I spoke the first Spanish words that came into my head. ‘Mañana Domingo de Pipiripingo,’ I sang out, taking great care with the pronunciation, ‘Se case Juanito con una mujer que no tiene manos y sabe coser …’
I could have done better with a bit of planning, but who plans for concussion? Telling a stranger that tomorrow on Wittering Sunday Juanito is marrying a woman with no hands who’s good at sewing, was no way to prove my command of my faculties.
I fell back on English. ‘Please give me the hypodermic. I’m quite capable of anæsthetising myself. I know where the pain is, don’t I? It’s my body, not yours.’
‘I’m not allowed. It breaks the rules.’
‘I won’t tell.’
He was being very unreasonable. He wanted to play doctor even more than I did. I won’t say he botched the injection, but it’s a fact that a local anæsthetic depends for its effectiveness on the concentration achieved at the nerve fibre. That’s why it’s called a local, for heaven’s sake! If he had let me do it I’m sure I would have scored a bull’s-eye. He was shaking his head so fiercely to discourage me that he didn’t quite get the needle in the right place, and a shed tear of Lignocaine dribbled its cold way down the side of my head. Spanish body language has its drawbacks.
After that my mood of omnipotence passed and I was content to let someone else put in the stitches. I’ve still got a little scar over one eyebrow, but I can’t say it bothers me particularly. Nor did I give up the unauthorised frying after my little mishap, though I was more careful when bowling along with an incriminating pan.
Anyway, that’s the story behind the legend which attached to me after that (The Hard-Core ‘Vegetarian’ Who Tried to Sneak a Black-Pudding Fry-Up When No One Was Looking). As if the blood in the pan had been on the menu all along.
As for other appetites, well … in some ways the twenty-year-old Cambridge undergraduate was very different from the twenty-year-old who had gone to India the previous summer, hell-bent on celibacy. I had learned that suppressing desires only leads to explosions lacking in any possible dignity. My new watchword was moderation rather than abstinence, but I had stumbled on to a rather promising definition of true moderation.
The old man must resort to the poker
Klaus Eckstein, all-round man that he was, was always going on about the essays of Montaigne, writing Que scais-je?, his motto, on the blackboard for us to ponder. What do I know? Not a bad slogan, though I was more interested in the question of who wanted to do the knowing in the first place. Still, according to Eckstein, Michel de Montaigne had known himself as well as anyone ever had. I told him how much I disliked French as a language, and he told me there was a famous early translation, enjoyable in its own right. John Florio, contemporary of Shakespeare. Eckstein was probably thinking of my essay on Lorca when he added that strangely enough, this nobleman with a wife and family had in his writings expressed the deepest feelings not for them, but for another man. His best friend Etienne de La Boétie.
Grudgingly I got hold of the book, through Mrs Pavey of course. Almost the first thing that my eyes fell on was this marvellous sentence: ‘One should (saieth Aristotle) touch his wife soberly, discreetly and severely, lest that tickling-too-deliciously pleasure transport her beyond the bounds of reason.’ There was plenty more in that vein, but what struck me with great force was something that Montaigne expounds elsewhere, viz. that the ideal of moderation should work in both directions, not only lessening what is excessive but amplifying what is insufficient. Moderation should be both curb and whip, as circumstances dictate. Montaigne could be very matter-of-fact about sexual activity, defining it as the ‘tickling delight of emptying one’s seminary vessels’ which becomes faulty only by immoderation. He was very big on the tickling, was dear old Montaigne, but also on the moderation.
So what was my position in his scheme? Well, I didn’t need to push suitors away with my crutch and my cane. If as Montaigne suggested, An unattempted Lady could not vaunt of her chastitie, then nor could I. If I wasn’t an unattempted Lady, then I was pretty much an unattempted Lad.
Montaigne was particularly eloquent when addressing the subject of old age and the waning of the powers. The young man should damp down the blaze of his ardour, the old man must resort to the poker to get a blaze going. Young men should control their desires, old men should cultivate them. The imperative of moderation, though, underlies both cases. It is just as much a virtue for an old man to ginger up his appetites as it is for a young man to rein them in.
In this context, I was at twenty an honorary codger. Youth was no part of my portfolio. My birth year was relatively recent, but that wasn’t enough by itself to make me young. As a man in a wheelchair my desires were everywhere an embarrassment and an inconvenience. I was expected to behave decorously, miming impotence, tactfully impersonating a pensioner in glandular terms, passions safely in the past. But moderation required the opposite. Moderation required excess for the proper balance.
So I took the opposite vow from the one I had taken before I visited India, the vow of celibacy that had ended with such a disconcerting burst of imagery. I vowed non-celibacy, sexual exploration in any direction that opened itself to me. Systematic debauchery on principle, whether I felt like it or not. This was at least a vow that might yield some fun along the way. The times were right for exploration rather than for abstinence. People had a new dread of being thought to be narrow-minded, which might serve my purpose. I had more to fear from not trying than from taking every chance that was offered, and making chances where there were none.
At Cambridge I saw more films than ever before or since. There were many cinemas, and most colleges had a film society of some sort. It may even be that my cinema-going in those years had a spiritual dimension, though it was hidden from me at the time. I was struggling with a sense of spiritual dryness, and it seemed ridiculous that I had ever thought of being on a Quest. That capital letter had suffered a dwindling along the way. The word itself had lost its vivid promise, the sense of illumination being just around the corner. My sense of discipleship often seemed to be unravelling, though the guru never let me go.
In his teachings Ramana Maharshi used the cinema as a source of images even more than the radio. The spectators of a film, for instance, attend to the images which replace themselves on the screen with such deceptive smoothness. No one gives a thought to the screen, although without it there could be no projection of the film. The screen is the same whether or not a film is being shown, just as the self is the same in sleep and waking. It is unchanged by what flickers across it – a filmed flood has no power to wet it. A filmed conflagration does not scorch.
A few years later, as if going out of their way to contradict this strain of Hindu mystical thought, the makers of Earthquake came up with a film about an earthquake which actually shook its spectators, at least in cinemas equipped with the Sensurround system, whose speakers emitted low-frequency vibrations so as to produce real tremors. But that was just showing off.
Of course when I had paid my money to get into the Arts Cinema, or the Victoria or the ABC, I was watching the projected pictures like everyone else, letting my mind be ruled by images and ignoring the screen itself. But at some level I was keeping faith with the idea of self-enquiry, even so.
It was important for me to make it a habit of going out, not to surrender to blank evenings in A6. As a schoolboy I had gone to films as part of a group, coasting along with the social momentum. Now I had to plan expeditions on my own, but I was nevertheless drawn to the cinema.
The leather belt of office
One evening I went to see Wild Strawberries at the Arts Cinema with a boy I knew slightly from German lectures. Noel was an angelic little blond, if angels can have snub noses. His was a type I don’t much care for but he was presentable, undeniably.
He seemed very young, even for those days, when freshers arrived with their mothers’ kisses still evaporating from their cheeks, and the scarves their aunts had k
nitted wound tightly round their necks.
I liked the way that, after a lecture, he just watched with amusement as our fellow students either made themselves scarce or squared up to volunteering to help me, as if they were signing up for years of military service. Noel seemed to find this comical, which was very much the perspective I aspired to myself.
There was no real significance to our going out together. We just arranged, after a lecture, to meet at the cinema. The choice of film was an accident from my point of view – Noel had mentioned in conversation that he would be going, and I had asked to tag along. I knew that without a definite social obligation I would back out of the expedition and all its uncertainties.
I had the sneaky feeling that our arrangement was asymmetrical. If I didn’t turn up Noel would have no difficulty proceeding with his evening, but if he didn’t turn up I was stymied. Before I set out I did what students so often did at the time, when puzzled over questions great or small. I would consult the Book of Changes, the yarrow-stalk oracle – the I Ching. I used the Westernised coin-throwing option rather than the traditional version with the yarrow stalks, although with my contacts at the Bot I should have been able to come up with the authentic flora. My question, of course, was ‘How am I to dissolve myself into the life of this indifferent city while continuing to ask “Who am I?”?’ The reading that came up always seemed to be The leather belt of office will be given and taken away three times in one day. Lovely, poetic, highly suggestive, but what I wanted was more along the lines of Go to the flicks with someone you hardly know – make it something arty.
I could have asked Noel to collect me from Downing, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was forcing myself to put in the effort, hoping that there would come a moment when I stopped noticing all the hard work I was doing. That was the moment I would find my place among the mobile.
The Arts Cinema lay down its own little passage off Market Hill (a hill which isn’t a hill at all, thank God, but a square with a slight tilt), so it was particularly unhandy for me to get to, even in a city of awkward access. Cambridge and above all its university is strongly fortified even against the able-bodied – the grass is always greener in the Fellows’ Garden, and that’s out of bounds to students except for the occasional summer party.
I hitch-lifted my way out of the car and into the wheelchair, but no one seemed to be going my way, and I ended up having to punt myself laboriously down Arts Cinema Passage.
When I arrived, Noel was looking at the showcases of stills from forthcoming attractions. Rather daunting attractions: troubled Nordic eyes and stern cheekbones gazed out of the cases. It must have been a Bergman season. Noel turned to greet me with a dazzling smile, as if he too was about to be photographed, wanting his expression to be at its peak of bloom when flashbulbs exploded to record it.
The ushers at the Arts were normally students themselves, friendly rather than businesslike. They watched with interest as I gave Noel instructions about propping me against the wall while he collapsed the wheelchair, then toting me into the cinema. Noel seemed happy to be observed coping so splendidly. Good luck to him! He might not enjoy the same level of attention if it came along every minute of the day.
When we were in the modest little auditorium I indicated a couple of empty seats in the middle of a row. That’s where I wanted us to sit. Why should I have a sidelong view just to save him a little trouble? Let him earn his keep. ‘They’re numbered seats, John,’ he whispered, ‘and ours are here.’
‘Tell you what, then,’ I said. ‘We’ll move if we’re asked.’ I wasn’t normally so bolshie, but I wanted to make clear that I wasn’t just a charity parcel. You like being conspicuous? I’ll give you conspicuous.
As Noel carried me along the row of seats I could feel little extra movements in his arms, which made me suspect that he was shrugging every few feet, to convey an apology to the people we were disturbing. Terribly sorry. This is what he’s like.
He needn’t have bothered. The people in those seats couldn’t do enough to oblige us. They were practically hurling themselves out of our way. They’d have lain flat on the floor if they’d thought it would help, they would have stood on the backs of their chairs. It’s wonderful what a little embarrassment can do. Most of the time I work hard to put people at their ease, but once in a while it’s good to let rip and have everyone cower in their Englishness.
Then in the dark I had to revert to a meeker style. I found that I couldn’t see the bottom of the screen – and consequently the subtitles – so I had to ask Noel to improvise a cushion for me out of his rolled-up coat. I certainly wasn’t going to allow him to ask for one of the cushions they keep for children’s screenings. Before I had new hips installed my position in a cinema seat was more upright, since I wasn’t actually sitting. It was more that I was leant against the seat like an umbrella. Still, it’s not something you can expect to find in even the smallest print, is it? Warning: artificial hips may limit your enjoyment of foreign-language films.
As the film got into its dour stride I realised that there were compensations to having company. Noel had brought along some butterscotch. Not just any butterscotch but the good stuff, Callard & Bowser’s, which came in an oddly fortified packet, braced with cardboard, wrapped first in paper and then cellophane. Perhaps it still does. In those innocent days of packaging, it was a very distinctive product. It suggested a childish treat that was only accessible to deft and determined adult fingers. The sweet itself came in double tablets, wrapped one more time in a sturdy lined silver paper which retained traces of the sticky virtue it had wrapped and kept safe.
The naked butterscotch
The double shape of the sweet suggested that a mother might snap it in two where the brittle toffee narrowed, before popping one tablet in her child’s mouth and one in her own. Personally I had always favoured sucking the sweet entire, though the double tablet would hardly fit in my mouth. The opposite ends of the flat finger of burnt sugar poked at the insides of my cheeks in a way that was almost painful, until the oral solvents had done their leisurely work.
Noel asked in a whisper if I wanted him to unwrap the butterscotch for me. Why ever not? I wasn’t in the mood for handicraft. He got points for treating me as his equal in greed – it didn’t seem to occur to him to snap the tablet in two. He posted the naked butterscotch into my mouth, his fingers brushing past my lips in a way that I didn’t find presumptuous or unpleasant. Then my consciousness slid back into the film and all its radiant gloom.
At the end of the showing I stayed put, and not only because it would be foolish to make a move immediately, before the lights were put on, and be jostled in the crush. It was still my habit to watch the screen till the very last credit.
To me it was a tiny crime not to finish a film or a book or even a record. I stood firm even on the issue of ‘Within You Without You’ at the beginning of Side Two of Sergeant Pepper, when everyone else wanted to plunge the needle straight into ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. I fought many battles on behalf of George Harrison’s rotten pseudo-Indian song.
Swedish end-credits were no less entitled to sympathetic vibration than English ones, sympathy being distinct from understanding, and many of the names were beguiling in their own right. After Wild Strawberries, Noel had the sense to humour me, perhaps seeing from the set of my body that I wasn’t prepared to budge just yet. He set off to retrieve the wheelchair, which had been tucked in the box office for safe-keeping.
As we left the Arts, Noel scanned the dispersing crowd while remaining attached to me. ‘Are you looking for someone?’ I asked, but he said no, he was all mine. When we reached the car, I asked if there was somewhere I could drop him – an absurd idea, since he lived in Christ’s, barely a hundred yards away. Even I could walk that distance, though perhaps not in one go. ‘Do you want me to see you home?’ he asked, as if I was a debutante at a dance. I was going to tell him not to bother – how did he think I coped on a daily basis? – when I realise
d that by this time the Tennis Court Road gate would be closed. I would need to get someone to open up, and I might as well take Noel along. He could scamper into the Porter’s Lodge and make the request on my behalf. It isn’t easy to summon people with a toot on your horn without seeming lordly.
The colleges were still officially sealed by a ten o’clock curfew, but in practical terms they were porous. Authority was crumbling of its own accord, without needing to be actively overthrown. It was common knowledge which sets of railings offered easy informal access to the various colleges. Monumental architecture offered any number of handholds to youth and recklessness stoked by beer. The back streets of the town were full of excited young men, clambering up and sliding down. Some stretches of railing saw heavy traffic even on weeknights.
If men were reckless mountaineers of the railings after dark, then women still liked to be climbed up to, rather than doing the climbing themselves. They had a rooted preference for Juliet’s rôle in the balcony scene, looking down on her swain as he ascended, sweating and cursing, with a bottle of rock-bottom Hirondelle from his college buttery sticking precariously out of his jacket pocket.
The women’s colleges made an effort to discourage such overnight visitors, but it was no more than a show of discipline. One second-year in my college spent most nights in New Hall. While his girlfriend dutifully entered by way of the Porter’s Lodge he would shin up the wall (the modernist architecture of the college offering as many aids to climbing as the Gothic) and in through her window. His route was much quicker than hers – he boasted that by the time she reached her room he would be waiting for her in bed, wearing her nightie for that androgynous 1970 frisson, and with the kettle sighing its way to the boil.
There were times when it seemed as if I was the only one to whom a curfew still applied, though any number of undergraduates solemnly assured me that I could safely be transferred by a chain of hands over the railings in Trinity Lane, the wheelchair following, into Bishop’s Hostel in Trinity and out again whenever I wanted. I never dared to accept such offers. To be transported by many hands, like a crumb at a picnic being carried off by a thousand ants, was a frightening prospect. People seemed keener to convey me over the railings of colleges after hours than to help me get to lectures in the mornings, which would have made far more difference to my university life.
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