I warned him that the cooking process would continue for quite a while after turning off the gas, but he thought he knew best and overcooked the syrup, ending up with a great pan of molasses which he stoically ate on his cereal and drank in his coffee until it was finally all gone and he could look forward to breakfast-time again.
Finally we got it right, decanted the syrup into bottles and used it as our stock. The new semi-inverted sugar refracted light ninety degrees the other way. The first batch of wine made with it seemed miraculous. The syrup dissolved sweetly into the must, fermentation was smooth and very fragrant. The esters floated off the oranges and fruits, and we were all in joy. From that point onwards we really got going, gaining in confidence and also in ambition. We made wine from rose petals, from clover, from nettles, from lettuce, from potatoes, from rhubarb.
We were perfectionists who would never dream of using pectin to clear a cloudy wine (it bonds to the starch and sinks out in the lees). Without pectin it was virtually impossible to clear potato or rice wine, but the trick could be managed with parsnip, if you had the knack. I seemed to have the knack.
My memory of family life is of a constant thwarting, yet when I came up with such a project Mum and Dad would help me to carry it out. Perhaps I really did have some sort of hypnotic ascendancy over them in those years. I wish I’d known – I’d have worked them harder. Half of what I have done in life has come from hypnotising other people. The other half from hypnotising myself.
With Dad in particular I got on better when we had something in hand, something to generate the slow rhythms of companionship. The books had all said ‘If you can bear the wait (the hardest part of wine making!) let it mature for two or three years.’ For us that was easy. Making wine was the point, not drinking it. We had so much wine by now that we had to store the surplus flagons in the conservatory-greenhouse-sun lounge, where it roiled in slow motion with the dull excitement of fermentation.
Barbara Broier tried to keep me in the swim with school gossip and school crazes, all the things which tended to pass me by. People wouldn’t go to the trouble of filling me in. I can’t say I missed it. There’s something about leaning over a Tan-Sad (or any other disability conveyance) which is mildly shaming to both parties.
There were riddles which passed round the school like verbal measles. Barbara wanted to be sure I developed immunity like everyone else. So she would say, ‘This is a good one, John. Antony and Cleopatra were lying on the floor surrounded by broken glass and water. How did they die? Let me know if you’d like a clue.’
‘Righto, Barbara. Thanks.’
Then she couldn’t leave me alone. ‘Have you worked it out yet, John?’
‘Not yet. But I’m enjoying not being able to work it out.’
‘Shall I tell you now?’
‘Not yet, if you don’t mind.’ It became obvious that she did mind. The suspense of keeping me in suspense was more than she could bear. She was bursting with it. ‘Tell you what, Barbara. Why don’t you tell me another one? That might make you feel better.’
‘Then can I tell you the answer to the first one?’
‘I suppose so. Is there a time limit? Am I being very stupid?’
‘No, John, it’s not that. Don’t you want to know the answer?’
‘Oh yes, but at the moment I’m enjoying the wait.’
‘You’re impossible. Okay, here’s another one. A man goes into a bar and asks for a glass of water. Instead the bartender produces a gun from behind the counter and points it at him. After a few moments the man says,
“Thank you” and goes out. What’s going on?’
‘Oh, I like that one. It’s even nicer than Antony and Cleopatra.’
‘Well, which answer do you want first?’
‘At the moment I don’t want either, thanks all the same. I’ve got a lot to think about, what with Antony and Cleopatra and the man in the bar with the glass of water and the gun. Have you noticed, by the way, that there’s water and glass in both puzzles?’
‘No, John, I haven’t noticed and it isn’t important.’ Then she stalked off, saying rather irritably over her shoulder, ‘Let me know if you change your mind.’
I’m not an innocent. I knew exactly how annoying I was being. Of course, negation is the only, rather feeble, form of power available to me, the disadvantage being that I can only use it against people who are actually trying to deal with me, and who might be felt to deserve better. Certainly Barbara Broier deserved better.
Storming the citadel of speech
But there was more to it than that. I wasn’t being insincere, though it was intoxicating to see that everyone, potentially, could be strung along. I did enjoy the puzzles as things in themselves. I was almost ready for some Zen koans.
Try to see your original face, the one you had before your parents gave you birth.
The wind is not moving. The banner is not moving. Your mind is moving.
Does your bean curd lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight?
Eventually Barbara came storming up to me and said, ‘For heaven’s sake, John! Antony and Cleopatra suffocated. They were goldfish! The man in the bar had hiccups – that’s why he wanted the glass of water, to cure them. And the shock of the bartender producing a gun cured them anyway – that’s why he said Thank You!’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I thought it must be something like that.’
‘You mean you worked it out, and you’ve been torturing me all this time?’
‘Not exactly,’ I said, doing my most maddening impersonation of serenity. ‘I just thought it must be something like that.’
The answer to a riddle, like the last chapter of a detective story, is at best a crowning disappointment. The only consolation is to pass the riddle on, so as to relive your disappointment at one remove. Or to read another detective story. In practice everyone agreed with me (once they had heard those riddles’ solutions) that they enjoyed the questions more than the answers, but they seemed to think that sooner or later another riddle would have a satisfying solution, as if there was no general rule involved. As far as I could see, though, questions and answers didn’t have much of an affinity. You could even say they were natural enemies.
Home wine-making was one thing I discovered at Barbara Broier’s house. Another was Victor Borge’s ‘phonetic punctuation’, which the two of us heard one Saturday on Radio 2, as the Light Programme was now called. This was a classic comic routine in which Mr Borge spoke the printer’s marks out loud. We loved it, and started to imitate him. We didn’t have the original to consult (or a recording), and I imagine there was a certain amount of drift between the acoustic representations we heard that one time on the radio, and our own repertoire of homage. Our full stop (I can’t vouch for his) was a popping noise made with the lips, our comma a click of the tongue, our exclamation mark a downward-whistle-and-pop.
This was a party trick well suited to my talents, the tongue being the only muscle in my body that was perfectly obedient. The underlying idea was also vastly appealing, this Peasants’ Revolt of underclass marks, the voiceless ones, socially invisible, storming the citadel of speech.
In time, though, it became a compulsion, and my party trick become more like a brush with mental illness. I found it a real effort to leave stops unvoiced, even when answering a teacher’s question during a lesson. The return of the repressed isn’t a process that is easy to put into reverse. It isn’t a straightforward job to put the lid back on Pandora’s Box of punctuation, and that little tic took a long time to die down. It helped if I asked Barbara to sit far away from me in class. Then the hysteria had a chance to die down, though our friendship stalled, rather, with what looked like rejection on my part. Sometimes I would get panicky when she spoke to me, for fear that I would erupt again, a displaced Pentecostalist bearing witness to his molten God not in tongues but spoken signs.
A proper cage of rules
When autumn came the family’s wine-making activities tailed off, since
fermentation became too slow for good results. I looked around for a new project to maintain our momentum, and suggested that Dad occupy his time by growing mushrooms in the greenhouse. ‘It’ll give a bit of heat to the plants,’ I said, ‘And the insulating effect will lower our fuel bills.’
Dad might reasonably have answered, ‘When did you give a fig for our heating bills, John, with your taste for leaving doors open in all weathers?’ Instead he buckled down to become a mushroom farmer.
It was a funny old psychology that he had. He liked to know what he was supposed to do, which was easily managed when he was at work. Inside a proper cage of rules he could be very unyielding – so that my phoning him at work was a tremendous liberty that must be stamped on and prevented from recurring. But at home he had less sense of running on rails, and at the weekends he was almost grateful to have me organise his time. He tried to get me interested in what interested him, but at this stage I was fairly resistant and it’s fair to say that the flow of hobbies was more the other way.
Soon I was giving orders, watching him mixing horse dung, straw and organic composting powder, testing the temperature with a hotbed thermometer. We bought the spawn by mail order from a local farm which advertised in Exchange & Mart and even undertook to buy the crop back from us when it was ready. We couldn’t lose.
There was great excitement when we saw bits of the peat casing begin to heave with fungal nodes. Everyone went to look in admiration at the little pearls as they grew steadily bigger. We patted ourselves on the back. All that hard work was worth it.
Finally it was time to pick some of our crop and taste them. ‘Would you care for some mushrooms, m’dear?’ Dad asked, doing a jovial pastiche of what he imagined was Peter’s manner at work. ‘They’re from Chef’s own garden.’
‘Yes please, Dennis,’ said Mum, and then ‘I don’t think this is a good one, though, dear. Can I try again?’ They were none of them good. We couldn’t lose – yet somehow we managed it. Something rather ghastly was eating them before we had a chance. Our fungi had funguses of their own.
I scolded Dad for cutting corners with his fungiculture – he had turned the mass too little, he hadn’t been particular enough about the temperature of the hotbed, which was crucial. This can’t have been much fun for him. Mum joined in with me in what must have been a horrendous alliance. To be hen-pecked and chick-pecked simultaneously, what a fate.
I was already firmly established as the family’s telephone wheedler, and I got on the phone to the farm. ‘I’m afraid there’s something gone wrong with our crop – do you want to come and inspect it?’ Suppressed panic leaked down the line. The response was very clear: Don’t for God’s sake bring them here!
Dad said he didn’t see the harm in us paying a visit. Privately I thought we would be as welcome as Blind Pew at the Admiral Benbow, primed to pass on the Black Spot to poor Billy Bones, but I also thought it might be fun to make them sit up and take notice. We took a few of our stricken mushrooms with us, though we left them politely in the car. We were relying quite a bit on the ‘knock’ effect of the wheelchair. The chair always knocked people back, and then they tended to lose track of their normal behaviour patterns.
Knock knock! Who’s there? Abel. Abel who? Able-bodied dismay. I asked the farmer if there was any medicine we could administer to our defective mushrooms.
‘Um … There’s powder I could give you.’
‘Will that work?’
‘No. I’m not hopeful. Best to dispose of them carefully and start again from scratch.’
All the same, they gave us a huge tray of mushrooms to compensate for the failure of our crop. This was a very welcome knock-on effect of our visit. We were many pounds of mushrooms to the good, though the truth was that we none of us cared all that much for mushrooms. It was the activity that was important, the uniting fever of a hobby, and the mushrooms, like the wine we made, were a sort of side-effect, almost a nuisance which we would have done without if we’d been able.
When both of us enjoyed the product as well as the process, though, we made quite a team. I privately claimed credit for having made the conservatory happen, but I have to give Dad his due in matters of siting and temperature control. He knew what he was doing. The dry, desert half of the conservatory was for Mum, of course, but also cacti (mainly grown from seed) and Drosophyllums to boot, though the first few batches didn’t seem too happy. It’s a temperamental plant, though, everyone knows that. The dry bit of the conservatory had a door into the garden for when it grew too hot, even for Mum.
The damp greenhousy part, which was kept shadier, had no external door. There was plenty of sun both morning and evening, with shade being provided by the trees, carefully pruned to allow a rich flow of air under their branches and over the greenhouse top. Just the sort of conditions your Cymbidium orchid is partial to. Moving patches of sunlight generated a really nice tropical fug, ideal for drosera, sarracenias and (even if it was just the once) an Australian byblis which Dad raised from seed.
It all worked beautifully, even if Drosophyllum wasn’t persuaded yet. I would have liked to convey my appreciation to Dad, but compliments were never really part of our currency, in either direction.
An anarchist commune for seeds
Even after the mushroom débâcle I hadn’t altogether lost my touch with Dad. It made sense to go on pressurising him for things, just to keep in practice for when it was really important. In one of his Telegraphs, probably a Sunday one, I saw an advertisement for an eiderdown called the Margaret Erskine Dream-Cloud. There was a splendid picture illustrating the virtues of the product. It showed a girl ensconced under her eiderdown, warm as toast, radiantly smiling, despite the ice blocks surrounding her, which seemed to crimp the crust-edges of a strawberry-apple-girl pie.
I wanted a Dream-Cloud immediately. It was the perfect solution to my odd combination of needs, my love of fresh air in all seasons and weather coupled with this body’s intolerance of cold. There were various levels of insulating excellence, with goose down at the top. That’s what I wanted, goose down and nothing less, and I wore Dad down, though he did some bargaining of his own. It was finally agreed that the Dream-Cloud represented two birthdays and one Christmas. Dad said, ‘You’d just better promise that you’ll make it last.’ That was just like him, to save face by taking a hard line – even after he had caved in.
I read and re-read Gardening for Adventure, from its first page to the last, and the ones after that. I’ve always had a particular fondness for indexes, bibliographies and postscripts – everything that publishers call ‘back matter’. Gardening for Adventure had something I myself had lacked for some years now, an Appendix, which listed suppliers of plants. Number 17 on the list of 35 was Major V. F. Howell, of Firethorn, Oxshot Way, Cobham, Surrey. There were other suppliers relatively near, but I have to admit I was attracted by the idea of ordering plants from a Major.
Majors have popped up at the edge of my life from time to time – starting with the Air Force colleague and friend of Dad’s, Kit Draper, who was officially known as the Mad Major. All of them have been somewhat eccentric, though I doubt if the rank of Major actively generates quirks. More likely it’s the highest military position compatible with independence of mind.
I wrote to Major Howell asking for his terms of business. When he wrote back I felt that my choice of him had immediately been vindicated. His ‘catalogue’ was made up of sheets of foolscap paper. There was an introductory paragraph, and then a bald list of the Latin names of plant seeds he had in stock, typed in capital letters. Major Howell’s seed exchange was totally egalitarian. Seeds were seeds were seeds were seeds. Common grass seed might sit next to the most exotic orchids, and the strychnine tree be cheek by jowl with meadowsweet – but only if their alphabetical position dictated that arrangement. In Major Howell’s pages, breeding meant nothing, family meant nothing, and size meant nothing. CYMBIDIUM and COCOS NUCIFERA were in hailing distance of one another on the page, although Cymbi
dium is an orchid plant with seed so fine it blows away at the slightest puff of wind, travelling almost infinitely far, and Cocos nucifera is a monster.
This was not a conventional business at all but something described as a ‘seed exchange’, a loving and utopian project. We were already living in the Age of Aquarius, though we didn’t yet know it. Rumours trickled across the Atlantic with the news that on the New York stage naked performers mixed with the audience at the end of a show called Hair, and in Surrey a military man was running a commercial enterprise as if it was some sort of anarchist commune for seeds.
I passed the list across to Dad, who read through it closely before declaring, ‘The chap’s obviously potty. Take this item, for heaven’s sake …’ – he pointed out a name on the list – ‘it’s so darn common I only have to open the kitchen window and lean out and it’s almost in the palm of my hand. And Cocos nucifera … Have you any idea what that is?’
‘Is it a kind of palm?’
‘Not bad, not bad,’ Dad said. ‘Cocos nucifera is a coconut. Nothing more, nothing less. Why buy a coconut from this chappie? I can get a coconut in Maidenhead!’
‘I think …’ I said, instinctively defending the Major’s eccentricities, ‘the Major is referring to the fact that it may be a mere coconut, but that doesn’t stop it being a seed. Why should the poor coconut be banned from a seed-list? A seed is what it is. Aren’t you always telling me not to make the mistake of despising a plant because it’s common?’
Dad just grunted, but soon his eye fell on something more interesting. There were some fascinating items on the list, in among the common grasses and fairground prizes. There were plenty of Drosera species which we didn’t have, and soon we were making a shopping list of our own. Dad decided that we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of some interesting specimens just because the man was potty. Major Howell had converted me instantly, but it took Dad a little longer to come round. He came to mock and stayed to fill in an order form. Soon the Cromers, father and son, were regular customers.
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