He wasn’t entirely at ease with the company after meals at A6 anyway. He had acquired a nickname he disliked, and in a way it was his own fault. Like many people studying a language he was struck by the limited sounds of Russian (while of course forcing his tongue to master intricacies unknown in English). One day he happened to mention that there was no H in Rooshian, so that his own name, Hughes, would be pronounced Gooks. What he said wasn’t exactly ‘Gooks’, but that was what people decided they heard, and he was Peter Gooks after that, or just ‘Gooks’. I tried to set up a counter-tradition by calling him Pyotr or Petrushka instead, but no one ever used those fond forms but me.
Sites of sordid suffering
I’ve always been a slow eater, and always will be, but the improvement in what we ate in Hall made Alan Linton also linger over his food. Mealtimes became companionable, now that we could bask in the envious glances of our flesh-eating fellows, who would chew their corrupt rations in grim haste. Our plates were not sites of sordid suffering, and our forks were not burdened with karma.
The slow pace of eating suited rambling chat, but I was running out of subjects. I had qualms by now about turning my summer in India into a party piece. In any case it often fell flat. In practice, telling people about my sojourn as guest of the mountain only prompted questions about Indian restaurants. Which was better, the Sylhet or the Curry Centre on Castle Hill? I had no idea. I had spotted a restaurant called the Curry Queen on Mill Road, and had decided it would be my first port of call, but I hadn’t got round to it yet.
In those days even educated people knew only a tiny handful of words in any Indian language, and one of them was always Sutra. Another was Karma. I spent a lot of time explaining that the Kama in Kama Sutra was not the same thing as the Karma the hippies held so dear. To make the distinction clear I would roll the r in Karma exaggeratedly, until my whole brain shook in its moorings from the force of the alveolar trill.
In early days there was another obvious subject of conversation. For the amusement of my fellow-students in Hall I would imitate Mrs Beddoes, giving her an exaggeratedly strangulated voice which swooped from would-be posh to common in a single sentence. I don’t know how this fool’s route to popularity ranked, when set beside the folly of buying rounds indiscriminately in the college bar. Rather lower, I suspect.
I was repeating past successes in the rôle of raconteur, from the times I had beguiled the dorm at Vulcan with a thousand variations on themes of sexual passion and home cooking. Bit by bit I worked Mrs Beddoes up into a character, exaggerating her very mild mispronunciations and odd patterns of stress. ‘Oh Mr Crow-maire, if you really think my duties extend to tidying up after your friends you’re very much mis-taiken. Alf (that’s my husband) always tells me I do too much for others, but then Mr Crow-maire you are a child of God as good as any. Better than most.
‘All well and good, Jean, says Alf-that’s-my-husband, but if I’ve told you once I’ve told you times without number, your endless service to others may well se-coor your place in the blue hereafter, but what about the here and now, eh?
‘By which he generally means his tea.’
Such routines were much in demand, and if I didn’t announce a performance with a single stylised sniff the cry would go up of, ‘Come on John, entertain us. Do the bedder, she’s priceless.’ It was reassuring to have a routine that reliably brought approval.
It was only gradually that I became uncomfortable. Wasn’t I traducing the person who had shown me most friendliness, an intimacy without demands? (A cup of tea freely offered is a small miracle of consideration.) I determined to stop.
I wasn’t brave or self-righteous enough to lecture my faithful audience on the misrepresentation we were conspiring to perpetrate, to announce Mrs Beddoes in so many words as the salt of the earth without which there would be no savour. My conscience pushed me in the opposite direction from the one I had taken historically, not towards wilder flights but a greater fidelity. I added in more and more of the humble details – the caravan outside Beccles, the deaf sister in Waterbeach. Eventually people stopped asking me to ‘do’ Mrs Beddoes, and neighbours in Hall who had missed the performance for a while would receive frantic signals not to egg me on.
Ribs in the head
All in all there has been quite a lot of eye-rolling in my immediate vicinity down the years, just outside my line of sight, or just within it when people have underestimated my peripheral vision. Most of the useful information I have gathered has reached me out of the tail of my eye.
With Alan I found myself talking about homœopathy. As a medical student, he was biased against therapies not based on the Western tradition, but he wasn’t entirely opposed to new ideas. His mind was neither open nor shut, but ajar. I argued that homœopathy was a Western tradition in itself.
I emphasised that homœopathy individuates, taking each person as a separate unit, while conventional science generalises and expects the same results to hold for everyone. Alan was intrigued by the unimportance in homœopathy of theory without result, its sheer practicality as a set of techniques.
As always when homœopathy was the subject in those years, I was at least partly thinking about something else. Similes similibus amentur, if you like. I had heard of something called the Gay Liberation Front, which sounded angry rather than loving, and in any case hadn’t yet forced itself on my attention in the university or the town.
I asked Alan if he knew the story of the 1854 cholera epidemic in London. ‘Bloody hell, John,’ he said. ‘I am a medical student, you know. I know a little bit about the history of diseases and a few things about the human body. This is my third year of study, so I even know that the ribs aren’t located in the head.’ I rather enjoyed being on the receiving end of some sarcasm. It gingered me up. Normally people get rather mealy-mouthed in my vicinity. ‘So if you’re referring to the discovery of the water-borne transmission of cholera, and how the doughty John Snow saved lives in Soho by taking the handle off the Broad Street pump, then yes, I know the story of the 1854 cholera epidemic.’
He had taken the bait. ‘Then you know about the report on the epidemic prepared for Parliament by the Board of Health.’
‘What about it?’
‘The exclusion from it of the data from the Homœopathic Hospital in Golden Square, which was in the middle of the outbreak.’ After my visit to Great Ormond Street I had discovered that it wasn’t the original London base of homœopathy.
He went rather quiet. ‘I’m a little vague about that. Remind me.’
‘The Homœopathic Hospital gave the information as requested – names and addresses of patients, symptoms, remedies and results. The whole hospital had been given over to victims of the epidemic. Out of 61 cases of cholera, 10 died – a mortality of 16.4%. At the Middlesex Hospital nearby, 123 died out of 231. A mortality of over 50%. Under protest the Board of Health released these figures, which had been kept out of the original tally.’
‘Did they say why they had suppressed them in the first place?’
‘Oh yes. First because they were so out of keeping with the other results that they would have distorted the findings. Second because they didn’t want to lend support to “empirical practice”. You weren’t supposed to cure illness without understanding its causes, and in homœopathy you just pay attention to symptoms and deal with those. Hahnemann himself, the chap who invented the system in the first place, came up with a therapy for cholera without seeing a single case, from the symptoms described by colleagues. Treatment without formal diagnosis is intolerable to the medical establishment which you’re so keen on joining. Better to let people die than have cures that don’t obey the formalities. But perhaps John Snow wasn’t the only one saving lives in Soho that year.’
‘Is this all on the record, John? I’d hate you to be pulling my leg.’
‘I can’t reach your leg. And yes, it’s on the record. Will Hansard do? I’m afraid I don’t have the exact references.’
‘I’ll
manage.’
I’m sure I would have heard about it if Alan’s researches hadn’t corroborated what I had told him. His attitude towards homœopathy slowly changed. Soon he was saying that if I gave him a prescription he would take it with an open mind. I said that it would only be a fair test if some symptom was troubling him. Perhaps there was?
The mother tongue of the placebo
Apparently so. At least there was a physical condition, too trivial to be taken to the doctor, which could be examined for experimental purposes. The matter was intimate enough for him to deliver me back to A6 Kenny so that he could make his confession. It turned out that Alan was troubled by copious sweating under the arms, even in winter, and by an accompanying animal odour. In short, B.O.
He had an exaggerated idea of his case. I was well placed, after all, while he was labouring up and down steps with me, to detect any offensive aroma. He smelled like an animal, yes, of course, but only because he was one. He smelled clean, he smelled warm and alive. Barry, on the other hand, the botanist who had been a whiffy basidiomycetous saprophytic fungus in a (recent) previous life, would never be able to detect his own aroma, any more than saints can see their own haloes.
I didn’t have to work very hard to select a remedy for Alan. There’s a passage of Magic of the Minimum Dose – from which I had been freely quoting, of course, preaching in borrowed robes – which describes just such a case. I knew I should ask a full set of questions, but on this occasion I went by hunch. Chronic issues require particular attention to the Mind section, and I let myself be guided by my impressions (Nervous and excitable / ‘Brain-fag’ / Abstracted / Fixed Ideas).
I took out an empty notebook and wrote For Overactive Sweat Glands in Young Adult Male – Silicea 200 on the first page. Then I wrote Alan Linton / signetur 1/1 silicea c200 / x3 gutt. sub linguam on a label and attached it to a vial that had come with my starter kit of remedies. I enjoyed the paperwork for once, or more exactly the methodical feeling that comes from separating and labelling, even if there was an element of the rough and ready about my Latin. Nobody really reads the Latin – I could have written lingam for linguam without making any difference to Alan – but it massively reinforces the psychological effect. Slightly bogus Latin is the mother tongue of the placebo.
When I saw him next, Alan told me that from the first moment he held the pillule on his tongue he could feel it taking effect. His sweating moderated and any odour dissipated in a few days. Certainly his self-consciousness about it rapidly became a thing of the past. Of course homœopathy normally brings about improvements over a longer period of time, but rapid cures are not unknown. One of the great virtues of the method, in fact, is that it doesn’t persist with remedies that are proving ineffective. Not for the homœopath the GP’s reflex of the repeat prescription, the increased dosage. If it doesn’t make a difference at the first attempt, you stop and try something else.
‘What did I tell you?’ I crowed. Despite this I was astounded by the success of my first attempt at prescription. What had I told him, after all? Nothing that I really knew about. Could the whole pretty system possibly work?
From that moment on, Alan Linton was a believer, verging on zealotry. He started borrowing what books I had on the subject, but he soon exhausted my modest library and started researching on his own account. To some extent this played into my hands. I was someone, after all, who had special borrowing privileges from the University Library, but found it impossible to consult the catalogue so as to order books. Alan on the other hand could only consult the UL’s holdings, not take them away, but was easily able to do the legwork. So it was agreed. He would use the catalogue for me, and I would borrow books for him.
I enjoyed the feeling that I had made a convert, even though it wasn’t to my religious perspective, as I had hoped before I came to Cambridge. Homœopathy wasn’t a core belief of mine, it hadn’t even had time to bed down as an obsession. It was no more than a hobby in waiting. I had written Homœopathic Prescriptions on the cover of the notebook in which I had written Alan’s details, but it was quite a while before there was a second prescription noted down. In Hall at Downing, in the meantime, it was now Alan who would inform me about his latest discoveries as we took our time over tomato flan and that great novelty of vegetarian cuisine, as it seemed to us then, pasta salad.
In his own way Alan was rather a tactile person. Often he would put his arms round me and give me long hugs, saying that he got a very positive energy from being with me. Sometimes our lingering over the meal meant that he came back to A6 with me on his own.
At one stage we were talking about being ‘grounded’, and how wrong it was for us to elevate ourselves above the ground. The starting-point of the conversation was probably the traditional Buddhist strictures against sleeping away from the ground.
I agreed in principle, but had to add, ‘Yes, Alan, that’s all very well but because of my legs and whatnot, I have to sleep off the ground!’
‘Yes, but even a little time on the ground is better than nothing …’
‘I suppose so. Not something I know much about.’ It wasn’t the time to mention that I had been sexually initiated in a sleeping-bag on the ground, while at Woodlarks summer camp for disabled schoolboys.
‘I’m sure I could get you onto the ground for a bit. Shall we give it a try?’
‘If you like.’
Carefully he manœuvred me onto the ground, cradled in his arms. Then he made a disgusted face and said, ‘This carpet could certainly do with a clean …’
I hoped all the same that the pungency of the floor-covering wouldn’t lead him to break off our experiment. I was becoming excited by our entwined posture, and couldn’t help myself from pushing myself against Alan in a way that wasn’t particularly Buddhist.
It was a strange experience, all the same. There was so much of him. In fantasies my sexual partners – Blyton’s Julian, Rollo from the Rupert annual – were the same size as me. They didn’t extend beyond me, or protrude in awkward ways. Admittedly Julian Robinson at Vulcan was a big boy, but in our most memorable encounter, with a kindly observer providing the motive power, the feeling of a sensual pulsation was only part of the hilarity of the total event.
Alive in the groins
Now I was pressed up against a young man several inches taller even than Julian, and fully in charge of his parts. I seemed to occupy only an intermediate zone of this enormous physique. I felt cheated of the full picture – I was getting only fragmentary impressions of his body, while the warmth poured into me through his clothes.
I could hear the gurgling of Alan’s stomach, as a digestion at the peak of its young powers smoothly converted pasta salad into radiant heat and the faculty of embracing. ‘Just to let you know where I stand,’ he told me. ‘I have a strong aversion to queers and their ways. I shouldn’t be prejudiced, but there it is. Any sort of poovery gives me the creeps. At least I’m honest about it.’
He told me he’d been briefly involved with an organisation called the Monarchist League, whose members were strongly in favour of the monarchy, obviously, but not the monarchy we actually had. They believed the Queen was an impostor of some sort. He had been to one of their dinners in a house in Trumpington. At the end of the meal, after elaborate toasts to the rightful royal family, he had seen a man put his hand between another man’s legs. He took the only proper action available and fled the premises, quite fast I imagine since his legs were long.
I wanted to wriggle up and be close to Alan’s face, and also to wriggle downwards and be aligned with his crotch. I couldn’t do both, so I made my choice. I chose down. Belatedly Alan detected the erotic vibration in what we were doing. ‘Now John,’ he said, ‘I must remind you that if I thought for one solitary second there was anything sexy for you in this, I’d be out of here like a shot!’
I’m fine about being sly, but flat dishonesty isn’t really in my nature, so I said, ‘Then I am very sorry, Alan. I have to confess that you’re making m
e as randified as anything.’ I resigned myself to the interruption of this delightful adventure, pushing myself against him one last time.
Strangely, though, just when I had come clean he started to make excuses for me. ‘Yes, well, John, you should understand that you are a person who D. H. Lawrence would say is very “alive in the groins”. It’s nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about at all … Greatly to your credit, in fact. Human beings are only animals, when you get right down to it.’
I blessed the holy name of David Herbert Lawrence, about whom I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I adored Women in Love, particularly the wrestling scene by the fireside – unclothed apotheosis of the tender grappling I had dreamed of in my sickbed and coveted as a Burnham schoolboy. This very encounter on institutional carpet was the closest I could ever hope to come to recreating it. I had taken an oath not to see the film, because I wanted to imagine the faces of my choice on the bodies of Gerald and Birkin. Some things are sacred, and I wouldn’t let Ken Russell wrestle me away from the casting couch of my fantasies.
It was Lady Chatterley’s Lover I shied away from. Somehow I didn’t think Lawrence’s plan, when he put Lady C’s husband in a wheelchair, was to indicate that he was alive in the groins.
Alan kept faith with our Buddhist experiment until he started to get pins and needles, and that was as close as I got to Alan on the physical plane. It turned out that a little grounding went a long way.
The consolation prize for me was news of this amazing club called the Monarchist League. I had no interest in the royalist aspect either way. For me the hand between the legs was the good bit. Surely it must be the core value of the organisation? I didn’t dare to ask any more questions, but I became obsessed with the idea that hands were being thrust between legs only a couple of miles away. Once I even drove the Mini out to Trumpington and pestered innocent pedestrians, saying, ‘Excuse me! Could you possibly direct me to Headquarters of the Monarchist League?’ Nobody knew, or they were all in on it and weren’t accepting new recruits.
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