 For all of Dunglass 's humour and patience , the following two years were a grave trial . He was encased in plaster and kept flat on his back for most of that period . Although buoyed up by the sensitive support of his wife and family , as he later confessed , " I often felt that I would be better dead " . Towards the end of 1942 he was released from his plaster jacket and fitted with a spinal brace , and in early 1943 he was mobile for the first time since the operation . During his incapacity he read voraciously ; among the works he studied were Das Kapital , and works by Engels and Lenin , biographies of nineteenth and twentieth century politicians , and novels by authors from Dostoyevsky to Koestler . 
