KIDNAPPED BY EVENTS

A very long time ago, when foreigners visiting Britain were known as aliens and had to report weekly to the local police station and when anyone arriving on our shores would have to queue up to be greeted individually by a man dressed as an admiral, with gold braid on his black uniform, and given a monolingual notice to read surmounted by the Royal Coat of Arms and headed ‘Have You Anything to Declare;’ in the days of the British ballistic rocket, ‘Blue Streak,’ and a putative British fighter called TSR2 billed as the Spitfire for the 1960s; when Bernard Levin was still writing for the Spectator, I found myself incarcerated for three days in a French geriatric hospital.

I haven’t bothered to see the film about Benjamin Button, but the trailer suggests that he lived his life backwards, being born old and dying young. A sensible order, if you ask me, for, as we all know, youth is wasted on the young and far better to give them old age instead. Whether I tolerated my spell among the geriatrics better at the age of 18 than I may do at the age of 80 I cannot say - if you’re still around, maybe I can let you know.

It came about like this. With a rather tall, bespectacled but timid friend, who for the sake of argument I shall call Graham, I found myself booked into one of those Youth Camps in the south of France at a place called Lézignan-Corbières. We were to travel down by train: we had tickets from the Gare d’Austerlitz, but first we thought we would look up a friend in Paris. Then we found we had time to spare and after ambling rather pennilessly around the city for a while decided to spend the night uncomfortably under one of the bridges of the Seine.

I confess this was my idea - and not one of my better ones. For some reason, probably not unconnected with George Orwell, spending the night under a bridge in Paris seemed, at that juvenile age, impossibly romantic. It beckoned like any rite of passage.

But as always on these occasions the reality belies the illusion. We were cold, the bridge was smelly, the air damp and humid, drunks paraded up and down, dogs sniffed. It was to put it at its simplest, not a good night. Graham to whom I had sold the romance slept not a wink. Indeed he was most extraordinarily put out.

Still, he didn’t jump ship and we made it to the station the next morning and an electric train hurtled us south. The weather was hot, the carriage crowded. Nevertheless, there was much to observe in the changing countryside and the people who squeezed in and out of the compartment whenever we halted.

It must have been around early afternoon and the hottest part of the day when I noticed a secondary reason for Graham not speaking to me: he had collapsed and was catatonic. By degrees the other occupants of the carriage noticed it too (this wasn’t England after all) and began to fan him with their newspapers and pinch various parts of his anatomy. As he failed to respond their voices rose in a babble of sound of which I understood not one word.

Or rather there was in fact one such word - ‘appendicitis!’ - a cry shrieked over and over again by a plump lady in a spotted dress. I wondered should I pull the communication cord: but to what point?

Luckily, however, the train began slowing and in a couple of minutes we arrived at Cahors.
Here events proceeded way beyond my control. The stationmaster arrived, or maybe it was the guard, or even both. Graham was manhandled off the train by the crowd and laid out like a corpse on some sort of parcel barrow.

All around people surged forward to look, to cross themselves and to look skywards. Somebody went to telephone someone. I tried to explain that we didn’t have any money, certainly not money for urgent hospitalisations. This may have seemed callous but I never really thought Graham was seriously ill. How could he be?

True, he had the nervous and inhibited sort of disposition of the bad travelling companion and he had refused any sort of sustenance during the 48 hours he had been in France; no doubt believing that the French were given to doing strange things with food and - as Bernard Levin once put it - in olive oil too. No doubt Graham thought that in the absence of bangers and mash he would be well-advised to delay the awful moment of contaminating his alimentary canal with any alien nourishment for as long as he possibly could.

But trying to explain in elementary French to a group of excited adults that it is most unlikely that there is anything wrong with your friend and that the reason he is now catatonic is that his blood sugar level has fallen to zero because of his inability to appreciate French food and that if only someone were to give him a good old cup of English tea with milk and two sugars and perhaps a doughnut he would begin to revive.

But on that platform in the hub and press of country folk it was hard to make oneself heard let alone understood and then, behind me, a whistle blew and the train glided out of the station and with it the lifeline to a secure and ordered séjour in this foreign land.

Now some species of medical orderly in white overalls materialised from somewhere and commanded the throng to bear the patient into the back of something that bore a remarkable resemblance to a hearse. They did so. I was told to climb in and we were off, klaxon blaring, I knew not whither. I might have been kidnapped. Indeed, in a sense I was.

By this time Graham was indeed beginning to show signs of life again, gradually returning to consciousness, but hardly had we begun our journey than we stopped and were being bundled this time into the cool grey vault of a building that seemed to be remarkably full of nuns.

Several of these took hold of him heaving him on to a stone slab. They loosened his trousers and prodded him gently as though he were a pudding. The doctor would come, they said re-assuringly. When? I asked. They didn’t know. Gradually the nuns went back to doing what nuns do. I sauntered out into the street.

A barrow man was selling peaches; great, fresh, juicy yellow peaches for next to nothing. Realising that my own blood sugar level might not exactly be buoyant, I bought a kilo and began eating them one after another, the sticky juice dripping down my face and hands.

Back in the hospital. I lost track of time. Graham was asleep now. All seemed quiet. Everyone had gone. I looked around. This seemed to be some kind of hospital, but if so it was a hospital without doctors. Indeed it was a hospital without much of anything, it seemed.

Eventually a doctor did come of course. He examined Graham cursorily and decided that he had fainted due to low blood sugar. He set up a sucrose drip and departed. With luck, I thought, we could catch the evening train - but the doctor had told the nuns apparently to keep him under observation for three days. Three days! So the nuns came back and together we him on to one of the wards.

It was then that I discovered that this was some species of geriatric establishment. All the patients were old men in various stages of decrepitude. Apart from one who was - a Spaniard, as I later found out - a man in his forties who wore a very English flannel dressing gown and slippers and who had something wrong with his kidneys, though he seemed in no degree incapacitated or even in pain.

Everyone looked at us rather strangely, but after a few hesitant seconds simply reverted to their games of cards or looking out of the window. For all I know we were the third English teenagers they had seen that week.

The nuns secreted me away somewhere, finding me in a little room to myself, about which I don’t have much recollection, but we took our meals with the inmates on the ward. A bell would ring and the patients would shuffle out of their beds. The nuns would place a great pitcher of wine on the communal table and one of those great round coarse loaves of industrial size. With the bread and wine came a soup or stew or casserole, poured thickly onto a shallow plate and eaten largely with lumps of bread.

The first day I sat there, without cutlery, watching the patients pull out great hooked clasp knives from the pockets of their dressing gowns. With these they stabbed at the improbable cuts of meat or squished the sauce into their bread. But I had no such knife and it seemed a long time before I managed to make this known. I think I had expected to be given a clasp knife too, but when the grumbly serving nun came back from the kitchen she offered me a perfectly ordinary table knife and spoon. I was quite disappointed.

With nothing to do during the day I used to wander around Cahors, and over the medieval fortified bridge across the river Lot that you see at the top of this piece. I was often in the company of the little Spaniard. He bizarrely spoke even less French than I did, and no English at all. I spoke no Spanish. Nevertheless, we enjoyed each other’s company talking, I seem to remember, about bull-fighting about which I knew at least as much as can be gathered by an impressionable child from one of Hemingway’s lesser known works. He talked in Spanish and I responded in English. We made a lot of gestures.

At the end of three days Graham was deemed well enough to travel. We bade goodbye to the nuns and thanked them and I said ‘adios’ to my little Spaniard. We shook hands in turn with the inmates whose sentence would no doubt be devoid of any satisfactory ending. And we made for the station.

And I never returned to Cahors until, that is, last month, when I walked over that same bridge and through those same streets, now much changed from those of my memory. Nevertheless, if you look hard enough I am sure in July you will find those same peaches, succulent and sweet to eat beside the river Lot - deep, green and wide on its endless meandering journey to the sea.