Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Old Turps, the same headmaster who had been able to propose nothing better for my future life than work as a clerk, came to see me before I left the hospital. I didn’t forget that he had indulged my phobias and kept me safe from Teddy boys as much as he could. ‘If you go on to do great things,’ he said, ‘I hope you’ll give us a mention’ – consider it done.

  Somewhere in this phase of life I had made an advance in my prayer technique. My relations with divinity were calmer. I’d stopped bargaining so nakedly. Now I was praying that if I was going to have pain in this life, and it seemed that I was, that I should have the pain all at the beginning, compressed, so that I could relax and enjoy what came afterwards. The way I phrased it to myself, and to God, was that I wanted to have all the gyp in a dollop. ‘Gyp’ came from Mrs Dale’s Diary, I think, to which Mum had become addicted.

  This was a real break-through for me, to be praying for what I already had. It was definite progress. My prayer wasn’t disinterested, to be sure. It was a sort of bet, but when later in life I read about Pascal’s Wager I felt rather sniffy about it. I didn’t think it was particularly impressive, either intellectually or spiritually. Pascal’s idea was that it made sense to believe in God and judgement, since if you were wrong there was no penalty, and if you were right there was a reward. Either you won or you didn’t lose.

  I see now that he was conducting a sort of mental experiment, which may even have included elements of teasing. At the time I felt it was really just cowardly to trick yourself into belief. My approach was a little subtler. Prayer showed no signs of being able to take the pain away, so I would devise a new style of prayer which would be self-fulfilling. It would seem already to be being answered, day by day. I had asked for pain, and here it was, but I could tell myself it came on my terms. I awarded myself the privilege of meaningful choice despite my absence of options. I took pain on myself, now, not as an ordeal or a sacrifice but as something more in the nature of an investment.

  Dolls of the world

  The Cromers and the Morrisons kept in touch for some time after I left CRX, though Sarah and I stopped being so close. The last time I saw her was as late as 1972. She was living in a Cheshire Home near Crystal Palace. The spark that made her Sarah seemed to be missing. She knew who I was, but I couldn’t interest her in very much. She didn’t always answer a question, and if she did it was as if she had to push the words out against some sort of internal resistance. Then her voice would tail away. Even Muzzie couldn’t always get through to her.

  Sarah lay in bed with her eyes on her prized possessions. Her doll collection had grown enormously. Now she had a magnificent mahogany cabinet with glass doors to house them all. Her ambition was to have a doll from every country in the world on those shelves. She was nearly there. I think there was only one more doll needed to complete her miniature United Nations.

  The only signs of a new interest were the Crystal Palace supporters’ scarves draped across the top of the cabinet, and I couldn’t be sure they were Sarah’s. They might have been something the carers had thought of to bring a bit of life to the room.

  Sarah had more to say to her dolls than she did to people. Every now and then a carer would put a doll in her hands and then she would prattle away, almost like the Sarah I had known. She seemed to know what all her dolls were doing with their lives. They all had names, of course. She even knew what they did when she was asleep herself. She might call for Rita to be exchanged for Serafina, or Pushpa for Gita. Holding the doll in her arms, she would listen intently to what she had to say. She would say a few motherly words herself, give the doll a cuddle and then call for it to be put back in exactly the right place. Then she would call for another one.

  The helpers at the home entered into Sarah’s world whole-heartedly. This was greatly to the credit of the institution and its staff. It was also rather creepy. Maria said, ‘Sarah! You haven’t mentioned or spoken to your little Eskimo girl for ten days – I hope she’s not starting to feel left out?’

  ‘Oh yes Maria you’re so right!’ chirped Sarah. ‘Oh do give me Polly straight away … Oh Polly darling, yes it’s true I have been neglecting you, but I didn’t mean to. It’s just that you’ve been so good, you see. That doesn’t always pay, you know! I’m afraid I’ve been terribly busy trying to keep the peace between Sally and Salim. Come and have a quick cuddle. I won’t let you get too warm … What? Yes, I know you’d like me to keep you in the ’fridge, but if I did that I couldn’t see you! And be fair … I have put you in the part of the cabinet that’s nearest to the window and the fresh air. I’m afraid that will just have to do …’

  I felt fatally grown-up compared to Sarah, and very sorry for her. I wanted to buy her that one last doll, but at the same time I had qualms about putting the finishing touch to someone’s life’s work. Her life’s work was what it seemed to be. Best to leave her to get on with it. With the United Nations complete, what would Sarah have to look forward to? Academic question, as it turned out, since she died a few months later.

  One isolated case isn’t any sort of scientific sample. I have no evidence to back up my indictment of steroids, as they were administered in the 1950s and ’60s, beyond the fact that my friend Sarah had a mental age of ten when I met her in the 1950s, and the same mental age in 1972. The drug had stopped her bones from hardening as much as mine had, but at the cost of making other things soft as well. By the time she died, Sarah had been prattling to her dolls for a good fifteen years. Steroids had stopped her growing up. They’d even stopped her from out-growing her toys. Thanks to the medication she was given, her second childhood came hard on the heels of the first. They were like the sentences tough-minded judges sometimes pass on hardened criminals when they want to make an example of them, running consecutively without remission.

  No Such Word as Can’t

  There were definite things I wanted from a new school. At CRX the hospital was the sun and the school the moon. A lot of the time it had hardly been visible. It was a pale, almost theoretical presence. Education was required by law rather than pursued with passion. I wanted a place where lessons wouldn’t just be fitted in around the routines of a hospital, where education wasn’t always giving way to medical science.

  The new school had a strange name. It was called The Vulcan School. It also had a sort of subtitle amounting to a technical description: ‘A Boarding School for the Education and Rehabilitation of Severely Disabled but Intelligent Boys’.

  When I had been told about Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital all I needed to know was that there was a school on the premises. Then I was happy to be on my way. After CRX I wasn’t quite so trusting. I had learned to be afraid. Mum and Dad had to do a little selling of its advantages. There were three main attractions to Vulcan School, as they presented it to me:

  1. It’s in a lovely old castle, like something from a fairy tale. A famous explorer used to live there, but now it’s a school for boys like you.

  How like me? Exactly like me?

  No, but boys who need a bit of help getting around and doing things for themselves.

  2. The headmaster, Mr Raeburn, is the brother of the lady who does the puppets on television. Yes, that’s right, Margery Raeburn pulls the strings for Andy Pandy.

  3. Guess who helps the school to get money? Uncle Mac!

  All of this was true. Farley Castle was indeed a crenellated pile, although built in the eighteenth century as a folly, rather than earlier on as a defensive stronghold. It had been owned by Colonel ‘Mitch’ Mitchell-Hedges, an adventurer and explorer (less romantically a collector of English silverware), who had lived there with his adopted daughter Sammy. The legend was that he never had less than half a million in cash on his person at any time.

  The school had been founded by Marion Willis and Alan Raeburn. Alan had a special feeling for disabled boys – he had lost the use of his legs during the war when a tank rolled on him. And yes, his sister Margery held the strings of Andy Pandy and made him move. I
t wasn’t a particularly dazzling piece of puppetry. Andy Pandy didn’t move a lot more fluently than I did.

  Points 1 and 2 didn’t make this funny-sounding school seem all that attractive. Number 3 had more weight. Uncle Mac, alias Derek McCulloch, Chairman of the Board of Governors of Vulcan, was the most immediately familiar figure outside family for any British child of the time. He presented Children’s Favourites on the radio (though plenty of people still said ‘wireless’). He was the voice of Muffin the Mule. Uncle Mac pervaded Saturday mornings at CRX. We would listen raptly to the Light Programme when he was on. Admittedly much of the silence on the ward every Saturday morning was explained by the fact that one or more of us had written in to the BBC with a request for Uncle Mac. There wasn’t an official league table, but everyone knew Sarah Morrison had had her name read out on the radio more than anyone else. That was Sarah all over.

  Uncle Mac’s catch-phrase was the way he signed off at the end of a programme: ‘Good-bye children ….. everywhere.’ It was the pause that made it so distinctive – that drawn-out ellipsis. Definitely five dots rather than three. Uncle Mac’s radio programmes were central to our experience of radio and of life on the ward, and a school whose board of governors was chaired by this avuncular mystic couldn’t help getting a boost in my mind.

  The songs that Uncle Mac played came to carry a huge freight of emotion by association. Hearing one of your favourite songs on a Saturday morning could make a difference to the whole weekend. I liked Danny Kaye’s ‘The King’s New Clothes’, because it was more or less rude. I liked ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ because it was frightening. I liked ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ because it showed someone else believed in magic. I liked ‘The Animals Went In Two by Two’ because it was easier than reading the Bible. I liked ‘The Runaway Train’ because of the happy ending (the last we heard she was going still …). I liked ‘Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats’, despite its failure to win me friends at CRX, because it was in a sort of code. I liked ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ because I thought they would be waiting for me in CRX woods, providing I could dodge the Teddy boys from Ward Three.

  I liked ‘I’m a Pink Toothbrush, You’re a Blue Toothbrush’ because the guru Max Bygraves helped me see that love doesn’t mind if you’re different. I liked ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ because there was no resisting the idea of mice in clogs. I liked Lonnie Donegan’s ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ because it meant I could sing in Cockney, even in earshot of Mum, without getting a scalding. I liked ‘Little White Bull’ for the same Cockneyphile reasons – I was careful to pronounce ‘little’ with the proper glottal stop as ‘li’ul’ – and also because I was in love with Tommy Steele. I kept asking Mum when I’d be old enough to have my hair dyed blond to match his. I liked Rosemary Clooney’s ‘This Old House’ (she didn’t realise how much she loved the house, and would be really sorry when she left it) because it served her right.

  I loved ‘Dem Bones Dem Bones (Dem Dry Bones)’, for reasons that had nothing to do with the words. What got me was the bounciness of the rhythm, the thrilling male voices calling out in gospel style, and the percussion that mimicked clockwork, either running down or being wound up. The hipbone’s connected to the – thighbone, the thighbone’s connected to the – kneebone. I made no connection between the bones in the song and my own, which were very connected indeed.

  Mum and Dad told me that Uncle Mac had lost an eye and part of a lung in the Great War, and then lost a leg in a car smash-up between the wars. I thought he must be clumsy as well as unlucky, but it was as if they were giving me a present. ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ they asked. Not wonderful that he was disabled, exactly, but wonderful that he led such an active life no one would know. He didn’t let missing a few bits and pieces hold him back. It took a bit of getting used to, the idea that Uncle Mac and I were supposed to have things in common. I wasn’t missing any bits, but so far being disabled was doing a grand job of holding me back. I was too disabled to be a doctor or a scientist or anything important, but somehow I didn’t seem to be disabled enough to cut any ice with the Busy Bee News.

  The Tin Triangle

  The new place had to be better than CRX. ‘I expect you’ll miss having girls around,’ said Dad, with a roguishness that wasn’t really his style. He made it sound as if being the only boy in a group of girls, all of us disabled, made me a sultan with a harem. No I would not miss having girls around (I was forgetting my engagement to Sarah, of course, and being disloyal to Mary’s memory). However bad boys could be, they could never be as spiteful as girls.

  I made out to Mum and Dad that the Uncle Mac factor was the clincher, but there were other things going on in my mind. Peter with his love of planes filled me in on the school’s name. The Air Force had three V-bombers – the Vickers Valiant, the Handley Page Victor and the Avro Vulcan. The Vulcan was their longest-range bomber. It could fly 4000 miles at 50,000 feet. It was also known as the Tin Triangle (which made me think of those less inspired pieces of technology, Ansell’s tailor-made walking pods). As far as Peter was concerned, I couldn’t do better.

  For a long time, too, I had prayed to God for a boy companion whom I could love and who would be my special friend. I had strong ideas about this, not all of them derived from Enid Blyton. Boys played together and chummed up. When they had a scrap they would always seem to end up rolling on the ground, two as one, their legs interlocked and their arms wrapped round each other. My special friend was going to be physically normal or almost normal. Of course at the beginning we would spend a lot of time in tender loving embraces, but when passion had ripened into something more mature, the real quest would begin. It would be daring and dangerous. He would fight the enemy on the physical plane and I would take care of the ghosts, spirits and ghouls. Vulcan School would be the ideal place to find this soul-mate, among the Intelligent Boys. The place was clearly the answer to my prayers.

  My mind gave Vulcan School the thumbs-up, but my body had other ideas. It started playing a mean trick on me that I thought was ancient history. I had chewed those linen sheets and spat them out, I had frotted myself against them ecstatically, and now I was wetting them like a baby.

  Rather surprisingly, bed-wetting attracted no punishment in CRX. My sheets were changed without complaint or reproach. I could even enjoy the state between waking and dream, that strange shoreline that can seem deeper than the sea. I could luxuriate in the feeling of warm wetness seeping all around, knowing the sheets would be changed before the pee got uncomfortably cold. I was very ashamed, all the same, and knew perfectly well that at Vulcan School this would never do.

  I also snored incurably, a vice which I thought I could get away with in the absence of other night-time vices but hardly in combination. I was confident that boys, intelligent boys, would be more understanding and generally nicer than girls, but bed-wetting and snoring would hardly be a passport to big-boyhood. I was well enough versed in the literature to know that in boys’ schools they gave you nick-names. They would be bound to come up with something that would advertise both my vices. I badly wanted to start with a clean sheet but I was sure I was doomed to swap Wally Snorts for something worse.

  Snoring and wetting the bed. No great inventiveness would be required on the part of my fellow intelligent boys. They would call me ‘Snorwetta’ but no, ‘r’s and ‘w’s didn’t really go together like that. They’d just drop the ‘w’ and I’d be known as … Snoretta.

  A boy who sounded like a piggy version of Henrietta. I would never be allowed into proper boyhood, Julian-and-Dick boyhood. I’d be chained by girlhood again, as I had been at CRX, where a posh accent was considered girly. Ansell and some of the other staff had always said I sounded nice and not girly at all, but I hadn’t been living and sleeping with Ansell, unfortunately.

  In my time of limbo between institutions, when I hung between a hospital set up by someone who didn’t believe in pain and a school that might have been named for my benefit by Bomber Command, there was
one memorable day. The Mad Major put in a personal appearance at last – he was invited to lunch. Who by? It can only have been Dad. There was a conciliatory edge to his usual patterns of behaviour in the run-up to the event, as if he knew he had arranged something that went well beyond the call of marital duty.

  Peter and I knew it was an important occasion. Each of them kept complaining about the fuss the other was making about something very ordinary. Mum said, ‘I don’t know why Dad is so keyed up about seeing this dull old friend of his,’ but it wasn’t every day she folded napkins into the tricky Bishop’s Mitre shape, following the instructions in her old copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management. The book was a cast-off of Granny’s – in fact it was less a book than an oppressive hint, printed and bound. It was an old edition, old enough to list the duties of the ‘tweeny’, which included cleaning the back stairs. Every time she opened up the book Mum must have reproached herself for having neither a tweeny nor back stairs to turn her loose on.

  Meanwhile Dad was saying, ‘I don’t know why your mother has to make such a song and dance about a visit from an old comrade-in-arms. Still, you know what she’s like.’ Indeed we did, but we also saw the look in Dad’s eyes which meant he was wondering if he should ask her if his tie was smart enough. He might even be considering the drastic step of wearing the cuff-links she had given him for Christmas. Peter asked, ‘Is he really mad? Is he doolally loony? Will he bark?’ Mum said she wouldn’t be surprised.

  ‘Shall I call him Major Mad or Mad Major? Which is proper?’

  That was going too far for Mum. ‘Neither is proper, neither is polite. You’ll call him …’ – suddenly she didn’t seem certain herself – ‘Major Draper.’