Pilcrow (5 page)

As for food, I didn’t have anything that could be called an appetite, and Mum had to coax me to swallow every mouthful. Even before I was ill, I’d been a fussy eater. Meat in particular I instinctively
disliked
. The idea of chewing it disgusted me, so I would spit it out, politely if possible, if not, not. This was the heyday of the British Sunday joint, with leftovers in various forms being made to last much of the week, but if I hated the theme then I could only hate the
variations
on it. It was still hateful meat, however behashed or enrissoled.

It wasn’t likely that I would work up an appetite while I was lying still all day, so Mum became expert at working one up for me, using presentation as much as the promise of flavour. She learned not to put too much on the plate, which was sure to put me off. I could eat maybe a quarter of a boiled egg and a single finger of toast, a solitary soldier cut off from the company. Half an egg on a good day. An egg was a special thing in the domestic economy so soon after rationing, but I didn’t know that, and its aura wasn’t enough in itself to
stimulate
my appetite. An ice lolly, though, was a tremendous treat, well worth the trouble of licking. I couldn’t bear anything heavy – a little mouthful of sponge pudding and custard would be the most I could manage. Mum learned to tempt rather than scold, and to resist
turning
the whole subject of eating into a psychological minefield by striking too many bargains (if you finish your egg I’ll brush your hair – that sort of thing). She told me Brussels sprouts were ‘fairy
cabbages
’, knowing that the nick name would draw me to that
disregarded
vegetable. She was like an advertising executive, trying to crack a one-child market.

Mum would put a Mars Bar in the ’fridge to chill, and then cut it into thin slices. That worked pretty well. It wooed me. I could
usually
manage two or three of those little slices, and the daintiness of the presentation was a pleasure in itself – its elfin picnic aspect. Or its laboratory overtone, I suppose. Mum made meticulous cross-sections of those Mars bars as if she was a lab assistant preparing slides for the microscope. She even took the trouble to chill the saucer she served it on, so that the slices didn’t warm up too quickly, and lose their
satisfying
firmness of texture before they entered the cavern of my mouth.

Mum was enough of a traditional housewife to bake cakes, but I took no notice of them. They all went down Dad’s throat. I loved to eat the scrapings from the bowl, but I set my face against the finished cakes. Cakes were fine until they went into the oven, as far as I was concerned, and then they were spoiled for good, done for.

I had pretty much given up on the practice of eating, but Mum didn’t stop educating me in the theory. She explained that the correct and best way of eating, which didn’t apply to me for the time being because of my hands and so on, was to sum up the whole meal in each mouthful. So: suppose I was going to eat 1) Sausage, 2) Yorkshire Pudding, 3) Roast Potato, 4) Garden Peas and 5) Gravy, first I would have to survey my plateful, assessing the elements at my disposal. The gentle art of eating started with the setting aside of a building area on the plate. This was why it was never correct to fill a guest’s entire plate. Although it would not actually be wrong to assign the centre of the plate for this job, this course of action was less than ideal. A blank sector to one side of the plate was a better choice.

Then the job was to build an entire miniature meal on the convex side of the fork. Convex, not concave. If some of the food was
awkward
, for example peas, then a little mild mashing was allowed, but only as much as was needed to help the peas to stay in place while mouthful-building was completed. ‘Why?’ I asked. Why go to so much trouble? Because the delight of mixing is to take place in your mouth – as long as you don’t open it for all the world to see.

Mum gave a demonstration, and it was fascinating to watch her at work. First she mashed and moulded a tiny piece of potato onto the rounded side of the fork. I guessed that this was to be her foundation, a moderately squashy substrate for the cornerstone of sausage which would still leave room for the addition of Yorkshire pudding in a small but unprocessed chunk. There must be room left for a bonnet of lightly crushed pea. I was fascinated to watch the whole edifice grow, tottering a little but never in serious danger of falling.

Finally it was time to crown the forkful with gravy. This was the moment of truth, a test of the cook as well as the diner. Mum carefully rested her loaded fork on the plate. A suitable puddle of gravy would be waiting to one side of the perfectly balanced forkful. Providing the gravy was properly viscous, she could coax it with a swoop of the knife against the urgings of gravity so that it ended up on the top of the potato-sausage-pudding-pea amalgamation as a savoury varnish.

‘With practice it soon becomes possible’, she told me, ‘for one to have an intelligent conversation about something entirely different at the same time. While working in this way it should never appear that any particular effort is required. Food must always be incidental to the pleasures of conversation.’ In this way her atomic theory of the forkful melted into a fantasy of gracious dining. In fact the whole
little
demonstration of microcosmic eating may have been the only meal I ever saw her eat without anxiety.

Mum had a cunning way of serving bananas. It wasn’t so very long since bananas had become available again at all, and those with
memories
of rationing greatly prized the yellow fruit. Mum could hardly believe it when I showed no interest in a fruit so rare and distinctive, so curved to the eye and creamy on the tongue. There was no trace of the excitement I had shown before I was ill, snug in Dad’s arms and seeing the yellow hands hanging from their hooks.

Then one day Mum tried again. She would never give up. She waved a banana in front of me and when I said I wasn’t hungry, she said, ‘This one is different. This is a special banana.’

I stayed silent just as long as I could, but curiosity was spreading over my body like a rash, as Mum had known it would. ‘What’s so special about it?’

‘It’s a magic banana.’

She had me. This was irresistible. ‘What makes it magic?’

‘What makes it magic, John, is that it’s already in slices. Inside the skin. Just open it and you’ll see.’

Already in slices inside its skin? Now I was in the palm of her hand. She held the banana where I could see it close up, and revolved it slowly so that I could see that there was no blemish on it of any kind. Finally, with me still watching very closely and ready to halt the operation if I saw anything at all fishy, she tugged on the hard stalk on the top of the banana until it broke open with an alarmingly
definite
noise. It was as if she had snapped the neck of a sleeping yellow bird. Then she peeled back a strip of skin, far enough to show me that she was telling the truth. The flesh was cut into even discs. I was
baffled
and thrilled. Impossible for the skin to have been peeled and then put back in place.

‘Where did you get it? How did you do that?’

‘Eat it and perhaps I’ll tell you.’

‘I won’t eat it unless you tell me.’

‘You’ll have a long wait.
Patience is a virtue
,’ Mum chanted,
presumably
re-hashing one of the many bitter lessons of her childhood, ‘
Virtue is a Grace. Grace is a little girl – who never washed her face.
’

The prestige of the magic banana was so great that Mum won an argument at last. I ate it. From then on magic bananas appeared at regular intervals, when my indifference to food became actively alarming. Mum knew how to keep the magic going, too. Sometimes she would produce a banana and I would ask, ‘Is it a magic banana?’ And she would say, ‘I’m afraid not, John. This is just an ordinary banana. There weren’t any magic ones in the shops. It’s a very short season, you see.’ And it sometimes happened, since human nature is perverse, that I would eat the ordinary banana anyway.

It was years before I learned how she did the slicing, and how she discovered the method in the first place. While I was in bed I
obviously
didn’t attend parties, and my own birthday celebrations were muted to the point of inaudibility. But Mum had heard from a
neighbour
about a magician who performed at children’s parties and had amazed everyone – the adults perhaps more than the children – with the banana trick. Mum managed to get his address and sent off a letter begging to be told the secret. She enclosed a ten-shilling note. A letter came back sharing the secret, but also returning the
ten-shilling
note. With all the heart-rending details she included in the letter, the return of the money was practically certain. Sometimes there are worse ways of getting what you want than her life-long
technique
of milking the world for the sympathy it contains.

The secret was laughably simple. All you need is a pin (needle, miniature bodkin). What you do – what Mum did – is to push the pin into the banana at one of the seams of the peel, and then work it back and forth until the improvised lever, pivoting where it enters the tougher tissue of the peel, has carved a slice through the flesh. Withdraw the pin, leaving no more trace than a pinprick, and repeat at intervals along the fuselage of the fruit. Abracadabra! Magic banana.

So much for food. Mum’s training as a nurse helped her to deal resourcefully with a number of other difficulties. I couldn’t use the lavatory, but the bedpan was a non-starter. I had to lift my bum from the horizontal to use it, and this was agony, so Mum devised a
different
method. She taught me to ‘go’ on my side, sissing into a bottle, tuppennying onto a kidney dish. Our teamwork improved, until every drop went into the bottle. The bladder-hooliganism of my earlier days had been properly tamed.

For a short time it was actually thrilling to be a baby again, praised and rewarded for a level of dependence that would have brought stern looks and impatient words only weeks before. But regression is an unstable pleasure, all the more so when no choice is involved.

The head of the bed was by the window, so I couldn’t see outside, though I could hear things. Nature filtered in, but not in any form I could interpret. I could hear birds scuffling on my window-sill in the mornings. I thought of them as wrens, because of the farthing ashtray which I was sometimes allowed to hold and explore with my eyes. In ornithological fact they were almost certainly tits. Sometimes I would hear a big galumphing noise which could only be a stork depositing a baby under the gooseberry bush at the bottom of our garden, the
little
girl Mum had always wanted to make the family complete.

From a distance in time it’s easy to say that Mum and Dad could have turned the bed round, the moment an indefinite sentence was passed on me, so that I could at least see out of the window, though my view from that angle would have been only sky. It wasn’t even the bed that needed turning round, just the bedclothes. It wasn’t a major engineering project. It could have been done in five minutes. Even so, I understand quite well why they didn’t. Every adjustment to my new state was a step backwards for them. Turning the bed round would have made it harder to pretend that I was going to get up any time soon. I only had my situation. They had something much worse – knowledge of my situation. I was not their son in the way I had been, and there was nothing they could do to re-connect me with what they had lost.

If Dad was at home then of course the radio was his preserve. No one questioned his need to hear the news whenever it was on. If he was away, Mum would sometimes lug it in and set it up in my room. I liked listening to the
Billy Cotton Band Show
, though Mum thought Billy himself was very vulgar, and his opening cry of ‘
WAKEY WAKEY!
’ really got on her nerves. It was the pronunciation that got her goat particularly. What Billy Cotton shouted was actually ‘WHYky– WHY–
KEE!!
’ and he stretched out the second ‘WHY’ so that it seemed to last for ever. I wonder if Mum guessed how much I loved it.

I was told not to move, and I was a good boy. I had to move
something
, and if it wasn’t my body then it would have to be my mind. I learned my numbers. I got Mum to teach me to count to a hundred. Then I’d reel off the tally, time and time again. Counting up,
counting
down. Mum was very patient. She didn’t baulk even when I upped the stakes and went as far as a thousand, not even sighing when I asked, ‘What comes after a hundred, Mummy?’ If I had known about times tables I would have made short work of them. I loved every little number. I didn’t let her read the paper or do her sewing while I did my counting. I made her say, ‘Very good, John,’ or ‘Correct!’ after every single number. I made her concentrate on me absolutely. She was never allowed to be off duty.

Mum would soothe me by brushing my hair. As a special treat she would use Dad’s brush, a Mason Pearson with no actual handle, a
military
oval of manly grooming, the bristles set in a bed of dark pink rubber. My own brush was softer but conveyed no electrical tingle to the scalp. Sometimes she would leave Dad’s brush with me when she left the room. On some primitive level it seemed wrong that my
hairbrush
had a handle and his didn’t.

When she was out of the room, counting lost its interest, and I explored the few movements I was allowed, things that didn’t count as moving. There were various activities that could be managed while lying perfectly still, as the doctor had ordered. It counted as keeping perfectly still as long as you didn’t move any bones. There were no bones in eyes, for instance. I rolled my eyes until I felt a sort of
dizziness
, although I was flat on my back and there was no danger of falling. I could fool myself I was falling while remaining perfectly still. I learned to cross my eyes. I practised breathing in different ways, concentrating on one nostril, for instance, at the expense of the other.