CHANGING PRIORITIES

[Stanley]

Changing priorities, or giving things up without feeling deprived. An essay written by my friend John Pudney. Poet and dramatist.

(First appeared in the Times, September 7th, 1977. John died the same year.)

Poet, author and dramatist John Pudney contributes this week’s guest column.

Harassed by food rationing during the First World War my mother used to say: “If only we could give up eating and just have pills or take it through a tube.”

Her wish was fulfilled for me, at least, 44 years after her death when I looked down through an anaesthetic hangover and made the acquaintance of a tube and spigot protruding from the left side of my stomach wall. The hospital warning note NIL BY MOUTH over the bed was familiar. It proclaimed a temporary fast essential for an, operation or a barium X-ray. This time it was there for good. I had had a gastrostomy by means of which all food and drink have direct access to my stomach. This was done because cancer and radiation had put my oesophagus out of action. Writing this soon after the event I marvel how really portentous events take so little time. The divorce proceedings which ended my first marriage after 20 years took 14 minutes. They told me that the gastrostomy ending 68 years of eating by mouth took about the same time.

Having the stuff pumped in after the prolonged and frightening struggles to eat and drink conventionally was such a relief at first that the implications were hidden in clouds of euphoria.

The reality of my loss began with yearnings for a boiled egg. I think it is the first food I remember. The performance of opening it; learning to tap the thinner end, being allowed to " take the top off ". The horror if it were either hard or too runny. Special treats, the speckled eggs laid by my favourite Plymouth Rock. The precision, the individuality, the completeness of a boiled egg! The unique taste which nevertheless varied interestingly from one boiled egg to another throughout a lifetime. (Let us forget momentarily the man-inflicted gradations farm fresh, factory-produced free range, shop-stale.) Guinea-fowl eggs, duck's eggs as my father preferred them with cold pickled pork, bantam’s, plover’s, gull’s eggs hardboiled. Yet it is the soft boiling of a hen’s egg "just right" which can bring marriages to a brink or speed a mistress on her way.

At times in war any egg became a rare luxury. The most glamorous for me was the goose egg, admittedly sur la plat served as a main course at Claridge’s. I was a guest so I do not know what this golden egg cost. In Malta toward the end of the siege we were offered pigeon-size hen eggs at three shillings each. But the reality of a boiled egg never hit me so hard as when I watched them pumping the stuff into me beneath the NIL BY MOUTH notice and listened to a comforting voice: ---“This will do you good. It contain three eggs". So that was how eggs were to be! Not another boiled egg in my life ! And a right good cure for self-pity this.

So back to that bleak subject –deprivation. To be deprived from one moment to the next of the pleasures of eating. “You can put things in your mouth, have a chew and put them out. You may even swallow the taste of the thing.” was the only mitigation of he sentence.

It was a case of working on deprivation all over again, keeping self pity out. No established or organized therapy exists. Grateful for the life saving gastrostomy the patient must come to terms with the personal, domestic and social implications and from the first day with the question What does it really feel like.?

I was fortunate at least in having had some rehearsal, the experience of giving up drink and then tobacco, the first deprivation imposed by the threat of moral and physical breakdown, the second by a self imposition with health and aesthetic pressures. The food by mouth deprivation was a sudden drastic medical necessity, and the continuing experience of the other two helped. Had I anything of the saint or the holy man in me or of the philosophy which Teilhard de Chardin evokes as “the forces of diminishment”, if these deprivations were spiritual or were touched with nobility they would be more edifying. Nevertheless they are not to be thought of as punishment.. One has not been singled out by some Calvinistic predestination.

There are too many people in the world starving, too many in prison, too many deprived of too much under duress for one to be stricken by any sense of singularity. So when the Devil began his blandishments with: “Look at the way everyone else is enjoying this summer with juicy smoked salmon followed by strawberries and cream", it was no good trying to block out the dainties and to forget them. Far better to relish them in the mind, celebrate the times and places when they gave most pleasure and be grateful that they still exist for others. It was a temptation to lie awake desolately pondering favourite items---pork crackling, new homemade bread, pheasant well hung, treacle tart, asparagus from the garden --and all the carefree privileged people consuming them. Far better though to lull oneself to sleep thinking not only how enjoyable these were and that the so-called privileged ones still tucking- in were no wiser or godlier and were just as likely to lie awake worrying as I was.

This for many of us has been a first line of recovery from over drink. The alcoholic who must give it up, which he must for ever, must realize his parity with his fellows. Those fastidious friends round the polished table at the club, the merry young people at the pub round the corner, old George lifting his pint after digging the garden, are not privileged. They are no richer or poorer in spirit, in sociability, in love, in work because they happen to drink. There is nothing wrong in them enjoying, what I enjoyed for so many years. I am not diminished. I can join everyone of them in friendship and drink something of my choice that isn’t alcoholic. I do not shun company. I stand my round, I keep and serve liquor in the home.

This parity which, fully realised, gets rid of the deprivation bogey, is not a mere defensive or passive attitude. Some genial expression may well reinforce it. “Do you tolerate me merely because I drink?” has been addressed to those who begin to make heavy weather of abstinence. To the man who spots one with a soft drink and says: "Are you still drinking that stuff ? " I recommend a steady (smiling) glance at the Scotch in his fist and: "Are you still drinking that stuff ? " " It’s whisky, best malt whisky, what's wrong with that?

It is an affront to point at his Scotch yet derisive questions about, soft drinks are fair game. Keep a little compassion though. The fellow is probably worried about his own drinking.

About food there is no need to be aggressive unless people start boring you with diets. You can kill that scene with a shrug. "I just don't eat. anything." Those who force culinary advice and boast of their exploits in the kitchen can be quickly overcome. I have found, with a recital of a typical day's menu which my wife Moggy administered to me through the tube (For my mouth a token sip of each meal to keep up with the taste.) This, for instance: Breakfast, banana, goat's yoghurt, lemon juice and honey, Caloreen; Lunch, watercress and onion, cream cheese and casein (protein); Tea. dried apricot, pulp, yoghurt and honey, Caloreen. Dinner; avocado, tomato, sesame cream, soya milk, casilan.

I go back to alcohol and especially to smoking for the next point which is one of the
priorities. While not turning one’s back on the pleasures of the kitchen and the table one must not become obsessed with them. Let the thought of it all settle into the background. Let its significance diminish.

Drink absolutely dictates the life patterns of the alcoholic. How to obtain supplies and how to dispose of empties (you daren’t use your own dustbin and the antics of the unacknowledged alcoholic with his empties is the surest giveaway to his condition.) Every hour of every day is tempered by the availability of the stuff and furtive means of using it. Not only the metabolism but the social structure of life are ruled by this tyrannical priority.

Treatment and the first stages of recovery cause it to slip from the top of the list. It is gradually edged out because so many things, not least human relationships, are more important. For years I have kept a broached bottle of Scotch in my workroom (behind the Trollope’s on the bookshelf where it used to be hidden for quick regular tippling). Its presence there spells out the message that I am not deprived, the availability is there but the priority has vanished. This is not a smug touch, rather it is an item of personal industrial archaeology.

Overt companions of the atrophied Scotch is a tobacco jar and a cherished Dunhill pipe with their message “we’re here if you want us again” An open packet of French cigarettes besides them is for current hospitality. This might appear sentimental and smug. Yet it was, and is, an important aid to the therapy of giving up tobacco. Addicted smoking asserts a priority as tyrannous, and more subtle than that of drink. Neither society nor the individual demand secrecy about it. Indeed the addict is often
boastful about, it. That first one of the day! The joy of it when the rested and awakened palate takes its initial assault. The rituals of giving and taking which are built into the social structure. But with it the anxiety to stock. Never, in spite of the slot machines, to run out. The miles I travelled across country for an ounce of. tobacco. The deviations in London to take in the only café, in Fleet Street, where the stuff was available all night. From 16 to 60 years of age I was happy in this bondage, gratifyingly masculine, deft in operation, soothing company in the solitude of writing. Why give up?

I had no real threat of cancer when I did it. No special worries about the health hazard. I simply wondered why I had to cart a bit of wood about in my mouth with occasional tubes to replace it in polite society. How ugly, messy and time-consuming it all was. Looking not only at myself but at even the most beautiful creatures smoking, what a blemish! Why spend so much time, energy, and money on a pleasure which half the time, was distasteful, ultimately downright harmful and aesthetically uncouth.

The way to give up is to attack the priority by stealth, indifference and good humoured neglect. It should be a non-event and provide fun. Do not begin on New Year's Day, your birthday or even a Monday. Surprise yourself mid-morning or mid---afternoon, not even looking at the clock, by putting down a half-finished smoke, cigarette, pipe, or aromatic cigar, saying: “That’s the last ever”---. Don't tell anyone. Don’t cut off supplies but after buying in few days stock continue to pay yourself, childish money box pleasure. Forget when you started. Observe how family and
friends continue not to notice the change. When they do, play it very casually. You won’t remember when and you don’t really know why you gave it up. In any case you are keeping stocks and paraphernalia in case you should want to take it up again. You offer the pack around. You have not set up as anti-smoking, or as a health freak…. By this time the priority has toppled and a keen sense of liberation can blow through the smoke and across the sordid ashtrays like a summer scented breeze.

So I do not remember even the year when I put the Dunhill on the shelf and that disposal of a priority is the kind of exercise that can help the first stresses of giving up eating. The social problems are formidable compared with those of non drink and non smoke. Intimate friends and children may enjoy the rituals of tube feeding and even participate. For the rest, eating out means taking your own food and equipment. A ‘meal’ only takes a few minutes. Afterwards one can join the company at table and accept token titbits like a grown-up baby and if well conditioned in anti-deprivation this is not an unpleasant way to spend the time.

(John sent me this piece when he wrote it. First appeared in the Times, September 7th, 1977. John died the same year.)