ABSTRACT
When I returned from Kinshasa in December 1978, I found Caroline very unwell and Nurse “Robbie” Robbins at the end of her tether, having had problems by night as well as by day. She soon made it clear that she would not be coming to us again. Throughout January 1979 Caroline, though she struggled up to London with me during the week, grew visibly worse. At the end of the month she had a fall and was carried off to the Battle Hospital in Reading with violent inflammation of the shoulder muscles and a serious infection of the lungs. For two and a half weeks she lay there, practically unable to move and in nursing conditions that could only be described as scandalous. It was the house doctor who warned me that, if she was left there any longer, the prognosis would be very bad indeed. England was under snow, and the ambulance service was on strike, so we loaded her into our car as best we could and drove the twenty-five miles of icy roads to a private nursing home at Edgecombe House to the west of Newbury. There a wonderful transformation took place, the result of comfort, care, tempting food, and brilliant physiotherapy. In early March I was able, with the help of a skilled private nurse, Julia Coble, to bring her home to Frilsham. But in April Caroline suffered a cruel attack of shingles, the residual pains of which never left her. In June a gastric ulcer caused severe haemorrhages that had to be treated in hospital. In September she fell and cracked a femur. The John Racliffe Hospital in Oxford decided that Caroline would not stand an operation, and she was transferred to the Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital, where she remained for three and a half months, supposedly waiting for the crack to heal itself. There were said to be forty physiotherapists in this world-famous establishment, but they were not allowed to lift patients singly and never could any two of them be found free to try to get Caroline onto her feet. In January 1980 they abandoned their efforts altogether, and in our desperation we turned once more to Edgecombe House, where the single visiting physiotherapist managed to repeat her miracle of the previous year, to the extent of making it possible for Caroline to walk the necessary few steps from one room to another by leaning on the arm of one helper. This made it possible for her to live for nearly four more years at home.
