Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  It sounded perfect. It had been called St Dunstan’s, but Mum and Dad changed the name to Trees – which I thought was a bit of a cheat. If that was allowed, what was to stop common people decamping metaphysically from their numbered hovels by granting themselves decent addresses? Still, St Dunstan being the patron saint of the blind, he was no longer needed at that address. The trees, too, were worth celebrating. There were four or five poplars out at the front, as well as a cherry tree. I loved the poplars particularly, not just the way they looked but the sound they made. They sighed and swayed. There’s no tree more in touch with its past lives than your poplar.

  Bourne End was a little further away from CRX than Cookham, but it was in the same neck of the woods, and Muzzie offered to do a certain amount of ferrying. If there was any money left over it would go towards a car. Then I would be able to travel to this new home of ours at weekends without relying on lifts from other people.

  When Mum and Dad had done a great deal of outdoor hacking and indoor de-greasing, the house looked very nice. The neighbour opposite, Arthur Foot, put up his easel one day, took his oil paints and painted a picture of it. He even gave them the painting, which was a lovely gesture. Arthur and Dad became good gardening friends, which is a curious sort of friendship, though in some ways better than the real thing. Mum had some sort of fraught acquaintance with his wife Dorothy. She knew her, in a phrase I found endlessly mysterious, ‘to speak to’. I think she was shy of her. She wanted to spend all her time with upper people, but sometimes she felt she couldn’t keep up with the uppers. Arthur and Dorothy Foot were always known locally as ‘the Feet’, a nick-name which Mum used nervously if at all.

  Now that Trees had been made ship-shape I assumed Granny would be visiting. Mum soon squashed that notion. ‘I don’t need Granny getting under my feet,’ she said, but she sounded almost wistful. I didn’t dare ask any more questions about the family ruction which was keeping Granny away. Whatever it was, I assumed that it was my fault.

  The only thing which was definitely disappointing about the new house had to do with the phone. The telephone at Bathford had a proper rotating dial, even if I wasn’t supposed to use it except on special occasions. I remember one of Mum’s friends had the number 4444, which was very tempting. I would be able to dial the whole thing without taking my finger out of the hole. It would be like dialling 999, but without having to wait for the house to burn down for an excuse. At Trees, though, there was no dial on the apparatus. You had to pick up the receiver and a little voice would say, ‘Number please?’ It was a bit of a step back.

  Joyful gipsies

  Still, those first weekends in the house were wonderful. We all had to camp out, like joyful gipsies. We used paraffin lamps which had a lovely stink, though the light wasn’t strong. Essentially, when it got dark, we went to bed. We had the radio, though, since it ran on a battery. I don’t think I was ever quite so happy in that house again. As the house began to come together as a workable family residence, I began to feel that I was the only one still squatting. There wasn’t enough money to do any real converting for my benefit. Perhaps I was meant to understand that a little inconvenience was a fair price for me to pay personally for the family up-rooting. The unwritten rule which operated in CRX seemed to be general: the disabled person must adapt to the world as it is.

  It was a bit of a shock when I first heard Mum saying in company that the house had been bought ‘because of John’. If it was my doing, shouldn’t I perhaps have been asked whether I actually wanted them to up-root themselves? It was a bit much to make me solely responsible for something that was just announced to me from on high. Mum never stopped saying it, though, and I more or less got used to it.

  Mum made friends quite quickly with a neighbour called Joy Payne, who was extraordinarily willing to put herself out to be helpful. She couldn’t do enough for all of us. Soon she was driving Mum over to CRX on a Friday in her Vauxhall Victor estate. I loved how big and roomy that car was. I didn’t know there could be anything so spacious. Of course her husband was chairman of Vauxhall Motors, or at least high up in the firm, so it wasn’t quite the status symbol that it seemed to me then.

  The Paynes lived in Otters Pool. How could you fail to love people whose house was called that? But Joy’s real gift to me wasn’t her house’s name but her own. Joy Payne. How can you improve on that? What a lot of food for thought there was in those two syllables.

  There was even a sweet that was popular at the time called Payne’s Poppets, which reinforced the idea that Joy was a poppet as of right. One weekend Joy brought the Tan-Sad home with me and Mum – there was always room for one more in that Vauxhall. It folded up rather half-heartedly, and even semi-collapsed it was unwieldy. The Tan-Sad stayed at Trees from then on, but it was much better suited for trips outside than for anything in the house. It was very unmanœuvrable, and it brought dirt in with it on its wheels.

  Mum would sometimes take me into Bourne End in the Tan-Sad to do her shopping, hanging her purchases from the handles or tucking them next to me on the seat or down by my feet on the foot-plate. As a reward we would go into Mr Clifton’s Toy Shop afterwards. There wasn’t much in there which was up my street, but I would feel a tiny excitement before going in. You never knew, after all. Round the next corner of the shop there might lurk something which was just for me, perhaps a candle which burnt forever, or a tiny elephant which you had to feed real grass, chopped up very fine.

  If I fell down during a weekend at home, if for instance I tripped on a carpet edge, Mum would help me up but Dad would take no notice. If we were alone in the room he’d pretend nothing had happened. He wouldn’t look at me.

  Informed wonder

  It was very hard on him. He must have felt he’d been deprived of the son he was entitled to, but even so there were times when he forgot to be bereaved. Then he’d take me on nature rambles, pushing the Tan-Sad perfectly happily and collecting specimens from streams for me to look at. Hydra and daphne and rotifer: little worlds in water that he enjoyed explaining to me. ‘That’s a cyclops, John, see? A female – she’s laden with eggs.’ I could just make these creatures out with my naked eye, though Dad’s powers of resolution were certainly superior. A new note came into his voice when he spoke about the natural world, one of informed wonder, and he became a different being. I liked him best when we were out and about away from the house. I don’t know whether I wanted him to myself, or if he was genuinely different out of Mum’s company. He seemed younger, almost a boy playing with another, the way he was before the War put the kibosh on his university career and reading biology.

  One winter before Christmas, Mum said we should make a special trip to Clifton’s, because he had things displayed which he didn’t have at other times of the year. Mr Clifton had even said to her, ‘Why don’t you bring your son along to have a look when he comes home from hospital?’

  I was excited, but mainly because Mum was. Deep down I knew that the toys in my dreams would never be found in a shop, but I got into the spirit of things.

  The shop was chokker. There were loads of toys and games. I reckoned it would take at least an hour to have a proper look. All those extra things meant the space available for customers was smaller than usual. Mum got the Tan-Sad round as much of the shop as she could, and she went to fetch things from the parts I couldn’t get to so I could see them properly. I was careful not to admire anything so forcefully that it ended up as a Christmas or birthday present. I had said I wanted a pet snake, and I knew this wasn’t a popular request. I didn’t want to be bought off with a Meccano set I couldn’t use.

  Then Mr Clifton came along and said, ‘Your son is very welcome here, Mrs Cromer, but please, not at Christmas time! Why don’t you bring him along for our January sale? We always have more space then, and there’ll be some knock-down prices too!’ He bent down to address me directly. ‘That’ll make your money go further, won’t it John?’

  ‘Yes, of course, Mr Clifton,’ I said.
I was as exasperated as anyone else with the intractability of the Tan-Sad, and I wasn’t so very interested in the shop in the first place. All the same I didn’t want Mr Clifton to feel that I thought he had a lot of tatty stuff in there, so I said, ‘I can’t see round that corner! Can you keep a few of those things for the January sale?’ and Mr Clifton said he would see what he could do.

  Mum pushed me outside into the fresh air, delightful after the fug of the shop. I thought that was an end of it, but as soon as she’d put the brakes on she went back in. My heart sank when I heard her shouting and wailing, while Mr Clifton pleaded with her not to misunderstand.

  ‘Misunderstand? Misunderstand??’ she wailed. ‘Oh no, Mr Clifton, I most certainly do not misunderstand, in fact I understand only too well. You don’t want either my son or myself in your shop, that’s what I understand. Good day to you, Mr Clifton!’ She pushed me home, sobbing all the way and entirely forgetting to buy bread and vegetables. After gathering her strength with a cup of tea she started on a telephone marathon, telling all her friends and neighbours, the Feet and the Paynes and of course Muzzie, exactly how awful Mr Clifton had been. ‘I ask you,’ she would say, ‘can John help taking up more space than a healthy boy? Isn’t he entitled to a little fun at Christmas too? Now he’s very upset, and small wonder.’

  John wasn’t upset in the slightest. Except that John didn’t enjoy being used as a sort of amplifier for other people’s emotions, though he was having to get used to it.

  I don’t think Mum set out to organise a punitive boycott of Mr Clifton’s Toy Shop, but more than one of the phone conversations ended with her saying, ‘Well, if you think that’s best. I wasn’t going to suggest it. But that awful man can’t say he didn’t ask for it. See how he likes it, when the boot’s on the other foot.’

  I tried to soften Mum’s attitude, but she told me not to make excuses for that horrible man. The next time she picked up the phone I found I was incorporated in her monologue all over again: ‘John tried to tell me he didn’t mind – as if he could pull the wool over a mother’s eyes! He’s such a sweet boy. He hates to see me upset.’ Nothing is so crushing as a reputation for being noble, and I wasn’t being noble at all. I just didn’t care. If I’d been barred from a bookshop things would have been different. I’d have organised the boycott myself.

  I’m not trying to suggest that Mum exaggerated the toy shop affair so as to be sure she would get plenty of offers of lifts to Maidenhead to do her Christmas shopping there. The emotional turmoil was its own reward and anything else was just a fringe benefit.

  Dregs of humanity

  What made things awkward for Mum was that Mr Clifton was such bad casting as any sort of villain. People who choose to run toy shops in genteel towns are rarely the dregs of humanity. When Mum next took me into Bourne End, she crossed the road with the Tan-Sad so that we didn’t have to pass the toy shop, but Mr Clifton must have been watching out for us. He came trotting out of his premises and crossed the road to greet us.

  He seemed very agitated. ‘Ah, Mrs Cromer,’ he said, ‘I’m so glad to have caught you. I felt so bad after our … discussion the other day. I wanted to let you know that I’ve re-organised the whole shop. Everything’s so much better now. I’ve put some hooks in the walls and arranged things higher up. The customers can see everything now – you’ve really done me a favour.’ His smile was ghastly. ‘Please come and see how much space there is, for everyone. And do please bring young Master Cromer.’ Then he trotted back to the shop he had transformed to win back the favour of our scanty custom.

  I wanted to see the new arrangement very much, and assumed we would call in on the way back from our shopping. Instead Mum chose a route which by-passed the shop altogether. ‘Aren’t we going to the toy shop?’ I asked from the depths of the Tan-Sad. ‘No, JJ, we’re not.’ She sounded very unhappy. ‘I just can’t face Mr Clifton after all the things I’ve said about him.’

  I didn’t get a Meccano set for Christmas, and I didn’t get a snake either. I got nasty white mice in a wooden cage, on straw that smelled of wee. In fact they smelled like Ivy. I hated them. I wailed, ‘Where’s the present you said I would like?’ The mice disappeared and were never seen again. Instead I was given a First Aid Kit. That was more like it. It had been planned as my birthday present but it was brought forward in double-quick time. It was a black box with a key and various dummy medications. Back at CRX I became the ward’s community doctor, and soon ran out of supplies. I filled the empty bottles with dolly mixtures from the shop, carefully divided by colour. Dolly unmixture. Dolly mixtures unmixed by me and revealed as wonder drugs, placebo steroids without side-effects of any sort.

  I thought perhaps Mum would take me to Clifton’s for the sale in January, but still we kept away. I was back at CRX by the time I heard Mr Clifton had died of a heart attack, in February. I was sure it was my fault, at least partly. I could have tried harder to get Mum to accept the olive branch which Mr Clifton held out to her, with such pleading in his voice. I was supposed to be the one with the unreliable heart, but it was Mr Clifton who hadn’t been able to stand the strain of trying to do business with the Cromers.

  The life-jacket of the future

  It wasn’t just the Decca Gramophone Company who treated the unfortunate children of CRX to presents, or at least to surplus stock. There was a businessman, a tycoon even, who had invented a new sort of life-jacket, which you didn’t have to inflate. It was the life-jacket of the future, destined to save thousands of lives. Little windows in the jacket expanded when wet. He gave the hospital a whole batch, for use in the hydrotherapy pool, for the poor children who couldn’t support themselves in water in the normal way. Sister Heel and Miss Withers did a great job of building up these magic jackets in our minds. The staff would be able to pick one of us up and throw us into the pool, and we’d be absolutely fine. Even if we landed head down, the jacket would turn us right way up in no time, and then keep our heads safely above water.

  It may have been clear to the staff at the time that this was at least partly a publicity stunt. It didn’t occur to us. Private enterprise was tapping into a rich vein of pathos, but we who were that vein had no inkling. The new apparatus was tested, of course. The hospital authorities didn’t take such claims on trust. It was tested on me.

  I assumed that I was chosen because of my charm, intelligence and good humour, but although these may have been taken into consideration I was missing the point. I was the lucky volunteer because I hadn’t been medicated with steroids. The illness having raged, my bones were almost ideally dense. My natural buoyancy was close to zero. I was the least floatable of an unfloatable bunch. This body pulls me under. In water my bones felt softer, all the same, like the canes which Miss Reid soaked overnight for basket weaving.

  There were quite a few people gathered round the pool for the test. I don’t think it was exactly a press call or photo opportunity – such things were in their early days then. The life-jackets were a lovely yellow colour. They were all technically Small, since they were being issued to children, but the one they put on me seemed very big just the same. It laced up, and there was so much cord left over that it went round me several times.

  Miss Withers came into the pool with me. She was a real water baby. She loved it. On dry land there was no getting round her, but in the water she would turn a blind eye to a little bit of cheekiness. She could just about maintain her strictness when she was in the pool, but you could tell it was an effort. Not that I was being cheeky on this particular day. I was on best behaviour. Her hands were beneath me in the pool, and then she gave me a little push and I went under. Nothing much happened for a while, except that I started to breathe something that wasn’t air. She hadn’t given me enough warning, and I hadn’t had time to take a breath. I thought perhaps that was the trouble. Maybe they were waiting for bubbles to break the surface before they decided it was time to rescue me. I tried to make bubbles but I didn’t know how.

  Then Mi
ss Withers was lifting me up and I was spluttering in her arms. I was sorry that I hadn’t been able to make the life-jacket work, but Miss Withers wasn’t cross with me. She hugged me in a way that was rather painful, saying ‘There, there.’ Dad was away at the time, but I could almost hear his voice saying, ‘For God’s sake don’t make such a fuss, he already thinks the whole world revolves around him.’ Someone brought warm towels to wrap me in, and I began almost to enjoy myself. I can’t have been under water long, but the air above the pool had changed, all the same, while I was away. Now it was agitated and swirling. The inventor in his dark suit was saying something about this not being a fair test. Not fair at all. My body was too abnormal for any life-jacket, past or future, to hold it up.

  The hospital authorities must have been convinced by this line of argument, because the yellow life-jackets replaced the inflated rubber rings we had been using in the pool, except for me. I had failed to be saved by the life-jacket of the future, so my buoyancy would be guaranteed by an old-fashioned rubber ring. I didn’t really mind. We weren’t too closely supervised. There was always someone around, but staff might pop out for a few minutes without worrying.

  One day I was playing with Mary Finch in the shallow end. In water our bodies were much more coöperative, much more responsive to commands, than they ever were on dry land. We could almost run, in a sort of slow motion. Mary ‘ran away’ and I ‘chased’ her. The difference between our speeds was nowhere near as great as it was when we were really walking.