The World I Fell Out Of. Andrew Marr

sassy dresses and high heels. ‘We are keeping you on the ventilator,’ she told me. ‘You have a lung infection and we are giving you antibiotics.’ Later, when I was off the ventilator, she was more expansive. It was pneumonia. I was strangely thrilled, in the way you are when you’re a kid and you’re going to have something to boast about when you go back to school. It was like being eight again, falling off roller skates and cracking a bone in your wrist. But at that point I was just frustrated. I’m fine, I tried to tell her with my eyes. The purgatory of the ventilator jammed in my mouth was becoming unbearable. I wanted it taken out. I pleaded with the nurses on my alphabet card. W-H-E-N? T-O-D-A-Y? At the weekend, they said. Soon. They lied. Lied repeatedly and prodigiously. The weekend never came. Day followed day. I inhabited some lost bit of space, some cul-de-sac on the dark side, all alone, floating along in my own ghastly spaceship of tubes and sighs. Beep-beep-debeepbeep. Beep-beep-debeepbeep.

      I remember when they took the ventilator out – there was an unpleasant rippling sensation as the corrugated ridges of the tube were withdrawn from my throat, I had a fleeting vision of those perforated blue drainage pipes, the kind you dig into the soil of your garden. Then it was over and I was drawing in my own air, could talk again. My jaw and my ears ached, despite the morphine, my tongue so dry and fat I was barely decipherable. I pleaded for a drink, but they refused: it was still too dangerous for me to try swallowing. At one point Christine moved across my line of vision, dragging a machine on wheels.

      ‘You don’t know this, but today is a very good day, a very significant day for you.’

      I looked quizzical.

      She smiled her shy smile. ‘I’m taking the ventilator away from your bed space. You’re making real progress.’

      At some point during that time, on a morning ward round, the doctors clustered inside the curtains round my bed and asked to do an anal examination. What I didn’t know was that this was the test to see how paralysed I was. The spinal cord ends in the perineal area, your bottom, and if you have sensation in your anus, it indicates how badly injured your spine is.

      I was rolled on my side and they stood behind me. Can you feel that? Can you clench your bottom? No, I said. Nothing. They were silent, grave. I decided, in my morphine haze, to be a good hostess and fill the silence to cover up any embarrassment. After all, my body was the party, wasn’t it? ‘That’s the nicest anal examination I’ve ever had,’ I said in a jolly more-tea-vicar sort of voice, trying to lighten the atmosphere, turning my head so I could grin at them. I didn’t understand why they didn’t smile back.

      The severity of a spinal injury is measured on a scale developed by the American Spinal Injury Association – the ASIA impairment scale. If you are Asia A, you’re completely buggered, basically: you have no power or sensation preserved below the injury to your spine. You will not recover function. Asia B, you have sensory feeling below the injury but your muscles don’t work. Asia C, some muscles do work but they’re very weak. Asia Ds have muscles, at least half of which have reasonable strength and they can walk. And Asia Es, lucky creatures, are normal healthy people.

      I was diagnosed Asia A. Completely buggered. They didn’t tell me that. Not then.

      Only the ward was real. My other life had receded to some distant place. My sanity, my compensation, was to pretend I was indeed that war correspondent on the front line, compelled to start recording this crazy story, to make sense of it to myself. Besides, it was good copy. I was finding things quite fascinating, in a rather grotesque way. By writing, I figured, I could justify my absence to my bosses at my newspaper, The Times. It’s peculiar how much of a priority this felt at the time – a measure, I suppose, of my desperate determination to hold onto something familiar and re-establish some control. Work could save me, keep me viable. At the same time, it represented escape from emotional anguish. Very few things made chronological sense to me. Unbeknownst to me, Dave came every day. Other visitors were discouraged by the hospital and he was like a Rottweiler keeping people at bay. Later I heard some of the details of events outside: Dougie had been away on an Easter ski trip in the Alps and apparently it took him a couple of days to get home; his mates performed a heroic drama-filled dash to get him to Geneva. I honestly don’t remember the moment when I first saw him at my bedside; grief and morphine have kindly erased the memory of the encounter. I hope he has forgotten too: but even now, years later, I am unable to ask him, in case I reawaken the pain. In some dark corner, I have a terrible memory of trying to give him a thumbs-up gesture with my right hand as he left, and realising with shock that I couldn’t; my thumb wouldn’t move – simultaneously realising that he had perceived the same thing. At the time I was aware only of the unbearable hurt I had inflicted on my child … and him being extraordinarily brave and composed and trying to comfort me.

      Dougie’s best friends from university, I much later discovered, came to stay at our home with him to comfort him during the first couple of weeks. I thought that was wonderful, that he had friends as fine as that. He was always more of a doer than a dreamer and I realised after my calamity that he was happiest when l asked him to do practical things; it was welcome distraction. When he knew I wanted to record what was happening to me, he brought in his Dictaphone. After he had gone I asked the nurses to place it beside me on the pillow and switch it on. I spent half an hour or so rambling gently about how I’d got here, trying to be professional, coherent. I had a job to do. A job to try and keep. I expressed anger at my own stupidity in falling off. Then I ran out of energy and the machine kept running, recording my breathing and the voices of the visitors in the bay opposite mine. Perhaps in my head that corner of the ward was still a curry shop at the time, or maybe by then I was at the stage of being convinced that a crowd of football casuals had got in and were trying to steal from my bedside cabinet. Shimmying between sanity and madness, I managed to summon the wit to ask a passing nurse to hit the off switch.

      The next day Dougie took the Dictaphone and promised to email the recording to London.

      They must have transcribed it and put something in the paper because at one point Su Pollard phoned the ward to talk to me, which was precisely the moment I knew my spaceship had landed on another planet. Su Pollard, for those under forty, is a wacky English character actress best known for a sitcom in the 1980s called Hi-de-Hi, which I had been aware of, as a young twenty-something, as a piece of cheesy middle-brow telly for my parents’ generation. A totem of its time, like Morecambe and Wise. Su is famous for eccentrically outsize glasses and a funny voice. Good-humoured Eighties kitsch. I had never met her in my life.

      ‘Call for you,’ said a nurse, holding the phone, eyebrows raised, a rather amused expression. ‘It’s Su Pollard.’

      It must be a morphine moment. She would drift away in a minute.

      ‘THE Su Pollard?’ I said.

      ‘Sounds like her.’

      ‘But I don’t know her.’

      ‘It’s you she asked to speak to.’

      Too random. Had to be opiates. The nurse held the phone to my ear and I had a short, apparently lucid conversation with someone who sounded exactly like the hapless holiday camp chalet maid Peggy Ollerenshaw whom I’d occasionally seen on TV thirty years ago.

      Of all the people I least expected to discuss my plight with, it was Peggy Ollerenshaw. (© Getty Images/United News/Popperfoto/Contributor)

      ‘Your article moved me so much I had to phone you and speak to you. You’re very brave and I send you lots of love,’ she said.

      ‘That’s really sweet of you,’ I said lamely.

      ‘I’m rooting for you.’

      ‘Thank you.’

      I still don’t know if it really happened or not.

      At night, I experiment with the only bit of my body that still answers me, that has a glimmer of feeling. My right hand, weak and floppy and fast becoming numb, fumbles down past layers of exhausting obstacles, past sheets and tubes