his role in it in the way he showed himself contemplating himself in The Centurion’s Servant or was to portray in Christ Carrying the Cross. The possibility of something happening to disturb that equanimity was to him ‘fear of attack’, and he was to attribute much of humanity’s irrational behaviour – sin, evil – to defence against the possibility. He himself loathed being put into a position of such defencelessness.
Says Sister S., ‘Tell Mrs D. [Miss Dunn, the former Asylum Matron] that for the last meal there was barely enough for twenty-two patients, let alone thirty.’ So I am called upon to deliver a slap to this formidable lady. I have to say something, as I know I shall be questioned by Sister S. on my return. I was continually having to be a buffer between two opposing parties.
Such orders, which involved competitiveness or the possibility of failure or the humiliation of a disclosure of personal inadequacy, were ‘shocks’. Under normal circumstances, Stanley could cope with them, find his way through them. But ‘everything at the hospital was so quick’. Shock followed shock too quickly for meaningful adjustment.
There were a few quiet backwaters where Stanley could for a time find calm. He could occasionally slip into the laundry cupboard by the Sister’s office in Ward 4B, always leaving the door open, to refresh himself by thumbing through his precious Gowan and Gray art books. These small inexpensive handbooks were a source of mental comfort and several were among his effects when he died. He found congenial too those sections of the hospital wherein the Sergeant-Major’s writ did not run – the hospital laundry, even though under Miss Dunn, or the Stores, under the Quartermaster-Sergeant, ‘Mr’ King, whom he later described as the Pope to Kench’s Mussolini. These were havens where he could momentarily recapture something of his Cookham life. For similar opportunities of contemplation, Stanley welcomed being sent on routine journeys to other parts of the hospital such as the X-ray department or the pathology laboratory which were in the original female wing. The mirror-image sensation which had captured his imagination in the Fernlea-Belmont neighbourliness at home continued to fascinate him at the Beaufort. In the former female wing everything was repeated but the other way round, and on each journey he had the sensation of entering a looking-glass world.
None of the daily shocks, the reprimands, the agonies of being made responsible for actions not in his power to accomplish, the long hours of tedious physical work and the barren intellectual atmosphere which gave so little opportunity for the contemplation so vital to his nature – none of these would have mattered if only he could have assimilated them into a revelation of some deeper meaning: ‘I did not despise any job I was set to do, and did not mind doing anything so long as I could recognize in it some sort of integral connection with the spiritual meaning that demanded to be clarified.’ The problem at the Beaufort was that the ‘integral connections’ would not materialize in his mind, leaving him confused and frustrated. One of the ‘shocks’ was the frequency with which the ‘atmosphere’ of his ward kept changing:
Every bit of change, no matter how slight or often, would be felt [by Stanley] and the arrival of a convoy – two hundred or more would arrive in the middle of the night – was the most disturbing change in this respect. One had just got used to the patients one had, had mentally and imaginatively visualized them. One’s imagination, once it had taken hold of the whole of an affair, cannot conceive of anything in that affair being altered or different or in any way being added to or detracted from.8
But now, at the Beaufort where ‘everything was so quick’, although the essential significance of the ward remained inviolable – ‘unchangeable’ – the visualization Stanley needed to express it would, like a will-o’-the-wisp, disintegrate before he had the time to establish it: ‘What will the world be like tomorrow? What about Courtney and Hines when the beds between them are filled? The significance will remain as an eternal factor, but another God-creation takes place in the night, and I will find it in the morning.’ In his repeated attempts at image-forming Stanley found himself like a puppy chasing its tail, going pointlessly round and round: ‘At Bristol there was no essential change, but on the contrary anything that occurred there was clearly intended to ensure the continuity of its unchangeableness.’ Creatively, the hospital was a ‘nothing-happening’ place.
When thus thwarted, Stanley could give way to anger at those who were apparently baffling him by their obtuseness. There were the other orderlies: ‘It is the utterly selfish spirit of these orderlies that makes me wild. … being here is wasting time to no purpose. …9 There were the ward Sisters: ‘Ill-natured, cattish, conceited Sisters who are also incompetent; they make the nurses and orderlies their servants.’ And there was the place itself: ‘There is something so damnably smug and settled-down about this place. … If I can, I am going to transfer into something else. I would give anything to belong to the Royal Berks.’
His frustrations were not improved when in September Gilbert was posted away to the main RAMC depot at Tweseldown in Hampshire; Stanley and Budden took him to Carmen at the Bristol Hippodrome on the eve of his departure. Then a fellow-orderly named Tomlin whom Stanley and Gilbert liked took sick and died unexpectedly. Finally, one of the lunatics went berserk and, although Stanley was not shocked in the medical sense, his feeling for the inhumanity of the man’s suffering made the event one of horror for him:
I always get the feeling of a man possessed by devils when I see a man in a mad fit. I remember one man, he was perfectly all right, and then suddenly he was cast down and it took about ten men to hold him. He was put into a room, a padded cell at first, but that was not big enough to hold him, so they spread about 12 mattresses on the floor of a room and put him in there. There he raved a day and a night and spat at everybody, especially when he was being fed. The Sister used to hold his food to his mouth while two or three men held his arms down. His face gave me the feeling that he wanted to pray that the devil would come out of him. He was taken away, but is now all right – in his right mind. Nothing like this is shocking, but to know a man and like him and to know that man is going mad is awful.10
So when during October or November of 1915 a notice was pinned on the hospital notice-board asking for volunteers for RAMC service overseas, Stanley thought about it for some days. His parents were the main obstacle. Henry Lamb had written to say that he was about to undertake a crash course at Guy’s Hospital in London to complete his interrupted training as a doctor. He would be commissioned in August 1916 and wanted Stanley to wait and become his batman. But, Stanley decided, he was ‘too impatient’. When he eventually signed the notice, his was only the second name. But gradually thirty-eight more were added, including that of Lionel Budden. Stanley did not immediately tell Ma or Pa and asked his friends not to do so. In those still early months of the war, even though more than a year had passed, medical standards remained high. Of the forty volunteers, only fourteen were passed. Stanley was youthfully gratified to find himself among them and to learn that Budden too would be going with him. However, army bureaucracy took its time. Some of the volunteers did go, but those like Stanley and Budden in the main batch were kept kicking their heels. In the meantime, several surprising things were to happen to Stanley.
The first was that he was scrubbing the floor of the Dispensary one day when a one-legged Dardanelles patient came in, thrust a newspaper under his nose, and demanded to know, ‘Is this you, you little devil?”11 Flabbergasted, Stanley read an account of a New English Art Club exhibition in November in which his painting The Centurion’s Servant was highly praised. It transpired that Henry Tonks, having used his surgeon’s training to advise on the establishment in France of the many private hospitals and convalescent homes which British patriotism was endowing, had returned to London and, among other activities, set up an autumn exhibition of the New English Art Club of which he, Steer and Brown were the virtual founders. Not knowing where Stanley was, he had written to Pa to ask if paintings were available and, without telling Stanley, Pa had sent The Centurion’s Servant and another work.* Stanley’s reaction was one of fury at Pa’s action and of horror at what the press might make of his picture. Mercifully, however, no reviewer put any untoward interpretation on it, and all praised it for a variety of qualities, most of which Stanley had not intended.
In a closed community like the hospital, the news that young Spencer