much criticized for his methods.
A more cheerful episode showed a plump young man who volunteered for an experiment, a deliberate infestation, providing he was rid of it before his coming marriage. This was done, and he lay on the grass next to it. It was over six feet long, but he had lost several stone and was fitted for a most elegant wedding outfit he couldn’t have done up earlier.
This confirmed a story I heard long ago of yet another Regency doctor, apothecary or quack, who became famous for helping young women to lose weight. He sold them tapeworm eggs as slimming pills and they were all, for a time, fully satisfied. I myself have recently lost several stone, but no one has suggested I have a tapeworm. I just eat less.
This unpleasant creature, while the star of the show, was not the only member of the cast. There was a very sympathetic young rock singer whose left eye had been eaten away by some tiny horrors picked up in the Far East, and an admirable young woman who had spent a lot of time in Africa treating infested and starving village children and adults. Via an insect bite she had developed elephantiasis, as yet only in one leg. We had a good look at that too, hideously enlarged, grey and heavily wrinkled. They are trying a new cure on her, but won’t know if it works for several years. She was clearly of a sweet and courageous nature, but I couldn’t help recalling the cynical aphorism, ‘No good deed deserves to go unpunished.’
‘I am becoming a sleepaholic’
It is remarkable, however, that by now we are able, through exposure by the box, to watch almost anything without fainting or vomiting: operations, the slaughter and dismemberment of animals, extreme brutality and, of course, birth. I remember a Jewish comedienne (Maureen Lipman perhaps) complaining that you couldn’t turn on the TV any more without someone ‘having a baby in your face’. I don’t say it isn’t better that we should be able to accept what we are all of us in part responsible for, but I sometimes suspect an element of gloating, like the way a crowd materializes instantly around a bad car crash.
Perhaps it’s a constant in human nature. It wasn’t so long ago after all that we stopped publichangings, banned dog-fights, cock-fighting and bear-baiting; and, in secret, some people are still digging out badgers to watch them torn to pieces.
William Blake, always appalled by human cruelty – one of the reasons they thought he was mad – in one of his many jousts with God, or Old Nobodaddy as he sometimes called Him, asked Him how, on the one hand, He could create the ‘tyger’ and, on the other, the lamb. It’s even more puzzling why He should have invented the tapeworm. It’s one of the many reasons I find it impossible to believe in the possibility of a beneficent ‘personal’ deity, let alone a judgemental one.
‘Everything that is squint-eyed, doddering and grotesque is summed up for me in this one word, God.’ André Breton
Of course I watched the tapeworms writhing, wriggling and growing ever longer until the last frame, and fell into a deep sleep which lasted until midday.
*
I now take a cornucopia of pills, some once a week, most daily. Recognizing my increasing tendency to make a muddle, Diana or sometimes Desdemona (surely an odd choice of name for an African?) fill up a plastic blue or violet pill-box divided vertically into the time of day and horizontally the days of the week. This box looks rather like a tiny chicken’s battery system. The pills themselves are of many colours, sizes and shapes, like distorted Smarties. They are to fend off various threats. There are four tiny yellow ones, but only for Monday mornings. These are to suppress psoriasis, an unsightly disease in which an over-production of cells piles up on the surface of the skin and flakes off to leave patches of raw flesh (another example of God in a bad mood). I seem to have inherited this complaint from a great-uncle who developed it so badly that he never married because of the shock and repugnance it would cause his bride when, on their wedding night, he removed his combinations. As far as I know I was the only one among his nephews, nieces and a wide younger generation of cousins to inherit this grisly heirloom. In my case it did not surface until my early sixties, but from then on it never restrained itself. Happily it didn’t attack my face, but the rest of me was covered with it. Naked, not by then a pretty sight at the best of times, I looked like a plant-eating dinosaur who had survived an unsuccessful attack by prehistoric raptors. Luckily the yellow pills defeated the disease, except for a small sprinkling on my knees and elbows. They are, however, apparently very powerful and can affect the liver and/or kidneys.
My first skin specialist, the good Dr Fry at St Mary’s, Paddington, demanded regular blood tests. I don’t mind these, although I am not fond of the needle and give an involuntary squeak when one pricks my skin (my father tended to faint). Once I was quite amused by a nurse, evidently a black humorist, who had covered the walls of her small room with Dracula posters, and hung a realistic imitation bat from the ceiling. She, alas, has gone, taking her bat and posters with her.
Dr Fry, who treated me during the disease’s heyday, never prescribed the yellow pills; perhaps they were not yet available. Instead he offered me a cream or ointment to rub on. It did no good except to alleviate the itching that led to inadvisable scratching (my bed at times resembled a butcher’s shop in which someone had spilt several packets of cornflakes). He told me there was a certain cure: a month or so on the shores of the Dead Sea and frequent immersion in its waters, so saturated in natural minerals and salts that it’s impossible to sink. (The Dead Sea provided the setting for one of my favourite pictures, Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat, which hangs in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, opposite Liverpool.) He added, however, that on one’s return with skin like a baby’s bottom, almost immediately the psoriasis would erupt again with equal vigour. In consequence I decided it wasn’t worth it, and he agreed with me.
He did, however, propose I try another possible avenue of help, a twice-weekly visit to a department many floors up in another branch of the hospital. I warned him that, due to contracted singing engagements all over the British Isles and commissioned travel articles abroad, I might find it impossible to make every appointment. He said he quite understood.
What I had to undergo was exposure to ultra-violet light, brief at first, then building up gradually to around twenty minutes. He warned me that the nurse in charge had been there for many years, was in fact well past her official retiring age, but insisted on carrying on and was, he added with a twinkle in his eye for he was a drily humorous man, ‘of the old school’. And so she was.
She was tiny, with spectacles, and wore a spotless white coat. She spoke with the educated yet brisk accent of the headmistress of a posh girls’ school. Her shoes were white plimsoles. Her surgery was not especially large, but contained three separate cubicles side by side, the size and shape of police boxes and, to add to this comparison, the same dark blue. I always thought of the one I entered as Dr Who’s Tardis. Each had a small rectangular window let in to the door so she could, from time to time, check you were all right. There was also an individual switchboard to turn on the strip-lights inside, and a timer to make sure you were not exposed for too long or short a period.
At the other end of the room was a short square box where patients could sit, like the assassinated Marat (who also had psoriasis), if only their lower bodies were affected. Along one wall, at right angles to the police boxes, was a row of small compartments where you stripped behind floral curtains with hooks to hang up your clothes. On my first visit Miss Day told me always to bring dark glasses to protect my eyes.
The door to the room was between the Tardis and the compartments. On the outside was a stern warning: ‘Knock and wait!’ If she was busy, the wait could take some time and, on my first visit, I presumed she hadn’t heard and knocked again. When she did respond, she snapped, ‘I always hear. You must be patient!’ I never knocked twice again.