Pilcrow (41 page)

It all worked quite beautifully. Nothing happened instantaneously. There was a fractional pause which allowed Peter to make his escape. In that pause, the seething wax seemed to be assessing the cold water that had been dumped into it with a sort of elemental incredulity. It held its breath. Then it exploded. There was a marvellous caustic burp, a great rising cloud of steam and ash, and boiling wax was richly deposited on our clothes and any flesh they didn’t cover. I had the glorious sensation of having challenged Nature to a duel and
survived
. It was a draw. It’s true that there was a scrap of cloth which landed on my lap still burning, but Peter easily patted it out. He was as exhilarated by our discovery as I was myself.

It was all throughly worth while. From candle-ends and a pie tin we had fashioned a gratifying little bomb. I suppose Peter must have been a bit worried about the incendiary wax-shower and the burning shreds in flight, because he confessed to Mum in dribs and drabs while she was putting us to bed. He was always a good boy. She said nothing about it. She didn’t seem to take it in. She just smiled absently and said, ‘I’m glad you two amused yourselves.’ As if we’d been playing Scrabble.

The next day we did it all over again. Only this time a boy staying with neighbours insisted on being in on it. Parents didn’t keep
children
on a tight rein in those days, even in cities, and the Abbotsbrook Estate was no city. We
told
him it was dangerous. We
told
him it was only for big boys. I suppose Howie was about five – not nearly old enough to understand science. We told him to stay far back but he wouldn’t listen. Howie said if we didn’t let him see he’d tell his mother we’d hit him.

That was too much for me, and I said, ‘You’ll really tell your mum that
I
hit you?’ And he said, ‘No I won’t.’ He pointed at Peter. ‘I’ll say that
he
hit me and you
bit
.’ So we let him stay. Of course we didn’t let him pour the water into the tin, but he stood right next to Peter, watching, and he wasn’t so sharp at backing off.

He got very little of the wax on him, but of course he went
howling
off to his mother, and then she came round screeching, ‘How
could
you burn my baby?’ If Howie was five then he wasn’t a baby, or
alternatively
, if he was a baby she shouldn’t have let him out of her sight, should she? She wasn’t being at all reasonable.

Howie’s mum told the whole saga to Mum and soon Mum was
bellowing
, ‘What in the world did you think you were doing, burning poor Howie?’ A scolding can be just as bad as a scalding because you just have to stand there and pretend it doesn’t hurt. However unfair it is.

Mum absolutely denied that we’d told her the day before what we’d been up to. ‘Do you really think’, she said, ‘that I’d have let you play with fire if I’d known what you were doing, with or without Howie being there?’ It’s true we had been puzzled by how calm she was the night before. I suppose we twigged that she hadn’t taken it in, but we’d told her just the same. Wasn’t that the point? It wasn’t our fault that she was hypnotised and not listening. And what were we supposed to do when Howie started pestering us and wanting to be in on the experiment? Tie him up?

We had discussed tying him up, as a matter of fact, Peter and I, but Howie was the sort of child who runs to his mother about everything, so he’d be off complaining about
that
the moment he was set free. So really it made quite as much sense to let him witness our experiment and take his chances. He might learn something, even if it was only to listen to what bigger boys said.

I couldn’t seem to get the hang of how I was supposed to behave. Everybody kept on about how awful it was that I couldn’t do normal things, but the moment I made a normal bomb they came down on me like a ton of angry bricks. Mum’s face even looked like a brick when she shouted. I’d seen her plucking her eyebrows, anyway,
hundreds
of times, so I couldn’t understand all the fuss about Howie’s. She always said they grew back overnight.

Somewhere in this turbulent epoch I managed to find the time to fail my eleven-plus. Quite why we were all put in for this ordeal I don’t know. The results wouldn’t have made a difference to our futures either way – it’s not as if there was a grammar school and a secondary modern both reaching out for us, waiting for our results to see which institution would get lucky. I dare say participation in the eleven-plus charade was (like the entirety of our education) no more than a legal requirement.

I failed the eleven-plus. I don’t remember the details. Apparently I wasn’t as clever as everyone said, or at least not good at getting my brain across to people I didn’t know, who didn’t know me. I don’t even remember whether I used a pen, writing fast and with doctorish illegibility, or the typewriter, readable but painfully slow. Either way, in the separation of sheep from goats, I was officially a goat. I think we were all goats at CRX.

Not that it held me back. The eleven-plus was a sort of dummy exam, in my case at least. Failing it didn’t hamper my progress, any more than passing it would have moved me on. It turned out that a new school had already been thought of, to provide secondary
education
tailored to my needs, or my body’s.

I’d understood by then, without knowing the word, that Dr Ansell was an assimilationist. She felt that the disabled should – wherever possible – go to mainstream schools. She said she’d heard all the
arguments
about bullying, the sheer vulnerability of the handicapped (as we were then, before we became disabled), and she didn’t think much of them. In practice it didn’t happen. People got on with their lives. The arguments about bullying were all pretexts for a sort of fearful apartheid. It was touching that she assumed bullying would be a new danger for a child who had been a citizen of her little kingdom.

Even so, no mainstream school was proposed for me, by Ansell or anyone else. Perhaps I was just too disabled. I fell foul of the small print, of that ‘wherever possible’. Ansell had a splendid motto, very enlightened for the period: ‘Every child has his own disease.’ Even so, my own disease seemed horribly classic. I was text-book – but an old text-book, a pre-war or even Victorian text-book, from before the arrival of steroids.

What I was offered wasn’t a normal school. Still, if it was a school at all, if it wasn’t a hospital lightly disguised, then it could only be more normal than what I was used to. ‘More normal’ would have to stand in for normal.

I had exhausted the educational possibilities of the school inside the hospital inside the Nissen huts in the grounds of the stately home, but I hadn’t exhausted everything the place had to teach me. One thing I completely failed to spot during my time at CRX was that the place itself was one colossal clue. There were esoteric secrets on the premises beyond the ken even of the Famous Five. I didn’t know that Nancy Astor was a Christian Scientist. Of course I also didn’t know who Nancy Astor was, or what she had to do with CRX. I didn’t know that she was the first woman to be elected an MP – well she wasn’t, so I have that excuse for not knowing it. She wasn’t the first woman to be elected an MP (who was a member of Sinn Féin
campaigning
from prison in Holloway) but she was the first to take her seat in the House.

I also didn’t know at the time what a Christian Scientist was. If Christian Scientists had bombarded CRX with anything like the
fervour
of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I’d have been better informed. Nancy hadn’t been raised in the faith but had seen the light of Mary Baker Eddy. Her husband Waldorf had seen it too, if only because it was bounced off the reflective surfaces of the formidable Nancy. If Nancy had taken up ritual cannibalism, Waldorf would most likely have gone along with it, not tasting the human sacrifices, necessarily (perhaps refusing with a wave of the hand when the plates were brought round), but ready with a toothpick afterwards, to help Nancy dislodge the human gristle from her teeth. So both of them adhered to a faith that says the pain is unreal – and then the moment a war comes along they volunteer their house as a hospital. It’s more than a gesture. They pay the wages of thirty-odd people, Lady Astor helps on the wards.

She had her own style of nursing, admittedly – if she didn’t rub salt into servicemen’s open wounds, she certainly grated ginger over them. What she didn’t do was tell them, as a good Christian Scientist should, that their pain was caused by Error and not real. If pain is unreal, why take pains to relieve it? Indifference would seem the
better
response.

So even in the foundation of the institution in which I lived for so long, with its two addresses and two pronunciations, there was a huge clue about the double nature of pain and the double nature of
everything
else. Both real and not real. Or (if that makes it simpler)
neither
. Neither real nor unreal.

Old Turps, the same headmaster who had been able to propose nothing better for my future life than work as a clerk, came to see me before I left the hospital. I didn’t forget that he had indulged my
phobias
and kept me safe from Teddy boys as much as he could. ‘If you go on to do great things,’ he said, ‘I hope you’ll give us a mention’ –
consider
it done.

Somewhere in this phase of life I had made an advance in my prayer technique. My relations with divinity were calmer. I’d stopped
bargaining
so nakedly. Now I was praying that if I was going to have pain in this life, and it seemed that I was, that I should have the pain all at the beginning, compressed, so that I could relax and enjoy what came afterwards. The way I phrased it to myself, and to God, was that I wanted to have all the gyp in a dollop. ‘Gyp’ came from
Mrs Dale’s Diary
, I think, to which Mum had become addicted.

This was a real break-through for me, to be praying for what I already had. It was definite progress. My prayer wasn’t disinterested, to be sure. It was a sort of bet, but when later in life I read about Pascal’s Wager I felt rather sniffy about it. I didn’t think it was
particularly 
impressive, either intellectually or spiritually. Pascal’s idea was that it made sense to believe in God and judgement, since if you were wrong there was no penalty, and if you were right there was a reward. Either you won or you didn’t lose.

I see now that he was conducting a sort of mental experiment, which may even have included elements of teasing. At the time I felt it was really just cowardly to trick yourself into belief. My approach was a little subtler. Prayer showed no signs of being able to take the pain away, so I would devise a new style of prayer which would be self-fulfilling. It would seem already to be being answered, day by day. I had asked for pain, and here it was, but I could tell myself it came on my terms. I awarded myself the privilege of meaningful choice despite my absence of options. I took pain on myself, now, not as an ordeal or a sacrifice but as something more in the nature of an investment.

The Cromers and the Morrisons kept in touch for some time after I left CRX, though Sarah and I stopped being so close. The last time I saw her was as late as 1972. She was living in a Cheshire Home near Crystal Palace. The spark that made her Sarah seemed to be missing. She knew who I was, but I couldn’t interest her in very much. She didn’t always answer a question, and if she did it was as if she had to push the words out against some sort of internal resistance. Then her voice would tail away. Even Muzzie couldn’t always get through to her.

Sarah lay in bed with her eyes on her prized possessions. Her doll collection had grown enormously. Now she had a magnificent mahogany cabinet with glass doors to house them all. Her ambition was to have a doll from every country in the world on those shelves. She was nearly there. I think there was only one more doll needed to complete her miniature United Nations.

The only signs of a new interest were the Crystal Palace supporters’ scarves draped across the top of the cabinet, and I couldn’t be sure they were Sarah’s. They might have been something the carers had thought of to bring a bit of life to the room.

Sarah had more to say to her dolls than she did to people. Every now and then a carer would put a doll in her hands and then she would prattle away, almost like the Sarah I had known. She seemed to know what all her dolls were doing with their lives. They all had names, of course. She even knew what they did when she was asleep herself. She might call for Rita to be exchanged for Serafina, or Pushpa for Gita. Holding the doll in her arms, she would listen intently to what she had to say. She would say a few motherly words herself, give the doll a cuddle and then call for it to be put back in exactly the right place. Then she would call for another one.

The helpers at the home entered into Sarah’s world whole-heartedly. This was greatly to the credit of the institution and its staff. It was also rather creepy. Maria said, ‘Sarah! You haven’t mentioned or
spoken
to your little Eskimo girl for ten days – I hope she’s not starting to feel left out?’

‘Oh yes Maria you’re so right!’ chirped Sarah. ‘Oh do give me Polly straight away … Oh Polly darling, yes it’s true I have been
neglecting
you, but I didn’t mean to. It’s just that you’ve been so good, you see. That doesn’t always pay, you know! I’m afraid I’ve been terribly busy trying to keep the peace between Sally and Salim. Come and have a quick cuddle. I won’t let you get too warm … What? Yes, I know you’d like me to keep you in the ’fridge, but if I did that I couldn’t see you! And be fair … I have put you in the part of the
cabinet
that’s nearest to the window and the fresh air. I’m afraid that will just have to do …’

I felt fatally grown-up compared to Sarah, and very sorry for her. I wanted to buy her that one last doll, but at the same time I had qualms about putting the finishing touch to someone’s life’s work. Her life’s work was what it seemed to be. Best to leave her to get on with it. With the United Nations complete, what would Sarah have to look forward to? Academic question, as it turned out, since she died a few months later.

One isolated case isn’t any sort of scientific sample. I have no
evidence
to back up my indictment of steroids, as they were administered in the 1950s and ’60s, beyond the fact that my friend Sarah had a mental age of ten when I met her in the 1950s, and the same
mental
age in 1972. The drug had stopped her bones from hardening as much as mine had, but at the cost of making other things soft as well. By the time she died, Sarah had been prattling to her dolls for a good fifteen years. Steroids had stopped her growing up. They’d even stopped her from out-growing her toys. Thanks to the medication she was given, her second childhood came hard on the heels of the first. They were like the sentences tough-minded judges sometimes pass on hardened criminals when they want to make an example of them, running consecutively without remission.