Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  ‘Not quite, Sir. I was asking more about his family background.’ Which wasn’t quite the phrase I wanted. I knew what the brochure said about Vulcan, the official line: This god had been hurled from Olympus by his father and become crippled, but he had doggedly pursued the physical skill of metal-working, becoming the smith and armourer of the gods, and also renowned for his intellect.

  ‘I see.’ Raeburn’s grey-blue eyes were looking straight through me. ‘Well, John, I’m going to treat you as a grown-up. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve heard, or what you’ve read, and I promise not to fob you off with flannel. Does that sound fair?’

  ‘More than fair, Sir. I suppose what I’m asking about, sir, is really Jupiter and not Vulcan at all. Is it true that when Jupiter saw Vulcan as a baby, he thought he was so ugly he threw him out of Heaven? Really he wanted to kill him, but the baby was immortal so he couldn’t, so instead he grabbed the baby by the leg and threw him out of Heaven so he fell all down the sky. So he’s lame where Jupiter hurt him. He’s only handicapped because his dad hated him and couldn’t actually kill him. Is that true?’

  ‘That’s what the myths say, yes. But you must have noticed that none of the gods is exactly normal. They’re none of them well-balanced, even the Greek ones. I suppose Athena comes close, but she’s always playing favourites and she cheats when she gets the chance. Apollo seems to play fair, but even he’s a bit of a pill. I’m speaking frankly now, John, and telling you things that may not be in the Tales you’ve read, which water things down a bit. The gods are in and out of bed with each other the whole time – and with mortals. Sex-mad, the lot of them. Some of the goddesses aren’t far short of trollops. And as for Jupiter, who should be setting an example, he’s pretty much the worst of the lot. So we shouldn’t be too upset that poor old Vulcan doesn’t live up to our hopes. Do you see, John?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘We racked our brains to find a good name for the school, I don’t mind telling you. Marion was all for “Nelson” – one eye, one arm, changed the course of history and all that – but I thought we’d end up spending all our time explaining we weren’t running a training college for naval cadets. So I was rather bucked when I thought of Vulcan. There’s also the Greek version of the same god, Hephaistos or (to the Romans) Hephæstus, but I thought the school would have quite enough trouble making its way in the world without being difficult to spell.’

  Even so, I was thrilled by the idea that if he had decided differently I might have been attending a school with the honorary twenty-seventh letter in its name. Already I was fighting the temptation to write his name with the same embellishment, as Ræburn. ‘But now you know more about the goings-on on Mount Olympus than dear Marion does, and I’d be grateful if you kept it that way. She’d be upset, you see, if she thought that the name we came up with for our school had made any one of our boys unhappy. She’s devoted to you all, you know.’ As I was devoted to Alan Raeburn.

  In the summer of 1962 it was decided that my health was stable enough for the family to go on holiday. Our destination was Looe in Cornwall. Peter and I were thrilled. We had no idea what to expect from a family holiday, and the name of our destination was fantastic. For ages we’d ask, ‘Are we really going to [th’]Looe for a week?’ sounding the article as much as we dared. Loo was an even lower word than toilet. Peter said we might end up staying on Khazi Street, but we knew that was too much to hope.

  When she married Dad, Mum must have been thinking of the foreign postings which would take her thousands of miles away from the mother she couldn’t quite reject. Looe wasn’t quite what she bargained, a poor substitute, almost a booby prize. I put the kibosh on world travel by becoming ill, which was hardly fair on her. I remember Granny saying once that Mum had married a uniform, and if that was true then she was fully entitled to the travel documents stowed away in its inner pockets.

  The choice fell on Looe because friends of Mum and Dad had a guest-house there. Dorrie Mason was a former resident of the Abbotsbrook Estate who had retired to Cornwall after her husband died. Running a guest-house had always been her dream. Mum said it was an ideal situation. Staying with old friends meant that you got the best of both worlds, family atmosphere and reasonable rates.

  It was a punishing drive in the Vauxhall, and we were starving when we arrived. Dad greeted our hostess with, ‘Awfully good of you to let us all stay here, Dorrie.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I, Dennis? That’s why it’s called a guest-house! And so much nicer with old friends.’

  Dorrie Mason was like Aunt Fanny in the Famous Five books, only more motherly. Her language was down-to-earth if not downright rollicking. Mum sometimes let Peter and me watch Coronation Street on the Light Programme – in fact she made us watch it, saying we shouldn’t be protected from knowledge of what low-class people were like. The Northern accents were hard to make out, and Dorrie’s was nothing like them, but there was a directness that I loved and recognised. Dorrie pounced on Audrey, who had slept for most of the journey, and swept her into her arms, delighting her by kissing her tummy with a noise like a whoopee cushion.

  When she left the room to make tea, Mum whispered to Dad, ‘I don’t remember her being quite like that when she was our neighbour.’ Dad nodded wisely and said, ‘Shall I tell you what’s happened, m’dear? She’s reverted to type,’ and Mum nodded in the same style. Away from the genteel breezes of Bourne End Dorrie had become blowsy and coarse-grained.

  Dad made conversation perfectly smoothly, but Mum was really quite put out by Dorrie’s class back-sliding. ‘She’s just stopped making an effort, that’s what it comes down to,’ she said later. Dorrie had thrown out her fish-knives and gone native.

  Peter and I fell in love with the whole set-up immediately. We had arrived late and very much hoped for a hot meal. ‘I’ve not got a lot in the larder, ducks,’ said Dorrie, ‘but I’ll see what I can do.’ What she could do was make fried-egg sandwiches. When the plate was put before her Mum just stared at it. Of course Peter and I ate like pigs and chirped out, ‘Can we have these at Trees, Mum?’

  All through our stay Dad kept trying to offer help. ‘Let me give you a hand with all that, Dorrie,’ he would call out. ‘This is all really very good of you, you know!’ and Dorrie had yelled back, ‘Nonsense, Dennis, you stay right where you are – you’re on holiday, remember!’

  At breakfast the next day Mum, who hadn’t slept well, tried her best to find Dorrie’s fatal weakness. She cast a critical eye over the room’s décor, but though the colours were brash and the patterns clashed, the house was spotless. The tea was also scolding hot, just the way Mum liked it, and served in green Beryl Ware, the only crockery Mum was really at home with.

  Dorrie made an entrance carrying a large oval ceramic dish with many fried sunny-side-up eggs arranged at its centre, surrounded by many slices of lean back bacon. ‘Toast coming right up, love,’ she said. ‘Won’t be a jiff.’

  Mum muttered, ‘I wonder if she can cook anything except fried eggs,’ and it’s true that we ate so many eggs that week it’s a wonder any of us had a bowel movement ever again. Mum cheered up when she saw that Dorrie had forgotten to warm the plates, whispering, ‘By the time it all gets here your eggs will either be cold or hard or both. You know how you both hate that! Really she’s hopeless! She hasn’t a clue! I’m sorry about this, boys.’

  Dorrie came sailing in with the toast and butter, saying that she would just nip out for the plates. While she was out of the room Mum said to us, ‘Everything is going to be cold by the time you get it. The only trouble with staying with friends is that you can’t complain when things go wrong. Never mind – if you really can’t face it we can get some food in the town later on.’ In the event we ate so quickly that the temperature hardly mattered. The butter spread like a dream. By the time Dorrie produced home-made marmalade Mum was thoroughly out of sorts.

  I could never decide whether Dad’s interventions in her moods were mean-spirited or just badly timed.
Now he said, ‘Isn’t it good to be staying with friends, m’dear?’

  When Dorrie came in to tidy up the breakfast things she asked if we were having lunch in Looe or would prefer to eat in the house. Peter and I yelled out ‘Here!’ but were smartly over-ruled.

  Even in town we kept on singing Dorrie’s praises. We weren’t consciously rebelling against Mum’s way of doing things, but I doubt if that made it easier for Mum to bear. When we were offered ice creams or a funfair ride, we would ask, ‘When can we go back to Dorrie’s?’ The guest-house was supposed to be a basic lodgings, a base from which to explore the sights and sounds of Looe, but as far as we were concerned it was the sights and sounds of Looe. It was good that Audrey was too young to defend her preferences, and could be trotted off unprotesting to the beach.

  Positively indecent

  I suppose Dorrie played up to us, offering a performance of rustic joviality, but she put her heart into it, and her daughter Celia made a fine supporting player. Celia had put in a brief appearance on our first night in Cornwall, but long enough for me to realise that she had nothing in common with the shy girl I remembered from Bourne End, who hid behind her hair. She had blossomed, and her clothes hadn’t quite kept pace.

  ‘Cee-li-aaaah,’ Dorrie had barked out in her saloon-bar voice, ‘I want to see you wearing different trousers tomorrow. You’re looking positively indecent.’ She looked at Peter and me and rolled her eyes. ‘That girl!’ she said, completely unembarrassed, as she bustled off to put the kettle on. Celia was an unalterably genteel, Bourne End sort of name, but Dorrie made it sound almost obscene by the way she dragged out the syllables.

  The following morning, when Celia made her entrance, there was nothing amiss with her grey flannel slacks, but a hole had mysteriously appeared in the back seam by the time she got up from the table.

  ‘Cee-li-aaaah!’ Dorrie called after her, ‘Do something about that hole in your bum, or you’ll be giving these nice boys the wrong idea!’ Mum didn’t know where to look, although when she was pushing me around in Bourne End and saw a botty or a boozzie that was a little out of the ordinary, she’d be sure to nudge me so we could share a little laugh. Now, though, she said, ‘I’ll just go out and get a breath of fresh air,’ a polite reproach wasted on Dorrie, whose sensibilities had been blunted by years of shameless biscuit-dunking.

  Celia galumphed up the stairs and came down a few minutes later wearing a gleaming pair of tight-fitting white trousers. She twirled in front of us. Again there was a hole in the rear, though a much smaller one.

  ‘I thought I’d fixed that,’ said Dorrie, ‘but my stitches don’t hold.’ Then she said straight out to Celia, ‘When I see a hole like that in your bum, it makes me want to stick my finger up it! Know what I mean, boys?’

  Peter and I were deeply glad that Mum was out of the house, inhaling the moral breeze. We also decided to spend as much time nattering with Dorrie as we possibly could. She was very happy to oblige. At the end of a meal she would say with a wink, while she was clearing the table, ‘We’ll have coffee later, boys,’ the italics perfectly audible. Having coffee later meant having a natter with Dorrie while we drank it. She would also light up a succession of cigarettes. The nattering was continuous, though there were little pauses in the flow when I think Dorrie was fighting the urge to offer us one of her smokes.

  A boy-friend in the wood-work

  It was no part of Mum’s holiday plans for her sons to spend their time revelling in the smutty talk of a sea-side landlady. She became tearful, though Peter and I were unsympathetic. Couldn’t she wait to cry till we got home? Dad wasn’t indulgent either, telling her to buck up, m’dear, buck up and enjoy the rest of the holiday – but then he too was crying inside when Dorrie served up the bill the night before we left.

  It turned out that the hospitality of old friends didn’t come cheap. Dad said, ‘I feel such a chump for helping her clear the table – I should have charged the ghastly old bird by the cup and plate!’

  We travelled home in the Vauxhall in an atmosphere of rancid gloom. Audrey made a great fuss, while Mum and Dad argued about who should give up which pleasure, to pay the high price of staying with old friends. Mum was considering giving up her own occasional cigarettes, but it seemed a futile gesture if Dad was still puffing away. Mum had only ever smoked her way through a shed.

  In the car, Dad said, ‘It’s pretty obvious that there was a boy-friend somewhere in the wood-work. Thank God she didn’t show show him to us – at least we were spared that. Shows the woman hasn’t lost her senses completely.’

  Mum shuddered. ‘I hardly dare think what such a creature must be like. But I can imagine the state of his finger-nails.’

  Dad had more or less cheered up by the time we were in mid-Devon. ‘Do you think that woman does much reading, m’dear?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so, Dennis. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I was just thinking … if it wasn’t so obvious that she never opens a book from one year’s end to another, I’d say she’d been reading far too much H. E. Bates.’

  Mum laughed nervously, as if she didn’t quite follow. It was understood that since she didn’t drive she should beguile the time for Dad on long journeys with undemanding conversation. She was under instructions to talk but not to prattle. The border between these activities is hard to establish.

  If Mum didn’t take up conversational space then Peter and I would infallibly get on Dad’s nerves by reading out every road- and pub-sign we passed, just as we had on the outward journey (‘Wethered, Dad!’, ‘Arkells, Dad!’).

  Sometimes it was painful to listen in to Mum’s strained talk, but this time I was glad I had. I made a note of the name. If H. E. Bates wrote stories about people like Dorrie and Cee-li-aaaaah then I wanted to read them. There was a public library in Bourne End, and I was already a regular customer, though it was Mum who liaised with Mrs Pavey, the excellent librarian, ordering books for me and bringing them home in her bicycle basket.

  Dad raised an eyebrow when he saw my library copy of The Darling Buds of May. He said it was Bates’s earlier work, stories written under the pseudonym of Flying Officer X, which was really worth reading, but I didn’t care. I was gorging on warmth and earthiness until it almost revolted me. It made Enid Blyton seem a little feeble, and though I felt a pang of disloyalty I over-rode it. I needed to know that there were people like Dorrie and the Larkins, who didn’t hide their feelings as a matter of course. At this point books were telling me more about life than life was.

  I needed to know there was life beyond Bourne End. I couldn’t afford to keep life at arm’s length – my body would do that all by itself. I hugged to myself the idea that if I escaped Bourne End and let myself run to seed like Dorrie, constipated only in the literal sense (those fried eggs), in all other respects lusty and open to impulse, there might be a boy-friend somewhere in the wood-work for me too. I would never tire of looking at the dirt beneath his finger-nails.

  Peter and I wondered when we should start pestering Mum and Dad to take us to Dorrie’s in Cornwall again. We didn’t get very far. The excuse they gave was that Gipsy had pined for us while she was in kennels, and had lost a lot of weight. Dorrie didn’t accept pets, which Mum thought was a bit of a nerve, abandoning the consistency of her position in the heat of the moment. If Dorrie did accept pets, Mum would have had to find another excuse to fob us off with.

  A ban on limbo-dancing

  Back at school for the autumn term, I continued my worship of Alan Raeburn. I would write out my fantasies about him (using the intimate spelling Ræburn) – and very innocent they were too, cuddles and caresses. Even so, the moment I had finished writing I covered the paper with my strong UHU adhesive and folded it over, so that my love would only be discovered at the end of time, the secret bursting from its chrysalis of glue.

  All the same, I allowed myself to worship one other teacher. Mum had told me that how well you did at a given subject depended on how well you got on with
the teacher. If you liked him a lot, then you could learn anything without even trying. By that criterion Mr Nevin could have taught me anything from quantum physics to origami.

  Nevin was a Canadian, tall and rugged, who taught English. He was a great lover of the outdoors, of adventure and canoeing, and he took me out in my wheelchair a lot. One minute he could be talking about gerunds and parsing sentences, then we would be in the woods making a fire. He would turn over a log and call me over to see the larvæ of a stags’-horn beetle. He was a man who was whole and could turn his hand to just about anything. Every other person I had ever met in the world seemed twisted in some way. I had never realised until I met Mr Nevin just how straight, noble and god-like a man could be. I wasn’t ready for a guru but I was more than ready for a hero. I could ask him anything and he never minded. Why should he mind? There was nothing he didn’t know.

  There were plenty of woods around the school, and we would spend a lot of time there, though I don’t think we can have been alone together quite as much as my memory likes to think. Mr Nevin built big bonfires, using brushwood and leaves to start with, then moving on to logs. We had a proper camp fire, up to the highest cowboy standards. In winter Mr Nevin would produce warm wraps for us both, and cups of steaming drink to keep out cold.

  His stories were full of nature, and of the wonder of all things Canadian. The way the leaves turned yellow, crimson and even blue in the autumn. About (a word, incidentally, which he pronounced as ‘aboot’) how cold it got there. If we thought our winters were cold, we didn’t know what we were talking about.

  Dad was good at talking about nature, but not much interested in my thoughts and feelings. Mr Nevin was strong in both departments. He had the knack of drawing me out without seeming to pry, though it was only near him that I was shy in the first place. His own physical poise played a part in this, the sense that he was completely at ease in the world. I told him I had learned about sundew plants when I was five, and had cried over the sad fate of the insect trapped inside. Then I thought about how helpless and immobile normal plants were, and how superb it was that a few of them had learned to pounce.