Pilcrow (2 page)

I had my fair share of adolescent clashes with my parents, but there is one thing I never said: ‘I didn’t ask to be born.’ It’s a sentiment teenagers express very often, as a way of magnifying their sorrows and making the world take notice. I disapprove. It can’t be good to
blaspheme
against your own existence.

‘I didn’t ask to be born.’ That’s the bass note of every whine, the fundamental. The drone underlying the moan. It’s the sloping
foundation
on which nothing can be built true. Because there’s no proof either way, is there? And I prefer to think that I did. I did ask to be born, knowing more than I do now. I made my choice. It isn’t even necessary, as life goes on, for me to understand my reasons.

Souls await a womb. That’s from the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
. Every religion contains at least one true thing, and this seems to be Tibetan Buddhism’s. Souls await a womb, and I waited for my mother’s. I knew what I was doing. I have to trust the judgement I had before I looked out of this one pair of eyes only.

I chose the womb as surely as the Duke of Westminster chose his – and who’s to say I wasn’t offered that one first? Perhaps I gave it up, like a seat on a train, in favour of someone who needed it more. Perhaps I decided to wait for one that would suit me better.

Admittedly the etiquette involved is hard to fathom.
No thank you, I think I’ll pass. After you, Gerald, I insist. You be Duke this time. I’m in no hurry. There’ll be another one along in a minute
. There’s a system of
shortlisting
in operation, obviously – not all wombs available to all souls. That’s where karma comes in. Your past lives affect the range
available
. Karma winnows, karma restricts the possibilities. But there’s still plenty of scope for the choosing agent, in a subset of infinity. The short-list being infinite in its own right. Between lives the soul moves with a special caution, gingerly as a cat in snow. Try to see your original face, as the Zen koan puts it, the one you had before your
parents
gave you birth.

I sat quiet in the womb I had chosen. I made no erudite statements from the darkness of my becoming. If I’d spoken out, if I’d intervened in the world before I was part of it, then surely Mum or Dad would have mentioned the fact. Even in a family like mine, where there were so many blockages of communication, news of that sort would have got through. Uterine speech is the province of a few highly developed souls, incarnations out of my league.

There’s a great sage in the
Mahabharata
, Astavakra, who spoke out before his birth. Out of the womb he piped up: ‘Father, through your grace I have already learned the Vedas, even lying in my mother’s womb. But I am sorry to say you often make mistakes in your
recitation
. Allow me to correct your Sanskrit.’ I don’t know what the
equivalent
of the Vedas would be in Dad’s life – maybe the home pages of the
Telegraph
. It’s a fact that I love to be right. I can imagine floating there in the dark and picking my father up on his bad habits. I might have announced, ‘Father, the
Telegraph
is confirming every
assumption
you have already. Can you find no better guide to the world?’

I might have taken issue with his odd habit of playing Switzerland in matters of family conflict, saying, ‘Father, why do you not side with your wife against her mother? This is the great struggle of her life, and you are not entitled to neutrality.’

Or I might have taken a longer view, saying instead, ‘Father, the men of your generation were unfairly accelerated by the War you grew up into. Even from here I can see that there are still trapped bubbles of childishness in all of you. Are you sure you are ready to be a father, however much you want the completion of your family? Are you sure you meant to give me my opportunity?’ I might have had the option of resolving back into dew, never to be born, in a spiritual abstention. Perhaps this is the origin of miscarriage, in fœtal second thoughts.

I might have added a few words to Mum, in a lower tone, my voice reaching her directly through her bones and mine. ‘Mother, I must ask you to pronounce
vegetarian
properly. The word is not
vegeteerian
. The avoidance of meat is an enlightened choice. There is no call to sneer at it, by your pronunciation of the very word.’ If I’d been given the option of some such amniotic lecturing I would have chatted away pedantically nineteen to the dozen.

Astavakra’s dad cursed the baby in the womb, saying, ‘May you be born with a twisted form.’ And in fact Astavakra was born with
disabilities
. The name means
eight curves
. Dad didn’t curse me, though over time he may have come to see me as some sort of judgement, on him and the choices he had made.

I was a text-book healthy baby, a magazine-cover specimen of infant. I don’t exaggerate. The magazine for which I was the cover star was
The Nursery World
, Vol. 41, No. 1,290 – the issue for August 31st 1950, when I was eight months old. I was the sort of bonny baby who provokes knitting frenzy in susceptible persons. The publishers have detected this matinée-jacket-provoking aura of mine, and have linked my image to a commercial slogan:
Wise knitters aim for … Target Cherub baby wool!

They knew full well what bait they were dangling in front of the knitting public. They knew what a marketing tool they had in me. I’m adorable. I’m enough by myself to start a craze for bootees and tiny cardigans, pale blue with matching pearlised buttons.

I wasn’t always so groomed and wholesome. I remember playing in the garden, as a baby, as a toddler, and loving to eat dirt. It’s one of my strongest early memories. When Mum caught me doing it, she would scold and even shout. It was the first thing that I learned was wrong. Not that I stopped doing it. I liked the taste too much. Eating dirt was the first thing that I learned to do when Mum’s back was turned. It was the secret vice which turned the withdrawal of her attention into an opportunity rather than a bereavement.

Mum hated dirt, though she also hated cleaning. The garden with its necessary dirt was unattractive to her. Dad took charge of all
outside
chores, until (much later) she discovered the joy of herbs, and a way of planting them which let her keep her shoes clean. Of course she kept a pair of old shoes to wear in the garden, but even those she hated to get dirty.

Inside or outside the house, creating order was a burden to her. Dirt was her enemy, cleanliness not altogether her friend. There was something brusque and aggrieved about her housework. Every flick of the duster, every pass with the broom, every guilty glance at the cleaning lady (when we could afford one at last), was part of a
life-long
dialogue with her mother, with Granny, whose attitude to domestic hygiene was passionate and entirely single-minded.

In Hindu cosmology it’s said of Krishna that he too ate dirt as a toddler. A playmate told on him to his mother. But when Krishna’s mother went to scold him and demanded that he open his mouth, he did – and then she saw that all the stars and the planets were held there in safety also. That was her revelation of her boy’s Godhead, when she saw the cosmos whirling in his little mouth, a mouth that still had its baby teeth. If Krishna’s mum had been mine, of course, he’d have been sent to bed without supper just the same.

There’s a theory that children, when they put the wrong things in their mouths, are incorporating necessary impurities, building up their defences for later encounters. Mum took a more social view – eating dirt was common. When I put nasty things in my mouth I was showing her up, even when there was no one around to witness my vulgar behaviour.

Once I found a red Spangle in the garden. It was caked with dirt, but I wiped it roughly clean and ate it. It was delicious. Afterwards I didn’t feel so good. When the taste wore off, there was nothing left in my mouth but fear, telling me that I’d done something terribly bad and wrong.

The mouth, being at that age the cave of all pleasure and knowing, refuses admission to nothing. Another time my imaginary friend Peterkin and I ate some little black-and-yellow caterpillars we found in the garden, not for the flavour but to feel them wriggling in our tummies. Peterkin said that nobody could see him but me, but that was just him being silly. I only pretended to eat my caterpillars, but Peterkin didn’t notice and wanted to show he was as brave as me, so he swallowed his down. He said he could feel them moving for a long time afterwards. It wasn’t half as much fun as I’d said, but I knew he’d do the next thing I told him to do just the same.

Near Christmas, I saw some holly bushes in full berry. I had Peterkin with me, and I told him they were the tastiest of all berries. ‘And now, Peterkin,’ I announced, ‘we’re going to eat tasty holly berries like the ones in the carols.’ Even after the berries had been heaved up on the kitchen floor I tried to talk my way out of trouble with Mum. I wasn’t ready to come clean even when my guts had made a full confession. ‘I only ate one,’ I said, ‘but Peterkin had lots and lots.’ There was no chance of my getting away with it, since Mum could see the undigested berries shining in what I had thrown up. My vomit was more truthful than my story.

After that I ignored Peterkin, pretending I couldn’t see or hear him. I made him cry. He didn’t like being reminded he was
imaginary
.

Of course Peterkin wasn’t really my imaginary friend, he was my little brother Peter. Peter on his birth certificate, Peterkin to the
family
(I think the diminutive comes from
Treasure Island
). I was told I should love him. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want a brother at all, I wanted a friend who could run and maybe fly. Instead there was this dull bundle who spent most of his time on the floor even after he had learned to stand. Perhaps it was my job to teach him to fly. I helped him up onto a chair in the kitchen and told him he could do it, but he had to wait until I had counted to ten before he took off. Then I went into the garden, still counting. There was no sense in being too near the scene of the spell if the magic didn’t work after all.

When Dad came in from his work, he would turn his hand into a flat blade and use it to deliver a soft chop to his forehead. He did this to Mum, he did it to me, sometimes he even did it to Peterkin. It was called a salute, and other people’s daddies didn’t do that. My daddy flied for the King. My daddy was a Squadron Leader. Mum made a smile with her lips while I saluted back.

We were allowed to roam pretty freely. I said to Peterkin, ‘I know exactly how to get on the runway where Daddy keeps his plane. I’ll take you there if you like.’ Then there they were, all the flying men. From the start I liked uniforms always. The men stamped together and saluted. ‘That’s all for us, you see,’ I explained. ‘This man is
coming
to see us. He wants to know if we liked it.’

Of course when he came closer I saw that it was Dad, and all he wanted to know was what the hell we thought we were up to. He was jolly cross.

It was Mum’s choice to call me John, but Dad was delegated to choose my middle name, as a consolation prize. Originally I was going to be John Draper Cromer, after one of Dad’s Air Force heroes, Kit Draper, but Mum dug her heels in. She hadn’t met him, but she certainly didn’t like what she had heard about him. Yes, he’d served in the War – yes, all right, both wars – but he wasn’t what you could call a war hero, was he? He kept wrecking planes. He was a show-off and a liability, if not worse – some said he had been lucky not to be tried as a traitor and a spy. Dad said that was all nonsense and drivel, but she insisted on his second choice instead, and so I became John Wallis Cromer. After Barnes Wallis, of the Dam Busters and the bouncing bomb.

Somewhere in Dad’s papers I expect there’s a list of possible names for his first-born, written in small caps:

As if he imagined them looking well on a war memorial, if it came to that. Of course the War still cast its shadow, over him and over everyone. There was rationing still. ‘Cheshire’ would have been for Leonard Cheshire, war hero and witness of the bombing of Nagasaki, ‘Gibson’ for Guy Gibson, who led the raid on the Ruhr when the bouncing bombs were dropped.

The earliest pattern of sound I can remember is Mum saying ‘
Dou-asíss – Dou-asÍSS!
’ I didn’t know what it meant at first, but she always made that sound in the same set of circumstances.

Sometimes it sounded like ‘
Móndou-asíss
’. Some sounds were fuzzy and others were clear. Some were said so quickly I missed them all together. There was almost certainly a little ‘k’ before the soothing, pleading phrase, but I have no memory of it.
Dou-asíss
was familiar and friendly, and sometimes Mum stretched out the final ‘s’ for
onomatopœic
ages.
Siss
was Mum’s word for doing a wee. We were
playing
a game, Mum and I. She wanted me to have a wee so I would drop off to sleep right away, and I didn’t want to, for exactly the same reason.

The next memory after Mum saying ‘
Dou-asíss
’ is of Dad saying, ‘You should blow on it, m’dear!’ That was his stock form of address to his wife, a phrase so stylised that it hardly counted as an endearment.

Under the hood of my big black pram it was almost as dark as the womb. It was wonderful to be wrapped up in swaddling clothes with my face breathing in the cool air. I would wait for the blissful warmth to creep up all around me. It was impossible to maintain this bliss for more than a second or two without falling into sleep, but I wanted to enjoy sleep as a conscious condition. I was a precocious investigator of states of mind. I wanted to stand on the shore, on the very edge of the tide of sleep, and feel myself being washed away. I was drawn to examine the moment that consciousness gave way to one of its opposites. I wanted to freeze that moment, to savour my awareness as it slipped from me, and my secret weapon in the quest was a full bladder. That focus of discomfort kept me on the edge of nothingness, preventing me from dropping off. Then when I could hold it in no longer I would relax and let it all flood out. It was bliss to feel the gentle warmth seeping into my swaddling clothes, before I fell properly asleep, for the few moments before Mum woke me with an exasperated sigh.

It must have been very frustrating for Mum, who had to keep changing my clothes. ‘He’s being impossible today – I’m at the end of my tether. I’ve only just put him into fresh clean clothes and now look! He’s soaked them again!’ That was why she was so keen on
making
me ‘go’ before putting me down to sleep, and why Dad came up with his crucial suggestion: ‘Blow on it, m’dear!’ I didn’t actually hear Mum say, ‘Dennis, I’ll do no such thing!’ but with my later
experience
of her I can absolutely guarantee that she would have used that form of words. In the end she didn’t have to do it. Dad would do it for her. I remember the feeling of the cool air flowing over my body, and seeing Dad with his cheeks puffed out, as he blew cool air over the clenched bud of my infant equipment.

His tactic was sound. I let go immediately, and on this first
occasion
I hit him right in the face, while Mum shrieked with horrified laughter. After that he managed to dodge the jet. Mum and Dad made gratified noises.

I was happy to be the cause of such sounds, even though it meant I was being cheated out of a few precious seconds of nirvana. From now on, when I was wrapped up I had no way of indulging in this delicious game, playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with oblivion. I just drifted off. It wasn’t long, though, before I began to enjoy Dad’s blowing
technique
in its own right. I remember seeing the jet of water rising high into the air, and being very proud that I’d managed to achieve this. How they managed to catch the proud stream I don’t know.

I soon discovered that any source of fresh air could act as a trigger, so when I came to toddle I started to experiment. Even opening the little flap of my dungarees was enough to start the tingle of release.

I have a separate memory of sitting in a shaft of sunlight and
realising
that everything around me happened by my say-so. Everything was conditional on me. Logically, of course, this is a memory of
successful
potty-training. The potty has been pushed out of the picture, but I know it’s there. I’m a little king, and I’m sitting on a
foreshortened
throne. My gross happiness is the immediate radiant aftermath of being told I was Mummy’s clever boy for doing my siss or my ‘
tuppenny
’ (the family word for defæcation) so beautifully in the right place. That’s something that disappeared early on – excretion as one of the pleasures of life, expressive as a smile, not some dark duty that dominates the days.

My fascination with my personal squirting device didn’t stop in the cradle. As soon as I was fully mobile, I wanted to aim, to stand and point. I came to think that potties were dreadful silly things,
useful
only if you needed to do a tuppenny in them, and I would head straight for the garden instead. Whatever Raff station we were at, West Raynham, Waterbeach or Hayling Island, as the family moved home in my early days, I would soon be toddling around in the
garden
seeing how far I could make my siss go. The desire soon spread to the road. The attraction here was there were other houses and those other houses contained little boys. I’d practised my sissing skills in private, so by the time I was ready for the road I was quite advanced, and it wasn’t long before I was taking part in tournaments. None of the other little boys was quite as good as me. I was the champion of siss. Mum and Dad told me I wasn’t allowed to go into the road, but there was no rule to say I couldn’t do my best to project a stream of urine from one side of it to the other. After I ate beetroot once my siss turned red, which was thrilling and gave an extra flair to my display.

I was a good little boy, always meaning well, so it follows that a lot of my memories are about doing wrong. There’s no contradiction there. My iniquities were striking enough to be remembered. When I was naughty Mum called me ‘Bad King John’, and if I grizzled Dad would say, ‘Pipe down, Johannes R.’ Both of those were from a poem. But it was understood between us that I was a good boy.

Once when I was staying with Granny, though, I saw her changing the bulb on a bedside lamp. After that, I had an idea about how I too might shine. I wanted more than anything to glow like that.

Granny had given me an idea about the electric light and how I could make it work in a different way. I knew the switch had to be on to make the light work, and I unscrewed the bulb and put my finger in its place, switched it on and duly got a burn. I knew I’d been naughty, and I tried to hide the place for as long as I could, till it had quite a blister. There’s probably not a necessary link between being scolded and the smell of vaseline, but there is for me.

I don’t know where Mum was when I went to stay with Granny in her old house in the country. Perhaps she was there too. Mothers are so constant, so irreplaceable in early life that they tend to disappear from the picture somehow – just as Mum, as well as the potty,
disappeared
from my memory of seated happiness, though her approval was what created the memory in the first place.

Granny’s house had thatch on it, which hung very low. She had to stoop to get in her own front door. There was a painting of a cat in Granny’s house, hanging over the fireplace. She lifted me up so I could see it properly. I tried to stroke it. It was funny that Granny had a painting of a cat, when the animal she kept was a dog, her lovely boxer Gibson. I don’t know who or what he was named after. There’s a make of guitar by that name, but I think we can rule that out. There were ‘Gibson girls’ who danced, but I don’t think Granny would name a male dog after females. It certainly wasn’t Guy Gibson the raider of the Ruhr. I plump for the Gibson cocktail, a dry martini
garnished
with a pearl onion instead of an olive.