My taste was more adventurous in poetry than in prose. If I had been asked then what was the most important book published in the twentieth century, I would have answered ‘Ficcíones’, in unison with every other self-respecting Cambridge undergraduate of the period – and Borges’s Spanish is indeed crisp and fine. But the books I read more than any others were Roald Dahl’s collections of admirably sick short stories. Books have always been awkward objects to me without exception, but I managed to tuck my copies of Kiss Kiss and Someone Like You out of sight behind more impressive-looking volumes, just like everyone else.
Theoretically the person to consult in my perplexity was my tutor Graëme, but that was obviously not going to do any good with the way things stood between us, and I wasn’t going to grovel. Humble pie is no dish for vegetarians (historically, numble pie). The filling is deer guts, if you really want to know. I didn’t consult Graëme, just told him what I had decided. He gave a mannered little sigh and said that it was a matter of statistical fact that English students were more prone to nervous breakdowns than those who read Modern Languages. He hoped that my change of academic direction didn’t qualify as a cry for help in its own right.
I didn’t anticipate that the change of subjects would be too jarring. I was better integrated into the life of the college than I was with my department, though that wasn’t saying much. Still, the Mini had become almost the Downing taxi. I was often being asked to ferry people around, and I enjoyed doing it.
The risky parts of air travel are take-off and landing. The dangerous moments when conveying bone china by hot-air balloon are loading and unloading. Why should wheelchair-based car trips be any different? I was vulnerable while my helpers were conveying me from room to car, and much more so on the return journey, at the end of the day above all, when alcohol had a bit part in the drama, and sometimes the leading rôle.
It vexed me that Downing was a castle of learning strongly fortified against its own residents. Returning from an evening out, early enough for the back gate to be open, I was faced with a barrier, a vertical stanchion blocking access for cars. Dons with parking privileges were issued with keys which let them unlock it and hinge it down out of the way, this lone fat prison bar blocking the Mini’s liberty. I shared their parking privileges but not their right to a key, without which parking privileges didn’t amount to much.
Until I was vandalised myself
I asked for a key at the Porter’s Lodge and was told that I should apply through my tutor. Did I imagine the look of wry amusement which ricocheted around the room, bouncing off the notice boards and arrays of pigeonholes? They might have had the manners to wait until I had gone, my tail between my legs, and then they could have murmured quite audibly, ‘And a fat lot of good that will do you, as everyone knows!’ The nicest of the porters said that a key wouldn’t make all that much difference anyway, since I couldn’t manhandle the post myself – which made me wonder why I had ever thought him the nicest. If I had a key then my passengers would do the physical work for me, and the social bubble would be preserved that much longer. When I had to go by way of the Porter’s Lodge people tended to mooch off, and then I would have to recruit someone to return the key anyway.
One evening I came home late with a slightly rowdy party. We had made a ritual journey across the modest urban lawn of Parker’s Piece to pay our respects to Reality Checkpoint – no more than an elaborate Victorian lamp-post, really, ornamented with a motif of dolphins, but universally known by the phrase painted on its plinth. By common consent Reality Checkpoint offered reassurance to those who got lost while voyaging strange seas of thought alone and artificially bewildered by drugs. It was a pilot light to rekindle the snuffed spirits of those trapped between dimensions.
Then nothing would content the group but to play games with the traffic lights, or rather with the mechanism that made them change. There was some sort of sensor buried under a heavyweight rubber strip, which counted the cars passing over it and triggered the lights to change when a predetermined number had been reached. This seemed to the group an astoundingly sophisticated piece of technology and also (here I parted company from the general mood) something that cried out for a bit of tampering.
A lot of good my dissidence did me. The idea was to bounce the wheelchair back and forth on the decision-making flange, persuading it that cars were massing in large numbers and that the lights must therefore change. There was no logic to the use of the wheelchair, since weight was the issue and John plus wheelchair was lighter than any one of my companions, but then the logic of the group was purely alcoholic. The evening had been alcohological for some time, and I looked up at the events unfolding around me with a sour sobriety.
Returning to college had an edge of melancholy and resentment for me. My passengers didn’t necessarily share this mood, and would get up to pranks and high jinks. All very amusing, until someone fell over my foot.
Someone. Mentioning no names. You know who you are – don’t you, Stephen Morris?
All right, it wasn’t quite as innocent as all that. My pals were busy uprooting the stanchion, and though I hadn’t exactly put them up to it I was silently cheering them on. The stanchion was quite feebly rooted in concrete, like an ailing tooth, and it came out quite suddenly, which was when Stephen stumbled backwards and fell over my foot.
I had been all in favour of vandalism until I was vandalised myself. Still, I had a couple of weeks of significantly easier access to my room until the repairs were done. By then my foot had stopped hurting quite so much, and the world and I were back at our usual loggerheads.
Even so the Mini brought more joy than anything else. There were many trips in that little car which resembled rehearsals for world record attempts in the human compression category. Only the observers from the Guinness Book of Records were missing. We were always fitting one more person in. And then one more.
If the Mini was 120 inches long, 55 wide and 53 high (though obviously you have to discount the distance between the ground and the bottom of the car), then you subtract the measurements of the boot and the engine and you get … my maths isn’t what it was, but I’d estimate the interior volume as being between 127 and 134 cubic feet. Call it 130. Not a lot when, like most of my passengers, you’re built like a Greek god, except for your English inability to look people in the eye, or anywhere near it.
There might be as many as four outsized knees jammed up against my back in the driver’s seat, so close that I could feel the freckles on them. If ever I did take the Mini for a drive on my own, it seemed to ride unnaturally high on its axles. When the suspension didn’t bump it felt as if there was something wrong.
All this driving placed a lot of strain on my shoulder, which could freeze even in the warmest weather. Three-point turns were my nightmare – despite Dad’s best drilling, they tended to have five or seven points. So one summer evening my passengers sweetly relieved me of the need to perform them.
There were four of them, strapping boys who had been playing cricket on Parker’s Piece before I drove us all to Midsummer Common for a pint in a pub they liked. They wore their hair at a timidly daring length, creeping down over the collar, enough to needle their parents when they visited Cambridge for the ritual of Sunday lunch at the Blue Boar – roast flesh carved from the trolley, and is it so hard to find a proper tie? – but far too short to impress their contemporaries.
The pub was popular, and parking spaces were very limited. ‘Just stop here,’ said one of the party, and they all got out, innocently slamming the doors with a force driven from the shoulder and suited to flinging a ball or wielding a bat. If the windows had been closed I imagine my eardrums would have burst. There’s an anvil in the ear, you know, and those doors banged like hammers.
After a little chat in murmurs the lads took up positions round the car and simply picked it up, taking advantage of those open windows to get a good grip.
They lifted the Mini as if it weighed nothing at all. It wasn’t
a heavyweight among cars, admittedly, and now it was transfigured and airborne, levitated into the balmy Cambridge evening by eight beefy arms. I’m a leg man myself, a leg man to my fingertips, but I have to say that I enjoyed watching the arms I could see from the driving seat, the tanned ones and the pale with freckles. I could see white shirts with rolled-up sleeves, and summer sweat staining the armpits. There are days when the world seems entirely peopled with giants, but this was an evening when I felt I could meet anyone’s eye and hold anyone’s gaze.
Truthful bitterness of hops
After they had parked the car and I had struggled out of it they picked me up in a compact version of the same formation and conveyed me in state to the outside seating area of the pub. It was like riding in some human sedan chair.
Local people had grazing rights on the Common, and while we sipped our drinks we could hear horses tearing up mouthfuls of grass, that placid ripping. I like the way horses’ eyes are set in their heads, on a soft edge in a long skull. That’s a particularly pleasing touch.
These young men were cider drinkers, leaving me with my half of bitter to claim maturity of taste. Their green palates preferred apple sweetness to the truthful bitterness of hops. I spent most of the evening perched on one broad knee or other. I would have one sturdy arm wrapped round me while the other hand took care of the precious pint of cider. Dandled by the group I listened to the conversation with abstract rapture.
Young people at university at that time behaved as if they spent their days in the underground youth culture of resistance and revolution, surfacing only rarely to deal with The Man (by attending a lecture or supervision). Every now and then they might have to have lunch with those aliens their parents. Asked what they were going to do with their lives, students would give rambling answers in which the words ‘kibbutz’, ‘start a band’ and ‘underground newspaper’ stood out.
Lads like these cider drinkers, sons of doctors and solicitors in county towns, mumbled less convincingly than most. Their hearts weren’t in it. The turmoil of youth and social upheaval would pass like the measles, leaving most of them unchanged, without even a scar. What’s that folksy saying? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree (unless it’s wrenched tenderly off the branch to make cider). This was a period when the apple was determined to turn into an orange or a pomegranate. I loved this attitude all the more because I couldn’t share it. This banana doesn’t change his spots.
Even among themselves these young men stuck devotedly to the generational clichés. Asked why he had turned up late to play cricket, one of them said, ‘I couldn’t get my act together.’ ‘And what act was that, pray?’ I wondered to myself dreamily. ‘Billy Smart’s Circus? The Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Is it too much to expect that you be punctual, since you’re installed in a body that anticipates your every wish?’ I’ve always been slightly cracked on the subject of timekeeping. I admit it.
In fact I was enjoying myself too much to make trouble. As I was passed from lap to lap over the course of the evening, I tried to see if there was even one of these young groins that didn’t stir when sat upon at the proper angle. In every lap there was a hydraulic response ignored by its owner. Young flesh salutes a change of pressure. It’s a purely barometric pleasure.
Meanwhile I enjoyed their stoical conventionality, their casual social weight. These were men as reliable as the rhythms of a hymn, sung by a congregation with most of its mind on Sunday lunch. Was there also something left over from public-school loneliness, the residue of tears after lights-out? I like stolidity and stolid men, the slow processing of emotions. It’s a great luxury not to respond right away. The redhead of the group must have been told three times a week since he went to kindergarten that his colouring gave him an ungovernable temper, and he was still stupendously phlegmatic.
At the end of the evening I was carried back to the car in the same processional fashion as I had been delivered to the pub. I loved being so high above the ground yet feeling so safe. Even if one of my bearers stumbled the others would keep their footing. When I was at school at Vulcan, one of the boys had tried to run away to be a truck driver’s mate – perhaps this was really what he wanted, not just rough company and the dream of sounding the horn, but the elevation of the cab.
The Mini certainly had a comical aspect to eyes enlightened by drink, hemmed in so snugly by its neighbours. It looked like something dropped from the sky, or else thrust up by stage machinery. After I had been slid tenderly into the driving seat, my four porters picked up the car again, disengaging it from its narrow space and then serenely rotating it in the middle of the road, to save me the trouble of making the turn myself. The evening was still light, and there was no real need to turn the headlights on, but I did it for the sense of occasion.
Why is this memory so radiant, verging on the radioactive? It wasn’t just the beauty of the young men which powered my joy. Of course mammals spend a lot of their energy trying either to generate heat or to lose it, and there’s something peculiarly inviting to happiness about those moments when we are at one with our surroundings without having to work to make it so. Our bodies can turn off the fans and radiators for a while. We stop squandering energy to maintain the status quo. Summer night a case in point, bringing the human body close to the bliss of the reptile, organism which submits without a struggle to the conditions in which it finds itself.
Those tiny spasms
There were more specific inducements to happiness. The smell of earlier sweat, relatively fresh but dried in, voluptuously blended with grass smells, released and combined with new secretions as the young men exerted themselves in an improvised sport calling for a different sort of teamwork. The slightly laboured breathing of healthy young people, within earshot of each other, trying to pretend to be that little bit fitter than they were. The sound of cricket boots on road metal, long paces, regular gait, the crunch of the little nails on their soles, ominous, military, but also like little boys wearing Dad’s shoes and wanting to sound just like him, striding with a manliness maintained by conscious effort. There’s so much poignancy in the state of trying to be a man, nothing remotely comparable about being one.
The boy nearest to me outside the driver’s window, the stolid redhead, was suffering from singultus. In Latin a sob, in English no more than a hiccup. He had the hiccups, and those tiny spasms translated into a strangely seductive rhythmic lurch of the whole vehicle. The involuntary movement hiccups gave his arm had a knock-on effect on his neighbour, the lad outside the passenger window. Their positions made eye contact hard to avoid, and then other factors entered in, cider and laughter. The cider caused the hiccups, it amplified and distorted the laughter, and soon the whole body of the car was faintly vibrating with the hilarity of those who carried it. The infinitesimal rocking that comes from being slightly out of step in a concerted task was subjected to an interference pattern of hiccups and laughter. Waves rippled back and forth, disrupting themselves and each other, complex functions on a graph of exhilaration.
I was whispering ‘Mush!’ to a team of very English huskies, on eight strong laughing arms, eight cider-drunk hiccupping legs, as if I would never need to deal with life on the flat, and yet I didn’t really want to linger. I enjoyed a brief swirl of people in carbonated moments, as long as the bubbles were guaranteed to burst. I liked to be held and then passed on.
I was still dictating terms to Maya, and she always agreed to them, but she does that, doesn’t she? She gets you caught in her trap by letting you design it yourself. She gives you a free hand. She plays along.
Mum and Dad were only mildly disturbed by my proposed change of subject. Of course I didn’t present it as any sort of defeat. I could tell them perfectly sincerely that Cambridge had enjoyed a glorious history in English studies for much of the twentieth century, and Downing had been near the centre of all that. It was Downing, after all, that had given F. R. Leavis a professorship. Leavis, the heretic guru of English letters, who had founded and edited a ma
ssively influential magazine. That magazine had been called Scrutiny – the Cambridge word above all others. The unscrutinised life was not worth living and the unscrutinised text had no place on a serious person’s shelves. Vast and merrily crackling was the critical bonfire of the deficient.
At that time Leavis was in retirement but could still be glimpsed occasionally. I didn’t mention that the one time I had seen Leavis he was walking briskly down Senate House Passage on a chilly day with fanatical vigour and remoteness, wearing a sports jacket and an open-necked shirt. He picked up his feet like an aggrieved heron, and I was sure he would spear me if I got in his way, wheelchair or no wheelchair. Anyone less life-enhancing would be hard to imagine, but naturally I didn’t pass that impression on to Mum and Dad. I simply said I would be in safe hands, experiencing the full flow of a great tradition. Of course, Leavis had eventually severed his links with Downing in the usual austere huff, scattering excommunications in all directions like black and baleful confetti, but again, there seemed no need to relay such a minor detail.
My proposed academic trajectory – from Modern Languages Part I to English Part II – felt disjointed, a wrong turn in a life that couldn’t afford one. It seemed absurd that I could travel single-handed across the world (though I don’t wish to slight the many strong arms and lifting hands which helped me on my way) to pay my respects to my guru in India, but not pursue my studies as I wished at an educational institution that recognised me as worthy to attend. It was absurd but there seemed to be no way round it. Trudge on, pilgrim.
Cedilla Page 67