Here we were at the heart of the matter, the charity case refusing to be patronised. ‘Now see here, Mrs Beddoes, why do you bring me tea?’
‘I thought you could do with a cuppa.’
‘But you don’t bring tea to anyone else, do you?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Perhaps you feel sorry for me.’
‘Not really, Mr Cromer. It’s the others I feel sorry for.’
That stopped me in my tracks. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you’re the only one who is ever awake. The only one who doesn’t groan when I knock on the door. And after all, they’re missing the best part of the day, aren’t they?’
After that the scales fell from my eyes, and I started taking Mrs Beddoes’ cups of tea at face value, as a real privilege and quite a contribution to what was (as she said), or became, the best part of the day.
A door to close behind me and a key to lock it with. These were things I had never had until I was an undergraduate. They seemed fairytale privileges. Space and privacy were not things that had gone together in my history. My most intense previous experience of control over my surroundings was possession of the ornamental Chinese box given me by Ben Nevin at Vulcan. A precious enclosure, but not large enough to accommodate so much as a pack of playing cards or, more importantly, a full tube of depilatory cream.
Now I had room for whole vats of Immac, if I had wanted, and could have kept them safe from pilferers. The Immac, incidentally, had done its work, and more than its work. I was making no efforts to suppress the sprouting of my beard, but it was chemically damaged and never grew quite right. There were irregular patches where nothing much happened. Unfortunately they were more on one side than the other, perhaps because I laid the stuff on thick where I could reach most easily. I didn’t try to shave what I had, all the same. I had enough on my plate without razor chores. My growth, however substandard, didn’t draw attention to itself in a whole university town full of scrappy facial hair.
Possession of a key transformed my status. It conferred so many privileges: the knowledge that no one could enter the room in my absence (except, theoretically, the Head Porter, who had a master key). Control of any admission while I was in. Privacy and security, necessary elements of the much-touted ‘peace of mind’.
All this amounted to a huge step forward. My key practically defined me as an adult – far more than my beard did. Children, invalids, prisoners, the mad. None of these gets the key to his room. Thanks to the smiling authorities of Downing College, Cambridge, I was gathered in from my life on the margins. I was not only mature and well but free to roam, and certified sane into the bargain. I was in control of my own life. I was my own doorkeeper. I had the key to freedom.
It took me a couple of weeks to realise that I didn’t like it. That is, I enjoyed not having inferior status, but I didn’t like locking my door, or even closing it. I hadn’t come to a university to shut myself away. It was at home that I sometimes wanted to do that. It was at Trees, Bourne End, that a key to the bedroom would have come in very handy from time to time. At Trees I could have become a recluse very happily between meals, ignoring Mum’s anxious knocks, thinking my own thoughts and steadily filling a whole array of urine bottles like a penniless little Howard Hughes, while my beard grew long on the one side only.
The other door to the room at Trees, the one which gave wheelchair access to the great outdoors, would always be left open wide, unless there was a blizzard or Mum tried to sneak up and spy on me from that vantage point. Even when automatic doors à la Starship Enterprise, with their soothing whoosh, become standard, I’ll be sentimental about the peerless charm of an open door. An open door offers me my only real chance of catching someone by surprise. Leaving the door open being also my best way to arrange to be surprised myself.
In any case for me the difference between a closed door and a locked one isn’t as great as all that. It’s almost a technicality. I went through a brief phase of leaving my door unlocked, though I tried to remember to take the key with me when I went out, in case Mrs Beddoes or some other authorised person innocently locked the door on my behalf. Then one day I came back to find a stranger dozing in the Parker-Knoll. It was the junkie who regularly fixed up in the lavatories. He didn’t make trouble, just shambled off on command like a dog in disgrace, but after that I took security more seriously.
Every possible insult
Back in Bourne End the floor of the room I shared with Peter was bare lino. In A6 Kenny I did at last have carpet. The college authorities were less worried about the problem of my tracking mud across internal spaces than Mum – perhaps it came under the heading, from their point of view, of fair wear and tear. For Mum, wear and tear could never be fair, since everything was part of a conspiracy to make her look slovenly in her mother’s eyes. Wear and tear was always unfair.
When I took a closer look at the carpet, I saw that every possible insult that could be offered to a floor covering had already been visited on it and been (more or less) wiped, hoovered and scrubbed away, darkening the overall tone of the textile.
I was a little embarrassed about being cleaned for. It was partly that I didn’t want a servant – if I was condemned to having a servant I wanted one who would be more useful to me. I tried to show Mrs Beddoes that most forms of clearing up merely made things inaccessible to me. As far as I was concerned, tidying up was only hiding with a whiff of self-righteousness. Books, for instance, needed to stay on the front section of the desk if they were to remain within my reach. She nodded uncertainly, and after that she mostly left my things where I wanted them.
What I really needed, if I had to have help of some sort, was help with washing. Dressing I could manage, and laundry wasn’t too much of a problem – there was a service which collected and made deliveries. Bathing was much harder work than washing clothes. I would have been delighted if there had been a similar service operating – to send this body off for laundering and get it back neatly folded and smelling fresh.
The toilet arrangements were satisfactory – in fact, since (naturally enough) the other students tended to avoid the cubicle with my commode parked in it, it was very much the cleanest of the three, the best of a bad bunch.
Bathing was a different matter. In the bathroom of A staircase, Kenny Court, I had to run a bath and transfer myself from the wheelchair to a hoist supported by a rail on the ceiling. It was reasonably manageable. I would lay two ‘canvas’ (actually synthetic) straps crosswise on the seat of the wheelchair before sitting down on it. Each strap had a ring on the end, which had to be slipped over the hoist’s hook. These technical descriptions are hopeless! Better to imagine the picture on the front of a standard christening card. Now substitute me for the baby in the sling of cloth, and an engine attached to the ceiling (dangling a hook) for the stork.
I would rise in my cradle into the cold air of the bathroom, negotiate myself into the right position and lower myself into the water, pulling on the appropriate strings to turn the motor on and off. Green for Go and red for Stop. Even when I was in the water I had to stay in the harness of the hoist. I would conjure some suds from the soap onto a flannel, then perch the flannel on the end of my stick and poke at the outlying parts of this body, but I was relying more on the power of hot water to magic away dirt than anything else. The bare bones of this routine were familiar from life at Trees, where the bathroom ceiling was also fitted with a rail, but I was used to having help or at least company.
I’m not usually much of a wallower in baths. Experiences at the hands of a sadistic physiotherapist employed at CRX had more or less broken any link for me between bodies of water and peace of mind, though I’d felt safe enough in the pool at Burnham, surrounded by my fellows. My ‘shamming’ in the bath at Trees was never very prolonged, even though I was surrounded by family. It was a sort of trance state, all the same, so much so that I wonder if a spore of language, the word shaman, hadn’t been what originally drifted into Dad’s mind. De
spite his own best efforts, Dad was rather good at inklings. He preferred not to tune into other people’s awareness, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself.
In the tub on A staircase, Kenny Court, though, I would lie there till the water grew cold. Not wallowing so much as postponing the inevitable. I knew it was going to be such an almighty effort to heave my bones out of the soapy broth and get out again.
Lowered back into the wheelchair, I had only to detach the straps from the hook and I was free, though the overall expenditure of effort had been enormous. The whole business of taking a bath single-handed was like manning some assembly line, whose only end product was myself, wet and often shivering, but with some claim to being clean.
Help getting bathed would have changed my undergraduate life more than any other single factor, but I didn’t know anyone well enough to ask and I had set myself against making friendships based on need. The most I dared do was ask a passer-by or staircase-mate to close the quarter-light window in the bathroom to keep the heat in.
A large towel is unmanageable, a small one isn’t up to the job. Towelling was rather a frustrating process altogether, and it made sense to wait for the laws of nature to finish the job. Given time, drying is something which happens on its own.
There was no point in waiting in the bathroom when my room was so much warmer, so I would set off home in the wheelchair, discreetly draped in a towel. Remembering my school science lessons I said to myself, ‘This is no more than an observation of the phenomenon of the loss of latent heat of evaporation,’ and my body had indeed lost a lot of heat by the time I was back in my room, thanks to the movement of air (and my own trundling) in the bathroom and corridor. If I was colder then, logically, I was also drier.
Elves with hairdryers
Being back in the warm was a great luxury. It was tropical! It wasn’t long before I was almost dry. Of course my shoulders lost heat more quickly than my bottom, and my bottom was still damp when the rest of me was dry. Ideally, if my body had allowed the position, I would have lain face down on the bed while National Health elves with hairdryers played warm currents of air across my backside. As it was, I would ease myself up onto the carpet, whose traction enabled me to raise my bum from the seat of the chair, and then retrieve the still-damp straps from underneath me. Sometimes I would have to take them back into the bathroom personally, but usually I could ‘volunteer’ a student to take them back to the bathroom and hang them up for me ready for next time.
That sort of ‘volunteering’ can only be an emergency measure – language itself rebels against intransitive verbs being turned inside out like that, like umbrellas in a hurricane, and the social fabric is damaged by people’s helpfulness being forced instead of being allowed to open out like a blossom in its own sweet time. But as far as I was concerned, in my Cambridge period, that was just too bad. Jump to it! I haven’t got all year.
I didn’t do much home-making in my new premises, but I did pamper myself with a couple of indulgences that had been forbidden at home. First I bought joss-sticks and lit them, an act banned at home. Dad explained, ‘The thing about joss-sticks, incense, all that sort of stuff, is … you see, they can disguise all sorts of other smells …’ And I had said, ‘I know. Isn’t it marvellous?’ I missed the point, I failed to twig. Dad wasn’t referring to the standard male fug of a shared bedroom but to the smell of cannabis. Mary Jane, goblin weed, eater of souls. No doubt cannabis made people do many strange things in those years, but one of the strangest was to make parents sniff around their children like police dogs at airports.
At Trees I had wanted a red lightbulb in my room, to make it more like a shrine, but this suggestion also created alarm. Mum and Dad didn’t seem to be attuned to the effect I wanted to create, that receptive spiritual aura. The disapproving term Mum used was ‘boudoir’, while Dad’s phrase was ‘knocking-shop’. So I simply draped a piece of red cloth over an existing bulb, and gave their opposition a united front. Fire risk. Concern for safety masked something more mysterious, a moral disapproval of coloured light. In my best surly-hippy manner I muttered, ‘You’d tax the ruddy rainbow if you could find its home address. You’re a disgrace to the Age of Aquarius.’ Not that I believed any of that guff.
Now I was free to install that questionable glow, to let my moral fibre loosen softly under its influence. Mrs Beddoes rather hesitantly installed a red bulb at my command, and soon I was happily basking in its rosy aura – the colour of life in the womb, on those sunny prenatal days – in my boudoir in Kenny Court, my yet-to-be knocking-shop.
There were ways for undergraduates to fill their calendars, short cuts to a social life – clubs and societies. These were on display at the Freshers’ Fair, to be held in the Corn Exchange. My tall staircase neighbour P. D. Hughes – Pete – said he was going, and didn’t mind giving me a push. I know I say ‘tall’ the way some people say ‘nice’, but Pete really was. He was nice and tall. He sometimes had to duck while going through a doorway designed for smaller folk. He and I lived in a constant state of amazement at the size of each other’s shoes.
The din at the Freshers’ Fair was astounding, a physical reminder that I was part of a massive intake of student flesh, perhaps the loudest noise I’d heard since The Who took the stage at Slough. I felt correspondingly oppressed and insignificant. I was hoping there would be a Ramana Maharshi Society, since Cambridge University was alleged to be a progressive environment, but I was out of luck. The closest thing to it alphabetically was Mah-Jongg Club – not close. The closest to it in content, at least as other people were concerned, was the Transcendental Meditation Society, of which I had a holy horror. How dare this sub-guru Mahesh appropriate (and garble) the name of Maharshi?
Pete seemed not to have interests or hobbies as such. He was drawn to stalls manned by women, no matter what organisation they represented, chess club or choral society. Men outnumbered women by a factor of ten at the university, something which neither gender ever forgot. Pete, though tall and nice-looking, was awkward, conscious of the odds against his being a winner in the sweepstakes for companionship. If there was a pretty face at a stall, he asked for details of the organisation concerned. With a little encouragement he might have signed up for anything. A smile could easily have drawn him in to satanism or even stamp-collecting.
He would park me at an angle while he made a play for a young woman whose looks he liked. I wouldn’t be able to see his target from my position, but I could follow the progress of the little flirtation from the behaviour of Pete’s hands on the handles of the wheelchair. Unconsciously he would rock me back and forth, like a mother pacifying the baby while chatting to a neighbour, but since his physique was large and strong – not to mention gripped by sexual tension – his movements weren’t as smooth as he must have imagined. They weren’t at all soothing. No baby could have been lulled by such agitated pushing and pulling. It would have woken and howled. I had to bite my lip myself.
Pete accumulated a lot of leaflets and fliers, smudgily printed on rough brightly coloured paper, which he dumped in my lap while he pushed the chair. After we had left the Fair, he gathered them up and thrust them into a rubbish bin. We had been warned against the temptation, common for freshmen, of signing up for every sort of society and voluntary organisation, rather than find our own way in a relatively denuded social landscape, but we seemed in our different ways to be immune.
After a few days at Cambridge, all the same, I began to have the nagging feeling that I had missed something. When the feeling clarified itself, it turned out to be a throwback to my first reactions at CRX. Then the question had been: I can see the hospital, but where’s the school? Now it was more complicated: I can see Downing College, the Senate House, King’s Chapel, Heffers, Lion Yard, the Corn Exchange, the Modern Languages Department, the Blue Boar and the Round Church, even the University Library (most of them, admittedly, only on the map, or while arriving in the Mini), but where’s the university? If the whole august institution
had devoted itself to the vichara, to Self-Enquiry, asking constantly with full attention the arch-and only question Who Am I?, what would be its answer?
Holy tipples
The University had a motto, of course, but it was a bit on the cryptic side: Hinc lucem et pocula sacra. Roughly, ‘This is where we receive enlightenment and imbibe holiness.’ But the Latin doesn’t make a complete sentence and you have to supply the missing grammar. Hinc means ‘from here’. Good – I’m in the right place. And the next bit is about light and holy tipples (poculum being a diminutive meaning a goblet or the liquid it contains, so ‘little drinks’) and it’s in the accusative, so someone is doing something to the light and holy tipples – or will do something or has done something. ‘Getting them’ is as good a guess as any, and I suppose it may as well be ‘us’ that does it. It’s all rather frustrating – or to put it another way, good practice for construing Sanskrit scriptures.
Oxford has a motto, too – Dominus Illuminatio Mea – also with the verb missing, but this is a pretty elementary conundrum since there aren’t hundreds of verbs which are followed by a noun in the nominative. Technically it’s called ‘taking the complement’. Verbs are shy beasts. Only a few can take a complement.
God – blank – My Light. It’s more or less on the level of Spike Milligan’s Crossword Puzzle for Idiots (One Across: first letter of the alphabet, One Down: the indefinite article).
Any guesses? You there, at the back…
And the winner is. Is.
Est. Though actually … why shouldn’t it be Sit, or Fit or Fiat? Let God be my light, God becomes my light, Let God become my light. Not a bad little mantra, when I think about it. But given the cultural atmosphere in 1970 I suppose Sit would be the obvious candidate for runner-up. Let It Be.
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