the hand, became in Douglas’s mouth meat and juice and gore. ‘Ooh, isn’t he morbid?’ these girls would say to me, hoping to stir into action the dishy friend of the mad boy talking carnage in the warm coffee-steam. But I liked these cinema outings because I could do what he was doing, in a stealthy way, with boys. Where he paddled and dipped and unhooked, I stared and tested and occasionally found my eye met. Assignations were made, and one afternoon I discovered that there was an end and a means to them which was neither lonely nor procreative. I never wanted to stop. I do not know whether Douglas knew. I was mooning, desiring and not daring to pursue; Douglas even followed the plots of the films, so simply physical was his quest.
My first hospital brought my first happy sex. In the white laundry, among slapping towels, tents of sheet, eight osier chariots full of dirty white linen, and the rolling surge of industrial washing machines, the slippery floor gritty with fragrant blue Daz and my eyes stung with bleach, I embraced and was embraced. I was old to be learning, and my joy was great. The smell of hospitals, which is fearful to many, is mysterious and delicious to me. The hospital was the first world beyond my family. It was disciplined and self-contained; the first institution discovered after the family is laid down for nostalgia, and the glamour and function of hospital are blended for me into something for which I feel what could almost be called patriotism. Their glamour offers me something resembling that which hotels offer the homeless rich.
As I grew into a real doctor, then specialised and became a consultant and at length a recognised plumber of the heart, so I became more dependent yet on my hospitals, though no longer dependent on them for love. I could not be. My success had stripped me of the anonymity which had made things easy before. I was not tempted either to try to find my first paradise again. Just as public school boys move on to their clubs, I moved on, without losing the tingle of danger and indulgence I had enjoyed. In Turkish baths, in plain tiled lavatories, I remember the sluices and laundries in which I had first been happy.
The hospital where I have been for some years now was built as a small foundling hospital. It has grown four times; once, when a philanthropist commissioned Norman Shaw to add to its modest single block. He added long windows set in a tall façade of stone; pendant from each window is a small false gallery, faced with tiles, in eggy blues, greens and sunlight yellow. There are twelve windows and each set of tiles depicts a different illness, succoured by men and women dressed in long green robes, much as we appear, in fact, though the intention is pre-Raphaelite. Conspicuously absent are heart-disease and cancer and the new Pink Death. Brain-fever and tuberculosis are there, and infant death. No cure for that, but the panel parallel shows a slim woman with a furled armful which may be a baby though it looks like a small adult, standing up as present and correct as the Bambino. At the upper corners of each of these glossy tablets is a tile showing a snake bandaging a meaty iris stem, the flower signifying the Trinity. This part of the Hospital is called the Trinity Wing, which makes me think of a wounded dove – a Holy Ghost – winged, as it flies over, by a bad shot. I enjoy Christian iconography; it is like roadsigns, an attempt to find a language which will show all nations the way, without taking into account that what is St Mark to one man is a bored old lion to another.
The next two additions were made in the 1960s. They are buttressed with spindly steel and their surface is hubbled and the yellow of coarse sand. The buttresses are as awkward as the legs of drinking giraffes. None of the windows in this part of the hospital is without its niggling draught. Inside, the optimism of that decade has allowed the architects to waste a great deal of space.
My first hospital brought my first happy sex. In the white laundry, among slapping towels, tents of sheet, eight osier chariots full of dirty white linen, and the rolling surge of industrial washing machines, the slippery floor gritty with fragrant blue Daz and my eyes stung with bleach, I embraced and was embraced. I was old to be learning, and my joy was great. The smell of hospitals, which is fearful to many, is mysterious and delicious to me. The hospital was the first world beyond my family. It was disciplined and self-contained; the first institution discovered after the family is laid down for nostalgia, and the glamour and function of hospital are blended for me into something for which I feel what could almost be called patriotism. Their glamour offers me something resembling that which hotels offer the homeless rich.
As I grew into a real doctor, then specialised and became a consultant and at length a recognised plumber of the heart, so I became more dependent yet on my hospitals, though no longer dependent on them for love. I could not be. My success had stripped me of the anonymity which had made things easy before. I was not tempted either to try to find my first paradise again. Just as public school boys move on to their clubs, I moved on, without losing the tingle of danger and indulgence I had enjoyed. In Turkish baths, in plain tiled lavatories, I remember the sluices and laundries in which I had first been happy.
The hospital where I have been for some years now was built as a small foundling hospital. It has grown four times; once, when a philanthropist commissioned Norman Shaw to add to its modest single block. He added long windows set in a tall façade of stone; pendant from each window is a small false gallery, faced with tiles, in eggy blues, greens and sunlight yellow. There are twelve windows and each set of tiles depicts a different illness, succoured by men and women dressed in long green robes, much as we appear, in fact, though the intention is pre-Raphaelite. Conspicuously absent are heart-disease and cancer and the new Pink Death. Brain-fever and tuberculosis are there, and infant death. No cure for that, but the panel parallel shows a slim woman with a furled armful which may be a baby though it looks like a small adult, standing up as present and correct as the Bambino. At the upper corners of each of these glossy tablets is a tile showing a snake bandaging a meaty iris stem, the flower signifying the Trinity. This part of the Hospital is called the Trinity Wing, which makes me think of a wounded dove – a Holy Ghost – winged, as it flies over, by a bad shot. I enjoy Christian iconography; it is like roadsigns, an attempt to find a language which will show all nations the way, without taking into account that what is St Mark to one man is a bored old lion to another.
The next two additions were made in the 1960s. They are buttressed with spindly steel and their surface is hubbled and the yellow of coarse sand. The buttresses are as awkward as the legs of drinking giraffes. None of the windows in this part of the hospital is without its niggling draught. Inside, the optimism of that decade has allowed the architects to waste a great deal of space.
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