Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  ‘Perhaps another comparison will be more useful,’ he said. ‘Let’s say that a man sends his boy to school, as a boarder, not so much for him to have a good time – though he is glad that he should, as long as he gets it by working hard and keeping out of mischief – as because it is the best education and training for him, to fit him for something higher later on.

  ‘The father wishes his boy to keep straight, and to have a good influence over his friends, and in his house, and (if possible) in the whole school as well, and is pleased if he finds the boy is shaping that way. He keeps in touch with him by writing, so that the boy has no excuse for forgetting what his father wants, and how much he cares about it!

  ‘Another thing that helps the boy very much is that he had an elder brother at the school. The school was in a very bad state when he came there, but his work in it (particularly in the last part of the time that he was there), and the work of the friends whom he had influenced, made a great and lasting difference to it, though it is a very long way from being what it might be. The boy has the example of his elder brother to live up to, though he knows he will never even come close. The elder brother has not in any way ceased to take an interest in the school – he keeps in touch with it and comes back to it. He is just as anxious as the father that the boy should be a good influence on his house.

  ‘Besides this, the boy has another person to help him, whose influence is entirely in the same direction. He has a good friend whom he can always get at and consult, and who is really always giving him advice in an unobtrusive sort of way, setting him on the right lines and keeping him there. Of course the boy doesn’t always take the advice he is given – he may well put it on one side, because it is hard or unpleasant, or because the other fellows at the school will laugh at him if he follows it.

  ‘Even so, I’m sure you will agree that a boy who has all this help available to him has no right to turn out a failure. At the end of his time at school he ought to have a record he can be proud of, one that will make him a credit to the Father and Brother and Friend who helped him. He should be fit for higher work when he comes to leave the school at last …’

  This contorted allegory left me more confused than ever. I suppose it might have worked better in the Catholic tradition – then at least there would be a place in the scheme for a Matron. The school analogy didn’t please me half as much as the solar one, partly because I no longer felt the need to personify God, as I had in the days when I thought of him as the Knitting Pattern Man. I didn’t visualise a man with a white beard – if anything I visualised a beard without a man, a Cheshire Cat kind of deity.

  It didn’t appeal to me to think of Heaven as an Old Boys’ reunion in the sky, though I idly wonder how many old school ties the Trinity would be sporting – one? Three? Perhaps even two, since it was a moot point whether God the Father had actually attended.

  Trevor the human suitcase

  On Sundays when I did take fire from the Reverend Cook for a while, there was no one to share the feeling with, and my excitement would have died by the time we got back to the school. I liked the idea of drinking communion wine, but it made me feel sick to see old biddies slobbering into the chalice. I certainly prayed that the Holy Ghost was effective against germs.

  Every Sunday after church Mr Yeo the church warden would come back with us to the school, take his jacket off, roll his sleeves up and bathe two or three of the less portable boys.

  Then the school was given a Thames Valley Leyland bus, a single-decker, by the Handicapped Children’s Aid Committee. It could carry both boys and wheelchairs, so the Bedford Transit was retired from duty. Raeburn devised a derrick that enabled boys to be hoisted through the door at the front of the bus without leaving their wheelchairs. We would then be tied securely to bolts in the floor. Eventually BEA gave the school some old aircraft seats, which were installed by a coach firm in Reading. I remember watching Miss Willis bouncing on her seat on the way to church, her face at peace, her bulky handbag on her lap. I might have found the sight less reassuring if I’d known then, as I do now, that she carried a carving knife in that bag. This was in case there was a crash, and she had to save us by cutting the straps that secured us to the floor.

  The only exciting moments in church were when things went wrong. There was one boy, Trevor Burbage, with polio so severe that it almost seemed he needed holding together by artificial means. He had a calliper on one leg, but that was only the beginning. He had to wear a device called a Milwaukee brace, a sort of metal corset with a rod going up to the back of his head and a frame under his chin to hold his head in the correct position. The brace even had a sort of handle at the back of the collar – like the handles you see on heavy luggage. He was practically a human suitcase.

  One Sunday at church he fell over during a hymn. No one worried about him – his mother made him wear a riding hat at all times, and we were confident that it would have absorbed the impact. Trevor was merry, talkative and entirely impervious. Miss Willis passed a hymn book down to him and he went on lustily singing from underneath his riding hat. In deference to the formality of church the ABs waited till the end of the hymn before they lugged him to his feet.

  Outings and expeditions were a major part of what Vulcan had to offer, though one of Raeburn’s favourite destinations seems a little odd in hindsight. He used to take parties of disabled boys to watch the passing-out parades at the Army Apprentices School at Arborfield. Perhaps there was an element of nostalgia for him in these visits, bitter-sweet memories of his own training before it was cut short with the crushing of his legs. More likely, though, he wanted us to notice what happened at least once on every occasion, more often when the weather was hot. These were literally passing-out parades. Cadets holding a motionless pose would simply keel over in a faint. Perhaps Raeburn thought it was useful for us to know that even perfect bodies could let their owners down. Or perhaps he just enjoyed seeing it happen. We certainly did.

  Whipser-Nade

  A more important occasion for me personally was a visit to Whipsnade Zoo. It wasn’t even my first exposure to the Zoo – I’d been there before, on a trip from CRX, but this was the important occasion.

  I remember being proud on the previous visit that I knew to give the name two syllables, along with Sarah, while Wendy and her crew said ‘Whipser-Nade’. Even the nurses at CRX made the same mistake. All the same, that first visit wasn’t a happy one. The Elephant House had a wall in front of it, which adults could look over, while children had to be lifted. I was waiting my turn to get a view when some non-CRX kid jostled in front of me and scrambled up on the broad foot-plate of the Tan-Sad to see for himself, as if I was more parapet than person. He trod heavily on my foot, which swelled up and was sore for a good ten days.

  I don’t even remember whether I got to see the elephants that day. It hardly matters. I don’t have an elephant’s memory, but some things will stay with me as long as this body does. I experienced what it would feel like if an elephant stepped on your foot, not even noticing, and that’s not something anyone forgets.

  On this second visit everything was different. I saw a keeper with a snake round his shoulders. He was wearing it. It must have been a young python, recently fed and pleasantly drowsy. Everyone else was hanging back and saying it gave them the creeps, but I wanted to wear a snake too. There was no bravado in this, for once, it was a physical longing entirely separate from the desire to impress. I put my hand up, and I think the teacher in charge must have made a more obvious signal because the keeper came over to me right away.

  As often happens to me when I want something really badly, I swallowed my voice and the keeper had to lean over to hear. Then even before I had asked if I could have the snake on me, the python moved its head my way. It was as if it understood. As the keeper helped the snake to unwind from him and wind onto me, he said, ‘Don’t worry, ’e’s perfectly ’armless!’ though I hardly needed reassurance. The rest of the Vulcan party laughed uneasily. I’m not
even sure they got the feeble joke.

  With a snake round my neck, I felt crowned and complete. There was an instant bond. I understand that this requires explaining. Snakes have found an ecological niche for themselves where legs would only get in the way, and we’re prejudiced against such a radical bit of stream-lining. I myself have warmed to the world of the cold-blooded, starting from that moment at Whipsnade, with the snake warm round my neck.

  Cold-blooded is a rather loaded term, of course. Just go to the desert and see whose blood is hotter, the snake’s or the human being’s. See for yourself which organism struggles to keep to a comfortable operating temperature. The more respectful word is ectothermic. The point is, that every time I say python or cobra, I’m like a well-bred teenaged girl saying ‘pony’. With that undertone of crush. Pash. Thrill.

  It wasn’t a spiritual lesson I had at Whipsnade. It’s easy to say that the snake, limbless but absolutely whole, was there to show me the way. The immature python round my shoulders would never have as much dexterity as I did even with my clumped fingers, but its adaptation to life was absolute. Who would dare to say or even think that a snake was disabled? All perfectly true and perfectly irrelevant. What I felt wasn’t a sermon in reptile guise but a piercing sensation, a deep satisfaction that was also an intensification of longing.

  Charman clean and Charman dirty

  The main satisfaction within the walls of Vulcan was still the night-time story-telling. After I had broken through the gender barrier, there was no holding me. First of all the temptress became German. It helped that my range of German cliché was a little wider than ve-have-vays-of-making-you-talk. I remembered Gisela Schmidt, for instance, saying that CRX was ‘not Charman clean, but clean’. Also ‘In Charmany your parents would have to pay.’

  There was Charman clean and there was Charman dirty. I made the temptress say, ‘I want your hand to squeeze my bosoms,’ but she wasn’t a cheap trollop, she was a woman in love. After the bosomsqueezing was done (with the dorm chorus providing any number of unlikely pneumatic noises) she said tenderly, ‘Oh Darlink I luff you.’ That went down a storm. Effectively I was the Marlene Dietrich of our little after-lights-out repertory theatre.

  I don’t think I can have seen any of Dietrich’s films on television at that time, but whenever I’ve happened to tune in to one since, it has seemed like familiar territory. So perhaps there was some subliminal memory of Destry Rides Again or even Touch of Evil in those ignorantly erotic improvisations, some whiff of Tanya (Tanya with her chilli!), of Frenchy, in those love scenes, those luff scenes which came so close to getting out of hand. When the temperature started getting too high I would interrupt my flagrant self and her lover in the character of Mum, knocking on the door with a feast of curried stew and thickly buttered bread, and endless cups of tea.

  Then over time the mother figure mutated into Miss Willis, the mum who was actually on the premises. I incorporated some of her mannerisms into my performance. For instance I consciously let my cheeks go slack, to duplicate the unmistakable Willis wobble.

  Marion Willis and Alan Raeburn were very much the mum and dad of the school. In a sense they were like a couple of newly-weds who had fallen in love with a derelict castle while on honeymoon and had bought it on impulse, without being able to change a fuse. Farley Castle was their folly à deux, though of course they weren’t married. Marion was older, and bulk limited her romantic appeal. They were no less a couple for that. They were married to the same vision, a vision which led them into areas of which they had previously known nothing.

  The qualifications that Mr Raeburn and Miss Willis had for running a disabled school were really very simple. She was a teacher, and he was disabled. After the War, Alan Raeburn had studied at Cambridge, then gone to Barts Hospital to train as a doctor. He contracted TB, which closed off that particular career path. He was working half days in a local office when he and Marion got to know each other. He had a car, an adapted Morris Minor, but no garage, so Miss Willis let him share hers. They started talking about the tragic mental thwarting of intelligent disabled boys. The Education Act 1944 was a step forward – it imposed an obligation on local authorities to provide schooling for the handicapped, but grammar-school education was not available. They decided that was the standard they would aim for.

  If Farley Castle wasn’t technically derelict when they acquired it, still everything needed looking after. The bottom kept dropping out of the Aga. It didn’t take much to block the outside drains, and it took ages to clear them. Manholes ran in a chain from the front door and outside the kitchen windows, all the way to a cesspit in a neighbour’s field. The manholes were so widely separated that sometimes one set of rods wouldn’t reach, and the co-principals would have to borrow a spare set from the Post Office at Farley Hill. Once, in fact, the postman was persuaded to break off from his round of deliveries to lend a hand with the unblocking.

  There were always problems popping up to surprise the co-principals. They had some woodland cleared on the other side of the road from the school, but the workmen hired to fell the trees had ignored the instruction to refrain from making bonfires. Neighbours rang up to complain that smoke was working its way underground towards them. I remember more than once watching with incredulous delight as firemen tramped gingerly over hot ground, tracing the fire by little spurts of smoke popping up in front of them. What a boost for my pyrolatry! Perhaps in the next life I’ll come back as a little rogue flame, and not as a person at all.

  I had been wildly excited, after all, when I had read about the will-o’-the-wisp, nagging Mum and Dad to take me to see it, until it was explained to me that it wasn’t something you could see on demand. It was more an event triggered by certain circumstances. The real wisp would only appear in haunted marshes at night-time when there were few people around to be scared. I had hopes, though, that methane would combust spontaneously from all the tuppenny in the Vulcan School cesspit. That would be good enough for me.

  The roof leaked after heavy rain. The co-principals would hear about it from a staff member on the receiving end of the drips, who would have had to hold up an umbrella in bed. The slates on the roof were brittle. The battlements weren’t held in place in any sensible way, they simply balanced there. Leaning against them would be enough to send them toppling.

  Once Raeburn, inspecting the loft, found five starlings drowned in the water tank. With a heavy heart he summoned the county’s Medical Officer, expecting to be told to close the school down for a period. He wasn’t looking forward to the equivalent of evacuating a small town of dependent people. Luckily the MO of Berkshire merely advised the boiling of drinking water for a week or two. After all, no one had been poisoned so far, had they? No need to panic.

  It was a strange experience to watch Raeburn climb the ladder to the loft. Miss Willis would stand below him, since he had no sensation in his legs, grabbing each foot in turn and placing it on the next rung. She had to do this both going up and coming down. Raeburn’s sister Margery might have been a professional puppeteer, but on these expeditions into the unknown areas of loft and roof it was Miss Willis who seemed to have usurped that rôle. Alan might not be putty in her hands, but at loft-inspection time he was at least half puppet.

  Civilisation and the cripple

  Raeburn took a kindly interest in me, and said he would give me private walking lessons. So at eleven o’clock most mornings we met in a classroom for twenty minutes. Supporting himself with an expertise which was beyond me, he helped me in the gentle art of challenged walking, telling me I was quite safe, not to worry, and assuring me I could not fall. His touch was very tender and I felt safe with his strong arms making a little cage around me or a bar for me to hold. I remember I could touch and hold that strong arm-sinew as much as I liked. Looking back, I realise he must have kept an arm free to hold on to his sticks, but I don’t remember it, and fortunately at that time logic drifted in and out of my world.

  When the classroom was busy we
met instead in his study. One day he caught me looking at a book on the shelves whose spine I could read. Its title was Civilisation and the Cripple – poignant juxtaposition. I don’t know if he was referring to that book at all, perhaps even paraphrasing, but at that point we had by far the most searching general conversation that I had had with anyone to date. Everyone was always telling me I was clever, except the eleven-plus examiners, but no one before him treated me as an adult. I suppose he was using me as a sounding board for his own inspirational little theories.

  I remember him saying, ‘You and I are the judges of civilisation, in a way. If civilisation means anything it means looking after the weak, not getting rid of handicapped children by exposing them on the mountainside, as I’m afraid the Ancient Greeks did, for all their culture, and not by throwing useful human beings in the dustbin, as we sometimes do. Funnily enough the Aztecs – those are the chaps who used to live in what we now call Mexico – uncivilised people in many ways, but they looked after disabled people very well. They had the idea that people with … um, with deformities, were holy in some way, you know, dear to the gods.’

  Nothing could have been better calculated to get me wildly excited, what with my blocked dreams of religious vocation, an occupation where it seemed my face fitted only in the little book where uniforms folded neatly down round a stuck-in photograph. ‘So were the handicapped people made into priests?’ I asked. ‘I’m not sure about that, John, but I’ll try to look it up for you.’ Perhaps he did, but he didn’t ever mention the Aztecs to me again.

  Since then I’ve learned that Aztec enlightenment had its limits. They had a rather narrow definition, as it turns out, of the value of the disabled. Not so much intrinsic worth as usefulness in a crisis. The disabled were emergency supplies of sorts. The Aztecs looked after their deformed citizens with great care until there was a solar eclipse, and then put them right at the top of the list of the human sacrifices, to have their hearts cut out and their skin removed. A compliment of sorts, since only the choicest hearts and freshly bleeding hides could tempt the day-star out of hiding, but not easy to take in the right spirit.