class rather than the top. Perhaps he’d be good at football instead. A visiting social worker hinted that he might be deaf and suggested a hearing-test. But deafness was an unthinkable stigma, and I would not entertain the possibility of it.
About three months before Paul was two, I discovered, to my horror, that I was pregnant again. After the last experience, I could hardly welcome the prospect of another baby, but as I would not have considered having an abortion I had to get used to the idea. I was worried, though. With a restless three-year-old Anthony, and with Paul, my hands and days were completely full. And as if to underline the awkwardness of my new state, a few days later Paul was once again whipped off into hospital – again with a strangulating hernia.
In 1957 we had moved from Derbyshire to Hale, in Cheshire, which was much nearer to St Helens. Packing Anthony off to his grandmother’s , I was free to visit the hospital as often as I was allowed. But though I went down there each day, nobody was able to tell me what the programme was likely to be. Paul had a wheezy chest, and as long as this was in evidence, it was not likely that he would be given an anaesthetic. It began to look as though he would be sent home untouched by medical hand, strangulating hernia or not.
The night when everything fell apart was a Tuesday in February, 1958, and every detail is etched like poker-work into my mind. The previous evening, the Sister in charge of the children’s ward had asked if I would come early, as the house doctor would like a word with me. Somehow I presumed that the operation must be off, and I would be asked to bring Paul in each day as an outpatient.
Frank, who at this time was a manager with the Associated Octel Company in Northwich, was bringing a French colleague home to dinner, and fitting in the 6.30 visit to the hospital was a bit difficult. I had a mad scurry round before leaving, and at six o’clock put some sort of casserole into the oven. When I came back I should have to serve the meal immediately, and I wasn’t taking any chances. No instinct told me, as I closed the front door and stepped out into the chill February night, that the door was closing on everything I had been: that this night would mark a new and fearful beginning. It seemed a night like any other, except that I was worrying about the dinner-guest.
When I got to the hospital, I didn’t go to the ward, but asked the girl at the reception-desk to tell the house-doctor that I had arrived. I was directed into a small waiting-room on the ground-floor. Within a few minutes a white-coated doctor walked in, a sheaf of papers in his hand. He was a man of about thirty or so, recently arrived from some Middle Eastern country, with no more than a sketchy idea of the English language, and none at all of the language of diplomacy.
‘You are the mother of . . . -er, -er . . .’ He riffled idly through the papers in his hand. ‘Ah, yes, Paul Craig?’ I nodded.
‘Of course, you know he is not normal,’ he continued, in the same tone as before. His voice didn’t ask a question, it made a statement.
NOT NORMAL. I stared at him blankly, my world slowly dissolving, all reality crystallising into that one murderous phrase which a stranger had just uttered with such casual ease. Not normal, not normal. My mind struggled with this alien concept, but could not grasp it. I felt buffeted by meaningless words which were heavy with menace. The voice went on, as though the world was still the same; it was a voice that struggled with a language that wasn’t its own; a voice that lacked warmth and understanding. ‘He has Höhler’s Syndrome, a rare disease. In English you call it . . . er, gargoylism.’
Through the thickening fog in my head I heard him, and into my punch-drunk consciousness swam hideous figures, straight off the pages of Notre Dame de Paris – gargoyles. Monstrous creatures carved in stone, water gushing out of their leering mouths. Oh God, not that; anything but that. Not my son.
Like a drunk crazily determined to walk a straight line if it kills him, I managed to dredge up some words. Very slowly, and as though from an immense distance, I heard my own voice ask the question which was already tormenting me. ‘Will he be all right? I mean . . . his mind. Mentally?’ I can still see that doctor shrug away the question. It was more than his scanty English could cope with – and in any case, there was no answer. ‘I do not know. You must wait and see,’ he said impatiently. And walked out.
It seemed like hours that I sat there after he had gone, not even trying to collect my scattering wits. Then in a drug-like stupor I dragged myself to the telephone and rang Frank. I don’t think I did more than ask him to come for me. I wouldn’t have found words to tell him what had happened.
In a trance I walked up the stairs to the children’s ward, where I sat looking at Paul, with a heavy boulder where my heart had been. The scales fell from my eyes then with brutal suddenness. Self-deception was no longer possible; and I could see beyond doubting that Paul would never be as other children were. The stubby fingers, the too-thick lips, the flattened, bridge-less nose, the empty eyes, all pointed to this hateful but inescapable truth which we had gone on hiding from ourselves.
Frank came and took me home. It must have been terrible for him, but I was overwhelmed by my own misery and had no room for his. We had to go through the farce of a dinner-party, since our guest was a Frenchman who had nowhere else to go while waiting for his return flight from Ringway Airport, which was about five miles from where we lived. He knew something awful had happened, but we couldn’t trust ourselves to talk about it. There was a spectre at that feast, and both the food and the effort at conversation nearly choked us.
When he had gone, we packed a suitcase apiece, and drove silently to my mother’s . She had alerted her own doctor, an old family friend, and he had left a sedative for me. I took it with relief. It was a new product, which was just finding its way on to the market, and, because it was effective that first night and was easily available over the counter in chemists’ shops, Frank went and bought a new supply of tablets for me next day. I went on taking them for several weeks. It was not until nearly two years later that the name of this product, Distaval, came into a shocking prominence, as one of the names for thalidomide. I was two months’ pregnant and I took the tablets for at least a month. My blood runs cold at the thought of our narrow escape on this occasion: Mark, the child born in the December of that year, was a perfect baby.
There is a mental blank where the next few weeks must have been. All I remember is that after the first night I could shed no tears; a great freeze had descended on my emotional system. I was not, as some people believed, ‘being wonderfully brave’; I was merely in an extended state of shock, with all my capacity for feeling paralysed. Perhaps it was nature’s own kind of anaesthetic.
What triggered the change I don’t remember, but I can never forget the night when the anaesthesia wore off, and I was left to wrestle with my blinding, asphyxiating terrors in a foretaste of hell. Despair rolled through me in waves as I looked into the future I did not want to face, and found it full of grotesque images: of enlarged heads, swollen abdomens and drooling mouths. The dreadful word ‘gargoyle’ was working its evil in me, filling me with self-pity and panic. From now on, I felt sure, I would see myself and be seen as some kind of pariah, the mother of a monstrous child. Friends would avoid me, and Paul would be taken away. Oddly enough, in view of all this self-pity, the fear of Paul’s being dragged off to an institution was the blackest one of all. However agonising it might be to look after him, I could not face the prospect of letting him go.
It was the mother of an old school-friend who brought some sanity into my exhausted brain. ‘Look,’ she said briskly, ‘if you ever do come to send him away, you and Frank will have arrived at the decision yourselves. No one is going to drag Paul away screaming. For Heaven’s sake, stop worrying about something that may never happen!’ I knew she was right, and tried to cheer up. As I got up to leave, she came out with one of those pious clichés which at certain moments have tremendous force. ‘God makes the back for the burden,’ she offered, by way of consolation. The phrase impressed me, simply because it seemed so unlikely. God had picked a loser
