Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  There was some comb in the honey, which she showed me was made up of little regular rooms. Late at night she sat on the chair opposite my bed and told me her cure for sleeplessness. She was wearing a dressing gown which made a luxurious rustle quite unlike the anxious swish of Mum’s. I assume she was sleepless herself, wandering the house, and found me in the same state.

  Polyhedral infinity

  What she did when she couldn’t sleep, she said, and what I should do also, was to imagine herself being inside one of the cells with a little brush, a brush as soft as a whisper. Only when my brush had done its work and the little chamber was perfectly clean and shining should I move onto the next cell with my whispering brush. In this way the mind might be calmed and sleep invited. I liked the idea of polyhedral infinity, my mind as an empire of cells, needing proper maintenance. It was entirely in character that Granny’s cure for sleeplessness should be vicarious housework. It was still hard, though, to associate Granny with either sleep or the lack of it. I already felt that she would resist being mastered by unconsciousness. Why would she give in? Capitulate to that soft siege. Equally unthinkable, though, that sleep wouldn’t come running the moment she snapped her fingers.

  Granny let her guard down a little that night we pooled our insomnias. ‘I remember when your mother was starting to grow up, John,’ she said, ‘she would go out to dances and such things. I would tell her very strictly to be back by nine, ten at the absolute latest. Sometimes she would not return until gone eleven. On one occasion it was after one.’ Children love these revelations that Mummy and Daddy weren’t always good little girls and boys themselves, and in that respect I was no different. I was utterly normal.

  Between louche and lozenge

  ‘I would sit at the window,’ Granny said, ‘watching for the lights of the car of the young man who was to bring her home. Mostly all I would see was the ghostly outlines of trees. When there was a car, I became very agitated, thinking that this must at last be her. It never was, but during those moments I realised how much I really …’ The word love almost leaped from her lips under these special circumstances, but even sleepless and confiding she was able to choke it back. ‘… How much fondness I had for her.’ Love was a word that had been fiercely edited out of her conversation. There was a gap in her personal dictionary somewhere between louche and lozenge.

  ‘Then my son Roy – your Uncle Roy – asked me what I was doing. I said, ‘Worrying,’ and he said something that was not just sweet and clever but wise. He wasn’t fully grown up himself, in some ways still a child, but he knew what he was saying. He said, “Well, why don’t you just get on up to bed and I’ll sit up and worry for you?” I really valued that in him. So I say to you now, if you have a worry that is keeping you awake, just tell Granny and she’ll do the worrying for you, while you get some sleep.’

  What kept me awake was more like a disappointed appetite for events than worries of any kind. Since my life was being kept so free of content, I would have to import things to occupy me from the few people I saw. It wasn’t that people volunteered their inmost secrets, exactly, but they certainly said more than they would have to anyone else in my age group. Baby talk is a performance, even if you’re a baby. Prattling becomes a chore. Sooner or later the adults I spoke to tired of the effort it took to talk down to me.

  I dare say the people around me felt a need to compensate me for my deprivation, as I floated month after month in a clumsy 1950s prototype of the isolation tank. They chatted on, and I encouraged them with every inducement I had. I didn’t always understand but I always remembered. I had nothing else to do with my time. If I was precocious, at least I was innocent of swank. It was pure survival strategy. Who else was I going to talk to, if not adults? For practical purposes I had no contemporaries. Peter was younger and unavailable, intent on exploring his surroundings in ways I no longer could. He didn’t share his discoveries, either out of innate tact or because Mum had warned him not to rub it in that our destinies had diverged so markedly.

  From Mum I wanted to know if we had other ‘home’ words, like ‘siss’ and ‘tuppenny’, which I had needed to explain to Dr Duckett. I wanted to know the proper outside word for things as well. It’s the doctor-and-nurse word that really counts. Then when she said that the proper word for tuppenny was ‘fæces’, I thought it was priceless. I made up a rhyme which went ‘My sheep have got fæces in their fleeces.’

  Besides ‘taily’ and ‘scallywag’ there were words for female parts. ‘Boozzie’ was the family word for ‘bosom’. There was no home word for the lady’s hole where the taily was alleged to go, which struck me as rather suspicious, but there was apparently a doctor-and-nurse word, which was ‘vagina’, which had a nice poetic sound to it.

  Not all home words came from Mum and Dad – some were from me. ‘Snort’, my improvised baby-word for ‘nostril’, had passed into currency, so that Mum herself sometimes used it.

  One day Mum let slip that she had been brought up with a different set of home words. I piled on the pressure till she told me what they were. At last she gave in, but she made me swear not to use them even in the house. The pleasure for me in learning this archaic vocabulary lay not only in imagining Mum having to use the words but also Granny teaching her them. Mum’s childhood word for ‘milk’ was ‘ookkies’. What we called ‘tuppenny’ was ‘jobs’.

  Throbbing with ancient trauma

  Jobs had been a dark word in Mum’s childhood. ‘Have you done your jobs today, Laura?’ Granny would ask her every day, and if she hadn’t the sentence was castor oil. Mum’s voice throbbed with ancient trauma. ‘That is something you never want to take, John.’ I thanked my lucky stars that however ill I seemed to be, I had never been subjected to castor oil. ‘Tuppenny’ must have been her light-hearted antidote to to the fearsome ‘jobs’. Spend a penny, spend two while you’re at it, no need to make a fuss.

  In Mum’s childhood ‘sick’ was ‘ikky’, or (even better, I thought) ‘ikky-boo-ba’. If you’d been sick in the lavatory you had to say, ‘I’ve been ikky-boo-ba down the slobber-pail.’ Mum could hardly bear to say the words even as a grown-up. Now I hear an extra element in all these silly words, a posh archness and glee which reveal a younger Granny than the one I knew. Granny had been very comfortably brought up, as she told me more than once, with fruit from the glasshouse reserved for her, and a goat milked for her benefit because she had once been ikky-boo-ba after drinking cow’s. She didn’t claim to be allergic, just indulged.

  By this time there was a sort of pressure differential between me and anyone who sat by me or came to visit, which made information flow in my direction almost irrespective of the character and intentions of my companions. It was a form of magnetism, or electrolysis. I learned to generate a current which would produce a transfer of microscopic anecdotal particles from them to me. I was a scavenger living on molecules of gossip.

  Some of this was imitation. Mum herself was good at getting things out of people and would rise to the top of any social gathering of service wives. She was a bit of a queen bee. When she came in from the shops, if she so much as said, ‘Oh, I saw Doreen Parsons, she asked after you,’ I’d milk her for every last drop of gossip and aimless service-wife conversation. I who had no memories of ever being in a shop learned that ‘I always say you get what you pay for’ was a valid contribution to any discussion of value and price. I learned to give the proper cues myself. And what did you say? And what did she say to that?

  As bad as St Peter

  I tired Mum out with my talking. I exhausted her modest store of small talk, and still I wanted more. Tell me about anything. I absorbed all her prejudices. U and non-U, I suppose. Well-bred people say ‘sitting room’ not ‘lounge’. Never ‘lounge’. You can lounge about in the sitting room, John. That’s different. There were no limits to the traps that lay in store in language. When referring to weather or a room that is uncomfortably hot and airless, you must say ‘stuffy’, not ‘sultry’ or ‘clos
e’. And I still don’t know why.

  There was an etiquette for everything, even elevenses. Mum was very particular about morning coffee. A little dip of the biscuit into the coffee was acceptable, though best avoided. She showed me the way it should be done, if the temptation grew too great. The biscuit went in and out of the tea in a flash. It didn’t have the time to become soggy. That was the nightmare, the loss of texture and form. If the biscuit showed signs of bending when held at the horizontal, a point of danger was being reached. ‘Never let a dip turn into a dunk,’ she would say. ‘Don’t do what your father does. When he dunks a biscuit in public, there is absolutely nowhere I can look.’ Just because I was ill didn’t mean I was allowed to be common. She didn’t fully close her mouth while she ate the dipped biscuit, so that I could hear that it retained its crunch. She broke one rule (she whose lips closed round a mouthful as if sewn shut) so as to underline the importance of another.

  If you said ‘sultry’ or ‘close’ you were something worse than common. You were suburban. Being suburban was much worse than being working-class, because suburban people had their roots in the working classes, and were denying their own people just as St Peter did to Jesus. Suburban people were not ‘our sort’.

  Being working-class wasn’t really bad, in fact it was often fine. Really it was heroic. These were people who loved to have things the way they used to be. They knew their place, and liked it. They looked up to you. They were marvellously free of pretence.

  Poor Mum. She herself was under-stimulated. It wasn’t as if her life was full of incident. She had barely enough on her own plate without being made to dish it up again for two. She was missing out on some vitamins essential to healthy mental life. So she’d end up saying things like, ‘Doreen’s not really on our level, but she’s terribly sweet,’ or ‘Barbara is terribly suburban, but a lovely person. Really lovely. You know me, I take as I find.’ All of which I would store away for later pondering. She was my captive audience, and I was hers.

  I must have been a bit older, I suppose, when I started to see Mum’s snobbery as no more than a dutiful shadow of her mother’s. It had the air of something learned by heart rather than felt in the bones. She lacked the maddening confidence which allowed Granny to break her own rules. Funny that it should be harder to forgive Mum for a bad habit than Granny for a vice – I suppose because the vice had a sort of magnificence.

  Mental mantelpiece

  Some of the things Mum said to me were a little more substantial than the social stratification of vocabulary. She enlightened me, for instance, about the day of the red ball, Dad’s ceremonial domestic flypast and dropping of an innocent projectile.

  That red ball had been given pride of place on my mental mantelpiece all the time I was in bed. It was an official happy memory, proof to the world that my life had once been full of drama and life out of doors, impulse and play. As such it was a group project as much as an individual effort of recollection. It was like a big jigsaw done by the whole family, where the grown-ups establish the border, and the children fit in a few straightforward pieces and are heartily praised for their cleverness.

  Even so, I have to say that I couldn’t make much sense of the incident when I thought about it from the vantage-point of my bed. What did it mean, that Dad dropped a red ball to me out of the sky?

  The flying aspect I took completely for granted. Flying was magical, of course, but it was magic my Dad did every day. I wasn’t sensitive to the level of skill involved, the sheer difficulty and daring of hitting as small a target as a child’s hands with an object dropped from the moving cockpit of a low-flying Tiger Moth. It was a piece of marksmanship worthy of the man who invented that other bouncing bomb, the Barnes Wallis I was named for.

  Something bothered me about the choice of object to be dropped. A red india-rubber ball – wasn’t that in a poem I knew? Of course it was. The poem was by A. A. Milne and it was about Bad King John (‘King John was not a good man – / He had his little ways. / And sometimes no one spoke to him / For days and days and days’). The poem soothed me because of its rhythm and the pleasure of its story, but it was also a tease because I was John, and the poem was somehow about me. When Mum said, ‘King John was not a good man …’ I didn’t know whether to be pleased or scolded. And when Dad said, ‘Pipe down, Johannes R.,’ I knew that was my last warning. That was from the bit of the poem where King John writes his Christmas list, addressed ‘TO ALL AND SUNDRY – NEAR AND FAR – / F. CHRISTMAS IN PARTICULAR’, and signed ‘not “Johannes R.” / But very humbly, “Jack”.’ He takes the list onto the palace roof and leans it against a chimney-stack.

  Perhaps I had already shown an aversion to Christmas, understandable in someone whose birth-date was the 27th of December, in competition with incarnate God from the outset. Perhaps I had mistaken the whole festival as my tribute and been disappointed when I was told I still had two days to wait for that other big (bigger) day. It turned out that the presents under the tree weren’t all for me. The unwelcome news, so hard to take in, that there are other people in the world.

  Bad King John in the poem gets the present he most wants, a big, red india-rubber ball, even if it comes through one of the palace windows by accident, propelled by a peasant child’s foot, and I got my ball too. Except that it had been my red ball in the first place, and Dad was only borrowing it.

  Theme of A. A. Milne

  That was as far as I got in my understanding of the big scene, based on the information I had. But there were things I didn’t know about the tiny drama, that ærobatic variation on a theme of A. A. Milne.

  There was a larger cast of characters than I appreciated at the time. ‘You’ll have heard Dad talk about that awful Major, JJ. Mad Major Draper. I’ve always thought he was a terrible influence on your father, though I haven’t met him and I’ve no wish to. He does the sort of madcap stunt that might be amusing in a child, but he’s a grown man and old enough to know better.’

  The Mad Major couldn’t resist stunts like flying low over water, so low in fact that the wheels of the plane were made to spin by the contact, a stunt made all the more difficult by the fact that the undercarriage couldn’t be seen from the cockpit. Dip the wheels just a little too deeply in the water and the nose of the plane plunges in also. As the Major eventually found out. The onlookers couldn’t even necessarily see when the stunt had gone right, but nobody could miss its going wrong. ‘Dennis always hero-worshipped the man, which was bad enough when he was just an ordinary eccentric sort of person, but then suddenly he was in all the papers. I thought it was the silliest thing ever, but Dad was pleased as punch, proud of knowing such an outstanding individual. He kept on saying, “Good old Kit! He showed them!” but no one could tell me what it was he’d shown them – whoever “they” were.’

  The Major had hit the headlines in a big way, nationally and even internationally, in May 1953, which must have been a little while before Dad asked to borrow my red ball. Kit Draper was no longer a serviceman, and he did what he did entirely off his own bat. He hired a plane and then flew underneath all the bridges over the Thames from Waterloo to Kew, including Hammersmith (the lowest) and Westminster (the narrowest), missing out only Hungerford, Fulham and the Kew railway bridge. Fifteen bridges in all. After that he was known to the whole world as the Mad Major.

  ‘I was worried sick,’ she went on. ‘I was at my wits’ end.’ That was when Mum’s worries began, back when she didn’t have to worry about me, when she could worry about her impressionable husband. ‘I started thinking that Dennis would try to beat that stupid Major at his own game, by doing some mad stunt with the whole world looking.’ By bad luck Dad was shortly going to be in the public eye himself. What if he did something silly? ‘Your father has a very good record – there was the time he took off without checking his fuel and had to make an emergency landing, but nobody made too much out of that. I asked him, “You’re not going to do anything silly on the big day, are you?” but I should know by now h
e’ll never give a straight answer. He just said, “A fellow needs some fun, m’dear.” You know yourself what he’s like, and how maddening it is.’

  The big day she was referring to was big by any standards – the new Queen’s Coronation Day. Dad was due to take part in a mass flypast over the Mall. What if he took it into his head to loop the loop in his Meteor, with millions watching on the television? She would die on the spot, that’s what.

  The poultice of indulgence

  Mum had already headed off Dad’s attempt to pay tribute to the Major on my birth certificate, and she hadn’t softened her attitude since then. But perhaps she had learned some tactics. She decided to humour her husband, whose maverick streak was deeply buried. Better to give him his head than risk him doing something Draperesque on a grand public occasion. Best to get the mischief harmlessly out of his system, to have him pull off an authorised transgression with no official ripples. She would draw the poison of self-will with the poultice of indulgence.

  If Dad had been a heavy drinker, Mum might have tried to curb his excesses by accompanying him to the pub, having a drink herself by his side, forcing herself to have just enough fun to kill the adventure for him. She applied the same technique in a different area. ‘It was Mum that came up with the idea of your red ball, JJ,’ she said. ‘I thought he could have some fun without risking his career.’ Her voice went very quiet. ‘We didn’t know it was one of the last days you’d be running around the garden.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mummy,’ I said. ‘At least I got my ball back.’

  Mum’s stratagem of letting Dad break the rules in a setting that was comparatively tame seemed to do the trick. Perhaps he was just playing with her by hinting that he had some dramatic misbehaviour planned. Dad played his part in the celebrations as scripted, though weather conditions were uncertain until almost the last minute. When Group Captain Wykeham-Barnes, the commanding officer of RAF Wattisham, near Ipswich, made a reconnaissance over the route in mid-afternoon it looked unpromising. Cloud was so thick over Biggin Hill that he couldn’t see the ground from 900 feet, but moments later, from near Crystal Palace, visibility was almost unlimited. He could actually see the procession moving through the West End.