to care. Ordinary human feelings were becoming a luxury I could not afford.
That doctor had almost penetrated my defences, but my public self-control was still armour-plated. So I forced a smile and asked her in, and we began, as one inevitably did, on the old, old questions. Who is he, what is he, why is he, when, how, where? The questions rolled off an endless cyclic conveyor belt, and were answered as mechanically as they were asked. If I had been better organised, I should have made out a list of questions and answers, and made photostats of them to hand out. They were always the same. We always began at the beginning, at pregnancy if not at conception, and worked right through. No one ever came pre-armed with the relevant facts, there had never been any liaison with previous questioners (even when they came from the same hospital or local authority), no data bank of information was ever consulted, if indeed any existed. We always started with a tabula rasa. The game began on square one, and our opponents were always the victors, if one could judge by the flushed face and air of triumph they wore on departure.
Even with Betty’s help, the strain was beginning to tell. I was getting to the end of my resources. The climax came one day when I was alone in the house with Paul. I went into the room where he was playing and found that not only had he soiled himself, but he was cheerfully smearing the faeces all over the wall. Ours was a largish Edwardian house, with half-landings recessed into a sweeping staircase. Holding Paul under the armpits I began to drag him up the stairs towards the bathroom, paying no attention to his squawks of protest. We had reached the first half-landing when he began to cough. I stopped there, but the coughing fit grew worse. Suddenly, to my horror, his breathing became jerky, he began to choke, and his face went black. I was terrified, stuck as I was half-way up the stairs and nobody within earshot. With a strength born of desperation, I pushed and pulled him up the remaining stairs and inside the bathroom. Shutting the door on him, I fled downstairs to the telephone to order an ambulance. Then I rushed madly up again to try and get him cleaned up.
The ambulance came. Unfortunately, in my panic, I had given no details over the telephone. I had omitted to say that Paul was breathing only with difficulty; and the ambulance arrived without the vital cylinder of oxygen. The minutes seemed like hours as we waited for the second ambulance to arrive, and Paul’s condition got worse with every breath he tried to take.
The oxygen arrived in the nick of time, and Paul was taken off to hospital to recover from the first of many bronchial convulsions. He came out within a week, fully restored and entirely cheerful. But my nerves were raw. The problem of Paul had me utterly beat.
In the summer of 1962, we took the family to the seaside. But I could not relax; the change of environment only made me more conscious that I had come to the end of the road in more ways than one. I had lost sight of myself as a person, I viewed the future with fear, and I realised with a shock that even my rather vague religion had deserted me. I no longer believed in God. What more was there to lose? Self-pity, always lurking in the background, came surging in on a flood-tide. Life was absurd and meaningless, was it not, a dirty-tricks department writ large? And the whole idea of a loving God was a hollow sham, a cosmic joke worthy only of Paul’s crazy laughter. But there was no way out of the impasse, and I could only go on compounding the meaninglessness. Suicide, even if I had not been the devout coward I in fact was, would only have shifted the whole ghastly mess into someone else’s court, and I was not far enough gone to accept that as an answer.
Frank suggested that I should go away on my own for a week. I jumped at the idea, but couldn’t think where to go. I had always disliked holidays, and couldn’t face the thought of one on my own, especially in the depressed state I was in. Perhaps I could go and make myself useful somewhere, offer my services to a charitable organisation, sink my own troubles in the contemplation of someone else’s. But I had never been a very useful sort of person; apart from a flair for cooking, my domestic talents were almost non-existent. Still, I could cook, so I had something to offer. But to whom?
I don’t really know why or how, but somehow that same evening I found myself alone in a church. Maybe I’d gone there to give the Almighty a last chance. Or maybe I’d just gone there for a good howl in private. Anyway, there was no one else in the church, and it was a fine echo-ey building. As even when I’m quite alone I tend to be self-conscious, I didn’t howl, but muttered a defiant if muddled: ‘Damn you, you don’t exist, but I hate you.’ Then I burst into tears, and threw decorum to the winds. ‘All right,’ I heard myself shouting, ‘if you do exist, show me a way out. For a start, what the hell am I to do next?’ After this unbridled exhibition, I was startled by the noise I was making, and ran out of the church at top speed.
Frank was in an armchair reading when I got back to the house, still tear-stained. My mother and Betty had the children in another room, where they were watching television. We had, as we always did, brought with us enough books to withstand a siege, some of them selected from the local library by Frank. Idly I picked up one of these and looked at the title: The Face of Victory by Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, V.C. I could see that it was autobiographical, and I put it down again with a grimace. Cheshire, the bomber pilot V.C., had had a lot of publicity during and after the Second World War, and I was always suspicious of popular heroes. Not content with what others had written about him, I thought scornfully, he was now writing about himself. What an egoist the man must be. Frank saw the look on my face and more or less read my thoughts. ‘Don’t just put it down,’ he urged. ‘I think it would interest you. At least, give it a try.’
I had picked the book up again, and was rifling through the pages as he was speaking. As we went on talking, I stood with my thumb on one page somewhere near the end. When I put the book down it came open at that page. I stared at it, and saw that it was full of addresses, of Cheshire Homes For The Sick, where voluntary help was required. Right at the bottom, one address stuck out; a Home run not by Leonard Cheshire but by his wife, Sue Ryder. Home For Concentration Camp Survivors, Cavendish, Suffolk, I read. As I stood looking down at it, I realised that one part of my prayer in the church had been answered. I had demanded to know what I was to do next, and now I knew. I was going to Suffolk.
CHAPTER 4
SUE RYDER
It was not just an off-the-cuff decision to step into the unknown. As soon as I saw that address, I knew I had to go there; the way had already been prepared – when I was in Louvain.
The address took me back with a jolt to the Clinique St Raphäel, where I had spent so many interminable evenings after Paul had been put to bed. I couldn’t go out and leave him, so I had taken to pacing the corridor outside our room, up and down aimlessly for hours on end, Past the various wards and single rooms.
One night I saw a woman wheeled on a trolley into one of the emergency rooms, and was forcibly struck by her gaunt appearance and her sunken staring eyes. They were the eyes of a woman haunted by some appalling and unforgettable suffering. The next night I heard a woman scream, and knew who it must be. It was an unearthly screeching sound, unlike anything I had ever heard, a sort of banshee wail; and it filled me with an unbelievable dread.
The screaming continued for an eternity of ten minutes or so, then stopped as suddenly and as eerily as it had started, leaving behind a silence that was full of nameless horrors. A man who was pacing in the other direction must have seen the fear in my eyes, and he came to join me. ‘She was in Ravensbrück,’ he said quietly, with the air of one who has explained everything. ‘Ravensbrück?’ I asked blankly, as much in the dark as ever. The man looked taken aback by my obvious ignorance, and proceeded to tell me more. Ravensbrück, he explained, was the Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin, where women and children were sent. Many of these had been subjected to medical experimentation, and many thousands had died there. (The official figure was in fact 92,000.) This woman had been one of the guinea-pigs on whom experiments had been carried out. She was a sorry part of the human wreckage which had survived such camps, as much dead as alive. The hospital
