THE PLAGUE AND I, by Betty MacDonald, originally published in in the UK in 1948, my edition 1959 (boy, do I love old Penguins)…
One of my favourites, for years and years. I can’t remember when I first encountered The Plague and I,
but certain expressions and catchphrases from it have passed into our
family shorthand, so my guess is that my parents loved it
too.’Toecover’, for instance, a word that describes a hand-made object
of uncertain usage and all-too-certain unpleasantness. Ideally, a
toecover should have no discernible function, and – in my opinion –
involve limp crochet in some respect. Then there’s ‘Hush ma mouth, what
have ah said?’, delivered in a clichéd Southern accent. This should be
deployed after the ostensibly inadvertent revelation of some fact that
has got the speaker into trouble, and is ironically directed at the
person who has given the game away. Then – no, enough already. You get
the idea.
This should not be a funny book. Absolutely not, no way, it’s about a
stay in a 1930s tuberculosis sanatorium, for heaven’s sake – and yet it
is. Hilarious, even laugh-out-loud funny in parts, and yet those parts
are interspersed with more serious stuff. I recently lent it to a friend
who had to spend some time in hospital, and she not only loved it,
finding it funny too, but also found it relevant. As she said, ‘times
change, but people don’t.’
In
the late 1930s Betty MacDonald – who had led a slightly unconventional
life but who had, as yet, not committed any of it to paper (her
best-known book is probably The Egg and I, about her first
marriage to a chicken farmer and which came out in 1945) – developed a
series of colds, then a cough, then extreme tiredness… But, ‘operating
under the impression that I was healthy and that everyone who worked
felt the same as I did’, failed to put two and two together. In all
fairness, so did a series of doctors (largely because she consulted each
specialist about his – and I mean his – own area), until she was
finally diagnosed with TB. Tuberculosis, of course, could be tantamount
to a death sentence. As it can now, sometimes – but then there were no
drugs which worked against it and it was horribly prevalent. It’s also
highly contaigious and MacDonald caught hers from a co-worker who
managed to infect several other people as well. As a single mother with
two small children and a negligible income, she was luckily admitted to a
charitable sanatorium in Seattle, which she calls ‘The Pines’ in the
book. She was to stay at Firland Sanatorium for nine months, in 1937-8,
and emerged cured.
The
picture she creates is so vivid that this is one of those books where
the mental images generated are so strong that they dominate even when
you see contradictory pictures of the place that inspired them. The
echoing, draughty corridors, the never-ending cold, the sound of
invisible footsteps approaching, passing and then fading into the
distance… but it’s not depressing, even in the serious phases. It’s
populated by a cast of characters, all of whom I find exceptionally well
drawn and entertaining. They range from Betty’s family and her
near-constant companion in The Pines, Kimi Sanbo, to the miscellaneous
array of nurses and other patients such as Gravy Face and Granite Eyes
(two nurses); Charlie who loved to pass on depressing news of deaths and
disasters; Minna of the Southern drawl and ability to dump people in
the cacky… there are so many of them, so well delineated, that picking
just a few to mention here was difficult. But space has to be made for
Miss Gillespie of the Ambulant Hospital’s occupational therapy shop,
generator of many a toecover:
‘Miss Gillespie was physically and
mentally exactly what you’d expect the producer of hand-painted paper
plates to be. She had a mouth so crowded with false teeth it looked as
if she had put in two sets … and her own set of rules. One of these
rules was that women patients could not use the basement lavatory
because “the men will see you go in there and know what you go
in there for”. Another forbade the pressing of men’s trousers by women,
on the grounds that such intimate contact with male garments was
unseemly.’
MacDonald is extremely good at expressing the life of any closed
institution. The way the world narrows down; the way rumours (‘all based
on a little bit of truth’) start, expand and spread; the effect of
being thrown into involuntary contact with people you would normally
avoid, and the intensity of the resulting reactions. (‘…the major
irritation of all was my room-mate, who was so damned happy all the
time, so well adjusted. She loved the institution and the institution
loved her. She loved all the nurses and the nurses loved her. She loved
all the other patients and all the other patients, but one, loved her.
That one used to lie awake in the long dark cold winter nights and
listen hopefully for her breathing to stop.’) It was a tough
regime, but it had to be – no drugs, remember. TB was essentially
treated by rest and some basic chest operations; there had to be rules.
But there was also the pointless expression of power indulged in by
some: ‘ “We do not tell the patients the rules, Mrs Bard. We find
that trial and error method is the best way to learn them.” I said, “But
how can I be obedient, co-operative, and helpful if I don’t know what
I’m supposed to do?” She said, “We don’t allow arguing, Mrs Bard”…‘
She is also very good on how difficult it is to adapt to life
afterwards, describing what could almost be a type of Stockholm
Syndrome. But she did shake herself free, and the TB didn’t reappear.
So yes, a sort of happy ending. ‘Sort of’ because Betty MacDonald
died in 1958, from cancer, at the age of only 49. I’m sure she would
have been surprised and possibly flattered to know that people were
still enjoying her books over fifty years later. I most certainly am.
Great book.
biblioglobal 
Caroline Counihan 