Pilcrow (39 page)

I felt honoured because Mum had always drilled into me that
fountain
pens adapt to the writer’s hand. You should never write with a pen that belonged to somebody else, and you should certainly never lend yours to anybody.

Taking the sacrosanct pen I drew a little box, put in two windows and a door, and topped it with a roof. I added a chimney with smoke coming out. For me a house without a chimney hardly counted as a human habitation. People need smoke – it’s a mystical given. ‘Very good!’ said Mum. I looked at my little house which was very good, apparently, if not quite good enough to deserve the Queen’s Velvet in her Historic County of Buckinghamshire. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘take away the walls, windows and doors and tell me what’s left!’ I couldn’t exactly take those bits away, so I shifted the paper and made a few more quick Parker strokes. I said, ‘It leaves a roof and a chimney with smoke coming out.’

I still couldn’t see anything in Mum’s headed notepaper like this pictogram, so I screwed up my eyebrows and scratched my head with my stick. Mum’s puzzle was turning out to be quite a poser. Perhaps I’d under-estimated her brains. To give myself more time to think, I popped open the tube in which I kept my Liquorice Allsorts and flipped one up into my mouth. My aim was much improved by this time, practically perfect.

Mum gave me an encouraging smile. ‘Try looking at how the
telephone
number is done,’ she said, so I had another good hard look. On the left of the page I read:

Bourne End 1176

though it didn’t look like that at all. It wasn’t horizontal. It sloped as steeply as the corridor at CRX just by the main entrance. If that ‘Bourne End 1176’ was part of the Queen’s Highway in the Historic County there would be a sign before it bearing a giant exclamation mark and the words
CAUTION
/
STEEP HILL
/ 1:3.

If Dad was driving up that hill he would pray that it was a good dry day and that the Vauxhall had a decent amount of tread on its tyres. He would give the throttle all he’d got even before he reached the ‘B’, and then he just might make it to the ‘6’ at the end of the ramp, pointing all the way up to the moon. The blood was pounding in my ears as I imagined the scene and I felt almost faint.

The telephone number sloped upwards like this: /, and the way Mum had the address printed out made an imaginary line sloping like this: \. When when you put them together you saw something like this: /\.

Bingo Jai-Jaiya Hallelujah and Allah-Be-Praised! I had seen the roof of the little house at last. My imagination must have been severely inflamed, because for a moment I could see an imaginary chimney and imaginary smoke coming out too. I was incoherent with excitement for a good ten minutes. Mum was pleased to have made a convert but still rather taken aback. I seemed to be even more obsessed about the importance of the right stationery than she was. I told her that we must get the house notepaper redesigned. After the present batch had run out, we were going to have the address done just the way she had it, but with one vital addition – a printed
housetop
with a chimney, and smoke coming out of it.

I wanted to start writing letters there and then to all and sundry, so as to use up the old stock of notepaper, now obsolete. At that moment I felt I could write letters tirelessly all day, until there was no paper left. ‘Let’s starting writing lots of letters, Mum!’ Good though her mood was, Mum wasn’t going to indulge me any further. ‘Don’t be silly, JJ,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my notepaper just the way I want it. And it’s not cheap. It’s not for wasting on letters that aren’t important.’ She wouldn’t let me use so much as one piece, and this threw me into a stark depression.

She took back her Parker pen, as if she regretted breaking her own rules by letting me touch it, boxed up the Queen’s Velvet and put everything away. The only consolation for me was that she tucked my very ordinary sketch, done on very ordinary white paper, into the box as well.

I felt completely exhausted after all the stationery excitement. My moods went wildly up and down. Emotions fizzed like sherbet on my tongue and then tasted of ashes. At the time I thought that childhood was like this for everyone. One more reason to wish for it to be over, although another part of me was terrified of growing up. I wished there was a way to stop being a child that didn’t involve becoming a grown-up.

Moods are complex constructions, chemical storms. Part of that chemistry was to do with sugar intoxication from my Liquorice Allsorts. A child’s metabolism is finely balanced, easily knocked off its kilter. The tube from which I shook them was involved. It was a metal screw-top Smith Kline & French tube passed on to me by Mum or Muzzie. It was much harder to open, and much more satisfying, than the packet they had originally come in.

I didn’t pay any attention to what had been in those tubes before. It was something prescribed without a murmur, after all, to anyone who was feeling a bit run down, a popular general pick-me-up. A standard tonic – Muzzie called it ‘petrol for the nerves’. It was
benzedrine
, racemic amphetamine, and the powdered residue from the tablets had settled on my Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts, dusting each one with a stimulant coating. That was why I so often chattered
nonsense
at a terrific rate, and then felt sullenly exhausted. No wonder my mood would lift off like a rocket and come down like a stick. Muzzie, Mum and I were all on speed. In that sense we were all upper people.

Forces both inside and outside me seemed to push me towards a new and alarming stage of life. My taily was whispering in my ear, telling me secrets deeper than anything Charlie knew. It was pointing the way into the future, with a slight leftward slant. When everyone in the ward was on rest time taily showed me how to enter a heavenly and forbidden world. When I manœuvred a cold pillow between my legs and pressed taily against the cool flaxcloth, it showed me how to be a player in a silent orchestra.

I had never seen a man’s taily, and could only imagine what such a thing would look like. There seemed no likelihood that it would match mine in any respect. At CRX there was little opportunity for groin-watching. The staff were mainly female, and the men I saw, whether doctors or porters, wore white coats or overalls. It was at weekends in Bourne End that I could look more closely at the middle parts of men.

What I liked best of everything I saw was pressed black trousers. I loved the neat seam running through the middle of the shapely lump. I thought the taily would be equally neat and pressed and cloth-like. More like a warm tie pointing upwards than anything made of flesh.

The beautiful young men in my fantasies were still the ones I had admired with Mary. I’d been faithful. They were the ones from the Famous Five: Julian for preference. I imagined him asking me along on an adventure, to a cave or some such place. Then he would send the others (including Timmy the dog) out on a recce. Julian would clear his throat and say, pretending calm, ‘You know why I sent the others away, don’t you?’

My heart hammering, I’d say, ‘To uncover the mystery?’

He’d smile as he opened his arms and legs to me at last. ‘The only mystery here is you and me …’ I had Dick in reserve for when Julian’s aura was exhausted. In third place, as emergency fetish, Rollo the gipsy from the Rupert annuals. The gipsies, oh. The raggle-taggle.

My loyalty to old friends might seem rather pitiful, as if I was
hallucinating
on vanilla ice cream in the absence of stronger stuff. It’s true that like everyone else in the 1950s I wasn’t exactly bombarded with sexually inviting images, but this line of thinking doesn’t do justice to my imagination, or to Enid Blyton’s either. I wasn’t
surprised
when I read up on her later, to find that the Queen Bee was a rather racy figure in her own way. Tennis parties in the nude and so on. I don’t think she was actively beaming arousing thoughts down the hill to me from where she lived, but she was a livelier figure than she has been given credit for. Her characters were bound to reflect that sensuality, once she left Andy Pandy and Big Ears in the nursery and started writing more freely about the Famous Five.

Masturbation corrupted my character, but only incidentally. It wasn’t the act itself, but the extremes I had to go to in order to
practise
it undisturbed. I didn’t even do tuppenny in private, so how was I going to talk to taily without eavesdroppers? Rest time was an oasis only in theory. Now we were older none of us did more than doze, and I had the feeling of female ears tuning in to every little move. The solution was to break the rules. Only if I misbehaved seriously and often would I be exiled to a side ward, where I would have the leisure to explore taily properly.

I had to learn taily’s language. Masturbation for me has to come from the shoulder, apart from the odd finger-flick. More satisfying, usually, since my hips could generate virtually nothing in the way of thrust, was to hold the sheet against myself. I learned to excite myself without actual touch, using a stream of charged images to urge myself on to the dry lightning, the thrilling discharge of nothing yet. Thanks to Ansell, the electrical storms of pre-adolescence were
provoked
by contact with the finest Irish linen.

It was a different sort of sin against those linen sheets that most often got me banished to a side ward in the first place. Early on in my time at CRX I had learned that linen was more or less edible. I could suck a patch until it went soft and then chew a bit off. Then I’d spit it at the wall to see if anyone noticed. Paper was also useful for this purpose. First I chewed it to soggy pap and then spat it at the wall. Once it had dried, it stayed stuck there remarkably firmly. But linen was my spitting material of choice. It’s a paradoxical textile, resistant to high temperatures but vulnerable to friction and nibbling. I have to admit there was an addictive aspect to my bad habit. I was drawn to those sheets like a moth to a flame, like a moth to a winter woollie. The staff might not notice the spat-out whitish lumplets on the wall, but they could hardly miss the nibbled edges of the sheets. I hope that Ansell never knew how I insulted the luxury textile that she insisted we have, a two-pronged assault with teeth and taily.

Later on in my school career I learned that I wasn’t alone in the
animal
kingdom – weaver birds, house martins, ants and termites all used the same technique. By then I had grown out of my vice, but I felt retrospectively vindicated. I wasn’t such a masticatory anomaly as I had seemed to myself and others. I may even have been inspired by my budgie in the first place. Charlie was a dab hand at chewing things, including cloth and paper. On one famous occasion he had made short work of a ten-shilling note Dad had left unattended, chewing it into little balls of brownish pulp. It was a tremendous feat, on a par with a human being chewing up (and spitting out) the Bayeux Tapestry, but Dad didn’t appreciate it.

By this time I knew the rules of CRX. When my body became a man’s, or at least stopped being a boy’s, I would be moved to Ward Three. The prospect terrified me. It wasn’t that I loved the girls on Ward One, but I had decided I didn’t like boys either. I had overheard a nurse saying, ‘They’re all Teddy boys in there.’ Mr Turpin the
headmaster
was the form teacher of Ward Three, and I didn’t mind him, but he didn’t sleep on the ward. I knew because I asked him, and he said he went home to Mrs Turpin. Teddy boys were exactly as
terrifying
as teddy bears were wonderful. Teddy boys were wild. They came out at night. How could Old Turps protect me then? I decided I would be better off staying where I was.

Mrs Pullen, who played the piano thickly and sang, ‘Where there’s a king with a golden crown, riding on a donkey,’ now taught me English and Essays. She tried to soothe my terror by telling me that she also went to Ward Three to teach. I couldn’t understand how she could go there and live. The Sister of Ward Three was known to be a dragon – and don’t even think of looking for a heart of gold beneath those scales. It didn’t help that I was told, ‘No nurse will wipe your bottom on Ward Three, so you’d just better work out a way of doing the job yourself!’

I’d stay where I was, Wendy or no Wendy. One of the
compensations
of the school being such a secondary presence in the institution was that it had no power to coerce. If I dug my heels in, they couldn’t make me move. So Mr Turpin went on coming over to teach me in Ward One. He must have thought I was being very silly, but he
didn’t
make me feel bad about it.

In fact Wendy had in some strange way lost her power. It wasn’t exactly that she had mellowed. Her body turned out to have another trick to play on her, besides the one that had brought her to CRX in the first place. She had always had a strange dentition, though as she didn’t make her way in the world by smiling it wasn’t the first thing people noticed. Her front right tooth (left when you looked at her) was almost twice as wide as its neighbour on the other side of the median line. It had a groove in the middle, if you looked closely, but no real division.

Double teeth are caused by disturbances during odontogenesis, the lovely word that only means the birth of teeth. They run in families. A geminated tooth is one where two teeth grow together, though each one still has a root canal. In true fusion, the tooth germs unite before the calcification process has begun, and the result is a tooth with a single root canal. There’s also a variant known as concrescence, when the fusion occurs in the embryo when the cementum layer of the root is forming. The technical terms of dentistry have their own special magic – really, the whole vocabulary is glorious once you lift the veils of fear and pain which shroud it.

Wendy couldn’t wait to lose that big tooth, that monster gnasher. When it finally happened she was delighted. She wouldn’t have expected compensation from the Tooth Fairy in exchange for a body part she detested so much. If anything I imagine her leaving a tip under the pillow to cover the cost of disposal. She waited for the adult teeth to erupt, hoping they would be separate and normal. None came.

This is a classic pattern. A double baby tooth is associated with a missing adult tooth. Wendy was very upset, but there was nothing she could do about it. The Tooth Fairy giveth and the Tooth Fairy taketh away.

Time drew Wendy’s teeth. It became possible to imagine feeling sorry for her, in the same way that it’s possible to imagine the square root of minus one, even after Mr McCorley had fitted her with a
relatively
convincing false tooth. Two false teeth, actually, so Wendy got at least part of what she wanted.

Despite not wanting to grow up, I had come to enjoy testing authority in small sidelong ways. I loved to have the last word. One day there was a film on the ward telly, with a group of men on an adventure. When one of the men was wounded, a lady who had come along (even though she’d been told this was an expedition for men only) tore a strip off her skirt to dress his wounds, using some
disinfectant
which she kept handy. He flinched and looked the other way while the music went very lovey-dovey indeed.

When night-time came (in the film) I couldn’t help myself. I called out to Staff Nurse, ‘Come quickly, come quickly!’ Then when she’d trotted up looking rather flustered, I said, ‘See! It’s night-time, and look! They’re sleeping in the forest. Why doesn’t someone come along and take those trees away? Don’t they know it’s dangerous to sleep near all those plants?’

Staff Nurse seemed a little flummoxed, but said the difference was that the people weren’t in hospital. I said, ‘One of them has just got wounded and that’s almost the same.’ Then she got quite shirty and told me about the Upas Tree. The Upas Tree gave out a gas which
stupefied
an already sleeping man. It would then bend its branches down, pick you up, digest you while you were sleeping and you would never be seen again. Within a day everyone would have
forgotten
that you ever existed. I should be grateful I only had daffodils and buzy lizzies to contend with, and not ask so many questions.

Of course the upas tree,
Antiaria toxicaria
, isn’t like that at all. Only the sap is poisonous, a sort of toxic milk, and you’d be waiting a long time before one got round to eating you. Even so, I was delighted. I admired carnivorous plants unreservedly, and the idea of a carnivorous tree thrilled me to the core.

My hand-writing was resisting all efforts to improve it. I didn’t see why I had to write things down. I wanted to live my whole life
without
having to make silly marks. If things were forgotten then so be it. The forgetting made way for new things to come along. Finally Turps had the idea that I should learn to type instead. Perhaps he had noticed my love of fiddling with knobs and buttons.

‘Typing’, said Miss Reid grimly, ‘is only for those who have learned to write properly first!’ As if this was tea-time, and typing was the cake reserved for those who had eaten up their bread and butter. I hated arbitrary objections like this – why couldn’t she just scream, ‘No you can’t! Over my dead body will you learn to type! You’re a pesky little nit!’? That would at least be honest.

‘Oh I don’t know …’ said Turpin. ‘Why don’t we let him try and see how things go?’

I suppose he was exercising his authority. Turpin and Reid weren’t exactly the best of friends. They’d had a minor territorial barney a few weeks before, so perhaps their backs were already up. Mr Turpin had come along to give me an English lesson, using a book by Ronald Ridout which I had loved. Reid had been very sniffy about it, saying she would never recommend that book.

Now Miss Reid went very red in the face, which didn’t suit her. ‘As you wish, headmaster,’ she said. ‘Teaching him such a skill, though, would lie Outside The Orbit Of My Assistance.’ It’s a lost art, I’m afraid, speaking in initial caps. ‘One must be careful not to set a precedent.’

I didn’t know what a precedent was, but it certainly felt like a
variation 
on a theme of Weetabix. Allow him to type and they’ll all want to do it. Ward One will become a typing pool. ‘Perhaps you can find someone else.’

‘As a matter of fact I have someone in mind who I’m sure will be happy to help.’ I noticed that he too was red in the face. ‘Mrs Rhodes.’

‘I need hardly remind you that Mrs Rhodes teaches on Ward Three, and John is refusing to go there. If he wants to continue in his
childish
ways, then he shouldn’t expect to get adult things like
typewriters
as well!’ Her reedy voice was displaying an unattractive range of overtones, but I didn’t care. Turpentine and Reid were having a row, right there in the ward, and it was all over me!

At this point Turpentine went on the attack. ‘I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you, Miss Reid, to put yourself in John’s shoes?’ said Turps. ‘If you hadn’t been doing your best to hold him back for four years, he might be on Ward Three right now!’

This was outrageous, of course. He could just as easily have said it was to her credit that I didn’t want to leave her class. Poor Miss Reid had little enough status, and now it was being trampled on. A
typewriter
was imported from Ward Three, and so was Mrs Rhodes to teach me how to use all my fingers. Miss Reid learned a new skill of her own – looking straight through me. After all we’d been through together, the sins, the songs, the botany.

Mrs Rhodes had her work cut out. I remember her training me to type the word ‘alone’ correctly, dividing the work between my hands, rather than pecking haphazardly, but there were limits to what I could do. My hands were not like hers, and not only because she had long nails painted red.

I instinctively knew that if the point of her long fingernail hit
anything
hard, then it would give her a nasty jolt, and that if the hard thing was the key of a typewriter (manual, naturally, at that date), then it would just plain hurt. Even so her typing was rapid and bossy. Not only did her clattering fingers hit the right keys, but on each stroke the pointed nail would fit tenderly for an instant over the rounded key, like a cap designed to fit it, before the next command came from Mrs Rhodes’ brain and her fingers darted away to flirt with another key.