Mr Vogel

  Let us join her as she mulls over her first days at Rhyl:

  It was the proudest moment of my life when I first put on my uniform and marched across the Hospital to Chapel. The Superintendent was a most awe-inspiring lady standing five feet ten in her stockings. She occupied a sort of raised throne at the entrance of the Chapel, from which she could survey her flock and correct any misdemeanours...

  The Royal Alexandra Hospital was, I believe, the first hospital for cripples that ever advocated fresh air as an integral part of treatment...

  To Miss Grahams teaching I owe an immense debt of gratitude, for she taught me the paramount importance of... fresh air and happiness. She held that no nurse was worth her salt if she had not the joy of life in her, and the power of sharing it with her patients. She believed, which was unusual in those days, that God should be made manifest through joy Certainly, the cripples of that Hospital were as cheerful a set of rascals as I have ever seen. All the children who were not too ill were carried out on the sands with their buckets, the others were pushed outside to watch the nigger minstrels, Punch and Judy shows, &c; summer and winter, the verandas were in full use.

  Agnes did not stay her full year at Rhyl – she moved on to a London hospital, and to give you a taste of nursing just a century ago, this is how she describes it:

  ... the nursing staff had not been touched by the finger of Florence Nightingale. The Matron was honorary and untrained... the nurses were housed in big dormitories, which they had to scrub out once a week. Their dining room was in the basement, the food was not appetizing and very ill served. Supper, for instance, was bread and cheese and beer; it was possible, however, to get a glass of milk instead of beer. The crumbs of this repast were still on the table when we trooped into breakfast the next day, and the smell of stale beer and cheese hung on the heavy atmosphere. Breakfast consisted of tea and milk and sugar, all mixed together in a big urn, thick slices of bread and butter, and an egg that had been kept too long. The meal never varied, except, perhaps, in the date of the birth of the egg. We worked from 8am to 8pm, with, if we were lucky, two hours off every other day. No care at all was taken of our health, and it was no uncommon thing for one or two of us to be warded and seriously ill... the house surgeons were not very much better off. One of them told me that the post-mortem examinations had to be done in their dining room, as there was no post-mortem room in the hospital.

  At this time Dame Hunt met her lifelong companion, Emily Selina Goodford (nicknamed Goody). Theirs was one of those enduring and chastely endearing bonds forged by women in the pre-modern society when they decided not to marry – a symbiotic and loving friendship between two like-minded individuals of strong character.

  Together they were sent into the hovels of Hammersmith and Fulham to dispense aid. She says:

  The work was hard but intensely interesting. Here I realized for the first time the tremendous scope and power of the nurse’s life. One went into these homes, not as ‘my lady bountiful’, but as a fellow human being, a friend to give personal help, to teach and to serve... nobody can be a district nurse for any length of time without realising the astounding patience, unselfishness, and bravery of the poor. Let me give one example among many. A woman was dying of heart disease, her husband was a casual labourer, and they had many children. For several years this patient had quarrelled with her next door neighbour, and their only conversation had been unprintable abuse from their respective back doors. Yet the moment this neighbour heard of the plight of her enemy, she, who in the day earned her living at the wash-tub, made of her poor tired body a human pillow for her life-long enemy to rest upon, as the invalid could not breathe unless she was practically sitting up, and no other pillows were available.

  She went to work in the Isle of Wight, where she met a typical Poor Law doctor of that time, who might have stepped straight from a Dickens novel:

  He was dressed in a broad-brimmed top hat, an old and very greasy black coat and black trousers to match. He drove about in an ancient brougham, whose springs and upholstery must have dated from the eighteenth century. He had also the unfortunate habit of taking a pinch of snuff from one waistcoat pocket and applying it to his nose, and directly after from yet another pocket would appear a large piece of cheese which he ate with apparent relish! One day he asked me to help him in his dispensary. I knew nothing about dispensing but he promised to teach me. Certainly, it did not prove to be difficult, as one prescription consisted of rhubarb and soda, and the other of quinine, iron and brown sugar.

  He told me to make up three gallons of each, and when the patients came I was to ask for their bottles and fill them up. He added that I could tell which they had been having because there was always a bit of sediment left in the rhubarb bottle, but if they thought the medicine was not doing them any good, I could give them some of the other. If, however, there was a new patient, it would be best to start him on the rhubarb and soda. He said he was sorry he could not stop, but he had a pressing engagement elsewhere.

  Agnes and Goody went off to fight typhoid in Rushden, where Agnes was nearly raped by a tramp. Together they made an intrepid pair, though Agnes suffered frequent bouts of ill-health and had to take to her bed for months on end. I seem to remember that Florence Nightingale took to her bed for many years after returning from the Crimea, as if the gift of healing on the one hand and hypochondria on the other were bedfellows, like Jack Spratt and his wife. I’m not suggesting that Agnes was a hypochondriac – it was amazing that a crippled girl achieved what she did, especially at a time when cripples were considered incapable of any form of lifestyle and were usually left to lie on pallets outside houses all day, if the weather allowed it, or forced to vegetate indoors with no expectation of them, as if they were mentally rather than physically handicapped.

  At the end of This is my Life I felt I was closer empathically to the Vogel cause, but I was no nearer to the root of the story. I entered a period of dormancy during which the Vogel story incubated slowly. I carried on with my own busy and pleasurable life on the road, darting home whenever I needed a brief rest.

  One day I struck on a ploy. I arranged lunch with a journalist friend and quickly engineered a photo-shoot and a brief article on the tenor that I was researching the Vogel Papers and was looking for any slightest recollection, or any reference in any historical papers, documents, wills, terriers, stories, fables etc. I was pictured outside the Blue Angel bookshop with one hand holding the Vogel Papers and the other pointing at the roof, where they were found.

  As I expected, there was no response.

  But the Vogel Story, as it went along, seemed to be a story of serendipity and quirky coincidence, and it was not going to let me down now. My next break came from a most unexpected quarter. Certainly not from the town – a blank was drawn there. Although I seldom looked at the local rag, I now bought it every week in case there was any reaction to my appearance. As I said, there was none. But one Thursday as I flipped idly through its pages my eye fell on a weekly nostalgia column by the local historian.

  His article was on the traditional Welsh craft of stick-making, with the emphasis on unusual handles. I scanned it quickly. I still have the cutting in my drawer crammed with Vogel matter, and this is the relevant part:

  Of course, other parts of the world have their own traditions. For instance, I can remember a most unusual type of stick, seen only once in this area. It’s an unusual story. One day, some years ago, a mystery man called on a famous local surgeon – quite unexpectedly – while he was having a meal with a friend. It took some time for the surgeon to realise who this stranger was, since he hadn’t seen him since he was a child. They invited him in, but he didn’t stay for long: after speaking to them briefly he put hundreds of dollars on the table and then left. He wore a leather long-coat and a large-brimmed hat, and he walked with the aid of two walking sticks, their heads carved to resemble the faces of two Red Indian chiefs in full regalia. The diners, who were the renowned Doctor Robert Jones
and his colleague Agnes Hunt, were surprised but amused by their impromptu visitor, who apparently represented a firm of American violin makers.

  As you might expect, this snippet set in motion a fast and extremely profitable chain of events.

  THE MAN FROM AMERICA

  MY FRIEND THE JOURNALIST SAYS that reporters are taught to flesh out their stories however they can. No matter how trivial a fact may seem, it could be important to readers. For instance, if I say my age is 47, which was my father’s age when he died, readers will have a point of comparison, and they can position themselves neatly in the age queue, like children waiting to go into class. Starting with the youngest, their eyes will travel all the way up the line to the oldest, and they will draw comfort or despair from their position as they wait for the bell to call them in for the final exam.

  So this is probably the right time to say a little about myself. I am indeed 47, and in good health. Doctors at the hospital said I have an excellent constitution. I think they were implying that I didn’t deserve it, and looked at me accusingly, as if I had cheated and grabbed it before the music stopped while playing Pass-the-Parcel.

  I am a six-foot professional, slim, GSOH, non-smoker, own teeth, own home, sensitive, very fit, and no, I’ve never looked through the Lonely Hearts columns. Quite happy alone, actually. WLTM no-one with a view to marriage. Women I simply don’t need.

  I’ve been told that I’m very attractive to the opposite sex but I’m simply not ready to settle down yet. I’ve no need for human bondage (or should that be bonding, I always confuse the two).

  I have a few inconsequential faults. Nobody could accuse me of having a well-ordered or carefully structured existence, as many people can boast. Anarchy starts at home, I say. There is something about life-planners which frightens me. Hubris? Cheek? I expect all those people who take out pensions when they’re still in the fifth form and book their retirement venue at the same time as they’re sorting out their gap year to drop down dead at the snap of a godly finger.

  Perhaps I’m a little frugal (my less timid friends have used the word mean). Yes, I’m careful with money; I don’t buy new clothes or appliances if I can possibly avoid it and I don’t waste food or electricity – I make sure that everything is off before I go to bed, something which some people find irritating.

  I have a scalpful of antic red hair, and green eyes. I wear unobtrusive, steel-rimmed glasses and I can spend up to twenty-four hours a day looking for them. I dress carelessly, and because I hate wearing new clothes I am kitted out in charity shop clothes, which is my only similarity to Mr Vogel, since I am unusually nimble and sprightly for my age. I have never been married (there was someone a long time ago, first love and all that, but time and distance parted us). I have no children. As I have already told you I am taking a year off, between jobs, having inherited a rather gratifying heap of cash from a rich uncle, who also left me his house. Funnily enough there is a small, modern, B&Q pagoda in the back garden.

  That is enough about me for the present.

  I will take you back, now, about thirty years, when I was in a hospital. I suppose you need to know a few relevant things about me. Yes, I was a patient. No, I don’t want to talk about it.

  The hospital had a side-ward which contained nothing but hydrocephalus cases.

  During our lives we collect a handful of fundamental experiences, such as our first corpse, or our first sexual encounter, and the hydrocephalus ward was a formative experience for me. It was full of incubators, I’d say about twenty, each containing a human being with a small body and a grossly enlarged head, like those cartoon aliens with blobby white heads and tadpole bodies.

  Hydrocephalus, put simply, means a gathering of water in the brain. It’s a condition which is treated quickly and effectively nowadays, if detected in time, by inserting tiny pipes subcutaneously to drain the fluid. In olden days the disease created hideous forms, only nominally human, with deadened eyes. They simply lay there all day experiencing that most terrifying of states, a living death, not that they appeared to know their plight. I walked among them in awe. They looked back blankly. There was nothing in those eyes, less than there is in a doll’s eyes. They could not move an inch.

  To me they were the embodiment of Dante’s tortured souls in purgatory; they could have been a detail in a Hieronymus Bosch. Why do I mention these zombies, these living dead? Some were children, some were teenagers, some were in their twenties, and they are all dead now. I came across them as I came across a cluster of frogs’ eggs in a rut in a farm track during my trek. The eggs had been laid in an unsuitable place, because tractors drove through them occasionally and displaced the water. Some were already opaque and dead. They reminded me of those children in the ward. I walked away all those years ago, and I walked away now, as the quick walk from the dead, not with rejoicing or schadenfreude, but with incomprehension. There was only one difference between me and the disembodied children and the frogs’ eggs; none of us had any comprehension of the others’ state of being, but I could walk away.

  Which brings me neatly to the man with two sticks and lots of dollar bills who walked, out of the blue, into the lives of Dr Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt, as noted by my local newspaper. I pestered the paper’s librarian and he allowed me to examine his bible copies. The room smelt fusty. So this was the smell of a hundred years of history, I said to him. I came across a tiny insect scuttling slowly across a whole broadsheet page before me, like a microscopic camel in a desert of words (like me in Wales?) It was a bookworm, presumably.

  ‘Do you know anything about bookworms?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ he replied.

  ‘Don’t you get to know anything about them? Mechanics get to learn about rust and dentists about caries. I thought you might know the different types, their eating habits, their preferred binding glue?’

  ‘No,’ he replied again, more stolidly this time.

  The incident in the newspaper column had happened at the Liverpool home of Dr Robert Jones, whom I have already mentioned as co-founder of the Gobowen Orthopaedic Hospital. I was led to a full and proper version of events in Frederick Watson’s The Life of Sir Robert Jones:

  One day Agnes Hunt was having lunch with Robert Jones in his studio in Nelson Street when a tall young man with a slight limp was ushered in. He spoke with a strong American accent, and asked Dr Jones if he remembered a little lad from Manchester with a very bad hip disease – and added ‘You came twice a week to see me and you induced a lady to give me a violin and teach me how to play it, and now I am managing director of a violin and instrument factory in the United States, and I humbly ask you to accept this small donation for any crippled institution in which you may be interested.’ The donation was a five hundred dollar bill.

  As the door closed I turned to Robert Jones and asked for his story.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I will tell you the story, because it can show what an excessive influence for good a cripple child can exercise. He lived in a wretched slum in Manchester, such a home which only drink-producing poverty can achieve. The mother, an apparently hopeless slattern, the father earning good money and spending it all on drink; they had but one redeeming feature, a great love for the cripple boy. The gradual restoration of that home was what will interest you. I got a friend to teach the child the violin, and going there one Sunday evening heard a violin accompanied by many childish voices singing Abide With Me. Apparently the whole street used to gather there on Sunday evenings to sing hymns with that cripple boy. Finally, he asked me to have a cup of tea with him; the tea was perfectly served and the house spotlessly clean. With tears in her eyes the mother said that the father brought home every penny of his wages.’

  The story is very typical of Robert Jones; he told it to me because it showed what exceeding influence for good a cripple child can exercise; not a word of the quiet talks he had with the drinking father, not a word of his gentle advice to and his influence over the mother.

  I read this with
growing certainty that Watson had hit me over the head with the biggest clue yet to Vogel’s identity. Tall man with a limp, violin factory, Abide with Me... either I had a huge, smelly red herring wafting under my nose or I had landed a whale-sized clue. My fellow strollers, what do you think we should do next? Read The Life of Sir Robert Jones from cover to cover? Job done! Yet more clues! Robert Jones was directly linked to the Bonesetters of Anglesey, through marriage! Here was a watertight connection with the little boys washed up on the shores of Anglesey and rescued by the smuggler Dannie Lukie.

  Dr Robert Jones achieved many things, and once again I will ask you to rest awhile; let us sit on this bank on the shoreline near Flint Castle, which stands like a child’s crenellated sand-bucket, smashed and washed up by the tide.

  Dr Robert Jones (could this be the Dr Robert mentioned in the Vogel Papers?) had also been involved in the building of the Manchester ship canal. I quote from Watson:

  It was necessary that a surgical and hospital staff should be appointed to look after the health of the 20,000 men with their wives and families in the hutments along the canal. Only a surgeon with a wide experience of accidents among manual workers could organise such an undertaking. While upon holiday in Norway in 1884, Robert Jones attended a case in the hotel where he was staying with such success that he aroused the interest of the English people staying there. Amongst these was Mrs Garnett, head of The Navvy Mission.