Easy. You don’t have to be a lawyer, a Jesuit or a diplomat to wriggle out of commitments that don’t suit you. I had given my word that I wouldn’t pass through the doors of the Senate House. I would use the windows instead. Not a very elaborate bit of wriggling, as wriggling goes.
My party took no persuading. A scout went into the building to prepare the way. Soon a window was opened from inside and I was hoisted up bodily and passed in. It wasn’t a relaxing experience, since the windows of such a grand ceremonial building were large and high off the ground. Even on the way up I wasn’t sure that there were reliable hands ready to receive me. I had a long moment of queasiness suspended over the window-sill, being transferred between teams of supporters. Then the thing was done. I had kept my narrow promise while disregarding its broader meaning.
While I was teetering over the sill I experienced a biblical twinge. The whole scene was full of New Testament echoes. Was it when one meeting was so crowded that Christ had to enter by this unorthodox route? Or did a sick man’s family resort to extreme measures to get their kinsman to the top of the queue? Either way, I was a bit shaken by the parallel, once I’d detected it. If your initials are J and C, it’s just the sort of thing you need to be on your guard against.
Inside, there was an atmosphere of celebration. People smoked dope and played guitars in the academic holy of holies, where students were admitted only for rites of passage, matriculation and graduation. But there was also an earnest side to the occupation. I remember a board being put up with a list of teach-ins and debates, from ‘By Any Means Necessary – How to Make a Molotov Cocktail Without Blowing Yourself Up’ to ‘Sister Power – The Lessons of Radical Feminism’. A crèche was signposted, though there wasn’t a child in sight.
There was also a tremendous sense of anticlimax and loss of purpose. We had made our point, hadn’t we? Whatever it was. Couldn’t we go now? No, we had to stay put indefinitely, or the whole event would fizzle.
Perhaps I was a mascot, but I was also a nuisance, bleating for veggie food when there were other priorities. I said I couldn’t be expected to live on chips indefinitely. The idea seemed to be that it was a privilege to make sacrifices for the Revolution, and mine was eating Wimpys. I wished I had a book with me, and wondered if I could come up with a medical excuse for leaving in the morning. I could say there was medicine in my room which I needed to take (but what if someone offered to fetch it?).
Early the next morning the proctors arrived and drove us from the building. We hadn’t done much to barricade doors that had been left open in the first place, and were dazed by sleep and cheap wine. It was a textbook bit of tactics – wait until the enemy is off his guard, and then scour him from the city you have pretended to cede to him. I do seriously wonder if the Vice-Chancellor at the time wasn’t in fact a military historian, seizing the chance to demonstrate the eternal relevance of his speciality.
I was asleep on the floor in the library, with someone’s coat as a mattress, when the cry went up of ‘It’s the pigs!’ Someone blearily picked me up and ran with me. Neither of us had time to put on our shoes. It didn’t matter that I was barefoot. It mattered rather a lot that he was wearing only socks, since he slipped on the staircase and dropped me.
This time there was no human providential mattress to break my fall, as at Burnham, no stoutly built Marion Wilding to absorb the impact as at Vulcan. I gave up the effort of constructing the illusion of time and space. I dropped my knitting needles, and the skein of consciousness bounced softly across a cold hard floor, unwinding as it went.
The next time I was up to the chore of creating my surroundings, I was in Addenbrookes Hospital with an unfamiliar man, formally dressed, sitting on a chair by my bed.
I don’t remember the fall itself, nothing from the moment of being routed out of the library and heading towards the stairs. If I try to force my memory all I get is an academic version of the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin, with the shiny shoes of faceless proctors replacing the implacable boots of the Tsar’s soldiers, the wheelchair standing in for the baby-carriage as it bounces helplessly down. Of course it didn’t happen that way – I wasn’t in the wheelchair, and there was no massacre on the Senate House steps. There was no massacre on the Odessa Steps either, for that matter, but there is now. That’s just the way Maya works.
My heart was on its last legs
The slightly daunting man by my bed introduced himself by saying, ‘I’m one of your nasty proctors.’ Which made me feel a little queasy and a little guilty too. My voice sounded very tinny when I answered, as protocol demanded, ‘And I’m one of your revolting students.’ Was he a guard or an interrogator-in-waiting? Perhaps my tutor had told him to hold me fast until he came in wrath.
My next concern was for the wheelchair and what had happened to it, but there it was beside my bed. This was a lesson in itself: the wheelchair had followed me to my new address like a faithful pet. My shoes too had made their own way. It all went to prove one of Ramana Maharshi’s favourite teachings, that self-enquiry is the only priority. Everything else takes care of itself.
They wanted to keep me in Addenbrookes for a night or two, under observation, but I didn’t see the fun in that. They did an ECG, which I consented to – for all the good it would do them. An ECG is all very fine, but it’s a standard procedure designed to measure a standard organ. What else could it be? But my heart is not standard. My heart is my own. Under my first diagnosis, of rheumatic fever, there was worry that my heart would be permanently damaged by the infection I was supposed to have.
Under my second diagnosis that worry was made moot. As my joints began to follow new laws during the ill-advised period of bedrest, the chest cavity was squeezed and skewed, and the heart followed suit. My heart has adjusted to new conditions, but it’s anyone’s guess how well it has maintained its functions. My diaphragm, the heart’s body habitus, is irregularly shaped, which makes the echoes hard to interpret. I have yet to meet a specialist who could decide from my ECG readings whether my heart was on its last legs or likely to beat its little drum another billion times. We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we? Household items seem to know when their guarantees run out. Perhaps I’ll feel the existential twinge which in a washingmachine immediately precedes the outpour of dirty water onto the kitchen floor.
I couldn’t wait to get out of Addenbrookes, mainly because my digestion demanded it. The wheelchair had followed me to hospital, not so the loo chair, and I badly needed to defæcate. Nurses are all very well, some of them even know their business, but I’d rather do my business in my own way.
The disturbances were serious enough for the university to commission a report into them. It commented with displeasure on dis order ‘during which a student was injured’. That’s me. If you can’t make the headlines, at least make the footnotes. It’s my only real presence in the official record between the rites of passage of matriculation and graduation, and I’m being used as a stick to beat my radical generation. No mention of the fact that it was the university’s own crackdown which caused the incident. We were snoozing happily in the library before then, safe and sound. Even without the report, though, my telephone would have been back in its original category, as far as Graëme Beamish was concerned. A lost cause. And Cambridge is not the natural home of lost causes – Oxford claims that distinction.
During the Easter holidays, in consultation with Peter, I decided it was time to try the substance which had fascinated me for so long, mescaline, which was on offer in a local pub. It would be silly to have my heart conk out with my curiosity still unsatisfied.
We had done a lot of research, one way or another. Peter wasn’t much of a reader, but I had read bits of The Doors of Perception to him, and he had spent the previous summer hitch-hiking round California and asking a lot of questions. He volunteered to be my psychedelic chaperone, and I could think of no one better for the job. I felt entirely safe with Peter, and it made sense for him to see th
e effects of the drug at close hand before he slipped into the unknown himself.
We decided to avoid Easter week itself. Even if you think you’re not a believer, that story is so strong that it’s bound to percolate into your opened mind, even if you avoid, say, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. You’d better not be playing on the railway when the express comes through, or your consciousness will be flattened like the pennies we used to leave on the tracks.
We secured our supply well ahead of time. It was mescaline I was after. LSD-25 sounded exactly like what it was, something made in a laboratory, lacking any tradition of use, an industrial product originally intended for a different purpose and opportunistically diverted when it turned out to have surprising properties. This hardly corresponded to my sense of the sacred. I wanted a proper rite of passage, dissolving the appearances and inducting me into a higher order of meaning, not some brute of a rocket which would twang me up into the mental sky to find my own way home.
Luckily there was a dealer at the Castle pub in Windsor who supposedly sometimes had mescaline. I didn’t have a sense of wrong-doing, so there was no frisson about being a stone’s throw away from the Queen’s residence. I would have liked her blessing on the enterprise.
The dealer in the pub was rather ratty-looking and couldn’t keep his eyes still. ‘Not here, not here,’ he muttered, and led the way to the lavs. Peter had spoken a lot about the importance of setting for the encounter with hallucinatory reality, but the same rules applied, I felt, more generally. My ingrained sense of the integrity of an event made me sit through all the end-titles of films. Why would it be content with a drug experience that began in furtiveness and indignity? I wanted solemnity, if not priests in robes then some closer approximation to masonic regalia than a greatcoat with some buttons missing.
I had to generate the sense of sacrament more or less single-handed, though Peter was sympathetic from behind the handles of the wheelchair. ‘What do you have for me?’ I asked gravely, but the only answer I got was ‘Two for a pound.’
‘Is this mescaline?’
‘Yeah, yeah, good stuff. How many d’you want? Two for a pound.’
‘Two doses, please.’
‘Is that two or four, then?’
‘Er … two, please. Pay the gentleman, Peter.’ The moment the money had changed hands, our friend grabbed a piece of hard Izal toilet paper from the cubicle and screwed it up round two little pills. Then he shoved the tawdry little packet into Peter’s hand and scarpered. It was all a far cry from the enlightened heyday of the Catholic church in Mexico, the slices of peyote button offered up in all reverence at Communion long ago.
Peripheral swirling
On the day itself I would trust Peter to choose a suitable spot, scenic and not too frequented. He was the one in the family who was best at buying birthday cards – from a young age he had been able to match the image to the person perfectly, and this was really only an extension of that. We had decided that the Tan-Sad was the suitable vehicle. It was better suited than a wheelchair to rough ground, and we were mindful of all the horror stories about people having ‘trips’ who thought they could fly and threw themselves off buildings. Once I was in the Tan-Sad I wasn’t going to throw myself anywhere.
The timetable of the psychedelic event took some working out. We knew the whole experience could last many hours, and we wouldn’t necessarily find it easy, living at home as we were, to hide the signs of my derangement. Since the earlier stages were the most intense, it made sense to spend them away from Trees. The later stages would be less conspicuous. On the other hand, it would be an inefficient way to make use of our time away from home if we waited to be out of the house before starting things off. So it was agreed that I should take the pill after breakfast. Half-pill, rather. We had decided on the basis of my body weight that a half would be plenty. Peter was confident that he would be able to read the signs of the drug taking effect, and would whisk me away before my behaviour made it obvious to the untrained observer.
Peter hustled me into the Tan-Sad and had me out of the house in ten minutes flat. I didn’t know what signals I had given off, and was rather startled. Apparently I had been making the shapes of words but not saying them, even when Mum wasn’t nearby. I wasn’t convinced that there was anything so very odd about this, and Peter himself had noticed that Mum could every now and then (less as we got older) work out exactly what we were thinking.
Still, it did no harm to be careful, and there was some watery sunshine. The place Peter had chosen was next to a pond near a sort of miniature weir, but well away from home and also Mrs Adcock’s. While we were on the move I experienced a certain amount of peripheral swirling, but when I was installed by the pond nothing seemed changed. Of course the picture-postcard prettiness which Bourne End possessed in such large measure is always an unstable quality. There’s always a bit of the postcard that seems to show where a body has been buried with a bone sticking out. After a while I said, ‘That’s a pound down the drain, Peter. I honestly think it was a dud. People are such twisters …’
Peter wasn’t so sure, but he was getting a little bit bored and he wanted to go and buy a bag of sweets from Mr White’s. I said I’d be fine.
The ducks on the pond were very talkative that day. One in particular kept making very meaningful quacks. I quacked back – but then I always do. Seconds later everything had changed and I was in the middle of a distinctly tetchy conversation. I was speaking Duck! An instant later, I was corrected. I was speaking Drake. The languages diverge in the matter of verbs, with females using entirely different forms.
What I was being told was that stale bread was a very poor food for any bird. I was being given instructions for wrapping up worms in leaves and tying them securely with knots of grass. I was trying to explain that this level of preparation was beyond me when a hand came round from behind the Tan-Sad and clamped down on my mouth.
I thought I was being kidnapped. I could almost smell the chloroform. Of course it was only Peter, back from Mr White’s with his sweets, trying to stop me from quacking at the top of my voice.
I calmed down then, and realised that the mescaline had come on very strongly. I made an effort to relax, and waited for the optical effects to die down. There was a sort of shimmer sweeping back and forward, an effect of tessellation as if small units were trying to assemble themselves into bigger ones, and sometimes the sunshine made everything unbearably spangly. Then as I tried to tune in to the deeper patterns of creation the distractions died away.
I tried to focus on Mescalito, the spiritual embodiment of the mescal plant (Lophophora williamsii). I don’t know if it was Mescalito – I assume so – but the god came out of a tree and started saying, ‘If you want to prove yourself, I have some friends here who I can’t do any more for. They need help with some simple things, answers to basic questions. How to carry on. Will you help them?’ I said I would, honoured to be trusted with such a responsibility.
I could communicate with the god’s friends at once, though perhaps not entirely in language. The first one I spoke to was called Sally – but then it turned out that they all were. She was very agitated, but I managed to calm her down. I had to explain about grafting and propagation, and there wasn’t much time. These creatures, whatever they were, needed help to reproduce, though it wasn’t clear that childbirth was involved. I saw four or five generations come into existence, and the elders die. Over time I was venerated for the help I brought and after four hundred years they wove me a crown of wisdom.
My mind received in drips
My awareness changed character when Peter started to push the Tan-Sad again. It was getting cold, and he had covered me up with his windcheater. It was time to go home.
Back at Trees Peter carried out the really clever part of our plan, borrowing a record of Mum’s and putting it on the old player we had in our room (when Audrey didn’t borrow it, that is). I lay there peacefully as the music turned to sculptures of perfume in my head, sifti
ng through the events of the day.
My mind received in drips what would have swamped it at a greater rate of flow. I understood now who the Sallys or Sallies were. There were personifications of the willow, also known as the sallow or salley (I knew a Yeats poem about the Salley Gardens) – in fact the weeping willows round the pond where I had been reclining in porous rapture that day. Salix sepulcralis.
Why those particular willows should have difficulty propagating themselves I didn’t know, since under normal circumstances they take root readily from cuttings and indeed anywhere that broken branches lie on the ground. But there it was. Mescalito had been concerned for them. It suddenly struck me as wonderful that the cactus god should reach out in fellow feeling to the willow, despite the remoteness of their families and the huge disparity of habitat.
I had a sense of the willow as a somehow œcumenical tree, contributing impartially to conventional and alternative medicine. The sap is heavily charged with the salicylic acid which gives us aspirin, grand-daddy of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. But why would anyone seek a remedy for colds and fevers in the willow to start with? Because it grew, as was symbolically appropriate, in cool damp places. That was before the two branches of medicine separated, and started to pretend that they didn’t share a root.
Peter had left the record sleeve propped up where I could see it. The photograph showed water in movement over a riverbed of large stones. The music expressed a serene turbulence of its own, if I’m any judge of these things. Moura Lympany playing Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. Nicolai Malko waving his willow wand in front of the Philharmonia Orchestra.
It was our idea that classical music and illegal drugs couldn’t both be present in the same room, at least in Mum’s view of the world, and so that Rachmaninoff would wash all suspicion away. An inspired notion, as long as it didn’t catch on too widely and become discredited. Dear Marje, I’m at my wits’ end about my teenaged son. He’s started listening to Beethoven. Is he taking drugs?
Cedilla Page 71
