Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  The next morning Miss Willis drove off in a panic to track him down. She was back in five minutes. He’d got as far as the bottom of Farley Hill. He was tired and hungry but he had seen the world. He came back to a hero’s welcome, and I have no idea why.

  Grit buggered the relays

  I had been waiting so long for the motor and battery required to convert my Everest & Jennings to self-propulsion status that they had joined the category of things which can exist only in language, like hen’s teeth and sky-hooks, the horns of the hare and the children of a barren woman.

  I had learned to get around reasonably well without a motor, in the end, graduating from pushing against the tyres by hand to using a stick to punt myself about. In fact I had mixed feelings about the new arrangement, not because Roger Stott was a handsomer engine than any substitute (I couldn’t see him while he was pushing anyway), but because he was more reliable than the mechanism which replaced him.

  Grit of any sort buggered the relays on an Everest & Jennings, and it couldn’t cope with some surfaces. If you wanted an electric wheelchair which could be driven over gravel, for instance, you had to go private and fork out. The Everest & Jennings was almost Government issue, with all that that implied – like the hard toilet paper at CRX. If you wanted the equivalent of soft toilet paper in self-sufficient invalid transport then you would have to throw money at Messrs Wrigley (as Trevor Burbage’s grandmother and others had).

  The E&J was controlled by a sort of tiller, a T-bar which came up from the top of the motor and passed between my legs. It had two speeds, plus neutral and reverse. The tiller would be fitted on after I had been installed in the chair, and I needed someone to remove it before I could be helped to dismount. There was a twist grip mounted on the right-hand bar of the T. If the grip had been on the left bar then, with the short-comings of the elbow on that side, I wouldn’t have been able to operate it.

  Once all the pieces were in place I was the proud owner/driver of an electric wheelchair. Having a powered vehicle allowed me to pretend that the controls had got stuck, so that I could run over the feet of members of staff, always with a cheery cry of ‘Awfully sorry, Sir! These bloomin’ chariots take some getting used to!’ In an ideal world I would only have trespassed on the toes of teachers I actively disliked, but in this life my opportunities to make mischief have been limited. There is an obligation to make the most of them. I wasn’t about to restrict my fun by being fussy and high-minded, so if even the divine Ben Nevin came within range, his god-like toes were fair game for the crunching.

  Waltzing ninnies

  For years I had only had a postal Granny, and then suddenly she was back in the picture, flesh and blood. The first I heard of it was a passing mention from Mum. ‘The strangest thing has happened,’ she said. ‘You know that Mediterranean cruise that Caroline is going on – you know, Muzzie’s Caroline – well, your Uncle Roy’s going on it too. Pure coincidence. And we were saying, Granny and I, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they liked each other? Caroline’s a lovely girl, delightful, and at least she’s not tall.’ It was all-important in that generation that wives be shorter than their husbands.

  I had met Caroline a few times when she came to visit Sarah in CRX. She was as cheerful and as buxom as her mother.

  ‘Roy would be a bit of a catch,’ Mum said, ‘even though he’s a bit older.’ I was so surprised by the mention of Granny that I missed the ominous overtones of the word ‘catch’. Dad had been a bit of a catch in his day, after all, a catch who didn’t much want to be caught. There was always a catch, wasn’t there?

  I couldn’t remember the last time Mum had referred to her mother. ‘When did you see Granny?’

  ‘Oh, we spoke on the phone.’

  ‘Was it you who called her? Or did she call you?’

  Mum frowned. ‘I don’t remember.’ Was I really supposed to believe she could have been in doubt about something so crucial? I didn’t believe her for a moment, but Mum could be stubborn when she chose to. Since she had never admitted to a breaking-off of relations, I could hardly expect details of a reconciliation.

  As far as I can piece it together, Granny had been pulling a few strings ever since Audrey was born. She wasn’t going to be accused of ignoring the birth of her first, her only granddaughter, but nor was she going to melt like a sentimental old lady, forgiving offences promiscuously. Amnesty on strict conditions was more her style. So she sent along a shawl, an apostle spoon and a christening mug, and there was a cheque tucked into the accompanying card, but the card itself was blank.

  That cheque was like a hand-grenade of solvency waiting to go off. Sooner or later Mum would pull the pin and money would explode into the bank account she shared with Dad. Granny would hear the echo of the blast when she next cast her eyes over her bank statement, and she would know that Laura hadn’t been able to live up to her injured pride.

  The extension to the house must also have been funded by Granny, though I don’t know how it was negotiated. Extensions don’t grow on Trees, and I should have realised that the family exchequer was being topped up. Granny still kept her distance, but Mum must have hated the being beholden.

  Money has a way of estranging even as it reconciles, which of course was one of the things that Granny liked about it.

  The conversation about Roy and Caroline marked a further phase of warming in family relations. The Cold War was almost over. Granny and Mum were united at last by their compulsion to meddle.

  Granny took to staying the odd weekend at an Otel on the riverside not far off, a rather grand one in fact, the Compleat Angler at Marlow. Rooms there could easily cost ten pounds a night. It was one of her favourite quips to say that Cockneys should be encouraged to run Otels, ‘since they can at least pronounce the word properly, unlike so many people these days’. I was keen for Granny to come and stay with us in the house, but there were limits to détente.

  A summons to join Granny at the Compleat Angler would come for the whole family or, according to her mood, for Peter and me, or just one of us. These occasions were balanced on a knife-edge between treat and ordeal. A knife-edge, or a fork-point – since the use of cutlery turned out to be something of a mine-field.

  Granny developed the habit, while staying at the Compleat Angler, of sending a taxi to pick up Peter and me for our meal at her expense. The taxi was expensive but not extravagant, since it served a double purpose. Quite apart from conveying her grandchildren the few miles required it delivered a satisfactory snub to Mum and Dad.

  The first time Peter went there for a meal on his own, he ordered a prawn cocktail. He had only just conveyed the first spoonful safely into his mouth when Granny came out with her whiplash whisper: ‘One uses a fork!’ He came home from his evening with Granny more or less gibbering with etiquette trauma. Another time we were both there, and it was my turn to order the prawn cocktail. I did my ankylosed best with a fork. This time Granny seemed almost puzzled, saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier with a spoon? The rules don’t apply to you, John. You may eat it in any way you please.’ I had noticed, though, that my exemption from rules was a precarious dispensation. It was best not to rely on it.

  Granny always ordered the same way, and usually the same thing. ‘I’m going to plump for the lamb and mint sauce,’ she would say. ‘What would you like, boys?’ Granny always ‘plumped’ for things. I would usually plump for an omelette. Peter plumped for steak.

  In fact Granny didn’t have much of an appetite. When the main course arrived, she would say, ‘You boys carry on. All Granny does is make a little road right through the middle.’ She did exactly that, while Peter stuffed himself. I didn’t do badly either, in my weight class. After she had made her little road across the plate, Granny would put her knife and fork down and say, ‘Well, I’m defeated.’

  Granny gave Peter a little lecture on what to look for in a good restaurant like the one at the Compleat Angler. She told him to watch the waiters, to see how their job should really be done. ‘
It’s not just a matter of serving from the right and taking away from the left, though that’s part of it. It’s an attitude, an attentiveness, which holds lessons for everyone. It should never be difficult to catch a waiter’s eye.’

  Granny waited until every last waiter had his back turned, dealing with other diners, and then murmured, ‘Excuse me!’ Immediately one of them appeared at her shoulder, leaning forward with a neutral readiness. ‘Would you be so kind as to bring me a fresh fork, please? This one has rather a mark.’ ‘Of course, Madam,’ he murmured, ‘right away.’

  ‘Do you see, boys?’ she said. ‘Some may say that being a waiter is a lowly career, but there’s nothing more important than seeing that people are properly fed. I myself ran a British Restaurant during the war, and it was no small thing to organise. Once I had my staff properly drilled – I had to make do with waitresses, of course – the whole mood of the place changed. It became a pleasure to be there, even if the food was basic at best. We created the right atmosphere, do you see?’

  At the end of the meal Granny announced, ‘Peter, I think waiting would be a suitable job for you, in due course. I’ll look into it. The best waiters are of course foreign. It might be necessary for you to be trained abroad – Switzerland, perhaps, if not France itself.’

  Peter managed to keep his feelings hidden until we were in the taxi on the way home. He despised waiters absolutely, hating in particular the way they walked. When we were home, he did an impression of a waiter’s walk, wiggling his bottom absurdly. How could Granny give so much as a penny to those waltzing ninnies, let alone tell him he should become one of them?

  ‘Don’t be too hasty, Peter,’ I said. ‘The old lady may be on to something.’ I was thinking of something quite different, about how nice waiters’ bottoms looked in their tight black trousers. Their short jackets could almost have been designed to draw attention to those bottoms, and I liked the fact that you were allowed to inspect them quite closely before you plumped for your omelette.

  Granny never referred to the long absence of social contact. She didn’t seem actively happy to see us, but then that was never her style. Mum for her part had a sort of masochistic glow, as if a stone was back in her shoe that she had never really learned to do without.

  Perhaps the attempt to make a match between Roy and Caroline was just an excuse for something that would have happened anyway, but I remember meals at the Complete Angler where strategy was discussed. Dad had no interest in the romantic plotting, and stayed away.

  ‘We must be very careful how we handle this, Laura,’ said Granny. ‘I rather think it will be like stalking wildlife in Africa. We should keep ourselves well and truly down-wind of Roy and, for that matter, Caroline as well.’ It simply wouldn’t do to clash batch and spinst together like a pair of cymbals.

  Damp powder

  Despite the subtle seethe of planning behind the scenes, nothing much came of the cruise. Caroline had followed her mother under the surgeon’s knife, and was now by all accounts much less top-heavy. She wasn’t fully used to her new centre of gravity, all the same, and part of the idea behind the cruise was that dancing on a boat made everyone’s movements reassuringly clumsy. She would be able to take to the floor without embarrassment. I think that was how the whole curious business was explained to me.

  Anyway, it didn’t work. Either romance fizzled out early or the powder was damp from the beginning. Granny had listed the subjects in which Roy took particular interest, and Mum had passed them on to Muzzie. Caroline had lightly read up on them, being careful not to show undue independence of mind, but even so Roy was not to be taken out of himself. As Caroline reported to her mother, who passed the news on to Mum, ‘It was all jolly hard work, and Roy was strange. He was always polite and courteous to me, but his attention always seemed to be on … another man.’ Mum left the insinuating three dots intact when she passed this information on to me. I think it must have been a marginally censored version which reached Granny. I can’t see Mum retaining that punctuational innuendo.

  I was slow to connect Granny’s reappearance with the fact that Dad had resigned from the Air Force. Wing Commander Cromer came back down to earth, with something of a bump. It was no small thing, as he discovered, to be looking for a job at forty-plus. He held onto his rank, of course, but it was a rather different thing to be a Wing-Co at an altitude of zero feet. There was no reason given for this drastic change of life. I doubt if I even asked. The reasons grown-ups gave for things never made sense to me anyway. Mum didn’t say in so many words that she put pressure on him. All she said was that a family needed a father. He couldn’t expect to go on a foreign posting and then walk in whenever he felt like it for a hero’s welcome.

  Granny’s antennæ registered the shift in the family’s finances, and the new relationships it made possible. Mum and Dad would find it much harder to say ‘no’ to any offers she might care to make. They might even be made to beg. I swear she could smell an overdraft the way ogres in fairy tales smell an Englishman’s blood.

  Mum and Dad were faced with the problem of what school to send Peter to now. One possibility was Sidcot School in Winscombe, North Somerset. We all went along along in the car for Peter’s interview. From the first breath I found the atmosphere of this school wonderfully comforting – it was an old Quaker foundation, though at the time I wouldn’t have understood anything by that. I was very happy for Peter if it meant he could have a new start in such welcoming surroundings, though I felt all the more isolated in my own schooling.

  The headmaster of Sidcot, Mr Brayshaw, was both absent-minded and very much on the ball, a combination rather common among school-teachers. I thought he was beautiful. He gave Peter a sincere welcome. Peter was shy and I suppose traumatised, so he hung back. Mum was nervous and horribly humble, while Dad was almost truculent. You could almost hear him thinking, ‘Don’t think your authority impresses me, I’ve got some of my own if it comes to that. I’ll hear you out but that’s all. Just don’t expect me to kow-tow.’ In Dad’s book kow-towing was worse than being a sneak and a copy-cat and a bad sport all put together.

  When Mr Brayshaw set eyes on me, he included me in the conversation quite naturally. He was wonderfully warm. He was like the dream uncle I’d always wanted, and more. In this lifetime I’ve suffered from a severe shortage of uncles. Roy was a dud uncle, really.

  As he gave us the tour Mr Brayshaw kept saying madly positive things like, ‘Now there’s not really much of a step here,’ and, ‘This next classroom may be difficult, but I am sure we can find a way if we just put our minds to it … You know, we really only go in there in the winter. Most of the time the class just comes outside and sits under that tree over there, so that would be fine for John … I’m sure something can be arranged before winter comes …’

  With much rambling and pottering he mapped out his vision of Sidcot School with John in it. The greatest problem as he saw it was the inaccessibility of the dancing class, but it was clear that if I had my heart set on learning to dance it would be made to happen somehow.

  Mum was in a panic and going ‘ahem’ like mad, making the humble artificial double cough that meant she needed to be asked to speak, but Mr Brayshaw hadn’t risen to the rank of headmaster without knowing how to ignore a parent. He conducted the whole interview as if I was the only candidate to be considered, as if that had been the morning’s only task and theme.

  When we wound up back in the headmaster’s study, Mr Brayshaw asked if we had any questions, just as if Mum hadn’t been trying to butt in for the last half-hour.

  ‘But Mr Brayshaw,’ she cried. ‘It’s John’s brother Peter who is applying to come to Sidcot, not John himself!’

  ‘Yes, I’m well aware of that, Mrs Cromer,’ he replied, ‘but I thought it would be rather nice for Peter if he could have his older brother with him, don’t you? It’s perfectly practical. He’s not on any dangerous medication, I take it? So it’s not a matter of medical supervision, just washing and dressin
g. Not a great deal of effort, I should have thought. Doesn’t seem much of an obstacle, as obstacles go.’

  The twinkle in his eye made me jump up and down from my seated position, exploiting the residual flexibility of my spine. I waved my arms about and shouted out of turn, ‘Oh Mum, wouldn’t it be wonderful? Mr Brayshaw wants me to be with Peter! Please, please, oh please say yes!!’ Please let me escape from Judy Brisby and from the Board of Education. Please let me sit under a tree surrounded by love and understanding, where the harvest called learning will be brought on by steady sunshine. This was more like it. This was the old tune of No Such Word As Can’t played thickly on Sparky’s Magic Piano, not picked out with one finger. I was being offered something I would never have dared to ask for myself.

  To Mr Brayshaw Dad said, ‘Well, we’ll have to think about that.’ But the moment we were in the car, he told me, ‘It’s not on. It’s a lovely dream, chicken, but it’s not on.’

  ‘But you said you’d think about it!’

  ‘I’ve thought about it. It’s just not on, and that’s that!’ How I hated those words. I was no longer a child, I wouldn’t thrash and scream and say, ‘You lied, I’ll never trust you again.’ I sat and thought about what could be learned from this unprecedented afternoon.

  I looked at Mum and Dad in the car, bickering routinely over the map. For the first time in any of our lives we had encountered something genuinely unusual – disability being treated as unimportant, neither here nor there. And what was Mum and Dad’s reaction? Social embarrassment. Revelation had been greeted with fidgeting and changing of the subject. I vowed that the next time a path opened up in front of me, I would put the Everest & Jennings into the higher of its two gears and head straight for the gap. Then woe betide any toe which got in my way.