Cedilla (13 page)

Peter would be exercising rather self-consciously in the sunlight with the chest-expander Dad had given him for his birthday, two wooden handles connected with woven elastic ropes. As his powers increased he was supposed to add more of these ropes, clipping them to rings on the handles. Eventually the chest-expander would have six strings, like a guitar, though currently he was stranded at the banjo stage with four – but still, he was stringing and tuning his teenaged vigour as if it was an actual instrument. He was proud enough of his progress to exercise where he could be seen, shy enough to keep the operative area out of sight by wearing an ærtex shirt rather than a singlet.

Even Gipsy joined in the harmonious mood, an ageing dog these days, sedately romping. By now her hips were more or less on a par
with my substandard ones, though of course she made no exorbitant demands on them for balance. They held her up without any trouble, it’s just that they moved rather stiffly and made her unwilling to risk the blithe jumps of her youth. Dogs’ hips don’t last for ever. Mine at least had improved with age, thanks to the visionary butchering of Mr Arden.

Dad, of course, retreated to the greenhouse in protest at the din, but gave the game away by leaving the door open a few inches. The elementary particles of sensation had always seemed to stream right through Dad, or to bounce off him. His pain threshold was high, his pleasure threshold higher still. Perhaps this was only the side of him we saw, but we saw a lot of it. It took mighty waves of positively charged experience to provoke the smallest interior ripple of enjoyment. He preferred to go through life without being obliged to provide emotional commentary.

There must be a benefit, for the species if not for the individual, in the refusal of joy. A hedon is the unit of pleasure, just as a dolor is the unit of pain. The hedon isn’t recognised by any authority, not even one as marginal as a Swedish university research project. Still, it’s logically necessary, even if I just this minute made it up.

Hedon radiation was agitating every molecule of the shed, hedons were pulsing and throbbing like fireflies, tickling the soft palate of anyone within range like inhaled lemonade. Strong California sunshine trapped in grooves of black plastic was converted back into the visible spectrum by the travelling prism, tip down, of the stylus on the family record player. Our English summer was given substance by the American one on the record.

Even Dad couldn’t hold out against the Beach Boys for ever. Sustained hedon bombardment day after day, relentless, was bound to find the chink in the shed, and Dad’s armour. It took its toll. Dad’s resistance was high but he wasn’t quite hedon-proof, much (for some reason) as he might want that.

One day he was watering the garden while Mum was playing the song indoors at the usual volume, and I could see for myself how those
good vibrations infiltrated the arm that held the hose. Whenever that peculiar passage came round when an unearthly electronic instrument goes
OOOWEEEYOOO OOOWEEEE
like an ecstatic banshee, Dad would move the hose in luxurious loops and spirals. Random beds and plantings in the garden got the benefit of a more generous, carefree sprinkling, the moisture subtly ionised by Dad’s grudging pleasure in the song.

There came a day when I caught him whistling bits of the tune. Dad’s was a generation of whistlers. They whistled when they were cheerful and also when they weren’t. They whistled their way into the War, and those who came back were still whistling, when it ended, with a fair approximation of nonchalance.

In later life they whistled as they washed the car, as they tidied the tools in the shed, and on their way to the funerals of their contemporaries, though it was always considered poor form to reproduce much in the way of a tune. And now Dad, despite himself, was whistling a song he wanted to hate. I looked enquiringly at him, hoping he would admit to liking and enjoying something that we all loved, but he didn’t respond. It would be too much of a loss of face to come clean and admit that not all songs with guitars in them were infantile rubbish. That would mean, somehow, that we had won, if he ever admitted he was just as much seduced by this luminous summer anthem as anyone else.

There was a similar pattern of behaviour on the rare occasions we went to a restaurant for any sort of celebration meal. Dad would start to rally his troops immediately after pudding, and I would ask, ‘Can we have some coffee, please Dad?’

‘No point, John,’ he would say. ‘We’ll have it at home where they know how to make it. Everyone knows the coffee here is intolerable.’

‘Have you tasted it yourself?’

‘I expect so.’ Dad didn’t enjoy telling actual lies, untruths without any blurring at their edges. He didn’t have much of a gift for equivocation, come to that. He was a little better at changing the subject, but I was too fast for him.

‘Try to remember. Have you had the coffee here?’

He looked at the corner of the room. ‘Possibly not.’

‘Then how do you know it’s so bad?’

‘Experience and common sense.’

‘It isn’t experience if you haven’t experienced it, and it can’t be common sense if it’s not sensible.’

‘It seems I must order some intolerable coffee in order to pander to the prejudices of my son.’

‘Yes please, Dad.’

‘Waiter! I’d like a cup of your’ – the next word was mumbled – ‘intolerable coffee, please.’

‘Yes, sir. Right away.’

When it arrived he took a small sip. ‘What’s it like, Dad?’

‘Worst coffee I ever tasted.’

‘Are you going to leave it, then?’

‘Certainly not. Senseless waste. Now put a cork in it, John. Can’t a man have a little peace in which to try not to taste his intolerable cup of coffee?’

When he had finished the cup he made a final pronouncement: ‘Positively the worst cup of coffee I ever drank or even heard of. Do you want some?’

‘Yes please, Dad.’ Of course it was delicious. But he’d already given the game away by the way he relaxed as the coffee got to work on him. His look was almost dreamy.

He wasn’t trying to be difficult. No one enjoys seeing a fixed idea go up in smoke, an axiom torpedoed. I think it gave him physical pain to change his mind.

Dad got his little bit of revenge for ‘Good Vibrations’ by commandeering the record player himself, and putting on his own favourite song again and again. Not anything by Eartha Kitt, in fact (perhaps he was more fascinated by the singer than the songs) but a song from a film – ‘Moon River’ from
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. The song wasn’t a single but a track on an album (of Andy Williams singing songs from films), so Dad had to keep returning the needle to the right place on the record by hand, instead of letting it find its own way to the beginning of the song again, as Peter did when he left the repeat lever in the up position. ‘Moon River’ is a nice enough song, and I
was quite likely to find myself humming its tune, but it never saturated the garden the way ‘Good Vibrations’ did. It didn’t have the power to charge Mum’s dowsing hand as she picked her herbs, or to make Peter’s chest-expanding exercises keep time with its beat (it didn’t really have one). After a while Dad would tire of re-positioning the needle, and we would hear other classic hits from the Henry Mancini songbook, and when the whole side of the record finished (with ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’) the time was ripe for the Beach Boys to storm the turntable all over again.

I knew there was a link between ‘Moon River’ and Audrey Hepburn, she being the star of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. My little sister had been named after that demure goddess, and perhaps the idea had been to align her with certain feminine qualities, with neatness and self-control. If so it hadn’t taken.

There was a line in ‘Moon River’ which struck me as being as mysterious as anything in ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. The song starts talking about two drifters setting off to see the world. Apparently they’re
after the same rainbow’s end, / Waitin’ ’round the bend
/ My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me …

What on earth was a ‘huckleberry friend’? I knew that a gooseberry was someone who stopped two people from being together, but as for huckleberry I was stumped. Dad didn’t know either, though he seemed irritated to admit it. Either that or he didn’t want me to know what a huckleberry friend was. Perhaps he was afraid I’d ask where his was, if I knew, or want one of my own.

There was one little thing I had kept from Marion Wilding during our final confrontation at Vulcan, that parting of the ways over incompatible visions of my future. On that occasion I presented Burnham Grammar School as the answer to a disabled boy’s prayers, a modern building throughly suited to his needs. In fact it wasn’t ideal for a pupil in a wheelchair. Far from ideal. Vulcan had been built as a castle-shaped folly, and was turned into a school for disabled boys in the teeth of its architectural allegiances. Only a tiny lift could be installed, and the inconvenience of this was felt every single day, until the new buildings allowed the dorms to move to the ground floor. Burnham Grammar School wasn’t a folly, but it wasn’t a sensible construction on my terms. Modern, yes, but lacking a lift of any sort, big or small.

We had been misinformed, before the interview. We had been reassured about the presence of a lift by people in a position to know. I suppose Dad, instead of making the call himself, might have got his secretary to do it (now that he had one) and hadn’t briefed her properly. I can see that happening. Take a letter Miss Smith. Oh, and find a school for my son. Yes, Mr Cromer, right away, sir.

So when we turned up for the interview the School Secretary was first flustered and then frosty. What business did we have accusing the school of having lifts? Who had made these false claims of suitability? Burnham Grammar School was strongly resistant to the needs of the disabled, and gave every sign of being proud of it.

Mum looked frantically at Dad, who fished a piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘Miss Cornelia Norris from County Hall, High Wycombe, that’s who,’ he said. Surely information supplied by someone called Cornelia Norris could be trusted? – otherwise the whole world was going smash.

Mum backed him up. ‘Miss Norris said there were lifts!’ Between them Mum and Dad chanted this formula three or four times. In their own way they had grasped the basic principle of the mantra. Repetition bringing its own meaning.

The secretary wasn’t spiritually susceptible to this approach. ‘Miss Norris, whoever she may be, doesn’t know what she’s talking about. There are no lifts on these premises. And never have been.’ As if this might in fact be a standard procedure, removing lifts at short notice so as to squash the educational dreams of the disabled. She stalked off into her office, where we could hear her complaining loudly about parents and education officers, and how fed up she was with the whole bang lot of them.

I had already seen the steep and terrifying stairs, and I let defeat slide into my heart. The little flame that had been burning there since that miraculous interview at Sidcot School, when I had been accepted with open arms by an institution to which I hadn’t even applied, finally snuffed it. In the case of Sidcot, only Mum and Dad had stood between me and a radiant education, but now they were on my side and still things were hopeless. I felt suddenly tired and said, ‘Can we go now? Let’s not bother to wait around. Complete waste of time.’ I felt rather bitter about it. Dad looked unsure of himself, perhaps because it wasn’t in his nature to leave a meeting without being properly dismissed. No shuffling off, no sneaking away. Then before we had a chance to beat a retreat the secretary came out again, with a rather poisonous smile, and said, ‘Mr Ashford will see you now’.

Mr Ashford was much more friendly, but also a little dismayed at what we’d been told by Miss Cornelia Norris. He was tall and lean, and he had a distant look in his eyes, something which reminded me of the co-principal of Vulcan School, Alan Raeburn. Perhaps it’s a common ophthalmic feature of teachers, produced by a mixture of concentration and vagueness, and the constant repetition required by the rôle.

All tint seemed to be fading from Mr Ashford’s face, more or less as we watched. His hair was greying and his eyes were grey already. ‘It’s a puzzle, certainly. However … one thing we do have is plenty
of boys.’ He said it again, seemingly pleased. ‘No shortage of boys.’ I thought this was a rather tactless thing to say – if the school had plenty of boys, why would they want another one, let alone a boy who was lost without a lift?

He meant something different from that. He meant that boys in bulk would stand in for the missing mechanism. The school had plenty of boys, and the boys would carry me up and down stairs. Two at the back of the wheelchair, two at the front. If by some misfortune the boys carrying me lost their grip then other boys, below me on the stairs, would perform an equally valuable service by breaking my fall, whether they saw me coming or not. Some girls might end up acting as shock absorbers too, since the school was co-educational.

‘Do you see?’ asked Mr Ashford, with a prim small smile. ‘The more that fall over lower down on the stairs, the greater will be the cushioning effect. They won’t
all
fall over and tumble down, will they? It’s elementary physics, and common sense.’

It was lunacy. It was the antipodes of common sense. Each of us individually may have had doubts about the wisdom of the proposed system – me, Mum, Dad and perhaps even Mr Ashford – but as a collective we voted for it unanimously. Legally the arrangement must have been very precarious. If anything went wrong, if I was dropped and damaged, then there wouldn’t be enough lawyers in the world to break the school’s fall. Nothing similar would be contemplated for a moment now.

The craze for litigation, though, had not yet hit these islands. In those days hardly anyone went to law no matter what injury was done them. People trapped under fallen masonry apologised for being a nuisance, signing away their rights with whichever hand was the less damaged. Perhaps the lawsuit virus was actually carried by that other invader, the American grey squirrel. Too late to eradicate it now.

Though I had doubts about the viability of the method of porterage and mass human-cushioning proposed by Mr Ashford, it wasn’t that I was sentimental about lifts. I can’t say I ever cared for them much as gadgets. In every lift I’ve ever tried to enter there’s been a cheery
chappy who says with a grin, ‘Room inside for a littl’un,’ when there patently isn’t. Perhaps it’s always the same man. I may be a littl’un, but when you factor in the wheelchair and (let’s hope) the someone to push it, it’s more of a littl’untourage. And then I’m perfectly placed, in terms of level, to catch the farts that seem to be forced out of people by the movement of the lift. Is it to do with the change of air pressure, or perhaps a side-effect of claustrophobia?

The full address of Burnham Grammar School was Hogfair Lane, Burnham, Slough. The street name referred to some ancient livestock market, I dare say, but it seemed appropriate enough. We were both taking on something unknown, the school and I, both buying a pig in a poke. On my first day at the school I turned up in the wheelchair. With my McKee pins working smoothly I could now sit down in a wheelchair reasonably convincingly. What I couldn’t do, as it turned out, was stay in place while the chair was carried up or down stairs. I perched stably enough for life on the flat but not for the amateurish toting of my peers.

That first day was nightmarish. They couldn’t keep the wheelchair level, and if it tipped I would be tipped out, and then the boys and girls who broke my fall would break me in the process. Seat belts hadn’t been thought of for wheelchairs back then – they had hardly been thought of for cars. After the first frightening day I had to regress from the Wrigley to a more primitive style of vehicle, back into the prehistoric phase of my life on four wheels. The Tan-Sad invalid carriage from long ago was dusted off – quite literally. I remember Mum disinterring it from the shed and flapping her duster at it in dismay.

One step forward and one step back. Not much of a dance, but that seemed to be what my karma had choreographed for me. I was now independent, in the sense that I was receiving a mainstream education for the first time in my whole life. In other ways I needed more help than I had for quite some time.

I had struggled over the mountains of Vulcan to find myself stuck on a plateau. The Tan-Sad symbolised this predicament – and no one wants to spend his schooldays travelling between classes in a symbol. The Tan-Sad’s wheels were fixed, so it couldn’t turn corners. It was less steerable than a supermarket trolley, though its wheels didn’t
squeak. Its great advantage was that it had a broad footplate and so wouldn’t tip me out – but it was very unwieldy, and far too heavy to be punted along by a crutch or a cane like a wheelchair. I would always need to be pushed on school premises. No more self-locomotion. No more privacy, or to put it more positively, no more solitude.

I needed to be lifted in and out of the Tan-Sad, like a baby with its pram, a demotion I felt keenly. I wanted a deepened style of relationship here in the mainstream, based on more than wheelchairs passing in the night. So much for being in the swim of a normal education. Already I felt to be swimming like a stone.

And yet in general terms the mad scheme worked. I never came to serious harm, though the experience of being carried could be terrifying. I got a few knocks from such accidents and I’m sure I dealt out plenty more, but the sea of boys always broke my fall. Ashford was right. They didn’t all go tumbling in their turn. Enough hands reached instinctively for banisters to stabilise the toppling tower. Massed pupils acted as a wildly laughing safety-net whenever the Tan-Sad broke loose from its bearers. For everyone but me it was fun and a break from routine, something that schoolchildren crave more than anything. Since then, whenever I see pop concerts on television where the singers dive ecstatically into the audience it reminds me of my schooldays, although it was never by choice that I surfed the crowd in my trundling chariot.

I had been pushed around in the Tan-Sad for years as a child, feeling both conspicuous and invisible, but the new routine made a difference. I was much more self-conscious, of course, as a teenager who was only on those premises because of his fixed desire to be independent. There was another element in play, though. Partly it was the number of people helping, but mainly of course the change of level, the element of laborious lifting, which added something almost ceremonial to my progress from floor to floor. Sometimes when I arrived safely on a landing, and my helpers set me down, there would be a little ripple of applause from the other pupils, as if I had done something remarkable, and though this was nonsense still it made people
look at me differently. Naturally the cheers were louder when I was almost dropped, but there was a stubborn feeling of carnival even without a near-disaster.

At the end of each schoolday the Tan-Sad was left in the hall of the school. I would be reunited with it the next morning before assembly, without much rejoicing.

Assembly took place in the big hall. There was a hymn, accompanied on the piano by a plump little lady with a fixed smile, though the minority of pupils who made any noise at all conspired to slow the music right down, stripping it of the slightest claim to forward motion. Roll-call, which was held in the classroom, had a strange element of apartheid. The school was co-educational but not exactly equal in its treatment of the sexes.

The rule was that boys would be called by their surnames, and girls by their first names. The intonations were different too, gruff and challenging for the boys, tender and sweet for the girls. So it would be brusque, denunciatory ‘Adams!’ for Peter Adams and murmured tentative ‘Julie?’ for Julie Chandler. A name like ‘Valerie’ became filigree on the lips of some of the teachers. Valerie was well on her way to becoming a mythological figure. Positively a dryad of Slough.

Even at this late stage of normal education, it seemed that girls were made of sugar and spice (and all things nice), boys of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. This piece of symbolic theatre was repeated at the beginning of every school day, with girls being cooed over as if they were unique and fragrant blooms, boys marked down as bleak little blobs, no improvement on the fathers whose names they were made to answer to.

Girls were nicer than boys, then. It was official, and perhaps it was even true. Certainly the girls of the school were franker and warmer in their approaches to me – but I was never willingly going to be mothered again. And as far as I could see, sistering was just mothering at a lower voltage. I knew from my years at CRX how easy it was to become an honorary girl, and it wasn’t going to happen again. Once in an incarnation was plenty.

Little chatty groups of girls came over to cultivate me. No one quite dared to come alone – but the boys were much less enterprising. Boys were very happy to push or carry the Tan-Sad, and perhaps they had some limited opportunities to spy on me, but I noticed that every now and then a boy would be despatched to ask the girls for information, to find out what I had said and what I might turn out to be like.

There were disordered refinements to the hateful system of rollcall. If two girls had the same Christian name, then one of them would be set apart with a diminutive, so that there might be one Jane and one Janie. If two boys had the same last name, their first initials would be used to distinguish them, but it would be snarled rather than neutrally spoken. The same lips which shaped ‘Valerie’ so tenderly that you could almost feel the floaty fabric of her dress spat out the initials as though they were bitter pips. The discrimination of tone became extreme when two boys made the blunder of having the same last name and the same initial as well. So it was ‘Savage,
Paul!
’ and ‘Savage,
Patrick!
’ spoken with a sort of rage, barely suppressed. How dare twins share an initial on top of everything else! It was asking for trouble.

On my first day I was upset at hearing my surname barked out so baldly. The rasping double consonant at the beginning of
Cromer
suddenly seemed tailor-made for parade-ground abuse.

Ideally I would have reformed the system, but it was more practical to gain exemption from it. I vowed I would become John in the school universally, first in class and then at roll-call. This was a strictly limited blurring of the boundaries: I wanted my name read out at roll-call in the female style, but my interest wasn’t in androgyny, only special treatment.