Why didn't I kick the bucket when I had the chance?
21
View
comments
Not impressed: Only two get-well cards? Why did I bother battling back from my near-death experience?
When I was dying from pancreatitis in a Cornish hospital over Christmas and the New Year, do you know how many people sent me a Get Well Soon card? I can tell you. Two.
One was from a fellow writer and the other was from a woman I’d once taught at Oxford, a quarter of a century ago. Nice of her, you may think. Not really. She said she was glad I was at death’s door because a reference I’d once composed for her must have been so lukewarm that she’d failed to get whatever job it was she’d hoped to get.
In fact, she blamed me for every ill that had beset her, including a broken marriage and children who weren’t speaking to her. Unfortunately, her name rang no bells and I refused to feel guilty.
Fair’s fair: I did receive a bunch of cemetery flowers from my publishers.
They’ll be furious I am not dead. If I’d died, it would have been a priceless career move, the very titles of my two recent books — Seasonal Suicide Notes and What Am I Still Doing Here? — suddenly taking on brilliant new ironic meanings and prophetic connotations.
RELATED ARTICLES
Share this article
ShareHad I kicked the bucket in my early 50s, I’d have joined comedy greats such as Peter Sellers, Peter Cook and Leonard Rossiter, who ensured their immortality by making premature exits.
I’d be like Elvis, had he been a 5ft 2in cannonball born in Caerphilly.
Anyway, plugged into dozens of IV drips, I survived, though only to have to listen to Cornish folk whimpering all night on the ward with their ailments.
Traumatic: Plugged into IV drips, I survived my ordeal in a Cornish hospital, but I had to put up with the whimpering of fellow patients
Oh, they did get on my nerves. ‘Why don’t you just die, you old fools!’ I muttered in a compassionate way, my sleep having been interrupted for days on end.
Two actually did, which was very reasonable of them, but I then had to put up with the weeping and wailing relatives, so I got cross again.
If I was your genuine celebrity, of course — someone like Christopher Biggins, Wayne Sleep or Lord Deedes — the hospital switchboard would have been jammed with well-wishers.
Fruit, teddy bears and balloons would have arrived by the lorryload. Fans would throng the corridors.
All that happened in my case was that my Welsh mother leapt on her broomstick and flew to Truro bearing gifts of eggs, fruitcakes, blankets, biscuits and a pullover belonging to my late father that she’d found in the dog basket. She had so much luggage that no grown man could lift it all.
Why did I fight for survival? If I'd died early like comedians Peter Sellers (left) and Peter Cook (right), I, too, would have ensured my greatness
She had a great time, talking to me non-stop for two days about people I’d never heard of and going in and out of Truro M&S because they had a sale on.
After a week in High Dependency — where I was the only patient to survive, such was the power of my Welsh Curses — I was moved to the comically named Poldark Ward. I’ve never known such boredom. I couldn’t read — diabetes having blurred my vision — and there was a complete absence of stimulus.
No music, no books, no conversation, no pictures on the walls. Harsh striplights and linoleum. I lay on the bed for two weeks and it was a glimpse of hell.
Only when I learned to have the courage to shoot pins into my fingers and test my blood for glucose levels was I discharged. I am on heaps of tablets to boost my insulin, calm down cholesterol and neutralise stomach acids.
Work of God? They prayed for me and the Duke of Edinburgh (left) at Llandaff Cathedral in Truro. Did it work? I've been more atheistical than Richard Dawkins (right), so I believe it was cold, hard science that pulled me through
I’ve lost 2½ stone, but instead of looking slender and the better for it, here at home I creep about in a brocade dressing gown and a pair of surgical stockings, looking like award-winning John Hurt doing Samuel Beckett’s Krapp.
I’m craggy, pouchy, morose and look as if I was born in 1920 or 1820, not 1960. The slightest thing tires me out.
Twenty yards to the left of my front door is the GPs’ surgery, where Doctor Twelvetrees abides.
Twenty yards to the right is the Bromyard funeral directors. It is a toss-up which way to head.
When I did go to see the diabetic nurse, the next thing I knew I was on a couch and the diabetic nurse and her colleague were gazing down at me. ‘Ooh, he does look white!’ they were exclaiming. I’d fainted.
When I went the following week and the diabetic nurse said ‘I won’t be putting any needles into you this time!’ I fainted again. The word ‘needle’ was the trigger. What a girl I am.
I learned another thing, too — when I lay dying down in Truro, prayers were said in Llandaff Cathedral ‘for the Duke of Edinburgh and Roger Lewis’.
A confession: Perhaps it was the morphine, but as I was fading away I saw my late father calmly sitting by my bedside as clear as day
One, of course, being a politically incorrect, gaffe-prone curmudgeon who annoys everyone intensely. The other being married to the Queen.
Did the prayers work? I’ve always been more atheistical than Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens combined. Cold, hard medical science is what pulled me through, I felt.
If it’s supernatural powers I want, the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream suffice. Perhaps it was the morphine, but allow me to confess this: when I was fading away and it was touch and go whether I’d make it though the night, I saw my late father calmly sitting by my bedside as clear as absolute day.
Spooky, eh? Perhaps this is why at no point did I feel the slightest fear about conking out. Indeed, I felt bizarrely happy, serene. (The morphine again, I suspect.)
I’ve been doing whatever it is I do with scant recognition for 30 years — writing books that receive wholly inadequate and irresponsible reviews; my Anthony Burgess biography sold four copies in 2011 — and I was quite content to fade away, to leave my anxieties behind.
I even scrawled my memorial service instructions in a notebook: a Welsh male voice choir, Welsh hymns, the Welsh National Anthem.
My last joke: I hate Welsh. The language, I mean, not the people — Plaid Cymru Taliban, please note.
But unfortunately for my enemies, and perhaps for me, I came back from the brink.
Now I have been resurrected it’s as if I’ve been patched up by the docs only to face the firing squad again.
I got home to a pile of post, all beastly. Bills, invoices, final demands, laughable royalty statements. VAT. Income tax. If I was a normal person doing a proper job I could spend a few months on the sick on full pay.
Not only that, the boiler has gone kaput. I am convinced Satan lives in my boiler. When I was ill in 2010 (it was the liver that time), it played up.
Now it has started leaking water and it’ll cost £1,500 to fix. When the vicar came to call — they always pester the sick — I said: ‘Don’t bother about me. Exorcise the damn boiler.’
Boilers never go wrong in sunny August, only on cold and damp January evenings. This is a scientific fact.
So, to keep warm, I’m huddled under piles of blankets, glad of my surgical stockings. All I can manage to read (with the aid of a magnifying glass) are John Mortimer’s Rumpole stories.
That is my intellectual limit.
I tried an Agatha Christie, but it was too complicated. Vladimir Nabokov in the original Russian would have been simpler.
I said this to my friend Barry Humphries, who said, ‘I have a first edition of Enid Blyton’s The Queer Adventure, a real page-turner.
‘You can borrow it if you wish.’ What is he implying?
When not staring into space, I tap away at my computer, hitting the wrong keys. I had a curious email exchange with veteran film director Bryan Forbes, who was very fulsome (‘Darling Roger’), particularly as I know him only vaguely. It turns out he thought he was communicating with Roger Moore.
He (Bryan) only twigged when he asked with justifiable puzzlement: ‘What on earth were you doing in hospital in Truro over Christmas ?’
Indeed, you’d be unlikely to find Monaco tax exile 007 Sir Roger Moore CBE in Truro over Christmas, or at any time. Had he been rushed to A&E, however, I bet he’d have received more than two cards.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pa3IpbCmmZmhe6S7ja6iaKaVrMBwrdGtoJyklWJ%2FcYWUamxqZ4KktKa%2BjIWcsKGjYqSpxYydoJ2mpGKWbrfInKJmmqWYuKbAjIJknKCRo7CmesetpKU%3D