He leaned back while I spoke, entirely relaxed. Weak sun threw patches of light on his face, and then he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, ‘Well if that interests you, John, we have pitcher plaants aplenty …’ He lengthened the ‘a’ in ‘plants’ but didn’t twist it as Americans seem to do. ‘When I go home during the holidays I’ll bring one back for you if you like. I’ll have to hack it out of the ice, of course, but I’ll bring it back. Maybe we could set up a little garden for you at your height. When spring comes you can look after it and watch it grow.’
What could Raeburn offer me compared to this? Here was a man in the fullest sense of the word, a lover of the outdoors, knowledgeable, humorous, strong.
I asked him could I have his address in Canada and he said, ‘Sure,’ and wrote it out like this:
Ben Nevin
Rothesay
New Brunswick
Canada
‘Is that it, Sir?’ I asked, and though he nodded I still couldn’t believe it. When I looked at the few addresses I had in my collection, my adoration grew. My own address was:
John Cromer, Esquire
Vulcan School
Farley Castle
Farley Hill
Swallowfield
Nr Reading
Berkshire
England
I lived in a tiny little country but I needed eight lines to tell the postman where to take my letters. Ben Nevin lived in a vast land, but all he needed was four lines. Take away his name and the country, and that left two. I couldn’t get over it. I cross-examined him, and he guaranteed me he had given me his full and correct address, just as it appeared on his passport. Even so my faith was weak. In the hols I wrote him a letter to test the theory. My love grew to infinity when I received a reply. I cherished the fact that his name differed only by a letter from Ben Nevis, the highest point in Great Britain (though a dwarf peak by Canadian standards), our little local Himalaya.
A man whose beauty exceeded that of all other men was going to return to a vast country where he was so well-known that just three words on an envelope would find him, and part of his time he might be hacking out a pitcher plant just for me. I realised he might never do it, but I told myself that it didn’t matter. The fact that the idea had occurred to him even for a moment was intoxicating.
The fantasy which grew up around Ben Nevin was strong and total. Relatively few actual climaxes were involved, and they were never of the quick-lurk-in-a-corner or moment-snatched-in-the-lav sort. That would have sullied the purity of my feelings. The moments of truest arousal were in the great outdoors, Mr Nevin’s natural habitat. I had learned the lessons of CRX well, and could quite discreetly bring myself off (my orgasm still dry at this stage) under the blankets my idol had so thoughtfully supplied. He never noticed. My powers of concentration increased, and eventually I was able to take my pleasure with my hands decorously visible above the blanket. I don’t know why the phrase ‘mental masturbation’ should be such a disparaging one, when the skill is so useful and privacy hard to come by.
Mr Nevin set up a sort of garden on a low table (when I told Dad about it, fair play, he was inspired to do the same). Even so, it wasn’t ideal – there was only so much of the area I could reach. I dreamed of a much wider garden, with bays at regular intervals along it for wheelchair access, a sort of flowering arcade.
The mealtime rule at Vulcan was that elbows were never to be rested on the table. I can’t say I was bothered – my elbows don’t have that inclination. It’s like a ban on limbo-dancing as far as I’m concerned, an infringement of my liberty, obviously, but not something I can work myself into a lather about.
Ben Nevin, though, invariably rested an elbow on the table. Sometimes two elbows, when he was making a resting-place out of his interlaced fingers for his strong chin. There was a certain amount of grumbling behind his back about this, which I did my best to squelch. Why was Ben Nevin allowed the satisfactions of this bad habit when we weren’t? The answer was so terribly obvious. Because he was Ben Nevin, and we weren’t.
I imagined living with Mr Nevin in Canada after I grew up. Then I spoiled the fantasy for myself by realising that a woman would come along and ruin everything by marrying him, so I tried very hard to give up that particular dream. It was true that we could manage in Canada very nicely, but I thought it pretty unlikely that he would ever take up with anyone as small as me.
Mr Nevin was generally loved, but I discovered with a shock that Raeburn wasn’t necessarily popular with the boys. Some of them made fun of the fact that he hadn’t really been injured in the War. It was during the War, but not in the War. A tank had rolled on him while he was doing his training at Sandhurst. For some of the boys this meant he wasn’t a proper hero. I didn’t think it made a difference.
The Board of Education
Another thing on which I disagreed with some of my fellows was ‘The Board of Education’ – the same wooden paddle with a cartoon of a boy printed on it which I had seen so often while browsing in the Ellisdons catalogue. Alan kept the Board of Education on his desk, or else he tucked it into his back pocket while he did the rounds of the school. His knees knocked together and his feet were splayed out as he walked with his canes, so that the Board bobbed almost merrily in his back pocket. To me this was only proof that the co-principal of Vulcan School loved getting toys and tricks through the post as much as I did, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that the B of E was an object of fear to many of the pupils. I didn’t understand it, though, and one day I asked if he would let me take a look. Cheerfully he handed it to me to inspect.
It was light in weight but very strong, and very comfortable to hold. Looking at the grimacing manikin having his bottom whacked on the Board, I decided to whack my own spare hand with it. It didn’t hurt a bit. I just wondered if there was a secret thing on it, some wonderful button which made it spring into action. The finest and most characteristic Ellisdon products had some such gimmick. Eventually I returned it to Raeburn, still baffled by its appeal to him and its menace to everyone else. In my best junior-boffin voice I asked, ‘Exactly what does it do, Sir?’ and he simply replied, ‘I hope you never have to find out, John …’
At the school, it was Raeburn’s rôle to demonstrate to the boys that there were few obstacles that could not be overcome with the proper attitude. His watch-word was, ‘If I can do it, so can you.’ He was more than a teacher, he was a living lesson.
Miss Willis was more the educational philosopher of the pair. She felt that every boy should be encouraged, even goaded, into achieving as much physical independence as was possible in his particular case. Encouraged – or goaded. The goading idea, with its Nancy Astor overtones, ran deeper with her than with Alan. Marion felt that a boarding school was well placed to help disabled boys, because their families had a regrettable tendency to cocoon them. She didn’t know a lot about my family, in which the cocooning was very erratic. Marion’s watch-word was, ‘There’s no such word as can’t.’ I spent a lot of my time at Vulcan School muttering between clenched teeth, ‘Can’t is a perfectly good word.’
Sometimes there were film shows put on for us. Reach for the Sky came round rather more often than was natural – the Douglas Bader story. It was a homily in celluloid, preached on the foundation text of the school. The Germans could have tortured him for days without him admitting that there was such a word as can’t. They would have had to take the pliers to Kenneth More’s tongue. We didn’t much care for that film. Julian Robinson got a big laugh by saying that if ever they made a film about the food served at the school, it should be called Retch for the Sky.
Marion Willis was the one with contacts, and the skill at exploiting them. One particular Friend of Vulcan was Bernard Miles, the actor and impresario. He arranged for boys from the school to attend performances of Treasure Island at the Mermaid, the theatre he had founded in London. He himself played Long John Silver, with one leg fairly obviously tied up behind him (which was disap
pointing) but with a real parrot, which was just about the most marvellous thing I’d ever seen in my life. His Long John Silver was very well done – rather frightening, a study in charm and greed. He’d sidle up to his victims and almost lean on them for support while he slid his knife in, murmuring soothing words the whole time. ‘That’s it,’ he would say. ‘Let it slip in gently, boy … All will be darkness soon.’ Could this terrifying villain really be Miss Willis’s friend?
Some of us went to see Mr Miles back-stage – the braver ones – and were disappointed that he abandoned the rough accent along with the wooden leg and the parrot, whose cage had a cloth thrown over it to promote silence. It was all ‘Marion, how lovely to see you!’and ‘Darling, it’s been an age!’ He conveyed intimacy by way of a paradoxical formality, calling her Ma-ri-on, as if he’d never heard of the name before or only seen it written down.
It wasn’t that we expected him to lean stabbingly on Miss Willis, though that would certainly have been something to talk about in the school bus on the long ride home. We got used to it. His voice was like dark sweet beer. In fact he spoke the words for the Mackeson advertisements. The voice had come to merge with the product it promoted.
Something about the production which excited me almost as much as the parrot was the way they used dry ice from canisters to reproduce sea mist. It seemed (predictably) mystical to me. I almost strained my tongue reaching out to try and taste it. I convinced myself that I could detect the other-worldly flavour on my tongue, an essence of clouds.
I asked Mr Miles, posh in his dressing room, if you had to make it or if you could buy it. He was helpful and informative, though he warned me a grown-up might have to do the actual buying. Then of course I was pestering Mum and Dad for them to get me a canister of my own. There must be shops that sell it, otherwise how would theatres buy it?
Square balloons
It was like the time I spotted a square balloon at a CRX fête. It was floating straight up all by itself, so I knew it was filled with something cleverer than air. Dad explained to me about helium, and when I went on and on at him he promised to get me my own square balloon later on, perhaps hoping to shut me up. He didn’t know me very well if he thought I would forget. When I say square – technically I suppose cuboid. Straight edges, that’s the point. I put him under pressure to do the rounds over the next few months. Gamages. Hamleys. Harrods.
I had particularly high hopes of Harrods. Dad must have cursed the day he told me that Harrods could get you absolutely anything you wanted, even an elephant. I reminded him of that more than once. He could hardly say I didn’t listen to what he said. And hadn’t he told me that if you sent a telegram to Harrods, you sent it to Everything, London? Wasn’t a square balloon part of Everything? Wasn’t a canister of dry ice part of Everything? I had seen these things with my own eyes. I wasn’t making them up. They existed.
There was also another expedition to the Theatre Royal, Windsor, this time to see the pantomime. I loved the frumpy Dame who was a man dressed up. It was wildly funny. There was one bit of dialogue I particularly remember.
Page-boy: ‘What’s your name?’
Dame: ‘It’s Gertrude. But you can call me Gert, and leave off the rude part.’
We howled. We thought that was absolutely killing. Marion Willis’s middle name was Gertrude. Those of the party with flexible necks craned round in their seats to look at her. She had turned the colour of a letter-box.
From then on she acquired the nick-name Gertrude. In my mind I sometimes called her ‘Marion Gertrude’, or rather ‘Marlon Gertrude’. I’d noticed early on that the co-principal of Vulcan School signed herself ‘Marlon G. Willis’. I asked her why she didn’t dot the ‘i’, and she said that in a signature you could do things like that. No one could tell you how you should sign your name. No one could over-rule you. This little revelation gave me one more reason to embrace the chore of writing by hand.
Even on the premises, Miss Willis had a talent for creating an atmosphere on special occasions. She enjoyed choosing a decorative scheme – sea creatures, say, or Spain – and went to a lot of trouble to make everything look magical. True, the high ceilings of the castle meant that her efforts didn’t have the impact they would have had in more compact quarters. I particularly remember one combined Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes, when for once my reactions weren’t entirely conditioned by the presence or otherwise of high-grade fireworks. The build-up towards the end of October was intense. We boys were given the job of hollowing out pumpkins for the Hallowe’en aspect of the festival.
Actually it was mostly mangel-wurzels that were dished out, which were so cheap they were almost free. The extracted guts completed their life cycle by being fed to David Lockett’s lucky pigs. I was fortunate enough to get a pumpkin, but even with this softer fruit I needed a certain amount of help. I knew exactly the effect I wanted to achieve. Making the nose, eyes and mouth was extremely satisfying – I made sure there were peggy teeth with the right air of menace. I was very particular that the top of the lantern was the top from my pumpkin and not another one, feeling that some of my fellow pupils were being negligent in not minding which lid went where.
Grace in the kitchen, who had taken our pumpkin guts to turn into a big pie, also made parkin and special biscuits. There were gingerbread men and toffee apples, baked potatoes and French bread. There was even a special bonfire cake. I think the whole presentation topped even Mum’s Scrambled Egg Boats when she pulled out all the stops on Bonfire Night. I loved the smell the candles made, as they toasted the pumpkin flesh from inside.
I made a secret wish that all the lights would be turned off so we could see the dancing faces, and almost the moment I made the wish, Marion Willis made it come true. I went into a trance looking at the flickering show. Even when bed-time came I didn’t want to leave. Since boys had to be taken up one by one in the slow lift, bed-time must have been an arduous business for the staff. But that night the kind matrons let me stay where I was for as long as possible, worshipping the lights. On that lovely night I may have been the last boy in the whole school to be put to bed.
We know what we’re doing
Whatever the quality of the school celebrations, I wasn’t going to miss the fireworks at Trees, and the only festival my family did consistently well. Since the triumph of Fun with Gilbert, my Bible had been Chemistry Experiments at Home for Boys and Girls by H. L. Heys, MA (Cantab). It was first published in 1949, making it my exact contemporary. I loved even its epigraph, which tapped into my hunger for primary experiences: ‘Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do it.’
Even better was the passage which read: ‘A recent Annual Report of His Majesty’s Inspectors of Explosives announces a large increase in the number of accidents caused by the illegal manufacture of fireworks.’ A whole career path opened up in front of me, bathed in a flickering chemical light. It was obviously just the job. This is Inspector Cromer of HMIoE. I’m afraid I must impound those home-made Roman Candles. They will be disposed of in controlled explosions by properly trained personnel.
We know what we’re doing.
I still wasn’t allowed to light fireworks or handle sparklers, and I suppose I can see the sense of that. Things that have to be done at arm’s length come too close.
The only dissident at those festivities was Mum, who turned into the personification of a damp squib. Once she said, after what had been one of Dad’s best displays, ‘I really don’t know why your father bothers. The Queen has the best fireworks – I thought everyone knew that. He’ll never even come close.’ She took a sort of pride in missing the point.
Gipsy would howl from the kitchen, not so much because she was scared of flashes and bangs as because she felt abandoned by her people, though able to smell them strongly through the door. Solitude is what dogs never get used to, though they put on brave faces.
Peter and I made lists of fireworks and marked them out of ten. We ranked them by a definite system.
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The brand names of fireworks had an appeal distinct from the products themselves. There was a thrill in even the plainest: Standard. Then there was Brock’s, with its overtone of badgers. I never felt quite the same about Astra fireworks, though, after I learned they weren’t the Air Force’s own make – the RAF motto of Per Ardua ad Astra was inculcated very young in a household like mine. Then there was Pain’s. I thought that the name must be some sort of message. It was spelled differently from Payne, our neighbour Joy’s name, but I had the sense that a similar hint was being dropped. Once or twice a glazier’s van came to the Castle, with the motto Your Pane is Our Pleasure painted on its side, which may also have been significant. I tried to turn the pain in my joints into firework patterns, bright tracings against a background awareness like dark velvet, to go ooh and aah rather than ow and yikes and make it stop.
There was a separate set of ratings based on pure performance. Half our marks went for colour and half for sound, and there were bonus points for variability – doing unexpected things such as splitting off, changing colour, going from being pretty to being noisy, or starting off noisy and subsiding into prettiness. Brock’s were the tops – plenty of good colours and the best bangs. Standard were perfectly respectable fireworks, though at a level below Brock’s. Peter and I gave Pain’s the thumbs-down. The colours were so poor and bleached. They were anæmic – a potent word from my memories of CRX. They needed iron injections in the bottom and lots of spinach in their diet.
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