Why, on examination, his precious recollections of his wartime childhood didn’t stand up to scrutiny either. During Operation Pied Piper in the autumn of 1939, his mother had evacuated to Kent with Cyril as an infant. When for months on end the sky didn’t fall, she returned with her baby to Birmingham. By the time German ructions began in earnest, the newly intrepid Betsy Wilkinson was leaving her firstborn with her younger sister during the day, the better to help manufacture munitions. Although the bombings in Birmingham were ferocious, she chose aiding the war effort over the safety of her family and refused to evacuate a second time—a decision Cyril had always lauded. Yet his jumbled images of that period were full of anachronisms; in one much-revisited snippet, whilst on leave from the Italian campaign, his handsome uniformed father put a reassuring arm around his son in the sitting room as they watched television. Why, Cyril had even fancied that he retained flashes of that original evacuation to Kent—he’d stored glimpses of hurried kisses on a train platform, a gracious family waiting with chocolate biscuits on the receiving end—but for pity’s sake, he’d only been eight months old. His vivid “recollection” of his mother’s insistence on dragging her unwieldy yet beloved sewing box to the air raid shelter in the middle of the night had a female voice-over: what he remembered was being told about it. All the Blitzy crashes, booms, and dust in his mind had been constructed from family lore, embellished with every retelling. The bombings had been real enough, but his memories of the assaults were fraudulent.
He went through a period of walking ritually around the floor plan of every house or flat in which he’d lived: the two-up two-down of his childhood in Birmingham, the larger house the family had shifted to when he was sixteen, the residence halls of Imperial College London, his first bedsit in Rotherhithe with Kay . . . With concentration, he could summon a floppy green sofa from the early years of his marriage that he hadn’t pictured in decades, or the rose-patterned wallpaper of his childhood bedroom. He rehearsed the interiors, bodies, and controls of every car he’d ever owned—the Ford Cortina when they married, the Morris Minor Traveller when the kids were small . . . Having never been a dandy, he surprised himself with his keen recollection of his clothing through the years, from the funny corduroy shorts with the blue braces looping around brass buttons that he’d worn in early primary school to the streamlined pinstripe three-piece with a classic red tie that he’d worn professionally in the 1980s. During another phase he thought about foods, cycling his mother’s shepherd’s pie and Kay’s famous cauliflower cheese on a loop like an automated cafeteria. Yet he’d never cared much about food, and he always circled dolefully back to the bangers and mash of Kay’s final birthday. He had exhausted his thoughts on the NHS whilst writing his memoir; besides, it didn’t matter a jot what a silent lump in a bed thought about the health service. He could presumably muse about the purpose of the universe, but he wasn’t a philosopher, and any contemplation along these lines degenerated into a muddle of rage, resentment, and despair that made Kay’s soliloquy on her last night—“It’s taken me ages to realize that I still don’t understand what this is!”—seem like Shakespeare.
Yet he was not quite mind and only mind, like one of those brains suspended in a jar in the mad-scientist labs of 1950s science fiction films. That would be hellish enough, but perhaps preferable to continuing to inhabit a body over which, eyelids excepted, he could exert no control. By contrast, the torture chamber of the body still exerted control over him. Thus a muscle would cramp, yet he couldn’t stretch to release it. His lips grew dry, and he couldn’t lick them. The temperature in the hospital would drop, and he couldn’t pull a coverlet to his chin; the temperature would rise, and he couldn’t kick the coverlet aside. He could blink, but couldn’t tease sleep from his eye. A stray housefly was a catastrophe; it could crawl his face with impunity. What an unwelcome discovery: how vital it was to be able to readjust one’s legs in bed. Even the ability to discreetly pick one’s own nose was revealed as the height of luxury.
Technically, Cyril was not altogether deprived of the ability to communicate, but the farce that passed for conversation was wholly dependent on someone else being inhumanly patient with the Esperanto of the eyelid. The nurses were accustomed to asking lacklustre yes or no questions like, “You okay, sweetie?” but the new hires and short-termers often forgot whether it was one or two blinks for “no” even if they bothered to watch. They’d all been informed that he was conscious, but so little power did he possess to impress that awareness upon the staff that in practice most of them talked over him to one another as if he were a dinette set.
Early on, he did toy with the idea of resuming the composition of Fit for Purpose, as it would have been theoretically possible to blink out one letter at a time with the assistance of the alphabet board.
