CHAPTER FIVE

 MY FIRST SIGHT OF VIRGINIA WATER WAS ON AN UNUSUALLY SULTRY afternoon at the very end of August 1973, some five months after my arrival in Dover. I had spent the summer travelling around in the company of one Stephen Katz, who had joined me in Paris in April and whom I had gratefully seen off from Istanbul some ten days before. I was tired and roadweary, but very glad to be back in England. I stepped from a London train and was captivated instantly. The village of Virginia Water looked tidy and beckoning. It was full of lazy lateafternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived from an arid clime. Beyond the station rose the Gothic tower of Holloway Sanatorium, a monumental heap of bricks and gables in parklike grounds just beyond the station.

 Two girls I knew from my home town worked as student nurses at the sanatorium and had offered me sleeping space on their floor and the opportunity to ring their bath with five months of accumulated muck. My intention was to catch a flight home from Heathrow the next day; I was due to resume my listless university studies in two weeks. But over many beers in a cheery pub called the Rose and Crown, it was intimated to me that the hospital was always looking for menial staff and that I, as a native speaker of English, was a shooin. The next day, with a muzzy head and without benefit of reflection, I found myself filling in forms and being told to present myself to the charge nurse on Tuke Ward at 7 a.m. the following morning. A kindly little man with the intelligence of a child was summoned to take me to stores to collect a weighty set of keys and a teetering mountain of neatly folded hospital clothing two grey suits, shirts, a tie, several white lab coats (what did they have in mind for me?) and to deliver me to Male Hostel B across the road, where a crone with white hair showed me to a spartan room and, in a manner reminiscent of my old friend Mrs Smegma, issued a volley of instructions concerning the weekly exchange of soiled sheets for clean, the hours of hot water, the operation of the radiator, and other matters much too numerous and swiftly presented to take in, though I was rather proud to catch a passing reference to counterpanes. Been there, I thought.

 I composed a letter to my parents telling them not to wait supper; passed a happy few hours trying on my new clothes and posing before the mirror; arranged my modest selection of paperback books on the windowsill; popped out to the post office and had a look around the village; dined at a little place called the Tudor Rose; then called in at a pub called the Trottesworth, where I found the ambience so agreeable and the alternative forms of amusement so nonexistent that I drank, I confess, an intemperate amount of beer; and returned to my new quarters by way of several shrubs and one memorably unyielding lamppost.

 In the morning I awoke fifteen minutes late and found my way blearily to the hospital. Amid the melee of a shift change, I asked the way to Tuke Ward and arrived, hair askew and weaving slightly, ten minutes late. The charge nurse, a friendly fellow of early middle years, welcomed me warmly, told me where I'd find tea and biscuits and cleared off. I scarcely ever saw him after that. Tuke Ward was inhabited by longstay male patients in a state of arrested insanity who, mercifully, seemed to look entirely after themselves. They fetched their own breakfasts from a trolley, shaved themselves, made their own beds after a fashion and, while I was momentarily engaged in a futile search for antacids in the staff loo, quietly departed. I emerged to find, to my confusion and alarm, that I was the only person left on the ward. I wandered puzzled through the day room, kitchen and dormitories, and opened the ward door to find an empty corridor with a door to the world standing open at its far end. At that moment the phone in the ward office rang.

 'Who's that?' barked a voice.

 I summoned enough power of speech to identify myself and peered out the office window, expecting to see the thirtythree patients of Tuke Ward dashing from tree to tree in a desperate bid for freedom.'Smithson here,' said the voice. Smithson was the head nursing officer, an intimidating figure with mutton chops and a barrel chest. He'd been pointed out to me the day before. 'You're the new boy, are you?'

 'Yes, sir.'

 'Jolly there?'

 I blinked, confused, and thought what odd turns of phrase the English had. 'Well, actually it's very quiet.'

 'No, John Jolly, the charge nurse is he there?'

 'Oh. He's gone.'

 'Did he say when he'd be back?'

 'No, sir.'

 'Everything under control?'

 'Well actually' 1 cleared my throat ' it appears that the patients have escaped, sir.'

 'They've what?'

 'Escaped, sir. I just went to the bathroom and when I came out'

 'They're supposed to be off the ward, son. They'll be on gardening detail or at occupational therapy. They leave every morning.'

 'Oh, thank Christ for that.'

 'I beg your pardon?'

 'Thank goodness for that, sir.'

 'Yes, quite.' He rang off.

 I spent the rest of the morning wandering alone around the ward, looking in drawers and wardrobes and under beds, exploring store cupboards, trying to figure out how to make tea from loose leaves and a sieve, and, when my constitution proved up to it, having a private world skidding championship along the wellpolished corridor that ran between the patients' rooms, complete with whispered and respectful commentary. When it got to be onethirty and noone had told me to go to lunch, I dismissed myself and went to the canteen, where I sat alone with a plate of beans, chips and a mysterious item later identified to me as a Spam fritter, and noticed that Mr Smithson and some of his colleagues, at a table across the room, were having a discussion of considerable mirth and, for some reason, casting merry looks in my direction.

 When I returned to the ward, I discovered that several of the patients had returned in my absence. Most of them were slumped in chairs in the day room, sleeping off the exertions of a morning spent leaning on a rake or counting Rawlplugs into boxes, except for one dapper and wellspoken fellow in tweeds who was watching a test match on the television. He Invited me to join him and, upon discovering that I was an American, enthusiastically explained to me this most bewildering of sports. I took him to be a member of staff, possibly the mysterious Mr Jolly's afternoon replacement, possibly a visiting psychiatrist, until he turned to me, in the midst of a detailed explication of the intricacies of spin bowling, and said suddenly and conversationally: 'I have atomic balls, you know.'

 'Excuse me?' I replied, my mind still on the other type of balls.

 'Porton Down. 1947. Government experiments. All very hushhush. You mustn't tell a soul.'

 'Ah . .. no, of course.'

 'I'm wanted by the Russians.'

 'Oh ... ah?'

 'That's why I'm here. Incognito.' He tapped his nose significantly and cast an appraising glance at the dozing figures around us. 'Not a bad place really. Full of madmen, of course. Positively teeming with lunatics, poor souls. But they do a lovely jam rolypoly on Wednesdays. Now this is Geoff Boycott coming up. Lovely touch. He'll have no trouble with Benson's delivery, just you see.'

 Most of the patients on Tuke Ward were like that when you got to know them superficially lucid, but, underneath, crazy as an overheated dog. It is an interesting experience to become acquainted with a country through the eyes of the insane, and, if I may say so, a particularly useful grounding for life in Britain.

 And so my first permanent days in Britain passed. At night I went to the pub and by day I presided over a mostly empty ward. Each afternoon about four o'clock a Spanish lady in a pink coverall would appear with a clattering tea trolley and the patients would stir to life to get a cup of tea and a slice of yellow cake, and from time to time the elusive Mr Jolly dropped by to dispense medicines or reorder biscuits, but otherwise things were very quiet. I developed a passable understanding of cricket and my skidding came on a treat.