Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  In any case I rejected the idea that Spanish culture boiled down to this – soup, stamping and savagery. What about St John of the Cross, Cervantes and Lorca? I was particularly attuned to St John of the Cross and the notion of La Noche Oscura del Alma. In Hindu thought, there is a dark night of the soul as wide as the cosmos which lasts a hundred thousand years. There’s a special word for it.

  I could find excuses for Lorca’s bloodlust, but none for Miss Drummond. She never actually praised Franco in class, but said darkly that we shouldn’t believe what we read in the papers. You had to live in a country to know what you were talking about.

  But wasn’t it on Franco’s orders that Lorca was killed? I wasn’t the only one in class to be horrified by Miss Drummond’s enthusiasm for the bull-fight, but when there were muffled protests she told us we were making judgements in ignorance. Anyone who had the courage to attend a bull-fight with an open mind would certainly be converted.

  Miss Drummond’s ears and tail

  When I reported all this to Mrs Adcock, she immediately pulled out her own fighting equipment. A pen and a piece of paper. An envelope and a stamp. The pen in its own way was also a specialised weapon, with a deadly edge.

  ‘I’m going to write to the principal of your college about this,’ she said. She took down the relevant names. With anyone else I might have thought I was being humoured, but I knew Mrs Adcock would make good on her promises. In fact I wasn’t sure whether I wanted this hoo-hah to happen. I had been more or less tortured at CRX and at Vulcan school without mounting any sort of protest. Was I really going to take Miss Drummond to court for her perverted interest in the shedding of ruminant blood? It made more sense to keep my head down and concentrate on my A-level. Unfortunately the slogan ‘anything for a quiet life’ practically guarantees rebirth after rebirth, with no remission from the cycle, so I had to stick to my guns.

  About a week later Mum answered the telephone. It was the principal of the college. When I next came in, would I be kind enough to report to him? He would make sure that Miss Drummond was there also.

  I wasn’t looking forward to the meeting. When I saw Miss Drummond in the corridor she seemed tense and looked dreadful. She had never looked exactly well, even at the beginning of term, but now she looked positively ill. There was no colour in her face at all.

  ‘John,’ she said with false warmth, ‘why on earth didn’t you tell me more clearly about your objections? I would have been happy to explain at greater length if only you had given me the chance. Now you’ve gone and upset an old lady for no reason at all. You shouldn’t be sneaky, John, not go around three corners. If there’s anything you have to say you should just come out with it.’

  The principal behaved in a friendly manner towards me. It took me a little while to realise he wasn’t greatly exercised by the dispute in front of him as a disciplinary matter. He was closer to being an amused spectator than a hanging judge. I started to consider the possibility of giving him something to see.

  I said I did have one question, and the principal said, ‘Go on, then, John. Ask away.’

  ‘Would it be an act of mercy if I broke Miss Drummond’s neck, providing I had been kind enough to break all her fingers and toes slowly first, and as long as thousands of people were watching? Would that be exquisite?’

  Miss Drummond drew in her breath as if she had been slapped. It had been a bit of a mistake for her to have characterised Mrs Adcock as a frail victim. After that she could hardly denounce me as the cat’s-paw and mouthpiece of a vegetarian terrorist, which would have been far more accurate. It was something of a put-up job. I had more or less been coached by Mrs A, though I hadn’t been sure I’d be able to go through with it until the moment I opened my mouth. Now there was nothing very much Miss Drummond could do to regain the initiative. The principal said, ‘We won’t keep you, Miss Drummond. I know you have a class to teach.’ Whether he was letting her off the hook or twisting the knife in the wound I really couldn’t say.

  He seemed quite pleased with the way the meeting had gone. ‘I did enjoy that, I must say, John,’ he said, when we were alone. Possibly Miss Drummond’s Francoist inclinations made her less than popular in the staffroom. ‘It’s certainly made a change from my paperwork, I can tell you. I wish the College could run to a debating team. You could be our secret weapon – though perhaps as a matter of tactics it isn’t necessary to go for the jugular right away. Still, if this had been a bull-fight rather than a battle of wills, the crowd would have been in a tremendous lather and I would be awarding you Miss Drummond’s ears and tail at this very moment.’ This was a rather ugly way of putting it, I thought.

  I’m not sure if it was quite such a brainwave to have locked horns with a teacher and to have humiliated her in front of her boss. I was going to have to turn up to her class for the rest of the year.

  Conversely, she was always going to have to turn up to teach me. After our meeting in the principal’s office she always looked to me as if she had a barbed ceremonial dart (¿a banderilla?) broken off in her shoulder bone, crusted over but throbbing with stale pain every time her heart beat. And all thanks to me. As if it had been all my idea to turn further education into a blood sport.

  I had to learn a new skill as a student, the skill of learning from someone who disliked me and withheld all possibility of rapport. In those lessons I was no more than an academic barge being loaded with heavy pallets of knowledge by a dockside crane which answered in other contexts to the name of Dawn. I have to say, though, that even at her most distant Miss Drummond was a lot more polite than Klaus Eckstein at his most ingratiating. Teachers have different styles, and a casual visitor to her classroom might easily have thought that I was one of the favoured pupils, just as it would have been possible to conclude at Burnham (over hundreds of German lessons) that Eckstein considered me a hateful idiot.

  Death the needful

  Miss Drummond was absolutely in the wrong. I had no doubts about that. But over the course of the year I began to feel a pang of my own, not confined to the shoulder, the ache of pity which she refused to those baffled animals who bled their lives away on the public sand. Perhaps it was even guilt. Miss Drummond wouldn’t stay in the pigeon-hole I assigned her, of spokesman for sadism, shamed and justly routed. She began to take on some aspects of the sacrificial victim, and if that was true then I necessarily departed from my own pigeon-hole, my idea of myself. Everyone considered me innocuous, including me, but here I seemed to have done damage. Could vegetarians really draw blood?

  Mrs Adcock was very sure we had done the right thing. I wondered if there wasn’t some word we could come up with, using our combined lexicographical power, to mean someone who does harm by doing the right thing, a word more nuanced than meddler.

  The year I was studying Spanish and German at High Wycombe Technical College was also the year that Gipsy began to die. When she was a puppy filled to the bubbling brim with energy I was on the very edge of life, ready to be nudged into the next one by illness and pain. Now I was much stronger, leading something relatively close to a normal existence, and she could hardly get up from her basket. If her job was to give me a transfusion of vitality then she had done it outstandingly well, but now she was paying the price for her generosity. Her legs began to pack up.

  She would bark sorrowfully in the night to be let out. In the garden, or so Mum told me, she would expel with difficulty disobliging and desiccated turds. What Mum actually said was, ‘Her poo is all dry, poor love.’

  Gipsy was mortified to be old and helpless. The door was left open at night anyway, except in extreme conditions, but on those stiff legs Gipsy had great difficulty making it to the garden. It went against every fibre of her fur when the next stage came, and Mum had to pick her up and carry her outside to do her unsatisfactory business. A not-large woman carrying a not-small dog. Gipsy had been bought to look after me and to keep Mum sane. She had done both things. She had been a health professional all her life – no wonde
r she was a bad patient, or at least a very sad one. She hated seeing dependency from the other side.

  On the day of my Spanish oral, I finally said to Mum, ‘It’s time to give Mr Ticehurst a call. He needs to do the needful for Gipsy.’ Death the needful. Vets didn’t usually do home visits, even then, but Mr Ticehurst was always happy to come. It was common knowledge that he was having an affair with Isobel Dell – knowledge not confined to that hotbed of secrets, the sewing circle. Her husband was a pilot for BOAC, which meant he was away a lot. So Mr Ticehurst was very willing to turn out on any pretext. He appreciated any legitimate excuse to be in the area, the handy alibi of a house call.

  In a large veterinary practice there is a designated lethalist, and perhaps there are as many children who dream of being lethalists as ones who dream of being regular vets. Mr Ticehurst’s practice wasn’t a large one, and he did the needful for Gipsy. Then he took her body away with him in a carrier bag, and Mum wept. I don’t know why I didn’t, except that I had such a strong joyful sense of the good job Gipsy had done. There’s an assumption that the last incarnation has to be human, that it isn’t possible to have your last rebirth ‘lower down’ in the animal kingdom. I don’t see why that should be set in stone. There should certainly be some exceptional mechanism, just as in sporting events it’s possible in certain circumstances to skip a round. Gipsy deserved a bye, a walk-over.

  I’d never go to sleep until Peter came back from work at the Spade Oak. That night, after Peter had got into bed, I heard dog contentment breathing in the room. That unmistakable grumbling sigh. ‘Is that you, Peter?’ I whispered. ‘No, Jay,’ he whispered back from his bed, ‘isn’t it you?’ No of course it wasn’t. It went on for about a week, and then it stopped, or we stopped being able to hear it. We didn’t tell Mum about it. It’s not as if we were frightened. R.I.P. Gipsy 1953–1970. Good girl.

  Finally I decided it was time to put some more pressure on Dad to make good the promise he had never quite rescinded, the one about subsidised air travel. On previous occasions when I reminded him of his agreement to this plan he would only say, ‘We’ll have to see – won’t we? – when the time comes.’ Now the time had come.

  First I had to decide whether to go through Mum or ask direct. Her Dad-handling skills weren’t altogether reliable, and it wasn’t even certain that she would want to throw her trifling weight behind my plan. In the end I decided to try the direct route, though nothing with Dad was ever all that direct.

  A rather nasty little airline

  He didn’t deny that he’d made some sort of undertaking about helping me to fly somewhere. It was my choice of destination that brought him up short. ‘Madras, John? The place in India? Do you have a death wish? You’ve no idea what would be involved – it’s out of the question. Negative. Can’t allow it.’

  I was twenty years old! It wasn’t a question of his allowing the expedition or not, it was a question of his helping me to get there. Dad had been there himself, shortly after the War, flying emergency blood supplies to hospitals in special tanks in the wings. Fuel capacity had been reduced to make more room for this cargo of mercy, and he had to be careful to fly relatively low, to protect the blood from extremes of pressure and temperature. Then Dad had been an angel with blood in his wings, but with me he was playing a rôle he much preferred – devil’s advocate.

  He had already explained to me the way trade agreements between airlines worked. The child of a BOAC employee under twenty-nine paid only 10% of the normal fare. I knew that 10% of the price of a ticket to India was still quite a bit of money, but I had been saving and was sure I could muster the tithe required.

  Dad abandoned his overall objection to my plan and started to take it apart piece by piece instead. ‘There’s one thing you haven’t thought of, John. BOAC doesn’t fly to Madras. Delhi, yes, but not Madras. So I can’t help you. Too bad. Ask me another.’

  I didn’t see the force of his objection. ‘But you told me about trade agreements … agreements between airlines … ten per cent … child under twenty-nine.’ I could feel my voice trailing away.

  ‘Between normal civilised airlines, yes. But I’m afraid that doesn’t apply in this case. Air India is a rather nasty little airline. They haven’t signed the reciprocal agreements you refer to. Any time we want something from them we have to go cap in hand, and then we get a dusty answer as often as not. Or the beggars want favours in return. So there it is. Negative. And a good thing too, if you ask me. You have no idea what you’d be letting yourself in for, John. Even a flight to Paris would put a big strain on your system.’

  Begging Dad for things had never played much of a part in our relationship, if only because it had a strong tendency to blow up in my face. Now there was no other option. ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘this is very important to me. I want to go to India. I’ll never ask you for anything again.’ I groped for a word that would make it possible for Dad to relent. ‘Couldn’t you have a word with your … oppo … at Air India, please? Perhaps those beggars aren’t as bad as you think. At least give them a chance.’ Oppo was one of Dad’s favourite words. I’m not sure if it’s short for opponent or opposite number, but either way it was an important building block in his mental world. Oppo made much more sense to him than such floating categories as friend or wife. I suppose that’s the Forces mind for you.

  He snorted, all the same, when I used the supposedly magic word. Oppo Sesame it wasn’t, apparently. There was no one at Air India who he could think of in those terms. When he had been in the Air Force during the War he had had oppos in the Luftwaffe, but Air India were untouchables to a man, pi-dogs not to be petted.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve thought about who would put you up in those parts, John. What makes you think you’d be welcome in the first place?’

  Like a lawyer I had prepared paperwork to support my case. I showed him a letter from the ashram saying that any devotee of Ramana Maharshi was more than welcome to stay there. Could I inform them of my dates of arrival and departure? Signed by a Mr V. Ganesan, MA. I had flung an airmail letter blindly at the subcontinent, with nothing to guide it but the words ‘Ramana Maharshi’s Ashram, Tiruvannamalai, Southern India’. Indian postmen were obviously mystics to a man. Theirs is an inherently contemplative occupation – postmen have so much time to think their own thoughts.

  Dad must have mentioned my crazy scheme to Mum, because she told me she’d put in a good word on my behalf. With any luck Dad would talk to the relevant person at Air India, whether oppo or beggar and renegade. Mum rather spoiled the effect of her intervention by saying, ‘I said to Dad, “If we don’t at least try, we’ll never hear the end of it – you know what he’s like.”’ They knew what I was like! That was the whole trouble – they did and I didn’t. Wanting to find out was my reason for going to India in the first place.

  To John o’Groats for a pint of milk

  Dad phoned and made an appointment with a Mr Dalal, the head of the nasty little airline’s beggarly London office. ‘Dalal’ – the name itself seemed to stick in his throat. Then Mum wanted more details. ‘Why do you want to go to this place anyway? To Madras?’

  ‘Not Madras, that’s just the nearest airport. I’m going to Tirunavannamalai.’

  ‘Heavens, that’s a bit of a mouthful. Where’s that and what’s there?’

  ‘It’s a hundred or so miles from Madras, and my guru is there.’

  ‘Is that like a Maharajah – I mean a Maharishi?’

  ‘My guru is the path I follow.’

  ‘But you don’t have to go all the way to India, do you? I mean, the Beatles had a – a guru, didn’t they? A Maharishi Yogi something. And they went to see him in Wales, I think. Bangor, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes they did. But then they went to India. And my guru has never been to Wales, or anywhere outside India, all right, Mum?’

  ‘Keep your shirt on, John, I’m just trying to understand.’ Trying to understand, possibly. Trying to suggest I was planning an unnecessar
ily elaborate trip, certainly. As if I was dead set on driving to John o’Groats to pick up a pint of milk.

  All I could do was to impress on Mum the importance of certain words. I was sure that any right-thinking Indian would respond to my quest if it was presented in the proper language. ‘Make sure that Dad says I’m a devotee making a pilgrimage. “Devotee” and “pilgrimage”. Those are the words that will do the trick.’

  Hearing the words pilgrim and devotee applied to me, even if it was only by my own voice, changed things for me. I grew to fit these new clothes. I liked myself in them, and seemed to recognise this person. The mental mirror showed me an image which did not estrange.

  Mum wasn’t sure that Dad would stick to the script, and I had doubts of my own. I’d sent him off to Palm Beach Casino with strict instructions, and what had he come back with? A weekend job driving a van, that’s what.

  I just had to keep my head down and hope that he would bring it off. Mum said, ‘I talked to Dad and he says he’ll ask nicely, but he won’t do any more than that. He says he won’t kowtow.’

  Kowtow. Another trigger word, this one with a wartime origin. The Japanese weren’t content with surrender, they demanded this humiliating gesture of submission. Unfortunately Dad’s idea of kowtowing overlapped with many people’s idea of being polite.

  On the day of the meeting with Mr Dalal, Mum and I were both very unsettled. Peter suggested taking me for a walk before his shift at the Spade Oak, but I couldn’t imagine leaving the house. I was much more tense than I had ever been waiting for exam results. This felt much more important, far more of a turning point.