Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I learned the value in such sentences of the middle-class elaborations, the pattern of stress on the first word and the genteel adverb. I tried to convey that I was quite surprised to find myself in need of help, but there it was, it’d be a funny old world if we didn’t all of us need a favour now and then. And so on and so on. People were kind, and still it was all so tiring, so very tiring.

  In the daily operation of hitch-lifting, in the town rather than the university precincts, my most willing helpers were definitely good-looking boys out with their girlfriends. Nothing was too much trouble for them. They would set me down properly and make sure everything was at the right level. If we were in a pub they were likely to stand me a drink and to say, ‘If you want anything, I’m right here.’ A lot of this must have been for the benefit of the girlfriends, but not all – and only relatively new girlfriends would be in the market for such indirect buttering-up. Established partners wouldn’t be so easily fooled, if fooling was what this was about. I think it was a very natural overflow of contentment, sexual satisfaction spilling outwards as it rarely does even in the young.

  Cambridge was a large town compared to Bourne End. The streets were often crowded and so were the pavements. Bicycles were everywhere. Bicycles were the elementary particles of the Cambridge universe, but I had last reacted with one on an experimental basis in hospital at Taplow, and I couldn’t get excited about them now.

  I could park the Mini more or less anywhere, though I tried not to obstruct the passage of traffic. The wheelchair had its own tendency to produce clots, little embolisms in the pedestrian circulation. A surprising number of able-bodied walkers – I’d put it as high as one in a hundred – seemed bewitched by the chair, unable to step aside from its progress. This seemed to happen as often when I was being pushed as when I was punting myself along in the intervals between porters.

  It seemed to be some malfunction of the decision-making apparatus, with the option of going left being cancelled out by the option of going right. There was nothing to choose between them, and the alternatives produced paralysis. The wheelchair didn’t have headlights, of course, and these pedestrians weren’t rabbits, but the situations were parallel. At least once a day I would find myself confronted by someone, almost invariably male, blushing and mumbling, stalled in front of my vehicle, wishing the ground would open up and swallow him. Sometimes I wished for that to happen too, though I’d smile and say, ‘After you.’

  Hypnosis is hard work, it drains the system, and charm is hypnosis without the handy short cut of a trance. People can’t be made to do things against their will, but they can be led into a state where they don’t think in terms of what they want. But now I also came to see that charm is like a muscle or a gland. It took effort to clench someone’s attention in mine, or to secrete the social juices that made people play along, and at the end of a day my face would simply ache from the effort of geniality.

  Is it possible to sprain your smile? If so, then I did it sometime in the second week of that first term.

  I still had my photograph of Ramana Maharshi on my desk, but I could hardly bring myself to look at it. I seemed to deal with the world through a deviously grinning mask, the opposite of his smile in its piercing openness.

  Of course there were brighter moments, and there were even people who would come up and ask if they could help. I had my regulars, people I came to know almost as friends, just because they had helped me out a few times. One very big and broad woman seemed to enjoy the labour of assisting me. I suppose she was in her late twenties or early thirties. She wore denim skirts of an intermediate length which seemed to limit her range of movement. At all events, when she was preparing to lift me she would plant her legs far apart and then hitch up her skirts with a great grin. She seemed to be modelling her stance on a Japanese wrestler’s. Her body gave off a warm friendly smell, spiced like cloves or cinnamon. Her only conventionally feminine touch was the wearing of elaborate earrings, which must have looked discreetly decorative when she put them on, head at rest, but became downright alarming when she was out in public, thanks to the abruptness of her movements.

  Then one day she happened to pass when I had already accepted assistance from someone else. Her face became fixed and she went rigid with disapproval. I hadn’t seen her in time to give her priority, and it was impossible to dismiss a willing volunteer just because a more experienced porter had happened along after the fact. But after that, although I saw her passing by on a regular basis, she never offered assistance again, and this is something I have never understood, the process by which the helpful impulse shades into a sense of ownership.

  This person and I had never so much as exchanged names. She had held me in her arms, yes, but she was no more than an acquaintance. Sometimes it seems that I’m in a minority all over again, for feeling that physical intimacy shouldn’t go to people’s heads. Offering a service shouldn’t establish a right.

  The blooms from traffic islands

  Still, beggars can’t be choosers, eh? The status of begging was much on my mind at the time, because of a remark of Ramana Maharshi’s.

  Of course my begging wasn’t Indian begging, stumps-and-sores begging, but it felt real enough. In Cambridge at that time there seemed to be only two real beggars, both of them shaky alcoholics. One of them made a show of selling flowers on Market Hill, but everyone knew they were stolen, or at any rate pilfered. He slept in a hostel on the outskirts of town, and would uproot the blooms from traffic islands and park plantings as he neared the centre.

  What Ramana Maharshi said about begging was that it made him feel like a king and more than a king. To depend on strangers for the food he needed to live gave him the exhilaration others find in the exercise of power. I found this very hard to understand. I even put it down to his having been born a Brahmin, though he had shed his caste. As if he had kept a sense of entitlement even when the entitlement ran out.

  It was almost a form of slumming, wasn’t it? To treat begging as a sort of royal sport. Then I reminded myself that he was so indifferent to food, in his early days in Tiruvannamalai, that others had to place it in his mouth. Eating was optional and hunger an irrelevance.

  And if he had been able to see through the game of Brahminism, why should he not do the same with begging? Yet he didn’t say begging was a matter of indifference to him, he said it made him feel like a king (and more than a king). I couldn’t help seeing him in a constant downpour of food and flowers, which seemed less like begging than being crowned Queen of the May. It was all a long way from my world of Supplementary Benefit and Education Authority grants, and asking people to drag me from car to wheelchair so that I could attend lectures from which my absence would not be noticed.

  I was a poor student of Bhagavan, not to remember that his enthusiastic description of begging referred specifically to the beginning of his reliance on others for food. Whether he experienced the royal feeling over time isn’t clear.

  I was still seeing the world through Christian eyes. Admittedly Christ made a splendid remark about taking no thought for the morrow, but his teaching turns the beggar into a figure of reproach to those who have more than they need. When the privileged deal with the deprived, they are face to face with Christ’s representatives and their own judges – but there’s not much suggestion that the lot of the judges is a happy one. I didn’t want to be a reproach to anyone. I just wanted to get to lectures.

  So I tried to conform my thoughts to Ramana Maharshi’s, and to feel that I was partaking in something he regarded as a privilege, and still begging did not make me feel like a king. It made me feel like a beggar.

  Beggars get scraps. Begging my way to lectures was the only way I might find enough scraps fallen from the academic table to fill my mental belly.

  In Christianity, of course, there’s ‘blessed are the meek’, but even before I discovered Ramana Maharshi I had a strong feeling that by a great mercy meekness was not required of me. I don’t quite know what it wou
ld mean in my case, since meekness is voluntary powerlessness and I had no power to disown in the approved manner.

  I started to discard the clothes I had arrived in, like many another fresher, since they seemed dated and formal. Of course, thanks to Mum’s skill with her sewing-machine – ‘the Bernina’ – they were also made to measure, and I had to abandon fit along with formality. Wearing a gown had traditionally been a university requirement, but recent friction between town and gown had led to its suspension. The only benefit I might have got from a gown (supposing one was tailored to my size) would have been an extra layer of protection from the chilly winds for which the city is known, the icy gusts from the Urals losing little of their cutting power on the way to slice into East Anglia. One item I did hang on to was a sort of cape she had made for me, which I could drape round myself with the minimum of difficulty to keep the wind off.

  Mostly the gradient of university life was against me, but there were occasions when the playing field was level, or even had a tilt in my favour. It’s only fair that they should get a mention. Those were days like the ones I remembered (as a spectator, of course) from Vulcan, when an able-bodied local team was unnerved by the home side’s competitiveness or was undone by its own chivalry. Either way, it got thrashed.

  Fascinating elastic bread

  One triumph had its roots in a moment of outrage. As I was working my knife and fork down into my plateful of food one day in Hall, they came across something which felt like a special sort of bread, resistant but also squishy. I was intrigued. Evidently Chef had excelled himself, and all for the benefit of the little Modern Languages student in the wheelchair. I thought that before I took a bite I would just peek under the topping to see what this fascinating elastic bread was. It was a steak. It was an animal slab, and I went berserk. I’m sorry (very slightly sorry) to say that I howled for this heinous object to be taken out of my sight.

  The massed carnivores of the college watched it go, incredulous with sorrow. They mourned its passing, except that mourners don’t usually lick their lips. Even I could see that this was a shining specimen of the flesh feast, succulent, cooked to perfection – I hadn’t eaten at the Compleat Angler all those times without knowing what steak should be like. Granny might make a little road across her plate, but Peter laid down a four-lane highway over as many plates as were put in front of him. I imagine this superb atrocity was destined for High Table and had been blown off course. No wonder my fellow students looked on in such anguish. They would never see such a meal in their academic lifetimes, and I was sending it back with shrill squeals of protest.

  Next day the college Chef came to interview me about my preferences. ‘I’d like to make a special list of what you can and can’t eat, sir!’ This was a diplomatic breakthrough, this embassy to the untouchables. The outcastes were being wooed. Nato was reaching out a tentative hand to the Warsaw Pact.

  The ‘special list’ was simple enough. Can eat: non-meat. Can’t eat: meat. That was it, essentially, but it seemed best to go into detail and make positive suggestions. Just to be on the safe side I mentioned that vegetarians couldn’t eat anything which had been in contact with aluminium, and he gravely wrote down this also.

  From then on Chef paid special attention to the herbivores. The other two got the benefit without the shock of being ambushed by that steak, buried like a landmine of animal tissue beneath the innocent tomato topping. In a college of notoriously awful food, the three of us – the one per cent – dined in something like luxury. The minority is always right, of course, but rightness doesn’t usually tingle in the tastebuds as it did in ours then.

  It wasn’t long before the carnivores noticed the general superiority of our rations. A deputation approached the Bursary to request vegetarian food. Request refused – if they had wanted to register as vegetarians they needed to do so before arriving in college. This was entirely unfair and very pleasing. On the one hand, every new vegetarian is a gift to the world. If there’s one religion that should be allowed to proselytise, it’s vegetarianism. On the other hand, the deputation didn’t represent a change of heart but a sly bid for better grub.

  We lonely three were conscientious objectors who had faced down the stigma of refusal, while they were like volunteers who wanted to desert now that they had seen what life was like in the trenches of institutional catering. They were sent smartly back to the front, and we conchies held steady at one per cent.

  Mum wasn’t much of a letter writer by this stage of our lives, but she did send on to me a note from Mrs Osborne. Apparently Kuppu had wished me to be informed that if I ever returned to Tamil Nadu she would look after me for the rest of her life.

  This was a sweetly shocking thing to hear. The contrast with Cambridge life was very great. A gardener’s wife in India could pledge herself, after a few short weeks of acquaintance, to serving me as long as she had breath. In the West my value to anyone else was not high, and my needs were strictly my own.

  Dad was never much of a correspondent either. A letter from him was always something of an event, and his first letter to me at Cambridge was by his standards a hysterical document. A bit of a facer, frankly … timing could be better … not as if they’re short of a bob or two. He had received a bill from Downing. He sent it along for me to look at. Should he pay it? Why should he? But how could he not? Little ripples of alarm churned up the preferred flatness of his letter-writing manner.

  The bill was for the expense of fitting a rail over the bath on my staircase. It was accompanied by a compliments slip from the Bursar, but no refinement of stationery could soften the blow. The bill was for ninety-two pounds. Dad didn’t know whether to pay it, to refuse point-blank or to challenge the amount. And neither did I. None of the alternatives had the slightest appeal for Dad: being taken for a fool, defying authority and waiting for the bailiffs, or haggling like a carpet-seller in the souk.

  Even so, this was a thunderbolt which was in some ways almost refreshing – an antidote to brooding, something out there in the world that damanded immediate attention.

  Ninety-two pounds! It was an outrageous sum of money, as Dad knew very well since he had paid for the very similar (if not identical) over-bath rail at Trees. It was clear that Downing had given the work to some top-drawer contractor, then passed the mark-up on to us. It wasn’t even as though the college had been required to provide a hoist. I had brought my own. Technically I suppose it was Dad who had brought it along, loading it in the back of the car that had escorted me to Cambridge. It was made by the same Everest and Jennings who had made my first electric wheelchair, inferior predecessor of the Wrigley, and it wasn’t anything fancy. It was really only the motor from one of their chairs, lightly modified. Instead of the relays required to power a chair, there were two strings, a green and a red. Green for Go and red for Stop. Heaven help you if you’re colour-blind – but not in itself an elaborate piece of equipment.

  The Cromer family rail

  I didn’t even understand the principle behind sending Dad a bill. Was the idea that we would sell the rail back to the college when I left, minus depreciation calculated on some standard basis, or were we entitled (perhaps required by law) to rip it out and take it with us out into the wider world? Would we be sued for negligence at a later date if we left the Cromer family rail – a horizontal funicular only suited to the most unadventurous sightseer – disfiguring Downing’s handsome bathroom ceiling?

  Dad had no one to ask, but I did. Every Cambridge college assigns to its students an official whose job is to defend their interests, against the college itself if need be. This is their tutor. I was up against exactly the sort of situation for which the tutor system was designed, so I went and complained to mine.

  When I say ‘I went and complained’, of course it wasn’t as simple as that. Nothing is ever that simple. To get help from my tutor I needed an appointment with him, and to get an appointment I needed help from someone else, someone to carry notes back and forth on my behalf. The
system was essentially the same as what Mrs Osborne used to send messages in Tiruvannamalai, except that she had the benefit of a large stock of boys clamouring to be chosen. Perhaps the simplest method in Cambridge would have been to send someone with a message to my tutor’s pigeon-hole in the Porter’s Lodge, but there was no guarantee of a swift response and I felt that this was an emergency of some diffuse sort.

  I had been assigned a tutor on the same basis as everyone else, which was splendidly egalitarian but unrealistic, since what I really needed was a tutor with rooms at ground level. As it was, I had to be carried up two flights of stairs before I could begin to make my case. Each time I asked someone for such a favour of portering, I felt I was depleting my stock of social credit in the college, and well on my way to becoming a nuisance.

  I was already forfeiting any possibility of getting a good review for my time as an undergraduate, the sort of favourable verdict that goes A thoroughly successful experiment! An object lesson in how social inclusion can be made to work …

  We hardly knew he was there.

  The physical remoteness of my tutor was another version of institutional tunnel vision, like the bellpush that Marion Wilding of Vulcan School always mentioned as an example of the thoughtlessness of the outside world, well in reach of everyone but the disabled people it was installed to help. Still, if Mohammed will not come to the mountain then the mountain must come to Mohammed. The mountain was always having to stir stumps in my Cambridge days. The mountain had a fair few miles on the clock before long.