Pilcrow (9 page)

Treats and surprises were one thing, but what my morale needed was some regular occasion to look forward to. Mum had enough
nursing
expertise to know how to forestall bedsores by changing my
position
, but my mind was always lying in the same dull trench of thought. It was agreed with Dr Duckett that one expedition per week, properly supervised, was compatible with the sentence of bed rest.

It wasn’t much of an expedition. I only went as far as the hall. Our local grocer offered a delivery service, for which orders could be taken by telephone. It became my weekly treat to play a part in the chain of retail command. Mum would write out her list in diagram form, in the days before my reading became fluent. A sketch of two oblongs meant
Two pounds of potatoes please
. A red stick was
A pound of carrots
. Wiggly strips meant
A half of streaky bacon
. I even learned to
understand
the hieroglyph that meant
a quarter of field mushrooms if they’re not too dear – ask how much
. Then Mum and ‘the girl’ would set me up on a chair, well supplied with cushions, only lightly agonised, within reach of the phone in the hall. Mum would hold the receiver while I relayed the family order into the cold black curve of the mouthpiece. I loved doing that, feeling that I was at the nerve centre of the
household
. I manifested a character trait for which there was little scope at the time, obscured by pathos on this first appearance. The desire to be useful.

How did Mum cope? How did she save her sanity? One of the things she did was to get a dog, a golden retriever, our lovely Gipsy. If Gipsy was company for Mum then she was a sort of nurse for me, just as Nana in
Peter Pan
is more nanny than dog. Golden retrievers are frisky, lolloping creatures, but Mum trained her to stay put on a chair next to my bed. I would only have to say, ‘Hup!’ and Gipsy would jump up onto her chair and curl up to watch over me. I
couldn’t
really pet her. There’s a picture of the two of us taken the year after I became ill. I’m terribly skinny – it’s not surprising that Mum devoted so much energy to making me eat. I look like a monk on hunger strike. My face is like a worn-out mask, at the far end of life. Gipsy wears an expression of the most soulful worry. You would think she has just taken my temperature and is wondering when my fever will break. She slept in my room, adding her night voice to Mum’s and Dad’s. Every now and then she gave out a distinctive grunting sigh.

I remember one day when a neighbour came to call, bringing her own dog, a low-slung terrier. Gipsy jumped down from her chair and the two dogs went around in circles, sniffing each other’s bottoms. They were of such different heights that they had to get into the strangest positions. I thought that was the funniest thing ever – I really laughed, but being careful not to let my head go back or my shoulders shake.

Afterwards I asked Mum what Gipsy was doing with that other dog. She explained that long ago all the dogs in the world went to a special party, and they hung up their bottoms on pegs as they arrived. But then there was a fire at the party and everyone left in a rush,
taking
any old bottom down from the pegs. And ever since then, dogs have sniffed each other’s bottoms, trying to join up again with the lower half that had once been theirs. This fable says almost nothing about dogs, but it explains a great deal about Mum. During that fire alarm she might not even have looked for her bottom half. She would have managed without, and never looked back. Perfectly happy to wipe other people’s bottoms as long as she wasn’t expected to have one of her own.

Yet she often discussed my stools, with enthusiasm and technical knowledge. One day I asked, ‘Why was my tuppenny black today?’ I must have caught a glimpse of the kidney dish while she was carrying it away.

‘That’s because the doctor has been giving you iron. You need iron because you’re anæmic.’

‘Is it just iron that makes a tuppenny black?’

‘No, charcoal does it too. I expect a piece of burnt toast would be enough …’

‘Next time I have my half of boiled egg, can you burn the toast? I want to see if it makes my tuppenny go black.’

‘Yes, but you must finish the iron tablets first.’

‘Do tuppennies come in other colours?’

‘Oh yes, many! Ever so many.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I saw many different colours of tuppenny when I was a nurse.’

‘What colours did you see?’

‘Babies do tuppennies that are yellow. Yours looked just like scrambled egg. And I’ve seen tuppennies that were red.’

‘I bet you never saw a white tuppenny!’

‘Oh but I did!’

‘When?’

‘I told you. When I was a nurse.’

‘Was it a man’s tuppenny or a lady’s tuppenny?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I just can’t.’

‘Why was the tuppenny white?’

‘Because he’d had a barium meal.’

‘What’s a barium meal?’

‘It’s like porridge. You eat it and the next day they X-Ray your tummy and your botty so they can see if it’s all right.’

‘Have you had a barium meal?’

‘No. But your granny has.’

‘What did they see in Granny’s tummy and botty?’

‘Oh they were both fine.’

‘Remember when you saw the white tuppenny?’

‘Yes.’

‘You said you didn’t know whether it was a man’s tuppenny or a lady’s tuppenny.’

‘No, and I don’t.’

‘But then you said, “Because
he’d
had a barium meal.” So it must have been a man’s tuppenny!’

‘Then I expect that’s what it was …’

‘What do you mean, “
expect
”? You should
know
. You’re supposed to know nearly everything. Well, I don’t expect you to know
everything
, but if you remember the white tuppenny, you should certainly remember whether a man or a lady made it!’

‘Yes, I should, shouldn’t I? I would certainly have made the effort to remember if I’d known you were going to be so interested.’

‘So was that the only white tuppenny you saw, or was there another one?’

‘I can’t remember …’

‘Why ever not? When you saw a man’s white tuppenny didn’t you want to see a lady’s white tuppenny as well?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Why?’

‘Well I don’t expect there’d be much difference really.’

I was learning to make a little conversation go a long way. Mum, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly resourceful in manipulating my appetite. If she could turn a conversation about black excreta into a piece of salesmanship for burnt toast she was well and truly getting the knack.

She knew when to give way about food, strategically. I started to insist that all I would eat was a teaspoonful of raw cake mix. She said she couldn’t make such a small amount. I said why not? I might even eat two. I think she was beginning to be alarmed by my will-power. Immobility was the hallmark of my days, and now it seemed to be invading my character. So the next day she came in with half a dessertspoonful of raw cake mix. I wolfed it down.

Half-heartedly she warned me about the danger of worms but I wasn’t put off. Why not feed them too? I couldn’t believe that worms were nasty. The ones I could remember from the garden had seemed perfectly nice. She said they would tickle my botty from inside and make me want to scratch it. I quite liked this idea of
having
an itchy botty, but only if the reason was worms. I would want to be very sure that it was due to the presence of worms. Then I would want to see one, and keep it in a little dish for a while and then I would ask if I could feed it something else, or should I put it back into my botty to make it happy. Having something that enjoyed living in me seemed rather an honour. I would only take a worm-killer tablet if the worms got too itchy or bred too fast. First I would give them a good talking-to about how we should get along together, a worms’ rule-book or Highway Code. If they were
sensible
and behaved themselves I saw no reason why we couldn’t get along perfectly well together. I didn’t tell these secret thoughts to Mum, but hoped that eating cake mix might give the opportunity of putting my theory into practice. I never even caught one worm. It was a great disappointment.

Mum also knew when to go to town with the catering. Bomfire Night was a treat I could no longer attend. The family did without fireworks for the duration, though Gipsy and I could hear the whoosh of joy, the crackle of exhilaration, from other gardens than ours. Gipsy whined miserably and I did my best not to join in.

Still, Mum was shrewd enough to exploit my love of the fire
festival
to boost my intake of food. She had always made ‘Scrambled Egg Boats’ for Firework Night, and there was no reason to change the menu just because we weren’t having any fireworks. Like many of her best and worst ideas, the recipe came from a magazine.

Mum hoarded the recipes from magazines, but was afraid to try them until she had scanned subsequent issues in search of corrections of misprints. She had once been tempted by a recipe for home-salted beef, only to read in a later issue that the amount of saltpetre required had been over-stated by a factor of ten, making it potentially toxic. We might all have been killed by a typographical error – except that I wouldn’t have touched it. I alone would have been left alive, to charge
Woman’s Own
with manslaughter by misprint.

Mum would make the scrambled egg in advance. Nearer to the time of serving she made toast, then buttered and trimmed the slices into a graceful curving point at one end. While the toast was under the grill she took fresh tomatoes (neither too firm nor too soft),
quartered
them and scooped out the innards. Taking each tomato quarter she cut them into narrower, more graceful wedges. These were the ‘sails’ of the Boats.

She spooned a dollop of scrambled egg, to which she’d added a few chopped chives and a dash of pepper, onto each shaped piece of toast, and then put an eviscerated tomato wedge on top of that, neatly attaching the sail to the buttery, scramble-freighted hull with the mast of a cocktail stick.

She came into my room with a whole flotilla of them, arranged in naval formation on a large plate balanced proudly on the upraised
fingers
of one hand. I didn’t say no. The creamy egg and fresh tomato played such a lovely fanfare of aromas. Reluctantly I dismasted the savoury boat and wolfed down the ambrosial snack. The flavours danced and blended on the taste buds. Somehow the toast kept its crunch despite the moistness of the scramble.

The only shadow on the feast was my knowledge of the next day’s menu. The innards scraped from the tomatoes in the process of sculpting the sails had to go somewhere, in those thrifty ’fifties. In the wake of those delicious boats the abomination that was stuffed marrow, that dismal barge, would be slowly surging towards me.

Stuffed marrow was as disgusting as the Scrambled Egg Boats had been delightful. It wasn’t the tomato innards that I minded but the mince part of the stuffing. That I wouldn’t eat. Fasting was a doddle when you knew in advance it was going to be marrow for lunch, and could prepare yourself. The treat was balanced by the going without. I didn’t consciously thwart Mum’s plans to feed me up, but
something
in my forming character applauded the symmetry of this arrangement.

At some stage Mum realised that there were such things as indoor fireworks. It would have been poor tactics to lay on a display inside the house, necessarily very muted, on the same night that everyone else was letting off rockets galore just outside. Indoor fireworks are to outdoor what tiddlywinks is to the pole vault. Mum waited for my birthday instead.

One advantage of the indoor fireworks was that I was actually allowed to light them, with a long spill. They were brought in on a tray and laid on the bed. I particularly liked the ones that looked like pills on square pieces of cardboard, but produced a writhing snake when touched with the taper. A serpent made of some grey and fæcal ash would rush from the ignited pellet, and I watched in raptures while it writhed in coils of silent agony. The smell of indoor fireworks is harshly beautiful. I hated for it to dissipate and would plead with Mum not to open the windows. She grumbled that she didn’t want to be smelling that stink on her curtains in a week’s time, but still she agreed to wait for a few minutes, chafing, after the show was over.

Perhaps that was the day when I solemnly announced, ‘This is a very special birthday. Today I am the same age as all the fingers on one hand.’

I had yet to understand the spiritual significance of a birthday. The spiritual significance of a birthday is nil. She who fills a cradle fills a grave. I had yet to read the verse which describes celebrating a
birthday
as a sort of necrophilia:

The left hand which I held up to demonstrate the special significance of that birthday was becoming strange to me. The wrist was twisting of its own accord, and the fingers were losing the knack of staying parallel. Dr Duckett the GP recommended that I wear splints at night to minimise the distortion of the joints.

Now that my age corresponded to the number of digits on a hand, however well or badly shaped, it was time to think of my education. Not a school, of course, but schooling none the less. A teacher
coming
  to the house several times a week. An elderly school-teacher
earning
a little money in her retirement. Miss Collins.

There must have been a lot of work behind the scenes to arrange it, but Mum only gave me the news a little bit before Miss Collins arrived for the first time, so that my excitement wouldn’t become dangerously magnified by a long wait. I had time to ask, ‘Is she a
governess
?’ Granny had had a governess, who had marked her nose with a piece of chalk if she got her sums wrong. She hated that, and so would I. Granny’s governess would tie her thumbs behind her knees if she fidgeted. Would Miss Collins be allowed to do that?

Once I was reassured that Miss Collins wasn’t a governess, I was mad keen for lessons to begin. Someone was coming to the house with only one object in mind: to teach me everything she knew. I couldn’t wait. There was never a pupil so willing.

After the first lesson, though, I asked Mum, ‘Is Miss Collins a lady or a man?’ I was genuinely puzzled. My tutor was at a rather mannish stage of later life. She had whiskers of a rudimentary sort. Mum laughed rather uneasily and said Miss Collins was definitely a lady, but she could see why I needed to ask. After that we gave Miss Collins a nick-name which we used with much guilty pleasure. To us she became the Collie Boy.

This wasn’t the first time I had been puzzled by the marks of
gender
. For a long time I worried about the status of nurses, who seemed to be in some strange way intermediate. Finally I asked Mum, ‘Are nurses ladies?’

‘Whatever do you mean, JJ?’

‘Are nurses ladies or are they men?’ I wasn’t thinking in terms of male nurses, not yet knowing that such things existed.

‘They’re ladies, of course! Why would you think anything else?’

‘Well, nurses have ears and ladies don’t.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

What I was talking about, really, was that nurses were the only female persons I had seen who wore their hair pinned neatly back, so that I could see their ears. I had always thought the hair-do was all part of the lady. Normal ladies wore their hair permed and shaped, so that they had waves of glossy hair where their ears would have been if they had had them.

‘Men have ears, but I’ve never seen a lady’s except a nurse’s so are nurses ladies?’

‘Everyone has ears. I have ears, you know I do.’

‘Will you show me?’

‘Of course I will, silly. There’s one, see? And there’s the other.’ So the nurse question was settled, just as the Miss Collins question would be. It turned out that nurses and Miss Collins were all really ladies.

Not long after that Mum told me the facts of life. She was
remarkably
direct about it. She warned me that people would try to tell me about babies and everything, ‘and they’ll get it wrong’. So she told me. This sudden surge of frankness represented an underside of her character, the medical professional in a hurry to dispel ignorance. Other children were kept in the dark, even when they were obsessed with knowing where babies come from, and here I was being
overwhelmed
with knowledge well ahead of schedule, and without having to ask a single question.

She used family words for the parts involved, saying ‘taily’ rather than penis, but otherwise she was fairly frank. I was outraged. I thought she must be making it all up. ‘But you told me it was all to do with storks and blackberry bushes!’

‘No, John, I never did. I said that some people
say
it’s to do with storks and blackberry bushes. That’s what some people pretend to believe, but now I’m telling you the truth.’

She might at least have come up with a better story.

‘But that’s
rude
. Why do mummies and daddies have to be rude to make a baby?’

‘Well when they do it, it’s nice. So if it’s nice, it’s not rude.’

‘Nice?
Nice
?
What’s
nice
about putting your taily in a hole between a lady’s legs? I bet it hurts!’

‘No, it doesn’t. The lady likes it.’

‘
I DIDN’T MEAN THE LADY
. I meant, I bet it hurts
the man
!’ My concern was all for him, in this desperate transaction. ‘The poor man! He must love the baby terribly to do that with his taily.’

‘Oh no, the man likes it!’

‘How do you know? You’re not a man!’

‘No, but I told you – Daddy says it’s nice.’

This was where her lying was blatant and I became incredulous with anger. ‘Daddy would
never
say it was nice to stick his taily in a hole between a lady’s legs.’

‘He says it’s nice.’

‘Bring him here. I have to hear him say it.’ I was almost in tears. ‘He won’t say it, he
can’t
say it because it’s not true. You’re fibbing!’

‘I’m telling the truth. And one day you will find out for yourself …’

‘Do you mean that one day I’m going to take my taily and stick it in a hole between a lady’s legs?’

‘Yes, I expect so.’

This was the last straw. This made me so angry she must have regretted, for the sake of my immobility and my health (which seemed to be the same thing), that she’d ever started discussing human reproduction. I shouted, ‘Well I won’t won’t
won’t
! It sounds really horrid and I’m never
never
never going to do it! And I don’t want you telling your rude lies to Peter!’