Like a hole in the head
In 2003 I had a brain abscess surgically drained. For the second time in my life I had a condition diagnosed and operated on, the same day. When I was eleven and my appendix burst I suppose I knew in my heart what the timing of my op. meant, though nobody spelled it out, including me. When I was recovering in hospital from the brain surgery a couple of my visitors were curious enough to ask me how soon I would have died without the procedure. I didn’t know, and it was the last thing I wanted to discuss. (“Don’t be alarmed by our using the siren” they had said to me in the ambulance en route to hospital — then didn’t use the siren.)
What I wanted to know was whether my ability to learn lines was going to be affected. As soon as I was well enough to read, I started some sample learning. I seemed to be okay. My wife began telling people that I had learned “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, but I wanted to hush up the fact that I was engaged on possible remedial work. With some contradictions, such as I always seem to exhibit. I started using my hospitalisation — I was in for six weeks — as a ‘humorous’ get-out for any quite unrelated slowness at getting the point. “They knocked a hole in my head, y’know” I would quip, in a Deryck Guyler-ish voice. Then a friend gave me good advice. “I should stop saying that” Robert Marsden recommended, and he was right of course. People take you at your own valuation. The irony was that poor old Robert, suffering from the effects of a series of strokes, would not long be able to formulate so sensible an idea.
I started moving around, and I started passing out. I blacked out once in hospital, and they rushed the bed to me rather than vice versa. Then, after they sent me home, I over-exerted myself and lost consciousness. Maggie was upstairs, and our dear old dog Kiwi rushed up to pass on the idea that something strange was happening. When I came round, Maggie was saying “Do you know where you are?” (At the Pearly Gates or somewhere?) Whatever I answered, she went on “You’re lying on the ironing board”. I had a vision of myself stretched out with the board erected beneath me, as if for pressing. I eventually twigged that the ironing board had been folded up against the wall just where I had collapsed, and the board had crashed down below me as I crumpled. After that incident we got a personal alarm which I wore for a while so I could quickly call for help.
Happy ending. I got better and returned to normal, or what passes for normal with me. (Robert would tell me not to disparage myself, no doubt.) I could learn lines like before. “Doctor, doctor, will I be able to dance? … well, that’s funny because I couldn’t before” — and all those jokes.
Learning verbatim is a terrible chore, but I’ve always found that I can do it. I also learned the whole of “Richard the Second” as an exercise once — the whole play, not just the character. When we went to ante-natal classes with the National Childbirth Trust and were advised to learn a song to sing together as a couple during labour, I believe most pairs went for something like “Ten Green Bottles”, but we managed the more complex “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” from “Kiss Me, Kate”.
Well, why shouldn’t I brag a little, at this disheartening time? Robert was not the only older friend to give me good advice. Dear Jimmie Dale quoted Gilbert and Sullivan to me: “If you wish in the world to advance, your merits you’re bound to enhance; you must stir it and stump it and blow your own trumpet, or trust me you haven’t a chance!”
So after a year when, the only time I started to study a part, the project got “locked down” by regulations, it’s probably not necessary to doubt my ability to learn — which is where this train of thought, and memory, came from. But, as with so much else at the moment, you begin to wonder.
