Pilcrow (3 page)

Gibson’s colouring was so pale he looked spectral, other-worldly, with one eye a warm and cloudy brown, the other stony blue. Boxers aren’t clever dogs. They’re famous for it, the not being clever. I don’t mean that any dog is exactly brilliant – they’re never going to show up on
Mastermind
– but it’s a fair bet that by the time poodles are being made heads of university departments, boxers will still be
nosing
their alphabet blocks around with big frowns on their foreheads. All the same, Gibson was a very thoughtful dog. His great pastime was to pick up his ball in his jaws and carry it upstairs. Then he’d sit at the top of the stairs, nose his ball forward, and watch as it bounced all the way down. Then he’d repeat the performance, without limit. He’d do it until the ball was taken away from him. As I say, he was a very thoughtful dog. It took just the one thought to fill him.

Gibson loomed over my toddlerhood like a guardian angel,
tolerating
with patience the fist I thrust in his warm wet mouth. I would lean in fearlessly as far as my shoulder, like a plumber probing a drain, and he’d just let it happen, while I dredged his mouth for marbles or simply explored the walls of gum in which his teeth were set. Dogs can smell fear, as we’re always being told, but on me Gibson must have smelled something very different, trust and love. It’s the
simplest
explanation for his long-suffering ways. According to family
tradition
he let me learn to stand and then walk by supporting myself on his ears. I clutched tightly onto those velvety flanges, while his breath came out and warmed my face.

Mum told me his breath stank. She didn’t know how I could stand it. Simple – as far as I was concerned it wasn’t bad breath, it wasn’t even dog breath, it was Gibson’s breath and it smelled fine. I don’t remember smelling his tuppennies but I dare say I would have liked them too. I certainly liked mine.

Something about Gibson reminded my senses of Granny herself. He smelled a little like her, which seemed only right, though she never smelled quite as good as he did. Dogs’ ears smell of mown hay.

I couldn’t know then that Granny, fastidious but well aware of the damaging effect of frequent baths on dogs’ coats, sprayed him fairly regularly with her own perfume. Gibson, the thoughtful friend who taught me to walk, had a depth of aroma, all the way from mud and glands to high floral notes, worthy of a court lady from the time of the Sun King. Gibson must have been one of the few boxers ever to wear
Je Reviens
.

Gibson lost his hearing quite young. White dogs tend to be deaf. Deaf dogs tend to be white. These things converge. In Gibson’s case, with my granny as his mistress, it was always on the cards that he went deaf as a husband might, for the peace it brought.

I loved and admired Gibson more than any person in my life, except the mother whom I only noticed when she wasn’t there. I formed a passionate attachment to him. He was my totem animal, yet I could learn nothing from him. He wouldn’t even let me take his ball. Dogs know what the nose knows:
this
and
here
and
now
. That, yonder, tomorrow – none of these carries a smell. Animals can’t show us how to live as they do. With their enclosure in the present they offer examples we’re disqualified from following.

When I put my finger in the socket of the lamp where the bulb went, I was in search of light, but my deeper interest from the start was fire. I loved it that both Mum and Dad could make smoke with their faces. Dad was a serious smoker and Mum was a frivolous one, restricting herself to three du Mauriers a day.

The du Maurier packet was a lovely piece of design, red with an odd black pattern like a modified swastika or cubist sphincter – there was definitely a suggestion of engulfment, of being hypnotised and drawn into the oblong void if I looked at it for too long. On special occasions I was allowed to pull the rip-cord of cellophane on a new packet, though Mum might have to raise the edge of it for my
benefit
. It gave me great joy that the top of the box opened upwards from a hinge on one of its long sides.

Mum and Dad demonstrated their incompatibility not only in the way they smoked – he absently masterful, she nervous – but in the way they lit the necessary matches. I watched closely, loving to see fire in all its forms, even this transitory one. Dad would blow out the flame when it had done its work with a single smart puff, without really even looking at it. Mum would wave her hand around, not quite rapidly enough to extinguish the fire she held, slowing down and wavering in a kind of panic, until she finally worked up enough velocity with her hand to strip the little stick of its flame, a fraction of a second before Dad muttered, ‘For God’s sake, m’dear! Is it so
difficult
? Is it strictly necessary to burn the house down?’ She was addicted to something other than cigarettes. Her air of being at odds with her surroundings was something that she insisted on, somehow. It wasn’t something that simply happened to her. Meanwhile I
registered
the beauty of flame, and the way it could be summoned by the agency of matches.

When I was three I made a bomfire – that’s bomfire with an ‘m’. ‘Bomfire’ always held a promise of devastation for me, smouldering away in the middle of the word. I used grass cuttings, lit with matches supplied by an older boy, who cuddled me. He sat with his legs apart, which left room for little me between them. Perhaps there wasn’t really an older boy – perhaps I stole the matches from home and he was just a story I told when everything went wrong, with the detail about him cuddling me just a bit of wish-fulfilment put in for my own benefit. If I’d made up an older boy for the purpose of
spreading
the blame, I might as well get some extra enjoyment out of my excuse. In my mind that was a very natural position for me, between a big boy’s legs.

Even if there really was an older boy, the bomfire was all my idea. I did the talking, calming Peterkin’s doubts. I said, ‘I know what I’m doing. I’ve seen how it’s done.’ Adding with grave assurance, ‘Adults worry too much.’ Then I burned the greenhouse down. Well, that became the family story. In the struggle for survival of rival versions of an anecdote, ‘John almost scorched the greenhouse’ has no chance against ‘John burned the greenhouse down.’ My memory of the
incident
is of triumph not disaster. It gave me joy to release the smoke and flame lurking inside an unpromising heap of cut grass. The word normally attached to such feelings is pyromania, but I don’t really think it covers my case. It misses the aspect of worship, the sense of a sacrament. I feel ‘pyrolatry’ comes closer to the truth.

My love of fire affected my feelings about the days we celebrated. Nothing about Christmas could compare with Guy Fawkes. For a born pyrolater like me, December 25th couldn’t hold a candle to November 5th, and not just because someone with a birthday on December 27th was bound to feel his own nativity over-shadowed. Bomfire Night was a festival with no moral improvement to offer, a gala of unholy combustion that had its own sort of holiness. It was also something that our family did rather well.

Dad never used milk bottles as rocket launchers for our family
firework
displays. He built his own, using broom handles sharpened at one end so that they could be driven into the ground more easily, with eyelets screwed in at intervals along the shaft. Eyelets of different sizes could accommodate different diameters of stick, without the sloppy angle that comes from a loose fit.

I suppose all this was an extension of his identity as a pilot, his sense of a general command of the air. Milk bottles were out of the question because the size of rocket he favoured would have tipped them over. Dad didn’t ordinarily enjoy spending money, but he never begrudged the expense when it came to fireworks, and perhaps a sense of family pride came into it. Even if he’d bought the same titchy
little
rockets as everyone else, I don’t think milk-bottle launch pads would have been good enough for the Cromer family fireworks. Not for us the 85-degree angle – 72°, even – of rockets that loll in the mouths of milk bottles before the moment of ignition. The family projectiles were never less than fully erect. Our rockets must ascend in a perfect vertical, as if they really were meant to escape the earth’s pull.

Those home-made rocket launchers were the only bit of do-
it-yourself
I remember Dad doing. They fitted his definition of manly activity while serving the purpose, for once, of something
wonderfully
useless.

I wasn’t allowed to light fireworks or handle sparklers, and I can see the sense of that. The pyrolatrous glint in my eyes can’t have been much of an inducement to take a chance on me behaving responsibly.

Mum and Dad both smelled of smoke even when it wasn’t Bomfire Night, but underneath that Mum smelled like me and Dad didn’t. Mum and I had marked each other, as dogs mark lampposts. I smelled of the milk she had made inside herself, and she smelled of the milk I had taken in and then burped softly over her shoulder while she
patted
my back. Dad smelled different entirely.

I remember being held in my father’s arms at a fruit stall in a
market
. I was reaching out towards a bunch of bananas and saying the word ‘Gee!’ with a hard ‘G’. My word for bananas. What I meant when I said ‘Gee!’ was partly ‘lovely bananas, want bananas’ and partly something else. It was partly ‘I love my daddy’s smell and the feeling of being in his arms.’ It was only much later I wondered if the brand name Geest had been stuck onto the bananas, so that I was instinctively reading the word, remembering my letters from a
previous
life.
Geest
of course being the Dutch for ghost or spirit.

One day when I was three Dad borrowed my favourite red ball, flew over the garden and dropped it down to me from his plane. This would be the house in Bathford, outside Bath, at the top of a hill. Perhaps it was his farewell outing in a Tiger Moth, a training biplane
manœuvrable
at low speeds which was coming to the end of its long service life around then. Can I really have caught my red ball cleanly, without help, on the third enormous bounce? There was a Daddy Bear bounce, that seemed to go right back up into the sky it had come from, then a Mummy Bear bounce, up to the level of the tree-tops this time, and then a Baby Bear bounce which was just right, at hedge height. A bounce for each of us, and into my waiting hands. This was an
extraordinary
happening, needing to be replayed again and again in my mind until it took on a dark varnish of meaning.

I feature quite strongly in the early pages of the family album. Later on I’m relegated to the sidelines. I become awkward supporting cast for other people’s birthdays and holidays. But Mum and Dad had quite a lot of photographs taken when I was three, by
Cyril Howes of Bath / Abbey Churchyard / Telephone 60444
, so I go out in a blaze of glory as a photographic subject. Then later they couldn’t bear to sort through them critically, getting rid of the ones that weren’t so good. Knowing that my life from that point on had nothing in common with what went before.

As a three-year-old I was a cheerful active child, happy to play with my bricks while the photographer worked away, with a little gallery of memories that didn’t need chemicals to be developed and fixed – the happiness of a good session at potty, the pride of peeing a winning arc, and the physical stimulation of being in Dad’s arms, reaching for the suggestive fruit
par excellence
, all too obvious object of desire. Unzip a banana.

Then my life began. My life acquired its
sruti
-note – the
fundamental
drone that underpins a raga, the part of the music that isn’t even part of the music. The Sanskrit word has come to mean ‘
authority
’. Hindu cosmology is particularly compatible with musical
analogies
. It’s not so much the Big Bang as the Big Twang, a primal throb underlying every variation of pitch and timbre.

My life began with a fever. The pain came only at night, to start with. Starting in the knee. Hot and dizzy. At two in the morning I’d be screaming, then by breakfast-time I would almost have forgotten. All childhood illnesses are dramatic, but this was more dramatic than most. I would scream for quite a while without stopping, and I
couldn’t
bear for my knee to be touched. Mum gave me aspirin, so many that once I saw two Mums coming into the room.

The fever played hide-and-seek with doctors. Mum would take me to the local surgery, but by then I was fine again, running around merrily, impatient to be read Beatrix Potter, to start fires, to eat dirt when I could get it. The doctor may have wondered if this was an obsessive mother making too much of things. He said, if you’re really sure, call me out the next time it happens. If you’re really sure.

We didn’t have a car, but we did have a phone. Not everybody did, but we did, though it didn’t get much use in daily life. So the next time it happened she phoned him, her heart pounding as much from her own daring at disturbing a doctor’s sleep as from the screams of her first-born. When he came he could see for himself how inflamed it was, how much pain it gave.

It was beyond him. I needed to be seen at a hospital, where they would do tests. I’m taking you to a nice hospital, Mum told me. What’s that? A place where they stop you being ill. But I’m not ill. I’m a good soldier. I’ve only got a sore knee sometimes.

I was taken to a place called Manor Hospital, where they prodded and poked. It wasn’t a nice sort of place at all. When we arrived, I asked if my mum could stay as well. Because I asked that, it was put into my notes – as she later saw – that I had ‘an unnatural attachment’ to my mother. What would have counted as a natural attachment, in a three-year-old full of pain being left to be poked and prodded by strangers?

Mum came with me to the ward, but the moment I was put in bed she left, not saying a word. I watched her grief-stricken as she walked away. Her shoes made a sharp clopping noise on the floor, and the tight skirt of the period required her to take short steps, so that she seemed to take ages to abandon me. She didn’t even turn round at the last moment to give me a little wave, as love would have compelled her to do.

I felt deserted by her, and aggrieved by the hospital’s ways of doing things. They had put me in a bed with sides, a hospital cot. Did they think I was a baby? And now Mum who could have explained it all to me had gone away.

She came to visit the next day, and when I sulked and wouldn’t speak to her she cried, explaining that she was only doing what she had been told to do. The hospital said it was for the best to leave
without
saying good-bye. Mum had trained as a nurse, which may have made it harder to argue with hospital rules. She had no training in how to be the mother of a patient.