There is no object in recalling the long months of pain that I had to go through before I was fit to work. It is pleasanter to remember the enormous kindness shown to me by all sorts and conditions of people during those grievous days. In the nursing home they very soon made an effort to photograph the bullet with the X-rays, which were then only beginning to be used. It was a terrible ordeal in those days, and I should think I was over twenty minutes trying to lie still on a couch with a square negative for a pillow whilst the light spluttered about in a most unpleasant way. When it was developed they showed me a blur with one indistinct blob on it.
“What is that?” I asked.
“The bullet,” said the doctors.
“And have you photographed all the metal in my head?”
“Certainly.”
“Then where is the portrait of my gold tooth?”
I never got an answer to that, and the doctors took away the photograph, which I always maintained was only of interest to dentists.
A year ago I thought I would make a further investigation and went down to Birmingham, where my friend, Dr. Franklin Emrys Jones, with his partner, Dr. Hall Edwards, made several radiograms of it. Dr. Hall Edwards was in South Africa during the war, and was specially interested in bullets. It is marvellous, after all he has suffered in the pursuit of radiography, to see him, maimed and in pain,
directing the work with the greatest enthusiasm. The modern engines are more terrifying to the victim, and the affair is somewhat uncanny, for when the light is turned on the operators retire behind a lead-glass screen and watch you from afar. But it was all over in a few minutes, and very soon they returned with a negative in a dish, not a flattering likeness, perhaps, but an excellent picture of a side view of my skull and the bullet at the base of it.
I had plenty of doctors to look after me, and they were kindness itself, Wright and Southam and Judson Bury were with me at Quay Street, and Dr. Larmuth came up and put my ear-drum back in its place. It had got blown aside by the concussion of the revolver. I think that depressed me more than anything, for I knew if I was deaf I should never get back to work again. It was the left ear, and one of my early visitors said to cheer me up, “That doesn’t matter, judge, that’s the defendant’s ear, and you never listen to him, you know.” “That may be,” I said, “but there is all the difference between not listening and not hearing when you do listen.”