Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Miss Collins’s treatment of my rampant reading was very much in keeping with the doctors’ treatment for the underlying condition that caused it. The remedy for the excessive stimulation I was creating (to replace the stimulation that had been taken away) was to take it away. I hope this philosophy has fallen into the contempt it deserves. Miss Collins decreed that my access to books should be rationed, and the appetite for reading which worried her so much indulged for no more than half an hour a day.

  It was absurd that mental inactivity should be supposed to be beneficial, but then it was also an absurd proposition on the physical level. I was being kept in bed for reasons of fashion. Bed rest was the panacea of its time. Just as there were people with certain specific conditions who happened to benefit from blood-letting when that was the vogue – people with hypertension, gout, polycythæmia – so there may have been people who benefited from bed rest. I wasn’t one of them.

  The 1950s was a period which put a lot of faith in the healing powers of tedium. Taken to extremes, of course, this principle yields a mystical insight, but I don’t think that was the idea at the time, the hidden wisdom of the system. So patients with mild digestive troubles, for instance, would be put onto a bland diet, religiously avoiding roughage until their systems could hardly deal with anything more challenging than mashed potatoes.

  The fad for prescribing bed rest in hospitals and convalescent homes didn’t really pass until the late 1960s. Even then, it was phased out for economic reasons, not because the professionals lost faith in its effectiveness. It simply cost too much to keep people horizontal and in limbo. It was expected that mortality figures would go up when the beds were cleared, freed up for patients with acute and actual needs, the only doubt being how much. In fact death rates went down. It turned out that bed rest had been killing far more people than it saved. Pulmonary embolism was murdering people in their beds.

  So much for physical bed rest. The arguments in favour of mental bed rest hardly exist. I don’t believe that imposing inertness on the mind as well as the body would have improved the well-being of a single patient. My mental vitality had been forced underground by physical inactivity, and rather than rejoice that the current was still strong Miss Collins tried to pump concrete down into the culvert where my life now ran.

  After the rationing of books time passed more slowly. I think time passed slowly in the 1950s anyway, for everyone, not just for me. Still, I had The Tale of Two Bad Mice safely memorised, and odd stretches of Pigling Bland.

  Beatrix Potter revealed new aspects of herself when I considered her with my new style of attention, without the book in front of me. I was less involved, and saw things from a greater distance. Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, the anti-heroes of The Tale of Two Bad Mice, are confronted in their own way with the illusions of the world. Exploring a dolls’ house, they find food aplenty in its kitchen. Hungry, they settle down to eat, but the ham, the lobster and the bread are all made of plaster and stuck to their plates, a discovery that the mice greet not with religious resignation but with vandalistic fury.

  Pigling Bland’s name was delicious in itself. Those clustered consonants – gl – bl – had a globulous poetry to them. My favourite sentence went ‘Pigling Bland listened gravely, but Alexander was hopelessly volatile.’ I didn’t know what all these words meant, but still I felt I was being nudged towards something. I wanted to be one of those who listened gravely. When I was allowed my daily ration of reading, of course, I preferred to tackle books that I didn’t already know. If ever I’d been dilatory in my reading, idly browsing from story to story, then that time was in the past.

  Even when reading time was up I liked to have books near me. They became symbols of themselves. After the Collie Boy my love of books was deeply ingrained, and I would never again take them for granted.

  There was a pattern set by her edict. There have been times in life when people have pointed the way for me, but more often I’ve only been able to find my path by spotting the pile of rubble in front of it. The roadblock was actually a signpost. Every time I’ve been told that some activity was unnatural, I was actually been being shown that this was where my nature lay.

  Latent pigment

  In the meantime, there was printed matter which didn’t need to be read. I loved the paintbooks which were printed with tiny dots of latent pigment, waiting for the stroke of a wet brush to make their colours appear, like cactus flowers. In fact Magic Painting of this kind was the only painting I was competent to do. My elbow had more or less seized up, and my wrist felt the loss of that movement. The wrist joint itself was no great shakes in terms of flexibility.

  I loved the ‘Spot the Difference’ puzzles in comics. They were like a more sophisticated continuation of the beloved old games of ‘I Spy’. The puzzle page was always the first one I turned to, the moment the comic was in my hands. I never had the patience to save it up, to ration it so that it would last for the whole of the week. Sometimes as a special treat Mum would draw me a home-made one, to tide me over between publication days. I didn’t mind the fact that in a puzzle drawn freehand, there were always more differences detectable than Mum had meant to put in.

  There was a picture in a comic that made a deep impression on me at this time. It was the simplest possible image, of a boy sitting on a roundabout in a playground. There was nothing special about him, but in my mind he was the Sit-Upon Boy. He could sit on anything, whenever he liked, while I could only lie. It was a sort of crush of envy. I felt such pangs of yearning, to be him, to do what he did.

  In my daily half-hour I wanted to read proper grown-up books. Far from protracting my childhood by putting the brakes on my reading age, book-rationing drove me further forward into precocity. I didn’t always want stories. My favourite books were ones which explained the world, preferably all of it. Over several months I absorbed great swathes of The World We Live In by Arthur Mee. I would often lavish my whole half-hour on that book, as long as Mum sat by me to help me with the harder spellings and tell me what words meant. We had a little routine about the book before we started. I’d say, ‘Who wrote this book, Mum?’ And she’d say, ‘It’s by Mee,’ and I’d say ‘Clever Mummy!’ We never tired of that – at least I never tired of that.

  When the half-hour was up (and I could hardly pretend that I didn’t know the time, with Jim’s outsized radioactive watch permanently on my wrist) Mum would read to me from the book I loved so much. I listened gravely. She held up the book for me to see the pictures. It was absolutely thrilling. I loved the pictures of trilobites and wanted to keep one as a pet. There was a section called ‘The Pageant of Life’, which was a phrase I loved, even before Mum explained that a pageant was a sort of procession with everyone dressed up. The best chapter of all was the one on the sun. It had a lovely pull-out bit that showed just a wedge of the sun and how big (how small!) the earth was in comparison. I loved the pull-out pages in The World We Live In and dreamed of a book whose pages would fold out again and again, till the pages were bigger than elephants’ ears, and then fold back neatly to be put away. A book that was huge and tiny at the same time.

  I felt my mind stretching, as my body was forbidden to do, when I imagined how big the picture of the sun would have been if they had shown more than a wedge. The book would hardly have fitted in the room!

  My body was subject to pinpricks and broadsides of agony, but from time to time my mind had pains of its own. Growing pains, perhaps. One night I woke up terrified that the sun was going to run out of fuel. I screamed for Mum who said of course it wasn’t. There was nothing to worry about – but I remembered the open fire at Granny’s house in Tangmere, and how she had to add coals to it every few minutes, using a wonderful tool like a giant pair of sugar tongs. I remembered that at Granny’s house I wasn’t allowed to touch the coal tongs because they were dirty, nor the sugar tongs because they were clean.

  If Granny’s fire couldn’t burn for more than a few hours without going out, how was the sun any d
ifferent? Nothing could burn like that and not get smaller. But Mum said our gas fire was different from Granny’s open fire, which was old-fashioned. She asked me if I had ever seen her having to add gas to the fires in our house? I had to admit that I hadn’t, but I stuck to my guns. Arthur Mee specifically compared the workings of the sun to a domestic coal fire, so it would have to run out sooner or later, wouldn’t it? Mum picked up the book and showed me a wonderfully reassuring sentence: ‘The Sun has enough fuel to go on burning indefinitely.’ Of course I was only reassured because I thought ‘indefinitely’ meant ‘for ever’. It’s a good job I didn’t know I was being kept in bed ‘indefinitely’ myself. Neither state was strictly speaking everlasting. One day I would leave that room and one day the sun would run out of fuel, too. Bed rest wasn’t going to be for ever, but it came close enough. It gave me a good working model of eternity.

  When the half-hour of my ration was used up, and Mum had things to do so she couldn’t read to me, I would ask her to twiddle the knob of our big valve radio until it picked up words in a foreign language. Then I could find my own stories in the unfamiliar syllables. I loved it if there was a foreign radio play on, with unfamiliar speech-rhythms, dramatic music and mysterious sound-effects. I would come out with my own brand of rapidly-spoken gibberish, gabbling away and chortling all the time. I asked if I could learn to speak foreign, and Mum said, ‘No you can’t!’ which didn’t disappoint me as much as I made out. I wasn’t searching for sense but for magic. I didn’t want to understand so much as surrender, to something beyond knowledge with which I felt affinity.

  The invalid’s friend

  I always tried to keep a bit of my reading time reserved for the Ellisdons catalogue. This was one of my great weapons in the war of attrition against boredom. I expect Mum came across an advertisement for it in a magazine. It seemed inexhaustible. Postal shopping is the invalid’s friend. Catalogues can tickle an appetite that would otherwise die. I found the notion of sending off for things miraculous. The Ellisdons catalogue turned the letter-box into a magical opening, through which any number of wonderful, tawdry things could flood in. I was only just beginning to get the hang of spelling, but SSAE, for Stamped Self-Addressed Envelope, spelt Open Sesame as far as I was concerned.

  Ellisdons had some astounding things in their catalogue. A Magna No-Flint Lighter, which I wanted even at the exorbitant price of twenty-five shillings. Whoopee cushions and stink bombs, though I had enough sense to realise that a stink bomb only worked if you could run away from the stench yourself. I was much less mobile than my intended victims, and while they were busy running off I would inhale a dose which (given my apparent fragility) would probably kill me. It was probably the slogan used to advertise the stink bombs in the catalogue which made me so keen on them, with its mystical inkling of the way our everyday categories can change places under the right circumstances: ‘gives off a smell you can almost see …’

  There were fire-breathing lessons also, which I actually sent off for. The trick involved a wick (with potassium nitrate) and some hay. Like most of the tricks that really attracted me, it was incredibly dangerous.

  Of course there was the occasional dud. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would waste good money on a wooden paddle with THE BOARD OF EDUCATION inscribed on it. Drawn on the paddle next to that motto was a cartoon of a boy bending over to have his bottom whacked. It was crudely drawn, like something on a sea-side postcard, showing blown-out cheeks and air rasping out of the mouth. It seems strange that an implement of physical punishment could count as a novelty item in the ’fifties, however jocular the presentation. I wasn’t tempted. My pennies went towards tricks and treasures.

  When I sent off for things, I wanted to use my money, not to rely on Mum’s. I knew I had some money in a Post Office account, thanks to Granny. It was a shock to learn that I couldn’t take any money out until I was seven. To me that was the same as the Post Office robbing me. They had taken my money and now they were refusing to give it back when I asked nicely.

  Seven seemed an awfully far-away age, well over the horizon. The way things were going, I decided my body was going to be dead long before, and I wanted the money before then. I remember asking if I could make an early withdrawal because I was so very ill, but Mum said, sadly, no. The whole thing was definitely a swizz. The next thing I wanted to do was to make out a will, so that the Post Office could be made to cough up after my death, but I was told I wasn’t old enough to do that either. Swizzed all over again, swizzled and reswizzled. It seemed hardly possible that a boy who couldn’t go anywhere, hardly even to the other side of the bed, could be ramped and cheated by the world in so many ways.

  In the Ellisdons catalogue there was also a joke camera, a Home Hypnosis Kit, a ventriloquism course, some little worms which grew in water, a See-Back-roscope which showed you things behind you, a magical flowering shell, and many sorts of indoor fireworks: fairy ferns, snakes-in-the-grass, Bengal Lights and the star turn, Mount Ætna, which spat fire and sounded almost as good as the outdoor kind.

  I loved the little mummy which wouldn’t stay in its tomb (unless you knew how to tap the secret hidden magnet), and the magical fish which curled up in your hand and showed you how much life force you’d got in you. If an Ellisdons toy didn’t do anything it was no good to me, though I made an exception for the Java Shrunken Head. It didn’t do anything but hang there, but it had had no end of things done to it to make it so small, which was almost as good. It would have been a nice spooky treasure to have hanging from my ceiling in darkest Somerset.

  Jiggling her big fat bum

  In the end I sent off for the whoopee cushion. I couldn’t wait for it to arrive, and the postman became a figure of commanding fascination, though I’d never given him much thought before. In the end, though, it was a bit of a disappointment. It worked a treat on Mum, who hated it. In her book the only thing which might be worse than a real blow-off (the family word for fart) was an artificial one. But it didn’t whoop for the Collie Boy, who had been the prime target all along. At first I thought Mum must have tipped her off, but I suppose you don’t have a career in education without some experience of pranks. I knew she was in on the joke because she kept jiggling her big fat bum on the cushion, and nothing at all happened. Somehow she knew how to disarm it, to silence the rubber lips that gave the blow-off its rasping voice.

  My next Ellisdons acquisition was a trick camera, and I certainly got her with that. I asked if I could take her picture, but the camera was really a jack-in-the-box. When I pressed the button a toy mouse flew out of the apparatus and hit her on the nose. It was marvellous! Exactly as the catalogue promised. She fell off her chair. She didn’t see that coming! I suppose it was a prank that she hadn’t come across during her time as a school-teacher. It was news to her. It came from nowhere and biffed her right on the conk!

  Her own sense of fun was wholesome and even childish. I remember her giving a little cry of joy at Christmas when she saw our decorated tree. She couldn’t keep her hands off the ornaments. She blew all the little trumpets and rang all the bells, rapping every glassy bauble with her knuckles to make it sound.

  Dad always said I could wrap Mum round my little finger, which was a delicious image. I pictured a mother shrunken and made pliable, a plasticine woman I could wear like a toy ring or a sticking plaster. Dad himself was less amenable, and I was exposed over long periods to two female intransigents, the two styles of sovereign will embodied by Miss Collins and Granny.

  When Granny came to stay, she would sometimes sit with me while Mum went out. She would sit formally facing the bed, elegant in a way that indicated long practice, the grace whose school is time. Granny had been sitting beautifully for years, with a steely poise not always designed to relax her companions. In Bach terms she was very much a Water Violet, except perhaps for the bit about her serenity being a blessing and a balm to all those she encountered. Granny could use her serenity like a jemmy. I showed her the little fish from Ell
isdons which rocked in your hand to show the life force, or else rolled over or curled up at the sides (all of which had different interpretations in the little booklet that came with the fish), but it just lay still in her palm. ‘I suppose this means I must be dead,’ she said.

  Before she sat down she would inspect the seat of the chair and invariably picked up a long stray hair of Gipsy’s, which she disposed of without comment. She wouldn’t read to me or give me lessons as such, although she couldn’t help giving me a certain amount of schooling in her special subject of unarmed combat, or conversation as she called it. Sometimes she taught me tongue-twisters, and songs she called rounds. These weren’t rounds like a doctor’s rounds but special songs which you didn’t both sing together but in relays.

  When Granny was coming to stay, Mum would spend hours cleaning the house from top to bottom, with murder in her heart, using the white-glove technique to find dust in out-of-the-way places. By the time her mother actually arrived she was exhausted. Granny would wake her up bright and early the next morning, fresh as a daisy and bearing a cup of tea, with the words ‘You take the upstairs and I’ll take the downstairs, and we’ll soon have everything ship-shape. I don’t know why you insist on paying that girl. She’s worse than useless.’

  Granny and Mum did everything differently, down to the smallest detail. When she passed the mirror on my chest of drawers Granny would straighten her back and raise her chin, while Mum cast her eyes down and to one side.

  ‘Granny’ has always seemed to me a powerful word. It’s odd for me to hear it on other people’s lips, referring to some irrelevant or ornamental presence. Certainly for Mum, and even perhaps for Dad, Granny was a thin grey cloud which would always blot out the sun. I remember when I learned that ‘Granny’ only meant ‘Mum’s Mum’ – it was rather a letdown. Somehow there seemed much more to her than being Mum to the power of two. Mum squared.