Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  The record wasn’t newly released or even newly bought. It was bought with a Christmas present, but not in a hurry. Peter and I had consulted extensively about it. Mum and Dad had actually given him a book token, in an attempt to enlarge his rather basic library (Jane’s Fighting Ships and the Observer Book of Aeroplanes). I didn’t think presents should have strings attached, so I had taken the educational sting from Christmas by agreeing to swap the reproachful token for cash. It was no sacrifice. There were always books I wanted to buy.

  I did find it funny that it was Jane who catalogued the fighting ships – it seemed so much more a job for Tarzan. But maybe he was busy picking nits off Cheeta’s fur or gathering fruit for lunch.

  Soon, of course, with the benefits of his paper round accruing (and lucrative pub work looming), Peter would be standing casually at the counter of a record shop to ask for a single, positively willing the assistant to ask if he had just had a birthday, just so that he could answer ‘No’ in a faintly baffled tone, as a way of signalling that he was now a man of the world – emancipated from the yearly cycle of presents, rising above the grudging shillings of pocket money, able to plonk down eight-and-sixpence from his earnings as a matter of course, with only a trifling acceleration of the heartbeat at the rash committing of cash to an object that was perishable both in terms of material and its vulnerability to fashion. Those cash-flush days were only just round the corner, but for now expenditure still needed to be carefully monitored, and ‘Good Vibrations’ had proved a solid investment, vindicating the long period of consultation.

  Posh, spinsterly and shrewd

  Mum and Dad were predictably incompatible in their tastes for entertainment. Mum favoured light comic songs and routines – her top favourite being Joyce Grenfell, sly, posh, spinsterly and shrewd, because her observations were ‘so true’.

  Dad on the other hand admired Eartha Kitt, who was sexual and predatory – she even called Father Christmas ‘Santa baby’, for Heaven’s sake, as if he was no more than a sugar daddy in fur-trimmed pyjamas – yet somehow blatantly for sale herself. No better than she should be, and out for what she could get.

  I wonder, though, if Mum had her priorities right. Eartha Kitt was no real threat. If she had turned up in Dad’s office he wouldn’t have known what to say. He would have looked at his shoes, not her cleavage. Joyce Grenfell, though, could be much more dangerous in her quiet way.

  I don’t think Mum ever knew that Grenfell was a niece of Nancy Astor’s (not to mention a fellow Christian Scientist) and had a cottage on the Cliveden estate. It would have given her the willies to think that Joyce Grenfell might have sat near her in the CRX cafeteria one day, inconspicuous in a little tweed hat and fawn coat, on the alert for intonations and mannerisms. Mum’s admiration for the truthfulness of Joyce Grenfell’s would have turned to panic. She would hardly have dared to listen to her on the radio for fear of hearing herself transformed in a monologue. It would have been hellish to be on the sharp end of that truthfulness.

  When from time to time Dad threatened to buy Mum a record of Eartha Kitt’s for Christmas he was teasing, exaggerating for comic effect an insensitivity to her tastes which was perfectly sincere. Like all the men of the era he took something like pride in being a hopeless shopper, clueless and mildly resentful when confronted with a lingerie department, a perfume counter or a high-class confectioner’s. Why should he be expected to know what size his wife was, what she liked to smell of, whether she favoured the hard centres or the soft, chocolate plain or milky? These were feminine mysteries and husbands found them baffling on principle. A man who understood his wife’s needs would be regarded with something like suspicion. Something must have gone rather badly wrong to produce this morbid state of communication.

  Dad despised florists not in his capacity as a male but as a gardener. If Mum wanted to be bought flowers by her husband, she had married the wrong man. In any case, buying her flowers would always have been a perilous enterprise. That whole area was hedged about with superstitions which the most innocent bouquet-giver was sure to trespass onto, let alone Dad. It was unlucky to give lilies, those deathly blooms, or a bunch which mixed red and white flowers. Once when a neighbour gave her just such a bunch for her birthday – carnations – Mum hardly waited to say Thank You before frantically segregating them by colour in different vases so that the bad luck drained away, muttering ‘blood and bandages’ the whole time. Apparently those were the ominous associations of the ill-starred mixture, though I was mystified by the fuss kicked up. If there’s blood, don’t you want to have bandages handy?

  In the case of ‘Good Vibrations’ Mum overcame her prejudices, while Dad remained stubbornly attached to his. He violently disapproved of everything about the record, from the barbarous phrase ‘Beach Boys’ down. It was obvious to him that ‘beach boys’ were no more than loafers and layabouts. What they needed was jobs. I know Peter could imagine no better job than being in the Beach Boys, but he couldn’t quite find the words to say so.

  This was a song which really came into its own when the sun shone and the French windows were thrown open. Day by day the volume dial on the household’s Bush radiogram crept up, in stealthy increments.

  When ‘Good Vibrations’ was playing, Mum’s herb-picking became especially adventurous, with the music pulsing and prancing behind her. She would execute a courtly dance among her plantings in search of the right flavours, like a bee spoiled for choice between flowers. She danced a happy bumbling gavotte around the aromatic chequerboard of the herb garden.

  Audrey trotted out from the house and joined in, treating the paving stones as a sort of practice court for hopscotch. Sometimes she lost her balance and trod on a planting, which seemed genuinely accidental, though taking a small revenge on anything which attracted Mum’s attention away from her wouldn’t have been out of character. She knew exactly how many times she could get away with saying, ‘Oh dear, I’ve treaded on Mummy’s parsy,’ before she was suspected of systematic trampling. For Audrey in those days, parsley was parsy and there was no other herb, hardly another piece of greenery. From her point of view the vegetable kingdom was made up of the holy trinity, parsley, rose and Christmas tree.

  Peter would be exercising rather self-consciously in the sunlight with the chest-expander Dad had given him for his birthday, two wooden handles connected with woven elastic ropes. As his powers increased he was supposed to add more of these ropes, clipping them to rings on the handles. Eventually the chest-expander would have six strings, like a guitar, though currently he was stranded at the banjo stage with four – but still, he was stringing and tuning his teenaged vigour as if it was an actual instrument. He was proud enough of his progress to exercise where he could be seen, shy enough to keep the operative area out of sight by wearing an ærtex shirt rather than a singlet.

  Even Gipsy joined in the harmonious mood, an ageing dog these days, sedately romping. By now her hips were more or less on a par with my substandard ones, though of course she made no exorbitant demands on them for balance. They held her up without any trouble, it’s just that they moved rather stiffly and made her unwilling to risk the blithe jumps of her youth. Dogs’ hips don’t last for ever. Mine at least had improved with age, thanks to the visionary butchering of Mr Arden.

  Sustained hedon bombardment

  Dad, of course, retreated to the greenhouse in protest at the din, but gave the game away by leaving the door open a few inches. The elementary particles of sensation had always seemed to stream right through Dad, or to bounce off him. His pain threshold was high, his pleasure threshold higher still. Perhaps this was only the side of him we saw, but we saw a lot of it. It took mighty waves of positively charged experience to provoke the smallest interior ripple of enjoyment. He preferred to go through life without being obliged to provide emotional commentary.

  There must be a benefit, for the species if not for the individual, in the refusal of joy. A hedon is the unit of pleasure, just as a dolor is the un
it of pain. The hedon isn’t recognised by any authority, not even one as marginal as a Swedish university research project. Still, it’s logically necessary, even if I just this minute made it up.

  Hedon radiation was agitating every molecule of the shed, hedons were pulsing and throbbing like fireflies, tickling the soft palate of anyone within range like inhaled lemonade. Strong California sunshine trapped in grooves of black plastic was converted back into the visible spectrum by the travelling prism, tip down, of the stylus on the family record player. Our English summer was given substance by the American one on the record.

  Even Dad couldn’t hold out against the Beach Boys for ever. Sustained hedon bombardment day after day, relentless, was bound to find the chink in the shed, and Dad’s armour. It took its toll. Dad’s resistance was high but he wasn’t quite hedon-proof, much (for some reason) as he might want that.

  One day he was watering the garden while Mum was playing the song indoors at the usual volume, and I could see for myself how those good vibrations infiltrated the arm that held the hose. Whenever that peculiar passage came round when an unearthly electronic instrument goes OOOWEEEYOOO OOOWEEEE like an ecstatic banshee, Dad would move the hose in luxurious loops and spirals. Random beds and plantings in the garden got the benefit of a more generous, carefree sprinkling, the moisture subtly ionised by Dad’s grudging pleasure in the song.

  There came a day when I caught him whistling bits of the tune. Dad’s was a generation of whistlers. They whistled when they were cheerful and also when they weren’t. They whistled their way into the War, and those who came back were still whistling, when it ended, with a fair approximation of nonchalance.

  In later life they whistled as they washed the car, as they tidied the tools in the shed, and on their way to the funerals of their contemporaries, though it was always considered poor form to reproduce much in the way of a tune. And now Dad, despite himself, was whistling a song he wanted to hate. I looked enquiringly at him, hoping he would admit to liking and enjoying something that we all loved, but he didn’t respond. It would be too much of a loss of face to come clean and admit that not all songs with guitars in them were infantile rubbish. That would mean, somehow, that we had won, if he ever admitted he was just as much seduced by this luminous summer anthem as anyone else.

  Intolerable coffee please

  There was a similar pattern of behaviour on the rare occasions we went to a restaurant for any sort of celebration meal. Dad would start to rally his troops immediately after pudding, and I would ask, ‘Can we have some coffee, please Dad?’

  ‘No point, John,’ he would say. ‘We’ll have it at home where they know how to make it. Everyone knows the coffee here is intolerable.’

  ‘Have you tasted it yourself?’

  ‘I expect so.’ Dad didn’t enjoy telling actual lies, untruths without any blurring at their edges. He didn’t have much of a gift for equivocation, come to that. He was a little better at changing the subject, but I was too fast for him.

  ‘Try to remember. Have you had the coffee here?’

  He looked at the corner of the room. ‘Possibly not.’

  ‘Then how do you know it’s so bad?’

  ‘Experience and common sense.’

  ‘It isn’t experience if you haven’t experienced it, and it can’t be common sense if it’s not sensible.’

  ‘It seems I must order some intolerable coffee in order to pander to the prejudices of my son.’

  ‘Yes please, Dad.’

  ‘Waiter! I’d like a cup of your’ – the next word was mumbled – ‘intolerable coffee, please.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Right away.’

  When it arrived he took a small sip. ‘What’s it like, Dad?’

  ‘Worst coffee I ever tasted.’

  ‘Are you going to leave it, then?’

  ‘Certainly not. Senseless waste. Now put a cork in it, John. Can’t a man have a little peace in which to try not to taste his intolerable cup of coffee?’

  When he had finished the cup he made a final pronouncement: ‘Positively the worst cup of coffee I ever drank or even heard of. Do you want some?’

  ‘Yes please, Dad.’ Of course it was delicious. But he’d already given the game away by the way he relaxed as the coffee got to work on him. His look was almost dreamy.

  He wasn’t trying to be difficult. No one enjoys seeing a fixed idea go up in smoke, an axiom torpedoed. I think it gave him physical pain to change his mind.

  Dad got his little bit of revenge for ‘Good Vibrations’ by commandeering the record player himself, and putting on his own favourite song again and again. Not anything by Eartha Kitt, in fact (perhaps he was more fascinated by the singer than the songs) but a song from a film – ‘Moon River’ from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The song wasn’t a single but a track on an album (of Andy Williams singing songs from films), so Dad had to keep returning the needle to the right place on the record by hand, instead of letting it find its own way to the beginning of the song again, as Peter did when he left the repeat lever in the up position. ‘Moon River’ is a nice enough song, and I was quite likely to find myself humming its tune, but it never saturated the garden the way ‘Good Vibrations’ did. It didn’t have the power to charge Mum’s dowsing hand as she picked her herbs, or to make Peter’s chest-expanding exercises keep time with its beat (it didn’t really have one). After a while Dad would tire of re-positioning the needle, and we would hear other classic hits from the Henry Mancini songbook, and when the whole side of the record finished (with ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’) the time was ripe for the Beach Boys to storm the turntable all over again.

  I knew there was a link between ‘Moon River’ and Audrey Hepburn, she being the star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My little sister had been named after that demure goddess, and perhaps the idea had been to align her with certain feminine qualities, with neatness and self-control. If so it hadn’t taken.

  There was a line in ‘Moon River’ which struck me as being as mysterious as anything in ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. The song starts talking about two drifters setting off to see the world. Apparently they’re after the same rainbow’s end, / Waitin’ ’round the bend / My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me …

  What on earth was a ‘huckleberry friend’? I knew that a gooseberry was someone who stopped two people from being together, but as for huckleberry I was stumped. Dad didn’t know either, though he seemed irritated to admit it. Either that or he didn’t want me to know what a huckleberry friend was. Perhaps he was afraid I’d ask where his was, if I knew, or want one of my own.

  2

  Swimming Like a Stone

  There was one little thing I had kept from Marion Wilding during our final confrontation at Vulcan, that parting of the ways over incompatible visions of my future. On that occasion I presented Burnham Grammar School as the answer to a disabled boy’s prayers, a modern building throughly suited to his needs. In fact it wasn’t ideal for a pupil in a wheelchair. Far from ideal. Vulcan had been built as a castle-shaped folly, and was turned into a school for disabled boys in the teeth of its architectural allegiances. Only a tiny lift could be installed, and the inconvenience of this was felt every single day, until the new buildings allowed the dorms to move to the ground floor. Burnham Grammar School wasn’t a folly, but it wasn’t a sensible construction on my terms. Modern, yes, but lacking a lift of any sort, big or small.

  We had been misinformed, before the interview. We had been reassured about the presence of a lift by people in a position to know. I suppose Dad, instead of making the call himself, might have got his secretary to do it (now that he had one) and hadn’t briefed her properly. I can see that happening. Take a letter Miss Smith. Oh, and find a school for my son. Yes, Mr Cromer, right away, sir.

  So when we turned up for the interview the School Secretary was first flustered and then frosty. What business did we have accusing the school of having lifts? Who had made these false claims of suitability? Burnham Grammar Schoo
l was strongly resistant to the needs of the disabled, and gave every sign of being proud of it.

  Mum looked frantically at Dad, who fished a piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘Miss Cornelia Norris from County Hall, High Wycombe, that’s who,’ he said. Surely information supplied by someone called Cornelia Norris could be trusted? – otherwise the whole world was going smash.

  To squash the educational dreams

  Mum backed him up. ‘Miss Norris said there were lifts!’ Between them Mum and Dad chanted this formula three or four times. In their own way they had grasped the basic principle of the mantra. Repetition bringing its own meaning.

  The secretary wasn’t spiritually susceptible to this approach. ‘Miss Norris, whoever she may be, doesn’t know what she’s talking about. There are no lifts on these premises. And never have been.’ As if this might in fact be a standard procedure, removing lifts at short notice so as to squash the educational dreams of the disabled. She stalked off into her office, where we could hear her complaining loudly about parents and education officers, and how fed up she was with the whole bang lot of them.

  I had already seen the steep and terrifying stairs, and I let defeat slide into my heart. The little flame that had been burning there since that miraculous interview at Sidcot School, when I had been accepted with open arms by an institution to which I hadn’t even applied, finally snuffed it. In the case of Sidcot, only Mum and Dad had stood between me and a radiant education, but now they were on my side and still things were hopeless. I felt suddenly tired and said, ‘Can we go now? Let’s not bother to wait around. Complete waste of time.’ I felt rather bitter about it. Dad looked unsure of himself, perhaps because it wasn’t in his nature to leave a meeting without being properly dismissed. No shuffling off, no sneaking away. Then before we had a chance to beat a retreat the secretary came out again, with a rather poisonous smile, and said, ‘Mr Ashford will see you now’.