Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Mr Ashford was much more friendly, but also a little dismayed at what we’d been told by Miss Cornelia Norris. He was tall and lean, and he had a distant look in his eyes, something which reminded me of the co-principal of Vulcan School, Alan Raeburn. Perhaps it’s a common ophthalmic feature of teachers, produced by a mixture of concentration and vagueness, and the constant repetition required by the rôle.

  All tint seemed to be fading from Mr Ashford’s face, more or less as we watched. His hair was greying and his eyes were grey already. ‘It’s a puzzle, certainly. However … one thing we do have is plenty of boys.’ He said it again, seemingly pleased. ‘No shortage of boys.’ I thought this was a rather tactless thing to say – if the school had plenty of boys, why would they want another one, let alone a boy who was lost without a lift?

  He meant something different from that. He meant that boys in bulk would stand in for the missing mechanism. The school had plenty of boys, and the boys would carry me up and down stairs. Two at the back of the wheelchair, two at the front. If by some misfortune the boys carrying me lost their grip then other boys, below me on the stairs, would perform an equally valuable service by breaking my fall, whether they saw me coming or not. Some girls might end up acting as shock absorbers too, since the school was co-educational.

  ‘Do you see?’ asked Mr Ashford, with a prim small smile. ‘The more that fall over lower down on the stairs, the greater will be the cushioning effect. They won’t all fall over and tumble down, will they? It’s elementary physics, and common sense.’

  It was lunacy. It was the antipodes of common sense. Each of us individually may have had doubts about the wisdom of the proposed system – me, Mum, Dad and perhaps even Mr Ashford – but as a collective we voted for it unanimously. Legally the arrangement must have been very precarious. If anything went wrong, if I was dropped and damaged, then there wouldn’t be enough lawyers in the world to break the school’s fall. Nothing similar would be contemplated for a moment now.

  Lawsuit virus

  The craze for litigation, though, had not yet hit these islands. In those days hardly anyone went to law no matter what injury was done them. People trapped under fallen masonry apologised for being a nuisance, signing away their rights with whichever hand was the less damaged. Perhaps the lawsuit virus was actually carried by that other invader, the American grey squirrel. Too late to eradicate it now.

  Though I had doubts about the viability of the method of porterage and mass human-cushioning proposed by Mr Ashford, it wasn’t that I was sentimental about lifts. I can’t say I ever cared for them much as gadgets. In every lift I’ve ever tried to enter there’s been a cheery chappy who says with a grin, ‘Room inside for a littl’un,’ when there patently isn’t. Perhaps it’s always the same man. I may be a littl’un, but when you factor in the wheelchair and (let’s hope) the someone to push it, it’s more of a littl’untourage. And then I’m perfectly placed, in terms of level, to catch the farts that seem to be forced out of people by the movement of the lift. Is it to do with the change of air pressure, or perhaps a side-effect of claustrophobia?

  The full address of Burnham Grammar School was Hogfair Lane, Burnham, Slough. The street name referred to some ancient livestock market, I dare say, but it seemed appropriate enough. We were both taking on something unknown, the school and I, both buying a pig in a poke. On my first day at the school I turned up in the wheelchair. With my McKee pins working smoothly I could now sit down in a wheelchair reasonably convincingly. What I couldn’t do, as it turned out, was stay in place while the chair was carried up or down stairs. I perched stably enough for life on the flat but not for the amateurish toting of my peers.

  That first day was nightmarish. They couldn’t keep the wheelchair level, and if it tipped I would be tipped out, and then the boys and girls who broke my fall would break me in the process. Seat belts hadn’t been thought of for wheelchairs back then – they had hardly been thought of for cars. After the first frightening day I had to regress from the Wrigley to a more primitive style of vehicle, back into the prehistoric phase of my life on four wheels. The Tan-Sad invalid carriage from long ago was dusted off – quite literally. I remember Mum disinterring it from the shed and flapping her duster at it in dismay.

  One step forward and one step back. Not much of a dance, but that seemed to be what my karma had choreographed for me. I was now independent, in the sense that I was receiving a mainstream education for the first time in my whole life. In other ways I needed more help than I had for quite some time.

  I had struggled over the mountains of Vulcan to find myself stuck on a plateau. The Tan-Sad symbolised this predicament – and no one wants to spend his schooldays travelling between classes in a symbol. The Tan-Sad’s wheels were fixed, so it couldn’t turn corners. It was less steerable than a supermarket trolley, though its wheels didn’t squeak. Its great advantage was that it had a broad footplate and so wouldn’t tip me out – but it was very unwieldy, and far too heavy to be punted along by a crutch or a cane like a wheelchair. I would always need to be pushed on school premises. No more self-locomotion. No more privacy, or to put it more positively, no more solitude.

  I needed to be lifted in and out of the Tan-Sad, like a baby with its pram, a demotion I felt keenly. I wanted a deepened style of relationship here in the mainstream, based on more than wheelchairs passing in the night. So much for being in the swim of a normal education. Already I felt to be swimming like a stone.

  Sea of boys

  And yet in general terms the mad scheme worked. I never came to serious harm, though the experience of being carried could be terrifying. I got a few knocks from such accidents and I’m sure I dealt out plenty more, but the sea of boys always broke my fall. Ashford was right. They didn’t all go tumbling in their turn. Enough hands reached instinctively for banisters to stabilise the toppling tower. Massed pupils acted as a wildly laughing safety-net whenever the Tan-Sad broke loose from its bearers. For everyone but me it was fun and a break from routine, something that schoolchildren crave more than anything. Since then, whenever I see pop concerts on television where the singers dive ecstatically into the audience it reminds me of my schooldays, although it was never by choice that I surfed the crowd in my trundling chariot.

  I had been pushed around in the Tan-Sad for years as a child, feeling both conspicuous and invisible, but the new routine made a difference. I was much more self-conscious, of course, as a teenager who was only on those premises because of his fixed desire to be independent. There was another element in play, though. Partly it was the number of people helping, but mainly of course the change of level, the element of laborious lifting, which added something almost ceremonial to my progress from floor to floor. Sometimes when I arrived safely on a landing, and my helpers set me down, there would be a little ripple of applause from the other pupils, as if I had done something remarkable, and though this was nonsense still it made people look at me differently. Naturally the cheers were louder when I was almost dropped, but there was a stubborn feeling of carnival even without a near-disaster.

  At the end of each schoolday the Tan-Sad was left in the hall of the school. I would be reunited with it the next morning before assembly, without much rejoicing.

  Assembly took place in the big hall. There was a hymn, accompanied on the piano by a plump little lady with a fixed smile, though the minority of pupils who made any noise at all conspired to slow the music right down, stripping it of the slightest claim to forward motion. Roll-call, which was held in the classroom, had a strange element of apartheid. The school was co-educational but not exactly equal in its treatment of the sexes.

  The rule was that boys would be called by their surnames, and girls by their first names. The intonations were different too, gruff and challenging for the boys, tender and sweet for the girls. So it would be brusque, denunciatory ‘Adams!’ for Peter Adams and murmured tentative ‘Julie?’ for Julie Chandler. A name like ‘Valerie’ became filigree on the lips of so
me of the teachers. Valerie was well on her way to becoming a mythological figure. Positively a dryad of Slough.

  Even at this late stage of normal education, it seemed that girls were made of sugar and spice (and all things nice), boys of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. This piece of symbolic theatre was repeated at the beginning of every school day, with girls being cooed over as if they were unique and fragrant blooms, boys marked down as bleak little blobs, no improvement on the fathers whose names they were made to answer to.

  Mothering at a lower voltage

  Girls were nicer than boys, then. It was official, and perhaps it was even true. Certainly the girls of the school were franker and warmer in their approaches to me – but I was never willingly going to be mothered again. And as far as I could see, sistering was just mothering at a lower voltage. I knew from my years at CRX how easy it was to become an honorary girl, and it wasn’t going to happen again. Once in an incarnation was plenty.

  Little chatty groups of girls came over to cultivate me. No one quite dared to come alone – but the boys were much less enterprising. Boys were very happy to push or carry the Tan-Sad, and perhaps they had some limited opportunities to spy on me, but I noticed that every now and then a boy would be despatched to ask the girls for information, to find out what I had said and what I might turn out to be like.

  There were disordered refinements to the hateful system of rollcall. If two girls had the same Christian name, then one of them would be set apart with a diminutive, so that there might be one Jane and one Janie. If two boys had the same last name, their first initials would be used to distinguish them, but it would be snarled rather than neutrally spoken. The same lips which shaped ‘Valerie’ so tenderly that you could almost feel the floaty fabric of her dress spat out the initials as though they were bitter pips. The discrimination of tone became extreme when two boys made the blunder of having the same last name and the same initial as well. So it was ‘Savage, Paul!’ and ‘Savage, Patrick!’ spoken with a sort of rage, barely suppressed. How dare twins share an initial on top of everything else! It was asking for trouble.

  On my first day I was upset at hearing my surname barked out so baldly. The rasping double consonant at the beginning of Cromer suddenly seemed tailor-made for parade-ground abuse.

  Ideally I would have reformed the system, but it was more practical to gain exemption from it. I vowed I would become John in the school universally, first in class and then at roll-call. This was a strictly limited blurring of the boundaries: I wanted my name read out at roll-call in the female style, but my interest wasn’t in androgyny, only special treatment.

  I exploited the physical characteristics of the Tan-Sad, and the way it shaped my encounters with others. If I spoke softly, people had to lean over it to hear me, and then the charm could flow at full pressure. I learned how to sweep even teachers off their feet with the water cannon of intimacy. By the third week every teacher except Mr Jardine was calling me John, and I became John to him by the start of the next term. Only the horrendous Mr Waller stood firm in the face of sentimental pressure. Mr Waller was immune to every strain of personality magic I could come up with. He once logged a formal complaint against me for wearing a coloured shirt. I was the only pupil whose shirts had to be specially made, but I was allowed no compensating fun. It’s not as if adhering to the letter of the uniform code would help me blend in.

  Of course there was something ridiculous about my quest for Christian-name status at roll-call. For years I had been fighting to be treated as a normal boy, but the moment there was any danger of it happening I threw myself into a campaign for exceptional status.

  The day I was called ‘John’ at roll-call at last, I couldn’t stop smiling. I would never be filigree Valerie, but I was no longer denounced as Cromer. I was worming my way into the heart of the place.

  Burnham Grammar School gave me what I wanted in the way of education. I don’t necessarily mean that it was an educational hothouse, although I have no complaints. The hothouse doesn’t suit every plant. The great thing was that Burnham really was a school – a school and only a school. It wasn’t anything else in disguise. That was what I wanted. After so much time spent at schools that were really hospitals, or converted tennis courts, or folly-castles, it felt thrilling and holy to be going to a school that was only a school. A school disguised as a school! Glorious double-bluff. To be absorbing knowledge in a building designed, however unambitiously, for that purpose and no other.

  I thought, back then, that each phase of my life would make a clean break with the last. In that respect I was like an ignorant student of history, imagining that everyone woke up Victorian one day in 1838. In fact the phases were anything but distinct, with much continuity across alleged ruptures. My ramshackle vehicle trundled across every seeming abyss.

  In Hindu iconology there’s an image, called the Nataraja, of Shiva dancing in an aureole of flames. His left leg is elegantly, forcefully raised. There are two technical terms attached to this image, Lasya and Tandava. Lasya describes the gentle side of Shiva’s dancing, Tandava its savagely violent aspect. One style corresponds to creation, the other to destruction. I expect lesser gods are also involved. Hinduism has a crowded cosmology, and there’s always room for one more on the casting couch.

  It stands to non-reason that creation and destruction are always converging and swapping places – that’s what makes it a dance! Dualistic thinking is hard to shake off for anyone brought up on it, but with a little practice the gates of logic come off their hinges and then at last I believe in God the Either, God the Or and God the Holy Both.

  At Burnham Grammar I had everything I could possibly want, in terms of visual display. I could see something which I had been missing time out of mind. Horseplay – a sacred thing to me, almost. I couldn’t exactly take part in the rough life I watched, but I was sustained by it. Watching was my part in it. I coveted an unruliness I couldn’t muster myself, yet I didn’t feel excluded. It flowed through me as well as around me. I experienced it as a reconnection. After years in which I never made and hardly saw an action that wasn’t carefully considered, I could watch my fellows every day running riot in the spontaneity of their bodies. My eyes filled up with the sights I craved, and my ears were gloriously assaulted by the bedlam din of play.

  Cantering compound beast

  I was fascinated by the way the boys moved. I loved the frantic shuffle they used when they were late for a lesson but in full view of a master who would tell them off for running. I could see boys dashing along a corridor and turning a corner at full tilt, sliding and scrambling on the polished floor like unshod skaters but somehow not coming to grief – coming to joy, rather. I could watch a boy run down a corridor and leap without warning on another’s back. The other boy might stagger, might let out a shout of protest, but instead of collapsing and crying for medical help, as was his right, this victim would grasp his attacker under the thighs and turn assault into piggy-back, sometimes setting off at a canter as a compound beast in search of further collisions, charging with raucous laughter into the ranks of jeering infantry. Cautionary bellows from the staff seemed to be a necessary ingredient of the scene. The uproar would have been much more subdued without their contribution, increasing the pressure of high spirits by keeping the lid on. All this was what made normal education so special.

  Mobility is wasted on the able-bodied, just as youth is wasted on the young, which is exactly the way it should be. Even at slower speeds, I saw with wonder that able-bodied boys of my age didn’t walk with the scrupulous poise they might have been taught by physios. They took orthodox posture for granted and experimented with every possible variation and perversion on it. They would stand for long minutes at a time on the outside edges of their feet. They would scuff their shoes with every step, taking revenge on their parents for buying footwear which had to renounce any claim to fashionability if it was to qualify as smart enough for school. A flapping sole or a heel entirely worn down o
n one side was an achievement rather than a disaster. Part of me was horrified by this abuse of shoes, part of me was thrilled.

  Some boys walked without touching their heels to the ground for more than a fraction of a second, balanced always on the balls of their feet, though I had no way of knowing if this was an affected showing-off gait which they abandoned when no one was looking. It’s never a walking style you see on women, or on men over about thirty. Does that mean that gradually the period of heel contact extends, as the burdens of life increase, until one day that forward bounce congeals into a trudge like anyone else’s?

  Compared to the way things were at Vulcan, the caste system at Burnham was simple. I existed at the same distance from everyone else in my year, a greater but still uniform distance from anyone above or below me in the school. It puzzled me for a while that an asthmatic boy in my year was treated as if he was made of glass, when I was used to asthmatics as the supermen of Vulcan School, but I soon got used even to that.

  After the first week or so, Savage, Paul and Savage, Patrick, identical twins, more or less monopolised the job of Tan-Sad command. This was unofficial but became a recognised thing. It became their job to manhandle my vintage wagon, recruiting assistants as necessary, and to make sure there was always the required sea of boys beneath me on the stairs in case of a slip-up. I assume they elected themselves for the task by virtue of being a team, ready-made. They had shown their affinity for each other by choosing the same womb, and they coördinated their duties with confidence and even panache.

  For the first half of the first term, I found it impossible to tell which Savage was which, but after that I was amazed that anyone could ever muddle them up. There was a period when I got confused if I saw only their backs, but that soon cleared up, and soon I could recognise them from any angle. They were identical twins who didn’t look a bit alike, once you could see it.