Pilcrow (20 page)

One thing that many people have noticed, though, is that children die well. Children are better at dying, as a rule, than adults, but then adults react to this fact with sentimental wonder. No one ever asks why it should be that dying should become harder as people grow up – as the world interprets growing up. What is it that makes dying less and less like a melting, more and more like a tearing? It has to be the way we come to accept the conditions of life.

I got only a mild dose of this conditioning. The great obstacles to enlightenment are the ‘I-am-the-body’ illusion, and the ‘I-am-
the-doer
’ illusion. The years I spent in bed were an apprenticeship in pain. The pain wasn’t always intense, it had its moods and its tides, but it never wholly went away. To see myself only in terms of my body was to define myself in terms of pain. I wasn’t tempted. Looking for an alternative was as natural as any physical reflex. When pain is
continuous
you come to realise that you have an aspect that pain doesn’t touch. Without conscious effort I started to construct a different
mental
organisation, in which I might be able to live continuously where pain was not.

I had every incentive to develop a sense of myself that wasn’t dependent on sensation – since my sensations were so
overwhelmingly
negative. The road to satisfactory sensations was blocked by the piled-up wreckage of my health. If pain prevents us from
remembering
ourselves, then it is a great obstacle. If pain keeps us in the
present
then it is a great advantage.

In the whole of the Western tradition there’s only one text, as far as I am concerned, that has any illumination to offer on this subject. It’s a poem actually, and it goes,

A limerick, in fact, and not on the surface sympathetic to my
philosophical
position. It sets out to lampoon quackery and to champion common sense. It has no time for the transcendent. I get it, really I do. It’s droll. But how easy it is to draw the teeth of the satire! All it takes is some additional punctuation in the last line, leaving every word intact. The last line should read, ‘“‘I’ dislike what ‘I’ fancy ‘I’ feel.”’ That’s all it needs. Just a little re-pointing dissolves the
mockery
, and the final meaning is straightforward Hinduism.

As for the second illusion: I was able to do so little for myself in those years that I likewise loosened my ties to ‘I-am-the-doer’. If I was the doer, I was making a bad job of it.

When I tried years later in life to do yogic breathing exercises,
pranayama
, I found that some specialised respiratory patterns were already familiar to me. I had learned how to calm myself using only the body’s untapped resources. I knew how to raise or lower body temperature with different styles of breathing, and when the
pranayama
exercises called on me to inhale or exhale through a single nostril, I found that the knack was easily acquired or recovered. I’d already been practising in all innocence.

It may be that I was also meditating in an amateurish way, without benefit of a mantra, seizing on any remembered object for
contemplation
until I had worn it smooth, turning it into a mental pebble cool to my mind’s touch. If the main obstacle to successful self-realisation is uncontrolled thought, then I had a head start. There was so much less for me to shut off, only a dripping tap rather than the unperceived daily waterfall of distracting sensation.

From my bed I sniffed the wind and could smell the weather changing. I just couldn’t decide what exactly was happening. The emotional climate around me was complex and hard to read. There was change on the wind, undoubtedly, but the change didn’t
correspond
to the workings of a single season. It was as if the trees were shedding their leaves and coming into bud at the same time.

Then Mum told me I would be going to school. Decisions had been made. It would be a school
with other boys and girls in it
. I tried to bank down my excitement, but still it came fizzing up. Going to school! I could wait a lot longer without moving, if that was to be my reward. I could wait another year if I had to, so long as school happened in the end.

Mum and Dad didn’t spell out the exact character of the education that awaited me. They knew the things to say which would keep me happy. Yes, there would be teachers, many teachers and many other children. There would be books – any number of books – and there would be blackboards. There would be as many blackboards as I wanted. There would be chalk and learning, maps and sums and
foreign
languages. There wouldn’t be the Collie Boy. Her work was done.

In fact her life’s work was done. Soon after she stopped teaching me Miss Collins ate some contaminated tongue and died. There must have been something quite hard and cruel inside me at this time, because I didn’t mourn her. My main regret was that she had taken with her, as she departed from the earth, one of the few delicacies that I would
reliably
eat. She had been wise to the whoopee cushion on her chair, but not the sliced tongue on her dinner plate. That got her good.

Tongue had been just about my favourite food, being so silky and tender, and now I learned that it could be poisonous. From then on I could only look at it wistfully, knowing that if I was tempted to eat it again I would probably die. I hadn’t fully realised that tongue
was
meat until then – let alone what it really was. Compressed bovine
lingual
flesh. The possibility had never occurred to me. I knew that this silky food had the same name as the talking muscle in my mouth, but it looked nothing like. I assumed that there were two different words that only sounded the same. There are plenty of words like that. Like
pain
hurt and
pane
window. They might even be spelled the same, like
bark
a dog’s voice and the
bark
that was a tree’s skin.

I tried biting my own tongue, even chewing it a little, to see if it had the same sort of flavour, but again there was no resemblance. Mum had worried so much about the weevils in flour, the worms that never grew despite my hopes, and all along she had been feeding me something really dangerous, something close to poison. I’d never take that chance again.

So Miss Collins was out of my life, and her own, and there was also another good-bye that was harder to say. No pets were allowed at the school where I was going, so Charlie would be staying with Mum. This bit of news gave me a pang, but I got over it. Charlie was my best friend, but that had a lot to do with his being my only friend, and if I stayed at home with him I’d never get another. And besides, wouldn’t I be coming home at weekends? Yes, John. Every weekend? Not every weekend – some weekends. Now and then. And will there be holidays? Yes, every now and then there would be holidays. Then I’ll see Charlie on my holidays. Cheerfully I sold out my only friend in the interest of getting a proper education.

At that age I wasn’t able to frame the crucial question: is that in fact what I will be getting, a proper education? What I wanted, really, in the way of education, was to watch boys wrestling without
antagonism
, wrapping their legs round each other and rolling back and forth. It stood to reason that school was where that would happen, if at all. What Mum didn’t mention, until just before I was due to go, was that there wouldn’t only be teachers and books at the school. There would be doctors and nurses and needles. Some of the needles might have tiny hooks attached. There might be invasions of my mouth and my bottom. Soapy water might be introduced there until I made a tuppenny mess. I would be going to school, yes – there was no real deception involved. There would be lessons, certainly. But I wouldn’t exactly be going to a school. I would be going to a hospital, and the school was tucked away somewhere inside it. The hospital would be there all the time. The school would put in an appearance now and then, as and when.

She told me the truth eventually, in her own way. ‘You’re going to school soon, John dear, but it’s a special school. You see, this is a
special
hospital that is also a school. So they’re going to make you better and make you clever – all at the same time.’

In fact I would be living in a hospital. To be specific: I would be living in the hospital mentioned in the famous article, the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Taplow.

First I had to get there, to be schooled and hospitalled. Mum and I would travel to Taplow by train – but first we had to get to the train. A special ambulance would take us to the railway station. Before that, though, we had to get out of the front door, and that meant packing. I think the last day or two before I went to Taplow were the ones which taxed my patience most, in all that time of bed rest. Officially the sentence of bed rest might have been lifted,
unofficially
it went on, since there was so little I could do any more apart from lie down.

Those last few days were my homely introduction to Zeno’s Paradox, the rule that nothing can ever happen, because something else has to happen first, and something else has to happen before that … I truly thought I would go mad in those days, just when my seat was booked on the Sanity Express to Taplow, wherever that was.

I tried to think that packing was an adventure in itself. By ‘
packing
’ I mean watching Mum put things in a case I would never carry. She laid the things I would be taking out on the table and showed me them before she tucked them away. Spare pair of pyjamas, toothbrush, toothpaste, Mason Pearson brush with a handle, flannel and soap. Most important, as far as I was concerned, was a stack of pre-paid postcards, more important even than the sweetie tin filled with treats like Milky Way. Mum had addressed all the postcards to ‘Mrs L. M. Cromer’ at 5 Westwoods, Bathford nr Bath, Avon. I laughed at the sight of that bundle of cards, all of them under strict instructions to find their way right back to where they were now. It was a boomerang bundle! My hand-writing was atrocious if not actually non-existent, but Mum said it didn’t matter, I must write to her anyway and she would understand.

If I dreaded the labour of writing, I was still in love with numbers, and I worked out the aggregate cost of the postcards in the bundle. I still had several unreachable pounds in my Post Office Savings Account. I felt in my bones that those pounds were as good as gone. The Post Office would probably pass a law that you weren’t allowed to withdraw money if you lived in a hospital, just so they could hang onto my (Dad’s lovely word) spondulicks.

All I had in cash was 8s 5d, saved up from little gifts. Doing the sums in my head, I told Mum that I wouldn’t be able to write more than once a week or it would be too expensive. We had a bit of an argument, with her saying that I could write as much as I liked – it wasn’t going to cost me anything. In my own small way I reasoned back, using the argument that the money for the stamps would have to come from Dad. If it came from Mum, she would only have to get more from Dad when it ran out. Dad had quite enough to do already, without having to work even harder to pay for stamps for postcards to be sent home by me, a boy who couldn’t even write properly.

I reassured Mum that the family money problems would soon be over. After all my health problems were sorted out I would run a
jeweller’s
shop. Mum could come along and have any watch in the shop she wanted, absolutely free. It was only for now that we’d have to be careful about things like postcards. Finally Mum pointed that the money had been paid already, so it would be Wasting Money not to send all the postcards. Then I gave in, quite pleased for once to be over-ruled, after putting up a good fight on behalf of Dad’s solvency. I regretted it soon enough. I never heard the end of it, about John’s jewellery shop and how terribly sweet it all was.

As far as I was concerned the postcards were the most important things in my little case, but Mum said my toothbrush and paste were vital. I must ask Nurse for a kidney dish, and I must remember to brush my teeth morning and evening. ‘And I do have ways’, she said darkly, ‘of finding out whether you’ve been using your toothbrush. You’ve been well brought up, and if I asked you now, you would
certainly
tell me the truth. But you may find out in hospital that
advantage
can sometimes be gained – just for a little while – by fibs.’

I asked Mum if the train was going to be special, like the special ambulance that would be laid on for us. ‘Not really, JJ, but trains are always special to me. I’d live on a train if I could!’ All her life she had a fascination with trains. Roads terrified her, but trains were
somehow
soothing as well as thrilling. If she had her wish, there’d be more trains everywhere, more trains and more lines and more stations. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were no cars and only trains, no cars anywhere except taxis to take people to the station? Being proposed to by Dad on a train hadn’t crowned her obsession with the
permanent
way, but it had fallen short of putting her off the romance of the rails.

Any train was special for me, too, just by being a train, by not being my bedroom and by going to a place which also wasn’t my
bedroom
. That was specialness enough for someone whose experience had been narrowing, over the previous years, almost to a point. It didn’t need to go anywhere. Even a train that just sat there in the station without moving would have been enough to fill my dreams for weeks.