Deadly sting
Sir: The motives behind the writing of Liz Hodgkinson's article (`The joy of illness', 16 April) quite beggar the imagination. Was it for the money? Surely not. Or merely, per-
LETTERS
haps, to fulfil a contractual obligation? No. Surely no one, however mercenary or greedy for publicity, would contrive so sor- did a frame for herself and for her views. Self-confessedly ignorant of the horrors of cancer and of the awe-inspiring and immi- nent conviction of her own mortality, she appears to have closed herself off to the remarkable courage shown by Dennis Pot- ter in appearing on Channel Four's Without Walls.
Tumour pain, as I can confirm, is worse even than kidney pain, which for many years was considered unsurpassable and which I have also sampled. To hear, as Dennis Potter so recently has, that one has three months to live after such a one-sided struggle is an overwhelming and awe-inspir- ing thing. It concentrates the mind and the emotions, as it has done in Dennis Potter's case.
To be deeply convinced of anything is, in this present, trivial age, considered a sin. If it takes the certainty of death to bring out such convictions, I am all for that knowl- edge; it is a civilising and soul-enhancing knowledge. Dennis Potter has but a month or two left. After my three months were over, by some miracle I was allowed to sur- vive; for how long, who knows? But I learned and am learning something through my experience and that is, that it is a sorry thing to belittle integrity, and that when a society allows those, like Liz Hodgkinson, who have the power to speak for it, such dubious liberties, it risks its soul.
Mario Reading
164 Southfield Road, London W4
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