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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ scene was safely out of the way. We never bothered asking each other about the intervening scariness. We knew it was just an excuse.

      When a cartoon of The Snow Queen was broadcast one Sunday afternoon, Madelyn and I were by ourselves in the living-room. On the TV, a boy and a girl, slightly older than us, were playing in a Scandanavian homestead when, suddenly, the Snow Queen came whistling through the air and gazed in through the window at them. She envied their innocence, their purity. She wanted to make the boy her slave.…

      Madelyn had seen what was coming and legged it upstairs, crying ‘Tell me what happens’ in time-honoured style. I was left behind. Because of our you-must-watch-it protocol, I had to see the story unfold. So when the Snow Queen inspected the children and stared in at the doomed little boy, I had to watch it alone. Her cartoon eyes were enormous, lit with a cruel, unearthly brightness. They stared through the glass, her great green pupils mad and comfortless. There was no escape for poor Hans, nor for me. She was out to get both of us. A missile of ice sprang from her eyes and hurtled through the glass and flew into the small boy’s spindly chest. He turned instantly into a zomboid slave of the frigid queen, unable to speak to his sister or anybody else, utterly in the power of a woman who lived in an awful cold white land impossibly far from the comfort of home …

      It was appalling. I let out a four-year-old shriek that brought my parents running. I could not be consoled, even with hot milk and marshmallows. My parents were up half the night, reading me stories and trying to reassure me that the Snow Queen wasn’t lurking outside the windows of the nursery, ready to steal me away. Forty-odd years later, I still shudder at the mention of her name.

      Most horror films in the Sixties were dreadfully anticlimactic after The Innocents: all those tiresome bits of Hammer Guignol, with Peter Cushing playing his pinch-faced Man in the Library With a Skull On His Desk, and Christopher Lee sweeping about in a cloak, baring his ridiculous teeth in a blood-curdling Count Dracula leer that looked more like the smile on the Joker in the Batman comics. Even the old horror movie classics seemed pretty small beer. I watched the first Dracula and Frankenstein movies with interest but no great concern. I watched The Mummy and The Wolf Man and found them about as scary as a trigonometry exam. I sat through that bewildering expressionist farrago The Black Cat. without raising so much as a shiver. Nothing got to me as directly, as viscerally, as The Innocents and Peter Quint’s elderly, frozen, window-haunting predecessor from the Arctic wastes.

      The windows stayed in my head because of that night in 1963, when I was nine. All the components of the night came together as random images that suddenly cohered: the movie posters, the dripping blood, the staring eyes, the Gothic church with its congregation of grotesque old folks, the great wooden crucifix with its hanging man, the mad patient in his pyjamas standing in our hallway glaring at me, the man having an epileptic fit on the Welcome mat, that business with the teeth – they all were part of being a God-fearing, church-visiting, cinema-loving doctor’s son. And among these troubling Saturday-night images I could now introduce the Dark Face at the Window as an emblem of fright.

      This stream of images, spooling through my subconscious, got to me in the real world eventually. One episode demonstrated their hold over my imagination. It was the summer I worked, aged seventeen, as a ward porter in Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton. It was a holiday job and I loved it. The other porters were impossibly worldly and blokish twenty-somethings who read the Sun during their tea-breaks, smoked roll-ups and talked about West Ham and Queen’s Park Rangers with a kind of sulky enthusiasm as though somebody was forcing them to support their favourite football teams. They ruthlessly itemised the charms of every single nurse they came into contact with, and bragged shamelessly about the ones they’d managed to sleep with.

      The majority of the nurses were barely older than I was. I conceived a passion for the staff nurses, whose little tiaras of starched lace struck me as fantastically chic and sexy. A plump blonde radiographer called Linda ran the X-ray department. She was soon to be married but was obviously going off the whole idea. She would explain to me, in the brief moments of chat after I’d slid a patient off his trolley and on to an X-ray couch, how sick she was of everyone telling her it was normal to have ‘doubts’, that it was a natural response to your imminent nuptials, that her Bernard was a fine bloke and she didn’t want to let everyone down now, now did she? I murmured sympathetically. I told her that her friends seemed foolishly unsupportive, that her fiancé was shockingly insensitive. Each time, Linda said, ‘Oh, you understand, don’t you,’ and folded me in a wobbling embrace, thus ensuring I would treble my efforts to sympathise with her next time I had a patient on a trolley, whether he needed an X-ray or not.

      I enjoyed the camaraderie of the porters, the romance of the nurses, the swishy ‘Don’t speak to me, I’m too important’ heroism of the doctors, the little brothers and sisters in the kids’ ward, the coolly insouciant technicians, the lovelorn not-quite-girlfriend among the X-rays. It was like living in a village, or more precisely, in a village-based TV soap opera. Everywhere you looked, there was gossip and romance. Roger Moore, the actor, had been spotted in F Ward, allegedly there to have the bags under his eyes removed. A little girl in J ward was due for surgery to have her bat-ears pinned back, and when I went to pick her up from the Recovery Room and said, ‘Come on, Natasha, time to get back to your friends in the ward,’ she leaned over, fast asleep, and plonked a big kiss on my cheek. There was just so much going on. For a newly socialised seventeen-year-old, it was Hog Heaven.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ