Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Adults worry too much

  When I was three I made a bomfire – that’s bomfire with an ‘m’. ‘Bomfire’ always held a promise of devastation for me, smouldering away in the middle of the word. I used grass cuttings, lit with matches supplied by an older boy, who cuddled me. He sat with his legs apart, which left room for little me between them. Perhaps there wasn’t really an older boy – perhaps I stole the matches from home and he was just a story I told when everything went wrong, with the detail about him cuddling me just a bit of wish-fulfilment put in for my own benefit. If I’d made up an older boy for the purpose of spreading the blame, I might as well get some extra enjoyment out of my excuse. In my mind that was a very natural position for me, between a big boy’s legs.

  Even if there really was an older boy, the bomfire was all my idea. I did the talking, calming Peterkin’s doubts. I said, ‘I know what I’m doing. I’ve seen how it’s done.’ Adding with grave assurance, ‘Adults worry too much.’ Then I burned the greenhouse down. Well, that became the family story. In the struggle for survival of rival versions of an anecdote, ‘John almost scorched the greenhouse’ has no chance against ‘John burned the greenhouse down.’ My memory of the incident is of triumph not disaster. It gave me joy to release the smoke and flame lurking inside an unpromising heap of cut grass. The word normally attached to such feelings is pyromania, but I don’t really think it covers my case. It misses the aspect of worship, the sense of a sacrament. I feel ‘pyrolatry’ comes closer to the truth.

  My love of fire affected my feelings about the days we celebrated. Nothing about Christmas could compare with Guy Fawkes. For a born pyrolater like me, December 25th couldn’t hold a candle to November 5th, and not just because someone with a birthday on December 27th was bound to feel his own nativity over-shadowed. Bomfire Night was a festival with no moral improvement to offer, a gala of unholy combustion that had its own sort of holiness. It was also something that our family did rather well.

  Dad never used milk bottles as rocket launchers for our family firework displays. He built his own, using broom handles sharpened at one end so that they could be driven into the ground more easily, with eyelets screwed in at intervals along the shaft. Eyelets of different sizes could accommodate different diameters of stick, without the sloppy angle that comes from a loose fit.

  I suppose all this was an extension of his identity as a pilot, his sense of a general command of the air. Milk bottles were out of the question because the size of rocket he favoured would have tipped them over. Dad didn’t ordinarily enjoy spending money, but he never begrudged the expense when it came to fireworks, and perhaps a sense of family pride came into it. Even if he’d bought the same titchy little rockets as everyone else, I don’t think milk-bottle launch pads would have been good enough for the Cromer family fireworks. Not for us the 85-degree angle – 72°, even – of rockets that loll in the mouths of milk bottles before the moment of ignition. The family projectiles were never less than fully erect. Our rockets must ascend in a perfect vertical, as if they really were meant to escape the earth’s pull.

  Those home-made rocket launchers were the only bit of do-it-yourself I remember Dad doing. They fitted his definition of manly activity while serving the purpose, for once, of something wonderfully useless.

  I wasn’t allowed to light fireworks or handle sparklers, and I can see the sense of that. The pyrolatrous glint in my eyes can’t have been much of an inducement to take a chance on me behaving responsibly.

  Mum and Dad both smelled of smoke even when it wasn’t Bomfire Night, but underneath that Mum smelled like me and Dad didn’t. Mum and I had marked each other, as dogs mark lampposts. I smelled of the milk she had made inside herself, and she smelled of the milk I had taken in and then burped softly over her shoulder while she patted my back. Dad smelled different entirely.

  I remember being held in my father’s arms at a fruit stall in a market. I was reaching out towards a bunch of bananas and saying the word ‘Gee!’ with a hard ‘G’. My word for bananas. What I meant when I said ‘Gee!’ was partly ‘lovely bananas, want bananas’ and partly something else. It was partly ‘I love my daddy’s smell and the feeling of being in his arms.’ It was only much later I wondered if the brand name Geest had been stuck onto the bananas, so that I was instinctively reading the word, remembering my letters from a previous life. Geest of course being the Dutch for ghost or spirit.

  Baby Bear bounce

  One day when I was three Dad borrowed my favourite red ball, flew over the garden and dropped it down to me from his plane. This would be the house in Bathford, outside Bath, at the top of a hill. Perhaps it was his farewell outing in a Tiger Moth, a training biplane manœuvrable at low speeds which was coming to the end of its long service life around then. Can I really have caught my red ball cleanly, without help, on the third enormous bounce? There was a Daddy Bear bounce, that seemed to go right back up into the sky it had come from, then a Mummy Bear bounce, up to the level of the tree-tops this time, and then a Baby Bear bounce which was just right, at hedge height. A bounce for each of us, and into my waiting hands. This was an extraordinary happening, needing to be replayed again and again in my mind until it took on a dark varnish of meaning.

  I feature quite strongly in the early pages of the family album. Later on I’m relegated to the sidelines. I become awkward supporting cast for other people’s birthdays and holidays. But Mum and Dad had quite a lot of photographs taken when I was three, by Cyril Howes of Bath / Abbey Churchyard / Telephone 60444, so I go out in a blaze of glory as a photographic subject. Then later they couldn’t bear to sort through them critically, getting rid of the ones that weren’t so good. Knowing that my life from that point on had nothing in common with what went before.

  As a three-year-old I was a cheerful active child, happy to play with my bricks while the photographer worked away, with a little gallery of memories that didn’t need chemicals to be developed and fixed – the happiness of a good session at potty, the pride of peeing a winning arc, and the physical stimulation of being in Dad’s arms, reaching for the suggestive fruit par excellence, all too obvious object of desire. Unzip a banana.

  Then my life began. My life acquired its sruti-note – the fundamental drone that underpins a raga, the part of the music that isn’t even part of the music. The Sanskrit word has come to mean ‘authority’. Hindu cosmology is particularly compatible with musical analogies. It’s not so much the Big Bang as the Big Twang, a primal throb underlying every variation of pitch and timbre.

  My life began with a fever. The pain came only at night, to start with. Starting in the knee. Hot and dizzy. At two in the morning I’d be screaming, then by breakfast-time I would almost have forgotten. All childhood illnesses are dramatic, but this was more dramatic than most. I would scream for quite a while without stopping, and I couldn’t bear for my knee to be touched. Mum gave me aspirin, so many that once I saw two Mums coming into the room.

  The fever played hide-and-seek with doctors. Mum would take me to the local surgery, but by then I was fine again, running around merrily, impatient to be read Beatrix Potter, to start fires, to eat dirt when I could get it. The doctor may have wondered if this was an obsessive mother making too much of things. He said, if you’re really sure, call me out the next time it happens. If you’re really sure.

  We didn’t have a car, but we did have a phone. Not everybody did, but we did, though it didn’t get much use in daily life. So the next time it happened she phoned him, her heart pounding as much from her own daring at disturbing a doctor’s sleep as from the screams of her first-born. When he came he could see for himself how inflamed it was, how much pain it gave.

  It was beyond him. I needed to be seen at a hospital, where they would do tests. I’m taking you to a nice hospital, Mum told me. What’s that? A place where they stop you being ill. But I’m not ill. I’m a good soldier. I’ve only got a sore knee sometimes.

  I was taken to a place called Manor Hospital
, where they prodded and poked. It wasn’t a nice sort of place at all. When we arrived, I asked if my mum could stay as well. Because I asked that, it was put into my notes – as she later saw – that I had ‘an unnatural attachment’ to my mother. What would have counted as a natural attachment, in a three-year-old full of pain being left to be poked and prodded by strangers?

  Mum came with me to the ward, but the moment I was put in bed she left, not saying a word. I watched her grief-stricken as she walked away. Her shoes made a sharp clopping noise on the floor, and the tight skirt of the period required her to take short steps, so that she seemed to take ages to abandon me. She didn’t even turn round at the last moment to give me a little wave, as love would have compelled her to do.

  I felt deserted by her, and aggrieved by the hospital’s ways of doing things. They had put me in a bed with sides, a hospital cot. Did they think I was a baby? And now Mum who could have explained it all to me had gone away.

  She came to visit the next day, and when I sulked and wouldn’t speak to her she cried, explaining that she was only doing what she had been told to do. The hospital said it was for the best to leave without saying good-bye. Mum had trained as a nurse, which may have made it harder to argue with hospital rules. She had no training in how to be the mother of a patient.

  Spiritual carbon monoxide

  A clean break was prescribed as the least distressing procedure. It avoided the heart-ache of protracted leave-takings – tears, pleading. It prevented Scenes, and Scenes never did anyone any good. Better for the children in the other beds, certainly, if Mum walked off without a word, as if she couldn’t wait to be shot of me.

  There are things, though, which clean-break theory ignores. A child who imagines himself delivered into the hands of cruel strangers, for no fixed term, has an altered body chemistry. In his sleep he breathes out dismal vapour – spiritual carbon monoxide. Better for my ward-mates to have witnessed a scene of squalid sorrow, with me howling and begging Mum to stay, than to have taken into their lungs the low fog of desolation and abandonment which I exhaled that first night.

  Mum tried to cheer me up. Did I like it here? No I didn’t. I wanted to go home. Children cried in the night. I didn’t like the cereal. There was only Corn Flakes for breakfast and fried bread, which I hated. Why couldn’t I go home, where there was Weetabix?

  The third day she brought along some Weetabix, to give me a taste of home. A little bit of continuity between my new life and the old. When she asked a nurse for a bowl and some milk she was told that Weetabix wasn’t allowed.

  Mum argued the toss and made a little headway. It was agreed that it would be all right for me to have some Weetabix just this once, but it wouldn’t be right to make a habit of it. There were other children being looked after in the hospital who didn’t have mummies to bring them in Weetabix. It wouldn’t be fair on them. There was socialism of some punitive sort evident in the hospital’s thinking about cereal.

  Manor Hospital doesn’t get many marks from me, as a giver of care. Some of the procedures they subjected me to may have been medically sensible, but as no one explained anything they were humanly degrading. They kept putting swabs down my throat, looking for streptococcus, I suppose. Before the swab came the spatula. The spatula was horrible because it made me retch. I remember the feeling of being about to be sick, and also trying to work out how far back in my throat the spatula went to produce that hideous sensation. So I took the straw they gave me with a glass of water and practised taking it into my mouth as far as possible. When the sick feeling came I learned to overcome it. It was a sort of game. Soon it was easy.

  The doctor didn’t play along, though. When he came in again, I didn’t retch, or even flinch, when he got to what had previously been the point of my gagging reflex. He gave me a funny look, as if he didn’t enjoy being outsmarted, and pushed the spatula further in, until he got the painful, humiliating reflex he seemed to want so much.

  It was a useful discovery, that there were other factors in the world of doctors and hospitals than the welfare of the patient. However much I trained myself to accommodate his probings, this particular doctor would keep on pushing until he got the desired paroxysms. Other children on the ward gagged the moment the spatula entered their mouths, and the doctor was perfectly satisfied. If I’d had any sense I’d have done the same, from the beginning. As it was, by the time he came to scrape his swab against the back of my throat, the tissues were so tender it felt as if he was trying to strike a match there, to set my throat alight.

  There was another doctor who came in at one point to carry out the same procedure. His hands smelled of the same soap, but they followed a different code. They were gentle. His voice and manner were full of love. His spatula wasn’t pushed any further than the minimum, and my body reacted as if it was a different organism entirely. My throat opened like a flower to his swab.

  Tickling the bone

  There were also bone biopsies, which no doctor could have made painless. They involved scraping the bone of the conscious patient with an instrument that had a little hook attached to it, to gouge out a sample. It’s hard to describe pain, even to compare one pain with another mentally, all you can say is pain or no pain. This was pain. The scraping was deep inside me. I cried out for ‘Suzie’ and the nurse asked, ‘Is that your sister, dear?’ No, Suzie was a straw dog, given to me by my Uncle Roy for my first birthday.

  Many years later, reading accounts of tortures used on political prisoners in South America, I came across a very similar technique, which went by the grimly poetic name of ‘tickling the bone’. If I’d known that what the doctors were doing was a form of torture, though carried out in my own best interests, I might have tried confessing my meagre sins, crying out, ‘I ate a red Spangle that I knew was dirty! I saved up my tuppennies and did them in the bath! I wanted to see them float!’

  I was as incidental to what was being done to my body as the abductees on television programmes, when aliens probe and scrape. No one is actively drilling for pain, in the hospital, on the mother ship, but it spouts from its bottomless wells. Perhaps the writers of those shows had hospital experience as infants, and are using fantasy to work through their traumas. Good luck to them. I find such things hard to watch. I find such things hard to turn off.

  They stuck sharp things into my bottom and they pushed blunt ones up it. The sharp things were the needles that administered injections of iron, and the blunt ones were enema nozzles. I squealed as the funnel was inserted and the liquid began to flow. I remember the smell of the rubberised sheet beneath me mixed with the smell of my opened bowels. There was someone at each corner of the sheet holding it up, so as to prevent my helpless slurry from spilling onto the bed or the floor. Not quite the four angels, one at each bed-corner, that I had been encouraged to visualise in infant prayers, who were to guard me as I slept. The slurry formed a shallow pool with me at the centre. The whole event was shaming, with no explanation given. Why was I being made to go to the lavatory in bed? ‘It’s only soapy water!’ said a nurse in a rather cross tone, as if there had never been such a fuss made over nothing. And as if the exact composition of the warm liquid that was being driven into me, reversing the proper direction of travel, was something I could be expected to know. I was baffled as well as humiliated. Holding on was a relatively recent achievement for me, and now the right and clever thing seemed to be letting go. I just wished they’d make up their minds.

  The only good thing to come out of my Manor Hospital days had nothing directly to do with medicine. From my bed I could see a chimney on one of the hospital buildings which was pouring out black smoke. It was a windy day. A gust of wind suddenly snatched the smoke and whisked it past my window. I knew I was stuck where I was, but the smoke rushing past the window produced an optical illusion – as if the whole ward was moving at speed in the opposite direction. Objectivity went on the slide, just as it does when the train next to yours starts moving, and for a while you don’t realis
e that your own is still waiting at the platform. I lost my bearings in a way which amounted to revelation.

  This was a glimpse that stayed with me, a mystical inkling. One suggestive thing about the experience was that its materials were so humble. It wasn’t frankincense taking on a meaning beyond itself, only smoke from incinerated hospital refuse. A sense of the meaning of life can be constructed from any material however unpromising, from whatever lies to hand. Perhaps burning was a necessary aspect of the experience, from the point of view of getting my attention, since I’ve always been so attuned to combustion.

  I don’t know how long they looked after me at Manor Hospital. It was long enough for Mum to bring me Suzie the straw dog eventually, who gave me some comfort. When I came home I was no better but I had a diagnosis attached to me: rheumatic fever. It wasn’t an uncommon condition in those days, a side-effect of streptococcus infection. Three per cent of individuals with untreated streptococcus go on to develop acute rheumatic fever, when antibodies are generated which attack the membranes in joints – the synovial linings. It was thought that I might have had streptococcus without any noticeable symptoms. So perhaps there was a reason for them to be so keen on pushing swabs down my throat.

  At three I was well below the usual age of onset for the disease (six to fifteen), and the arthritic pains I was experiencing didn’t really fit the definition of ‘migratory’. They seemed pretty stubbornly resident. New areas were beginning to be inflamed, but not because old troubles were clearing up. There were squatters in my knees wrecking the premises, and they showed no signs of moving on. In fact somehow they were inviting their cronies to join the party, to occupy my hips and elbows, ankles, wrists and shoulders, until there was a general involvement of the joints in misery, pain and swelling.