Humour and pain

Text 1: Of a Tooth Drawn at Michaelmas Fair, by Augustus Treloar

An original essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

I had endured the tooth for a fortnight, applying to it in turn oil of cloves, a hot brick wrapped in flannel, a charm my landlady obtained from a woman at Wapley, and a great deal of brandy, of which the tooth took no notice whatever, though I took a good deal. By the Saturday of the fair my face had swollen to the shape of a pudding, and I resolved, in a fit of desperation that I can only compare to a man throwing himself into a river, to visit Professor Mallory.

The Professor, whose learning I should estimate at about the level of a moderately gifted horse, operated from a painted cart between the gingerbread stall and the fat pig. Beside him stood a boy with a drum. I mounted the steps to the applause of perhaps forty idlers, sat in a chair that had plainly been a kitchen chair until recently, and opened my mouth. The Professor peered in, said ‘Ah,’ in the tone of a man who has found an old friend, and produced a pair of pincers such as a blacksmith uses for horseshoes. At this the boy began to drum with great energy, and I understood, too late, what the drum was for.

I will not describe the next half minute. I have tried to forget it and have very nearly succeeded. I recall only that the Professor placed his knee upon my chest for purchase, that the crowd cheered as at a prize fight, and that the tooth, when he held it up to them, seemed to me about the size of a church. I walked home through the fair holding a handkerchief to my mouth, and a small girl offered me her gingerbread out of pity. I accepted it. I could not eat it for a week, but I have kept it, and I believe it is the kindest thing anyone ever gave me.

Text 2: The Van by the Bike Sheds, by Sandra Kitto

An original twentieth-century memoir.

Every school I went to in the 1970s had a dental van that came once a year, and every child I knew was terrified of it. It parked by the bike sheds like a white ambulance with blacked-out windows, and you went in one at a time, called out of lessons by a monitor who could not resist telling you, in a ghostly voice, that the last girl had not come out.

The dentist was a tall man with cold hands and a moustache, who hummed hymns while he worked and never once spoke to me directly. When I was eight he decided that two of my back teeth had to come out, and the nurse held a black rubber mask over my face that smelt of old balloons and hot tyres. I remember counting backwards from ten and getting to seven. I remember dreaming that I was falling down a well while someone played ‘Abide with Me’ on a kazoo. I woke up crying, with my mouth full of cotton wool, and was sent straight back to double maths.

My friends and I turned the van into a joke afterwards, as children do. We called it the Torture Chamber and did impressions of the dentist humming. It helped, a little. But I am forty-seven now, and I still cannot sit in a dentist’s chair without my heart hammering and my hands gripping the armrests. Last year my own dentist, a gentle young woman, asked me why I was shaking. I told her about the van, and to my horror I began to cry, exactly as I had when I was eight. Some things are funny afterwards. Some things only pretend to be.

‘Both writers use humour to make painful experiences bearable.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the painful experiences each writer describes
• explain how far you agree that humour makes these experiences bearable for both writers
• compare the ways the writers use humour and other methods to present their experiences.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.