Sin requires privacy, and there was little enough of that at CRX. There was no private space, unless you count the lockers that few of us could open ourselves, and no private time. The closest thing to either came during rest time after lunch when we were encouraged to take a nap. The curtains weren’t drawn, but sometimes screens would be pulled round our beds. One day a nurse said, ‘You were doing something with yourself during Rest, weren’t you?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I was hardly going to say, ‘Have a heart. It’s my only chance to have a proper talk with taily.’
Not that my investigations were very advanced. They were just that – investigations, carried out in a scientific spirit. Apart from the mystery of the ‘I’, unaffected by pleasure or pain, which was a mystery which couldn’t be broached with anyone I had ever met, tailies and what they wanted were life’s biggest enigma.
Sometimes I made a low wall with the bedclothes, with taily in the middle. I made it rise up stiff by thinking of boys playing with their legs round each other, then thought of nothing and watched as taily went down. It was so interesting to see that it didn’t go down smoothly, but in little steps – bob … bob … bob … – with a sort of elastic bounce. If I intervened with my mind before countdown had reached zero and taily had hit belly I could stop it from snoozing and make it wake up again. It was lovely, in a body which seemed to want nothing to do with my wishes, to have mental control of this little joystick.
I assumed that my taily was the only one of its kind, with this hydraulic capability. Everything about me seemed to be abnormal, so it would be rash to assume that anyone else’s taily had anything in common with mine. I couldn’t ask the doctors or nurses. I couldn’t ask my friends because they were all girls, and all sick boys did when they made their walls of bedclothes was put their toy soldiers all over the place and go blam-blam-blam … It seemed obvious that their tailies weren’t like mine, otherwise they wouldn’t build ramparts in the bedclothes for anything as stupid as blam-blam-blam. They’d be exploring bob-bob-bob just like me.
I felt that I was definitely damned for the fire, and almost wished they would just get on and do it now. Put me in the hospital incinerator, so that the smoke that had once been John could drift past the windows for the metaphysical diversion of another sick child. Miss Reid told us about holy people being granted visions by God. I closed my eyes and squeezed them together as tight as possible and asked for a vision. For a few moments I saw some pink and blue flowers, and there was a garden, and I even think Mary was in it, but the picture wouldn’t form properly. I decided I was not good enough to be granted a vision by God, which meant I was certainly damned.
At the same time some stubborn internal voice was protesting that they’d changed their minds about God. I hated U-turns more than anything. Don’t do a tuppenny in the bed whatever you do. Now we’re going to stick something up your botty and make you do a tuppenny in the bed. Don’t move whatever you do. Be a good boy and stay absolutely still. Now walk, walk, walk. Walking is what life’s all about! Now here’s a wheelchair – don’t walk without permission.
Hated parties
Now they’d played the same low trick on God. One week God was all-powerful, all-knowing and everywhere, the next he was a fraud and a failure: partipotent, partiscient and partipresent. I hated those parties. I wanted to go back to the omnies. I felt at home with the omnies.
If God was omnipresent he was in my taily as well as the telephone. He was taily as well as being everything else. I didn’t think God would let anyone go to Hell. And if God was everywhere, he was in Hell too, and then how could it be Hell? What did ‘Hell’ mean?
I was rescued from all this religious negativity by the very person who had got it started, Miss Reid. Christmas came round, tinsel and streamers were hung all about, a beautiful tree was brought into the ward, and all the kids went ‘AAaaaah!!’ Miss Reid sang,
All poor men and humble,
All lame men who stumble,
Come rest ye nor be ye afraid.
This was a song called ‘Poverty’.
Hope flared in my heart like an Ellisdons’ Mount Ætna. I wasn’t as poor as Wendy and her family, but I wasn’t far off. Sarah was rich, but she was pure which was the same as humble. I felt sure she was ‘poor in heart’. She had no interest in tailies unless it was in one of her disconcertingly dirty jokes, so that raised her score. As for ‘lame’ and ‘stumble’, well I passed that test with flying colours. Lame men hobbled around from place to place, but I was much more lame than the lame. I spent much of my time falling over. The time I spent falling over redeemed the time I spent talking to taily.
Miss Reid looked significantly at me when she sang about the lame men who stumble, just as she had when she was talking about the wheat and the chaff, but this time she was beaming with compassion. So yes, I was chaff and due to be burnt, but I was on my way to being poor, scoring top marks in the stumbling section, and as even Reid said, Jesus was most merciful and loved to rescue people. The song went on,
Then haste we to show him
The praises we owe him;
Our service he ne’er can despise
which clinched it. Jesus would see me right.
That Christmas Mum had the brainwave of giving me a tiny book – The Smallest Bible in The World, allegedly. Perhaps she got it from Ellisdons. At first it looked as though its teeny pages were covered in minute blobs, but Mum gave me a magnifying glass as well, and then I could read every letter. She followed it up for my birthday with a matching Webster’s Dictionary.
I didn’t enjoy being small myself, but I loved small things.
I loved the poem about Solomon Grundy. Everything from womb to tomb sorted out in the course of a week. I didn’t think it was morbid, I thought it was wonderfully tidy. It appealed to my taste for the small and definite. I hadn’t yet developed my love for the vast and indeterminate.
As for objects, the smaller they were, and the more they contained, the better. I had a blue money-box that was done up to look like a book, until you saw the coin-slot in the side where the pages should be. There was even a cut-out circle where you could post in a rolled-up banknote (fat chance!). Written on the cover was the motto Great Oaks from Little Acorns Grow, which more or less consecrated my fascination with little things, but I also loved acorns in their own right. They didn’t have to grow into oaks to prove their value to me. From the divine perspective but also from mine, they were already what they were meant to be. Acorns had nothing to prove to either of us.
I loved my tiny Bible and my tiny dictionary, but really I didn’t care what little books were about or where they came from. It was the dimensions I loved. They were books to swallow whole, to remember word for word. It’s a fact, though, that little books tend to have designs on their readers, and a lot of my favourites were from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Dad rolled his eyes when he saw them, and said, ‘My God! Now he’s reading tracts!’ I didn’t let him put me off the little books I loved.
A boy of wood
The next plot from us at Bourne End was a sort of big hut called a chalet. The Freemans lived there, Magda who was Austrian and Ozzie who wasn’t. Their son Pippo (his real name was Philip) ran around with no clothes on, which Mum thought was completely beyond the pale. They seemed to push him out in all weathers, naked, though it wasn’t clear if he was being actively punished or simply seasoned like a boy of wood. Magda certainly believed in the benefits of the cold.
Although the Freemans weren’t upper people as Mum understood such things (in fact precisely because they weren’t) she had a clearer grasp of how to behave towards them than she did with, say, our posher neighbours Arthur and Dorothy, the Feet. The way to behave with a family like the Freemans, with their chalet and their Austrian ways and their driving their shivering Pinocchio of a son out into the cold, was to get on the phone to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, day in, day out, till they finally sent someone to
check on the goings-on in that sinister household.
She did this very early on in her life in Bourne End, even before the re-wiring of the house was finished. Heather people can’t leave well alone. It was the only way Mum knew of settling into a new home. To make a cat feel at ease in new surroundings, you butter its paws – by the time it has licked them clean, it will have settled in. To work the same magic with Mum, all you needed was unconventional neighbours and the phone number of the NSPCC.
The visitor from the Society gave the Freemans a clean bill of health. There was no cruelty going on at that address. Mum found this out when she phoned up again, to learn the result of the swoop. She was shocked, rather disappointed by the fallibility of the organisation. ‘Don’t they have eyes in their heads?’ she wanted to know. ‘Those awful parents must have made their boy lie.’
I’m afraid I got the giggles. I was in an odd, hectic mood, something which came on me abruptly every now and then. My thoughts rushed after each other so fast they seemed to collide. ‘I don’t think so, Mum. We’d know if he lied, wouldn’t we?’
‘Would we? How?’
‘His nose would grow!’ I thought this was the funniest thing anyone had ever thought of.
‘You do talk nonsense sometimes, JJ.’ Which had already been remarked on at CRX. She bent down with a sigh to pick up a Liquorice Allsort which she had accidentally flattened beneath her foot. I quite see that I could sometimes be exasperating to live with.
I was going through a Liquorice Allsorts phase at the time, though I preferred to decant Bassetts’ noble confectionery from the packet into my own containers, tubes passed on to me by Mum and also by Muzzie. I was teaching myself to flick them into my mouth – otherwise I’d have had to use a fork – and my accuracy was improving, but a few inevitably ended up on the floor.
At CRX we were regularly lectured on the evils of eating sweets. After the years of wartime and post-war rationing, parents found it hard to turn the clock back by rationing their children’s sweet intake. The CRX dentist, Mr McCorley, ranted particularly against Opal Fruits when they came in. He thought them highly pernicious, with their squishiness, their way of moulding to the teeth and clinging there while their stinging sweetness was absorbed by the tongue, as if they were sticky slugs actively sensing the tender pulp behind the enamel – but Liquorice Allsorts were little better in his book.
Sarah’s sweet habit contributed to some quite severe decay. Mr McCorley gave her some fillings, numbing her mouth with cocaine. She must have had an allergic reaction – what she told us about it made me fear the dentist more than anything. When it was my turn to have a filling, years later, McCorley asked, ‘Shall I deaden it with some cocaine?’ and I said, ‘No thank you, it doesn’t agree with me,’ like the vicar refusing an offer of sherry.
The cocaine would have been made up in paste form, labelled FOR DENTAL USE ONLY and kept locked in a safe between treatments. Altogether a missed opportunity.
Revenge of a sort
I have to say Magda Freeman was remarkably good about the whole business of Mum’s denunciation to the NSPCC. She didn’t hold a grudge. She can’t have been in much doubt about who peached on her, but she didn’t stop being neighbourly. Peter and I liked her, much to Mum’s annoyance. Perhaps that was revenge of a sort.
Magda knew the way to our hearts. Later, when Peter was a Boy Scout, she gave him things to do in Bob-a-Job Week. He did her weeding while I sat by in the Tan-Sad. There was nowhere I could go without my brotherly engine. When she gave Peter his shilling at the end of the afternoon, she gave me tenpence of my own, for supervising him. And I wasn’t even a Boy Scout! Which meant I didn’t have to pass on the money to a charitable destination. If I had known I was getting paid to watch Peter work, I’d have enjoyed it more, and I’d have tried to wear a proper supervisory expression.
If I’d been told that an Austrian was a sort of German, I wouldn’t have been so trusting. Mum certainly missed a trick there.
We had a television at Trees by this time, although Mum didn’t let us watch ITV on it. I far preferred the commercial channel when watching at CRX, and pestered her about it. She explained that reception would naturally be good at CRX because of the transmitter up Hedsor Hill. On the Abbotsbrook Estate, on the other hand, which was after all near the river, the ‘other channel’ was so fuzzy it was unwatchable. There was no point even trying to tune in. Why she thought closeness to a river interfered with reception I don’t know. There was more involved than picture quality, clearly. Mum wanted to keep ITV out of reach on principle. Borrowing her terminology from radio, she called it ‘The Light Programme’, as opposed to ‘The Home Service’ (the BBC). Sometimes she complained that ‘your father has been watching the Light Programme again!’ which should have tipped me off to the possibility of watching ITV at home sooner than it did.
By Abbotsbrook stream on the way towards Marlow there was marshland, fascinating to Dad but of no interest to Mum. I only remember her coming that way with us the once, and that was for her own reasons. She had broken a mirror and was trudging behind us with the shards in a bag. Seven years’ bad luck! The size of the mirror doesn’t make a difference, apparently. This one was only a hand mirror, though quite a large one. Instead of accepting the sentence of doom passed by her belief system, Mum was trying to weasel out of it. The bad luck could be neutralised, according to the small print of her faith, by putting the pieces in running water. So she had kept them in the bath, with the tap running, and now she was going to dispose of them safely in the river. Somehow I had even less patience for Mum’s superstitiousness when she tried to dodge the bad luck she had invented.
Our party made an incongruous caravan: a rationalist (Dad) pushing a mystic (me), with an irrationalist bringing up the rear. I don’t remember if Peter came along, but if he did he would have added to the philosophical variety, being in those days pretty much a pagan.
On every other occasion Dad and I explored those parts alone. There were places I would rather have gone, but Dad was very methodical, preferring to examine a single habitat under different conditions. I was fickle and impatient – so the moment I heard from Miss Reid that sundews, plants that ate insects, grew wild on Chobham Common in Surrey I wanted to go there right away. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. As soon as I got home for the weekend I started pestering him, while he was still unloading the car, and he snapped at me. ‘Get out of my hair, you pesky little nit!’ he said, and I went crying to Mum.
The car was new, or at least new to us, a Vauxhall estate of our own. Perhaps the transaction was smoothed in some way by dear Joy Payne. Estate cars were a very new idea then (though nothing less would have accommodated the Tan-Sad) and Mum cautioned Peter and me against boasting about ours. I don’t know who she thought we would try to impress. It was really only her old worry about the word ‘estate’ with its two meanings, the upper and the working class. Casual acquaintances might not realise right away that this was an Abbotsbrook Estate car.
‘It’s so unfair!’ I told Mum when we got inside the house. ‘When you and Dad told me about sundews it made me cry because I felt so sorry for the fly. Then when I got used to the idea and asked where I could find one you both said you hadn’t the slightest idea. Then I go and find out on my own where I can get one, and now he tells me I’m a pesky little nit who gets in his hair. It’s not fair!’
Lessons in Dad
‘Well JJ,’ Mum said, ‘I can see I’m going to have to give you some LID. That’s Lessons In Dad. It’s a matter of timing. You must learn to hold back and then pounce. If you ask him while he’s rushing about, of course he’s going to say “No”! All he wants to do is get out into the garden. I’m afraid you’ll just have to let another week go by now. By then I promise you he’ll have forgotten the entire affair. Wait till next Friday and then pounce. I’ll make an apple pie and after that I’ll give him sweet milky coffee (ugggh!) and a couple of chocs left over from last Christmas. They’re Black Magic. Your father
never grew out of his liking for sweets, you know … Wait until he’s all relaxed and floppy and then spring it on him.’
I had first heard of the sundew plant in the Bathford days, when the thought of a plant eating a fly like that made me burst into tears. Perhaps I was a cannibal in a previous life – that would explain so much dietary fastidiousness in this. Then I had a conversation about them with one of the nurses at CRX, who said that it moved ‘ever so quickly’ to catch its prey. I’d become more of a man of the world by then. There were more than enough flies in the world, after all, and it made sense that there should be plants whose job was to eat some of them.
My interest had a scientific tinge to it. Perhaps this was an area where I would make discoveries and breakthroughs. It would be such a triumph to breed a variety which ate wasps, for the benefit of people like Sarah who reacted really badly to their sting.
And still I hadn’t seen one. By this time I had cross-examined the nurse who was an expert in sundews (at least compared to me) many times. I just asked the same questions time after time. I reasoned that if you kept on hammering away, sooner or later you were bound to hit the jackpot – even if the coins often cascaded towards you from a completely unexpected direction. It was especially encouraging when the victim said, ‘Honestly John, I’ve told you absolutely everything I know or can remember on the subject. There really isn’t anything more that I can remember.’ That always meant that they knew plenty. That wasn’t the moment to let go, but rather to intensify my mental grip.
One day I was reaching the end of a rather fruitful interrogation session – I’d established that the colour was a little more golden than I had suspected, and that the plants tended to have ten rather than six wee fisted rosettes. Then I heard a little voice edging politely into the conversation with, ‘Excuse me for interrupting, John, but I could not help overhearing your conversation with Nurse Burrows. I gather that you have developed quite an interest in the sundew plant!’
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