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she was told that Weetabix wasn’t allowed.
    Mum argued the toss and made a little headway. It was agreed that it would be all right for me to have some Weetabix just this once, but it wouldn’t be right to make a habit of it. There were other children being looked after in the hospital who didn’t have mummies to bring them in Weetabix. It wouldn’t be fair on them. There was socialism of some punitive sort evident in the hospital’s thinking about cereal.
    Manor Hospital doesn’t get many marks from me, as a giver of care. Some of the procedures they subjected me to may have been medically sensible, but as no one explained anything they were humanly degrading. They kept putting swabs down my throat, looking for streptococcus, I suppose. Before the swab came the spatula. The spatula was horrible because it made me retch. I remember the feeling of being about to be sick, and also trying to work out how far back in my throat the spatula went to produce that hideous sensation. So I took the straw they gave me with a glass of water and practised taking it into my mouth as far as possible. When the sick feeling came I learned to overcome it. It was a sort of game. Soon it was easy.
    The doctor didn’t play along, though. When he came in again, I didn’t retch, or even flinch, when he got to what had previously been the point of my gagging reflex. He gave me a funny look, as if he didn’t enjoy being outsmarted, and pushed the spatula further in, until he got the painful, humiliating reflex he seemed to want so much.
    It was a useful discovery, that there were other factors in the world of doctors and hospitals than the welfare of the patient. However much I trained myself to accommodate his probings, this particular doctor would keep on pushing until he got the desired paroxysms. Other children on the ward gagged the moment the spatula entered their mouths, and the doctor was perfectly satisfied. If I’d had any sense I’d have done the same, from the beginning. As it was, by the time he came to scrape his swab against the back of my throat, the tissues were so tender it felt as if he was trying to strike a match there, to set my throat alight.
    There was another doctor who came in at one point to carry out the same procedure. His hands smelled of the same soap, but they followed a different code. They were gentle. His voice and manner were full of love. His spatula wasn’t pushed any further than the minimum , and my body reacted as if it was a different organism entirely. My throat opened like a flower to his swab.

Tickling the bone
     
    There were also bone biopsies, which no doctor could have made painless. They involved scraping the bone of the conscious patient with an instrument that had a little hook attached to it, to gouge out a sample. It’s hard to describe pain, even to compare one pain with another mentally, all you can say is pain or no pain. This was pain. The scraping was deep inside me. I cried out for ‘Suzie’ and the nurse asked, ‘Is that your sister, dear?’ No, Suzie was a straw dog, given to me by my Uncle Roy for my first birthday.
    Many years later, reading accounts of tortures used on political prisoners in South America, I came across a very similar technique, which went by the grimly poetic name of ‘tickling the bone’. If I’d known that what the doctors were doing was a form of torture, though carried out in my own best interests, I might have tried confessing my meagre sins, crying out, ‘I ate a red Spangle that I knew was dirty! I saved up my tuppennies and did them in the bath! I wanted to see them float!’
    I was as incidental to what was being done to my body as the abductees on television programmes, when aliens probe and scrape. No one is actively drilling for pain, in the hospital, on the mother ship, but it spouts from its bottomless wells. Perhaps the writers of those shows had hospital experience as infants, and are using fantasy to work through their traumas.