Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  School for plastics

  My new school was hard to find, as if it took its resemblance to an enchanted castle seriously. The Cromer party in the Vauxhall got completely lost. The name of the school felt unnatural on the tongue, which inhibited us from asking directions. After we had gone round in circles three times Mum asked a farm worker where Farley Castle was.

  The farm worker said, ‘OO-arr! That’ll be the school for plastics will it? Your littl’un goin’ there be he? Well good luck, Sonny, that be a right rum place and no mistake!’

  Some allowance has to be made, in the way this story has been embellished in the passing on, for the incrementally yokelising tendencies of Mum’s ear and class assumptions. I was too keyed-up myself to listen properly, but the man’s speech did seem pretty rough. It’s just that I think I’d remember if he’d actually been chewing straw or scratching his head with the tines of a rake.

  When we finally set eyes on The Vulcan School, that first day, Mum cried out, ‘It really does look like a fairy-tale castle, doesn’t it, Dennis? Don’t you think so, John?’ Well, yes I did, but not everything that happens in fairy tales is nice.

  When the Vauxhall drew up on the school gravel Mr Raeburn came out to greet us, with his co-principal Miss Willis. Raeburn had distinctive eyes, grey with just a hint of blue. I had been alerted to his disabled status, which was presented (as usual) as a wonderful treat for me, as if he had let his legs be crushed by a tank just to make me feel at home. He managed his sticks very well, making progress in a series of fluent lurches. It was actually Miss Willis, vast and motherly, who moved more awkwardly.

  I would have liked to leap out of the car to shake hands, but if I had been able to do that I wouldn’t have been accepted as a pupil in the first place. I had to wait to be helped. Raeburn and Miss Willis didn’t make me feel awkward by crowding round the car, but they couldn’t avoid making me feel awkward by hanging back politely until I was helped to the upright. It was a sunny day, and I had to screw up my eyes to make out with any clarity these looming blobs of authority.

  It was important to me to walk unaided at this point, asserting my marginal claim to biped status. I did my level best. I even had a crack at shaking hands. Then I had to accept the convenience of the Tan-Sad, since the gravel was wide and there was a lot of ground to cover.

  When I had left CRX I was asked to return the wheelchair in which I had spent most of my time in that place, but there was no demand for the Tan-Sad, so I kept it. I was hoping my new school would provide a superior vehicle.

  A young man came up to us, and was introduced to me as Roger Stott. Raeburn said that he would be showing me round and answering any questions. He seemed unnecessarily tall and handsome.

  ‘Are you a teacher, Sir?’ I managed to ask, and he laughed and explained, ‘No, I’m one of the ABs. Able-bodied pupils. I have asthma. That’s usually what’s wrong with the ABs. Apart from having to do most of the work of running the school.’

  No one had alerted me to the fact that there would be physically normal, strapping great boys roaming all over my nice disabled school. When Roger Stott looked at me, I felt as I had at CRX when Mr Fisk first took his pictures, agonisingly naked, though he had large eyes with a lot of warmth and sparkle in them. He had celebrity looks, somehow, without actually reminding me of anyone.

  Roger pushed the Tan-Sad, and then with him behind me I felt more or less clothed again. There was a lot to see. The estate wasn’t in the Cliveden class, but it had nine acres of grass and woodland. There was no other house in sight of the Castle. Pupils had no sense of being overlooked. That was very much what Raeburn and Miss Willis had been looking for when they placed their advertisement in the Sunday Times, and the then owner, Colonel Mitchell-Hedges, had responded. There were trees, Spanish chestnuts and oaks, screening the grounds from the road, and great masses of rhododendrons. There was also a yew hedge, tall and very gloomy, with the edges of a sign just visible, half over-grown. Roger told me it had YEW HEDGE – POISONOUS TO HORSES written on it, but disappointingly the few horses that passed through never seemed tempted to try it.

  Are you sleeping with me?

  I had decided that I had only one slim chance of escaping the fateful nick-name of Snoretta, and that was to make friends instantly – before bed-time. I had only a few hours. I was in a hurry to establish who would be sleeping within range of my snoring and the whiff of my pee, so I asked Roger Stott the question whose importance dwarfed all others. ‘Are you sleeping with me?’

  I blushed and rapidly translated the question into what I thought was the universal school idiom. ‘Are you one of the chaps in my Dorm?’ ‘I don’t know where you’re going, exactly,’ said Roger. ‘If you’re Blue Dorm, then yes. But don’t worry about that – we’ll get you settled in later. Right now I’m here to show you around. You’ll soon get used to it.’ I tried. All the same it was frustrating not knowing who would be in my dormitory yet, the all-powerful peers, my judges.

  Roger showed me the area at the front of the Castle where games were played. There were a couple of go-karts which were brought out on special occasions. To start with, he said, they had been fitted with governors to limit their speed. The boys had gone on strike until they were removed. There hadn’t been any serious accidents, though one boy had panicked and forgotten how to stop. Luckily he had the sense to run into the bushes, not out of the drive and onto the road. It was reassuring to hear that there was room for mishap and possible disaster at this new school. The normal dangers.

  There was archery, too. Roger Stott looked at my arms rather doubtfully and said that wheelchair shinty – hockey for hooligans – might turn out to be my game. I thought this was an activity in which I would be pushed by an AB, perhaps by Roger himself, and tried to look forward to it.

  He showed me the area round the side of the Castle where cars were parked. For school expeditions there was a Bedford Transit van, but it had no room for wheelchairs. I could look forward to being manhandled into the back, while the folded chairs were loaded onto a trailer knocked together by a local garage.

  Then Roger Stott took me inside and showed me a sort of cubicle, a fairly dismal space but one without which the Castle could hardly last a day as a school for the disabled. This was the lift. All the dormitories were upstairs.

  Farley Castle may have had the privacy Raeburn and Miss Willis were looking for, but it was desperately short of amenities. You could say it was a folly twice over – once when it was built and all over again when it was converted, in the teeth of its unsuitability for the purpose, into a school for the disabled. The school itself was disabled, and there were aspects to living in a fairy-tale castle which came close to a living nightmare. CRX had been much more practical in disabled terms, being an enormous bloody bungalow straggling along a corridor, with treacherous slopes and any number of traps but no actual stairs.

  The lift at Vulcan wasn’t even big. It was nowhere near big enough to serve the needs of such a place, and had been squeezed in by the sacrifice of half the space of the back stairway. It had a weight limit of only 350 lb. Roger Stott explained that it was very slow, when it worked at all. ‘When the engine’s kaput,’ he said, ‘old Rabies has to crank the mechanism by hand. I can tell you he gets awfully red in the face!’ Old Rabies! I was thrilled to be at a proper school at last, with official nick-names and everything.

  When the school started up, there hadn’t been a lift at all. Admittedly there had only been one pupil, so it was hardly a problem. This was the legendary Kim Derbishire, prime mover in Vulcan’s creation myth. I would hear a lot about him in the days to come. Kim was pretty much able-bodied, having only infrequent epilepsy and mild spasticity in one arm and a leg. He could help with washing-up, cleaning and even carpentry. In keeping with the active role he played at the school, he had always called the co-principals Marion and Alan. Roger said he still visited the school every so often. One day I might meet him.

  As he showed me the hall where we
would be taking our meals, Roger passed on some of the colourful history of Farley Castle. There was a Grey Lady who had lost her lover while alive, and came looking for him every so often after her death. When a new boy arrived at the school, she had the habit of seeking him out to ask if this stranger had any news for her. You’d think I’d have grown out of childish scares by this stage, after the years of nonsense about Vera Cole, but I was thoroughly alarmed. It was going to be hard enough to keep the bed dry that night without a supernatural visitation.

  Roger went into a little more detail. ‘The Grey Lady drags her chains behind her as she searches for her loved one. I don’t know why she should be dragging chains, myself, the daft old thing … in fact, I’ve heard it said that her chains sound more like someone rattling an old sweet tin full of keys and coins. And she’s learned to imitate the voices of the boys.’

  ‘However does she manage that?’ I asked. I wasn’t cottoning on very quickly to Roger’s kind hints of reassurance. He had to spell things out more clearly.

  ‘The Grey Lady visits after lights out on the first night of term. About 9.30. And when all the new boys are quaking in their beds, she recites her poem. It’s not a bad poem, actually – I suppose she’s had plenty of time to get it right. Then she gives out the most bloodcurdling howl. It’s so loud it almost sounds like a whole lot of people howling.’ He lowered his voice. ‘And you’d better be a good little chap, and scream along with the rest of the new bugs.’

  He took pity on me, that’s what it comes down to, and initiated me into the hoax. Did he really say ‘new bugs’, or was that something I’d picked up from my reading? Perhaps it was something I demanded to be called, on my first day of secondary school, my first real school-day, the ritual insult that certified my belonging.

  I don’t exactly remember when Mum and Dad left, which suggests that the induction process was smoothly managed. I had no sense of being abandoned. And as evening drew on, I was buoyed up by the knowledge of the Grey Lady ordeal which was in store for all the unsuspecting new bugs but me. I was also so tired that I thought I might sleep through her visitation anyway.

  At supper I had a chance to assess the full range of the school’s intake. There was a large handful of able-bodied boys like Roger Stott, who helped with the actual running of the place, and there was a small handful of boys who could do next to nothing for themselves. These were the ones with degenerative disorders, who needed help even to eat. It was Vulcan’s proud boast that it imposed no upper limit on the severity of its pupils’ condition, though they should at least be stable. That was hardly the case with these few wan souls, fading away almost visibly. The mouths to which food was lifted in patient spoonfuls hardly reacted to the approach of nourishment.

  Roger poured me a glass of water from a large jug, but he didn’t meet my eyes. I wasn’t disappointed by that – though if I was going to drink without help I was going to need a more manageable vessel, something with a handle. It fitted in with what I expected from a real school. Roger had broken a rule by telling me about the bogus haunting. I cheerfully accepted that he might never acknowledge me again.

  As bed-time approached, I found that Roger hadn’t been exaggerating when he told me that the lift was hopelessly slow. The problem wasn’t simply the speed at which it moved. There was only room for one wheelchair at a time, and even so the foot-plates had to be removed. Some of the boys needed electric wheelchairs, which didn’t have removable foot-plates, so those pupils had to be transferred to a pushing chair for the journey up a level, while their chairs stayed below or were carried upstairs separately. The Tan-Sad, despite its lack of motor, was actually bulkier than an electric machine, so I had to be transferred myself. The master in charge looked at it with something like fascination. ‘That’s a very interesting buggy you’ve got there, I must say. Perhaps you won’t mind swopping it for something a little nippier?’ I wouldn’t mind at all. In fact I couldn’t wait.

  Even in a pushing chair riding in the lift wasn’t comfortable. Passengers with working knees could tuck their legs neatly away, but I had to be propped up almost vertically to fit in the cage. Vulcan was a small school, but it took a good three minutes to get even a pushing wheelchair into the lift and up to the first floor, so the evening transfers (and of course the reverse journeys in the morning) took up a great deal of time.

  My new home was in fact the Blue Dorm, and Roger was the AB assigned to it, which was thrilling, but I knew better than to presume on his acquaintanceship. My peers must judge me, and Roger would not intervene. As I lay in my bed after lights out in my new home, getting used to the dark and fearfully trying to gauge my bladder’s intentions, a voice spoke out. It wasn’t the Grey Lady making an early entrance. There was nothing other-worldly about the voice or what it said. It came from the boy in the next bed. What he said was a single word. He said, ‘Rip.’ I thought I knew what he meant, I certainly hoped so, but I didn’t dare to respond.

  A purty fair shake-down

  There was a pause, and then another voice said ‘Ned.’ Then I knew for certain what was coming next, and I said ‘Kelly’ at the same time as the fourth boy in the room. Some sort of game had started, but I didn’t know what kind, or what came next. I waited in high excitement. Then the first voice said, more confidently, ‘Waaaal, this seems like a purty fair shake-down, pardners … think the posse heard us?’ And we were off.

  Television had ridden to my rescue. God bless television. Television had taken the pressure off my bladder. Those little dorms were natural settings for story-telling and play-acting. A television series gave us our cast list, and we were off. What a relief after all my fears! We rode the range. We guarded the wagon train. We pronounced ‘coyotes’ to rhyme with ‘winter coats’. From that night on, the cue for the game was always the same. One: Rip! Two: Ned! Three: Kelly! I was completely caught up in our Western universe by the time the Grey Lady came for us with her box of coins and keys.

  Her poem went like this:

  I am the Ghost of Farley Castle

  For fifty years wrapped up in a parcel.

  The string was undone, I was let loose

  And now I’m out to COOK YOUR GOOSE!

  I couldn’t wait to get the dutiful screaming out of the way, and to head back to Indian Territory. The sheets were coarse after the linen at CRX but the company was kind, and the sheets stayed dry. It turned out after all my fears that I didn’t normally even need a pee in the night, but if I really got desperate I just called out for Roger Stott’s help. Nocturnal enuresis put its ugly head below the parapet, and I stopped worrying about waking up wet. I think it’s the worry that makes the wetness.

  Roger’s tenderness in alerting me to the ghost hoax seems to me, looking back, like the first gentle waft of the new decade. Just because he had been severely scared on his first night in a new place (presumably) was no reason to pass the trauma on. It was 1961, but the ’sixties were a decade which was a long time getting started and a long time dying down.

  In other respects Vulcan was lodged firmly in the 1950s, perhaps even earlier. There wasn’t a school uniform as such, but if a boy was able to wear a tie, he was expected to do so. If you couldn’t tie it yourself, like me, then an AB would do it for you. The knot had to be pulled good and tight. I asked if there were any exceptions, and it turned out that there were, but they didn’t cover my case. Exceptions were made for those with tracheotomies. If you were breathing through your neck rather than your nose, you were exempted from wearing a tie. So we were spared the sight of ties fluttering in the tracheal breeze or being inhaled dangerously into a makeshift orifice, where a door had been opened in a boy’s throat.

  Asthmatics didn’t have to wear ties, but were expected to sport cravats instead. If they were having a particularly wheezy patch they could go to a matron, who might let them off altogether. Then they could go open-necked.

  One particular boy called Paul Dandridge had been so badly affected by polio that he could only breathe by
gulping down air – we called it his ‘frog breathing’ – and not at all at night without the aid of a respirator. He still had to wear a cravat, unless perhaps he was officially exempt but had decided to set a good example.

  When the weather was warm we were allowed to loosen our ties (providing there were no important visitors). If we had lessons outside or went on expeditions, the more indulgent teachers would let us take them off. By ‘take them off’ I always mean ‘get someone else to take it off’, of course. And all this in a school whose whole reason for existing was to make daily life easier for disabled boys!

  I had only been at Vulcan for a week or so when I woke up with a pain in my lower right side. I hadn’t really settled in at the school, and I was already feeling rather sorry for myself. Is it possible that I was missing CRX? Perhaps even Ivy and Wendy seemed reassuring figures from a peaceful past, and a place where I had known the ropes. Here I was all tangled up in them.

  First a nurse came along and was sympathetic, and then an unfriendly one came and told me I must be namby-pamby to be making such a fuss about a little stomach ache. I’d been called many things at CRX, Posh and Dropper and Archie Andrews, but I’d never been called namby-pamby and I was offended. The physical pain got no better, and I couldn’t eat. The second nurse, who was called Judy Brisby, came back to see if I was still being namby-pamby, but I said I wanted to see the first one, the nurse who had been so much friendlier. Judy Brisby told me firmly that I was mistaken if I thought there were any nurses at Vulcan at all. Didn’t I understand that this was a school and not a hospital? There were matrons here, day matrons and night matrons, little matrons and one Big Matron who was in charge of all, but there were no nurses of any description.