Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  He telephoned Air Vice-Marshal Lord Bandon, stationed on the roof of Buckingham Palace, who gave the go-ahead but vetoed the tightly packed ‘arrowhead’ formations which were to have been used for the first time. The seven wings of aircraft (twenty-four in each, arranged in six ‘bunches’ of four) flew in line astern instead, with thirty-second intervals between the wings. They reached a speed of 340 mph – the round trip from Wattisham only took fifty minutes. Dad played his part in the Queen’s special day, and didn’t spoil it by saying, ‘Hang the weather, let’s give the arrowheads a go anyway. Let’s give that pretty girl the bunch of flowers she deserves on her big day. Isn’t she a smasher?’

  My childhood ego, undiminished in illness, perhaps even subtly inflated, took a little bit of a battering from having the incident brought down to earth. What had seemed a mystical episode in the family saga was only part of Mum’s campaign to keep Dad in check. Operation Killjoy. It turned out that I had only a bit part in my own big scene.

  My imaginary photograph of the cryptic event slipped down from the mantelpiece, and I lost track of it somewhere out of sight over by the fire-surround.

  Silent Perambulator

  Just by virtue of lying there, under doctor’s orders, I made my visitors unearth any scrap of their pasts that might entertain me. Granny, for instance, taught me by rote an advertisement for patent medicine dating from her childhood, or even earlier.

  Learning by heart is a discredited technique, I know, but I loved it. There’s something rewarding about the process of learning first and understanding later, even if my first real experience of it was If you want a really fine unsophisticated family pill, try Dr Rumboldt’s liver-encouraging, kidney-persuading Silent Perambulator, twenty-seven in a box. This pill is as thorough as a fine-toothed comb and as gentle as a pet lamb. It don’t go messing about but attends strictly to business and is as certain for the middle of the night as an alarm clock … Memorised formulas work on the mind from within, as if they were pills themselves, slow-acting pills which do their work over time.

  I wanted to understand things. I wanted family history. I asked Mum how she and Dad met. It was an idea I found exciting, that there had been a time when these people whose job was to make me and love me didn’t even know it! Her answer was distinctly vague. ‘Oh, at some dance or other. I don’t remember exactly.’ Disappointing. ‘He was based near your Granny’s house. RAF Tangmere.’

  ‘And when did you know you were going to get married and have children?’ When did your mission to make John become clear to you?

  ‘Oh, when he asked me, I suppose.’ I had absorbed the prevailing ideas about love and marriage, not yet realising that the coming child does the choosing, and I wanted something a bit more full-blooded. I needed more details, and reluctantly she provided them. ‘We were on a train. He was eating a sandwich. He said, “How about it?” and I said, “How about what?” He said, “Getting hitched.” I said, “That’s no way to ask such a question! Aren’t you going to go down on one knee, at least?” He said, “Don’t see why I should – there’s a lot of muck down there. Take it or leave it. Either you want to or you don’t. Just don’t expect me to ask again.” I said, “At least put down your sandwich,” and he said, “I’ve almost finished. Hang on a mo.” And he finished eating his sandwich, and then he shook the crumbs off the greaseproof paper and folded it up neatly. So I can’t say I wasn’t warned. He was never lovey-dovey. And he’s always been tidy – I’ll say that for him. There aren’t many men who are.’

  The London Derrière

  The high point of Mum’s marriage, to hear Mum talk about it, had been the wedding itself. I suppose it marked the point when she passed out of Granny’s direct power. That was something, that was quite a lot. And if Dad wasn’t lovey-dovey, then neither was Granny.

  Her bouquet was yellow roses. She pointed them out on my wallpaper. ‘They were always my favourite flowers. I had a favourite tune, too, and I wanted it played at my wedding, so I asked the organist, but I was shy about saying its name. I was being so silly. I thought the name was rude! So I asked if I could write it down instead of saying it, the name of the tune. What I wrote down was “The London Derrière”. Derrière is French for botty, you see, JJ. I knew that much. But the tune isn’t really called that, only I never knew. I had never seen it written down, I was going by ear. It’s really called “The Londonderry Air”, and it has another name as well. It’s called “Danny Boy”. It’s Irish, and the tune just pulls at my heart, do you know how that feels? But then a marvellous thing happened. It turned out that someone had loved the tune as much as I did, and he’d turned it into a proper hymn, so we could have it at the wedding. Not just the tune on the organ but everyone singing along. Shall I sing it for you, JJ?’

  ‘Oh yes, please!’ Mum wasn’t confident about her voice, so it was a treat to be sung to.

  She opened her mouth and sang,

  The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,

  The darkness falls at Thy behest …

  By the time she had finished, her eyes were shining with tears. ‘Your Granny said it was a bad song for a wedding, but I told her it was my wedding and I didn’t care what she thought. I was very brave then, wasn’t I, JJ?’

  In my mature judgement (if that’s what I have now) Granny was bang on the money. It takes some kind of Anglican genius to turn the Celtic keening of the original – ‘Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling / From glen to glen, and down the mountain side…’ – into such a desperate trudge, so unsuitable for a wedding as to be positively ominous, making the marriage-bed sound as welcoming as a warm grave. Asking for trouble, really. But yes, it was brave of Mum to stand up to Granny on this point or any other.

  The pink limit

  I decided to ask Granny about the wedding. I was beginning to feel like a sort of human Dead Letter Office, where unsent messages between these incompatible women could be safely left, picked up at the addressee’s risk, but I was also free to follow my own curiosity. I was building up a more complete picture by putting different versions together. ‘Did you go to Mummy’s wedding, Granny?’

  ‘Of course I went to the wedding, child. What a question! It couldn’t have happened without me, and I don’t say that just because I paid for it. I told Laura, “Many girls plainer than you are getting married to perfectly nice men. If this war had been like the last you might have had something to complain about, but there’s really no shortage.” Even so, I had to put in some work to make it happen. And then that wedding! Your dear mother has no taste in music whatever, and she chose a hymn like a funeral march. I told her, “If you’re going to have that dirge for your wedding, what’ll it be for your funeral – ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’?” But she would have her way, and I thought it best to let her. The last thing I wanted was for her to blame me for spoiling her day – as if she needed help! Have you seen the wedding photographs, John? She’s cut herself out of most of them, and do you know why? She got the idea into her head that there were thirteen yellow roses in her bouquet, and so the whole thing was jinxed. Can you believe it? She’s always been superstitious, Heaven knows why, but that to me was the pink limit.’

  Perhaps it was more than the pink limit. Granny and I should really have wondered if it wasn’t a sign of something beyond superstition for Mum to take the scissors to herself, even if it was just in photographic form. But Granny was too set in her ways, and I didn’t really have ways yet.

  Of the three available witnesses to the wedding, Dad was by some way the least forthcoming. He did at least confirm the fact that Mum had had ‘a bee in her bonnet’ about thirteen roses in her bouquet, when anyone with eyes could see that she was counting her thumb as the fatal bloom in the picture.

  Otherwise he kept his counsel about marriage, saying only, ‘Anyone who gets married is buying a pig in a poke, John. You can’t get your money back.’ I could have told him that. That’s what comes of wanting to put tailies in ladies’ holes! Besides, you
get what you pay for. ‘Still,’ he said without enthusiasm, ‘it’s best to be settled.’

  Illuminating parsimonious bean

  In my conversations with Granny I had exhausted her small talk, and all that was left was the serious side of things, from which I might have been kept. In effect I had drained the ornamental lake of Granny’s trivial lore, and there were strange shapes to be seen in the mud. She liked spilling the beans, did Granny, one illuminating parsimonious bean at a time, but I’m sure this time she told me more than she meant to. ‘Your father was a catch in his way, or so everyone said, but he didn’t altogether want to be caught, if you follow me. He came from good people, not well off. Generations of vicars, one rather good architect in the last century – your great-grandfather. The Air Force made a man of him, and uniform certainly brightens up a wedding. It was all arranged, and very suitable. Then your father sent me a letter.

  ‘Possibly the most remarkable document I’ve read in my life. I dare say I should have kept it. Quite astonishing. He said he was sorry, but he was unable to marry my daughter because of a “private peculiarity”. Luckily I knew exactly what to do. I sent him back a letter of my own, saying, “You do not say in what way you are peculiar, and I greatly prefer not to know. I will however give you the name of the top man in this field. You will see him, in his rooms on Harley Street, and you will have him send his bill to me. If treatment of some sort is required I will pay also for that. You have not had the good manners to deal with my daughter directly, and now you will be guided by me. You will not tell her of this correspondence or this consultation, either before your wedding or afterwards. I congratulated you when I was told of your proposal and Laura’s wish to accept it, and I see no need either to change my mind or to repeat myself.”’ Granny may have found Dad’s letter remarkable, but I can’t help feeling she rated her reply even more highly. I have no doubt that she kept a copy of that.

  Of course I was burning to know in what way Dad was peculiar. Perhaps then Granny realised that she had gone too far. She hadn’t been able to resist the temptation of letting me know that my existence was all thanks to her intervention. I racked my brains trying to think what else had been referred to as peculiar in my hearing, without much benefit. One of the Air Force wives liked beer, and kept up with her husband when she drank it. That was peculiar. One of the husbands handed round peanuts and crisps when entertaining company. That was peculiar, not the serving of snacks but the man rather than the woman (in that fiercely asymmetrical world) handing them round. I didn’t have a lot to go on.

  Granny wasn’t going to retreat from her words or apologise for their unsuitability. Instead she simply changed the subject. I might have stuck to the scent of Dad’s peculiarity if she hadn’t suggested that we sing together, something we did sometimes and which she knew I loved.

  She taught me a new round. I had come to enjoy these odd songs, where one voice after another joined the music and counting was important. We sang them together. ‘London’s Burning’ was bound to appeal to a boy who loved fire. ‘Frairer Jacker’ was another treat. If Mum came into the room Granny would try to get her to join in, to thicken the texture of the round, but Mum never would. Now Granny told me to start singing ‘Frairer Jacker’, and she’d join in with different words. When we’d finished she’d teach me the new words.

  ‘Frairer Jacker’ was in French and I’d learned it by rote. The new words were English of a sort. In her voice that was sweet like faded roses Granny sang:

  Life is butter, life is butter,

  Melon cauliflower, Melon cauliflower,

  Life is butter melon, Life is butter melon,

  Cauliflower, Cauliflower.

  I concentrated on singing my French words, but I liked the new ones right away, even if Granny had to work a bit in the second line, to fit ‘Melon cauliflower’ into the same space as ‘Dormay Voo’.

  Granny explained that the new words were a sort of joke, or perhaps more of a riddle. A play on words.

  ‘Do you see, John? Life is but a melancholy flower. Not “a melon cauliflower”. A melancholy flower. That means a sad flower. Do you see?’

  ‘Is it true, Granny?’

  ‘Is what true?’

  ‘That life is a sad flower.’

  ‘It’s not a question of true or not true. It’s a riddle. What’s called a play on words.’

  ‘But is it true about the flower being sad?’

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, it’s a round! It’s a song! It’s amusing because of how the words fit together. Don’t ask again about it being true – you’ll only get the same answer. We can sing it again if you like, but I won’t discuss it any further.’

  After that, we sang the round often with the new words. I’d let her start, and then try to force the tempo when I made my entry. Sometimes she’d insist on keeping to the pace she had set, but sometimes she indulged me and we turned it into a sung tongue-twister, racing harum-scarum through the syllables until laughter overcame us. Mum would come in with a rather disapproving expression, whether because I was over-exerting myself, though without moving, or because we were playing a game from which she had chosen to be excluded. Family history ruled out what musical sense demanded, the completion of the round. I imagine Mum had taken enough stick about the shortcomings of her voice as a child to be wary of singing in front of her mother ever again.

  Self-abolishing magic

  The new words to ‘Frairer Jacker’ were my introduction to a particular sort of power that lay in words. Not the obvious power of a spell, but the self-abolishing magic of a mantra. Something which becomes meaningful only when the meaning has gone from it. It was plain that Granny didn’t subscribe to the melancholy-flower idea. Life for Granny was a nettle to be grasped, grasped and then made into soup. I learned to do as she said, to relish while we sang the silly music of the words.

  If I didn’t really get the joke in the new words, I wasn’t offended that it wasn’t funny. Not many jokes are. It’s optional. Most jokes are like the ones in Christmas crackers, and produce only bafflement or groans. But it did bother me a bit that a whole phrase could mean two things. What I could enjoy in a single word I feared as a larger principle. When things meant more than one thing, a process was set in train that would end in them meaning nothing at all. It was the same with the biscuits that Mum dipped in her morning coffee. They came from a tin bearing the words ‘Peek Frean’. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked Mum, once I’d learned to read it. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, John, it’s just the name of the makers.’ Peek Frean seemed more freighted with meaning than a mere name should be, but I couldn’t pin its significance down. Then the name became a series of nonsense shapes and sounds. Peek Frean Peek Frean. The words dissolved in my mind just the way the biscuits lost their texture when Dad dunked them, so that a crisp edge became a gummy flap.

  Flakes of metal fur

  Dad didn’t spend much time with me, and when we played together there was likely to be a practical lesson involved. His mind was attuned to experiment rather than pure entertainment. He placed a magnet under some cardboard and showed me how the iron filings fell into a fated shape. Then he moved the magnet under the card. I loved the way the flakes of metal fur crawled into new arrangements.

  He played me musical glasses. He brought wine glasses into my room on a tray and made them sing at different pitches, by filling them to different levels and rubbing the rim with a wet finger. He taught me to see the agitation of the water in the glass, throbbing in little surges as the note was produced. I couldn’t decide whether the particles in their focused swirl were chasing the finger or trying to run away, but I was fascinated. This was science and music and magic all rolled up in one. Mum came to hear what the eerie noise was, and Dad tried to show her how to make the glasses sing. Even though he gave her precise instructions, she couldn’t produce a note, which annoyed Dad or gave him satisfaction or both.

  I knew better than to ask Mum or Dad himself about his being ‘pecul
iar’. Dad had got married, hadn’t he? – which meant he was cured of his peculiarity. Or if he was still peculiar, then at least he was a peculiar married man. At the time that counted as a sort of happy ending. Marriage being curative in itself, the end of the journey. Marriage didn’t solve everything, but in those days it did at least contain everything. Bachelor and spinster were larval forms of life, and only married people could claim to be grown up.

  Mum and Dad never knew anyone divorced, socially. There were no bad marriages in those days, none so bad they couldn’t be endured. None that were talked about as failures or allowed to unravel in public. There wasn’t trial separation and giving-it-another-go and staying-together-for-the-kids, there was only marriage.

  Marriage was the rest cure then, for relationships between men and women. Marriage was bed rest for couples. Lie down as man and wife and wait to feel better. If after a while it doesn’t seem to be working, then keep trying for another few years. As long as it takes, in fact.