Cedilla (66 page)

In the tub on A staircase, Kenny Court, though, I would lie there till the water grew cold. Not wallowing so much as postponing the inevitable. I knew it was going to be such an almighty effort to heave my bones out of the soapy broth and get out again.

Lowered back into the wheelchair, I had only to detach the straps from the hook and I was free, though the overall expenditure of effort had been enormous. The whole business of taking a bath single-handed was like manning some assembly line, whose only end product was myself, wet and often shivering, but with some claim to being clean.

Help getting bathed would have changed my undergraduate life more than any other single factor, but I didn’t know anyone well enough to ask and I had set myself against making friendships based on need. The most I dared do was ask a passer-by or staircase-mate to close the quarter-light window in the bathroom to keep the heat in.

A large towel is unmanageable, a small one isn’t up to the job.
Towelling was rather a frustrating process altogether, and it made sense to wait for the laws of nature to finish the job. Given time, drying is something which happens on its own.

There was no point in waiting in the bathroom when my room was so much warmer, so I would set off home in the wheelchair, discreetly draped in a towel. Remembering my school science lessons I said to myself, ‘This is no more than an observation of the phenomenon of the loss of latent heat of evaporation,’ and my body had indeed lost a lot of heat by the time I was back in my room, thanks to the movement of air (and my own trundling) in the bathroom and corridor. If I was colder then, logically, I was also drier.

Being back in the warm was a great luxury. It was tropical! It wasn’t long before I was almost dry. Of course my shoulders lost heat more quickly than my bottom, and my bottom was still damp when the rest of me was dry. Ideally, if my body had allowed the position, I would have lain face down on the bed while National Health elves with hairdryers played warm currents of air across my backside. As it was, I would ease myself up onto the carpet, whose traction enabled me to raise my bum from the seat of the chair, and then retrieve the still-damp straps from underneath me. Sometimes I would have to take them back into the bathroom personally, but usually I could ‘volunteer’ a student to take them back to the bathroom and hang them up for me ready for next time.

That sort of ‘volunteering’ can only be an emergency measure – language itself rebels against intransitive verbs being turned inside out like that, like umbrellas in a hurricane, and the social fabric is damaged by people’s helpfulness being forced instead of being allowed to open out like a blossom in its own sweet time. But as far as I was concerned, in my Cambridge period, that was just too bad. Jump to it! I haven’t got all year.

I didn’t do much home-making in my new premises, but I did pamper myself with a couple of indulgences that had been forbidden at home. First I bought joss-sticks and lit them, an act banned at home. Dad explained, ‘The thing about joss-sticks, incense, all
that sort of stuff, is … you see, they can disguise all sorts of other smells …’ And I had said, ‘I know. Isn’t it marvellous?’ I missed the point, I failed to twig. Dad wasn’t referring to the standard male fug of a shared bedroom but to the smell of cannabis. Mary Jane, goblin weed, eater of souls. No doubt cannabis made people do many strange things in those years, but one of the strangest was to make parents sniff around their children like police dogs at airports.

At Trees I had wanted a red lightbulb in my room, to make it more like a shrine, but this suggestion also created alarm. Mum and Dad didn’t seem to be attuned to the effect I wanted to create, that receptive spiritual aura. The disapproving term Mum used was ‘boudoir’, while Dad’s phrase was ‘knocking-shop’. So I simply draped a piece of red cloth over an existing bulb, and gave their opposition a united front. Fire risk. Concern for safety masked something more mysterious, a moral disapproval of coloured light. In my best surly-hippy manner I muttered, ‘You’d tax the ruddy rainbow if you could find its home address. You’re a disgrace to the Age of Aquarius.’ Not that I believed any of that guff.

Now I was free to install that questionable glow, to let my moral fibre loosen softly under its influence. Mrs Beddoes rather hesitantly installed a red bulb at my command, and soon I was happily basking in its rosy aura – the colour of life in the womb, on those sunny prenatal days – in my boudoir in Kenny Court, my yet-to-be knocking-shop.

There were ways for undergraduates to fill their calendars, short cuts to a social life – clubs and societies. These were on display at the Freshers’ Fair, to be held in the Corn Exchange. My tall staircase neighbour P. D. Hughes – Pete – said he was going, and didn’t mind giving me a push. I know I say ‘tall’ the way some people say ‘nice’, but Pete really was. He was nice and tall. He sometimes had to duck while going through a doorway designed for smaller folk. He and I lived in a constant state of amazement at the size of each other’s shoes.

The din at the Freshers’ Fair was astounding, a physical reminder that I was part of a massive intake of student flesh, perhaps the loudest noise I’d heard since The Who took the stage at Slough. I felt correspondingly oppressed and insignificant. I was hoping there
would be a Ramana Maharshi Society, since Cambridge University was alleged to be a progressive environment, but I was out of luck. The closest thing to it alphabetically was Mah-Jongg Club – not close. The closest to it in content, at least as other people were concerned, was the Transcendental Meditation Society, of which I had a holy horror. How dare this sub-guru Mahesh appropriate (and garble) the name of Maharshi?

Pete seemed not to have interests or hobbies as such. He was drawn to stalls manned by women, no matter what organisation they represented, chess club or choral society. Men outnumbered women by a factor of ten at the university, something which neither gender ever forgot. Pete, though tall and nice-looking, was awkward, conscious of the odds against his being a winner in the sweepstakes for companionship. If there was a pretty face at a stall, he asked for details of the organisation concerned. With a little encouragement he might have signed up for anything. A smile could easily have drawn him in to satanism or even stamp-collecting.

He would park me at an angle while he made a play for a young woman whose looks he liked. I wouldn’t be able to see his target from my position, but I could follow the progress of the little flirtation from the behaviour of Pete’s hands on the handles of the wheelchair. Unconsciously he would rock me back and forth, like a mother pacifying the baby while chatting to a neighbour, but since his physique was large and strong – not to mention gripped by sexual tension – his movements weren’t as smooth as he must have imagined. They weren’t at all soothing. No baby could have been lulled by such agitated pushing and pulling. It would have woken and howled. I had to bite my lip myself.

Pete accumulated a lot of leaflets and fliers, smudgily printed on rough brightly coloured paper, which he dumped in my lap while he pushed the chair. After we had left the Fair, he gathered them up and thrust them into a rubbish bin. We had been warned against the temptation, common for freshmen, of signing up for every sort of society and voluntary organisation, rather than find our own way in a relatively denuded social landscape, but we seemed in our different ways to be immune.

After a few days at Cambridge, all the same, I began to have the
nagging feeling that I had missed something. When the feeling clarified itself, it turned out to be a throwback to my first reactions at CRX. Then the question had been: I can see the hospital, but where’s the school? Now it was more complicated: I can see Downing College, the Senate House, King’s Chapel, Heffers, Lion Yard, the Corn Exchange, the Modern Languages Department, the Blue Boar and the Round Church, even the University Library (most of them, admittedly, only on the map, or while arriving in the Mini), but where’s the university? If the whole august institution had devoted itself to the
vichara
, to Self-Enquiry, asking constantly with full attention the arch-and only question
Who Am I?
, what would be its answer?

The University had a motto, of course, but it was a bit on the cryptic side:
Hinc lucem et pocula sacra
. Roughly, ‘This is where we receive enlightenment and imbibe holiness.’ But the Latin doesn’t make a complete sentence and you have to supply the missing grammar.
Hinc
means ‘from here’. Good – I’m in the right place. And the next bit is about light and holy tipples (
poculum
being a diminutive meaning a goblet or the liquid it contains, so ‘little drinks’) and it’s in the accusative, so someone is doing something to the light and holy tipples – or will do something or has done something. ‘Getting them’ is as good a guess as any, and I suppose it may as well be ‘us’ that does it. It’s all rather frustrating – or to put it another way, good practice for construing Sanskrit scriptures.

Oxford has a motto, too –
Dominus Illuminatio Mea
– also with the verb missing, but this is a pretty elementary conundrum since there aren’t hundreds of verbs which are followed by a noun in the nominative. Technically it’s called ‘taking the complement’. Verbs are shy beasts. Only a few can take a complement.

God – blank – My Light. It’s more or less on the level of Spike Milligan’s Crossword Puzzle for Idiots (One Across: first letter of the alphabet, One Down: the indefinite article).

Any guesses? You there, at the back…

And the winner is. Is.

Est
. Though actually … why shouldn’t it be
Sit
, or
Fit
or
Fiat
? Let
God be my light, God becomes my light, Let God become my light. Not a bad little mantra, when I think about it. But given the cultural atmosphere in 1970 I suppose
Sit
would be the obvious candidate for runner-up. Let It Be.

Perhaps there was something subtler involved in the whole elliptical-motto business than I noticed at the time. It’s rather suggestive: if even the motto of the place doesn’t make sense unless you supply what’s missing, then perhaps this is a sort of manifesto for the education being offered, where nothing will be served up on a plate. Nothing in fact can happen until you throw yourself into the void. More things than verbs can be ‘understood’ even when they’re not there.

Bit late to understand that now! It wasn’t that I was expecting to be spoon-fed even at the time, in fact that was just what I didn’t want. And I was unusual as a freshman in that I had actually spent time in (theoretically) educational institutions where some of my fellow pupils had very much needed to be spoon-fed, helped to masticate and swallow.

I didn’t need a welcoming committee, but I wouldn’t have minded a welcome. No doubt this is an impossibly subtle distinction, and I was just being difficult.

If you encounter difficulties for long enough, you become ‘difficult’ yourself. Karma-particles migrate from situations to the persons who find themselves in them, and before long people are saying, ‘John’s a terrific character, of course … but he can sometimes be
rather hard
work
, don’t you find?’ I hadn’t yet found the means to reverse the current, to install myself at a hub of radiant ease.

The first Saturday of term found me at a real loose end. I had great difficulty filling my time. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a feeling of confinement far more intense than I had ever experienced during the years when I was kept in bed. Entrapment clamped its lid down on me and sucked out all the air. Time crashed down on me in a tidal wave of stone. I would be struggling in this room –
with
this room – for a little eternity.

According to Hindu cosmology we live in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age many thousands of years long. I had absorbed this as an outlying part of my faith, but now I began to experience it as real.

During the Bathford years of bed rest I was isolated by a body that
was turning against itself, and by doctors’ orders that banned any sort of adventure – but now some more obscure force was holding me under, so that I experienced my liberty as house arrest.

At that moment there came into my mind a strangely soothing set of injunctions:
You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your
table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become
quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be
unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

It sounded like Ramana Maharshi’s voice murmuring in my ear. The only thing was, I had read it and been struck by it before I had read a word of his, before I had even heard of him. It was actually Kafka, a favourite writer of Eckstein’s and someone he was always quoting to baffled students at Burnham Grammar School. He had written it on the blackboard, that sentence about the world rolling
in
ecstasy at your feet
. He knew how to get me intrigued.

Now, though, established as a student of German and Spanish at an ancient university, I gave the passage a fresh mental reading. It didn’t sound like Kafka at all, however well attested. It sounded like the opposite of Kafka, who was so attuned to the negative. That’s why it sounded like Ramana Maharshi, who was as far from Kafka in temperament and background as it was possible to be. Here was Kafka, of all people, preaching on a text of Ramana Maharshi, and expounding the liberating principle that you don’t have to change your life to change your life.

Was it really Kafka, though? I mean, I know that passage is by Kafka
now
, but was it by Kafka before Eckstein wrote it on a school blackboard in 1968? Perhaps Ramana Maharshi had reached across time and space to send me a message of encouragement. It would be very much in his character as a worker of miracles to manage something so discreet, something which blended into its mundane surroundings. A miracle in camouflage. No commandments in skywriting for Ramana Maharshi, no burning bush, just a nudge of Eckstein’s chalk. Divine intervention as sly and cryptic as the crossword clues (not for idiots) which I could never manage to crack.
‘Gangster ducks five hundred and fifty in the general buzz (7)’. Answer: hoodlum, apparently. Please explain.