By Yasmin Ali
Lockdown inevitably blindsides us with moments of introspection. My own tend to be evoked by the sight of an ambulance, the roar of a red helicopter landing at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, even the ubiquitous floating red pom-poms depicting the Coronavirus on news programmes and public information advertisements. Recollections of hospitals, and old school friends, and jumpers.
My earliest, most intense memories are of hospitals. Pre-school, I can recall more of hospital than of life at home (and even the home memories tend to be of lying, delirious, on the sofa, waiting for the district nurse to call to inject me with something or other).
Hospitals were never frightening places when I was a child. I might not have been able to move, sometimes I couldn’t even breathe unaided, but I was never bored on the ward. By day, doctors did the rounds, sometimes trailing medical students, talking over me, a tiny three year old looking half that age. But I paid attention to their words as they examined the clipboard at the base of my cot. I needed to understand what they were saying. I knew it was important. My mother always claimed that my first word was ‘streptomycin’, and I suspect that she wasn’t exaggerating much.
By night, it was quieter. I liked to have a bed by a window overlooking the redbrick quadrangles at the back of the Children’s Hospital. I could look through a gap in the curtain at nurses changing shifts, hurrying across the grass, their capes flapping.
I don’t remember other children in hospital. There were plenty of them, but they came and went, dressed up to go home, or wheeled out from behind closed curtains. It’s the adults I recall. Every week the hospital librarian would wheel a bookcase through the ward. I have no memory of being taught to read, but I could read, and write my name and address, by the time I started primary school at the age of 4.
An August baby, I was one of the youngest in the reception class. I was seated next to an even younger child, Jonathan, who was nearly three weeks my junior. He was my first proper child friend. Jonathan was clever, and liked reading stories. We complained to one another that we were not allowed to move on to the next reading book until the teacher had heard us read aloud, which in a large class seemed to take forever.. We talked about the things we were learning. Upon being told in the morning assembly that God was everywhere, we tried earnestly to work out how that could be, finally concluding that God was air.
A few months after I started school, it was decided that I should have a heart operation. For my parents, it must have been a frightening prospect. They knew their daughter probably wouldn’t live to finish her allotted time at primary school, but the surgery proposed was new, barely tried on children. If successful, however, their girl might have a chance. I knew this too, but I’d lived my whole four years as more of a ‘thought being’ than a scrapes and knocks child. My own mortality was not unknown to me, but I did not fear it. As for returning to hospital, I was thrilled! I liked school, and I would miss Jonathan, but I loved hospital, and I knew that a heart operation was a very big deal. I couldn’t believe my luck! I would be in hospital for six weeks, at least.
I remember a lot about that time. Is it possible that I remember the operating theatre? I think I do, and vividly. There was an ‘out of body’ experience, of course, an aerial view of the gowned and masked team peering into my tiny chest cavity. Most of all, I recall the process of coming out of anaesthesia. My thirst was desperate. I tried to tell the nurses, but they were cruel. Why were they simply brushing my lips with water, rather than letting me slake my thirst? Had they told me why I couldn’t be allowed to drink, I know I would have understood. Later I remember the physiotherapy sessions at my bedside. I was being urged repeatedly to try to blow a ball of cotton wool off the therapist’s palm. I tried so hard, just to make the wisp of fluff tremble, but the effort would exhaust me.
The surgery was a success, and my hospital visits became less frequent. One I do remember was when the school lollypop man was away, and a police officer stood in. He halted the traffic, stood in the road, and waved us across. But a motorcycle came at speed around the corner, and hit me. It is said that the impact tossed me high into the air, depositing me before the wheels of a, fortunately stationary, bus. I don’t remember that part. I do recollect lying on the pavement on the policeman’s jacket, my head propped up in the crook of his pointed helmet. Children were huddled around me, but Jonathan pushed through. He was hysterical, repeatedly shouting, “Yasmin’s dead!”
I wasn’t dead, of course. I wasn’t even badly injured, nothing much but bruises and a broken ankle. In the ambulance I heard the crew on the radio discussing my admission to Selly Oak Hospital. I objected to this. I demanded to be taken to The Children’s Hospital. The paramedics, amused I remember, though I couldn’t at the time understand why, got back on the radio, before diverting to the medical facility of my choice.
It was around that time that Jonathan became obsessed with death. A precocious seven year old Goth, he liked black things, sculls, the uncanny American comics that he’d steal from his big brother, forbidden glimpses of Hammer House of Horrors on the television. That was all fine by me. He was still my partner in the weekly Scottish dancing sessions that our headteacher thought appropriate for a multicultural primary school in Birmingham. Jonathan would whisper to me that I was “his scrumptious partner”. He’d take me by the hand, and we would skip across the parquet, singing ‘Step we gaily, on we go/Heel for heel and toe for toe/Arm in arm and row on row/All for Marie’s wedding”.
One more episode. Jumpers were legendary at my primary school. Jumpers were men, and they were always men, some reportedly fathers of children at the school, who leapt onto the railway line from the footbridge that was the entrance to Cotteridge Park, a short walk from the playground.
We came out of school one afternoon to see nearly all the children running in one direction, down towards the park. This was a time when the ‘school run’ was unknown. We walked to and from school with friends or siblings. If an event did kick off, no adult could intervene to prevent our attendance.
The man was sitting on the wall, high above the railway line, his back to the crowd that had gathered. Jonathan pushed his way forward, but I didn’t follow. I couldn’t share the shrieking excitement of the other children. I turned and walked home.
I didn’t ask about the jumper the next day, though I knew he had pushed himself off the wall to plunge to his death as a train approached. Few of the children would have seen the body on the line. The embankment was steep, and walled. Did they hear the man’s distress, or the sound of the impact? Did they stick around for the ambulance? I don’t know. When Jonathan wanted to talk about it, I changed the subject. I’d like to say that my moral principles were highly developed for a child, but I don’t think that’s true. I just wasn’t interested.
I haven’t given a lot of thought over the years to this period of my childhood. Yet hospitals never lost their allure. For most of my life I have looked at hospitals, especially in the evening, when the lights are coming on, as places of comfort and safety. I’ve always been drawn to them, in any town, in any country. Madrid, Bangkok, Middlesborough, in exotic places, and humdrum ones, I have memories of catching a glimpse of the infirmary, and being comforted that within those walls at least, I knew what to expect. Not now. I’m too vulnerable to this virus. So I am cautious, careful, soaped and sanitised, locked down, and always ready with the thermometer should I fear a cough or a rise in temperature. I’ve also, like everyone else, had time to think of things, of people, I thought I’d forgotten.
Like Jonathan.
Babies of the class, we were ten years old when we left primary school, to move on to single sex schools on different sides of the city. My family moved house. I last saw Jonathan when we were 12. He asked me to go with him on a trip to Northfield, a by-word for deprivation now, but once a tempting shopping centre with a large Woolworths full of pocket money tat, It was, I suppose, a date. We sat together on a wall, and he made a clumsy attempt at taking my hand. The endearments he used to whisper confidently when we were small children would no longer come to him. We had grown up. He wanted me to call him Jon. We managed to talk about sci-fi, and pop music, but our hormones were coming between us.
Years later, shortly after I graduated, my mother asked me if I remembered Jonathan. She hadn’t known how close we were, or at least hadn’t taken seriously the strength of friendship children can have. But I didn’t wonder for a moment why she had, after all that time, mentioned my old primary school friend. It was obvious.
“Jonathan’s dead,” I said. And I knew with certainty how he had died. My mother nodded, and handed me the Evening Mail. There was a little paragraph about the local man who had jumped off a railway bridge in Cotteridge.