Pilcrow (11 page)

I always tried to keep a bit of my reading time reserved for the Ellisdons catalogue. This was one of my great weapons in the war of attrition against boredom. I expect Mum came across an
advertisement
for it in a magazine. It seemed inexhaustible. Postal shopping is the invalid’s friend. Catalogues can tickle an appetite that would
otherwise
die. I found the notion of sending off for things miraculous. The Ellisdons catalogue turned the letter-box into a magical opening, through which any number of wonderful, tawdry things could flood in. I was only just beginning to get the hang of spelling, but SSAE, for Stamped Self-Addressed Envelope, spelt Open Sesame as far as I was concerned.

Ellisdons had some astounding things in their catalogue. A Magna No-Flint Lighter, which I wanted even at the exorbitant price of twenty-five shillings. Whoopee cushions and stink bombs, though I had enough sense to realise that a stink bomb only worked if you could run away from the stench yourself. I was much less mobile than my intended victims, and while they were busy running off I would inhale a dose which (given my apparent fragility) would probably kill me. It was probably the slogan used to advertise the stink bombs in the catalogue which made me so keen on them, with its mystical inkling of the way our everyday categories can change places under the right circumstances: ‘
gives off a smell you can almost see
…’

There were fire-breathing lessons also, which I actually sent off for. The trick involved a wick (with potassium nitrate) and some hay. Like most of the tricks that really attracted me, it was incredibly dangerous.

Of course there was the occasional dud. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would waste good money on a wooden paddle with
THE BOARD OF EDUCATION
inscribed on it. Drawn on the paddle next to that motto was a cartoon of a boy bending over to have his bottom whacked. It was crudely drawn, like something on a sea-side postcard, showing blown-out cheeks and air rasping out of the mouth. It seems strange that an implement of physical punishment could count as a novelty item in the ’fifties, however jocular the presentation. I wasn’t tempted. My pennies went towards tricks and treasures.

When I sent off for things, I wanted to use my money, not to rely on Mum’s. I knew I had some money in a Post Office account, thanks to Granny. It was a shock to learn that I couldn’t take any money out until I was seven. To me that was the same as the Post Office robbing me. They had taken my money and now they were refusing to give it back when I asked nicely.

Seven seemed an awfully far-away age, well over the horizon. The way things were going, I decided my body was going to be dead long before, and I wanted the money before then. I remember asking if I could make an early withdrawal because I was so very ill, but Mum said, sadly, no. The whole thing was definitely a swizz. The next thing I wanted to do was to make out a will, so that the Post Office could be made to cough up after my death, but I was told I wasn’t old enough to do that either. Swizzed all over again, swizzled and
reswizzled
. It seemed hardly possible that a boy who couldn’t go anywhere, hardly even to the other side of the bed, could be ramped and cheated by the world in so many ways.

In the Ellisdons catalogue there was also a joke camera, a Home Hypnosis Kit, a ventriloquism course, some little worms which grew in water, a See-Back-roscope which showed you things behind you, a magical flowering shell, and many sorts of indoor fireworks: fairy ferns, snakes-in-the-grass, Bengal Lights and the star turn, Mount Ætna, which spat fire and sounded almost as good as the outdoor kind.

I loved the little mummy which wouldn’t stay in its tomb (unless you knew how to tap the secret hidden magnet), and the magical fish which curled up in your hand and showed you how much life force you’d got in you. If an Ellisdons toy didn’t do anything it was no good to me, though I made an exception for the Java Shrunken Head. It didn’t do anything but hang there, but it had had no end of things done to it to make it so small, which was almost as good. It would have been a nice spooky treasure to have hanging from my ceiling in darkest Somerset.

In the end I sent off for the whoopee cushion. I couldn’t wait for it to arrive, and the postman became a figure of commanding fascination, though I’d never given him much thought before. In the end, though, it was a bit of a disappointment. It worked a treat on Mum, who hated it. In her book the only thing which might be worse than a real
blow-off
(the family word for fart) was an artificial one. But it didn’t whoop for the Collie Boy, who had been the prime target all along. At first I thought Mum must have tipped her off, but I suppose you don’t have a career in education without some experience of pranks. I knew she was in on the joke because she kept jiggling her big fat bum on the cushion, and nothing at all happened. Somehow she knew how to disarm it, to silence the rubber lips that gave the blow-off its rasping voice.

My next Ellisdons acquisition was a trick camera, and I certainly got her with that. I asked if I could take her picture, but the camera was really a jack-in-the-box. When I pressed the button a toy mouse flew out of the apparatus and hit her on the nose. It was marvellous! Exactly as the catalogue promised. She fell off her chair. She didn’t see that coming! I suppose it was a prank that she hadn’t come across
during
her time as a school-teacher. It was news to her. It came from nowhere and biffed her right on the conk!

Her own sense of fun was wholesome and even childish. I
remember
her giving a little cry of joy at Christmas when she saw our
decorated
tree. She couldn’t keep her hands off the ornaments. She blew all the little trumpets and rang all the bells, rapping every glassy bauble with her knuckles to make it sound.

Dad always said I could wrap Mum round my little finger, which was a delicious image. I pictured a mother shrunken and made
pliable
, a plasticine woman I could wear like a toy ring or a sticking plaster. Dad himself was less amenable, and I was exposed over long periods to two female intransigents, the two styles of sovereign will embodied by Miss Collins and Granny.

When Granny came to stay, she would sometimes sit with me while Mum went out. She would sit formally facing the bed, elegant in a way that indicated long practice, the grace whose school is time. Granny had been sitting beautifully for years, with a steely poise not always designed to relax her companions. In Bach terms she was very much a Water Violet, except perhaps for the bit about her serenity being a blessing and a balm to all those she encountered. Granny could use her serenity like a jemmy. I showed her the little fish from Ellisdons which rocked in your hand to show the life force, or else rolled over or curled up at the sides (all of which had different
interpretations
in the little booklet that came with the fish), but it just lay still in her palm. ‘I suppose this means I must be
dead
,’ she said.

Before she sat down she would inspect the seat of the chair and invariably picked up a long stray hair of Gipsy’s, which she disposed of without comment. She wouldn’t read to me or give me lessons as such, although she couldn’t help giving me a certain amount of schooling in her special subject of unarmed combat, or conversation as she called it. Sometimes she taught me tongue-twisters, and songs she called rounds. These weren’t rounds like a doctor’s rounds but special songs which you didn’t both sing together but in relays.

When Granny was coming to stay, Mum would spend hours
cleaning
the house from top to bottom, with murder in her heart, using the white-glove technique to find dust in out-of-the-way places. By the time her mother actually arrived she was exhausted. Granny would wake her up bright and early the next morning, fresh as a daisy and bearing a cup of tea, with the words ‘You take the upstairs and I’ll take the downstairs, and we’ll soon have everything ship-shape. I don’t know why you insist on paying that girl. She’s worse than
useless
.’

Granny and Mum did everything differently, down to the smallest detail. When she passed the mirror on my chest of drawers Granny would straighten her back and raise her chin, while Mum cast her eyes down and to one side.

‘Granny’ has always seemed to me a powerful word. It’s odd for me to hear it on other people’s lips, referring to some irrelevant or
ornamental
presence. Certainly for Mum, and even perhaps for Dad, Granny was a thin grey cloud which would always blot out the sun. I remember when I learned that ‘Granny’ only meant ‘Mum’s Mum’ – it was rather a letdown. Somehow there seemed much more to her than being Mum to the power of two. Mum squared.

It must have been clear to everyone she met, as it was to me, that Granny had very particular reasons for being born, and for every link in the chain of decisions that followed on from there. Of course I can’t reconstruct her beginnings. The place Granny chose to be born is three wombs distant from me, and each womb is a wall of
metaphysical
brick which no mundane thought can penetrate. Each birth is an absolute new beginning (on the level of the organism, if not the
cosmos
). That’s the whole beauty and virtue of the system.

Granny was always a vivid figure to me, though not in the
oppressive
way that she was to Mum. I stood up to her sometimes. I knew no better.

In superficial terms, Mum made a very odd choice of womb. In a way she never managed to get free of the womb she had chosen. She was like the baby bird that can’t peck its way out of the egg.

I remember Granny squashing Mum flat one day just by re-hanging the washing while she was out. Granny went out into the garden and calmly unpegged every item, putting it back up the way it should be, without argument or mercy. Mum came and told me about it. She almost cried.

For one of my bed birthdays Granny gave me a doll. I’d said I wanted one, and of course what I wanted was a doll in a pretty dress, with lovely long hair and eyes that opened and shut, framed by long dark lashes. At the time this was not what boys were supposed to want, and my birthday wish was greeted with a certain amount of
discomfort
.

Granny made herself busy, and fulfilled my wish in a way that was more than half a thwarting. I got my doll, but it wasn’t at all what I had in mind. It was a little soldier in a tartan kilt. Thinking about it now, I realise that this was an unusual plaything for the period,
perhaps
even a specially ordered object, certainly not something that you would find on a shelf in the newsagents. Granny had gone to the top man, or to some toymakers
par excellence
, to secure what she wanted me to want.

I sort of liked it. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t cuddle it very much. I went through the motions, rather. No one had the vision to give me the ordinary thing that I wanted, without substituting their own
version
of what I should have asked for. It’s funny, really, that family members should stamp on the only faint manifestation of interest in the female body I ever had. Question of bad timing, I suppose.

What I wanted was a female doll I would call Mandy. Mandy would wet the bed. She would share my shame over that lonely
malady
, over which I cried so often. The boy doll didn’t do that. Dolls of the period were rather unstimulating in general. I also wanted my doll to do a tuppenny, and I wanted to watch her do it. I was ahead of my time. The market wasn’t ready for defæcating dollies.

Another reason, the most secret reason, for wanting Mandy instead of Hamish was to get a chance to see the hole where a man put his taily. The boy doll, being tailyless, having hardly so much as a bump beneath his kilt, was an utter dud from the educational point of view.

Granny’s manner with me in conversation was formal but not
condescending
. ‘Laura always suffered from the fidgets,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to see that you are different.’ Laura was Mum, and I wasn’t
different
at all, I liked nothing better than a good fidget, but it seemed a bit of a waste when there was someone in the room.

Talking to Granny was very different from talking to Mum. It may have been true that I could wrap Mum round my little finger, but Granny was not to be moulded, by me or by anyone else. She lived by her rules, and expected everyone else to abide by them too.

At home she kept bees and grew strawberries. I said that I loved strawberries, quite innocently, with no idea that I was asking for
trouble
. ‘John,’ Granny said, ‘you should love your parents, but you can only
like
your food.’

I was enjoying our conversation, and decided I’d have a go at
getting
round Granny. ‘Granny?’ I asked. ‘Can you like food
lots and lots
?’

She hesitated. ‘Well,’ she said, drawing the word out to three times its normal length. ‘I suppose one
could
.’

‘But if you can like strawberries lots and lots, it’s almost the same as loving them, isn’t it?’

‘Almost. But not quite – and remember, a miss is as good as a mile.’ This was one of the most serviceable proverbs in the adult armoury. Granny wasn’t going to any great trouble to keep me in line.

‘But if it’s almost the same as loving it, why can’t you just say you love it?’ This was where I played my little trump card. ‘You always say don’t ever waste anything, and I’m only trying to do what you say. I’m being careful with words. Look! “
I-like-straw-be-reez-lots-and-lots
.” That’s wasteful compared to saying, “
I love straw’bries
.”’

There was some shameless cheating going on here. To make my case stronger I dragged an extra syllable out of ‘strawberry’ in the wasteful example and contracted it back to two in the economical one. Eight syllables as against four. Surely I had her on the run?

It’s true that she was very much taken aback. But then she said, ‘Rules are rules. There are lines that need to be drawn.’ When I asked, ‘Why?’ she snapped back, ‘They just must.’ In fact the rules had changed. It was no longer legitimate to argue back, no longer a good thing to stick to your guns and use logic. Now the game had to stop, just when I was starting to enjoy it. For form’s sake I protested, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to dodge the strongest rebuff available to the adult brain and tongue: ‘
You just can’t, and that’s an end of it!
’ Logic was out of the window, logic had its back to the wall and so did I.

Even so, I admired adults like Granny for their ability to impose arbitrary limits, to say ‘so far and no further’ without having to give a reason. I decided to stop being a child as soon as possible, so that I could do the same, being reasonable when it suited me and jamming on the brakes when it didn’t.

I’m cheating even now, as much as I did then when I squashed and stretched ‘strawberries’ to suit the case I was making. When I had the argument about syllables with Granny, I didn’t actually know the word ‘syllable’. Miss Collins hadn’t got to them yet. Instead I made do with the term ‘word-bits’.

I had asked Mum what the right name was for word-bits, but she said words were made up of letters. That was all there was to it. I said there must be another word. For instance, I explained, Mum has one wordbit, Granny has two and cauliflower four. The number of letters in a word was something different.

Mum couldn’t think of the word. Her education had been extremely patchy, and her younger brother – Roy – was the one who had been designated as clever. Mum would never be able to earn Granny’s respect by using her brain, and I think she just stopped
trying
. Now she became flustered at her inability to retrieve the desired term. Perhaps I should have noticed with sorrow that she didn’t feel able to hold her own mentally with a five-year-old boy, but I was too frustrated by not getting an answer to my question.