Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Peter had had a few Boy-Scoutish qualms about his rôle in the experiment. ‘Aren’t we being a little …?’ he asked, and I cheerfully supplied the missing word as ‘sneaky’.

  It was all very well for him to have high standards, he could wipe his own bottom. I depended on paid strangers or close kin for humiliating tasks and had no prospect of equal dealing, so all I was doing was evening up the odds. Isn’t the Boy Scout motto ‘Be prepared’ anyway? I was prepared to be sneaky. I can claim Homer in my corner, as well as Baden-Powell. All very well for Achilles to be heroic – he’s invulnerable as long as he does what his Mamma says and wears his riding hat and his special shoes. Odysseus has to be sneaky to get by.

  There was only one detail of the scheme which caused me a little guilt. Dad and I knew perfectly well that the ‘sun-lounge’ wouldn’t help Mum tan, since window glass filters out the short-wave radiation responsible. We were more or less conspiring against her, he and I. We would have needed to fit Vita glass (very expensive) to lend real assistance to her sun-damage project, though this was the heyday of the suntan, its traumatic effects on the dermis unknown or unpublicised, and I can’t pretend we were actually looking out for her welfare. I didn’t know why Dad got a kick out of putting one over on Mum, but I knew it was so, and that a hint about the screening effects of window glass would give him a final nudge towards the project.

  There was no need to mention any of this to the lady of the house. Her happy moods weren’t so common that we could risk spoiling them. She pulsated with contentment as she lay there out of the wind on the lounger, basking in placebo sunshine.

  Of course we none of us said ‘sun-lounger’. Mum’s love of brand names had raised this item above the common ruck of loungers. This was the Relaxator.

  Mum not only went around recommending products but advertised their disgrace if they failed to perform, denouncing them from her kitchen pulpit. Unable to live up to her mother’s religion of the Top Man, she made do with the cult of the household name and the Which? Best Buy. Top Thing was a better bet than Top Person – but if a well-known or much-recommended purchase let her down it was a devastating blow, a sort of compound treason-fraud-sacrilege. When a washing-machine got the shakes just out of guarantee (though multiply lauded and endorsed), this was an assault on the integrity of the entire market-place. Hers was a world-view in which trailing threads were always likely to unravel the flimsy gestalt, and any little snag could ladder the sheer stocking of her self-belief.

  Examples: Kit-Kat (chocolate-covered snack) was on her blacklist because she could never get the wafer fingers to snap as crisply as they did on the advert, despite the foil wrapper which undertook to keep them fresh. Kit-e-Kat (cat food) was condemned because it intensified the vileness of feline breath.

  When we were slumming it by watching ITV and Kit-e-Kat was advertised during commercial breaks, with a voice asking cheerily, ‘Is your cat a Kit-e-Kat?’ we would all answer in mock-Cockney accents, ‘Then it mustn’t ’arf stink!’ This was our Bourne End saturnalia – sneering at the common people from our precarious upper rung. The only ITV programme which commanded our full respect, though it was always turned on ‘for John’, was the Saturday-night wrestling. It was the squirming aspect which spoke to me, I think, not the throwing about – I can’t answer for anyone else. I found it utterly thrilling, and was amazed it was allowed in any way at all. I kept quiet but Mum felt free to comment, saying, for instance, ‘Amazing to think that all these wrestling positions have names!’ One evening a wrestler was pinned on his back with his hands immobilised, so all he could do was push up with his pelvis in the hope of unseating his opponent, busy pushing down in the same style. Mum just said, ‘Gosh, Dennis, anybody would think those two were mating!’

  The ruddy crutch

  It was strange to be home at Trees with my newly adjusted disability (Granny had drummed into us the vulgarity of adorning your house name with inverted commas). The spaces were deeply familiar but had to be negotiated in a new way. As I moved around the house I had new problems of balance to contend with. I could now make reasonable progress, for instance, advancing towards the kitchen sink or the basin in the bathroom, but I needed somewhere to stow my crutch and cane while I used the facilities once I had reached them. No question of putting them on the floor, obviously, so I would lean them against the sink or the basin. Usually the cane stayed put but the crutch, being top-heavy, invariably fell with a scrape and a crash. Then the cry would go up, ‘The ruddy crutch!!’ Humorous, mock-exasperated. Or rather, expressing true exasperation beneath the mockery of it.

  Audrey would repeat the phrase in fun, copying those around her. She must have been six at the time, seven at the most. Mum and Dad seemed disproportionately irritated by the jarring noise, while Audrey’s laugh was genuine and delighted, which should have taken the sting out of it. Yet her repetition, though perfectly innocent, was the one I found most wounding. There was joy in it, and the joy that was in it made it so much worse – but I knew better than to ask her not to say it. Audrey’s wilfulness was already highly developed, and it was wisest not to alert her to her power to hurt, in case she explored it at her leisure.

  When the crutch fell, after the family hubbub had died down, I’d either have to lever it up somehow with the cane or ask for help. Peter would help me very willingly, and Audrey would return the crutch to my possession with exaggerated graciousness, as if it was a prize at the village fête, and she the Lady Mayoress doing the honours.

  No one thought of doing anything silly, like attaching a simple bracket to the basin and the sink, some little retaining hook for the crutch to lean against.

  It strikes me now how ridiculously easy such a gadget would have been to make. It would hardly test anyone’s do-it-yourself skills, but of course do-it-myself isn’t an option. Even Peter could have had a shot at it, if he had dared to swim against the tide. All he would have needed was a wire coathanger, bent so that one end curled round the base of one of the taps, the other run to the front of the basin and formed into a hook – into which I could tuck the crutch and still have it handy. Professor Branestawm would have been proud of Peter for such a useful bit of bodging, and so would I. But everyone seemed to prefer waiting for the crash and then raising an outcry. The whole family was oddly attached to my status as a nuisance.

  In the kitchen I liked to perch on a stool if given a choice, a privileged position bought with much effort. Perching was always my attitude relative to furniture, I was only pretending to sit out of politeness. I’d need help to get up there, but it was worth it. Perching was my great delight. Of course I had to leave the crutch somewhere, and someone would knock against it, and then the senseless cry would go up, as if in some way it was all my fault. The ruddy crutch. The ruddy family. The ruddy business of being alive.

  My sprouting groin

  A tube of Immac, procured with much labour from a chemist in Bourne End, had delayed the moment when physical maturity had to be acknowledged, but there was only so much a depilatory could be expected to do. The caustic smell, moreover, was hateful, and I certainly didn’t dare use it lower down, though my almost luxuriant pubic hair gave the lie to the Mummy’s-little-darling idea, on which tender relations with Mum depended, at least as much as my ghost of a moustache.

  Perhaps because of distaste for my sprouting groin, Mum made over responsibility for bathing me to Dad, who almost seemed to enjoy it. He was always drily complimenting me on the excellence of my equipment, which was nice the first time – I so rarely seemed to meet his standards – and rather awkward after that. No teenager wants to be told more than once that he is in possession of a magnificent beast, does he? Not more than a few times anyway, and not by a parent.

  Wiping my bottom was a grey area that became a battlefield. In theory this was a job which fell to Dad before he set off for work (I was a reliable morning defæcator), but he soon learned to get an early start so as to leave bog duty to Mum. There was no obvious willpower
in the man, yet it was remarkably difficult to get him to do anything he didn’t want to do. He didn’t seem to have any personal preference until the air around him thickened with an implied course of conduct, and then he generally voted against it.

  It’s odd, but I don’t remember seeing Granny at all during the period of my operations and rehabilitations, but then hospital visiting wouldn’t have been her style. She didn’t go in for sustained nurture but spectacular interventions. Not for her the weeding and the watering of some humble patch of garden. She would rather just happen to be passing when a hundred-year cactus bursts into the ecstasy of flower, charmingly disowning any credit but letting people come to their own conclusions.

  Now and then the trolley which carried the ward telephone would bear down on me, with Granny’s precise diction ready to pounce from the receiver, so I had occasional bulletins about her activities. During this period, rather to her surprise, she had made friends with a neighbour in Tangmere. Mere friendship was rather a come-down for someone whose preferred style of relationship was the slow-burning feud. She found a strange sort of nourishment in antagonism, and there was active disappointment for her in soft emotions and smooth dealings.

  The mutual benefit of the friendship was that Granny had money but no car, the neighbour a car and no money. All of this may also be part of the explanation for Granny’s absence from my bedside, that she and her neighbour were busy motoring to country towns and staying in what Granny never wavered from calling Otels.

  At the end of such conversations Granny would say, ‘That’s all my news, John, and I won’t embarrass you by asking you for yours. How could you have any, marooned as you are? And I’m sure the food is terrible. Make sure your mother brings you something better. She has no talent as a maker of salads, as you will undoubtedly know. If she has forgotten how to make the salad dressing I showed her, tell her to telephone me. She has only to ask.’

  It’s only now that I realise that there is a simpler explanation for absence than either a preference for other styles of charitable act or else her Otel commitments. Ridiculously simple, once the Granular mystique has worn away and you’ve given the thought permission to occur. Granny hated hospitals, and so she stayed away.

  What do people hate about hospitals? The smell. The lighting. Bad tea in the canteen. The fact that death comes calling.

  So when people say they ‘hate’ hospitals, it only means they fear them. Normally Granny embraced hatred with a certain amount of affection, and left the fearing to other people. But during the year-plus of my operations and rehabilitations, it was fear which drove her in any direction but mine, far more reliably than her neighbour’s car.

  Despite everything I remember the sense of a warm breeze moving through the house, which was partly summer, of course, but also corresponded to a break in the family weather, a climate in which lightning hardly ever flashed but clouds were slow to clear. Tensions never seemed to come to a proper rolling boil, but it was rare for them to stop simmering altogether for the duration of a radiant interlude. It was our nature as a family to seethe rather than explode, and even when we did explode there was no actual violence and very little damage to property. Admittedly Audrey showed signs of being a wild card, who would not play by the established rules that were good or bad enough for everyone else.

  Dad had a new job with BOAC, I had a new hip and a crutch whose misadventures seemed to tickle everybody, Peter had a paper round and Audrey hadn’t yet devised a hiding place beyond Mum’s power to find.

  I felt proprietorial about the conservatory-greenhouse (although of course I couldn’t say so) and I liked to be parked by it. I was already planning what Dad should grow there, apart from the Drosophyllum lusitanicum in whose interest the whole long-distance hypnosis experiment had been conducted.

  Love in the key of exasperation

  My next project would be to persuade Dad to experiment, in the new greenhouse, with another of Menage’s tips, Musa ensete – the Abyssinian banana. If we sowed it in spring next year it would reach nearly four foot by early autumn, needing to be transplanted first into a seven-inch and then a twelve-inch pot. By the end of the second year it would be pressing outwards against the panes of the conservatory, and Menage’s advice was to get rid of it and start again from scratch. It would be interesting to see whether Dad could be so casual about the fate of the cuckoo in his greenhouse – a plant which would have by then more or less the status of a family member. Then we’d see how good a job he made of rejecting the claims of a vegetable child.

  Mum fussed over me endlessly, which I tried whole-heartedly to hate. What do fully-fledged chicks feel when the mother bird regurgitates food down their throats, long after they’ve learned to feed themselves? Love, I expect, love in the key of exasperation.

  She was good at the job. She was more than competent. She wasn’t like some of the professionals I had experienced over the years, who had secretly hated the job, or parts of it, and had passed that hatred on. With Mum it was just the reverse. She liked it too much. It would fit her personality and her character (Heather) in the Bach herbal system, for there to be one child who never outgrew the need for her. Then she would never need to outgrow her own need. Audrey wasn’t the answer to her prayers after all, was in fact showing signs of being a right little madam, while Peter (with that paper round and pub work in prospect) was almost out of her orbit already.

  I wanted Mum’s life to have meaning – of course I did – as long as its meaning wasn’t that she had a tragically stricken son who couldn’t manage without her. Unfortunately that was the meaning she had her heart set on.

  She was always on my side, but whose side was I on? Not hers. I couldn’t afford to be. She was a helper who was also an obstacle. Mum wasn’t the alternative to an ‘institution’, she was an institution in her own right, a one-woman hospice-hermitage yawning to receive me.

  Bare observation

  I spent a lot of time viewing Mum through the wrong end of a mental telescope, practising the Buddhist vision – bare observation, indifferent to the agreed meanings of things – taught by the Satipatthana Sutta. What was Mum? Mum was a fathom-long carcass (closer to the fathom mark, in fact, than I would ever be), fat, tears, grease, saliva, etc. More to the point, Mum was the champion of the Relaxator, the Bernina – the sewing-machine – and Sqezy (I was troubled and thrilled by the manufacturer’s licence to drop the mandatory u after q), booster of the Kenwood, the Rayburn, Kia-Ora, Yeast-Vite and Nescaff, compulsive denigrator of Kit-e-Kat and Kit-Kat. The layman’s term for this spiritual enterprise is ‘hardening the heart’.

  When his family spilled out into the garden which was his exclusive province for much of the year, Dad tended to retreat into the shed. Mum’s main reason for being in the garden was to pick herbs. She had white paving stones laid in the back plot just outside the kitchen door, in the form of a chess board. Her herbs grew in the black squares, and she could walk on the white squares when she wanted to pick them.

  The first thing she did on a picking expedition was to shake her right hand, as if she was holding an invisible thermometer and trying to get the mercury back down to its bulb. When I asked her what she was doing, she explained it was to make her hand go floppy. ‘I want to be guided by influences far from the brain,’ she would say with a faraway look in her eyes. Her loosened arm would then rise smoothly up and get its bearings. Within a second or two it had jerked decisively towards the appropriate accents to be added to lunch.

  Clearly this was herbalist dowsing, yet Mum was horrified when she found out that Peter and I had been playing with ouija boards. I couldn’t see the difference – except that regimented herbs don’t talk back. But when it was me calling on influences far from the brain, that was somehow sinister and appalling.

  In our ouija sessions Peter and I had been having snatches of conversation with two ancestors, Great-Grandpa who designed the Cambridge Divinity School and Newnham College (not to mention bits of Girton) and Mum’s
Uncle Ted who suicided himself at Jesus College, Cambridge. The ouija board seemed to have a strong Cambridge bias. If it was controlled (Mum’s theory) by a minor devil, then it was one that sported a light-blue scarf.

  The ouija board was a homely device, nothing more than a glass upside-down on a piece of Dad’s shirt-cardboard marked with the letters of the alphabet. It wasn’t practical for me to put my hand on top of the glass, so Peter was flying solo. I suppose he might have been cheating, but the messages which came through weren’t in his style. Great-Uncle Ted kept saying I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE QUICK, round and round again, and then the astral switchboard seemed to lose interest, saying BLAH BLAH BLAH instead. ‘Are you tired?’ I asked, and the answer came back, SURE AM, BOSS. After that, no movement at all, however long we tried. Peter seemed disappointed, but I thought this was a good result. A pair of teenaged boys at a loose end had bored the Spirit World out of its tiny mind. Something to be proud of.

  We were fairly bored too, on our side of the spectral divide, with Great-Uncle Ted and Great-Grandpa endlessly repeating the same things. Even knowing the ouija board was prohibited couldn’t make it interesting indefinitely. There’s some forbidden fruit that tastes of nothing much.

  One particular song sums up that summer for me. Memory chooses a slice to sum up the whole, but it’s no great feat of compression in this case since the record was hardly ever off the turntable. ‘Good Vibrations’ by the Beach Boys, as radiant and bouncy a song as ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ was strange and riddling.