There was a certain amount of whispering behind the Tonys’ backs also, though their crime wasn’t ideology nor a taste for the constabulary but a more sinister sort of backsliding. George and I had been elected as a couple, we were a couple designed by a committee, while the Tonys were something much more threatening. They were an exclusive couple, exclusively composed of Tonys. Tony sports-jacket and Tony Jesus-sandals. Tony corduroy and Tony denim. Tony economist and Tony piano teacher (ex-organ scholar). I don’t shine at this sort of description. The truth is that I resent having to do it. Why should I sift through the various individuating traits – precise shade of eye colour, stature, mannerisms – to convey a vivid impression when all anyone needs to say to pick me out, apparently, is ‘John’ and then ‘You know, John in a wheelchair.’
The Tonys would sit on the sofa sometimes holding hands, not just one hand each, but doubly grasping, softly squeezing. Theirs was not an open relationship, which might have muted the criticism. Their relationship was air-tight, and no draught of eroticism from outside could flutter its curtains. This counted as degraded imitation of the heterosexual couple, itself degraded, and might easily have led to censure if it wasn’t that the group had nowhere half so convenient to meet.
Never mind that this level of domestic devotion didn’t actually remind us of any heterosexuals we’d ever come across. Certainly nothing I had experienced of the heterosexual tyranny corresponded to what I witnessed between the Tonys. Mum and Dad never held hands or stared into each other’s eyes. Even their neighbours in what seemed better marriages didn’t moon over each other in the slightest bit. They would give the lovey-dovey a wide berth, occupying their separate corners at the Black Lion. It would have been a canny observer who could pick out the couples, following the thread of exasperated fondness to predict who would drive home with whom.
It’s true that there was an irritating element to the Tonys’ togetherness, an unstated refrain of What would have become of me, if I hadn’t found you? We were all aware of it, but our objections were probably not political.
They were houseproud, they made quiche. Quite apart from the fact that men didn’t cook back then, quiche at the time was far from being a cliché, it was something of a showpiece of kitchen skills. Larks’ tongues in aspic would hardly have caused more wonderment. People at meetings stuffed themselves, but still I think the Tonys’ kitchen skills counted against them. Equal rights for sexual minorities and the search for a perfect savoury custard flan were seen, back then, as incompatible goals in life.
Eventually I summoned up the courage to tell the Tonys that their quiche smelled rather good, and was there any chance of their making a vegetarian one every now and then? After that my attendance became devoted. I didn’t want to risk missing one of their meat-free evenings, but didn’t quite have the nerve to phone up in advance to check.
I resolved not to join in the ritual slander of our hosts. The gossipy members tended to be young and flighty, often making little experiments in effeminacy. Ken himself was always talking about revolutionary androgyny, but the idea seemed very theoretical as it emerged from his thick neck. The flibbertigibbets of the group had their own idiosyncratic ideas about defying the patriarchy. Their revolutionary programme involved shop-lifting make-up from Josh Tosh. If there were other aspects I never heard about them.
I’m not a gossip and I don’t enjoy tittle-tattle. It’s not a moral position so much as a physical fact. Having an inflexible neck cuts me off from that whole aspect of the world. Gossip is only a pleasure if you’ve got supple vertebrae. I don’t find it easy to follow the social mechanics of a group. I can’t turn my head to deliver an aside, or catch the fleeting expressions on people’s faces when they think they’re not being observed. Peripheral vision isn’t enough unless you can keep it moving, pouncing on all the giveaway nuances at the edge of events.
An appropriate punishment for gossips might be blinkers or some sort of neck-brace arrangement, inhibiting the flow of information, though the effect might be paranoiac delusions. Certainly if I try to imagine what goes on around me, socially, in any sort of detail, I inevitably imagine people whispering against me. It’s a direct consequence of lack of mobility, and there’s not a lot to be done about it.
If people were considerate enough to arrange themselves in front of me like a group photograph, tallest in the back row or else crouching in the front, looking only at me, not exchanging signals among themselves in any sidelong manner, then I dare say I’d enjoy parties as much as everyone else does. It doesn’t seem a lot to ask. Perhaps we could arrange things on a rota basis – social life the majority way for fifty-five minutes an hour, then everyone adopting their positions at a given signal to arrange things to suit me. I could blow a little whistle. In the meantime, the simplest way for me to be part of a conversation is to rule it.
The sacred fluids are kept in trust
Sometimes there were guest speakers at CHAPs meetings. One was an anthropology graduate who gave a presentation about the very warlike Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea. According to this noble tribe, semen should never be wasted. Even such rituals as rubbing it into one’s hands or capturing it in an old Redoxon bottle would be unacceptable by their standards. These ways of cleaning up would qualify as dirty in their own right.
The student who told us about the Sambia wore a scarf so long that it fell below his knees, despite being coiled twice around his neck. The ends were bedraggled from being trodden on, by his own feet and those of others. He hunched his shoulders and held his elbows back while he spoke, as if he was longing to drive his hands into the pockets his jumper lacked. He was clean-shaven, except for little patches of whiskers high up on his cheekbones. He looked like a woodland creature from an early draft of The Wind in the Willows.
He started off by explaining that among the Sambia the transfer of semen to ladies’ vaginas was extremely limited and hedged about with taboos. The main sexual practice, crucial for the initiation of young males, was fellatio.
When Christians arrived, they were unenthusiastic about this tradition. They regarded the older members of the tribe as beyond help, but succeeded in building a chapel and enticing quite a number of young boys away from the Sambia and into their own curious practices. This process continued to the point where the existence of the tribe itself was in danger.
Our little radical Rat or Mole had our attention by now. He ended by quoting the defiant words of the headman of the Sambia:
‘These Christians are taking away our culture by building a chapel and converting our males.
‘It is a sin for my semen to be wasted. Women can only be approached at prescribed times and in the correct manner.
‘We will never defy our culture and waste our sperm. When the missionaries take our young men away, what are we to do? The only thing we can do after that is make a hole in the ground and go and fuck that when we need to have release. Tell me, is that all they will leave for us?
‘I tell you, these Christians make out they are so god-like. Accordingly to them we are only primitive savages who cannot be saved, but shall I tell you something?
‘One of our boys went over to these Christians and consequently never learned our initiations and our ways. Do you know what? A year or two after he had defected, a girl in that compound was raped … That is unthinkable amongst our peoples. All our women are loved and cherished here. They do not even know what rape is. No atrocity like that happens here. If it were ever committed, the punishment would be death. What is so “civilised” about those people?
‘In our tribe we fully know and understand the way we are made by the gods. If that boy had been here, he would have been initiated into drinking the semen of his elders. When he reached puberty and started to make his own sperm, he would have a younger boy to drink his semen for him, and when the younger boy grew older he would have another boy to service him, and so on. Thus the sacred fluids are kept in trust among our peoples … To this degree we respect the gods
and all our wonderful life.’
Despite his diffidence, our guest speaker held us spellbound. Even the ping of the timer on the Tonys’ electric oven, arriving in the middle of the lecture, had no power to break our concentration.
I dare say that like most of the life-changing texts of the 1960s and ’70s – Desiderata (‘Go softly’, and so forth) or the ‘Cree Indian proverb’ (‘Only when the last tree has died and / The last river has been poisoned and / The last fish has been caught, / Will we realise that / We cannot eat money’) – this plea was more or less made up. It doesn’t even matter. The text changes your life not by virtue of being true but because you are ready for the transformation it announces.
In Hall, as the academic year wound down, I heard people talking about their plans for the summer. One person was going to work in a pub in Argyll, another had found work repairing slate roofs on a farm in Cornwall. And what were my plans? Not quite in that class, though ambitious enough in their way. I would be spending the long vacation in the bosom of my family, trying not to choke on the bullying nipple of Mum’s need to look after me despite all protests.
Dancing with eyes averted
There was a rather hectic atmosphere as May Week approached. I had already noticed that students made a point of breaking up their love affairs near the end of a term. A little wave of tears would break over the undergraduate population just before Christmas and Easter, and then the heartbroken would go home to mope with their families, casting a pall on the celebrations. May Week, though (which lasted more than a week and took place in June), was high jilting season, particularly for third-years, many of whom seemed determined to wipe the emotional slate clean before they moved on into the ‘world’ and the next stage of their lives.
I dare say there were a few women who called the shots, but it was more of a female fate in those days to start May Week as the cornerstone of your boyfriend’s existence, and to end it more in the rôle of a stepping-stone, one on which he had wiped his shoes in passing.
Tickets for May Balls were very expensive, since they included food, drink and entertainment from mid-evening till dawn. Many couples had bought tickets well in advance, deposits had been paid for the hire of evening dress, so they went through the festivities despite the fact of rupture. Champagne, Pimm’s No.1 cup, whole roast boar, smoked salmon, all to be endured rather than enjoyed, at a sombre carnival that was like a wake without a body (unless you count the boar). I heard enough accounts of these events to be able to build up a composite picture. Couples would hang on grimly till dawn, dancing with eyes averted, then trudge away from the pleasure-grounds through a tide of plastic glasses and discarded kebabs. Really it was a relief not to be going. I counted my blessings. I don’t like tears and don’t like silences that seethe with reproach.
Not that there was much silence on the night. If the Nasty Thing had survived so long, the ambient vibrations would surely have done it in. I remember a slow blues that seemed to have twelve hundred bars rather than the specified twelve. Sometimes between numbers I could hear a more distant uproar, presumably Pembroke’s Ball or perhaps even Emmanuel’s, according to the dictates of the breeze. Homerton was also a possibility, I suppose, though the Balls at women’s colleges had the reputation of being a little more restrained, even staid. They were rumoured to serve vegetarian food and hire trad jazz bands. These were highly effective passion-killing measures even when imposed separately. In combination they made the successful production and maintenance of an erection, its shepherding to a climax, a practical impossibility.
Finally the echoes of sobbing died away from the courtyards of the golden colleges. Spilt emotion evaporated relatively quickly from ancient flagstones, but for quite a while many undergraduate hearts would feel an affinity with the lawns where marquees had stood, drained to yellowness and marked by the sharp heels of hollow revelry.
I stayed in A6 just as long as I could. I would have loved to convalesce at Mr Johnson’s Home in Bognor, but from health there can be no convalescence. Any other sort of institution might take me in but wasn’t guaranteed to let me out. Finally there was nothing for it but to face the family, with nothing to shield me but a thick sheaf of the strongest prescriptions I could think of, endorsed with the autographs which Flanny distributed so freely.
Peter was away on holiday. He took a train to Inverness and spent the summer hitch-hiking round the Highlands. Audrey was in residence, but we had never really been friends. She was in a state of wildly excited transition, spending most of the time with her best friend Lorraine Leeming. They would walk around with rolled-up tights stuffed into their tops, modelling the soft shapeliness to come. They would shout, ‘What God has forgotten we stuff with cotton!’ then roll on the floor shrieking with laughter, till their makeshift busts were squashed flat.
Looked good in a kaftan
The rest of the time they would write cheques in each other’s favour. Pay Audrey Cromer Two Million Pounds. Pay Lorraine Leeming Two Million Pounds. It was always two. A single million wasn’t enough for these plutocrats in the making. They were too young to have chequebooks so they drew their own from scratch. Freed from the constraints of plausibly representing legal instruments of exchange their cheques grew physically large, sometimes made up of several pieces of cardboard taped together.
The closest thing I had to allies in Bourne End were the Washbournes, Malcolm who shared my spiritual interests and his wife Priscilla who warmly mocked them. ‘Call me Prissie,’ Priscilla said from the first, meaning I suppose that she wasn’t. Wasn’t prissy, that is.
Mum seemed to think that the Washbournes were only trying to be youthful and trendy by being friendly to me, sucking up to the young, as if I was obviously a waste of an older person’s time. I said to Dad once, I don’t think Mum is very keen on the Washbournes, and Dad said, ‘Let’s face it, John, your mother isn’t very keen on anybody.’ Which was true enough but didn’t help in the short term.
The women were different types, and had no use for each other. Everyone always complimented Mum on how thin she was – how did she manage it? What was her secret?
Her secret was not eating. No great mystery. And to Prissie’s eyes Mum was actually too thin, a monument to appetite repressed. ‘You need some meat on your bones, Laura dear,’ she said once, which I think Mum never forgave. In her own eyes, if she wasn’t thin, she wasn’t anything.
Prissie for her part made her mark in the short period, a half-decade perhaps of heyday, when undernourishment was not quite compulsory and the phrase earth mother had an edge of awe rather than disdain. She looked good in a kaftan, the only one I ever saw (in that age of kaftans) who did. She could carry herself.
Prissie lived in bare feet – I don’t know why that way of putting it sounds so strange – though she would reluctantly put on shoes to go to the pub, slipping them off the moment she was ensconced with a drink.
From Mum’s point of view, of course, she was simply obese. I heard her mutter once, ‘That woman! Even her earrings are fat.’ She particularly disapproved of Prissie’s love of going barefoot. Mum seemed to think that shoes were necessary, like moulds for jelly, to stop the feet from spreading. Prissie would find, when she finally acknowledged the need for shoes, that she couldn’t force her feet back inside them.
I would often go out to the pub with the Washbournes. In fact I’d give them a lift. Prissie would be terribly appreciative, saying what a relief it was to be able to drink and not worry, since I was so responsible. She would keep up a running commentary in the car, saying, ‘John, you are miraculous. You must be the best driver in the world, that’s all I can say. I mean, there hasn’t been a peep out of Malcolm all this time’ – perhaps two minutes – ‘but when I’m driving he winces and groans the whole time. And now look at him – he’s blushing. Rather sweet. That must be your doing. I haven’t been able to get a blush out of him for years.’
‘How marvellous,’ she went on, ‘that you can park anywhere you like!’ –
since I had the benefit of my parking permit from the council, an orange card with a revolving indicator inside, on which I could show how long I expected to be away from the car.
‘How long do you think we’ll be?’ I asked. ‘Not long,’ said Prissie, ‘we’re just having a drink or two,’ and I told her to set the clock for four hours, just to be on the safe side. The joke of the whole rigmarole being that the Black Lion was only walking distance from home, for them anyway, and there were no restrictions on parking in any case.
The comedy continued inside the pub. Malcolm would install me on one of the high bar stools. I was conserving my funds, which meant I would order water with a dash of lime cordial, costing all of 4p, and nurse it all evening if need be. I’d buy a packet of peanuts for entertainment value. At one time peanuts had been provided free in a dish (a powerful dehydrating agent, and so hardly an unselfish gesture from the management), but people had been seen wrapping some up in a napkin for later, and that was that.
Rather than treating me to round after round, the Washbournes thought it was better sport to encourage me to do my party trick with the peanuts, flicking them into my mouth. Then they’d egg someone on to betting that I couldn’t still do it – and stay on the stool – if I had ‘a proper drink’. In this way I got a certain amount of free alcohol and became discreetly merry. When the second packet of peanuts arrived I might eat them out of Malcolm’s hand, funnelling my lips forward in a delicate trumpet, leaving his hand completely dry. Prissie, drinking her Campari, would say to no one in particular, ‘Really it’s just the other way about, you know. It’s Malcolm who eats out of John’s hand. Almost sinister, but what’s a girl to do?’ She sounded supremely unbothered, but then it took a lot to bother her.
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