It was November 1952, tomorrow would be Guy Fawkes Day. The box of fireworks was safely stored in the bottom of the airing-cupboard, away from the damp that pervaded the old house with its coal-fires and draughty door-frames. In the triangle of neglected kitchen-garden behind the back-lane garage, a pyramid of brushwood stood tall, awaiting only a priming of crumpled newspaper and the pyromaniac match. At the dark end of the afternoon, school had been out for half an hour and most of the children, like Rob, were already home. He should have been excited, rushing around with a torch, making final preparations, finding one more forkful of garden rubbish to thatch the bonfire, collecting long-necked squash bottles to launch the rockets and from somewhere in the attic, unearthing that old camping-stove to kindle the reluctant sparklers. But since returning home from school, the ten-year-old had not been well. His mother took one look at his flushed face, noted his listless collapse onto the old sofa in the alcove at the back of the breakfast-room, worried at the lack of clamouring hunger, then felt his forehead and sent him straight to bed. At five o'clock she went upstairs to check on him, carrying a tray with milk, biscuits and a saved copy of the Eagle, usually issued several days late as an incentive to be good. Rob wasn't interested, the bedclothes were scrambled, he could hardly speak. The room felt as if a three-bar electric-fire had been left on for hours. She checked his temperature - a hundred and two - then called the doctor.
The doctor got there after evening surgery and examined Rob thoroughly, listening carefully to his complaints of strange flutterings in the stomach and pains in his arms and legs, then dispensed penicillin directly from his black-bag - something they did in those days - and promised to return in the morning. Eventually the fretful and feverish night was over. The doctor repeated his examination, took samples and went away. For Rob, the day was a waking nightmare of burning fever, but, towards the end of the afternoon, his temperature dropped a little nearer normal and he rallied enough to show his disappointment at having to miss the fire-works. It is difficult to refuse a poorly child, especially when a little effort makes a satisfactory compromise. His parents decided that a limited Guy Fawkes celebration could be held. The bonfire, so far from the house, was out of the question, but there was space on the terrace outside the French-window, to let-off the smaller fireworks. Rob was carried downstairs wrapped in an eiderdown, then ensconced on the big old sofa and turned to face the window.
Vesuvius, represented by several different sizes of gunpowdery cardboard cones erupted in unnatural ruby-reds, traffic-light-greens and magnesium-whites. Roman candles produced either one more, or one less, soaring ball of light, than advertised on the packet. Crackerjacks jumped unnervingly at mother's skirts, Catherine's sparkling spirals whirred on the fence-post and impatient rockets tried to whoosh-off father's hat. Rob forgot his fever and watched the bright-eyed magic, but before the final rocket had flown over the oak-trees, he had fallen asleep. Later, when he awoke, he was back in his room. The doctor was standing by the bed, mother beside him, looking pale and worried. Father again wrapped him in the eiderdown and carried him downstairs to where an ambulance was waiting. The ride to hospital was strangely dreamlike. The vehicle swayed, Rob's mind seeming to catch up with each movement in time for its dizzying reversal. He didn't know who was with him, but there were comforting voices and a hand in his or on his brow. Then, when they stopped, there was a sudden burst of frosty air, jolting trolley-wheels and a sharp instruction to ‘Hold the door’. Bright light beat at his eyelids, turning the world a glowing red. Hands pushed under him and lifted him onto a bed. Then he was alone, the brightness gone, leaving a strange yellow twilight glowing above him He tried to move but found himself too weak. The effort brought back the fever and his mind floated deliriously free in a maze of lingering, fire-ball after-images.
They didn't let him rest. In the early hours, light blazed again, just one bright white fire-ball, hovering above his bed. He opened his eyes, but couldn't stand the dazzle. His momentary glimpse of white masks and coats would have been terrifying, had he been conscious enough to care. They pulled at him, pushed him from side to side, forced him to sit up and held him there, hit him on the knees and elbows, drew patterns on his stomach with sharp sticks, then did the same to the soles of his feet. They muttered and grunted among themselves, ignored his moans of protest and eventually, like demons of the light-bulb, left him shuddering in the dark.
For four days his only waking moments were when roused, either by the frightening white demons, or by a routine succession of nurses who helped him to drink or encouraged him to urinate. In Rob's mind, a universe of stars, the deeps of the ocean, billowings of sun-stitched clouds and the groaning depths below the mountains of the Earth, held sway. He soared high, tunnelled low, exploded with the galaxies or crushed himself to nothing under seeming tons of bedclothes. Reality was reversed, it was his waking moments that were nightmare.
On the fifth day, as night paled to dawn, he awoke. The bright stars of his delirium had become screaming seagulls wheeling against the grey sky beyond the window. For the first time he was able to see the detail of the strange room and the alien territories beyond his bed, the erstwhile domain of the light-bulb demons and land of starch encrusted nurses.
He lay, curled-up on his side, facing the glooming sky where bits of it had become trapped between the slender bars of the tall sash. Below the high sill, the space was filled with the massive cream-painted arcades of a cast-iron temple that radiated warmth into the sharpness of the air. Above it, the glazing-bars swam in the rising current, exaggerating the movements of banshee gulls as they skirmished, shrieking past the window, diving out of sight, then reappearing with loaded beaks and rising amidst battles for possession. To the left of the radiator, a huge rectangular china sink, with curious long-tailed taps, separated it from the door. A heavy, green-painted affair, with panels in the lower third and nine grey-sky-and-seagull-framing panes above. Whatever the birds were fighting over must be just beyond it. Sudden silence heralded its opening; a harsh grey woman, like a fragment of that November sky, hauled down and stuffed into a tight, dark-blue uniform, bustled into the room. ‘It's your breakfast, they're eating!’ she announced, ‘You should have been awake when we offered it to you’. Rob, to whom these were the first words he had been consciously able to understand since the ambulance man had asked for the door to be held open, was frightened; he burst into tears. The ward-sister called for a nurse to, ‘Sort him out!’
The nurse, a wide-faced girl with fair hair and a pale-blue uniform, came in and sat down beside the bed. There was warm tea in a spouted feeder; she applied it with a smile. 'Can you manage to hold the cup?' she asked. Rob thought he could, that is until he tried and suddenly realised something was seriously wrong. His left arm would hardly move and there was no way his head would rise above the pillow. He struggled, trying to pull his right arm out from under him, but seeing his distress, the nurse relented and continued to help him drink. As soon as the routine was over and the nurse had left, Rob wanted to return to the warm, wonderful dreamland of his recent delirium, but his retreat had been cut off by the end of the fever, all he had now was the pain of discovery to fill his head and the sharp cries of the gulls for company.
By mid-morning, after another visit from the nurse, this time with the spout delivering orange squash, the door opened and a tall man strode in and stood by the bed. Rob, fortunately not recognising him as the leader of the light-bulb demons, looked up from the pillow in silence.
‘Hello, young fella,’ said the demon-in-disguise, the words more friendly than the tone of voice, ‘I thought you'd like to know you're suffering from Heine-Maiden Disease, named after the doctors who discovered it.’ - for Rob, this was just another layer of confusion, another flock of feathers falling through the pillow of his mind. Whatever reaction the doctor had expected, Rob failed to give it. ‘You might have heard it called Polio, poliomyelitis, that is.’ The man paused - the child still had nothing to say - and continued, ‘I expect your parents will explain. Now all you've got to do is rest and recover’ - Rob got that bit, he managed a wan smile. ‘Is there anything you'd like to ask?’ concluded the doctor, hovering a moment before hurrying out.
Ask? Well, no doubt there would have been, had Rob understood what had actually happened to him, there was the problem with his left arm for a start, and why couldn't he sit up. He was an intelligent, technically-minded sort of kid, nobody who had seen his Meccano set in action would dispute that. What he should have been told, was that polio effects the nervous system; that parts of the body work a bit like model cranes. That the bones are moved about their hinge-points by strings of muscle. If there is nothing to tell the strings to move, then nothing works. Polio attacks the cells that give the muscle-strings instructions; that was what had happened to Rob's arm and much of the nerve-structure down his left-hand side. Muscles which do no work, fade away and leave bones unsupported, so they become unbalanced and grow awry. Nobody told Rob any of that, in fact, apart from the junk about Heine and Maiden, nobody had told him anything, not even where he was. He thought it was probably a hospital; but the isolation ward looked more like a prison than a hospital.
The room, a cell about twelve feet cube, was divided on its two inner sides from other similar cells by five-foot of solid partition; the space above filled with glass. The only access was that outside-door, the one besieged by seagulls. Light came in through the tall window or from the single central light with its dazzling white-enamelled shade, or when he was alone, as a distant yellow glow from the glass-walled nurse's room, filtered through the intervening cells. Apart from occasional items, such as the door and the waste-bin, where the pre-war grass-green paint had been retained, almost everything was painted glossy-cream. Glossy that is, where it had been washed, the lower halves of the two solid walls were clean, but above that they were smutty, cobwebbed and discoloured. The junction between cleanliness and microbe laden squalor was wavy, graded and banded according to the changing stature of subsequent generations of cleaners. Apparently, the hospital's policy had been either to employ smaller and smaller people or supply them with lower and lower chairs to stand on.
With nothing better to do - he was alone and locked to his pillow by the debilitating illness - Rob observed his surroundings. Four walls, ceiling, red quarry-tiled floor, those portals to an outside world dominated by seagulls, a locker, the radiator, sink, two chairs and his bed, there was nothing else. Curiously, the bed, despite being closest, was the last thing he examined. It felt large, but that was because he was curled-up small. It was hard; under the mattress his hand discovered a platform of boards, not an inner-sprung divan, like at home. The ends were silver-painted metal tubes, a mixture of builder's scaffold and tiger cage. At each corner were sturdy posts carrying an overhead frame. Then he noticed something new, almost out of sight, hanging behind the grillwork of the bed-head. It was a set of headphones. He struggled a few inches across the acres of his pillow to get a view between the bars. It was a headset just like the ones in every black'n'white war film he'd ever seen. Beside it, in the centre of a metal plate, was a rotating switch, with ‘Off’ at the top and four numbered positions. Here, at last, was a worthwhile target for investigation, he began to uncurl, take stock of his position.
Until then, the pillow had been his life-raft, something to cling to, as if he was slowly drowning in a rumpled sea of hospital sheets. The nurse was constantly complaining that whenever she came to tidy him up, all she could find was a heap marooned against the foot of the bed. In fact, it was from that position that Rob began to plan his campaign, and from there too, the bed-head was a far shore indeed. He scouted the distant coastline through a telescope of hollowed hand. The shore was defended by the breakwater of the bed-frame. Would that be help or hindrance? Behind the defences, a sheer and shiny, gloss-paint cliff loomed high, topped by the rolling landscape of part-washed grey hills supporting a filthy, smut-stained sky. Here, unlike the real sky outside the window, he must imagine the seagulls and the gathering tempest he needed to complete his plan. The mind-storm broke, calling up the breakers that helped him during the exhausting swim from the foot to the head of the bed. The final effort, pulling himself one-handed as high as he could onto the life-raft pillow, nearly sunk him, but at last, he had a hand against the cliff-wall. He walked his fingers up towards the knob, grasped and hung on, then clicked it one notch to the right. Suddenly his imagined seagulls had gained a scratchy, twittering voice, but they were too high and far away for him to hear the song. He subsided, satisfied and floated with the linen tide, as waves of crumpled sheets washed him back to his haven at the foot of the bed.
When Sister came in with her favourite question about the opening of bowels, she was annoyed that someone had left the earphones switched on; she turned them off, fussed with the loop of trailing flex and centred the headband on its bracket. ‘There will be visitors, soon,’ she said, following that with her second favourite sentence, ‘Sort him out will you Nurse’. ’Visitors?’ Who could it be, he had asked for his mother, but had been told this was an isolation ward and epidemics must be contained. But, wonderfully, it was his mother. She had to stand by the door, not allowed to hug him; so she'd brought cheerful words, pencils, paper, heaps of comics and a jar of peanut-butter. When, too soon, Sister whisked her away, he read the comics. All his favourites were there: Beano, Dandy, Lion, Eagle, Film-Fun and Practical Mechanics.
The drawing-paper he folded into a seagull, an origami recipe he was delighted to find in the Lion. Now all he needed was some way to fix it in the smutty sky above his bed-head. Nurse, helpfully, stuck it to the overhead frame with shiny pink sticking-plaster; it wasn't what he wanted, but it would have to do. Later, Sister declared it both a collector of germs and an affront to tidiness, she ripped it down and dumped it in the bin. He was angry and showed it. She took away his comics, refused to switch-on the light and left. The shadowy frame above his bed threatened like prison bars. The gulls had already returned to the sea, leaving only a splatter of sleet and the mournful howl of winter's wind to rattle the sash. He lay there sobbing, his comic lifeline from the outside world torn away. Once more, he was alone, adrift in the frighteningly alien world of the mind. Outside the sky darkened into night. The distant yellow light came on in the nurse's office Nobody came near him and eventually he fell asleep. Almost at once, the origami seagull stirred and rose, whole and haloed white, from the grave-like hollow of the waste-bin. Rob watched as it circled amid the scarlet whorls of his unforgiving anger, trapped in the shadows of the room. The pale reflection of the gloss-paint cliff attracted it to the bed-head and there it roosted, to await its fellows.
Morning arrived, and with it, nurse and warm tea, bedpan, marmalade and toast - no sign of his peanut-butter. He left the crusts, but Sister caught him before the nurse had time to give them to the birds. She made him eat them, standing there, hip-handed to ensure obedience. The origami seagull watched from the top of the bed-frame, unseen by all but Rob. When Sister went to leave, it flew, beating strong, wide, wild, white-paper wings, then passed straight through the tall sash-window to rally a feathered squall of gulls from the high grey clouds of dawn. As the door shut behind Sister, he watched the ravenous seagulls dive past the window, knowing they would be dining well. Soon, screams and cries confirmed it. After that, he felt a little stronger, more able to make the journey to the bed-head, and solve the mystery of the headphones in time for Christmas.
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Copyright The Mundesley Hermit ©1997 & 2007
All rights reserved.
Usksider
Pro 
Hmmmm.... that's a bit dark Munzly. Good though.