In Hindu cosmology it’s said of Krishna that he too ate dirt as a toddler. A playmate told on him to his mother. But when Krishna’s mother went to scold him and demanded that he open his mouth, he did – and then she saw that all the stars and the planets were held there in safety also. That was her revelation of her boy’s Godhead, when she saw the cosmos whirling in his little mouth, a mouth that still had its baby teeth. If Krishna’s mum had been mine, of course, he’d have been sent to bed without supper just the same.
There’s a theory that children, when they put the wrong things in their mouths, are incorporating necessary impurities, building up their defences for later encounters. Mum took a more social view – eating dirt was common. When I put nasty things in my mouth I was showing her up, even when there was no one around to witness my vulgar behaviour.
Once I found a red Spangle in the garden. It was caked with dirt, but I wiped it roughly clean and ate it. It was delicious. Afterwards I didn’t feel so good. When the taste wore off, there was nothing left in my mouth but fear, telling me that I’d done something terribly bad and wrong.
The mouth, being at that age the cave of all pleasure and knowing, refuses admission to nothing. Another time my imaginary friend Peterkin and I ate some little black-and-yellow caterpillars we found in the garden, not for the flavour but to feel them wriggling in our tummies. Peterkin said that nobody could see him but me, but that was just him being silly. I only pretended to eat my caterpillars, but Peterkin didn’t notice and wanted to show he was as brave as me, so he swallowed his down. He said he could feel them moving for a long time afterwards. It wasn’t half as much fun as I’d said, but I knew he’d do the next thing I told him to do just the same.
Vomit of truth
Near Christmas, I saw some holly bushes in full berry. I had Peterkin with me, and I told him they were the tastiest of all berries. ‘And now, Peterkin,’ I announced, ‘we’re going to eat tasty holly berries like the ones in the carols.’ Even after the berries had been heaved up on the kitchen floor I tried to talk my way out of trouble with Mum. I wasn’t ready to come clean even when my guts had made a full confession. ‘I only ate one,’ I said, ‘but Peterkin had lots and lots.’ There was no chance of my getting away with it, since Mum could see the undigested berries shining in what I had thrown up. My vomit was more truthful than my story.
After that I ignored Peterkin, pretending I couldn’t see or hear him. I made him cry. He didn’t like being reminded he was imaginary.
Of course Peterkin wasn’t really my imaginary friend, he was my little brother Peter. Peter on his birth certificate, Peterkin to the family (I think the diminutive comes from Treasure Island). I was told I should love him. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want a brother at all, I wanted a friend who could run and maybe fly. Instead there was this dull bundle who spent most of his time on the floor even after he had learned to stand. Perhaps it was my job to teach him to fly. I helped him up onto a chair in the kitchen and told him he could do it, but he had to wait until I had counted to ten before he took off. Then I went into the garden, still counting. There was no sense in being too near the scene of the spell if the magic didn’t work after all.
When Dad came in from his work, he would turn his hand into a flat blade and use it to deliver a soft chop to his forehead. He did this to Mum, he did it to me, sometimes he even did it to Peterkin. It was called a salute, and other people’s daddies didn’t do that. My daddy flied for the King. My daddy was a Squadron Leader. Mum made a smile with her lips while I saluted back.
We were allowed to roam pretty freely. I said to Peterkin, ‘I know exactly how to get on the runway where Daddy keeps his plane. I’ll take you there if you like.’ Then there they were, all the flying men. From the start I liked uniforms always. The men stamped together and saluted. ‘That’s all for us, you see,’ I explained. ‘This man is coming to see us. He wants to know if we liked it.’
Of course when he came closer I saw that it was Dad, and all he wanted to know was what the hell we thought we were up to. He was jolly cross.
To feel myself being washed away
It was Mum’s choice to call me John, but Dad was delegated to choose my middle name, as a consolation prize. Originally I was going to be John Draper Cromer, after one of Dad’s Air Force heroes, Kit Draper, but Mum dug her heels in. She hadn’t met him, but she certainly didn’t like what she had heard about him. Yes, he’d served in the War – yes, all right, both wars – but he wasn’t what you could call a war hero, was he? He kept wrecking planes. He was a show-off and a liability, if not worse – some said he had been lucky not to be tried as a traitor and a spy. Dad said that was all nonsense and drivel, but she insisted on his second choice instead, and so I became John Wallis Cromer. After Barnes Wallis, of the Dam Busters and the bouncing bomb.
Somewhere in Dad’s papers I expect there’s a list of possible names for his first-born, written in small caps:
JOHN DRAPER CROMER.
JOHN BARNES CROMER.
JOHN TRENCHARD CROMER.
JOHN BADER CROMER.
JOHN CHESHIRE CROMER.
JOHN GIBSON CROMER.
As if he imagined them looking well on a war memorial, if it came to that. Of course the War still cast its shadow, over him and over everyone. There was rationing still. ‘Cheshire’ would have been for Leonard Cheshire, war hero and witness of the bombing of Nagasaki, ‘Gibson’ for Guy Gibson, who led the raid on the Ruhr when the bouncing bombs were dropped.
The earliest pattern of sound I can remember is Mum saying ‘Dou-asíss – Dou-asÍSS!’ I didn’t know what it meant at first, but she always made that sound in the same set of circumstances.
Sometimes it sounded like ‘Móndou-asíss’. Some sounds were fuzzy and others were clear. Some were said so quickly I missed them all together. There was almost certainly a little ‘k’ before the soothing, pleading phrase, but I have no memory of it. Dou-asíss was familiar and friendly, and sometimes Mum stretched out the final ‘s’ for onomatopœic ages. Siss was Mum’s word for doing a wee. We were playing a game, Mum and I. She wanted me to have a wee so I would drop off to sleep right away, and I didn’t want to, for exactly the same reason.
The next memory after Mum saying ‘Dou-asíss’ is of Dad saying, ‘You should blow on it, m’dear!’ That was his stock form of address to his wife, a phrase so stylised that it hardly counted as an endearment.
Under the hood of my big black pram it was almost as dark as the womb. It was wonderful to be wrapped up in swaddling clothes with my face breathing in the cool air. I would wait for the blissful warmth to creep up all around me. It was impossible to maintain this bliss for more than a second or two without falling into sleep, but I wanted to enjoy sleep as a conscious condition. I was a precocious investigator of states of mind. I wanted to stand on the shore, on the very edge of the tide of sleep, and feel myself being washed away. I was drawn to examine the moment that consciousness gave way to one of its opposites. I wanted to freeze that moment, to savour my awareness as it slipped from me, and my secret weapon in the quest was a full bladder. That focus of discomfort kept me on the edge of nothingness, preventing me from dropping off. Then when I could hold it in no longer I would relax and let it all flood out. It was bliss to feel the gentle warmth seeping into my swaddling clothes, before I fell properly asleep, for the few moments before Mum woke me with an exasperated sigh.
It must have been very frustrating for Mum, who had to keep changing my clothes. ‘He’s being impossible today – I’m at the end of my tether. I’ve only just put him into fresh clean clothes and now look! He’s soaked them again!’ That was why she was so keen on making me ‘go’ before putting me down to sleep, and why Dad came up with his crucial suggestion: ‘Blow on it, m’dear!’ I didn’t actually hear Mum say, ‘Dennis, I’ll do no such thing!’ but with my later experience of her I can absolutely guarantee that she would have used that form of words. In the end she didn’t have to do it. Dad would do
it for her. I remember the feeling of the cool air flowing over my body, and seeing Dad with his cheeks puffed out, as he blew cool air over the clenched bud of my infant equipment.
His tactic was sound. I let go immediately, and on this first occasion I hit him right in the face, while Mum shrieked with horrified laughter. After that he managed to dodge the jet. Mum and Dad made gratified noises.
I was happy to be the cause of such sounds, even though it meant I was being cheated out of a few precious seconds of nirvana. From now on, when I was wrapped up I had no way of indulging in this delicious game, playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with oblivion. I just drifted off. It wasn’t long, though, before I began to enjoy Dad’s blowing technique in its own right. I remember seeing the jet of water rising high into the air, and being very proud that I’d managed to achieve this. How they managed to catch the proud stream I don’t know.
I soon discovered that any source of fresh air could act as a trigger, so when I came to toddle I started to experiment. Even opening the little flap of my dungarees was enough to start the tingle of release.
I have a separate memory of sitting in a shaft of sunlight and realising that everything around me happened by my say-so. Everything was conditional on me. Logically, of course, this is a memory of successful potty-training. The potty has been pushed out of the picture, but I know it’s there. I’m a little king, and I’m sitting on a foreshortened throne. My gross happiness is the immediate radiant aftermath of being told I was Mummy’s clever boy for doing my siss or my ‘tuppenny’ (the family word for defæcation) so beautifully in the right place. That’s something that disappeared early on – excretion as one of the pleasures of life, expressive as a smile, not some dark duty that dominates the days.
My fascination with my personal squirting device didn’t stop in the cradle. As soon as I was fully mobile, I wanted to aim, to stand and point. I came to think that potties were dreadful silly things, useful only if you needed to do a tuppenny in them, and I would head straight for the garden instead. Whatever Raff station we were at, West Raynham, Waterbeach or Hayling Island, as the family moved home in my early days, I would soon be toddling around in the garden seeing how far I could make my siss go. The desire soon spread to the road. The attraction here was there were other houses and those other houses contained little boys. I’d practised my sissing skills in private, so by the time I was ready for the road I was quite advanced, and it wasn’t long before I was taking part in tournaments. None of the other little boys was quite as good as me. I was the champion of siss. Mum and Dad told me I wasn’t allowed to go into the road, but there was no rule to say I couldn’t do my best to project a stream of urine from one side of it to the other. After I ate beetroot once my siss turned red, which was thrilling and gave an extra flair to my display.
I was a good little boy, always meaning well, so it follows that a lot of my memories are about doing wrong. There’s no contradiction there. My iniquities were striking enough to be remembered. When I was naughty Mum called me ‘Bad King John’, and if I grizzled Dad would say, ‘Pipe down, Johannes R.’ Both of those were from a poem. But it was understood between us that I was a good boy.
Once when I was staying with Granny, though, I saw her changing the bulb on a bedside lamp. After that, I had an idea about how I too might shine. I wanted more than anything to glow like that.
Granny had given me an idea about the electric light and how I could make it work in a different way. I knew the switch had to be on to make the light work, and I unscrewed the bulb and put my finger in its place, switched it on and duly got a burn. I knew I’d been naughty, and I tried to hide the place for as long as I could, till it had quite a blister. There’s probably not a necessary link between being scolded and the smell of vaseline, but there is for me.
I don’t know where Mum was when I went to stay with Granny in her old house in the country. Perhaps she was there too. Mothers are so constant, so irreplaceable in early life that they tend to disappear from the picture somehow – just as Mum, as well as the potty, disappeared from my memory of seated happiness, though her approval was what created the memory in the first place.
Granny’s house had thatch on it, which hung very low. She had to stoop to get in her own front door. There was a painting of a cat in Granny’s house, hanging over the fireplace. She lifted me up so I could see it properly. I tried to stroke it. It was funny that Granny had a painting of a cat, when the animal she kept was a dog, her lovely boxer Gibson. I don’t know who or what he was named after. There’s a make of guitar by that name, but I think we can rule that out. There were ‘Gibson girls’ who danced, but I don’t think Granny would name a male dog after females. It certainly wasn’t Guy Gibson the raider of the Ruhr. I plump for the Gibson cocktail, a dry martini garnished with a pearl onion instead of an olive.
Looming angel
Gibson’s colouring was so pale he looked spectral, other-worldly, with one eye a warm and cloudy brown, the other stony blue. Boxers aren’t clever dogs. They’re famous for it, the not being clever. I don’t mean that any dog is exactly brilliant – they’re never going to show up on Mastermind – but it’s a fair bet that by the time poodles are being made heads of university departments, boxers will still be nosing their alphabet blocks around with big frowns on their foreheads. All the same, Gibson was a very thoughtful dog. His great pastime was to pick up his ball in his jaws and carry it upstairs. Then he’d sit at the top of the stairs, nose his ball forward, and watch as it bounced all the way down. Then he’d repeat the performance, without limit. He’d do it until the ball was taken away from him. As I say, he was a very thoughtful dog. It took just the one thought to fill him.
Gibson loomed over my toddlerhood like a guardian angel, tolerating with patience the fist I thrust in his warm wet mouth. I would lean in fearlessly as far as my shoulder, like a plumber probing a drain, and he’d just let it happen, while I dredged his mouth for marbles or simply explored the walls of gum in which his teeth were set. Dogs can smell fear, as we’re always being told, but on me Gibson must have smelled something very different, trust and love. It’s the simplest explanation for his long-suffering ways. According to family tradition he let me learn to stand and then walk by supporting myself on his ears. I clutched tightly onto those velvety flanges, while his breath came out and warmed my face.
Mum told me his breath stank. She didn’t know how I could stand it. Simple – as far as I was concerned it wasn’t bad breath, it wasn’t even dog breath, it was Gibson’s breath and it smelled fine. I don’t remember smelling his tuppennies but I dare say I would have liked them too. I certainly liked mine.
Something about Gibson reminded my senses of Granny herself. He smelled a little like her, which seemed only right, though she never smelled quite as good as he did. Dogs’ ears smell of mown hay.
I couldn’t know then that Granny, fastidious but well aware of the damaging effect of frequent baths on dogs’ coats, sprayed him fairly regularly with her own perfume. Gibson, the thoughtful friend who taught me to walk, had a depth of aroma, all the way from mud and glands to high floral notes, worthy of a court lady from the time of the Sun King. Gibson must have been one of the few boxers ever to wear Je Reviens.
Gibson lost his hearing quite young. White dogs tend to be deaf. Deaf dogs tend to be white. These things converge. In Gibson’s case, with my granny as his mistress, it was always on the cards that he went deaf as a husband might, for the peace it brought.
I loved and admired Gibson more than any person in my life, except the mother whom I only noticed when she wasn’t there. I formed a passionate attachment to him. He was my totem animal, yet I could learn nothing from him. He wouldn’t even let me take his ball. Dogs know what the nose knows: this and here and now. That, yonder, tomorrow – none of these carries a smell. Animals can’t show us how to live as they do. With their enclosure in the present they offer examples we’re disqualified from following.
When I put my fin
ger in the socket of the lamp where the bulb went, I was in search of light, but my deeper interest from the start was fire. I loved it that both Mum and Dad could make smoke with their faces. Dad was a serious smoker and Mum was a frivolous one, restricting herself to three du Mauriers a day.
The du Maurier packet was a lovely piece of design, red with an odd black pattern like a modified swastika or cubist sphincter – there was definitely a suggestion of engulfment, of being hypnotised and drawn into the oblong void if I looked at it for too long. On special occasions I was allowed to pull the rip-cord of cellophane on a new packet, though Mum might have to raise the edge of it for my benefit. It gave me great joy that the top of the box opened upwards from a hinge on one of its long sides.
Mum and Dad demonstrated their incompatibility not only in the way they smoked – he absently masterful, she nervous – but in the way they lit the necessary matches. I watched closely, loving to see fire in all its forms, even this transitory one. Dad would blow out the flame when it had done its work with a single smart puff, without really even looking at it. Mum would wave her hand around, not quite rapidly enough to extinguish the fire she held, slowing down and wavering in a kind of panic, until she finally worked up enough velocity with her hand to strip the little stick of its flame, a fraction of a second before Dad muttered, ‘For God’s sake, m’dear! Is it so difficult? Is it strictly necessary to burn the house down?’ She was addicted to something other than cigarettes. Her air of being at odds with her surroundings was something that she insisted on, somehow. It wasn’t something that simply happened to her. Meanwhile I registered the beauty of flame, and the way it could be summoned by the agency of matches.
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