In December, when the others, the lucky ones, were advancing on Tripoli, Simon Boulderstone was sent to the hospital at Helwan. Before that he had been held in a field dressing-station then moved to a makeshift first-aid station at Burg el Arab. The desert fighting had so crowded the regular hospitals that no bed could be found for him until the walking wounded were moved on to convalescent homes. While he waited, he was attended by orderlies who gave him what treatment they could. He did not expect much. His condition, he felt, was in abeyance until he reached a proper hospital where, of course, he would be put right in no time.
The Helwan hospital, a collection of huts on the sand, was intended for New Zealanders but after the carnage of Alamein anyone might be sent anywhere. Simon was carried from the ambulance into a long ward formed by placing two huts end to end. Because he was an officer, even though a very junior one, he was given a curtained-off area to himself. This long hut was known as ‘The Plegics’ because few of the men there could hope to walk again.
Simon did not know that but if he had known, he would have seen in it no reference to his own state. At that time, he exulted in the fact he was alive, when he might so easily have been dead.
He and his driver, Crosbie, had run into a booby trap and, like an incident from a dissolving dream, he could still see Crosbie sailing into the air to land and lie, a loose straggle of limbs, motionless on the ground. In his mind Crosbie would lie there for ever while he, Simon, had been picked up by a Bren and taken back to the living world. And here he was, none the worse for the curious illusion that his body ended half-way down his spine.
The wonder of his escape kept him, during those first days, in a state of euphoria. He wanted to talk to people, not to be shut away at the end of the ward. He asked for the curtains to be opened and when he looked down the long hutment, its walls bare in the harsh Egyptian sunlight, he was surprised to see men in wheel-chairs propelling themselves up and down the aisle. He pitied them, but for himself — he’d simply suffered a blow in the back. It was a stunning blow that had anaesthetized him, so, for a while, he thought more about Crosbie than about himself. It was not until he reached Burg el Arab that he realized part of his body was missing. It seemed he had been cut in half and wondered if his lower limbs were still there. Sliding his hand down from his waist, he could feel his thighs but could not raise himself to reach farther. Speaking quite calmly, he told the man on the next stretcher that he had lost his legs below the knees. He was not surprised. The same thing had happened to his brother Hugo and accidents of this sort ran in families. He had dreaded it but now it had happened, he found he did not mind much. Instead, for some odd reason, he was rather elated. He talked for a long time to the man on the next stretcher before he saw that the man was dead.
The male nurse who dressed his wound asked him if he needed a shot of morphine. Cheerfully, he replied, ‘No thanks, I’m all right. I’m fine.’
‘No pain?’
‘None at all.’
The nurse frowned as though Simon had given the wrong answer.
Brens were arriving every few minutes with wounded from the front lines. Simon was at the first-aid station a couple of days before a doctor was free to examine him. When the blanket was pulled down and he saw his legs were there intact, he felt an amazed pride in them.
‘Nothing wrong with me, doc, is there?’
The doctor was not committing himself. He said he suspected a crushed vertebra but only an X-ray could confirm that.
‘It’ll mend, won’t it, doc?’
‘It’s a question of time,’ the doctor said and Simon, taking that to mean his paralysis was temporary, burst out laughing. When the doctor raised his brows, Simon said, ‘I was thinking of my driver, Crosbie. He looked so funny going up into the air.’
At Helwan, he was still laughing. Everything about his condition made him laugh. After the early days of no sensation at all, he became subject to the most ridiculous delusions. At times it seemed that his knees were rising of their own accord. He would look down, expecting to see the blanket move. Or he would imagine that someone was pulling at his feet. Once or twice this impression was so strong, he uncovered his legs to make sure he was not slipping off the end of the bed.
And then there was his treatment. His buttocks were always being lifted and rubbed with methylated spirits: ‘To prevent bedsores,’ the nurse told him. Every two hours he was tilted first on one side and then on the other, a bolster being pushed into his waist to keep him there. The first time this happened, he asked, ‘What’s this in aid of?’
The nurse giggled and said, ‘You’d better ask the physio.’
The physio, a young New Zealander called Ross, did not giggle but soberly told him that the repeated movements helped to keep his bowels active. Not that they were active. The first time a young woman had given him an enema, he had been filled with shame.
She had said, ‘We don’t want to get all bogged up, do we?’ Soon enough the enemas were stopped and suppositories were pushed into him. He became used to being handled and ceased to feel ashamed. He had to accept that his motions were not his to control but after a while, he recognized the symptoms that told him his bladder was full. His heart would thump, or he would feel a pain in his chest, and he must ask to be relieved by catheter.
Ross came in three times a day to move his knees and hip joints, performing the exercises carefully, with grave gentleness.
Everything they did to him enhanced for him the absurdity of his dependence. ‘You treat me like a baby,’ he said to Ross who merely nodded and tapped his knee.
The tap produced an exaggerated jerk of the leg and Simon, interested and entertained, asked, ‘Why does it do that?’
‘Just lack of control, sir. Your system’s confused — in a manner of speaking, that is.’
Once when his left leg gave a sudden move, he called for Ross, saying, ‘I must be getting better.’
Ross shook his head: ‘That happens, sometimes, sir. It means nothing.’
Even then, Simon’s laughter went on, becoming, at times, so near hysteria that the doctor said, ‘If we don’t calm you down, young man, your return to life will be the death of you.’
He was given sedatives and entered an enchanted half-world, losing all inhibitions. Seeing everything as possible, he asked the staff nurse to telephone Miss Edwina Little at the British Embassy and tell her to visit him.
‘Your girlfriend, is she?’
‘I’d like to think so. She was my brother’s girlfriend. I don’t know whose girlfriend she is now but she’s the most gorgeous popsie in Cairo. You wait till you see her. D’you think I’ll be out of here soon? I’d like to take her for a spin, go out to dinner, go to a night club . . .’
‘Better leave all that till you’re on your feet again.’
‘Which won’t be long now, will it, nurse?’
‘I can’t say. We’ll have to wait and see.’
‘You mean it’s just a matter of time?’
The nurse, making no promises, said vaguely: ‘I suppose you could say that,’ and Simon was satisfied. So long as he felt certain he would eventually recover, he could wait for time to pass.