Jack McLean - Hopeless But Not Serious

Hopeless But Not Serious

The Autobiography of the Urban Voltaire

JACK McLEAN

NEIL WILSON PUBLISHING

I am born. Well of course I am. Born at the fag-end of the War at that, and like the David Copperfield whose autobiographical reminiscence kicks off that novel I am born in especial circumstances. Copperfield was born with a caul, a strange membrane covering the infant head. I was born with a metaphorical, perhaps, metaphysical, membrane: I was born prematurely. At a time when birth was hard enough with a massive number of infant mortalities I was alive. Living at all was hard enough for the mother. We were, after all, at war. And I was just over two pounds at birth.

Today such a weight suggests that the childs chance of life is not good. At the end of the War it was impossible. I was the size of a milk bottle and possessed less colour. A few factors allowed my survival, all of them unlikely. Firstly I emerged from my mothers cavity, and after her with a long illness and all the doctors hoping to Jesus that she was still alive, bugger the baby, and her in Irvine Central Hospital, one of the few truly radical institutions in hospital care in the country. It has always been a certain source of embarrassment that I did not, after all, hail from the Magic City, but then neither did any famous and infamous and working-his-ticket Glaswegian. I was born in Irvine. Irvine is a New Town today and perfectly awful, apart from the people, who remain to this day pleasant, bucolic, and alcoholic often enough and impervious to the disgraces of the architecture which has been inflicted upon them in the last forty years.

My mother had suffered a variety of renal failures, and I was set aside, a bundle a baggage, a danger to a young mother. I was the second child and not only was I not expected to live, neither was my mother. My father was getting the shit kicked out of him by last-ditch Germans in France and didnt expect to survive either. The doctor was a Soviet fellow, sent across from Russia. Back in those days the level of medical development in the Soviet Union was high, or at least higher than the West possessed, but that was because British medicine was still tied to the ability to pay. Sure there were plenty of splendid doctors, but they cost money and working-class people could hardly afford the fees demanded. It wasnt that British doctors were greedy heavens, enough of them were overworked and low-paid it was that health insurance was inadequate. Give most doctors their due: they voted overwhelmingly for a democratic medical service, and despite some appalling fiddles by a handful of medicos who exploited this new National Health system shortly after the War, the doctors were then, and largely remain, strongly in favour of a health service which is still second to none, in the clichd phrase. Anyway I have been, since birth, since I was born, a patient in the same practice; a worry to my doctors for fifty years. You will find out why later on.

Sometimes a clich is a life-saver. In my case, dear Love of God, a clich is a gift from the Gods. For the Soviet doctor had introduced a new phenomenon. He called it an incubation tent. Unknown, or scarcely thought-of in Britain. It saved my life. But your Urban Voltaire would not be here to tell the tale were it not for the most important life-saver of all. She was nineteen years of age and a very inexperienced little Ayrshire nurse from Kilmarnock. I like to think of her as having blonde hair, and virginal enough but not too much. A wee spot of petting in the picture-house with a Bevin Boy seems all right to me. Her name was Elizabeth. The Soviet doctor had brought in these rather large and odd incubation tents. But Elizabeth had brought, at the end of her childhood, not very much expertise, but what is the first sense of even very young girls, the notion to hold a baby. I was covered in hair and blood, but the lassie picked me up, despite them all saying that she was a silly girl and announced to the experienced sisters and the Soviet doctor who had last seen service in the charnel houses of Stalingrad what my mother, in her pain and grief at losing her child, overheard. The little nurse said, in a quiet and shy voice what was true. The babys still alive, she said, as she picked me from where I had been discarded. But she was right: I was still living and breathing.

I was alive, the weight of a bag of sugar, the size of a milk bottle; you could hold me in your hand. I was covered in thick black hair. My father was covered in confusion and anxiety. His only thought was for his wife, I think so anyway. It is perhaps an explanation for his later resentment of myself. I was the one who could have brought about the death of the love of his life. I might be wrong about this, but I know I am right. I was ill for a long time, longer than my mother.

Dear Sweet Mother, I was ill for near eleven years. I couldnt have inoculations, apart from the smallpox one. I never caught smallpox but I caught every other bloody thing you can think of now. I had scarlet fever and diphtheria, and polio (then epidemic), and whooping cough, and rheumatism, and the sort of influenza which kills you, and migraine, and a hernia and anything at all which could upset parents. I caught the lot. Allied to that I was neurasthenic and half the time didnt know, nor did my parents, whether I was well or not. I could have been the wee boy in The Secret Garden. My grandma was wont to jouk about her town stating that I was a miracle baby, and then recount how ill I was and how I was not expected to live. Later, when I was older, I realised how much I could have made of this. At the time I was not well and made no advantage of it. Neither did my father who, I suspect, got pissed off having a delicate child on him.

A delicate child would seem daft now, but back then, when I was born, the Victorian experience of child mortality was yet in the mind of every parent and I was coddled a little. I really was ill in fact, slept in a different bed. Until I was nine or ten I slept separately from my young brother and my elder one. They slept together. I often slept between my mother and father because of the nightmares. When you are little and ill you get nightmares. I have them to this day but have learned to cope. Now I can control the nightmares, tell them what to do and more than that: I can start them up, unless there are bad nights. My chum, psycho-therapist Derek Rafaelli, says I cant, says Im kidding myself, but I can I know better about my childhood than he does, believe me.

Actually Derek knows I am telling the truth. If you spend your early childhood looking at death, nightmares are a psychic pabulum and morbidity is there when you wake, and your childhood is an early maturity. I was so ill in my baby years that I spent a lot of time with my grandma. Let me tell you about her.

She was less than five feet tall and came from Cornwall. I have seen photographs of her as a young girl with my Auntie Muriel. She had on a long skirt, to her ankles, and a shirtwaist, and a cameo brooch at her throat and she was just, and just, capable of putting her light brown hair up. For a girl of those days she was well-educated, stayed on at a girls school until she was seventeen. She came from a well-known, and to this day, well respected, Cornish family, the Nancarrows. They were related to the Roberts, from Ireland; Lord Roberts Bobs was a second uncle. They owned, and the cottage lies there still, Roberts cottage, now a tourist attraction in Perranporth. And then she met a shy young man, of Hungarian origin, Kador Bennish his father was. He called himself Richard Benny. He looked and indeed through the genes I do myself, Jewish, and despite the fact that Jews can only go through the matriarchal line, I have never quite forgotten the simple fact that I am of Slav origin: that, no matter, there is the Levant in me. My grandfather I never knew. But my grandma I did. She was very small and dainty and looked dreadful and washed-out when she was bringing up copious numbers of children and lost several through miscarriage and one through a terrible accident. His name was Eugene and I was nearly named after him. I have the photograph of him, framed. I always thought he was an angel because they said he had gone to become one, and in the photograph he has, somehow, an aureole around him. Ethereal he looks. I always felt his presence and still do. My bourgeois grandmas family would have felt that fanciful, but my grandma wouldnt have. Like myself, she had a Celtic nonsense in her head. I never said anything to anybody ever, until now, but I miss Eugene more than I can tell you. Dead twenty years before I was born and more, but I knew him well, and better than any other uncle.