‘What do you mean, “expect”? You should know. You’re supposed to know nearly everything. Well, I don’t expect you to know everything, but if you remember the white tuppenny, you should certainly remember whether a man or a lady made it!’
‘Yes, I should, shouldn’t I? I would certainly have made the effort to remember if I’d known you were going to be so interested.’
‘So was that the only white tuppenny you saw, or was there another one?’
‘I can’t remember …’
‘Why ever not? When you saw a man’s white tuppenny didn’t you want to see a lady’s white tuppenny as well?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Why?’
‘Well I don’t expect there’d be much difference really.’
I was learning to make a little conversation go a long way. Mum, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly resourceful in manipulating my appetite. If she could turn a conversation about black excreta into a piece of salesmanship for burnt toast she was well and truly getting the knack.
She knew when to give way about food, strategically. I started to insist that all I would eat was a teaspoonful of raw cake mix. She said she couldn’t make such a small amount. I said why not? I might even eat two. I think she was beginning to be alarmed by my will-power. Immobility was the hallmark of my days, and now it seemed to be invading my character. So the next day she came in with half a dessertspoonful of raw cake mix. I wolfed it down.
Half-heartedly she warned me about the danger of worms but I wasn’t put off. Why not feed them too? I couldn’t believe that worms were nasty. The ones I could remember from the garden had seemed perfectly nice. She said they would tickle my botty from inside and make me want to scratch it. I quite liked this idea of having an itchy botty, but only if the reason was worms. I would want to be very sure that it was due to the presence of worms. Then I would want to see one, and keep it in a little dish for a while and then I would ask if I could feed it something else, or should I put it back into my botty to make it happy. Having something that enjoyed living in me seemed rather an honour. I would only take a worm-killer tablet if the worms got too itchy or bred too fast. First I would give them a good talking-to about how we should get along together, a worms’ rule-book or Highway Code. If they were sensible and behaved themselves I saw no reason why we couldn’t get along perfectly well together. I didn’t tell these secret thoughts to Mum, but hoped that eating cake mix might give the opportunity of putting my theory into practice. I never even caught one worm. It was a great disappointment.
Tomato flotilla
Mum also knew when to go to town with the catering. Bomfire Night was a treat I could no longer attend. The family did without fireworks for the duration, though Gipsy and I could hear the whoosh of joy, the crackle of exhilaration, from other gardens than ours. Gipsy whined miserably and I did my best not to join in.
Still, Mum was shrewd enough to exploit my love of the fire festival to boost my intake of food. She had always made ‘Scrambled Egg Boats’ for Firework Night, and there was no reason to change the menu just because we weren’t having any fireworks. Like many of her best and worst ideas, the recipe came from a magazine.
Mum hoarded the recipes from magazines, but was afraid to try them until she had scanned subsequent issues in search of corrections of misprints. She had once been tempted by a recipe for home-salted beef, only to read in a later issue that the amount of saltpetre required had been over-stated by a factor of ten, making it potentially toxic. We might all have been killed by a typographical error – except that I wouldn’t have touched it. I alone would have been left alive, to charge Woman’s Own with manslaughter by misprint.
Mum would make the scrambled egg in advance. Nearer to the time of serving she made toast, then buttered and trimmed the slices into a graceful curving point at one end. While the toast was under the grill she took fresh tomatoes (neither too firm nor too soft), quartered them and scooped out the innards. Taking each tomato quarter she cut them into narrower, more graceful wedges. These were the ‘sails’ of the Boats.
She spooned a dollop of scrambled egg, to which she’d added a few chopped chives and a dash of pepper, onto each shaped piece of toast, and then put an eviscerated tomato wedge on top of that, neatly attaching the sail to the buttery, scramble-freighted hull with the mast of a cocktail stick.
She came into my room with a whole flotilla of them, arranged in naval formation on a large plate balanced proudly on the upraised fingers of one hand. I didn’t say no. The creamy egg and fresh tomato played such a lovely fanfare of aromas. Reluctantly I dismasted the savoury boat and wolfed down the ambrosial snack. The flavours danced and blended on the taste buds. Somehow the toast kept its crunch despite the moistness of the scramble.
The only shadow on the feast was my knowledge of the next day’s menu. The innards scraped from the tomatoes in the process of sculpting the sails had to go somewhere, in those thrifty ’fifties. In the wake of those delicious boats the abomination that was stuffed marrow, that dismal barge, would be slowly surging towards me.
Stuffed marrow was as disgusting as the Scrambled Egg Boats had been delightful. It wasn’t the tomato innards that I minded but the mince part of the stuffing. That I wouldn’t eat. Fasting was a doddle when you knew in advance it was going to be marrow for lunch, and could prepare yourself. The treat was balanced by the going without. I didn’t consciously thwart Mum’s plans to feed me up, but something in my forming character applauded the symmetry of this arrangement.
At some stage Mum realised that there were such things as indoor fireworks. It would have been poor tactics to lay on a display inside the house, necessarily very muted, on the same night that everyone else was letting off rockets galore just outside. Indoor fireworks are to outdoor what tiddlywinks is to the pole vault. Mum waited for my birthday instead.
One advantage of the indoor fireworks was that I was actually allowed to light them, with a long spill. They were brought in on a tray and laid on the bed. I particularly liked the ones that looked like pills on square pieces of cardboard, but produced a writhing snake when touched with the taper. A serpent made of some grey and fæcal ash would rush from the ignited pellet, and I watched in raptures while it writhed in coils of silent agony. The smell of indoor fireworks is harshly beautiful. I hated for it to dissipate and would plead with Mum not to open the windows. She grumbled that she didn’t want to be smelling that stink on her curtains in a week’s time, but still she agreed to wait for a few minutes, chafing, after the show was over.
Perhaps that was the day when I solemnly announced, ‘This is a very special birthday. Today I am the same age as all the fingers on one hand.’
I had yet to understand the spiritual significance of a birthday. The spiritual significance of a birthday is nil. She who fills a cradle fills a grave. I had yet to read the verse which describes celebrating a birthday as a sort of necrophilia:
Of all days
On one’s birthday
One should mourn one’s fall [into entanglement].
To celebrate it as a festival
Is like adorning and glorifying a corpse …
The left hand which I held up to demonstrate the special significance of that birthday was becoming strange to me. The wrist was twisting of its own accord, and the fingers were losing the knack of staying parallel. Dr Duckett the GP recommended that I wear splints at night to minimise the distortion of the joints.
Collie Boy
Now that my age corresponded to the number of digits on a hand, however well or badly shaped, it was time to think of my education. Not a school, of course, but schooling none the less. A teacher coming to the house several times a week. An elderly school-teacher earning a little money in her retirement. Miss Collins.
There must have been a lot of work behind the scenes to arrange it, but Mum only gave me the news a little bit before Miss Collins arrived for the first time, so that my excitement wouldn’t become dangerously mag
nified by a long wait. I had time to ask, ‘Is she a governess?’ Granny had had a governess, who had marked her nose with a piece of chalk if she got her sums wrong. She hated that, and so would I. Granny’s governess would tie her thumbs behind her knees if she fidgeted. Would Miss Collins be allowed to do that?
Once I was reassured that Miss Collins wasn’t a governess, I was mad keen for lessons to begin. Someone was coming to the house with only one object in mind: to teach me everything she knew. I couldn’t wait. There was never a pupil so willing.
After the first lesson, though, I asked Mum, ‘Is Miss Collins a lady or a man?’ I was genuinely puzzled. My tutor was at a rather mannish stage of later life. She had whiskers of a rudimentary sort. Mum laughed rather uneasily and said Miss Collins was definitely a lady, but she could see why I needed to ask. After that we gave Miss Collins a nick-name which we used with much guilty pleasure. To us she became the Collie Boy.
This wasn’t the first time I had been puzzled by the marks of gender. For a long time I worried about the status of nurses, who seemed to be in some strange way intermediate. Finally I asked Mum, ‘Are nurses ladies?’
‘Whatever do you mean, JJ?’
‘Are nurses ladies or are they men?’ I wasn’t thinking in terms of male nurses, not yet knowing that such things existed.
‘They’re ladies, of course! Why would you think anything else?’
‘Well, nurses have ears and ladies don’t.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
What I was talking about, really, was that nurses were the only female persons I had seen who wore their hair pinned neatly back, so that I could see their ears. I had always thought the hair-do was all part of the lady. Normal ladies wore their hair permed and shaped, so that they had waves of glossy hair where their ears would have been if they had had them.
‘Men have ears, but I’ve never seen a lady’s except a nurse’s so are nurses ladies?’
‘Everyone has ears. I have ears, you know I do.’
‘Will you show me?’
‘Of course I will, silly. There’s one, see? And there’s the other.’ So the nurse question was settled, just as the Miss Collins question would be. It turned out that nurses and Miss Collins were all really ladies.
Not long after that Mum told me the facts of life. She was remarkably direct about it. She warned me that people would try to tell me about babies and everything, ‘and they’ll get it wrong’. So she told me. This sudden surge of frankness represented an underside of her character, the medical professional in a hurry to dispel ignorance. Other children were kept in the dark, even when they were obsessed with knowing where babies come from, and here I was being overwhelmed with knowledge well ahead of schedule, and without having to ask a single question.
She used family words for the parts involved, saying ‘taily’ rather than penis, but otherwise she was fairly frank. I was outraged. I thought she must be making it all up. ‘But you told me it was all to do with storks and blackberry bushes!’
‘No, John, I never did. I said that some people say it’s to do with storks and blackberry bushes. That’s what some people pretend to believe, but now I’m telling you the truth.’
She might at least have come up with a better story.
‘But that’s rude. Why do mummies and daddies have to be rude to make a baby?’
‘Well when they do it, it’s nice. So if it’s nice, it’s not rude.’
‘Nice? Nice? What’s nice about putting your taily in a hole between a lady’s legs? I bet it hurts!’
‘No, it doesn’t. The lady likes it.’
‘I DIDN’T MEAN THE LADY. I meant, I bet it hurts the man!’ My concern was all for him, in this desperate transaction. ‘The poor man! He must love the baby terribly to do that with his taily.’
‘Oh no, the man likes it!’
‘How do you know? You’re not a man!’
‘No, but I told you – Daddy says it’s nice.’
This was where her lying was blatant and I became incredulous with anger. ‘Daddy would never say it was nice to stick his taily in a hole between a lady’s legs.’
‘He says it’s nice.’
‘Bring him here. I have to hear him say it.’ I was almost in tears. ‘He won’t say it, he can’t say it because it’s not true. You’re fibbing!’
‘I’m telling the truth. And one day you will find out for yourself …’
‘Do you mean that one day I’m going to take my taily and stick it in a hole between a lady’s legs?’
‘Yes, I expect so.’
This was the last straw. This made me so angry she must have regretted, for the sake of my immobility and my health (which seemed to be the same thing), that she’d ever started discussing human reproduction. I shouted, ‘Well I won’t won’t won’t! It sounds really horrid and I’m never never never going to do it! And I don’t want you telling your rude lies to Peter!’
Where the baby comes out
She bustled out of the room but she was back in a minute or two. ‘I’ve asked Dad. He says it’s very nice and not rude at all.’
‘What sort of nice? How can it be nice? It must be horrid.’
‘Let me think of something you really like. That’ll help you understand.’
She fetched Dad’s Mason Pearson hairbrush and softly brushed my hair with it. ‘When Daddy does the thing with his taily, it’s even nicer than this.’ How could it be nicer than this? Then she spoiled it by saying, ‘He puts it in where the baby comes out.’ Both of us had lost track of the fact that there was a lady involved, and that she had a place for Dad to put his taily, and that the lady in this case was Mum. I tried to concentrate on this important part of the absurd story. Making an effort to sound like Dad myself, no nonsense, all business, I said, ‘I think I’d better see this pocket where the taily goes.’
‘Well, I’m not going to show you!’
‘You can’t tell me and then not show me. That’s not fair.’
‘You just have to trust me.’
‘Well I won’t. You showed me your ears, remember.’ If she’d exposed the one hole, surely she could do the same with the other. ‘You’re just going to have to show me where the taily goes. Or else I won’t believe you ever again.’
‘You can believe what you like. I’m just trying to save you getting into a muddle later on.’ I wondered why she was so shy about showing me the pocket, really. Perhaps she had a little taily of her own.
The only bit of the story I liked at all was the idea that the bag beneath my taily (the family word was ‘scallywag’) was full of seeds. Otherwise it was obviously rubbish.
Dot-ditty-dash
From Miss Collins’s point of view I must have been a faintly alarming child to teach. Teachers usually like a responsive pupil, but in me the hunger for knowledge had got entirely out of hand. Mine was a desperate case. It wasn’t just that I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know anything, anything at all.
Miss Collins brought a little portable blackboard with her, which I thought was a thrilling piece of equipment. I loved the dot-ditty-dash noise the chalk made as she wrote, and the way she wiped the board with a hanky tucked into her sleeve. The noise of her dancing chalk was like the tapping of Morse code. Dad had a proper Morse tapper which he let me use, until Mum said that I was getting too excited. He said that to be really good at Morse you actually had to think in the code. He was probably thinking in Morse the whole time.
Miss Collins was rather set in her ways – not a surprising thing, considering that she had spent most of her life in charge of rooms where she was hardly likely to be intellectually challenged. Her lessons were set pieces, well rehearsed and forcefully delivered. I remember one rather dramatic lesson, about the family life of a vowel.
It went like this: baby ‘i’ used to be taken for walks by his parents. They held his hands on either side as they strolled along. Then one day the wind came along and blew off his hat – his hat, of course, being his
dot. To demonstrate, the Collie Boy puffed up her slack cheeks and blew on the blackboard, while she wiped off the dot with the board-rubber. Twice more she blew, and with each puff she wiped away the letters on either side of baby ‘i’. The wind blew away his parents!
Hatless and abandoned, baby ‘i’ was engulfed by shame, and there his childhood ended. His hat was lost for ever, and his parents weren’t there to hold his hand any more. He was doomed to grow up into a capital letter – that is, an adult – and to make his way in the world alone.
It’s not the most obvious way to think about the alphabet, is it? I don’t think I’ve invented the element of trauma and isolation – little ‘i’ as part of a joined-up world, then when maturity strikes having to come to terms with bereavement and solitude. I stands alone. I stand alone. Italics convey an extra emphasis on disgrace, the stricken capital staring down at its feet.
Apart from the Freudian scenario, there was something close to bad taste in Collie Boy spelling out this little drama to me. I was taking a bit of a break from standing up, myself. It was a treat even to be propped up, so that I could see the blackboard properly. Was it tactful of Collie Boy to remind me that even lower-case letters led a more active life than I did? She was teaching a standard lesson, not going to the trouble of tailoring it to the pupil.
The challenge of mashed potatoes
My writing was hopeless, but my devotion to books was intense. In fact Miss Collins became alarmed by how quickly I learned. My reading age was galloping ahead, since I had so little else to do. It couldn’t be good for a five-year-old to be rattling through Beatrix Potter, or so she thought. She would intervene. It didn’t seem to occur to her that normal development was no longer a possibility, and she must build on what she found. If I was racing ahead in one area, she should be glad rather than place obstacles in my path. In most respects I was falling far behind, and would never catch up.
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