Cedilla (19 page)

I wondered if Pete Townshend the guitarist wasn’t mildly disabled. He didn’t seem to have much mobility in his right elbow. Instead of strumming the strings in the normal way he would send his arm the long way round, to describe a full circle before it crashed into the strings. He certainly wasn’t letting disability hold him back, unless it was part of the show after all.

It turned out that some Burnham boys were at the concert too, and they decided to get in on the act, shooing the girls away from the handles of the Wrigley. Further proof of the irrelevant truth that girls were nicer than boys. The boys would never have thought of my preferences by themselves, but now they wanted to use me as a pretext for showing off in front of my original helpers.

They were stronger, but their handling was much less satisfactory. They couldn’t resist joining in with the rhythms of the music, until I felt I was being treated as an extension of Keith Moon’s drum kit. When they put me down in a break between songs I scooted off to the side where I could concentrate on the sound, bearing down on me from speakers twice my size, without bothering with the pictures.

After the concert I notched the motor into slow gear because of the crowd. An official attached to the group or the hall said that I should leave by the back entrance. The moment I was out on the pavement I notched the Wrigley into top. I didn’t know I was about to pass the Stage Door until it opened in my path. Out came a man with his arm round a small woman who looked Indian. He was so intent on her that he didn’t see me at first. Even when he looked up he didn’t seem to take in what was bearing down on them. For my part I was more enamoured of my rapid progress than of him. Top speed in the
confines of that little alleyway in Slough seemed much faster than the same speed out in the open.

At a late stage of my careering progress I recognised Roger Daltrey. By that stage of his life, he had perhaps lost the habit of getting out of the way for anybody. But then so had I. At that speed, a swerve in the Wrigley would have meant capsizement and disaster. The wheelchair and I would be helpless on the pavement, a compound beetle on its back in Slough rather than Prague. A second before impact, Roger must have realised what was about to happen, and leaped backwards with a yell of ‘Hooooo!! What’s
that
!?’ His look of horror as he lurched to safety didn’t improve a face that was always rather too craggy for my taste. I do like a smooth face. The sleek will inherit the earth, if I have anything to do with it.

Of course in my way I was star-struck nonetheless, and would have been happy to report to my schoolmates that the great Roger Daltrey had patted my back and thanked me for coming. As it was, I cheekily called, ‘Cheers, Rodge – great show’ over my shoulder and kept on rolling. ‘Over my shoulder’ represents not a physical movement but a sort of boomerang trick of vocal projection.

As I left the scene and headed in the direction of the railway station, the exhilaration of being at large in Slough at the controls of the mighty Wrigley took over, and blew away any lingering cobwebs. The juggernaut factor was high. A tune started up in my brain, and not one that I’d heard played at the concert. Not ‘Happy Jack’, not ‘Pictures of Lily’, not ‘My Generation’. A classic of the ’sixties, nonetheless, with a lazy swagger all its own. Two finger-clicks, and then a crooned, self-satisfied phrase. Not that I could click my fingers even approximately, but I could hear the sound distinctly and visualise it perfectly well. The fingers are braced against each other until the resistance (technically friction) of the skin is suddenly overcome, and the middle finger slams satisfyingly into the palm (though it is the beginning of its journey that makes the noise, not the end). ‘
{Click}
{click}
–
King of the Road …
’

With the Wrigley, though, I was only a prince of the pavement,
minor royalty at best. To crown my independence I would need to learn to drive a car.

We say ‘clicking your fingers’, but the Elizabethans thought of it differently – there’s a bit in
Sejanus
about statues of Jove clicking their marble thumbs. Ben Jonson – A-level set book. Obviously you need them both, the middle finger (is it?) and the thumb. Perhaps this mystical percussion was the first fruit of the opposable thumb. Perhaps we came down from the trees communicating by clicking our fingers at each other. Click click: your turn to do the hunter-gathering today. Click click: I did it yesterday. Click click: Say that one more time and I’m going back to my mother.

After she had been so helpful at the concert I could hardly avoid becoming friends with Barbara Broier, despite my prejudice against girls. She was a lovely person.

Barbara told me that she had a pet squirrel. ‘What’s his name?’ I asked, ‘Cyril?’ ‘No,’ she said, looking at me as if I was mad, ‘he’s called Fred.’ She had found him injured on the road and had nursed him back to health. I became very matey with her and was finally invited to meet her Polish father.

She lived in Cookham. Barbara was brainy, polite and well spoken, and it followed that her father was gruff and rather alarming. Barbara was not pretty. Those who have put themselves out to be helpful to me have not in general been pretty. When a pretty person has been helpful it has made a deep impression on me, of which I am rather ashamed.

In general terms I feel sorry for pretty people – they’re hemmed in by the possibility of losing face, which holds a disproportionate fear for them since they experience it so rarely. As for which is the consolation prize, good looks or independence of mind, I really couldn’t say.

Before I was allowed to meet Fred I had to have a chat with Barbara’s Dad. He was in a sense the gatekeeper of the squirrel. He had difficulties with the ‘
r
’ sound, which I’m sure exists in Polish, so it must have been some sort of impediment. His
r
’s all came out as aspirated
g
’s. He told me a story about a ghoom in Slough – if you ghented the ghoom for the night, that was the end of you. Your throat was slit with a ghazor while you slept. Your body fell down a trap-door and was turned into a sausage or even a ghissole. It was the Sweeney Todd legend, essentially, with some variation in the meat
products and the scene shifted to our neck of the woods, though I didn’t know the original story at the time.

Barbara had said that her dad liked people who stood up to him, and I did my level best. I said that if people didn’t insist on eating meat in the first place such murders couldn’t be covered up so easily. Just try passing off human flesh in a cheese omelette or an egg salad and see how far you get. Barbara’s dad gave a little bark of a laugh at that, and from then on he took a shine to me in quite a big way.

I liked Fred the squirrel very much, when I was finally shown him, and wanted to touch. Apparently, though, he was likely to bite or scratch, so that aspect of the visit fizzled out. Before I left, though, Mr Broier offered me a glass of tea wine. I’d never heard of wine being made of anything but grapes and was intrigued. It turned out he made it himself. The process involved spreading yeast on a piece of toast and floating it on top of a mixture of tea, lemon and sugar in a bucket, till it fizzed and slowly fell to pieces. More than anything I wanted to see that.

When I got home, even while Dad was driving me home, I started to preach the gospel of home-made wines. I had Mum running to the library to get books, and recruited Dad to make trips to Boots the Chemists for demijohns and airlocks (they had to be glass, not plastic). I put Campden tablets on the shopping list, along with fruit and raisins. Soon we had flagons bubbling away in airing cupboards, for the initial rapid fermentation. Then we transferred them, in the absence of a cellar, to cooler areas on the east side of the house for slow maturing.

I became too impatient to wait for Mrs Pavey to order more advanced books through the library, and started sending off for them myself. I learned that sugar, being a disaccharide, was alien to the human digestive system, so we should convert it (or semi-convert it) to a monosaccharide. I lectured the household in general and Dad in particular about the unhealthiness of sugar. I wasn’t happy about the long-term effects of the first batch we made without converting the sugar, about six gallons of it. We decided that it should be labelled
‘disaccharide, suspect, o.t.v.w.d.m.l.’ The letters stood for ‘offer to visitors we don’t much like’.

I made experiments. I took sugar in large quantities, added lemon juice and a little water and boiled it at the correct temperature, testing attentively with a jam-maker’s sugar thermometer, until everything turned a pale golden colour. All these verbs of action – ‘made’, ‘took’, ‘added’, ‘boiled’ and so on – represent acts of delegation. I was learning that Dad could be smoothly enrolled into a practical project. He was only uncoöperative when dealing with people directly, without working towards something definite.

I warned him that the cooking process would continue for quite a while after turning off the gas, but he thought he knew best and overcooked the syrup, ending up with a great pan of molasses which he stoically ate on his cereal and drank in his coffee until it was finally all gone and he could look forward to breakfast-time again.

Finally we got it right, decanted the syrup into bottles and used it as our stock. The new semi-inverted sugar refracted light ninety degrees the other way. The first batch of wine made with it seemed miraculous. The syrup dissolved sweetly into the must, fermentation was smooth and very fragrant. The esters floated off the oranges and fruits, and we were all in joy. From that point onwards we really got going, gaining in confidence and also in ambition. We made wine from rose petals, from clover, from nettles, from lettuce, from potatoes, from rhubarb.

We were perfectionists who would never dream of using pectin to clear a cloudy wine (it bonds to the starch and sinks out in the lees). Without pectin it was virtually impossible to clear potato or rice wine, but the trick could be managed with parsnip, if you had the knack. I seemed to have the knack.

My memory of family life is of a constant thwarting, yet when I came up with such a project Mum and Dad would help me to carry it out. Perhaps I really did have some sort of hypnotic ascendancy over them in those years. I wish I’d known – I’d have worked them harder. Half of what I have done in life has come from hypnotising other people. The other half from hypnotising myself.

With Dad in particular I got on better when we had something in hand, something to generate the slow rhythms of companionship. The
books had all said ‘If you can bear the wait (the hardest part of wine making!) let it mature for two or three years.’ For us that was easy. Making wine was the point, not drinking it. We had so much wine by now that we had to store the surplus flagons in the conservatory-greenhouse-sun lounge, where it roiled in slow motion with the dull excitement of fermentation.

Barbara Broier tried to keep me in the swim with school gossip and school crazes, all the things which tended to pass me by. People wouldn’t go to the trouble of filling me in. I can’t say I missed it. There’s something about leaning over a Tan-Sad (or any other disability conveyance) which is mildly shaming to both parties.

There were riddles which passed round the school like verbal measles. Barbara wanted to be sure I developed immunity like everyone else. So she would say, ‘This is a good one, John.
Antony and Cleopatra
were lying on the floor surrounded by broken glass and water. How did they
die?
Let me know if you’d like a clue.’

‘Righto, Barbara. Thanks.’

Then she couldn’t leave me alone. ‘Have you worked it out yet, John?’

‘Not yet. But I’m enjoying not being able to work it out.’

‘Shall I tell you now?’

‘Not yet, if you don’t mind.’ It became obvious that she did mind. The suspense of keeping me in suspense was more than she could bear. She was bursting with it. ‘Tell you what, Barbara. Why don’t you tell me another one? That might make you feel better.’

‘Then can I tell you the answer to the first one?’

‘I suppose so. Is there a time limit? Am I being very stupid?’

‘No, John, it’s not that. Don’t you want to know the answer?’

‘Oh yes, but at the moment I’m enjoying the wait.’

‘You’re impossible. Okay, here’s another one.
A man goes into a bar
and asks for a glass of water. Instead the bartender produces a gun from
behind the counter and points it at him. After a few moments the man says,

“Thank you” and goes out. What’s going on?
’

‘Oh, I like that one. It’s even nicer than Antony and Cleopatra.’

‘Well, which answer do you want first?’

‘At the moment I don’t want either, thanks all the same. I’ve got a lot to think about, what with Antony and Cleopatra and the man in
the bar with the glass of water and the gun. Have you noticed, by the way, that there’s water and glass in both puzzles?’

‘No, John, I haven’t noticed and it isn’t important.’ Then she stalked off, saying rather irritably over her shoulder, ‘Let me know if you change your mind.’

I’m not an innocent. I knew exactly how annoying I was being. Of course, negation is the only, rather feeble, form of power available to me, the disadvantage being that I can only use it against people who are actually trying to deal with me, and who might be felt to deserve better. Certainly Barbara Broier deserved better.

But there was more to it than that. I wasn’t being insincere, though it was intoxicating to see that everyone, potentially, could be strung along. I did enjoy the puzzles as things in themselves. I was almost ready for some Zen koans.

Try to see your original face, the one you had before your parents gave you
birth.

The wind is not moving. The banner is not moving. Your mind is moving.

Does your bean curd lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight?

Eventually Barbara came storming up to me and said, ‘For heaven’s sake, John! Antony and Cleopatra suffocated. They were goldfish! The man in the bar had hiccups – that’s why he wanted the glass of water, to cure them. And the shock of the bartender producing a gun cured them anyway – that’s why he said Thank You!’