Mum gave a little sigh of exasperation at her son’s intransigence or (giving her the benefit of the doubt) the intransigence her husband and her first-born seemed to share. Mum had never got round to reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or she would have realised that the resemblance was purely coincidental.
To my face Dad was more politic. ‘Look here, Chicken,’ he said, ‘Mum and I both admire you for standing up for what you believe in. We’re only asking you both to vote, to show you’re adult by exercising this privilege. We would never try to tell you how you should vote. That’s not the point. It’s the voting that counts. How you vote is entirely your affair and nothing to do with either of us.
‘Naturally, if you wished to show a little solidarity with your parents and the cause of common sense in the face of the current countrywide opportunity to make a stand, by voting for the Conservatives, we would feel gratified. It would also not go amiss with Muriel’s sewing class. There are rumours that you’re going to the bad, what with your vegetarian crusades – giving teachers at your college an earful about bull-fights and what-not – and Mum could do with something positive to report. Anyway, as I said, it’s the voting that counts. Where you make your mark is entirely a matter for your conscience.’
On the day itself Dad gave me a ten-bob note, telling me that Peter could push me to the polling station, and we could stop off at Thorne’s Stores in the village. I could buy a strawberry Mivvi and Peter could have some ham, freshly sliced. ‘Tell him he can eat it just as it is, with no bread, no roll, nothing like that. I know he loves to eat it that way. I’d be grateful, though, if he didn’t actually cram it into his mouth straight from the slicer, though I know he would given half a chance. At least let the shopkeeper put it in a bag! Otherwise it’s Liberty Hall … just don’t tell your mother.’
It was strange that Dad gave the instructions to me rather than Peter, who was so much more likely to follow them. Dad must have thought, after the procurement of a first-class return ticket to Madras, that his secular authority was beyond question, but I couldn’t let even gratitude sell me down the river. I had a duty to thwart him.
The taste of corruption
Don’t tell your mother. This warning didn’t apply to Dad’s undermining of democratic process, which was blatant and undisguised, but to his giving permission for Peter to eat ham publicly in a vulgar style, news of which might also get back to Mum’s sewing circle, the way everything else in the proximate cosmos seemed to.
The Cromer brothers arrived at the polling station with the taste of corruption on their lips, animal-salty in Peter’s case, dairy-sweet in mine. After we had established our identities Peter tried to push me over to the polling booth, but we were intercepted. It wouldn’t be right for Peter, under cover of giving help, to see how his brother cast his vote. Inwardly I chuckled – the authorities being so concerned with the little proprieties, while substantial wrongdoing was taking place beneath their very noses! I was pushed to the booth by an official who helped me stand, so that I could reach the voting surface, where I would make my crucial mark with a stubby pencil on a string, and then turned his back theatrically, as if we were playing a children’s game of some kind – Elector’s Footsteps, perhaps. Pin the Tail on the Candidate.
When we got home there was no formal debriefing, though Dad certainly wanted to know how the virgin voters had ‘got on’. I assured him that the day’s Mivvi had been particularly delicious, and Peter loudly sang the praises of fresh-sliced ham. Thanks, Dad!
More information was required. Though Dad had announced it was none of his concern how we would vote, it was a different matter when we had actually expressed our preference in the matter of national politics. The moment the deed was done any privacy was forfeit.
‘Do you want to tell me how you voted, boys? Not that it’s any of my business.’
‘Conservative, Dad!’ sang out Peter.
‘Good lad. John?’
‘Labour, Dad.’
‘Labour?’
With that stubby little pencil I had pierced him to the heart. I had refused to support the powers of light against darkness. Dad gave a sort of growl, and though he didn’t lay a hand on me he came close. He grasped the handles of the wheelchair and pushed me roughly to my bedroom in disgrace, muttering, ‘You can stew in your own juice, you little turncoat!’ Peter had left the brakes of the wheelchair locked, and Dad had to wrestle to get it in motion. For a long moment his rage discharged electrically through the chair. It was a close thing. If the wheelchair hadn’t had rubber tyres I might have been cooked by that human lightning.
The whole adventure was thoroughly satisfactory. My period of house arrest as a class traitor would have been more arduous if the side door, which had a ramp installed for my benefit, hadn’t been wide open as usual throughout.
As it turned out the next day, Mr Heath turfed Mr Wilson out of Downing Street even without the help I had been supposed to give him, but that wasn’t the point. The point was probity, even if Peter and I defined that notion differently. He had retained his integrity despite the ham because he had been going to vote Conservative all along, while my conscience was easy as long as I hadn’t done what Dad wanted.
Our votes cancelled each other out, of course, so Dad had spent his ten shillings for nothing. If he hadn’t intervened in the first place, Mr Heath (or strictly speaking our local Tory candidate) would have had one more vote under his belt. All Dad had accomplished was the transfer of a Mivvi and a few ounces of ham from a deep freeze and a fridge respectively into the digestive systems of his sons. Dad was indeed a master conjuror and manipulator, a wizard of action at a distance, but only when dealing with grocery items on a small scale.
I hadn’t really changed my thinking about politics, and I wasn’t entirely motivated by the desire to get one over on Dad. I merely applied the teachings of Ramana Maharshi to the question. If a dream hunger requires a dream food then a dream election deserves a dream vote, and it certainly shouldn’t be a cheaply corrupt one. You couldn’t accuse Dad of losing his touch with his sons, since he had never set out to cultivate such a thing. But he might have chosen slightly more adult bribes if he wanted to suborn us. Show some respect!
A few days later the precarious equilibrium of my pilgrimage arrangements was upset all over again. One morning there was a knock at the door. Mum went into the hall wearing the cat. This was a fairly new arrival, a neutered male called Sultan – Mum left females alone but had males briskly disarmed, exercising summary powers in this area uniquely. Sultan liked to drape himself round her shoulders like a stole, even while she was doing the washing-up, his tail slowly lashing with contentment. I could hear a low murmur of voices, then a double thump as Mum brushed Sultan off her shoulders. Apparently this was too serious a conversation to be shared with a living fur stole. Or with me.
Once again there was a huddle and a confab just inside the front door, whispers and mysteries. This time it wasn’t Dad and Mum who were talking but I soon recognised the intonations of the new arrival. It was Pheroza Tucker, an Indian lady from the other end of the Abbotsbrook Estate.
Sultan came in to me in the kitchen, rather put out, but I set my stick at an angle to debar him from the consolation of my lap. Cats are too proud to sulk, but he wasn’t pleased with the turn of the day. Meanwhle I tried to tune in to the hushed voices inside the front door.
Ominous snatches of sense
Being excluded from conversations is bad for the character. It makes you construct conversations in your mind that would justify your being excluded. Plans to put something in your tea and be shot of you for good.
The murmurs in the hall yielded ominous snatches of sense – ‘What a blow for his hopes’, ‘How am I supposed to tell him?’, ‘Best just to come out with it.’ ‘I’d ask you in for a cup of tea, but I’ll have to break the news to His Nibs.’ I had a right to hear all this at first hand. It was humiliating to be on the edges of something which clearly concerned me first
and foremost. I suppose I could have sidled into the hall, but sidling isn’t really a strong point, and it would have been the work of a moment for Mum and her visitor to step out of the front door and frustrate me again. If I sidled implacably on, they had only to float off into the depths of the garden.
At last the front door closed, and Pheroza was gone. It seems a little strange, looking back, that I took so little interest in an Indian neighbour and family friend. But I knew that Pheroza was a Parsee – who had married out of her religion – rather than a Hindu, without knowing exactly what a Parsee was. It’s almost as if I was being protected from distraction. If I’d known more about the Parsees and their rituals, who knows what might have happened? There’s fire involved in much Hindu observance, but nothing that can hold a candle to Zoroastrianism, where even the place of worship is called a fire temple. My pyrolatry might have become dangerously inflamed. It’s odd to think I had so little interest in India outside the life and teaching of Ramana Maharshi.
When Mum came into the kitchen I pretended to be taken up with Sultan, chiding him for the sour mood to which I had contributed. She stood behind me and I could hear the crackle of a newspaper with an unfamiliar smell. She took a breath and passed it to me at last, appropriately folded. It was the Times of India. The death of Arthur Osborne was announced, not in a small advertisement but in an article on the front page. The headline described him as ‘a good friend of India’.
She waited for me to read it and meekly asked, ‘What will you do?’ If her first reaction had been relief, at the prospect of such a body blow to my trip, she was politic enough to leave it in the hall.
What would I do? I didn’t know. I would go anyway and take my chances, I supposed. Or turn my face to the wall.
That evening I watched Mum as she wrote a letter on her beloved headed notepaper. Sultan was keeping to the garden, and a different animal member of the household was seizing its chance, a yellow bird without a name. I don’t know why the naming mechanism broke down. Normally the name is the first thing you think of.
The bird without a name perched on the end of the pen while Mum wrote her letter. There was nothing she could do to get rid of it – she would literally throw it away, pick it up and throw it across the room, and it would always come fluttering back while she muttered ‘Shoo!’
There’s a lot of Mum in that sequence of actions. Who taught the bird dependence in the first place? What right did Mum have to pretend that she didn’t want it hanging on her every move? She could only go through the motions of rejection because she knew the returning instinct had been instilled almost on the molecular level. Mum would only risk throwing something away that would come right back. That’s where I was letting her down, but of course I was following a family pattern myself. Dad, if he needed her, never said so or showed it, which trapped her in her turn. If either of us had clung to Mum she might have found something else to do with herself than look after us. In the meantime she had Audrey, whose clinging was a stranglehold.
Seeming-I is as-it-were sorry
Vasanas to the left of us, vasanas to the right of us. It’s hard to see the road for the ruts. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that there is any road apart from the ruts.
I had a letter of my own to write, expressing my sorrow to Mrs Arthur Osborne (Lucia). I felt I had to make the effort, though there were daunting obstacles. It was a sort of triple jump of condolence. On top of the foredoomed inadequacy of any attempt to express grief on paper there was the fact of my never having met either party, neither the bereaved nor the deceased. Then there was the faith we all shared, with its withholding of importance equally from birth and death.
My first draft had no spiritual underpinning. To boil it down: I’m sorry for your loss. My second attempted to go a little deeper beneath the surfaces of things. Baldly: ‘Seeming-I is as-it-were sorry for seeming-you’s apparent loss.’ I read over it and gave it the lowest possible marks, then went back to the first version. Again Peter escorted me to the postbox. There were some messages I didn’t altogether trust Mum to transmit – at least without scrawling Please if you have any pity in you discourage my deluded boy on the back of the envelope. Then all I could do was wait and hope for deliverance. The time of my flight was coming near, and I didn’t want to be left to the mercies of the road, which refuses no one and by the same logic welcomes no one either.
Meanwhile a window was mysteriously left open by Audrey, and that was the last we knew of the bird with no name. I suppose Audrey may have been jealous of Mum’s bird, at some level, but it’s also true that the namelessness didn’t help. Of course we’re none of us real, and names are no less unreal, but having a name does seem to keep us going, doesn’t it?
With Sultan Audrey tried a charm offensive. Her philosophy was that you could make any creature love you if you set your mind to it, by grabbing and smothering if need be. Mum would sometimes give Sultan orders to stay on Audrey’s bed till she fell asleep. Sultan would do it, but you could feel every feline fibre straining to be gone. Every pet we ever had was wary of Audrey, perhaps knowing things we didn’t.
Two days before the date of my flight, when Mum had cried all the tears she had in her and Dad had taken to leaving travel brochures for Paris around, remarking (as if casually) that the lifts on the Eiffel Tower went right the way to the top, a letter came from Mrs Osborne. I hadn’t managed to strike the right note when I tried to write a Hindu letter of condolence to Mrs Osborne, but her reply had perfect pitch. She said that she would have learned nothing from Ramana Maharshi if she let the shedding of an old coat get in the way of welcoming a fellow devotee.
The arrangements could stand. There was a place made ready for me thousands of miles from home, and I was expected by strangers I loved already. Of course if life and death don’t qualify as real, then family has quite a nerve to make such claims on us,. It’s only common sense that the family you choose outranks the one you were given.
3
Guest of the Mountain
I was taking a leap in the dark, the enlightening dark, in a body ill suited to any sort of run-up. A solo trip to India was a fairly adventurous thing for anyone to do in 1970, but my case was almost insanely bold. Over the years I had moved from a hospital to a special school and then to a normal one. With each successive change of address I had whittled away at the elaborateness of the infrastructure that was needed to support me. In India I would have absolutely nothing familiar to rely on. I would be travelling on a wing (two wings, thanks to Air India, and First Class wings at that) and a prayer. At Burnham Grammar School my falls had been cushioned by willing helpers, and India was even more richly supplied with personnel – but it seemed foolish to expect the entire population to act as ramshackle shock-absorbers protecting me from the impact of so much difference.
I had decided on five weeks as the right period for my pilgrimage. It was a length of time which would allow me a full month of devotion in Tamil Nadu, the Indian state where Ramana Maharshi had lived and died, with half a week at each end of that to recover from arriving, and to prepare myself for departure.
I’m good at packing. Packing for me is something that takes place on a piece of paper, where I list objects and actions as precisely as possible. The satisfaction only begins to leak out of the process when I have to pass the list over to someone else – to Mum, in this period, for the executive stage of packing, the actual gathering and encasing of possessions.
At that point you might think my involvement in packing was over, but not so. That’s when I have to maintain the greatest vigilance. Otherwise when the case is opened at the other end of a journey there are extensive omissions, bonuses and maddening bits of improvisation. When my outrage is reported back to the executive I never get a more satisfactory response than I couldn’t see what you wanted with X or You can’t have too many Ys. I have to anticipate the perverse algebra of the proxy packer, complicated in this case by the fanciful travel priorities of a virtual agoraphobic.
There was a certain amount of worldly advice current about what to take with you to India, things which were scarce there, and consequently better than hard currency – bottles of whisky and razor blades. I wasn’t going to be able to be my own porter, but even so, travelling light was part of my agenda. Travelling light was an admirable goal in itself, even if Dad, the family’s supreme exponent of the art, sometimes came close to showing off. He had arrived in Tanganyika once with all his possessions (toothbrush, flannel, razor) rolled in a towel under his arm.
The bottles disqualified themselves immediately, but I dare say I could have managed some razor blades – except that a pilgrim doesn’t bring contraband or even legitimate wares. A pilgrim brings only his submission to the sacred, and I refused to be canny or self-serving on this devotional journey.
Mrs Osborne had given the travelling-light agenda a wonderful boost by saying that I should bring a single change of clothes and no more. That was all I would need. There wasn’t much Mum could do to overrule such a definitive pronouncement. I took with me a suitcase to go in the hold of the aeroplane, and a carrier bag which would hang on the crutch when I walked. The carrier bag held crucial objects like my flannel, tooth-cleaning equipment, bum-wiper, passport and traveller’s cheques. By now I had developed considerable expertise with the bum-snorkel, to the point where I could do a better job using remote-control toilet paper origami than any nurse who had looked after me at CRX, or any helper at Hephaistos. Have snorkel, will travel. I would have hated to have to put my bum in the hands of strangers during my pilgrimage. The strangers themselves would have been less than thrilled, brahmins aghast and even pariahs not best pleased.
Marmite and Roses
Mrs Osborne had specifically asked me to bring some Marmite, as that strange substance (which I remember calling ‘salty jam’ as a child) wasn’t available in India. Mum insisted that she’d read somewhere that the manufacturers of Marmite were so keen on their product that they would send it anywhere in the world for a modest sum of money. When I expressed doubt about this, she did one of her rare Granny impersonations, smiling sweetly and saying, ‘Let’s write to Marmite and find out, shall we?’ She didn’t veto the purchase of a large jar of Marmite for my Indian expedition, but all the same she wanted to be vindicated before I left if at all possible. Marmite replied by return of post. Mum was in the right. The company would send a large jar of Marmite anywhere on the globe for the sum of 9/6 (including postage).
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