Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Ansell wasn’t best pleased to have her ingenious tailor-made John-supports rejected out of hand, and she told me I was spoilt, which was a bit of a slap in the face. I couldn’t be expected to realise that these hateful objects were the end products of a careful design process, and were dreamed up specifically to meet my needs. Someone in a Workshop somewhere was probably very proud of his resourcefulness, and Ansell was certainly glowing with job satisfaction before I refused point blank to use those deafening devices.

  I never heard that Ansell went on winter sports holidays, though of course it’s possible. We on the ward were incapable of speculating about the life of the staff when they were off the premises. I wonder if Ansell wasn’t doing a boisterous mime of skiing, using the pyramids as her poles, dashing them merrily against the lino, as she came rejoicing down the corridor to have her thoughtfulness turned down flat.

  Ansell felt snubbed, and she snubbed me in my turn when I said I wanted the same walking aids as the others. They used things like spider legs, but she told me rather stiffly that they were too heavy for me. She was almost sulking, unlikely though that sounds. I could just about lift one of Sarah’s spider legs, and I thought that it would give my arms good exercise to try walking with them. Anyway, she wouldn’t let me. ‘You’re not strong enough, John,’ she said with a sigh. ‘That’s the whole point. That’s why we tried to get you something different.’

  Behind the scenes she went on trying. The built-up shoes we all wore were very uncomfortable. One of the therapists who fitted them seemed to think that was as it should be. ‘If they don’t hurt they can’t be remedial, can they?’ she said. Blisters and calluses were commonplace. When we complained she padded them with cotton wool, entirely the wrong material for the job. In my mind I had a picture of something that would have the right effect, a sort of squashy wood which I had seen somewhere as a tile on a wall. Surely something like that could be cut to size? When I discovered, long afterward, that cork insoles were perfectly common items I was amazed all over again at the cluelessness of CRX in certain departments.

  One day Ansell had my feet properly measured in every detail. She told me there was a man in Maidenhead who was going to make me a special pair of shoes which wouldn’t pinch the way the National Health ones did. They were an incredible price, but somehow she had wangled the funding. She was a very powerful woman in the rheumatic field.

  ‘What makes these shoes special?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re Space Shoes, John. They’re what people will wear in space. They’re designed by scientists.’

  She certainly knew how to appeal to my tastes. I was going through rather a space-travel phase at the time in terms of my reading, with a particular love of the Kemlo books (Kemlo and the Martian Ghosts, Kemlo and the Star Men and so on). Kemlo was a boy who had been born in space, and so he didn’t need to breathe air. I tried to train myself to do without air like him, holding my breath for longer and longer periods, just as I had learned to inhale through one nostril during my bed-rest years. Of course this time it wasn’t rough-and-ready pranayama. This time it really was John being silly.

  Then the Space Shoes arrived, and I hated them. They were comfortable all right – it wasn’t that. They were closely moulded to the foot, and gave excellent support. But it was like the percussion tripods all over again. The man who had designed them had forgotten that I needed to look vaguely human. I wouldn’t have minded looking like a space man, but not a space monster. I refused to wear something that looked like a puffball mushroom. Wendy would show no mercy.

  Ansell tried to talk me round. She even said, ‘I can just see that space boy Kemlo wearing something like these,’ which at the time I thought was simply a lucky guess. Of course it’s more likely that she’d consulted Mary in hopes of finding a way to get me to like the horrible Space Shoes.

  I wouldn’t wear them. I was adamant. ‘Sometimes, John,’ said Ansell, ‘I wonder if you really want us to help you.’ I can’t blame her. For the second time she was having to put away something that had taken a lot of thought and organisation. Since the Space Shoes had been made to my exact dimensions, they couldn’t be offered to anyone else.

  All in all, it looked as though I would be exempted from the painful duty of walking. Because of the virtual immobility of my hips it was obvious an ordinary wheelchair wouldn’t help me. Instead I was issued with something called a Tan-Sad, a sort of raised baby carriage with a broad foot-plate and four fixed wheels. The manufacturers were pleased with their work, and had put a little plate on the Tan-Sad with their name on it, and a design of a rising sun.

  The Tan-Sad was indeed the dawning of a new day for me. It didn’t look inviting, but it was beautifully comfortable once you were in it. There were pillows and cushions aplenty. It was semi-reclining, so I could see much more of the world than when I was horizontal. I could imagine myself lying down again by tilting my mind backwards, or sitting up straight by tilting it forward.

  It had its draw-backs, of course. I couldn’t get into it by myself, but had to be lifted in and out. Because the wheels were fixed it couldn’t go round corners without being manhandled. It was forward or backward, take your pick, but it was certainly a step up from stretchers and trolleys.

  Silent worship

  At some stage I decided that Mary and I would be getting married. Purity was the keynote of the married state as I imagined it. I was strongly influenced by one of the songs that Miss Reid used to sing. It was called ‘Silent Worship’, and I decided it was about the sort of pure person I might marry:

  Did you not hear my lady,

  Go down the garden singing?

  Blackbird and thrush were silent

  To hear the earlies ringing

  O saw you not my lady out in the garden there

  Shaming the rose and lily for she is twice as fair.

  Though I am nothing to her,

  Though she must rarely look at me,

  And though I could never woo her,

  I will love her till I die.

  Surely you heard my lady

  Go down the garden singing,

  Silencing all the songbirds

  And setting the earlies ringing.

  But surely you see

  My lady out in the garden there

  Riv’lling the glitt’ring sunshine

  With the glory of her golden hair.

  Mary’s hair was more mouse than gold, but still the song seemed to fit. She was the right sort of lady. If I was ever going to have a lady, it would have to be like the lady of the song, the sort of lady who would never allow a man’s taily anywhere near her. There would be none of that taily and pocket nonsense between us, but we would be great companions and we would help people by raising money for charity.

  Of course the word wasn’t really ‘earlies’. At the time I heard Miss Reid sing the song, my vocabulary was lop-sided. I knew ‘quadriceps’ and ‘blue cere’, but I didn’t know ‘alley’. I wasn’t going to put my hand up (or wave it, anyway) and ask about the ‘earlies’ with Wendy ready to pounce on any weakness, so I let God tell me what they were. They were ethereal spirits who were really really early getting up. They were so gentle and so fragile that their existence was more precarious than a spider’s web. They could only be heard in crepuscular morning. The song of the Earlies took place between this world and the next, between darkness and daylight.

  With the exception of Mary, and possibly Sarah too, the CRX kids were too low to be able to hear the Earlies. Wendy would pass boiled sweets round after her parents visited, and then when our mouths were full she announced proudly that she’d left her bum dirty earlier on and wiped the sweets against it. How would she possibly hear the Earlies? Her ears were sealed with wicked wax.

  I told Mum about my plans and she looked thoughtful. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be better suited to Sarah?’ she asked. She wasn’t seriously weighing up Sarah as a marriage prospect. It was more that she and Sarah’s mum had struck up a friendship of th
eir own. Sarah’s mum would come to visit driving a Volkswagen. I knew about this extraordinary car, because sometimes on her visits Sarah and I would be pushed to the end of that quarter-mile corridor to sample the delights of the WVS canteen, staffed by Mrs Carpenter of the Squashy Thumbs.

  The squashy thumbs

  Her thumbs really were squashy, and she always invited us to play with them. She would reach across a big red hand to us. Our fingers left little dimpled marks on her thumbs. They stayed visible for quite a while. I enjoyed the game so much it never occurred to me to ask why it happened. I only thought it must be nice to have a bit of plasticine always with you. Possibly she suffered from a circulation disorder, causing some sort of œdema. At the time it seemed almost appropriate that someone who worked in a canteen should take on some of the characteristics of dough, and I thought that the only ill people in hospitals were the patients. I hardly understood that grown-ups could be ill too. Didn’t children have the monopoly?

  After that we would be pushed to the entrance. Sarah’s mum would give a kiss to Sarah and a peck to me, and we would watch her driving off in her car, which looked so funny it made me laugh. ‘It’s known as a Beetle and the engine’s in the back and the boot is in the front,’ Sarah said proudly, which made me start laughing all over again. We were too poor for a car, but I prayed that when we did get one it would be a Beetle because it was wonderful in every way. Sarah’s mum gave me a ride in it once, but it was so uncomfortable I nearly clicked my back and never wanted to go in one again. I reversed the current of my prayers, pleading for any other car than a Beetle and hoping that God would ignore my previous intercession.

  As their friendship developed, sometimes at weekends Sarah’s mum would pick my mum up at the station and bring her to CRX in the Beetle. Mum had nothing against Mary – no one could – but it had to be admitted that her parents, stranded as they were in Rutland, couldn’t offer to give Mum useful lifts. That was how I explained her preference for Sarah as a prospective daughter-in-law.

  I knew my mum liked Sarah’s mum Jacquetta, not because she had plenty of money, I don’t think, but because she had so much confidence. Sarah’s dad had been in the Foreign Office and Jacquetta was used to all sorts of people. She just naturally felt at home in any company, and that was something Mum admired and envied. Sarah’s mum was posh in a way Mum could never be, posh without effort. Even Granny’s sense of status had a strenuous edge to it, while true posh, as I came to see, was almost blithe.

  Without regular contact with her own mother, Mum’s snobbery was becoming somehow anæmic. I hadn’t yet noticed it, but in those years there was a Granny-shaped hole in my life. She wrote letters from time to time, which sometimes enclosed postal orders, but the postman brought me my only contact with her.

  If I had been more on the ball I would have realised that the two of them weren’t on speaking terms. Granny and Mum hadn’t fallen out at the time of my misdiagnosis being revealed, but soon after. In a crisis family tension took second place, but it didn’t go away. In fact the quarrel had been about something apparently trivial, but had taken a surprising turn. Granny had been going too far for most of her life. This time it was Mum who had trespassed into an area that was off limits, and Granny was slow to forgive. So slow that it seemed likely she would die first.

  Guttersnipe in the making

  Mum liked to talk about Jacquetta, and so did I. Jacquetta had given Mum her visiting card, which she proudly showed me. The address was ‘1, Melmott Court, Cookham’. As a trainee snob, I pounced on this. I thought I had found a flaw in Mum’s value system. I thought I had her cornered.

  Of course, while I was in Mum’s company I had to revert to my old choice of words, pre-eminently ‘lavatory’ rather than ‘toilet’. I had to hide the fact that her apprentice snob was also a guttersnipe in the making. According to Mum, ‘toilet’ was roughly the commonest word in the world. Still’s Disease was quite enough to be getting on with, thank you, without her son being infected with vulgar word choice. I was rapidly developing a habitual hesitation, almost a complex about what to call the room with the personal plumbing, rather a draw-back in a life where I must ask for help, more often than most people, to be taken there. I had reached a stage where every term sounded wrong.

  Now I had a chance to return the favour of embarrassment. ‘Mum?’ I said, nice as pie. ‘Didn’t you tell me that decent people never live in numbered houses? Except of course in London, where there are so many houses that the GPO insists?’

  If I’d hoped to rattle Mum I was disappointed. ‘Quite true, JJ,’ she said calmly, ‘but if your address ends in Court it’s perfectly all right.’ It turned out that there was a whole intricate cult of addresses, seething with rules and exceptions. She felt about addresses roughly what traditional Japanese feel about tea, or their ancestors. ‘It’s the same with addresses which end in Park, and also Mansions.’

  ‘How about Palace, Mum? Would that be a proper address?’

  Mum put her head on one side. ‘I think so.’ On balance she was inclined to let an address ending in ‘Palace’ scrape into the paddock of privilege.

  ‘But we live in Bathford, nr Bath, Somerset, and we have a number, don’t we?’

  ‘Well, yes we do. But we’re in married quarters, you see, and with so many servicemen the RAF had to give numbers. That’s quite all right. It isn’t ideal, of course, and the neighbours – for instance Doreen Parsons, bless her! – are very suburban, but you can’t always have everything, John. We won’t live there for ever, you know, JJ,’ she added. ‘Things will change, you’ll see.’ And at least our street number was a single digit. Apparently that made a difference.

  There were other subtleties. It was perfectly all right to have numbers if you were serving in the forces, or if you were in a nursing or medical college, or if you’d just left university and were quite poor, as long as you bucked up and got a proper address as soon as you possibly could.

  It turned out that absolutely everybody who lived in America had numbers, but it was a big place and often your house number would be more than a thousand which in some strange way made it all right. There were upper people in America too, though it wasn’t at all easy to tell them from the others.

  Even at the time I sensed that Mum would have found a way of keeping Jacquetta Morrison among the poshest of the poshies even if her card had read, ‘The Abandoned Railway Carriage, behind The Pigsty’. I hadn’t been able to put even the slightest dent in her dreams.

  Mum had lost a little of her authority in my eyes, somehow, along the way. At first I had been amazed that she could tell if I had disobeyed her orders and neglected to brush my teeth, but then I worked out that she gave my toothbrush a surreptitious stroke and scolded me if it was dry. The stiff bristles bore witness against me. After that it was easy to wet it from time to time.

  In those days I really loved the Just So Stories. Miss Reid would read them with me, sitting on the edge of my bed. I wasn’t sure that teachers were allowed to do that, whether they counted as doctors or only parents, but I wasn’t going to say anything. A cuddle from her would have been nice, but I knew there was no chance. It was nice enough seeing her white nylon overall with the corner of my eye, and then having her big white botty approaching and flowing in from the left. Then she’d hold up the book and start to read. I wondered if the man had asked her to marry him before she had such a big bottom. If so, she must be kicking herself for saying no while she was still young and pretty. But if he had asked her when she already had a big bottom, how could she have turned him down? Logic didn’t seem to help me to understand this important part of her life story. Perhaps she felt about tailies the way I felt about pockets. Not that keen. Perhaps it was as simple as that.

  At about this time I wrote my own Just So Story by accident. It was all to do with Sarah’s mum, and if it had really been written by Rudyard Kipling it might have been called ‘How Muzzie Got Her Name’.

  One day I had a real titbit t
o pass on to Mum, something that was guaranteed to give her pleasure. It was a lovely piece of intimate gossip about the Morrisons: I knew what Sarah called her mother when there wasn’t anyone else around. I knew the special home private nick-name the daughter had for the mother. I told Mum what it was, and she seemed very pleased. I’d only heard it spoken the once, and then I felt as if I’d stumbled over a jewel. It was so sweet and private, part of a secret language, and I treasured the knowledge of it.

  Sarah called Mrs Morrison ‘Muzzie’. ‘Mummy’ was for the ward and the rest of the world, but when they were alone together it was ‘Muzzie’. I spent a lot of time with them, on the days when Sarah’s mum was the only visitor on the ward. When Sarah’s mum brought Sarah a present, she always remembered to bring something for me, so that I didn’t feel left out, but this was the best present she could possibly have given me, the sharing of the home word and pet name.

  Mum enjoyed being in on the secret, but it was only going to be a matter of time before she revealed what she knew. Jacquetta Morrison was clearly an upper person, and everything about her was inherently interesting to Mum. Finally after the tea trolley had come round Mum said, ‘I know Sarah’s secret name for you, and guess how I found out?’