Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  When I looked at them both, the improvement was very noticeable. In fact the first one was awful, but my teacher hadn’t said so. She had used words of encouragement and helped me climb out of my own mess. This enlightened style of teaching was entirely new to me. There’s an old proverb that goes, ‘The harvest called learning requires the rain called tears.’ My art teacher at CRX gave me my first indication that the sun might get a look in from time to time.

  Mr Turpin must have seen some potential for study in me. He taught me English, managing to get through the barrier of my childishness. His biggest challenge came the day he said, ‘Today we’re going to do some poetry.’ He gave me a book and said we were going to read ‘To Autumn’ by someone called John Keats. He’d got as far as the first two lines before I collapsed into laughter. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’ he read, ‘Close bosom friend of the maturing sun’. I just howled. Oh what a lovely writer John Keats must have been. Bosoms bosoms bosoms. And how grown-up Mr Turpin was to be able to say ‘bosom’ without laughing.

  Mr Turpin looked at me kindly and smiled. I said, ‘Is it a poem about BOSOMS, sir?’ and collapsed back into my laughter. Even before I’d come to CRX I’d known that ‘bosom’ was a real word and also a rude one, though the home word we used was ‘boozzie’. Turpin explained that ‘bosom’ was a word of many meanings. He didn’t make the mistake of any actual reference to biology. I think he repeated bosom-bosom-bosom many times in an attempt to lull me into being bored with the word, but it made no difference. It was just as funny every time. Eventually he said we’d move on, and the rest of ‘To Autumn’ got rather more of my attention than the opening lines.

  I was almost totally blind to the lost songs of spring, although I thought the barrèd clouds blooming the soft dying day were great, since I learned from Turps about how you could use accents in a word to make another syllable. I decided that accents and funny letters would become a speciality for me from then on. Deep down my pleasure was more typographical than literary.

  Bosom bosom bosom

  At home I would walk around the house saying bosom bosom bosom, cunningly incorporating the word into proper sentences, to see if anyone in the family could keep a straight face. As it happened, Mum wanted a word with me on a very similar subject. She told me that Muzzie was going to have an operation because her bosom had grown far too big. The phrase ‘Muzzie’s boozzie’ was full of giggly music, but I soon understood that this was a serious thing. I tried to pass the word to Muzzie that I couldn’t see anything wrong with her boozzie. In fact I liked it. It made her into a lovely pillowy sort of mum for Sarah, while my Mum was more a straight-up-and-down sort of mum. Muzzie was like a great walking cuddle, and I was sad that she wanted an operation to take away something that was so much part of her, as far as I was concerned.

  Life was very fine with Miss Krüger gone, until we were told that her replacement was coming. I had a dreadful thought. Maybe the new one would be German too. I had to know. I asked Heel, because I knew she would tell me the truth, and she said, ‘As a matter of fact she is, John. Miss Schmidt. Why do you ask?’

  Then the sun was altogether hidden, and I went into a decline which mystified those who had charge of me. There was no one to connect my withdrawal with the impending arrival of a new pain-choreographer. The new physio would be a Miss Krüger with fresh tricks, that’s all. I knew it. Only this one would be smart enough to keep her thieving mitts off other people’s knitting supplies, and she’d make us dance as we’d never danced before.

  I had a week of misery, unable to eat or tell anyone what the matter was. I was a perky little bird in the normal run of things, but the news knocked me right off my perch and I stopped singing. Also eating. On the ward if you didn’t open your bowels, you’d have to take Senokot, but if you didn’t eat you were just told not to be so fussy.

  The day of my first session with Miss Schmidt I was back with the old Miss Krüger-pool feeling – let’s get this over with. I heard her before I saw her, because she was wearing clogs, and Mum said only people from Yorkshire wore clogs, so my first question was, ‘Are you from Yorkshire?’ even though I was fairly sure Yorkshire wasn’t in Germany, and she burst out laughing.

  Within ten minutes of meeting her I was singing again. She was a jolt of joy and a living delight. Apart from anything else, she did massage. It was Heaven. My body wasn’t exactly being pampered, but it was being worked on in a respectful way. It was being talked to, not punished or even lectured for its failure to coöperate. Miss Schmidt started me on a whole series of love affairs. One of them was with massage, and another was with the language she spoke. She would chatter in German while she kneaded subtly away. It sounded lovely, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She said, ‘Machst du mir Kuh Augen?’ ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. She wouldn’t translate what she had said until I had repeated it back to her and got it by heart, and then she told me it meant, ‘Are you making at me cows’ eyes?’ Then I understood, although I told her that in English we said sheep’s eyes.

  In German the look of love seems to be bovine rather than ovine. Neither image flatters the love-struck. Of course I was making cows’ eyes, sheep’s eyes, at her – take your pick. I looked at her the same way Sister Heel looked at the budgie who made life worth living, ray of feathered sunshine. If I had been Charlie I would have been displaying the posture I had taught Heel to recognise: head plumage standing up, side plumage fanned out. Eyes closed to slits. Happiness in full feather.

  I had so many reasons to be thrilled and goggling. Because Miss Schmidt had a lovely clear complexion, because her hands knew how to talk to my body in a way that wasn’t any sort of scolding, because she was German and even so she wasn’t holding my head beneath the surface of the hydrotherapy pool.

  I got up the nerve to ask her what her first name was. It was Gisela. She let me call her that. Adults letting children call them by their first names wasn’t common in those days anywhere. In hospitals it was as rare as undercooked vegetables.

  On our second or third session, Gisela starting reciting something with a soothing, tantalising sound and rhythm. I asked her what it was. It is a poem. A nursery rhyme. And I said: ‘Teach me please!’ What I meant was for her to tell me what the poem meant, but again she did something much better. First she taught me the poem as pure sound. My favourite part sounded like ‘Gink a line’. Only later did she supply the meaning, and by then the German words had put down little radicles of their own. They had begun to be rooted. Once again it turned out that medical staff had lessons of their own to teach.

  The poem went:

  Hänschen klein

  Ging allein

  In die weite Welt hinein:

  Stock und Hut

  Steht ihm gut,

  Ist ja wohlgemut.

  Aber Mutter weinet sehr,

  Hat ja nun kein Hänschen mehr,

  Da besinnt Sich das Kind

  Läuft nach Haus geschwind.

  The meaning, when she told me, was something like:

  Little Hans

  Went alone

  Into the wide world beyond:

  Stick and hat,

  He’s very pleased with himself.

  But Mother is crying bitterly,

  She hasn’t got little Hans any more.

  The little boy thinks again

  And runs very quickly back home.

  She couldn’t have chosen a more illuminating text. I liked the image of Little Hans with his stick. I had a stick of my own, not to walk with but to point to things or nudge them towards me. Also to scratch my head where I couldn’t reach.

  It became even more marvellous when Gisela explained that Hänschen was a double diminutive of John. She explained this to me with hand gestures rather than words. First she pointed at me, and said ‘Johann’. Then she put her thumb and index finger an inch apart, and said, ‘Hans’. Then she brought them so close together they were almost touching, and said, ‘Hänschen’. Hänschen wa
s Little Johnnie. Hänschen was a Johnlet, a mini-John.

  Horizontal vertigo

  My hatred of everything German began to turn into its opposite. The language made such satisfying demands on the tongue and the lips and the palate, while German fingers brought deep relief and warmth. Soon I was listening out for her footsteps in the corridor. The clop of her clogs made my heart lift even before I could see her. It was wonderful for me to lie down and have Gisela conjure delicious pangs from my flesh.

  She in her turn was impressed by the National Health Service of which she was now a part, saying simply, ‘In Charmany your parents would have to pay.’

  The standing-up parts of our sessions weren’t quite so much fun. I had a sort of horizontal vertigo after Miss Krüger’s lessons. That time left scars. I clung to the wall and resisted any attempt to coax me into walking. Small distances seemed absolutely terrifying. Gisela would crouch a little in front of me and sing out, ‘Come just so far, Hänschen,’ and I would make myself trust her. As I tried to do as I was asked, I experienced something that was either a hallucination or a revelation of the true nature of matter. It seemed to me that as I inched my foot forward, the ground came into existence to meet it, and dematerialised again the moment I took another pace and moved on. This was either an intuition of quantum physics or a side-effect of eating Liquorice Allsorts.

  I would manage the daunting distance to Gisela. But then she would move away the same distance and tell me again that I needed to come just so far. So I would say, ‘I think you lied to me, Gisela,’ and she would say, ‘I lied from love.’ Sensibly she broke the daunting task down into manageable slices of effort. Then finally she would turn me round and say, ‘Look! See how far you have been!’ And the distance would be impressive enough for her loving lie to disappear from my mind.

  I became ambitious under her influence. A tricycle was the next adventure. I learned to move the pedals through part of their arc, and then to back-pedal so as to do the same thing again. I really wanted to ride a bike, but was told it was impossible. I didn’t see why. My determination won approval from the faction that regarded refusal of a wheelchair as the greatest virtue in someone like me.

  It seemed to me that riding a bike would be relatively easy. Riding it, as opposed to starting or stopping. When the pedals were horizontal I would jiggle down against the ratchet for an inch and a half, then back-pedal slightly and repeat the process. Setting a rhythm was crucial. I managed to get another inch or two of drive down onto the pedals by lifting my bottom up.

  So Shmitty would always walk beside me. Walk and then run. One of the joys of riding a bike in CRX was that so much of it was on a slope. I could get up a fantastic speed in some corridors. Shmitty would be panting, saying that she had never had a patient who made her work so hard.

  Of course riding the bike was insanely painful, but there came a time when the joy and sensation of freedom it brought reached a certain level, and drowned the pain. Or rather, it was still pain but it changed key, and when I had got the bike moving properly the pain was in the key of triumph. It was well worth it, even though my legs felt very locked and deadened after Gisela lifted me off at last.

  I had a cactus on the ward. It did nothing. It did nothing in a really big way. It was inert even for a cactus, and cacti aren’t the most entertaining of plants. It didn’t help that I was watering it. Watering it and then, when that didn’t seem to do any good, watering it some more. I dare say I’d only been given the cactus in the first place because of its ease of maintenance. If so, my needs were misunderstood. I didn’t want something that survived despite my neglect. I wanted something that thrived entirely because of love and care. Somehow my rage to make things grow escaped people’s notice. I wanted active responsibility for life, not mere curatorship. In those terms, having intervened and failed (by watering a desert plant, thereby killing it) was a better outcome than learning the bad lesson of laissez-faire.

  I was serving notice of an important character trait, the need to keep something alive beside myself. Into that disobliging cactus I poured energy that would have sustained a whole extended family, a menagerie, a harem. It was Gisela who broke the news to me, saying, ‘Your cactus I think is dead.’ We lifted it from the pot and the stench of rotten vegetation was overwhelming. But the cactus didn’t die in vain. I asked Gisela to translate a special sentence for me into German. I wanted to know how to say, ‘You smell like my old cactus.’ Gisela laughed, but it wasn’t the sort of laugh that means no. She told me I should say, ‘Du stinkst wie mein alter Kaktus.’ She coached me until my pronunciation was perfect. Then I’d say it to doctors I didn’t like, under my breath at first and then with more confidence, out loud. It was my revenge for the way they were always producing incomprehensible sentences of their own.

  I didn’t know it, but some of the doctors were trying alternatives to cortisone. In 1958 we had all been prescribed phenylbutazone, under the trade name of Butazolidin. I memorised every medical word I came across, and I’d taught myself to read upside down, so I could decipher what the doctors were writing down. It was no good asking them – they wouldn’t tell you. Poor Geraldine went all red and itchy, so the drug was stopped for everyone. It’s true that it can kill white blood cells, it can hurt bone marrow in some people, it can lead to aplastic anæmia. Certainly its side-effects were more obvious than those of steroids, and they could be severe in ten per cent of people. It’s just that I can’t help feeling it was a better drug for the ninety per cent who could tolerate it than what they were on. It certainly wouldn’t have stunted them.

  I’m not talking selfishly at this point, since I wasn’t on cortisone in the first place. It’s the rest of my generation that I wonder about. Cortisone was insidious. Cortisone was the worse drug in the long run. Still, phenylbutazone was banned outright in 1970, so I’m in the minority on that one.

  I was put on Enseals after the Butazolidin fiasco, and stayed on them for a very long time. Enseals were coated aspirin. The outer shell came off after it had passed through your stomach, lessening the chance of hæmorrhage in the stomach lining. Presumably it did less damage to the jejunum, duodenum, and so on down the line.

  Gisela didn’t teach me German in any systematic way, but she’d often get me to say something during one massage session and explain its meaning at the next, when it had sunk in as pure sound. It’s a teaching method that I’ve become rather attached to. She knew how to intrigue me with arcane and archaic knowledge, appealing to the latent cabbalist in me. It’s as if she intuited my special interest in surplus or non-standard letters – residue of the battle over ‘Æ’– and showed me the old-style umlaut, which was two angled flecks over the vowel, like double inverted commas. Also the old-fashioned sign for a doubled consonant, a line over (for instance) the m in

  Physio’s pet

  I concentrated as hard as I could during official lessons, and wished there was school from morning till night, but learning from Gisela was different. I absorbed sounds first and meanings later, while her wily hands kneaded and released. Her massage was the only treatment I had received to date which had no other object than to make me feel better. Very few of the procedures designed for me were ever explained, but here was one that explained itself. I’d always wanted to be a teacher’s pet, but there was never a teacher I could worship without reservation. Now I settled very happily for being a physio’s pet instead.

  During weekends at home Mum continued to give me her own style of instruction, mainly on social matters. Bourne End was a world where she was beginning to get a toehold. It had never been run-down, but now it was becoming increasingly smart. There were rumours that an actor or two was thinking of moving in. It wasn’t clear whether this was a step up or down for the area.

  We lived on the Abbotsbrook Estate. She trained me not to say we lived ‘on an estate’ but to spell out our status clearly. Our cleaning lady, Mrs Ring, did live on a council estate, and there was a world of difference. I wanted to be lik
e Ring. I loved her directness. Mum and Dad were always saying they were short of money, and I found out that Ring’s rent was fourteen shillings a week. I decided that if we lived in a council house we might pick up the habit of saying what we meant.

  I was developing a class-consciousness which was a distortion of my parents’ already distorted view of things. I never liked ‘our kind of people’. I was convinced that a room full of working-class people would be really quite exciting. If a working-class woman didn’t like Doreen Parsons from Mum’s Bathford days, she’d call her a miserable cow, not ‘Oh you poor sweetheart!’ I thought Doreen Parsons would really rather be called a miserable cow, because later on, if she changed her ways, she might be told she was a Little Gem or something like that. If the first comment was sincere, then so would be the second.

  If Mum and Dad were saving money on where they lived, Ring could still pop round every day, do a bit of cleaning and then have a cup of coffee (she didn’t drink tea) and a chat with me. We would often have a good old chinwag while Mum was out, and I was looking forward to more of the same. Small talk and comfortable silences. ‘I saw that Night of the Demon,’ she might say, ‘That was nice, yeah …’