Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  To compensate for this joyless attitude to catering, we were always interrupting the narrative for someone to come in with a bowl of hot food. Never mind that the tension of the plotting slackened to nothing. This was fantasy of a different but no less necessary kind. One of the other boys improvised a bowl of hot chilli one night. ‘What’s chilli?’ I asked. ‘It’s spicy stew,’ he said. So I said crushingly that Chile was in South America, and that cowboys would eat the same food as the Indians, and Indians ate curry. I didn’t miss any chance to throw my weight around. After that the cowpokes settled down to big bowls of curry and crackers and coffee.

  I suppose I got a little cocky, a little drunk on acceptance. This has been a recurring fault with me, testing the limits of acceptable naughtiness. Minor matrons would do a head count last thing at night, before closing the door. One night I managed to wriggle round so that my feet were on the pillow. I got a smack on the bum for my trouble. Quite without warning. But that was just peremptory, there wasn’t any sadism in it. I was more surprised than hurt.

  I never really got used to the multiplicity of matrons at Vulcan School, matrons of all moods and sizes. At CRX Matron had been an overwhelming figure and a name of great power. As a Hindu in the making I should have rejoiced at the multiplication of deities at Vulcan, but the reality was different. It was like the moment in Fantasia when Mickey Mouse, sorcerer’s apprentice, hacks the enchanted broom to pieces – only to find that each separate splinter reconstitutes itself as a new broom, toting a pair of pails in a maddening imitation of life.

  Protective fugs

  The Blue Dorm in Farley Castle was on a corner of the building, and I think it must have been on the north side. In winter it was bitter. I remember Raeburn explaining that a dorm was for sleeping in, not living in. He thought that waking up in a cold room encouraged a boy to move about a bit, to get his circulation moving at a good rate and warm up naturally. Quite how a boy with his joints ankylosed was supposed to initiate this beneficial process was never made clear. Winter mornings in the Blue Dorm were hellish.

  The shock to my system was total. In Bathford days Mum had kept my room good and warm. At CRX Sister Heel made sure the radiators earned their keep. I had spent most of my winters in a series of protective fugs. Not any more.

  Waking up and being able to see your breath was only the start. The first job for the staff was to get boys out of bed and onto the toilet – and the Blue Dorm’s toilet was in a turret. It was the only toilet in the school whose door was too narrow to admit even the slimmest wheelchair. If the dorm was a ’fridge then the turret was a deep freeze. I’m not convinced that even Pippo Freeman from Bourne End, that boy of seasoned wood, could have stood up to the rigours of the cold in the Blue Dorm’s turret.

  I wouldn’t wish the experience of defæcating when your body can’t stop shivering on anyone. Then there was the wiping of the bum with hard dry crackly paper. The sensation ranged from awful to perfectly bearable, depending on the niceness of the matron on duty. Sometimes I was just left on the seat. After I’d opened my bowels I just got colder and colder, because the matron who had put me on the seat had forgotten all about me. My bum would go numb. I could call at the top of my voice from that cold turret, but no one heard me. Perhaps no one wanted to. I thought about what it would be like to die on that toilet seat. One day I even decided that it would be better to die than to be left like this. I wondered, if I did die, how long it would be until anyone noticed. I seemed to be getting more and more unimportant every day.

  Once it was a kind matron, Gillian Walker (always called Gillie), who forgot to come and get me off the toilet. She was the nicest of the nice, a rose in the spiky desert of the Vulcan garden. I remember once I wanted a mosquito bite on my ankle scratched, and it turned out there were different moral approaches even to this small request. Gillie’s school of matronly thought held that carers should only do what was best for the boy (and scratching would only make the irritation worse), while there were other matrons that would oblige without comment. I remember Gillie Walker saying with real dismay, after I’d gone behind her back to be scratched by another matron, ‘But John, you don’t understand, I care a lot more than Mrs Lewis does!’ She was actually quite upset.

  When Gillie remembered me at last, having obviously become involved with another boy’s needs – it wasn’t as if she’d gone to the pictures – she came running. She cried, ‘Oh John darling, you must think me absolutely beastly! I’d understand if you never ever forgave me!’ It was easy to say, ‘Of course I forgive you, Gillie,’ and even to add, ‘I could forgive you anything.’ It really didn’t matter as long as there was some tenderness in there somewhere, even though I was numb and sore and had pins and needles in unexpected places.

  It was obvious that Gillie and the Big Matron, Sheila Ewart, known as Biggie, were aware of the indignities we were undergoing. They set themselves to soothing us with kind words and gentle touch.

  Judy Brisby, though, had a different approach. She was the one who had dismissed my appendix pains as namby-pamby wallowing. While Biggie and Gillie tried to take the edge off the Spartan conditions, Judy preferred them good and sharp. She used the morning routine as an opportunity to transfer her own inner pain to the boys. I had a sense of this even then. During the bum-wiping process a boy had the chance of reviewing his karmic bank balance with her over the past week. The more sycophantic and dishonest he had been, the better for his bum’s sake. I learned to be a toady, which was the part I felt I had to play for a long time after I left the school. My motto had become You wipe my bum, and I’ll kiss yours.

  On a winter morning it was the duty roster which determined how the day would begin, whether discomfort would be intensified by cruelty or melted away with tender words. Biggie would come in smiling, and say, ‘Time to get up, boys.’ The smiling wasn’t forced, and it never stopped. She’d rub her hands together and say, ‘It’s very chilly bom-bom today, boys!’ still smiling. She loved to say that – chilly bom-bom. To make a game of the awful cold. ‘Yes, it’s very cold indeed this morning. I’ll get you boys up one at a time. The others can stay in bed until the first boy is finished. Now then, someone has to be first, I’m afraid, so who will it be? John, you’ve had a lie-in for a few days so it’s your turn to be first. OK then, bedclothes off! Come on then, let Biggie give you a little cuddle, but we can’t stay here all day, can we? That’s better.’ And she’d push me along to the dreaded turret.

  ‘Oh my dear, yes I know it really is a horrid cold toilet seat, isn’t it? Just stay in your wheelchair for a minute. Let Biggie sit on the toilet for a few seconds first to take the chill off … There, that’s a little better isn’t it? Oh this horrid paper! Let Biggie rub it together like this to soften it a bit … Let Biggie breathe on it to take the edge off. I really must see Miss Willis about having a little heater put in these toilets.’ It was one of Biggie’s quirks that she put the word ‘little’ in almost every sentence. ‘They’re bitterly cold, even for me, and I’ve been up since six o’clock and had my cup of tea …’ Motherly she clucked away, wondering if it was right for boys to have such hardship, and what the inspector would say if he paid a visit in the cold season. Biggie was a bustler if ever there was one, a bustler and a prattler, and the nasty moments passed without our even noticing.

  A Judy Brisby start to the day was different. No boy would be allowed extra time in bed. If Judy Brisby was going to get us up we had no warning at all. The bedclothes were whisked right off all of us, not just the first to be got up. Lying in bed shivering without bedclothes was just as bad as being plonked on a frosty toilet. Small bodies can’t retain their heat, as Judy Brisby must have known, particularly small thin bodies, which was all we were likely to be on the Vulcan diet. I was one of the smaller ones, but none of us was exactly pink with warmth on those mornings.

  Any boy who complained about the shock of the cold soon learned to put up with it. Complaints only led to even harsher treatment in the toilet, to
vicious scrubbings with hard paper. I’m sure I’m not the only one who lay there fantasising about a contraption that would lift the bedclothes back onto our bodies while Judy was out of the room. Professor Branestawm was the man for the job. I loved the books in which he appeared. I liked logic to fly free, without the downward tug of common sense. Professor Branestawm would design us a subtle system of ropes and pulleys which would yank the bedclothes off again at Judy’s approach, so that we were helplessly exposed to the cold. The way she liked us to be. Meanwhile the contraption would vanish into the walls.

  Tooth-cleaning was also a fearful event. Boys who were able to brush their own teeth were at a definite advantage here. I was an in-between. On a good day I could manage it, but when the weather was really cold my joints seized up altogether, and I couldn’t reach. I went through the motions as well as I could, knowing the consequences if she singled me out. I had a special toothbrush, but it wasn’t all that special. It was special in a very ordinary way. It was only a normal toothbrush with a stick (a piece of dowelling) tied to the handle to extend my reach. Apart from the question of reach there was also the problem of getting the right angle.

  She caught a boy slacking once, as she thought, and seeing that he wasn’t able to reach very well, she said: ‘Don’t you even know how to clean your teeth properly? Let me show you – and pay attention everybody!’ She put a good squeeze of paste onto the boy’s brush, then pulled his head back by his hair. She told him to open his mouth and started brushing. Or rather I should say she started agitating her hand. Her mouth twisted itself in a frenzy, while she transferred her sense of her own inner dirtiness into the mouth of the boy. He whimpered a bit, but she hissed, ‘Quiet!’ and increased the vibration rate. ‘This is the way to clean out a boy’s dirty mouth!’ she said. ‘And the only way you can tell when it’s really clean is to draw blood!’

  Draw blood she did. When she told the poor boy to rinse his mouth the basin was streaked with pink. Blood trickled from his lips. ‘There, that feels much better, doesn’t it?’ Judy Brisby demanded. The poor boy agreed through his mouthful of minty blood that yes, it was better now. Ever so much better. I don’t think she necessarily intended to draw blood, but when she saw the bleeding she declared it a good and necessary thing. It was either that or put the brakes on, maybe even apologise, and she wasn’t going to do either of those things.

  After we’d all been cleaned and delivered downstairs by way of that sluggish lift we had our breakfast, which was cold whatever the weather. Bread-and-butter and marmalade and Puffed Wheat. Only the tea was reasonably hot. There were four people at each table, one member of staff and three boys, and on the table there was a toast rack which held four half-pieces of wholemeal toast. This was for staff only.

  Mostly the staff ate their full entitlement of toast. It was a small enough perk in an unglamorous job. But Biggie always made sure that three of her pieces of toast were given away, and so did Gillie. Judy Brisby’s table was run differently. She would take a tiny nibble of her toast and then sit there, chewing very slowly, as if lost in her thoughts. Of course she knew exactly what she was doing. She could make that slice last all day. She would certainly stretch things out so that she was still on her first piece of toast when the table was cleared and we had to get ready for lessons. Not that the other slices will have gone to waste. I dare say the kitchen staff were rationed as much as any of us, but if they turned up their noses at the cold toast we so much coveted then it will have gone to the pigs.

  One of the asthmatic ABs, called David Lockett, a tremendous animal lover, kept pigs. It wasn’t the school’s project, he did it entirely on his own initiative. He had special permission, and he looked after them with superb devotion and efficiency. David always said that he was going to be a farmer in Australia, and since ABs weren’t automatically debarred from pursuing their ambitions, as most of us were, there’s no reason to think he didn’t manage to do what he wanted.

  Judy Brisby was sly enough to realise that if no one ever got a bite of her toast we would learn to ignore her nibbling routine. So there would be a small act of sharing every now and then, always in favour of the boy who abased himself most shamelessly in front of her.

  My toady self

  One breakfast time I qualified. As an avid reader of Æsop’s fables in CRX, I had learned the moral that if you praise the crow’s beautiful song you can steal the titbit (a piece of toast, say) when it opens its beak to sing. The toast had long since lost all its original warmth, of course, and Judy had smeared it with the thinnest possible scrape of butter, the most grudging dab of jam. As I ate it I tried to feel that it held at least a symbolic warmth, the memory of its charring, but all I could taste was my toady self. My mouth was full of the bitter juices of sycophancy.

  After breakfast I could feel that the worst part of the day was behind me, and that Vulcan School was really an OK place to be. I made a solemn vow, in the days of the Blue Dorm, that when I left school I would never again expose this body to the indignity of receiving a cold shock first thing in the morning.

  The cold at Vulcan was always presented by the authorities as having a healthful, bracing aspect. It didn’t occur to me that this, like many other features of the school, was really a matter of economics.

  Mum had explained to me that Cromer, the name of the man she had married and consequently my surname, was a resort town in East Anglia where it was always cold and windy. There had been a vogue in early Victorian times for healthful bracing resorts, where the north wind could be relied on to blow away all thoughts of lounging and to impose a régime of brisk walks, well wrapped up. ‘But who’d want to go to a place like that?’ I wanted to know. She couldn’t really give an answer. She had never gone there herself.

  I suppose I should pay a visit one of these days – see Cromer and die. I’m not interested in family history, not really believing in either family or history. I’m in two minds about geography, come to that. Anyway, it stands to reason that my forebears weren’t called Cromer when they lived there – they got that name at the next town they moved to, when they were the people from Cromer.

  The turret of the Blue Dorm made Cromer seem like Barbados, but the Spartan conditions weren’t entirely meant. Feather beds would sap the moral fibre, certainly – but feather beds were also expensive. When I had left CRX and come to Vulcan I had moved, without realising it, from the care of an institution with resources to one without. The difference was masked by their shared ideas about the young, and the dire consequences of mollycoddling. Thrift was the over-riding style of things, so that actual poverty didn’t show up so much.

  The Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, set up on a historic estate, had been richly endowed from the first day it was offered to the authorities. The Astors had provided more than the premises, paying the wages of staff. When the National Health Service was established, CRX was smoothly absorbed into it. CRX was a benefactor with a little body fat on it – Sister Heel’s gleeful mug-smashing and Dr Ansell’s matter-of-fact insistence on linen sheets for children were extravagances that could be indulged. If the toilet paper was hard, that was because the soft variety was morally suspect, not because it cost too much.

  Old Boys’ reunion in the sky

  The Vulcan School was different, the Vulcan School was skin and bones. It had only the most tenuous and long-delayed claim on public resources. The school opened on personal loans, with one pupil, and laboured to build up to official size and status. It was hard for local authorities to send pupils until this critical mass was reached. Things that might be classed as necessities, such as a lift so that wheelchair-bound children could ascend to the dormitories upstairs, were installed only as funds allowed. Vulcan was an undernourished orphan taking in others of its own kind, without having secured its own place in the world.

  From the school’s point of view I imagine even David Lockett’s pig husbandry came in handy. There were pigs to sell every now and then, and that can only have helped a
bit with the money side of things.

  Fund-raising was an issue that loomed large. We were strongly encouraged to attend church regularly at Swallowfield. This was a soft ultimatum. Raeburn and Miss Willis cultivated social contacts there, vital for funding. I didn’t enjoy the rough ride there and back in the Bedford Transit, with the wheelchairs bumping along behind on the trailer.

  I wanted to be in the choir, like some of the other boys. That would have livened up the services for me. I enjoyed singing and I don’t think my voice would have let the side down, but I didn’t qualify. It was discrimination of the most blatant kind – shocking, actually, in an institution that was supposed to give disabled boys a full life. I could sing, but I couldn’t get into the choir stalls at Swallowfield Church, and that was a good enough reason, apparently, to keep me out of the choir.

  So I day-dreamed through the services. If I didn’t already have a sense of God I wouldn’t have picked one up there. Every now and then, though, Reverend Cook the minister would preach a sermon that hit me for six. I remember him explaining the Persons of the Trinity in terms that really fired me up. ‘Think of the sun,’ he said. ‘There’s the sun itself, its light and its heat. They are three, but they can’t be separated from each other. We can’t begin to imagine the Sun without its Light and its Heat, yet the Light comes from the Sun, and the Heat from the Sun – and you could also say that its Heat comes from its Light.’ My mind was intoxicated with this way of considering the world in its invisible and visible aspects.

  Then unfortunately he changed gear, and started to explain the same theological point in terms that he must have thought were more accessible to the Vulcanians in the congregation.