Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  But if I left the chair in A6 Kenny and drove somewhere in the Mini, then I was helpless to go any further once I had arrived wherever the car could take me. What I lacked was regular help to load the wheelchair in and out of the car.

  What would solve the problem at a stroke would be another wheelchair, one that lived in the car, so that the amount of furniture-moving could be reduced. I was too proud to spell out my needs to Granny (for instance), but I’m not sure it would have done any good even if I had nerved myself to it. No one could describe her as a soft touch, but she had stumped up the bulk of the funds for the electric wheelchair that had made life easier at Vulcan, for the car that had replaced it, and even the reclining chair now occupying pride of place in A6 Kenny. Better not to go to the well too often, or the lid would slam down and catch you a nasty biff on the way. Putting it more simply, Granny would click shut the clasp of her handbag, in a judgement against which there was no appeal.

  I had already realised that the Parker-Knoll was both an amenity and an obstruction, something that clogged the wheels of daily life even as it oiled them. It was hopelessly oversized for that little room. Visitors would not rest until they had explored the mechanism, and their long legs were taking up most of the little space remaining. To prevent this I would sometimes occupy the P-K myself, but then visitors would help themselves to the wheelchair and we were only moments away from wheelchair races or attempts to use it as a sort of Jeep on the stairs. Meanwhile the little chair provided by the college, hopelessly surplus to requirements, was often placed on the bed, or outside the door, to keep it out of the way. I began to feel about the Parker-Knoll roughly what Ramana Maharshi felt about his tiger skin, and if a visitor had asked to take it away I would have been tempted to say yes.

  Egos in bantam display

  There was an immature side of me which was still waiting for the world to understand me, to tune in to my wave-length. Surely in this ancient university town, crammed with the best brains available, young and old, there would be somebody capable of imagining what it was like to be John, someone who would ask, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to manage with another wheelchair?’

  I had the wrong idea about universities. They were not institutions dedicated to the development of integrated personalities, light and holy tipples notwithstanding. They weren’t even places where intellectual adventurousness was encouraged. They were forcing-houses for the ego. At Cambridge the ego was fed and watered, preened and fluffed up, and then pitted against other egos in bantam display. This was apparent even at mealtimes.

  I didn’t have a set place to sit in Hall. It was rather a matter of where I was plonked by whatever volunteer made himself available, though the awkwardness of the wheelchair made it easiest to put me at the head of a table. Over time I was exposed to a fair cross-section of the student population, though I listened idly more than I joined in. The simplest conversation had a competitive edge. It didn’t seem possible to like a book or a record without becoming embroiled in a whole set of arbitrary alignments, empty convulsions of status. Slaughterhouse- Five. A Rainbow in Curved Air. Hot Rats. The Glass Bead Game. Bitches Brew. The Wretched of the Earth. Any of these could polarise a group. These artefacts were timeless masterworks, or they were pitiful trash. Endless arguments could rage on such subjects, arbitrary disputes being much more congenial to brains inflamed by egotism than sweet admissions of indifference. Not to have an opinion was seen as a sign of personality disorder, when in fact the opposite is the case. Every opinion is a rut in the road.

  The way Ramana Maharshi put it (in the supplement to the Forty Verses on Reality) is that for unpretentious folk there is only one family to be resisted – spouse, children, dependents. Among the learned, however, there are many other families: families of books, families of theories and opinions, all of them obstacles to understanding. ‘What is the use of letters,’ he goes on, ‘to those lettered folk who do not seek to wipe out the letters of fate by enquiring, “Whence are we born?”? They are gramophones, Oh Lord Arunachala. What else can they be? They learn and repeat words without realising their meaning.’ Cambridge was more than anything a city of human gramophones, playing the same records over and over again, mental needle in plastic groove.

  I don’t know if television played a major part in other undergraduates’ lives. On me it hardly registered. There was a set in the Junior Common Room, theoretically available (as long as your choice of channel wasn’t outvoted, presumably) but I never bothered. I can’t imagine that many students watched more than half an hour a week. If someone at Hall said to a friend, ‘I’ll see you at the usual place,’ it was likely to mean a rather shame-faced conclave convened in the JCR for Top of the Pops or Doctor Who. I hadn’t come to Cambridge to be an overgrown schoolboy, so I didn’t take part – which was a shame, since that lovely old ham Jon Pertwee was starting his run as the Doctor, and I’d have enjoyed dropping the name. There was something called Monty Python’s Flying Circus which people seemed to enjoy without embarrassment (one of the performers was apparently a Downing man), but the series had finished without my seeing any of it. I lost interest when I learned that it featured no snakes.

  Since I was too insecure to concoct my own course of study, I would obviously have to go to lectures, and this involved its own set of hazards. I hated the help I needed. I needed the help I hated. It wasn’t much use finding somebody who would be at my lecture if they weren’t also in Downing. Ideally of course they should be somebody in Kenny, though this was a bit much to hope for. Since students of Modern Languages were not a strong presence in Downing, the odds were stacked against my teaming up with a fellow freshman on any sort of regular basis.

  In fact there was one suitable person on my own staircase, the same nice tall Pete – P. D. Hughes – who had escorted me to the Societies Fair. He was reading Russian, which he always pronounced Rooshian like a Smersh operative in a Bond film, and had lectures at the Sidgwick Site, where mine mostly were. He was my trump card, but then again he was my only card. Trump cards wear out when played too often.

  There were other stalwarts on Kenny, but their numbers dwindled. As we all in our different ways were sucked into the university’s Maya, they found they had more important things to attend to than portering around one of their fellows. When novelty wore off, only drudgery remained, and being obliging became a bit of a bore. In their place I’m sure I would have done exactly the same.

  Pete was very willing – I can’t fault him for that. Sometimes I would give him a lift in the Mini in exchange for help getting in and out of it. How he fitted into that car I’ll never know. The distance between Downing and the Sidgwick Site wasn’t even very great, and Pete thought it would be fun to push me the whole way in the chair, but of course I would have to arrange to meet up with him later for the return journey, and I didn’t want to do that. It seemed vital to spread the load, to avoid a situation in which the name Cromer, J. W. irresistibly called up in Pete’s mind the association constant toting, in need of.

  Helpfulness becomes a chore when it is taken for granted, and I couldn’t help at least seeming to take it for granted, by dint of having no other option. My needs were continuous and unvarying. What I needed one day I also needed the next. Inevitably Pete would find this oppressive. I found it oppressive myself.

  There was no mistaking Pete’s outsized feet on the stairs, but many times when he knocked on my door I kept mum inside, forcing myself to manage without him. It was bad enough that he felt duty-bound to knock, without making him think that I was lost without him.

  If I didn’t have the momentum to proceed unaided then I simply missed lectures, which weren’t after all compulsory. I find it much harder to drag myself down a step than up a step, which meant that the greatest single obstacle in my whole impeded day was the one between me and the Mini. It took quite a build-up of determination (or sometimes just frustration) to wash me over that barrier and into the swim of the academic day.

  If I missed a lect
ure sometimes people would say the next week, ‘I didn’t see you last time – were you sick?’, and I’d say yes out of politeness, muttering, ‘Sick to the back teeth of managing without help’ under my breath.

  I began to think, though, that my mild hypnotic powers were waning along with my ability to meditate (better than it had been in India, but nowhere near full strength). If I found myself in a group, at Hall or in a lecture theatre or library, I learned to recruit helpers from the edges of the group, not asking those near me. I would say to someone I hadn’t seen before, ‘I think it’s your turn to take me to the lav, don’t you?’

  What’s the usual euphemism for excretion? Going to the toilet, or the lavatory, the crapper or the bog. That’s just it: going to. The journey involved. Once I’m in place, I can perform as well as anyone. It’s the journey that takes the work and the organising.

  My underlying strategy in recruiting outlying helpers was a longterm one. It was actually better to recruit the mildly unwilling for toilet-portering, since they were sure to have no hidden motive darker than a wholesome need to get away. Samaritans need not apply.

  I hoped that as word got round people would realise that there was no safety in hanging back. They might get off more lightly by coming up and sitting right next to me, in the eye of the storm in a teacup. In fact my victims on these occasions seemed rather to enjoy themselves. Many of them were public-school boys, fantastically estranged from their own bodies, who found they enjoyed the neutral physical contact of carrying another human being around for a bit, though it would never have occurred to them to volunteer. After their errand was accomplished they would be likely to sit near me, looking oddly dreamy and contented. Opiated by the combination of touch and civic virtue. I began to realise that the transaction was the opposite of what it appeared to be. I was actually doing them a favour. It was charitable work.

  On days when I had done without Pete’s help, I would emerge from A6 in a state of mild masochistic melancholy, and totteringly trudge towards whichever exit from the building I had decided to use. The obstacles were identical – a single step in either case. The rear entrance involved the shorter journey and a manageable door, but offered a much smaller chance of my being spotted by someone who would install me in the Mini.

  If I had decided to picket the front entrance, then the tableau I presented was pretty clear: the little chap and the door he couldn’t manage. The step on the other side of it a further obstacle. If I heard footsteps behind me then I would wait and see. Usually people would stop and offer help. Sometimes, it’s true, people would tiptoe out the back way. I wonder what that felt like. Not very nice, I expect.

  I would listen to the strange pause before they (mostly) squared their shoulders, walked up to me and asked if I needed help. In those moments my lack of mobility almost seemed to be catching. It was as if I made them think about their walking and forget how the steps went. It was a little hiatus in the dance – the hesitation tango – before conscience cut in.

  If people were coming from the other direction, so that they were crossing the courtyard when they saw me, I noticed that they would look quickly around to see if we were being observed by others. I seemed to put people on the spot, so that they would lose face both by helping me and by walking on. My situation emitted vibrations of embarrassment. It was my job to damp them down with charm and personal warmth.

  One way or another, on my own or handily boosted, I would make it to the Mini and drive to the Sidgwick Site. Then I would resort to a new method of transport. It’s the inventor’s privilege to christen his device, and I call what I learned to do hitch-lifting. As far as I know it was a piece of social interaction unprecedented in the West, perhaps even the world. If I was a tribe I would have much to show the anthropologists, but a one-man tribe slips through the nets of the discipline.

  If I wasn’t in a position to equip myself with a handful of more or less unresentful slaves, then I must learn to milk the general community of its goodwill. Hitch-lifting was a type of inverted hitch-hiking which had more than a glimmer of begging about it.

  Beggars are of course resourceful people, anything but passive before their fate, but their status is not high in the eyes of the world. If I played my cards right, though, I could keep my self-respect. My poverty was poverty of movement, and my task was to wheedle some free work out of people. I asked for alms in the form of action. I was playing a new game on a blank board with no rules, until over time I developed a certain amount of expertise.

  The hitch-hiking was inverted because I was the one with a car, throwing myself on the resources of passing pedestrians. There was no need for me to stick out an actual thumb – luckily enough, since my thumbs are not expressive instruments.

  The working of the stratagem was as follows. First I would select a target. As in all salesmanship, the choice of a victim was crucial. The target was almost always male, since the wheelchair would have to be lifted from the car. If there were no men visible, then a vigorous and bustling woman might find herself pressed into service. I would attract attention by voice, or by tapping on the window, or if all else failed by climbing laboriously out of the car and letting my deficiencies advertise themselves. I refrained from using the car horn. It was too peremptory, too much of an emergency signal. It slighted the free will of my helpers with the imperiousness of its summons. Besides, I needed to keep something in reserve for actual crisis, as opposed to the constant, barely managed crisis that was my life as an undergraduate.

  Adopted by a family of logarithms

  It sometimes happened that a physically slight young woman, not perhaps weighing much more than I did, put herself forward. Then the most likely consequence was a sort of secondary hitching, with my shrimp of a St Joan rallying male troops on my behalf. This transaction, what with that one-in-ten gender ratio, would take barely a moment. Perhaps I was indirectly responsible for forging romantic connections. Perhaps there are grandchildren at this moment stifling their yawns as they hear the old tale.

  If I needed to be conveyed up steps, then I wouldn’t announce the fact until my victim had lifted the chair out of the car. Once that had been managed, it was a very difficult position for my victim to refuse the second-stage request. The same is true of all confidence tricks. One Yes begets another until the No reflex is bound and gagged.

  Then I would ask to be lifted out of the car and into the chair. Then I had to have my books, and then I needed to be taken to where my lecture was being given. If my victim was a fellow student, then all too often he was on a tight schedule, and not likely to be going to my lecture of choice. In that case I’d hitch a lift off somebody else, which was relatively easy since I was at least on the pavement. I had hoisted my sails, at least, and could reasonably hope for a personified wind to fill them for the last stage of my journey.

  It all worked reasonably well. Still, the amount of mental strain involved was considerable, the continuous effort to impose myself on others by raw force of charm. All this before I could even begin to study! By the time the first lecture of the day began, I felt I had been through a whole alphabet of effort, from A to Z (passing æ somewhere along the way), while my fellow students had barely made it as far as B. I began to feel eroded and worn down. It’s not that I’m shy. Anyone who has been brought up without privacy has seen his shyness wither away for lack of nourishment. But my energy wasn’t unlimited.

  I was gradually discovering Cromer’s Paradox of Disabled Life. This is it: greater independence means greater dependence. So easily stated, so hard to live with.

  To elaborate a little: if your needs are being looked after institutionally then you don’t have to ask for help. Just ring the bell or wait for the nurse to come round. But if you’re managing by yourself, without being able to do everything for yourself, then you have to ask for help many times a day. The determination not to be defined by your needs leads directly to your having to spell them out the whole time. And so: greater independence means greater de
pendence. QE (alas) D.

  I made myself persevere with the technique of hitch-lifting despite exhaustion. Otherwise I was afraid I would gradually become a recluse, and soon even going to lectures would be beyond me. Then the authorities would conclude that mainstream education for the disabled was a noble gesture but an educational sham, without giving a thought to the extra difficulties that had been put in my path. I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  It didn’t take me long to realise that there were students of Modern Languages in my year who were virtually bilingual. They would mention casually that they had dreams, if you please, in Spanish or German. If I had a dream in a foreign language it was only likely to involve my shouting ‘Hilfe! ¡Socorro!’ while being crushed by a giant toppling dictionary. It turned out that these prodigies had spent their childhoods (in some cases) or at least large stretches of their school holidays in Germany or Spain. And at that point my patience and sympathy rapidly became exhausted. As far as I was concerned, that wasn’t studying a language. That was legitimised cheating, a flagrant abuse of the system, though no one seemed to see it but me. I mean, would we really go on admiring a mathematical prodigy after it emerged that he had been adopted by a family of logarithms?

  To sprain your smile

  I went hitch-lifting even when I didn’t have lectures to go to. I gritted my teeth and made myself go to the Whim for a cup of coffee that tasted of nothing but scalded milk. I tried to make hitch-lifting into second nature, so that I wouldn’t feel any erosive effect from all this wheedling. I’d park the car somewhere, ask a passer-by to get the chair out, thank them with brisk warmth as if I wanted to be rid of them, spot someone else walking along who looked as though they might be going where I was going, and chime in with ‘Excuse me … Could you possibly give me a push as far as …?’