The Christmas party was a light-hearted, gay affair in an indoor squash court. There was dancing to a wind-up gramophone, and a bar. Most of the booze was home-made. My father came down again for it, and when he and Bernard sat in straight chairs out in front and sang ‘The Charlie Chaplin Song’, instead of laughing, everybody started to cry. I disgraced myself by fainting while I was dancing the Beguine with a spotty Irish redhead. Bernard told me that it had looked quite comical, because she had continued dancing with me well after I was out of it: flinging me about like a corpse. Then she realized that I might be, screamed and dropped me.
Bernard told me that when I awoke, which was days later, sometime near January. Dad had gone home earlier, a bit shaken up. As soon as I opened my eyes Bernard slipped out to telephone him. He must have tipped Dr Hildegard off, because as he left she swept in. She made me drink a half pint of water before allowing me to sit up, or speak. When I looked down I could see that I was skin and bone; my pyjama jacket hung off me. I asked her, ‘What happened to me?’
‘If I was a foul-mouthed Englishman I should say Buggered if I know!’
‘But you’re not. You’re my doctor; for which I am grateful.’
‘I am glad we have cleared that up. But it doesn’t alter the case: I don’t know what happened to you. You passed out, and slipped into a coma. We tried for the best part of a day to bring you round.’
‘No good?’
‘No good. You just lay there with a nasty grin. Several eminent doctors from other hospitals have visited you. They didn’t know what to do either, so I feel better about it. Now that you’re back I shall consider you one of my successes.’
‘What do you think happened to me? Your best professional judgement.’
‘I think that you banged your head in the accident, and that we didn’t notice. Bad internal head injuries are often revealed by severe swelling of the head: haematomas.’
‘Yes?’
‘By the time you were brought in here your head was badly swollen anyway – by the heat and your burns. I think that that concealed an impact injury – I missed it.’
‘Will it happen again?’
She shrugged.
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so, but there is a dying Australian next door who has a phrase for it.’
‘What’s that?’
‘No guarantees.’
‘Situation normal,’ I told her. Then, ‘I think I’ll get up.’
She smiled. It took years off her, but she shook her head, ‘Definitely not. This time we go slowly. I asked Bernard to bring you a perambulator. He will push you about.’
‘But he’s as old as my father.’
‘. . . and he doesn’t go around crashing aeroplanes.’
Bernard walked in preceded by an ancient wooden wheel-chair.
I said, ‘Jawohl, Frau Doktor,’ and earned a scowl from the woman who had kept me alive since December. Bad one, Charlie.
Bernard took me visiting the larger wards, although they depressed me. There were a lot of people with bits missing, and sometimes, when you looked behind their eyes, you realized that there were bits missing there as well. The only positive note was that a nurse sat with me through each night. The night nurses were young, and some of them pretty; and when I couldn’t sleep flirted with me until I felt drowsy.
The spotty Irish redhead was one of them: she wasn’t spotty any longer. She had long, wavy and lustrous red hair, and when I told her that I was in love with her she laughed it off. Late one night she leaned back in the uncomfortable upright chair they used to keep my nurses awake in the wee small ones, kicked off her shoes, and rested her feet on the edge of my bed. I could have touched them, but I think that that would have spoiled it. The small radio the girls had smuggled into my room was burbling away to a dance station in the background. It was the Glenn Miller Band and ‘String of Pearls’. I asked her, ‘When will they move me out of here, and into the general ward?’
‘I’m not sure they will: you’re too unusual.’
Then I noticed the tears running down her cheeks. My heart gave a huge scared lurch.
‘Don’t be sad. I don’t mind.’
‘What?’
‘That I’m going to die.’
‘Don’t be soppy. What are you talking about?’
‘Then why are you crying?’
She wiped her cheeks with a slightly used handkerchief. ‘I always cry when I hear “String of Pearls”, stupid. I remember him when he was alive.’
‘Who?’
‘Glenn Miller, of course.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes. His plane went down in the Channel in December. Didn’t you know?’
‘No. It must have happened when I was hibernating . . . I’m not going to die then?’
‘ ’course not. Don’t be daft. We’ll discharge you in a week or so if you don’t faint again.’ She sniffed, and prodded my hip gently through the blankets with her stockinged foot. A reprieve, and what’s more things were looking more promising.
‘Does my face look good enough to kiss yet?’
‘Getting there, Charlie Bassett: I’ll tell you when it is.’
The next night she brought me a newspaper she had saved; its front page announced the band leader’s loss in big black words, around a large publicity photograph of him wearing the Major’s cap I had last seen him with. You may not believe this, but the face I recognized was that of a Major I’d once seen going into the American Red Cross
