LITMIR.BIZ

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danced about in front of my vision. I had become a cinema-verité, hand-held camera and all the shots were jiggled and out of focus, as I blinked back tears of alarm and struggled to see clearly. But my destination was all too clear. I was going to the worst place in the world.

      And it was because of the blasted windows that I felt so appalled. The doors of G Ward were always shut because of the need to keep the air temperature consistent and unwavering. Every other ward had its door open to visitors and passing medics and droppers-by; but not the ward from hell. I’d noticed, when furtively passing the doors, there were two little porthole windows at which you were supposed to present your face, to be identified before you’d be allowed in.

      In thirty seconds, I told myself, I will have to present my face at the window and wait to see what unspeakable apparition gazes out at me …

      I can’t do this, I said silently.

      I am walking, I told myself, into the biggest horror film I’ve ever seen, and it’s all going to be real.

      Something had changed about my relationship with windows. At home when I was small, they’d been the glass shelter that kept the outside world at bay. Then they were the screen through which awful people could come and look in at you, like Quint and the Snow Queen, as though inspecting your tortured soul. Now there were these round porthole windows, where I was the outsider looking in, but the people on the inside would have gargoyle faces. Everything had got all topsy-turvy. A crucifix on the wall brought back memories of St Mary’s, and the staring-eyed Maniac, my father’s crackpot patient, the asphyxiating Christ, the blood-boltered posters, the red-rimmed eyes of Dracula just before he pounces – all my most dreaded images. The big G loomed nearer. It began to take on a three-dimensional quality, like those monumental slabs of brick wall that spelt out the letters of Ben-Hur. I was about to be engulfed in heat, and the smell of cooked people, and the noisy whimperings of the dying and the muted groans of the ones whose skin had only recently started to tighten up and blacken.

      Oh no, I kept whispering to myself. Please no. Let me not have to do this. I will be good and virtuous and behave myself for ever and ever (I seemed to be praying to some Higher Being, halfway between God and my mother). I could hear a foolish mewing noise, a pathetic whimpering, issuing from the corridor. Was it the noise of some unfortunate patient …? No, Goddammit, it was me. I was in the final throes of panic. ‘Eeeennnmmm,’ the little mewing noise went, ‘Eeeeeennnnnmmmmm …’

      Suddenly I was there, G Ward. My Nemesis. My Golgotha. My Destination of No Return. The double doors were as firmly shut as if everybody inside were having a day off work. (If only.) The circular porthole windows lay before me, like two eyes looking at me.

      I tapped on one of them. I waited, a palpitating wreck, for something resembling Quint’s saturnine visage or the Snow Queen’s glacial physiognomy to stare back at me. Then a curtain twitched and a senior orderly looked out, the lower half of his face covered with a green mask.

      He opened the door and came out to where I was standing, gibbering with apprehension.

      ‘Ah, John,’ he said. ‘Good of you to do this. Geoff would normally have done it, but he’s in theatre at the moment, so I thought you wouldn’t mind …’

      ‘It’s OK,’ I said in a teeny-tiny voice, like Piglet in the Winnie the Pooh stories. ‘Where is the man with the terrible –’

      ‘No, no, the patient’s already been taken to theatre,’ he said, as though to a half-wit. ‘We rang down for another porter because we need to get a machine, a new respirator adapted for burns patients, to the operating theatre. It’s a bit heavy so we thought we’d send it by trolley, but you’ll have to take it along right now. Would you mind?’

      ‘I’d –’ I was almost incoherent with relief.

      ‘What?’ said the orderly.

      ‘I’d love to,’ I said with pathetic gratitude. ‘I’d absolutely love to.’

      ‘Well, it’s only a machine, old boy,’ said the orderly. ‘Of course we appreciate your enthusiasm for these, ah, menial tasks …’

      ‘Where is it?’ I asked, suddenly raring to go.

      ‘Just inside here on the floor in Sister’s office,’ he said, opening the door a couple of inches. ‘But I wouldn’t come too far into the ward itself, if I were you. It can seem a little, er, stifling if you’re not used to it.’

      ‘Doesn’t bother me,’ I said with airy confidence, and I pushed the trolley in through the awful doors of what was no longer necessarily Hell.

      I picked up the machine, and plonked it on the trolley, and set off to the operating theatre with a spring in my step. Peter Quint and the Snow Queen never showed up at any point. They stayed somewhere at the back of the ward, having their macaroni cheese supper, apparently uninterested in ruining my life any more.

* Sex films occasionally featured in this weekly induction to the Real World, but they too hinted at bad times: Bitter Harvest, with its back view of the naked Janet Munn, seemed to promise that some poor girl would suffer undreamt-of agonies simply because she went around showing too much flesh. Love With the Proper Stranger had Natalie Wood lying in disarray, apparently in the street, in the arms of Steve McQueen – the victim, I innocently assumed, of some traffic accident.

* Children are famously conservative readers, but there was something positively neurotic about the way I preferred cosy set-ups to narrative complication. When reading Enid Blyton, I used to wish the Secret Seven could just stay having meetings and drinking ginger beer for ever, and not worry about the Mysterious Foreigner, the conveniently discovered Puzzling Clue, and the Light Out At Sea in Chapter 6 …

* Discovering, much later, that this ghastly revenant was played by Peter Wyngarde, the actor who was to play the insufferably camp crime-fighter Jason King in the ATV series Department S, and enjoyed his own spin-off show, Jason King, deploying his twin affectations of rolled-back jacket sleeves and long coffee-coloured cheroots, until his career was sunk by revelations of gay cottaging, did nothing to assuage the memory of this most-frightening-ever movie moment.

* Jack Clayton, the director, claimed he’d actually had a vision of this sorry image in his own garden, a few days before filming it. ‘Just the sadness of it was what I think I saw,’ he later remarked.

       3 JOHN WAYNE’S FILTHY TEMPER Red River (1947)

      ‘Thanks to the movies, real gunfire has always sounded unreal to me, even when being fired at’

      – Peter Ustinov

      The first time I was ambushed by the Baxter Gang, I was ten years old, walking home from choir practice at the local church of St Vincent de Paul. It was a dusty, sun-bleached London Saturday afternoon in high summer, so hot that the granite pavement winked at you until your eyes hurt, your black school brogues felt like twin ovens around your baking feet, and the only solace for your raging thirst was to spend two shillings on a pyramid-shaped lump of frozen orange squash called a Jubbly. It was not an elegant form of water-ice – you had to strip back the slimy, orange-silted bits of cardboard from the apex and plunge your mouth over it, grinding away with all your teeth at once, like a horse, to loosen some icy shards of squash and hold them, melting, in your mouth until you couldn’t stand the pain any longer. Satisfying, yes, but strangely headache-inducing.

      I was walking home along Lavender Sweep, a road whose name (though once presumably thought charming) always put me in mind of a loo-brush, when the Gang appeared in front of me. There were two of them, about

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