Ageing Undine
Mrs Adcock was a neighbour of ours, though a much closer one of Jon Pertwee’s. She lived in a substantial riverside house – in its basement, rather perversely, which meant that she spent her days and nights below the water level of our Thames tributary, the ‘brook’ of Abbotsbrook. When it rained in winter the brook rose even higher, and Mrs Adcock would get flooded. Sometimes the water seeped in at its leisure, sometimes it broke its banks and washed her out. Rescuing her was a winter ritual for the local services, who must have found it irritating since there was nothing to stop her living on the ground floor if she had wanted to, or even on a higher level. Nobody else was in residence, but everything was kept in readiness in case her son Clive ever wanted to come to stay, which he hardly ever did.
Dad described her as a witch, but I think she was more of an elderly water-sprite, an ageing Undine, perhaps not of pure descent or she would have welcomed the seasonal floods which made her phone so disconsolately for rescue.
The first communication between our households (it must have been in the late 1950s) took the form of a plague of wasps. One summer while I was away at CRX a wasps’ nest had been found in the garden of Trees and Mum had been frantic about getting rid of it before I got home. I think Dad smoked them out, but Mum was terrified of vengeful survivors. She filled my mind with fear about what would happen if I was stung by even a single wasp, and hundreds might be waiting in ambush. I remember, though, that Peter had been stung a couple of times, and no great fuss was made about that. For some reason it wasn’t the same thing at all.
Mum made enquiries, and found that Mrs Adcock (‘that woman’) had had the wasps first. Her way of tackling the infestation struck Mum as even more sinister than the wasps themselves. Mrs Adcock had taken household rags and pieces of cloth, soaked them in cyanide, and hung them round the house, much as she might have hung out her washing. As far as Mum was concerned, there was a cyanide breeze blowing through Bourne End that summer. She would sniff the air for traces of the bitter-almond odour we knew from Agatha Christie mysteries.
If Mrs Adcock had known she was already a convicted poisoner (if only in the kangaroo court of Mum’s prejudices) she would hardly have sent food over from her kitchen, out of the kindness of her neighbourly heart. Clearly she loved cooking, and didn’t allow living alone to deter her from catering on a grand scale. Usually she sent cakes, covered with a variety of unearthly icings. Green was her favourite colour, purple the runner-up. Perhaps she was colour-blind? Her icings were phosphorescent and alarming.
I didn’t need much prompting from Mum not to eat these offerings – but she insisted I must write a note thanking her and saying it was very nice, which I did. Consequently cakes and dainties continued to issue from the Adcock kitchen in a lurid procession, until it was a real problem finding any sort of home for them. Then Mum had a brainwave. I should say I was giving up cakes for Lent, and that everybody else in the family was going along with the fast. It wouldn’t be fair to sit around eating delicious things in front of someone who was abstaining for religious reasons. That bought us a reprieve of forty days and forty nights, at any rate.
Mum tried to put me off Mrs Adcock by telling me that she was not only a vegetarian but an atheist. I certainly found this a strange combination. My visceral dislike of meat seemed to be part of a reverence for life, and I didn’t understand how you could revere something which just happened and had no deeper meaning. I cross-examined Mum about this atheism business. Under pressure she admitted that Mrs Adcock might actually be an agnostic. It took me quite a while to understand the difference. God was so very real to me, that I grew up thinking it was the same for everybody else. God didn’t say anything, and He couldn’t be tricked into revealing his secrets, but he was real all right. When I tried to find out what this ‘I’ of mine was and where it came from, I came up against a brown, warmly pulsating wall, and hadn’t been able to go any further. And that seemed to be that. It wasn’t God’s job to get me behind the wall. It was mine.
The path laid with lentils and rice
I had managed not to notice that Mum had manias rather than a faith, and that Dad was only in the most token way a believer. I think of him now as a spoiled atheist as others are spoiled priests. He had no religious feeling, but the family tradition of ministry stifled any pleasure he might have taken in his unattached state.
Mum didn’t hesitate to present Mrs Adcock as a warning of the dangers of vegetarianism. The path that was laid with lentils and rice led to damp basements and estrangement from God.
Mum wasn’t always an effective psychologist when it came to her warnings. Mrs Adcock came to fascinate me. Despite the stories of rags dripping with cyanide and the poisonous purple cakes, I decided I would go and seek her out in her lair. Her part of the house was down about half a dozen steps. Peter carried me down and then sat discreetly on the steps to wait. He didn’t want to come any closer than he had to.
She seemed to be expecting me, though she could have had no notice of my visit. It may be there was a certain amount of social spontaneity in Bourne End, just not at our address. The only neighbour I remember just calling by was Joy Payne, and she was known to be unstable – she had been locked up, she told us, for being too happy as well as not being happy enough. One winter Joy tapped on the window and handed our presents through, not wanting to bother us by ringing the doorbell. Unstable or not, the purity of Joy’s impulses showed everyone else up.
Mrs Adcock was certainly very old, but not decrepit. I couldn’t imagine her young, which I could normally manage, even with Granny. She must have been born old.
At that age I assumed that anyone who was uncertain about God would be in a constant state of terror, particularly as the grave came closer, but she didn’t look frightened. She made coffee for us, Nescafé made with all milk. We made a little small talk about schools and hospitals, and then I did my best to rattle her by saying, ‘I gather you don’t believe in God. What about death?’
‘What about it?’ she said, and now I was the one who was rattled.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you are rather …’
‘Old?’ she said.
‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘and …’
‘And you think that because I’m old I must be afraid of dying?’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘That’s it …’
‘Well, so far I’ve asked all your questions for you. Am I expected to answer them as well? I’ve no intention of answering a single question more unless you have the courage to ask me directly. That will be a good lesson for you to learn …’
If I hadn’t cut my teeth on Granny, I would certainly have been shamed into silence. In the end I managed to articulate the question as directed. ‘Aren’t you afraid of death, Mrs Adcock?’
Mrs A looked straight at me. ‘Oh no!’ she said, breaking out into a heart-warming smile. ‘Why should I be? Life without death would be so dull!’
‘But what happens when we die?’
‘We’ll find out when the time comes. Do you really want to know in advance?’
‘Of course.’
‘There’s no “of course” about it. Are you one of those funny people who turns to the end of a book and reads the last page first?’
‘No!’ I said, rather shocked by an idea that had never occurred to me, though of course such criminals exist.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘What’s the difference? If you were reading a really good story book, would you thank me for telling you how it all worked out in the end?’ I saw what she meant. She had a point and more than a point. Uniquely among the adults I knew, she had answered more of my questions than I’d been able to answer of hers.
After that I became a regular caller. Mrs Adcock showed me her portfolios of sketches. She had been quite an artist in her day, earning a living by doing drawings for fashion magazines and clothes catalogues. Sometimes we had coffee, and though sometimes we had tea she never made it in the samovar which she showed me as something s
he had ‘picked up on her travels’. I wanted her to start a little fire in it.
Mrs Adcock used to set me ‘Fun Homework’. She’d dish out arithmetic sums which looked awful, but the answers would come out as 44444, or maybe your very own telephone number. Seeing something so nice and familiar was my reward for working so hard at the sum. She’d play endless word games with me, and I enjoyed trying to catch her out. If I found a word which Mrs A didn’t know – which wasn’t easy – she was genuinely delighted rather than put out. You’d get a ‘thank you’ and a ‘that’s another one to add to my list’, and even a small present. Peter was still suspicious of her, so he would deliver me and then come back for me at an agreed time. It would take more than a batty old neighbour to make him think homework was fun.
Dumplings from heaven
At one stage my vegetarianism hit something of a crisis, not a lapse of principle but an intensifying of temptation. I had weaned myself with great effort off Mum’s dumplings and gravy, a dish that she made particularly well, but there were times when I came close to backsliding. The smell made my salivary glands turn traitor, drenching my mouth with pleasure in anticipation. Mum told me that if I wanted dumplings and gravy all I had to do was take them onto my plate. There would be no vulgar crowing. Not a word would be said. ‘You know I can’t make vegeteerian dumplings for you, John,’ she said, ‘because the recipe contains suet, which naturally you can’t eat.’ Mrs Adcock urged me to hold firm against the pounce of the inner carnivore.
A few days later a knock came at the front door. Standing in the porch was a boy carrying a plate with a metal canteen cover on it. He said this was a gift from Mrs Adcock and must be eaten straight away. Mum brought it in and set in on the kitchen table in front of me. Even before she raised the lid I could smell a warm wholesome aroma. When she did I could see fluffy dumplings smothered in a thick veg soup, lounging next to something that looked like a chop, but was actually a Granose ‘steak’ out of a tin.
Mum banged a fork down alongside the food and told me that I’d better get on with it. She didn’t repeat her warnings about not eating anything cooked by Mrs A, but her silence was hardly neutral. I hesitated, and then I decided that if there was poison anywhere in this set-up it wasn’t in the food. I took a tentative nibble at a dumpling. There was nothing wrong with it. There was nothing wrong with any of it. This was manna made manifest in farinaceous form, proof of the power of prayer. Dumplings from heaven.
Mum turned her back on me while I ate, and when I had finished she snatched the plate away from me and started scrubbing fiercely at it in the sink. It was as if she wanted to scrape away any molecular trace of Mrs Adcock’s kindness. Then she sent Peter to take it back, with the canteen cover, to where it came from. It was as if she couldn’t bear to have these objects in her house a moment longer than she could help. She sent no message of thanks, though I’m sure Peter was too polite not to deliver one.
Clearly it wasn’t pleasant for her to have a neighbour send me a treat, on a number of levels. To have food delivered into her very kitchen, as if this was Meals on Wheels for a deprived (poor) person. To have an atheist (or agnostic) demonstrate Christian charity, not to mention imaginative sympathy. Mum had no reason to feel grateful for being multiply shown up. Yet on this question the enemies were on the same side. I was too thin for my own good, and something needed to be done about it. Oddly, being underweight only seemed to signify if you were a vegetarian. Mum was a case in point – theoretically an omnivore, but not much of a vore of any sort. A nullivore if anything, or a paucivore at best, depending on the day and her mood.
Isn’t Queen Mary supposed to have given Gandhi a poke in the ribs on the occasion of their meeting, saying he needed to put some meat on his bones? All right, I’m making that up, but I had always been told by those who claimed to know – including the staff at CRX, Flanny and my parents – that those who ate no meat had feeble bodies and feebler brains. Mrs Adcock was proof to the contrary.
This lady who had been a vegetarian since her teens had also worked on magazines and made her own dress designs. She had toured the world in search of textiles, getting as far as China. Her brain fizzed with energy. She loved mathematical puzzles and word games, not only solving them but setting them. She knew every card game that had ever been invented – for heaven’s sake, she was even immune to cyanide, as her wasp-killing technique proved. She had been a conscientious objector in the War, though women had to make quite a fuss about it for their objections to register, since they weren’t expected to fight in the front line anyway. Mrs Adcock was that precious thing, a pacifist who likes a good dust-up.
It was never hard to rekindle my relationship with Mrs Adcock. Our rapport was never a thing of blazing glory, but there was some steady combustion going on. It was a sort of smouldering friendship. It might seem to go out altogether for months or even years, but it never needed much encouragement to break out again. Just a little fuel would make it burn brightly. I still tried to make a note of new words to pass on, even if we were neither of us as easy to impress as we had once been. When I read Gardening for Adventure in hospital it gave me a bright bouquet of verbal novelties to present to her, or to relay in notes delivered by Peter. Mrs Adcock was perfectly familiar with abortifacient, but clean bowled by emmenagogue (used to describe anything which promotes the menstrual flow). Peter never stayed longer than the minimum, and always turned down coffee and tea. I worried sometimes about his lack of adventurousness, which seemed partly a sort of brotherly inhibition. My rôle was to chafe against the limits of my world. He seemed to atone for his wider opportunities by not taking advantage of them.
When I started visiting Mrs Adcock again in 1968, while studying at High Wycombe Technical College, she hardly seemed any older. She had all her own teeth, she had all her own wits. By this time her vegetarianism had taken a new crusading turn. She was campaigning against factory farming, and got me to take out my own membership in the society she had joined.
The astral blood spurted green
She had stopped drinking milk, since she couldn’t be sure of the well-being of the cows involved, so that the milky Nescaff she served was now based on Coffee Mate. I took a discreet look at the ingredients on the label, and wondered how long she could get by on dried glucose solids and powdered hydrogenated fats. Milk had been the core of her diet. She only picked at other things.
There was hardly a vitamin or ghost of protein in her body, but there was nothing wrong with her drive and sense of purpose. In fact she had far more of a plan to change the world than either Mum or Flanny. She was expanding her range of activities and her areas of operation. So much for the low energy levels of herbivores. Not content with opposing the cruelties of the domestic food industry she had foreign barbarism in her sights. She was revolted by bull-fighting in Spain, which she wanted banned. If the Spanish had such a taste for blood, let them jab skewers in each other, and then talk about the dark glory of the sport.
I don’t think bull-fighting had many defenders in Britain at the time, but by bad luck one of them was my Spanish teacher at the college, Dawn Drummond. She had lived in Spain and explained that we had it all wrong about bull-fighting. For a Spaniard going to a bull-fight was no more exotic than going to the bingo in Britain, though a great deal more profound and poetic. She had attended many corridas. It was a mistake to think bull-fighting was based on cruelty. In fact it was an exquisite moment when the matador came in for the kill.
I did my best to represent the bull’s point of view in class but had made no headway. Dad had been chased across a field by a bull, but it didn’t make him wish the animal any harm. The matadors had no such grievance.
Miss Drummond said the matador used a special knife for the job, very sharp but surprisingly small. She even told us the Spanish word for it, but my mind refused to store it. Mentally I withheld my assent from the technical vocabulary of ritual killing. She said that the bull was completely exhausted by this stage, and frankly,
after all the jabs he’d received from the picadors, finishing him off so cleanly was an act of mercy.
She held an imaginary knife in her hand and plunged it into the bull’s imaginary heart, from which the astral blood spurted green. A macabre glow lit up her face with momentary incandescence, right in front of the eyes of the class. I felt I had seen an appalling transformation, which turned Miss Drummond into a blood sister of Miss Mitchell-Hedges gloating over her crystal skull at Vulcan School, draining the psychic energy from the pupils to feed on.
It’s only fair to say that there were other elements in Miss Drummond’s portrait of Spanish culture. There was flamenco, which I dismissed from a position of total ignorance. I couldn’t accord much respect to a style of movement which seemed to me to resemble bad-tempered tap-dancing, a ritual re-enactment, in frothy dress and high heels, of the stamping my sister did when she didn’t get her way. A choreographed tantrum. Then there was gazpacho, whose praises Miss Drummond constantly trumpeted, with digressions on recipe variations permissible and impermissible.
I was the closest the Cromer family had to an adventurous palate (if you bear in mind that eating meat is not an adventure). Mum greatly disliked the taste of olive oil, which I relished. I could even enjoy, or certainly tolerate, garlic, so gazpacho should have been well within my experimental range.
I don’t know whether the barrier was physiological or mental. It’s true that my body’s temperature equilibrium is easily upset. After a few minutes in the hot part of the new conservatory I would overheat and take some time to recover. I felt sure that drinking cold soup would sabotage my metabolism from within – yet I was the same John Cromer who liked to leave the bedroom door open on the coldest days.
I couldn’t face the idea of ingesting the icy liquid. On a hot day I didn’t want a chilled drink, though of course ice cream is in a different category. Ice cream rewrites the rules. And I take tiny bites, tiny sips, tiny slurps as it melts.
Cedilla Page 31
