Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I suppose I was a faintly alarming child from the word go, in terms of curiosity and oblique obsession. Illness had intensified my mental life without feeding it. And I had always been the sort of child who looks troubled – as his mother notices – during tellings of ‘Goldilocks’. Always at the same point in the story. Something puzzles him about the details.

  Then he tells her what he wants. They must do an experiment. He wants her to go into the kitchen and fill vessels of different sizes from the hot-water tap. He is trying to reproduce experimentally the conditions of the Bears’ interrupted breakfast. Fairyland is in breach of the laws of physics. This offends him. It doesn’t make sense. Baby Bear’s bowl is the one which must by rights lose its heat the fastest. If any of the helpings of porridge is to be ‘just right’, not too hot and not too cold, then it can only be Mummy Bear’s. Why has the story gone wrong?

  On the day of our alphabet quarrel Miss Collins humoured me at first, by bringing the little blackboard in range and handing me a piece of chalk, so that I could draw the twenty-seventh letter, but her expression was not indulgent. Perhaps she thought I was being cheeky. I did what I could with the chalk, to reproduce a letter shape that I had only seen in print – and only as a capital. Collie Boy hardly glanced at my drawing before saying, ‘There’s no such letter, John. Perhaps you’ll allow me to know best. The English alphabet has twenty-six letters in it. No more and no fewer.’

  ‘I can show you in a book if you’d like, Miss Collins.’

  ‘What nonsense you’re talking, John. Who is the teacher here, may I ask, me or you?’ Somehow my eagerness to learn registered with her as pathological. She was a particular character type, the teacher who doesn’t much care for responsive pupils, part of the strange group which includes the librarian who prefers the books to stay on the shelves and the bus driver who would much rather not pick up passengers.

  ‘It’s in the Ellisdons catalogue, Miss Collins.’ My Bible. ‘I know the page number by heart. If you pass it to me, please Miss, I can show you.’

  ‘Very well, John. You have one minute to find this wonderful letter that no one else has ever heard of. But be warned, I don’t take kindly to cheekiness, from whatever quarter it comes.’

  The passage I was looking for concerned a subject dear to my heart, indoor fireworks, and there it was: the pride of the box, miniature volcano which at the end of its display gives birth to a snake from its cone. Mount Ætna. Containing a letter which was neither A nor E but a glorious hybrid, a marriage or mutation. I was hoping for a creation myth from Miss Collins like the one she had for baby ‘i’, explaining how A and E came to be so lovingly interlaced.

  In fact I’m sure that Ellisdons only went in for this bit of typographical fancy-work in an attempt to raise the general tone, just as it described a remarkably wide variety of toys and devices as ‘educational’.

  Miss Collins was flustered for a good long moment. Then she said firmly, ‘That’s not a letter at all, John. That’s just a way of writing things down, quite different.’ She must have felt she was on weak ground here, since what she had said described letters precisely. They’re just ways of writing things down. ‘What I mean to say is it’s old-fashioned. We don’t write like that any more. It’s correct to write Mount Etna, E-T-N-A.’ I wasn’t in the slightest bit convinced, and I have to say that I took the whole thing rather personally. Miss Collins should never have tried to make a liar out of the Ellisdons catalogue.

  In fact I had a funny sort of love-hate relationship with spelling. At that stage I could have gone either way, towards pedantry or indifference. I remember how silly I thought some of the spelling rules were. Why did we need rules anyway? I verry much wonted to rite things owt the way they sownded, and then evrywun wood no wot wee wer torking abowt.

  Still, I applied myself to the task of learning the rules, despite a few despairing moments. The spelling of ‘meringue’ was so impossibly distant from the sound of merang that I thought it just wasn’t fair. And there were more exceptions than rules, which offended my sense of things. Why wasn’t the curved returning stick which aborigines threw, as featured in the Ellisdons catalogue, called a boo-meringue? Once again Miss Collins couldn’t give me a satisfactory answer.

  A saltation of tits

  A year or two after I started to be ill, someone had the idea of fixing a mirror to the end of my bed, a swivel mirror adjusted to an angle that let me look out of the window. At last I could see the birds that squabbled on the window-sill in the early morning. They were blue tits and not wrens at all. I wish I had been able to observe them more closely, since this was the time that blue tits were making a remarkable breakthrough. There’s a word for this: a saltation, a sudden evolutionary leap within a species. Not an exultation of larks but a saltation of tits. Admittedly the word is usually applied to appearance, whereas the breakthrough was one of behaviour, as birds adapted to the human environment.

  It was like one of Æsop’s fables, which I enjoyed being read so much. ‘The Fox and the Grapes’. ‘The Ass and the Grasshoppers’. I didn’t know at the time that the name could be spelled using the rare Siamese-twin vowel I loved so much, which would have been useful corroborative evidence in the case of Ellisdons v. Collins.

  In Æsop’s version it would have gone like this. ‘Here’s one you’ll like,’ Dad would say. ‘“The Tits and the Robins”.’

  It would have to be Dad telling me the story because Mum had no real interest in natural history. Dad, though, was a good observer and loved the Latin names of things.

  ‘Once there were some tits and some robins living near a village. The tits (Parus cæruleus) lived as couples when they raised their chicks, but when that was done they spent the summer in groups of eight to ten, flitting from garden to garden. The robins (Erithacus rubecula) stayed where they were, fiercely defending their territory. The tits chattered about everying and nothing, while the robins kept themselves to themselves. The tits thought the robins were stand-offish and the robins thought the tits were suburban.

  ‘Both groups of birds, the tits and the robins, drank milk from the top of milk bottles, where it was really cream. This was years ago, John, when milk bottles didn’t have tops at all. The cream was much richer than anything nature provided for the birds’ tummies. Not all of them could digest it, but it was such a potential advantage for the birds to exploit this resource that natural selection favoured those who could.

  ‘You see, John, birds are really nothing more than little æroplanes. And here was an unlimited supply of aviation fuel.

  ‘Then one day the birds found that they couldn’t get at the cream. There was a hard shiny film sealing off the rich treat they liked so much. It dazzled them and frightened them too. Nature is hard, John, and human beings are unsympathetic. They wanted all the cream for themselves. They didn’t want to share it with any of the birds, not with the blue tits and not with the robins either.

  ‘Those were hard times for the birds, both P. cæruleus and E. rubecula. Winter cost them dear. They hadn’t forgotten how to feed themselves, but they were close to starving without the rich food in those bottles. Not all of them lived to see the spring.

  ‘They were resourceful and clever birds, both species equally. They kept returning to the milk bottles with the shiny tops. By summer they weren’t afraid of them any more, but they were no nearer to getting the cream again.

  ‘But it is in the nature of birds to peck, and to be fascinated with their own reflection. It turned out that the shiny bottle-top was not only a mirror but a drum, returning a fascinating echo. Every now and then a tit or a robin pecking at the surface would make a tear in the silver foil. After that, with the cream so near and smelling so sweet, it was an easy matter to enlarge the tear and get at the creamy treasure.

  ‘The difference was what happened after such a happy accident. The tits, spending their time as a group, chattered and spread the knowledge amongst themselves. Soon they all knew how to get at the cream. They cal
led out to their neighbours, “Peck at the shiny place – soon your beak will be full of cream!”

  ‘But when a robin happened on the cream he kept the knowledge to himself. And when other robins heard the tits calling they sang back, “Keep your distance! Clear off! Come no closer! You’re no robin, but if you don’t clear off I’ll give you a red breast you won’t forget in a hurry!”

  ‘And that is why all tits and very few robins know how to get at the cream they all like so much. The tits keep the secret alive by spreading it far and wide, but the robins lose the secret by keeping it to themselves.

  ‘And the moral of the story is: Never be too proud to listen to gossip.’ Not something that Dad would have come up with in a thousand lifetimes, but I can’t help that. A fable needs a moral. It was one thing I particularly liked about Æsop’s fables, that the morals were so explicitly pointed. I was at the age for that.

  I myself was experiencing something like a saltation in reverse. The mobility of my joints was so impaired by this stage that I could hardly even lay claim, for practical purposes, to an opposable thumb. Garden birds were making breakthroughs, but I was backsliding.

  Thanks to the mirror I could watch Mum going shopping down the lane, and I could watch for her to come back. Bathford was a steep street, and we were at the top. I could see all the way down. The address was actually 5 Westwoods, Bathford. The street sloped so steeply down from where we were that I thought that ‘ford’ must mean a very high place. It was only much later that I learned there was a connection with water.

  The mirror was a comfort in some ways, a reprieve even, but in another it only made me more anxious, as I waited for Mum to come back with her shopping basket full. I worried about her. I was afraid that she wouldn’t come back, not because she would run away but because she would be run over. She always seemed to be looking at the ground as she trudged off. She wasn’t paying attention.

  For a boy deprived of childish company the wireless was a handy stand-by, either when Mum had to go out or when there was a programme we could listen to together. There was one programme which was specially for us, called Listen with Mother. The lady always asked, ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ which was very well-brought-up of her, but to start with I didn’t know how to answer. I knew that it was always wrong to tell a lie, but it was sometimes rude to tell the truth. I was neither sitting nor comfortable. I lay there squirming in a cleft stick of manners and morals while the lady waited for my answer. It was always a bad moment. Then she took pity on my embarrassment and said, ‘Then I’ll begin.’

  Later Mum explained that the lady couldn’t hear me and I could say anything I wanted to as an answer to her question. So I would shout out, ‘No! I’m lying down and it hurts!’ and sometimes Mum would even join in with the mockery of dear Daphne Oxenford.

  You’ve won fair and square

  My mind had only two gears, and one of them was idling, though ‘instinctive rudimentary meditation’ sounds more flattering. The other gear was overdrive. My brain raced wildly when there wasn’t enough to tax it. There were things on the wireless which set off chains of thought that flailed and skidded, giving my mind no traction. There was one song that came up every now and then on the Light Programme which I loved to pieces, though it was so strange on first hearing that I struggled to make sense of it. A man and a lady were singing together, but they weren’t being sweet to each other. They weren’t being what Mum called ‘lovey-dovey’ (something she didn’t like). They were singing and fighting at the same time. It wasn’t the singing that was beautiful – the lady was really only shouting in tune. So it was a quarrel as well as a song. They were being rude, in a way, but they sounded happy at the same time, and they sang in turn, waiting for the other person to sing the next bit, so in another way they were being polite even while they were fighting. It was a real puzzle.

  The song didn’t come along on the radio every day, it didn’t even come along every week, but sooner or later I would hear ‘Anything you can do I can do better’, and then Mum would know to turn the wireless up right away, without being asked, even before the song got as far as ‘Sooner or later I’m greater than you’.

  I concentrated as hard as I could. There was a bit in the middle of the song which I found particularly baffling, though being baffled was all part of the thrill of the song. ‘Can you make a pie?’ the lady asks the man, but when he says, ‘No,’ she says ‘– neither can I.’ I couldn’t stop giggling. It was heavenly.

  It was so terribly funny, but why, exactly? First of all because of the singing and fighting, which made it different from any other song. Then because they sang so fast. That was clever and it was fun for me to try to copy them.

  The whole song was quick. But the bit that I learned to listen out for was very very quick. It was so quick that ‘quick’ wasn’t really a quick enough word for it, whatever it was they were doing. There would be a word for being more quick than quick, but I didn’t know it.

  It was dazzling. I was following the quick argument in my mind, wondering who would be the winner. Then when the lady asked, ‘Can you make a pie?’ I applauded her in my mind. I didn’t really mind who won, but I had a lot of sympathy for the lady. She couldn’t win a physical fight with the man, so it would only be fair if she won this one. Ladies have different ways of winning. When she mentioned pies I gave her the crown in my mind.

  The line that went ‘Can you make a pie?’ was obviously the clincher. Everyone knew that ladies knew how to make pies (Mum specialised in cakes but she could certainly make a pie), and so I applauded her silently, saying, ‘Bravo, Madam! You’ve won fair and square!’ to myself. The matter was all settled and jellified when the man said, ‘No,’ and I thought that now the argument must be over for good.

  Except that I wondered how the song could go on if the argument was over? It couldn’t just stop in the middle, but I didn’t see how it could go on either, with the pie question settled so conclusively.

  So when she said, ‘Neither can I,’ it was a total opposite surprise. It took me completely aback, and I couldn’t stop giggling. I was laughing and also a little sorry for her, thinking to myself, ‘Oh you poor lady! You’re supposed to be winning this argument, oh dear! Yes I know it was very fast, and you had to think of all those things quickly, I really don’t know how you sing so fast and so clearly – I wish I could do that! – but surely, surely you’re supposed to think of something you can do if you want to win the argument? I suppose, like me, you thought you were a general sort of lady, and that as a general lady you could make pies because that’s what ladies generally do. So you asked the pie question without thinking about it properly first.

  ‘Then as soon as you had asked it, you realised that whereas most ladies could make pies, you for some reason could not. That was sad, and also a little dangerous. If you weren’t a general sort of lady and couldn’t make pies, he might not be a general sort of man and maybe he could, and then the argument would go right the other way and then you’d be well and truly dished. But once he’d given his answer, and it turned out he was a general sort of man and clueless about pies, don’t you think that under the circumstances you could have told a very small lie? The man would never know, and wouldn’t be likely to want to come and watch you cook one, and even if he did, he would have to make an appointment like we all do when we go to hospital or the doctor, and if that happened you could learn to make a pie in an hour or two, couldn’t you? Someone like my mum could give you a lesson. So if you had lied, nobody would ever have known!

  ‘But you were a very honest lady, weren’t you? Like an angel, you couldn’t tell any sort of lie, however small it was…’

  All this convoluted reasoning took place in a flash. It can’t have been conducted in words, because so much verbalisation wouldn’t fit into the second or two it took the people to sing that bit of the song. In my imprisoned and restricted body, I was having an intense session of mental gymnastics, and hearing the clever-quick-fighting so
ng made me feel on top of the world.

  I tried to explain all this to Mum, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t make her see what I saw or hear what I heard in the song. I was a chatty enough chap, but my tongue lagged far behind my thoughts. Each thought seemed to come faster than the last one, but each word arrived with more and more of a delay. What was going on in my head was like a disembodied squash game, with the balls having minds of their own. It was like a chain reaction of mental particles. The way each ricochet had more pace and spin than the last one would have been frightening if it hadn’t also been exhilarating.

  Of course I had entirely missed the point that if the lady hadn’t told the truth the song wouldn’t have been funny, so perhaps I wasn’t being that clever after all.

  There was something else I got from the song, other than the experience of having my thoughts bounce so nimbly from lobe to lobe of my brain. The lady said, ‘Neether can I,’ not ‘Nigh-ther’. And nobody scolded her. Mum smiled along with the song, as if that was perfectly all right. If anything, the lady was the one doing the scolding. She had the last word and won the argument.

  The knowledge that some proper people said ‘Neether’ was bound to come in handy for a later argument of my own. I didn’t make the mistake of coming out with it right away. Patience is a virtue, virtue is a grace. I was learning to have a few tactics, and to keep my powder dry. So all in all I got a lot of ammunition from Annie Get Your Gun. I’m sure I learned more from Irving Berlin than I ever did from the Collie Boy.

  Invalid privileges

  Two things happened towards the end of my years of bed rest which had a knock-on effect on my future, although I wasn’t really party to their importance at the time. One was that my dad sat down on the bed, and the other was that Mum picked up a magazine while she was waiting her turn at the dentist.