1946
I was kept in hospital for 10 days and, for reasons best known to the medical staff, I was never allowed to walk more than a few steps in all that time. One day I was carried from the main ward out onto a veranda and put into a bed in the far corner. All the other beds, about eight of them, were already occupied. None of us were allowed to leave our beds go to the toilet – we had to use a bottle and a bedpan. That was embarrassing because the two nearest beds to me were occupied by girls, rather older than me, who would insist in making improper suggestions. On my last day Dad came to collect me. I was wheeled in a chair to a waiting ambulance, still in pyjamas. One of the girls who had tormented me the most was crying copiously – not because I was leaving but because she had just been told that she needed another operation. I felt sorry for her.
When we arrived back home in Cotton Street Dad carried me into the house and straight upstairs into bed. Many of the neighbours had come out to welcome me home so someone had passed the news of my return around. It all seemed unnecessary because by then I felt perfectly capable of walking normally and unaided. I started back at school a week later and found my school pals, boys and girls, had a voracious and unhealthy interest in what had happened to me. I made the most of my fame!
About a month after the operation I went with my parents to the cinema where the newly-released film ‘Green for Danger’ was showing. This famous film, starring the lugubrious but brilliant Alistair Sim, is about patients being murdered on the operating table in a military hospital because the villain of the piece had filled the oxygen cylinders with carbon dioxide. In those days we often went to the cinema without actually knowing in advance what the film was about. Had my parents known what the subject was they probably wouldn’t have taken me. As it was, I enjoyed the film with morbid fascination but, because the victims in the film didn't struggle when the anaesthetic gas started flowing, it merely caused my nightmares to be more dramatic.
Postscript:
Many decades later I learned that although the surgeon had probably removed my appendix while he had me opened up, I did not actually have appendicitis but something called TB Glands. Both my sister, who later became a theatre sister at Clayton Hospital, and my parents knew that I had not had appendicitis but no-one ever mentioned it to me!
The curious thing is that my health improved dramatically after the operation and I quickly became a very fit young man.
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