Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I could muster enough bolshiness, despite the pain in my side, to point out that there were matrons at hospitals too, so it was a funny word to choose if you wanted people not to think of hospitals. I also said that if there were only matrons in the school then I wanted to see the other matron. In fact the biggest available matron.

  Judy Brisby muttered that I should learn to stop answering back if I knew what was good for me, but she did eventually do as I asked. When the Big Matron came, she was very nice, but she didn’t have the incandescent authority of Matron at CRX. I couldn’t imagine her saying, ‘I am the School!’ under any circumstances. That was clearly the prerogative of the co-principals, of Raeburn and Miss Willis. Still, the Big Matron, who was called Sheila Ewart, did manage to see that I wasn’t malingering.

  I hate to admit it, but Judy Brisby wasn’t altogether wrong. I had been conditioned by my long residency in a hospital. It hadn’t occurred to me that there wasn’t a medical staff at Vulcan. It really was what I had said I wanted: a school. Getting what you want always takes a bit of getting used to.

  On the other hand, I was right about thinking I had a pain in my side. Sheila Ewart called out the local GP, who was Vulcan’s only medical resource. He in turn called out an ambulance to take me to hospital, since I had appendicitis.

  The ambulance took me to a hospital, all right. It took me all the way back to CRX. I was back in those very familiar surroundings. No better cure exists for nostalgia than abrupt return to the idealised scene. In my case I was also helpless and in pain, which worked to restore defects of perspective. I was in a familiar hospital but a strange ward – Men’s Surgical, I think. Very soon I was nostalgic for the new school I hardly knew.

  Apparently the appendix was severely inflamed and had come close to bursting during surgery. On the other hand, I’ve never met anyone who’s had appendicitis without being told the same story. Perhaps it’s a standard piece of description, medical boiler-plate which makes both doctors and patients feel they’ve been caught up in a heroic intervention.

  I came round from the anæsthetic with a lot of pain. I was warned that defæcating was going to be very painful. ‘Oh, and another thing,’ the doctor said. ‘Don’t laugh whatever you do. That hurts a lot.’ I thought I would be able to avoid laughter. I could barely muster a polite smile for the doctor, and I was safe from any fiercer pangs of amusement.

  I had been looking forward to getting a scar, which was one of the few consequences of illness that had eluded me to date. It was a long wait. The incision stubbornly refused to heal. I ended up being ‘off’ for the rest of term. It particularly grieved me that my first school report was such a wash-out. There had been no such things as reports at CRX, so this was my first ever, and I had wanted a glowing testimonial to my intelligence, charm and powers of application. I wanted a written record of my virtues. No one could promise me an actual career, so I set great store by distinguishing myself in the school equivalent.

  I can’t blame the authorities at Vulcan – I’d only had a handful of lessons, after all. The most the co-principals could say in all conscience was that I seemed ‘an alert and cheerful boy’. They looked forward to getting to know me better.

  Pecking obedience

  I was soon bored to tears at CRX, though Ansell was kind enough to look in on me. I put sustained pressure on Mum to give me a convalescence present. I had my heart set on the miracle toy of the period, the Doodlemaster. ‘It’s suitable for anyone from eight to eighty and it’ll give me hours of instructive amusement,’ I told her, familiar with the sort of things it said on the boxes toys came in, and knowing the royal road to a parent’s heart and pocket. She gave in before I drove her round the bend, but only just before.

  It’s impossible to convey at this distance the mystique of the Doodlemaster. The best way of describing it might be as a Stone Age video game. It looked like a flat little television of red plastic, with two white knobs. Between them these knobs controlled the movement of a stylus which pressed on the underside of the screen and scraped off an aluminium-powder coating to make patterns. Your design was restricted by the impossibility of either correcting mistakes or lifting the stylus off the screen. When you had finished your drawing, after everyone had politely goggled at it and guessed what it was, you turned the Doodlemaster upside down and gave it a good shake, to redistribute the silvery grains ready for the next drawing.

  This was an absurd choice of toy to beguile my convalescence, though I had only myself to blame. What it was in essence was a wrist-humbling apparatus. Children with two fluent and flexible arms and hands were reduced to the level of robot toddlers with crayons bolted to their fists. Each wrist was demoted to providing a single element, vertical or horizontal, of a complex movement. It took even gifted students hours to be able to produce a passable diagonal, let alone a flowing curve. Those fabled Zen Masters we’re always hearing about, who think nothing of drawing a perfect circle with a single brush-stroke, would have been driven to foaming fury by the frustrations of the machine.

  My wrists were humbled already, and it was hard labour for me to get even a straight line out of the Doodlemaster. Soon my fingers ached with futile twiddling. My right hand was the more adept, since the elbow on that side had movement, but accomplishment on the Doodlemaster was necessarily on the level of the weaker arm. My right wrist had no power to raise my level. Instead the left one dragged me down. It was even more humbling when I had to ask passing nurses to turn the fiendish device upside down on my behalf, to give it the ritual shaking that prepared the screen for my next abject failure of doodling.

  Essentially it was a machine that simulated disability, by making a simple accomplishment daunting, and I was the last boy in the country to need that challenge just then. I already knew what it was like to have cursive shapes clear in your mind, and to produce only jagged scratches. That was my experience of hand-writing. I so much preferred the pecking obedience of a typewriter to anything my fingers could manage unaided.

  The Doodlemaster passed automatically into the suppler hands of Peter, without actively being given to him, when I came home from hospital. Soon he could do a passable Egyptian pyramid, while my drawings in that line were more in the stepped, Mayan style. They were ramshackle ziggurats. Peter would sit with the Doodlemaster and the toddling Audrey both on his knee, allowing her to work one knob with both little fists. It was clear that soon even the baby of the family would out-perform me on my convalescence toy.

  Shortly afterwards the makers of the Doodlemaster were taken over by an American company and the device was renamed the Etch-a-Sketch. My only consolation in the whole episode was that at least I owned a first-generation machine.

  Audrey was a very watchful child. She had a lovely smile, but from the moment she discovered her frowning muscles those were the ones she used most. From the start it was as if she had set herself to cracking the code of the strange family in which she found herself. I wished her luck with that ambitious and deceptive project.

  If Mum had hoped for a child who would never leave her orbit, unlike her boys who were bound sooner or later to join the world of men, then she was disappointed almost from the start. Mum proudly announced Audrey’s first word as ‘Mum’. In fact it turned out to be ‘merm’, her version of ‘worm’. She loved the worms in the garden, and would bring them indoors at every opportunity. Dad was delighted by her interest in the natural world, though of course it was too early to tell if she was a little biologist or just a little madam. I don’t know whether Audrey ever ate her beloved merms, or even ate much dirt, but sometimes she would come in with her mouth streaked with mud. Perhaps she knew by instinct what would agitate Mum most.

  Mum was having a hard time with Audrey just then, during my convalescence. This was a toddler who was just beginning to get into everything, and would resort to tremendous tantrums if thwarted. Mum couldn’t do anything with her. I had the brain-wave of taking some of the microscopic sweeties called hundreds and thousa
nds, dividing them by colour (which was a bit of a fag, admittedly) and then arranging them in separate compartments of my Junior First Aid Kit – one of my most treasured possessions, a Christmas present which I was slow to out-grow. Then I would look at the bawling Audrey, make great play of selecting the colour appropriate to her mood, and balance a single tiny pill on my finger.

  She would come over to take it from me, calmer already. Her mood sweetened and stayed sweet. I had discovered some sort of colour cure – call it chromotherapy by placebo. Cromer therapy, even. The effect was so marked that Mum thought it somehow abnormal. She asked me to stop dosing Audrey with magic beans, and got Dr Flanagan to prescribe something instead. Flanny gave her Distaval, the brand name of thalidomide. Which worked perfectly well, I admit. It’s a valid drug as long as you aren’t pregnant.

  It must have been at about the same stage of my convalescence that Peter taught me a huge lesson. He was being given a lesson himself at the time, and I don’t think he ever knew how much he taught me that morning. It was a Saturday, and he was enduring the piano lesson which was perhaps the low point of his week. Dad was reasonably musical, and even played the organ for services in Little Marlow Church. The vicar was a Mr Jayne, who had the mannerism of ending prayers with the formula, ‘a-through Jesus Christ Our Lord’. I pointed this out to Peter, and from then on we listened out for that moment, beginning to giggle before there was anything to giggle at. It sound like a holy sneeze.

  At Dad’s insistence Peter was sentenced to piano lessons, but he didn’t prosper at the keyboard. Now I listened in on his lesson, though that makes it sound as if I made a positive choice. It was more that I didn’t go to the mighty effort of moving out of earshot. From CRX I knew the layout of the keyboard, and even the names of the notes, but of course I was never in the running for lessons of my own.

  There was a note in the music which Peter was playing that never quite happened. He seemed to hit every possible note on either side of it, and then his teacher would say ‘Again,’ not with irritation but with a sort of suppressed sigh. Irritation would have been more bearable.

  In my mind I felt I could see his hand making the required stretch. In fact I could see my own hand – my hand as it should have been – striking the note fair and square. It seemed very unfair that I had the musical awareness and Peter the working parts.

  I lived with this comfortingly tragic view of destiny for perhaps as long as ten minutes. Then it occurred to me that Peter might be seeing in his mind exactly what I saw in mine, his hand reaching for the right note. It’s just that he couldn’t make his mental image into a reality. In that respect we were as one. Despite their differences of constitution the brothers were looking down at an identical disobedience. Was it likely that I was the only intuitively musical soul in the family, and the only one who couldn’t address the keyboard competently? Life wasn’t fair, it seemed to me, but its unfairness followed certain rules.

  This was my opportunity to realise that there was no difference between our two ways, Peter’s and mine, of not being able to play the piano. We just weren’t very musical as a tribe, we Cromers, even Dad. I think he liked the organ because all the stops and controls reminded him of a cockpit. It was a primitive flight simulator. Returning to my own case: there was no buried treasure of talent buried in my disqualified body. Underneath the disability my inability was intact.

  Of course none of this was neatly thought out. It came in a rush of conviction, a brain event like the opposite of a stroke, a reverse aneurysm. My awareness of one aspect of ‘reality’ had been closed off by a sort of self-imposed mental clamp, which had now simply fallen away. I felt the free flow of blood through a fresh set of thoughts. Shortly after that, to his profound relief, Peter stopped taking lessons.

  On top of its sheer folly, my demand for an appendicitis present had ruined the economy of Christmas. The Doodlemaster pretty much broke the bank. For Christmas proper, and birthday proper, I had to make do with a modest book token. I think I bought myself a bumper dose of Narnia, but however exciting the stories I read at home, I couldn’t wait to be back at Vulcan. Already I was nostalgic for those days which only really began at lights out, when the curtain went up on the latest improvised instalment of Western adventures, staged by our little after-hours sagebrush repertory theatre in deepest Berkshire. Bandit country.

  At New Year Mum took me to the Theatre Royal, Windsor, as a treat. She had bought the tickets months ahead. I loved going to a show and wasn’t in the least fussy, though Dad said it was only ever drawing-room comedies at the Theatre Royal, which I’d hate. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t.

  This wasn’t an expedition to the panto but an evening of music and laughter with Flanders and Swann, performing the songs from their revues At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat. I knew and loved some of their songs from the radio (‘Mud Glorious Mud’ for one, ‘The Gas Man Cometh’ for another). Musical pleasure, though, wasn’t the only reason for the outing. Michael Flanders was in a wheelchair, and I’d never even known. I hadn’t seen a picture.

  Mum had even got up the nerve to arrange for us to call on the artistes in their dressing room after the show. It was good to realise that although Swann was musically the driving force of the partnership, Flanders had the charisma. Donald Swann was a skinny little chap like a little bird who twittered with pleasure whenever Michael Flanders, burly and bearded in his wheelchair, said anything. Flanders rumbled sweetly, and Swann gave a little embellishing trill from his branch when the big man had finished speaking.

  Soon Flanders was saying, ‘Now I think I’d like a confab with this young man. Boys’ talk.’ Donald Swann took the cue and started buttering Mum up. ‘The purpose of satire’, I could hear him saying, ‘is to strip away the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth – and our job is sticking it right back again!’ With the advent of Beyond the Fringe I suppose their sort of material was beginning to seem rather tame. Mum laughed rather nervously. She didn’t enjoy clever talk.

  Michael Flanders was a sort of ambassador for disability, and a very good one since he was both sweet and sharp. He said to me, ‘You may already have noticed, young man, that the world and his wife think it’s wonderful when people like you and me manage without wheelchairs, and rather a poor show if we can’t. Pay no attention. We can’t all be Douglas Bader, can we?’ he said, and then added in a whisper, as if it was a great secret, ‘And not all of us even want to!’ He told me that Bader’s doctors had written on his medical notes, ‘Refuses to use a wheelchair’, with a tick. ‘If I’d been his doctor,’ Michael Flanders told me, ‘I’d have written silly ass instead.’ He made it into a huge joke and a lovely conspiracy against the cult of Mr Tin Legs.

  Michael signed a photograph for me, and even wrote a message on it so that I wouldn’t forget what he had said. What he wrote, in clear, firm, very legible hand-writing (unlike mine) was ‘REMEMBER: TWO LEGS GOOD, FOUR WHEELS BETTER!’ The only problem with the whole inspiring visit was that the dressing room hardly had room for two wheelchairs at the same time. Mum and Donald Swann more or less had to clamber round us, which took some of the fun out of Michael Flanders’ morale-boosting message.

  When the spring term began, I was anxious in case I had lost ground in lessons, but much more concerned that the nightly wagon train of narrative might have moved on without me. I needn’t have worried. Those slow-moving stagecoaches could be overtaken by the most lumbering wheelchair. Even the Tan-Sad would have gained on them.

  In fact there was danger of the situations becoming stale. The show-downs were repetitive, and you could see the double-crosses coming a mile off. Then one night our cowboy theatre witnessed an artistic break-through. There was something missing from the nightly adventures of our desperadoes, but no one had quite worked out what it was. Then one of the other boys said to me, ‘John, you’re very good at all the parts, but the story’s going round and round in circles. Would you mind playing a lady or a mum?’r />
  This was my chance to take the reins. I plunged right in. I started playing Mum, who broke up fights between her boys when they got too fierce and served vast amounts of imaginary food, steaming hot and lovingly described. Then I began to experiment in the temptress vein, making kissing noises that went on and on while everyone in their separate beds listened enraptured.

  I found the freedom intoxicating, now that I could take the story in any direction I wanted. It seemed incredible that we had been content with all-male stories for so long. I suppose that’s the way with a lot of primitive art forms. Greek tragedy only had one actor for quite a while. Sumo wrestling started off as a sort of dance representing the contest between a man and an invisible god (who always won) for a very long time before someone had the brave notion of adding another wrestler to bring the crowds in and put bums on mats.

  After that first night of playing female roles, I was rarely back in trousers. And though I could take the story anywhere I wanted, in practice I paid the proper homage to the basic drives, sex and hunger.

  Hunger was the more pressing interest. School food was fairly basic, sometimes aspiring to wholesomeness, sometimes flirting with inedibility. It turned out, for instance, that over the Christmas holidays the ’fridge had broken down. The butter had gone rancid, but it wasn’t thrown away, despite the horrible taste. We were told that expert opinion had been consulted, and no harm would come to us from eating it. They put that butter on the table for a month. We could smell it coming. Everyone switched to dry bread until the rank yellow grease was finally taken away.