Next morning Mum came in beaming to ask about my big evening out. My late-night song recital seemed to indicate a social breakthrough. She wanted all the details of my evening of Tory glory. It was only when I told her I hadn’t gone to the Young Conservatives after all that the atmosphere became suffused with toxins. Mum went quite white. It was one thing for me to engage in alcoholic carousal with Young Conservatives, quite another to do anything of the sort at the Red Lion. That was beyond the pale, and my singing of a cryptic Procol Harum ballad suddenly changed from a natural burst of exuberance to a sinister display of drunkenness, though I missed the same number of notes either way. The song might just as well have been ‘The Red Flag’ for all the legitimate entertainment it provided. Mum’s face, at first just ghastly, turned a darker shade of puce, and then she stalked off.
She didn’t speak to me for four days. She thought I’d been drinking, and as she didn’t ask me outright I didn’t volunteer any information. I’d stuck to soft drinks, naturally, being under age. Arguments about my behaviour raged through the house without my needing to participate, which was often the way. Once I heard the phrase ‘ – showed a little initiative –’ in Dad’s voice between two door-slammings. That must have been him standing up for me, welcome proof that he could come through with the goods in my defence when he was really up against it.
Dad was a much happier organism altogether, working in the personnel department of BOAC, than he had been as a sub-standard salesman for Centrum Intercoms, his first job after leaving the services. BOAC gave him back some of the sense of himself he had enjoyed in the RAF. He was a bit of a hermit crab, I suppose, when it came to the world of work. He needed the right sort of job – one with a proper chain of command – to give him a shape and a home. Otherwise he felt defenceless, skulking between shells.
During the school holidays I wanted to make a trip to London, to see where he worked. Joy Payne, best of neighbours, a joy to all and a bringer of pain only to herself, volunteered to drive me. So I phoned him up to ask for directions. Normally Dad enjoyed giving this sort of help. I had once seen him with my own eyes writing page after page of directions, with his fountain pen, for the benefit of some passing stranger. How much keener would he be when he was guiding his own son! I was sure a visit from me would increase his standing in the office.
I spoke to his secretary, who was lovely. We had a good long chat, but when Dad finally came on the line he was very short with me. I had used up all my charm on the secretary, and had no reserves left for someone who sounded much more like a stranger than she did. If I had been a salesman I could have got Dad’s secretary to sign up for anything, but from the man himself I got the bum’s rush.
Dad was cheerful again by the time he got home. ‘I’ve told my secretary not to put you through again under any circumstances. She’ll get fired if she lets it happen again. She should have known better, and now she does. So don’t bother trying to repeat today’s little trick.’
I was stung. How was it a trick to phone your father? I tried to argue my way out of this unexpected disgrace. ‘What if there’s an emergency?’
‘Such as?’
I didn’t have an answer ready. ‘Well … what if Mum dropped dead?’
‘Then what on earth would be the point of phoning me about something like that? Show some sense – phone the undertaker instead. I’ll find out soon enough when I get home.’
This wasn’t a very tactful conversation to be having with Mum in the room, perhaps. Her smile was a rather blighted thing. It wasn’t Dad who introduced the subject of death – I have to put my hand up to that. He certainly capitalised on it.
Sentient luggage
I wonder if Dad did actually have the power to fire his secretary for her insubordination in putting through an unauthorised call from a civilian. There was probably a more complex procedure to be gone through, the equivalent of a court-martial – a court-bureaucratic.
At weekends, obviously, Broyan wasn’t at my disposal. If I wanted an outing I had to make my own arrangements. That was where the rail system came in. I was never quite so gone on rail travel as Mum, but I can’t deny that it served me well. There was a system, or rather there wasn’t a system – which turned out to work much better than any formal set of arrangements could have done. I would simply turn up at Bourne End station and be loaded, Wrigley and all, into the goods van. I was treated as sentient luggage. It was glorious.
I would be asked where I was going, of course, but only so that I could be retrieved and off-loaded at the proper time. No mention was ever made of tickets or fares. This can’t have been an official dispensation, I don’t think – otherwise, surely, the goods van would have been piled high with wheelchairs and their occupants. And there would have been paperwork. It was just a blind eye being turned, a perk extended, without comment, to me personally. Unless a background murmur of marvellous-how-the-little-fellow-seems-to-manage counts as comment.
The sheer novelty of a wheelchair-bound person having an appetite for unaccompanied travel worked in my favour, I’m sure. Still, British Rail and its employees have access to this mystical truth, if no other: the body is always and everywhere luggage.
On one trip, a very neatly-turned-out guard came to have a chat. He was chummy as well as smartly dressed but I felt deeply uncomfortable about my ambiguous status and blurted out, ‘Shouldn’t you be making me buy a ticket?’
The guard said, ‘I can if you like, but I’d much rather not. You’re not in a proper passenger seat, are you? Then if I charged you for your travel, which includes the right to a seat, you could make a complaint that you’d brought your own seat with you and been charged for another one. We could charge you as luggage, but then we’d have to work out what the proper price should be. We might have to weigh you on the platform before putting you on the train, and then there’d be the driver waiting and passengers fretting. All things considering, it’s best to leave well alone. Just come along when you want to go travelling and we’ll see you right. If it’s cold we can always find you a blanket, and if you want a bit of company just sing out.’
At Slough I was duly unloaded onto the platform. I was going to see The Who in concert – which was a ticket that had to be paid for in full. I could only hope to be an honorary parcel on special occasions. The last thing I heard before I notched the Wrigley into top speed and raced off in the direction of the concert hall was a final refrain of ‘Ruddy miracle, that little cripple kiddie’, well-meant but a bit lowering. Oi! Less of the cripple. Less of the kiddie. Less of the little.
When The Who started playing I nearly leapt out of the Wrigley in forgetfulness of the body. The noise ripped right through me. It turned me into one big throbbing ear, an ear on the edge of pain. Just as well, really, since I couldn’t see a thing. I took up various positions in the crowd as it heaved around me, but either there were people in front of me blocking my view or else I was in the lee of the stage and couldn’t see up.
On stage in Slough, The Who were offering a sort of masterclass in non-dualist philosophy. While they were playing, it was obvious that there was only one thing in the universe, one thing in any possible universe, and that was this noise.
Then in a break between songs there was a girl shouting something in my ear. ‘John, it’s Barbara from school.’ I hardly recognised her out of uniform. Barbara Broier in purple tights and a very short skirt. Schoolgirls in particular looked quite different at weekends, though the boys were beginning to run them close, what with bright shirts and bell-bottomed velvet trousers. I was the odd one out, looking much of a muchness throughout the week, in school or at large. ‘Can you see anything?’ she was asking.
‘Not really, but it doesn’t matter. I can hear everything.’ I could hear my ears bursting.
‘It’s just Susan and I were thinking …’ The next song drowned out what it was that they were thinking, but I soon cottoned on when they put it into practice. They were thinking that they could tip the wheelchai
r backwards a bit so as to give me a view of the stage.
It was a kind idea, but I’m not sure that the girls realised how heavy the Wrigley was. They had seen the twins handling the unwieldy Tan-Sad at school, but the Savages had the benefit of lots of practice, as well as being coördinated almost on the genetic level. The Wrigley had the added weight of its motor. The girls gave me some sort of wobbling view, but I didn’t exactly feel secure in their hands. I wasn’t even sure the visual side of things, when I got it, added all that much. Townshend the guitarist had a huge conk of a nose, and Daltrey the singer had a huge everything, wild eyes, madly curling hair, giant teeth. Entwistle the bass guitarist seemed to be fast asleep, and my eyes were drawn mainly to the drummer, so dapper and pretty however frantically he pounded his kit alongside the ill-favoured others. Keith Moon. They were playing ‘I Can See for Miles and Miles …’, one of my favourites, admittedly for reasons that weren’t strictly musical. Patrick played it on the guitar and had shown me how simple the strange-sounding chords actually were, with a single configuration of fingers which he slid methodically across the frets.
I wondered if Pete Townshend the guitarist wasn’t mildly disabled. He didn’t seem to have much mobility in his right elbow. Instead of strumming the strings in the normal way he would send his arm the long way round, to describe a full circle before it crashed into the strings. He certainly wasn’t letting disability hold him back, unless it was part of the show after all.
It turned out that some Burnham boys were at the concert too, and they decided to get in on the act, shooing the girls away from the handles of the Wrigley. Further proof of the irrelevant truth that girls were nicer than boys. The boys would never have thought of my preferences by themselves, but now they wanted to use me as a pretext for showing off in front of my original helpers.
They were stronger, but their handling was much less satisfactory. They couldn’t resist joining in with the rhythms of the music, until I felt I was being treated as an extension of Keith Moon’s drum kit. When they put me down in a break between songs I scooted off to the side where I could concentrate on the sound, bearing down on me from speakers twice my size, without bothering with the pictures.
After the concert I notched the motor into slow gear because of the crowd. An official attached to the group or the hall said that I should leave by the back entrance. The moment I was out on the pavement I notched the Wrigley into top. I didn’t know I was about to pass the Stage Door until it opened in my path. Out came a man with his arm round a small woman who looked Indian. He was so intent on her that he didn’t see me at first. Even when he looked up he didn’t seem to take in what was bearing down on them. For my part I was more enamoured of my rapid progress than of him. Top speed in the confines of that little alleyway in Slough seemed much faster than the same speed out in the open.
At a late stage of my careering progress I recognised Roger Daltrey. By that stage of his life, he had perhaps lost the habit of getting out of the way for anybody. But then so had I. At that speed, a swerve in the Wrigley would have meant capsizement and disaster. The wheelchair and I would be helpless on the pavement, a compound beetle on its back in Slough rather than Prague. A second before impact, Roger must have realised what was about to happen, and leaped backwards with a yell of ‘Hooooo!! What’s that!?’ His look of horror as he lurched to safety didn’t improve a face that was always rather too craggy for my taste. I do like a smooth face. The sleek will inherit the earth, if I have anything to do with it.
Of course in my way I was star-struck nonetheless, and would have been happy to report to my schoolmates that the great Roger Daltrey had patted my back and thanked me for coming. As it was, I cheekily called, ‘Cheers, Rodge – great show’ over my shoulder and kept on rolling. ‘Over my shoulder’ represents not a physical movement but a sort of boomerang trick of vocal projection.
Prince of the pavement
As I left the scene and headed in the direction of the railway station, the exhilaration of being at large in Slough at the controls of the mighty Wrigley took over, and blew away any lingering cobwebs. The juggernaut factor was high. A tune started up in my brain, and not one that I’d heard played at the concert. Not ‘Happy Jack’, not ‘Pictures of Lily’, not ‘My Generation’. A classic of the ’sixties, nonetheless, with a lazy swagger all its own. Two finger-clicks, and then a crooned, self-satisfied phrase. Not that I could click my fingers even approximately, but I could hear the sound distinctly and visualise it perfectly well. The fingers are braced against each other until the resistance (technically friction) of the skin is suddenly overcome, and the middle finger slams satisfyingly into the palm (though it is the beginning of its journey that makes the noise, not the end). ‘{Click} {click} – King of the Road …’
With the Wrigley, though, I was only a prince of the pavement, minor royalty at best. To crown my independence I would need to learn to drive a car.
We say ‘clicking your fingers’, but the Elizabethans thought of it differently – there’s a bit in Sejanus about statues of Jove clicking their marble thumbs. Ben Jonson – A-level set book. Obviously you need them both, the middle finger (is it?) and the thumb. Perhaps this mystical percussion was the first fruit of the opposable thumb. Perhaps we came down from the trees communicating by clicking our fingers at each other. Click click: your turn to do the hunter-gathering today. Click click: I did it yesterday. Click click: Say that one more time and I’m going back to my mother.
After she had been so helpful at the concert I could hardly avoid becoming friends with Barbara Broier, despite my prejudice against girls. She was a lovely person.
Barbara told me that she had a pet squirrel. ‘What’s his name?’ I asked, ‘Cyril?’ ‘No,’ she said, looking at me as if I was mad, ‘he’s called Fred.’ She had found him injured on the road and had nursed him back to health. I became very matey with her and was finally invited to meet her Polish father.
She lived in Cookham. Barbara was brainy, polite and well spoken, and it followed that her father was gruff and rather alarming. Barbara was not pretty. Those who have put themselves out to be helpful to me have not in general been pretty. When a pretty person has been helpful it has made a deep impression on me, of which I am rather ashamed.
In general terms I feel sorry for pretty people – they’re hemmed in by the possibility of losing face, which holds a disproportionate fear for them since they experience it so rarely. As for which is the consolation prize, good looks or independence of mind, I really couldn’t say.
Before I was allowed to meet Fred I had to have a chat with Barbara’s Dad. He was in a sense the gatekeeper of the squirrel. He had difficulties with the ‘r’ sound, which I’m sure exists in Polish, so it must have been some sort of impediment. His r’s all came out as aspirated g’s. He told me a story about a ghoom in Slough – if you ghented the ghoom for the night, that was the end of you. Your throat was slit with a ghazor while you slept. Your body fell down a trap-door and was turned into a sausage or even a ghissole. It was the Sweeney Todd legend, essentially, with some variation in the meat products and the scene shifted to our neck of the woods, though I didn’t know the original story at the time.
Barbara had said that her dad liked people who stood up to him, and I did my level best. I said that if people didn’t insist on eating meat in the first place such murders couldn’t be covered up so easily. Just try passing off human flesh in a cheese omelette or an egg salad and see how far you get. Barbara’s dad gave a little bark of a laugh at that, and from then on he took a shine to me in quite a big way.
Offer to visitors we don’t much like
I liked Fred the squirrel very much, when I was finally shown him, and wanted to touch. Apparently, though, he was likely to bite or scratch, so that aspect of the visit fizzled out. Before I left, though, Mr Broier offered me a glass of tea wine. I’d never heard of wine being made of anything but grapes and was intrigued. It turned out he made it himself. The process inv
olved spreading yeast on a piece of toast and floating it on top of a mixture of tea, lemon and sugar in a bucket, till it fizzed and slowly fell to pieces. More than anything I wanted to see that.
When I got home, even while Dad was driving me home, I started to preach the gospel of home-made wines. I had Mum running to the library to get books, and recruited Dad to make trips to Boots the Chemists for demijohns and airlocks (they had to be glass, not plastic). I put Campden tablets on the shopping list, along with fruit and raisins. Soon we had flagons bubbling away in airing cupboards, for the initial rapid fermentation. Then we transferred them, in the absence of a cellar, to cooler areas on the east side of the house for slow maturing.
I became too impatient to wait for Mrs Pavey to order more advanced books through the library, and started sending off for them myself. I learned that sugar, being a disaccharide, was alien to the human digestive system, so we should convert it (or semi-convert it) to a monosaccharide. I lectured the household in general and Dad in particular about the unhealthiness of sugar. I wasn’t happy about the long-term effects of the first batch we made without converting the sugar, about six gallons of it. We decided that it should be labelled ‘disaccharide, suspect, o.t.v.w.d.m.l.’ The letters stood for ‘offer to visitors we don’t much like’.
I made experiments. I took sugar in large quantities, added lemon juice and a little water and boiled it at the correct temperature, testing attentively with a jam-maker’s sugar thermometer, until everything turned a pale golden colour. All these verbs of action – ‘made’, ‘took’, ‘added’, ‘boiled’ and so on – represent acts of delegation. I was learning that Dad could be smoothly enrolled into a practical project. He was only uncoöperative when dealing with people directly, without working towards something definite.
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