Then I must have slept more heavily. When I awoke I was alone in the bed. Then I started to hear strange grunting from floor level. When I wriggled myself round I could see Noel doing photogenic little press-ups. He grinned at me when he caught me looking. ‘I made you a cup of tea,’ he said.
I took it for granted that Noel would be on his way as soon as he could. No such luck. He seemed annoyingly refreshed, and in a mood to be further entertained. He had exhausted his curiosity about me, but had apparently promised himself the treat of meeting my bedder.
His smile was on full disarming power from the moment Mrs Beddoes arrived. She’d barely had time to say, ‘Hello, and who are you?’ than he’d offered her a cup of coffee. My coffee, not actually a plentiful resource. Reluctantly I introduced them. From nowhere Mrs Beddoes produced something which she’d been keeping dark, a Christian name. ‘Jean Beddoes.’
Noel said, ‘John kindly let me stay last night after I had a fit of the heebie-jeebies from a film we saw. Have you ever had a fit of the heebie-jeebies from watching a film, Mrs Beddoes?’
She hardly hesitated. ‘There was one … what was it called? Gravestones, and a man pouncing on a boy. Staring eyes. I couldn’t sleep for weeks after that.’
Noel raised his hands in front of him and gave a theatrical shudder. He even closed his eyes. ‘Magwitch!’ he whispered, in reverent horror, and then they were away, fast friends already on the basis of Great Expectations. At that moment, peeking out at Mrs Beddoes from behind a finger fence of artificial surprise, he looked like a minor Dickensian character himself. Minutes later he was helping her to make the bed.
Since I slept wrapped up in a cloud of dreams there was actually no need to do any such thing, but Mrs Beddoes would not be deflected from her professional code. There was no question of slackening off even when rigour was nonsensical. So every day she would unmake the bed and remake it, tucking the coverlet in with brisk determined movements so there was no possibility of the pillow making a run for it. I had shown her once that this technique would have made it hard for me to get into bed, if I hadn’t preferred the Dream-Cloud. I had slid my stick in and then yanked sideways to open a usable gateway to the sheets, like Dad using his paperknife on a letter, to show her how preposterous she was being. She stuck to her principles.
In the shock of rapport with Noel her cheeks were now quite pink. Somehow they had got on to the subject of favourite pieces of music. Mrs Beddoes was saying, ‘It’s my husband who knows about things. Alf’s favourite piece is classical music, and I really like it too. It’s by Beethoven.’
‘Really, Mrs Beddoes? One of the symphonies?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps the Pastoral? You may know it from Fantasia – the Disney film.’
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘It’s not from a film.’ I was delighted that Noel’s patronising suggestion had fallen flat. ‘It’s called … it’s gone out of my mind. It’s called … that’s right, “Wellington’s Victory”. It’s on the same record as the “1812”, but it’s even better.’ She clapped her hands together on either side of the pillow, to plump it up, but almost as if she was playing the cymbals. ‘Even more cannons and whatnot!!’
Which made Noel’s day, perhaps even his term. I had hoped he would leave before Mrs Beddoes did, so I could be spared the inevitable sneer about her musical taste, but he stayed on to round off the lovely morning he was having. I didn’t know ‘Wellington’s Victory’, but it seemed strange that liking Beethoven could be such a faux pas. Wasn’t Beethoven supposed to be the tops?
It was perfectly possible that Mrs Beddoes knew more of Beethoven’s music than I did. Once you’d mentioned Moonlight, Für Elise and Da-da-da-Dum, you’d just about exhausted my expertise on the subject. I wasn’t in a position to call Noel’s bluff, but I wished someody would.
What he said when we were alone was, I suppose, quite a mild exercise in contempt. ‘Good for Madame Beddoes,’ he said. ‘If you’re tone-deaf and pig-ignorant, you might as well go for the piece with the loudest bangs.’
Watching the way Noel played along with innocent Mrs Beddoes, I realised that my social skills were very partial. I needed to develop new ones. All this time I had been thinking in terms of bringing people within the orbit of my personality, entirely overlooking the fact that they were always going to be people, like the blond germ working his ’fluence on Mrs Beddoes, who badly needed to be kept at a distance. Poor mobility meant poor avoiding skills, so I would need to add an annexe to my laboratory of personal accomplishments. It wasn’t enough to have charm, I needed antidotes to the charm of others. Countercharm. Even the Everest & Jennings hoist I had brought from Bourne End had a red control as well as a green one.
I wanted to be able to accept the world’s butterscotch with the proper appreciation, while refusing its helping hand on my shoulder, its shallow fascination with the details of my daily life, its snores in my bed. I must learn the technique of ruling these things out of court so crisply that the offer never came again. There must be an end to haggling with the well-intentioned, the clueless and the plain invasive.
If I had liked Noel I might have crowned his name with a sparkly diæresis, so: Noël. As things stood, I stripped him mentally of any such insignia. He didn’t deserve them.
I was offended by Noel’s manner with Mrs Beddoes, but I also envied it. It obviously didn’t strike him as unnatural that he should be looked after at his college by a sort of servant, well on his way to adulthood. Perhaps he didn’t notice his dependence, but mine was highly visible to me. My independence was opening up by the slowest possible stages, and the leisure of the process maddened me. With every emancipation I became more chafed by the restrictions remaining.
Certainly Noel was a great hit with the woman he had taken so much trouble to mock. For weeks after his overnight stay, she would ask, ‘And how is Mr Noel? Sleeping again at nights, I hope?’ She would obviously have enjoyed a repetition of his visit. It had slipped her mind that one of her purposes, according to the university’s administration, was to make sure that the students in her charge spent the stipulated number of nights a term within a one-mile radius of Great St Mary’s, unless they had their tutor’s permission, in their own beds and alone.
What lay outside that magic circle was off the map and off the radar. As far as the rule was concerned, the university might be surrounded, like the earth in Hindu cosmology, by concentric oceans of (in order) brine, sugar-cane juice, wine, ghee, milk, whey and fresh water.
To me the University Library was far more plausible as the centre of student life than Great St Mary’s. People were always complaining that it looked like a power station, as if they had spotted a flaw in the design, when that industrial imagery was exactly what the architect intended. The UL was a mighty pulsing electromagnet, which drew towards it with implacable force two copies of every book published in the country, on the very day it appeared. It was a royal engine of bibliophilia, it was an austere brickwork lingam throbbing with imaginative power. What it wasn’t – with its staircase upon staircase – was a place I could go. The front entrance crowned a flight of steps with that abomination, a revolving door, hateful symbol of my banishment from the engine room of learning. No one has ever been able to explain to me why the trivial advantages of the revolving door are held to outweigh its obvious defects. Yes, it excludes draughts. It also excludes me.
I made one forlorn attempt at entering the premises by another avenue. There was a goods entrance at the back, where crates of books could be wheeled in. I would explore the possibilities there. Of course I had to make an appointment (more phone calls from the Porter’s Lodge) to be shown the ropes – the ramps, the lifts. Of course a ramp isn’t much use to a wheelchair-user unless he has a motorised chair or strong arms, and the lifts were pretty much hopeless, hardly larger than the ones at Vulcan, being designed in the first place for books and not people. All in all, the prospect of being an honorary book-crate in the UL was a lot less fun than being an honorary suitcase on trains leaving Bourne End station. It wasn’t a solution. I would have to find other means of gaining access to the treasure-house of books.
Luckily my status as a second-class citizen wasn’t a simple thing. It was speckled with exemptions and concessions. With a little cajoling on my part, there was a system in place. All I had to do was toot the Mini’s horn outside the Library at a prearranged time and the books I wanted would be brought down to me. The able-bodied undergraduates of the university, the hale and the hearty – they were the underprivileged ones. At the feast of learning offered in that rather sombre-looking building, they had to eat on the premises. I was entitled to take-away.
The library’s statutes allowed for special arrangements to be made at the discretion of the Librarian, but in practice it was only necessary to adapt the mechanism which allowed third-year undergraduates to borrow books. My Tutor became my proxy – so technically he was the one who borrowed up to five volumes on my behalf, and incurred any penalties also. There was a certain amount of paperwork, since Graëme Beamish had to give his authorisation. He had a supply of forms already printed up (normally for the use of those lucky third-years), but he did need to sign them. ‘I must say, John,’ he remarked once, ‘that I never dreamed that writer’s cramp would be part of the price I pay – with joy in my heart, I assure you – for the pleasure of acting as a moral tutor.’
Wheelchair access to libraries is a major cultural advance, but there’s no doubt about the greater poetry of the old arrangement. The boy at the foot of the steps whistles a special signal, and the books he wants come fluttering down from the roof of the building, birds of knowledge which alight on his fingertips. It’s all very Omar Khayyam.
I don’t have a nostalgic bone in my body, and I wouldn’t willingly go back to any day gone by. Adhesion to the past is as bad as wanting to sew yourself into your old clothes. I can’t help it if my times of waiting for books to be ferried down the steps are among the brighter spots in an overcast time.
Of course the real difficulty in the library lay in locating the books in the catalogues, writing down the relevant class-marks and placing my order. I made another attempt to sell Beamish on the idea that a telephone in Kenny A6 was the final element required to make the whole system workable. The staff of the Library wouldn’t mind my ordering books by phone. They might even look things up in the catalogue for me.
The Beamish wasn’t having it. ‘I’m beginning to see, John,’ he told me, ‘that you have quite a talent for sweet talk. It’s a fact that the Library and indeed the whole university is full of pussycats who could easily be talked into anything by someone with your wheedling skills. But at the moment our splendid Bursar is under the impression that disabled students are rather expensive to run, something of an extravagance in administrative terms. If I tell him you now need a phone in your room, he’ll be absolutely sure of it. So don’t over-play your hand. Put that honeyed tongue away.’
He seemed to have a very precise idea of his rôle: to make my life possible but not easy. ‘As I may have mentioned,’ he went on, ‘it was only quite recently that the colleges began installing telephones for their Fellows. I’m not sure it counts as progress. It makes it much harder to get work done when the phone keeps ringing. Forgive me if I am repeating myself. A repetitious demand deserves a repetitious answer.’
This was a bit much to swallow, the physicist as Luddite, and I’d only just explained that having a phone would actually help me with my work. Still, I had to knuckle under. Technically, under Regulation 8(a) of the University Statutes, it was my Tutor who was held hostage when books were entrusted to me by the Library. He was responsible for any penalties incurred, as if he had borrowed them himself.
So I had to put up with a rather unsatisfactory system, relying on other people to chase up the catalogue, dropping off notes with my requirements or taking my turn on the long-suffering phone in the Porter’s Lodge. All too often a porter would come down the steps to me at the agreed time, in response to my horn signal, with fewer books than I had hoped, or even none, saying cheerfully, ‘I’m afraid we’ve run into some problems, sir!’ And of course there was no possibility of appeal, to see where the system had failed.
Still, I now had at my disposal one of the great libraries in the country, stuffed with treasures Mrs Pavey could only dream of. I was determined to exploit it, and I wasn’t going to wait for an academic emergency which might never arise. I was determined to dredge up a wriggling rarity from the depths of the lingam, from its lowest possible vesicle.
It was Mrs Pavey who gave me the idea, when she was looking into different systems of shorthand at my request. I had acquired a competence in Pitman, but then become disillusioned with it because it was so angular. On the rebound I fell into the arms of Gregg, with which I was very happy for a while before I had to admit that it was simply too curvy. I gave up for a while, without altogether abandoning the hope that out there somewhere there was a baby bear of a shorthand system, neither too curvy nor too angular but just right. And I had never forgotten Mrs Pavey saying, ‘I did come across a reference to a book based on another system, John, but it’s impossibly rare. Still, it might be just what you’re looking for – it’s called Brachystography. Not just shorthand, which would be brachygraphy, but the shortest shorthand of all. From the Greek brachistos, shortest.’ And I had almost-nodded, as if I had been born knowing Greek.
So that was my choice. J. A. A. Percebois’s Brachystography, from 1898. At first the omens were good. The book had been located, in a sub-basement. There was a label on it saying NOT TO BE LENT OUT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Just the sort of prize I was after. There was a waiting period, while the case was referred indefinitely upwards for judgement, and then finally I received a note saying the book was ready for collection.
It was all terribly disappointing. The moment the glassy-eyed cœlacanth was in my fishing-net I realised I’d have had more fun with a goldfish in a plastic bag from the fair.
I shouldn’t have been expecting a little book, just because it was about a system of extreme abbreviation, and anyway my love of such things should have been exhausted a long time ago, when I was in CRX and Mum gave me the World’s Smallest Bible and a tiny Webster’s Dictionary. More to the point, Percebois’s system was about as sensible a way of representing the sounds of words as pictures of birds’ feet. No wonder it hadn’t caught on! I was reduced to my least favourite position, of agreeing with what everyone has always thought. That’s guaranteed to put my teeth on edge.
My status as Downing’s first disabled student wasn’t clear-cut. It turned out that there was another already, a blind student called Kevin who was reading Law. I would see him around the college, laden with textbooks in Braille. He was very popular, both in his own right and because he had somehow landed a job writing record reviews for the Melody Maker. LPs arrived for him by every post, and he was generous in passing them on. I wondered darkly whether he had a phone in his room. He seemed very favoured – and of course he hadn’t needed to have a rail fitted in the college bathroom he used. He represented a modest institutional investment. Unlike some people. Mentioning no names.
The college had assigned me a room that was accessible, give or take, to someone with my poor mobility, but had overlooked the need to make a similar arrangement for my pigeon-hole, where mail would be distributed. The alphabetical run was maintained, with the result that Cromer, J.’s pigeon-hole was set at a height which Cromer, J. would never be able to reach. I considered protesting, in the hope of being granted a more convenient slot roughly two feet off the floor, but I was learning to ration my appeals for special treatment. Wheedling was apt to blow up in my face, and the honeyed tongue was beginning to receive caustic answers.
It would have been futile in any case, since I couldn’t get into the Porter’s Lodge unaided. When I needed to use their phone, I took the porters on a trip back in time, to the etymological roots of their calling. If they had been able to vote on the phone-in-John’s-room question, they would have been solidly behind me, for the sake of equal rights and their backs. As for mail, they delivered it direct to my room.
The UL staff would only convey books to the bottom of the steps outside the front entrance, or a few paces further, to the door of the Mini. The personnel at Heffers, the university’s foremost bookshop, would come much closer to home. They matched the efforts of the college porters. In an attempt to fight off the challenge of rival businesses such as Bowes & Bowes and (who knows?) even W. H. Smith, Heffers would deliver books to undergraduates at no charge. What an enlightened gimmick! The books came to my door.
If I had only had a phone in my room the whole book-buying transaction could have been accomplished without labour on my part, and I would have become an early example of the stay-at-home shopper. Even allowing for bookshop visits to place my order, it was a lot better than nothing.
I’m happier with hardbacks than soft covers, which isn’t snobbery but pure practicality. With a paperback the only way you can avoid breaking the spine is to cradle it with your outstretched fingers. My fingers won’t reach that far, so it’s a matter of either balancing the book on the backs of my hands or going ahead and breaking the book’s back, flattening it against the table-top. There’s no room for sentiment when it comes to something as important as reading. Tender-hearted book-lovers wince when they see me in action, and I don’t care.
The first book I asked about that wasn’t on a course reading list was Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge. After some inner wrestling I had finally surrendered ‘my’ copy, the Bourne End Library’s copy, back to Mrs Pavey, though she would have been happy to go on renewing it indefinitely. Holding on to it would be wrong – a small civic crime, like wearing the life-belt that has been used to drag you out of the Slough of Despond on a permanent basis, though it is clearly marked Property of Slough Borough Council.
Heffers told me that the hardback was long out of print, but there was a paperback available. My heart sank at the news, though it’s no secret that bibliophilia is only fetishism of self-righteous form, and a sly perversion of the longing for knowledge. Book-collecting magnifies the differences between copies of the same work until they are overwhelming, when it’s the essential sameness of every copy which allows a book to make its impact.
A book is a book is a book. After lecturing myself in these terms, I ordered the paperback, which was priced at 18/6. While I waited for it to arrive, I tried to convince myself that it would connect me to my guru in exactly the same way the library copy had. In fact it would have the advantage of being fresh, free of associations – a new beginning for an established devotion. Looking at it in gardening terms, my devotion would be re-potted, with room to grow.
Then when the book finally arrived, announced by a knock on the door of A6, it was the hardback after all! Still the first edition, a full fifteen years after publication, and in theory long exhausted and out of print. I made the trip to Heffers and cross-examined the staff about this miraculous mistake, but they weren’t helpful, simply saying that there must have been a leftover copy at the warehouse. The word ‘warehouse’ indicated a place of decisions beyond the possibility of appeal, like ‘Providence’ or ‘the Government’. They hardly noticed that I was thrilled rather than bitterly complaining. My bliss knocked them off kilter.
I was deeply moved by this godsend, this gurusend. There was no rational explanation for the appearance of the book – but nothing is impossible for the guru. It was a time when I was feeling only tenuously attached to the reality I had tried to find in India. This gesture of continued good faith from the non-dualist cosmos was all the more welcome and sustaining. If it was a miracle, it was a miracle well spent. And only twenty-five shillings.
My new copy even had the same tender blurb on the dust-jacket that had drawn Mum’s eye in Bourne End Library, about the practice not entailing tortuous exercises or the tying of the body in knots. Words not holy in themselves but perfectly chosen as bait for the holy fishing-rod, making me fall for my guru hook, line and sinker.
Now I had a familiar book in my room. I also had my framed picture of Maharshi, but when Mrs Beddoes tidied it away out of sight I didn’t protest. No picture of the Maharshi shows him as anything but benign, his smile a constant while his body ages, and yet sometimes I found it hard to meet his eyes.
My vow of gardening chastity had been overridden by the generosity of the Bot, and now I was making some experiments with an old friend. I bought a bulb from Sanders Seed Merchants in Regent Street, which I placed on a saucerful of sand in my window. This was an experiment on a person as well as on a plant – a practical joke. The idea was irresistible, once it had occurred to me, and this new improved whoopee cushion (the original had fizzled frustratingly under my tutor’s bum during the bed-rest years) would not misfire.
No doubt in their native climes such things have a modest seasonality, but under the conditions even of humble windowsill Creation (let there be light! let there be heat! let there be water!) they can’t wait to grow. Soon I could see a fine stout prong rising from the centre of the bulb. It was a naughty-looking thing which did my thin social life nothing but good. Passers-by would comment on the living phallic symbol growing on my windowsill. There were even people who knocked on the door to see the plant rather than me.
One of them was a botanist called Barry, who begged me to let him know when it flowered. He was a rather ugly squat student, always bleating about having no girlfriend. He had worse odds to contend with than the famous ten-to-one ratio of student genders. Even if the disproportion between the sexes was corrected – even if it was reversed – he could have relied on finding himself alone. From the way he kept himself, or rather neglected himself, it was surprising that anyone talked to him at all. Bad breath and body odour were his calling cards. He lived within his noxiousness as innocently as the stinkhorn mushroom. Sooner or later a friend, while such things still existed, would have to nerve himself to break the news.
The sinister inflorescence in my window grew and swelled by the day. I had let Barry in on the secret that the flower when it arrived would give off a really disgusting smell. Barry was more than a bit whiffy himself, of course, but if you were in the same room with Barry and S. guttatum in full inflorescence, it wouldn’t be him you noticed. Whiffy Barry wasn’t in the same class.
Barry was mad keen to see the thing in flower so that he could give his considered opinion as a botanist. That was just what I wanted myself. I told Barry he would be the first to know when it flowered, and I tried to predict when the great event would finally happen, but these things are hard to get right. I was really only beginning to under stand the species.
Mrs Beddoes had started to take a tentative motherly interest in my welfare and happiness, so I knew my little scheme was working when she relapsed into her squirrel state of being. It was almost as bad as it had been at the beginning of term. She didn’t know where to look, all over again, while I stayed put in bed. This Eichhörnchen was anything but flinkes, doleful for all her twitching.
I waited her out, with a gleeful interior chuckle. Surely she wouldn’t be able to keep her peace much longer? She was being ridiculously patient. Then at last it came out, so very hesitantly. ‘Now, Mr Cromer,’ she said, ‘I don’t mind looking after you, hoovering your room, even making you the odd cup of tea. I hope you don’t think I’m making difficulties – but I do …’
She clenched and unclenched her fists in desperation, steeling herself to produce words that went against her samurai code.
‘… I do draw the line. I have to put my foot down somewhere … Now I know it’s not your fault, but try to appreciate it from my point of view, Mr Cromer.’ Appreciate came out as appreesherate.
I let her struggle on, while I put my face through as many convincing emotional permutations as I could muster. It was all working splendidly, and I had to give her as much rope as I possibly could. Meanwhile I shuffled my legs out from under the duvet and hooked them under the wheelchair seat. With the help of the McKee pins I could pivot myself up into a sitting position on the bed and lever myself, awkwardly but unaided, into the chair.
At this stage in the pantomime it was vital that she didn’t come to help me. I sidled discreetly over to the window side of the room. It would be exaggerating to say that I kept her talking. She couldn’t stop, knowing that sooner or later she would have to come to the point. Finally she had exhausted the family medical encyclopædia. ‘The thing is, Mr Cromer’ – one last gasp and she came out with it – ‘I do draw the line … at my gentlemen wetting the bed.’
‘I see, Mrs Beddoes. Your gentlemen must not wet the bed. And you think I have committed this crime against the Holy Ghost, for which there can be no forgiveness. Is that your last word?’
‘I’m afraid it is.’ She bristled a bit, and I loved her for that. ‘It’s no crime, and I don’t see what it has to do with the Holy Ghost, but I shouldn’t have to put up with it.’
‘And what is the solution to our problem? A rubber sheet? Plastic nappies?’
‘I don’t …’ She ran out of words altogether.
‘How about if I went down on my knees and begged for forgiveness?’
‘Don’t do that, Mr Cromer. You of all people …’
‘The terrible thing is, Mrs Beddoes, I honestly don’t remember wetting the bed. Do you think I’m going out of my mind?’
‘I really couldn’t say, Mr Crow-maire. Ungraduate gentlemen are full of surprises. Still, I wouldn’t say you’re the type.’
I wanted to take pity on her, but the game had to be played out in full. ‘Anyway, Mrs Beddoes, you’ll be taking this further – you have no choice in the matter, I quite understand that. But perhaps you’d better inspect the bed and show me where the wetness is.’
She prodded the Dream-Cloud, gingerly at first and then more thoroughly when she found it blameless. She sniffed. Then she went down a layer, still sniffing and snuffing, to levels of bedlinen which I didn’t actually use – as if I might be caught short, yet somehow burrow down to relieve myself.
She was baffled. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any wetness.’
‘Perhaps it’s dried up already.’
‘I suppose.’ She wasn’t convinced.
‘What a mystery. While we think about it, perhaps you wouldn’t mind opening the window and letting in a breath of fresh air.’
‘I’m with you there, Mr Crow-maire,’ she said. ‘The smell is making me feel quite sick!’ Mrs Beddoes drew back the curtains and went to open the window catch. At that point she reeled back. ‘Lord Gracious, Mr Crow-maire,’ she gasped. ‘It’s even worse over here!’
I assumed my best Sherlock Holmes manner, and pounced. ‘Precisely!’ I announced. ‘And there you have it, Mrs Beddoes.’
‘Have what, Mr Cromer?’ Perhaps she had been too hasty in dismissing the possibility of mental breakdown – that’s what I read on her face.
‘The answer to the entire mystery, of course!’
Somehow I persuaded her to go over to the bed, to sniff and feel that it was both dry and clean. ‘Use your eyes and your nose, Mrs Beddoes! Examine the evidence!’ I almost said, Mrs Hudson, as if I was explaining my theories of deduction to a baffled Baker Street housekeeper. ‘I insist that you give my personal hygiene a clean bill of health!’
She came back, frowning, to the window side of the room. ‘Well …’ was all she could manage to say.
‘Once you have eliminated the all-too-likely, Mrs Beddoes,’ I said, triumphantly indicating the unprepossessing flower, ‘whatever remains, however preposterous, must be the truth. May I present Sauromatum guttatum, also known as the Voodoo Lily? Voodoo Lily, Mrs Beddoes, Mrs Beddoes, Voodoo Lily. This flower is responsible for the sinister smell, the smell like a neglected jakes.’
I could have added that the Voodoo Lily is also known as Sauromatum venosum, Typhonium venosum, and Arum cornutum, but not everyone finds Latin names easy to understand and remember, so I kept things simple.
Mrs Beddoes’ face went entirely empty, blank as a doll’s must be before the paint is applied. She just stood there. It was very disconcerting. It was as if she had entirely forgotten who she was – a potential breakthrough during meditation, since personality must dissolve before the self can be manifested, but downright disconcerting in a college room reeking like a urinal.
I started to lose confidence in my joke. ‘It flowers very briefly, Mrs Beddoes. It’ll be gone by tomorrow.’ It was as if she was having some sort of fit, a hidden convulsion which prevented her from taking in a word I was saying. Nervously I took my explanation down a few levels of complexity. ‘No more stink – everything sweet.’ Then the blank look she wore suddenly went away. Her face was no longer vacant premises but a full house. It was standing room only, and the whole crowd screaming with laughter.
With the release of tension she wept hysterical tears. She had to sit down to get her breath. She made several attempts to speak, saying, ‘I never … I never …’, before she was able to go on with her sentence. ‘I never … in all my years at Downing, in all my puff … I never heard of such a thing.’ Her nervousness went up in flames of laughter and relief. The conflagration was almost alarming. She wasn’t producing tears enough to put it out.
Finally she got her breath back. ‘But if you’re thinking of playing any more tricks like that, then you’d better be careful. My health won’t stand it. It’s a good job it’s Alf who has the heart problem and not me. If it had been me … then what the consequences might have been … well, I wouldn’t like to say, Mr Crow-maire. I might have slipped away, and you without a phone in your room to call for help.’
‘I would have screamed, Mrs Beddoes,’ I told her. ‘I can make quite a noise when I have to.’
By taking liberties with her which she might easily have resented I had made her my friend. Charm could get me only so far, but now cheekiness had worked a magic of its own. I felt the release of tension too. I had dared to make a joke about something which had once been a baleful part of my history, bedwetting, and now I was free of the fear as well as the habit.
After that everything went smoothly between me and Mrs Beddoes. Nothing was too much trouble. Now it was official. The little yellow-haired squirrel eating out of my hand.
She started washing my hair, for one thing, though she didn’t exactly volunteer. I had to do some prompting before it occurred to her to make the offer. Day after day I left a bottle of shampoo out in a conspicuous place, so that she would have to move it to clean properly. Eventually the discrepancy between the constant presence of the shampoo and the actual greasiness of my locks became impossible to ignore, and she said, ‘Mr Cromer, I was wondering … would you mind if I had a bash at washing your hair? No offence, but it could do with a wash. Not in the bathroom, mind – I could do it here, wrap a towel round you and use a bowl …’
And I said, ‘Well …’ rather grudgingly, as if I would try to put up with her fussing round me. Anything for a quiet life.
After that, she would even cut my hair, just ‘tidying it up’, which was all that I would have wanted anyway. So the Voodoo Lily was anything but an ill wind from my point of view. It blew me no end of good. Mrs Beddoes would cut my fingernails for me and even squeeze unreachable pimples on my nose or forehead. This was a service which Mum rendered with a certain amount of cooing and scolding and chafing, saying, ‘You’re probably not getting enough chlorophyll in your diet’ or ‘Have you tried rubbing in half a fresh lemon?’, but it was far too intimate to be mentioned when it was performed on an undergraduate by his bedmaker. It suited us both to pretend it wasn’t happening.
Once in a while Mrs Beddoes would take a piece of my clothing home with her and wash it herself, but it was always clear between us that this was a personal favour and no part of the duties she performed for the college. It was between ourselves.
The flower of Sauromatum guttatum only lasts for the one day, and Whiffy Barry missed the show. He came along the following day, and together we examined the shrivelled and entirely odourless stem, which offered no insight into how the mechanism of the terrible smell might actually operate. That was my real interest in the Lily, to get hard evidence for Mr Mole at CRX, porter and self-appointed gardening expert, being wrong all those years ago. Mr Menage and Gardening for Adventure had sided with me in classifying S. guttatum as non-carnivorous, but I wanted proof, and Barry as an expert witness.
I had contradictory expectations of my fellow members of the student body. Colin the evangelical engineer wanted to get a firmer grip on his own soul by gathering mine in, and Noel the film-going chancer only wanted to pose and preen. Barry was the only one of the bunch who didn’t even pretend to take an interest in me personally, and he was the only one I welcomed in.
I would invite people back to my room after lunch, bribing them with better coffee than the college provided and making sure (less defensibly) that I always had cigarettes on hand. Only my neighbour P. D. Hughes ever replaced my supply, but I didn’t mind being exploited. At this point what I seemed to need was a definite idea of what my guests got out of my hospitality. What I wanted from them was less definite, in fact I can own up and say that it’s a complete mystery to me now. The room was far too small for ambitious entertaining, but I liked it when people were wedged in anywhere they would fit and the ceiling swirled with smoke.
Once a guest of mine brought me a present – a lava lamp. Admittedly it was defective and a cast-off, something that had been returned to Joshua Taylor and replaced. That swanky emporium had no use for the faulty product, and so it came to me. It was prematurely aged, so that it no longer quite had the effect desired, of distended yolks of wax rising and falling through excited oil. In my lava lamp the wax was tired and unresponsive, circulating in globules and clots, weary melting streamers. You’re not supposed to leave lava lamps on for extended periods, but I didn’t have a lot of choice – the power point not being accessible to me. Friends would drop round for coffee and turn it on for their amusement, and then it would stay on till the next morning, when I’d ask Mrs Beddoes to turn it off. It’s bad for lava lamps to be left on for so long, but what could I do? It was broken already, and I became accustomed to its sour ozone smell.
Pete had started to get weekend visits from his old girlfriend, Helen. She was from his home town (Birmingham) and they had gone out together for quite a while, but then before he went up to Cambridge he told her that a clean break was best.
Now he wasn’t so sure. He felt defeated by the sheer weight of numbers, the odds against finding a student girlfriend, and he was too shy to meet girls from the town, or the nurses of Addenbrookes who were in a special category, supposedly nymphomaniacs without exception. One night, tipsy and self-pitying, he had written a letter to the girl he had dumped back home, repenting of his callousness.
She took him back, but sensibly kept him on a short rein. No student girlfriend could have had him so completely under her thumb. Helen, who was crisp, organised and already in work, seemed very grown-up.
When Helen first saw me she said, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Making yoghurt,’ I said, to which she replied with the greatest cheerfulness, ‘How revolting!’ We got on well from the start, though she had no plans to share the limited time she had with Pete. She pressed him to give up smoking (so that he could contribute to her travelling expenses, as was only right), which tended to prevent him from coming to my room after meals. Helen had no interest in plants, so it was handy that I had learned to dispense with Pete’s services as botanical escort at weekends.
He wasn’t entirely at ease with the company after meals at A6 anyway. He had acquired a nickname he disliked, and in a way it was his own fault. Like many people studying a language he was struck by the limited sounds of Russian (while of course forcing his tongue to master intricacies unknown in English). One day he happened to mention that there was no H in Rooshian, so that his own name, Hughes, would be pronounced Gooks. What he said wasn’t exactly ‘Gooks’, but that was what people decided they heard, and he was Peter Gooks after that, or just ‘Gooks’. I tried to set up a counter-tradition by calling him Pyotr or Petrushka instead, but no one ever used those fond forms but me.
I’ve always been a slow eater, and always will be, but the improvement in what we ate in Hall made Alan Linton also linger over his food. Mealtimes became companionable, now that we could bask in the envious glances of our flesh-eating fellows, who would chew their corrupt rations in grim haste. Our plates were not sites of sordid suffering, and our forks were not burdened with karma.
The slow pace of eating suited rambling chat, but I was running out of subjects. I had qualms by now about turning my summer in India into a party piece. In any case it often fell flat. In practice, telling people about my sojourn as guest of the mountain only prompted questions about Indian restaurants. Which was better, the Sylhet or the Curry Centre on Castle Hill? I had no idea. I had spotted a restaurant called the Curry Queen on Mill Road, and had decided it would be my first port of call, but I hadn’t got round to it yet.
In those days even educated people knew only a tiny handful of words in any Indian language, and one of them was always Sutra. Another was Karma. I spent a lot of time explaining that the Kama in Kama Sutra was not the same thing as the Karma the hippies held so dear. To make the distinction clear I would roll the r in Karma exaggeratedly, until my whole brain shook in its moorings from the force of the alveolar trill.
In early days there was another obvious subject of conversation. For the amusement of my fellow-students in Hall I would imitate Mrs Beddoes, giving her an exaggeratedly strangulated voice which swooped from would-be posh to common in a single sentence. I don’t know how this fool’s route to popularity ranked, when set beside the folly of buying rounds indiscriminately in the college bar. Rather lower, I suspect.
I was repeating past successes in the rôle of raconteur, from the times I had beguiled the dorm at Vulcan with a thousand variations on themes of sexual passion and home cooking. Bit by bit I worked Mrs Beddoes up into a character, exaggerating her very mild mispronunciations and odd patterns of stress. ‘Oh Mr Crow-maire, if you really think my duties extend to tidying up after your friends you’re very much mis-taiken. Alf (that’s my husband) always tells me I do too much for others, but then Mr Crow-maire you are a child of God as good as any. Better than most.
‘All well and good, Jean, says Alf-that’s-my-husband, but if I’ve told you once I’ve told you times without number, your endless service to others may well se-coor your place in the blue hereafter, but what about the here and now, eh?
‘By which he generally means his tea.’
Such routines were much in demand, and if I didn’t announce a performance with a single stylised sniff the cry would go up of, ‘Come on John, entertain us. Do the bedder, she’s priceless.’ It was reassuring to have a routine that reliably brought approval.
It was only gradually that I became uncomfortable. Wasn’t I traducing the person who had shown me most friendliness, an intimacy without demands? (A cup of tea freely offered is a small miracle of consideration.) I determined to stop.
I wasn’t brave or self-righteous enough to lecture my faithful audience on the misrepresentation we were conspiring to perpetrate, to announce Mrs Beddoes in so many words as the salt of the earth without which there would be no savour. My conscience pushed me in the opposite direction from the one I had taken historically, not towards wilder flights but a greater fidelity. I added in more and more of the humble details – the caravan outside Beccles, the deaf sister in Waterbeach. Eventually people stopped asking me to ‘do’ Mrs Beddoes, and neighbours in Hall who had missed the performance for a while would receive frantic signals not to egg me on.
All in all there has been quite a lot of eye-rolling in my immediate vicinity down the years, just outside my line of sight, or just within it when people have underestimated my peripheral vision. Most of the useful information I have gathered has reached me out of the tail of my eye.
With Alan I found myself talking about homœopathy. As a medical student, he was biased against therapies not based on the Western tradition, but he wasn’t entirely opposed to new ideas. His mind was neither open nor shut, but ajar. I argued that homœopathy was a Western tradition in itself.
I emphasised that homœopathy individuates, taking each person as a separate unit, while conventional science generalises and expects the same results to hold for everyone. Alan was intrigued by the unimportance in homœopathy of theory without result, its sheer practicality as a set of techniques.
As always when homœopathy was the subject in those years, I was at least partly thinking about something else. Similes similibus amentur, if you like. I had heard of something called the Gay Liberation Front, which sounded angry rather than loving, and in any case hadn’t yet forced itself on my attention in the university or the town.
I asked Alan if he knew the story of the 1854 cholera epidemic in London. ‘Bloody hell, John,’ he said. ‘I am a medical student, you know. I know a little bit about the history of diseases and a few things about the human body. This is my third year of study, so I even know that the ribs aren’t located in the head.’ I rather enjoyed being on the receiving end of some sarcasm. It gingered me up. Normally people get rather mealy-mouthed in my vicinity. ‘So if you’re referring to the discovery of the water-borne transmission of cholera, and how the doughty John Snow saved lives in Soho by taking the handle off the Broad Street pump, then yes, I know the story of the 1854 cholera epidemic.’
He had taken the bait. ‘Then you know about the report on the epidemic prepared for Parliament by the Board of Health.’
‘What about it?’
‘The exclusion from it of the data from the Homœopathic Hospital in Golden Square, which was in the middle of the outbreak.’ After my visit to Great Ormond Street I had discovered that it wasn’t the original London base of homœopathy.
He went rather quiet. ‘I’m a little vague about that. Remind me.’
‘The Homœopathic Hospital gave the information as requested – names and addresses of patients, symptoms, remedies and results. The whole hospital had been given over to victims of the epidemic. Out of 61 cases of cholera, 10 died – a mortality of 16.4%. At the Middlesex Hospital nearby, 123 died out of 231. A mortality of over 50%. Under protest the Board of Health released these figures, which had been kept out of the original tally.’
‘Did they say why they had suppressed them in the first place?’
‘Oh yes. First because they were so out of keeping with the other results that they would have distorted the findings. Second because they didn’t want to lend support to “empirical practice”. You weren’t supposed to cure illness without understanding its causes, and in homœopathy you just pay attention to symptoms and deal with those. Hahnemann himself, the chap who invented the system in the first place, came up with a therapy for cholera without seeing a single case, from the symptoms described by colleagues. Treatment without formal diagnosis is intolerable to the medical establishment which you’re so keen on joining. Better to let people die than have cures that don’t obey the formalities. But perhaps John Snow wasn’t the only one saving lives in Soho that year.’
‘Is this all on the record, John? I’d hate you to be pulling my leg.’
‘I can’t reach your leg. And yes, it’s on the record. Will Hansard do? I’m afraid I don’t have the exact references.’
‘I’ll manage.’
I’m sure I would have heard about it if Alan’s researches hadn’t corroborated what I had told him. His attitude towards homœopathy slowly changed. Soon he was saying that if I gave him a prescription he would take it with an open mind. I said that it would only be a fair test if some symptom was troubling him. Perhaps there was?
Apparently so. At least there was a physical condition, too trivial to be taken to the doctor, which could be examined for experimental purposes. The matter was intimate enough for him to deliver me back to A6 Kenny so that he could make his confession. It turned out that Alan was troubled by copious sweating under the arms, even in winter, and by an accompanying animal odour. In short, B.O.
He had an exaggerated idea of his case. I was well placed, after all, while he was labouring up and down steps with me, to detect any offensive aroma. He smelled like an animal, yes, of course, but only because he was one. He smelled clean, he smelled warm and alive. Barry, on the other hand, the botanist who had been a whiffy basidiomycetous saprophytic fungus in a (recent) previous life, would never be able to detect his own aroma, any more than saints can see their own haloes.
I didn’t have to work very hard to select a remedy for Alan. There’s a passage of Magic of the Minimum Dose – from which I had been freely quoting, of course, preaching in borrowed robes – which describes just such a case. I knew I should ask a full set of questions, but on this occasion I went by hunch. Chronic issues require particular attention to the Mind section, and I let myself be guided by my impressions (Nervous and excitable / ‘Brain-fag’ / Abstracted / Fixed Ideas).
I took out an empty notebook and wrote For Overactive Sweat Glands in Young Adult Male – Silicea 200 on the first page. Then I wrote Alan Linton / signetur 1/1 silicea c200 / x3 gutt. sub linguam on a label and attached it to a vial that had come with my starter kit of remedies. I enjoyed the paperwork for once, or more exactly the methodical feeling that comes from separating and labelling, even if there was an element of the rough and ready about my Latin. Nobody really reads the Latin – I could have written lingam for linguam without making any difference to Alan – but it massively reinforces the psychological effect. Slightly bogus Latin is the mother tongue of the placebo.
When I saw him next, Alan told me that from the first moment he held the pillule on his tongue he could feel it taking effect. His sweating moderated and any odour dissipated in a few days. Certainly his self-consciousness about it rapidly became a thing of the past. Of course homœopathy normally brings about improvements over a longer period of time, but rapid cures are not unknown. One of the great virtues of the method, in fact, is that it doesn’t persist with remedies that are proving ineffective. Not for the homœopath the GP’s reflex of the repeat prescription, the increased dosage. If it doesn’t make a difference at the first attempt, you stop and try something else.
‘What did I tell you?’ I crowed. Despite this I was astounded by the success of my first attempt at prescription. What had I told him, after all? Nothing that I really knew about. Could the whole pretty system possibly work?
From that moment on, Alan Linton was a believer, verging on zealotry. He started borrowing what books I had on the subject, but he soon exhausted my modest library and started researching on his own account. To some extent this played into my hands. I was someone, after all, who had special borrowing privileges from the University Library, but found it impossible to consult the catalogue so as to order books. Alan on the other hand could only consult the UL’s holdings, not take them away, but was easily able to do the legwork. So it was agreed. He would use the catalogue for me, and I would borrow books for him.
I enjoyed the feeling that I had made a convert, even though it wasn’t to my religious perspective, as I had hoped before I came to Cambridge. Homœopathy wasn’t a core belief of mine, it hadn’t even had time to bed down as an obsession. It was no more than a hobby in waiting. I had written Homœopathic Prescriptions on the cover of the notebook in which I had written Alan’s details, but it was quite a while before there was a second prescription noted down. In Hall at Downing, in the meantime, it was now Alan who would inform me about his latest discoveries as we took our time over tomato flan and that great novelty of vegetarian cuisine, as it seemed to us then, pasta salad.
In his own way Alan was rather a tactile person. Often he would put his arms round me and give me long hugs, saying that he got a very positive energy from being with me. Sometimes our lingering over the meal meant that he came back to A6 with me on his own.
At one stage we were talking about being ‘grounded’, and how wrong it was for us to elevate ourselves above the ground. The starting-point of the conversation was probably the traditional Buddhist strictures against sleeping away from the ground.
I agreed in principle, but had to add, ‘Yes, Alan, that’s all very well but because of my legs and whatnot, I have to sleep off the ground!’
‘Yes, but even a little time on the ground is better than nothing …’
‘I suppose so. Not something I know much about.’ It wasn’t the time to mention that I had been sexually initiated in a sleeping-bag on the ground, while at Woodlarks summer camp for disabled schoolboys.
‘I’m sure I could get you onto the ground for a bit. Shall we give it a try?’
‘If you like.’
Carefully he manœuvred me onto the ground, cradled in his arms. Then he made a disgusted face and said, ‘This carpet could certainly do with a clean …’
I hoped all the same that the pungency of the floor-covering wouldn’t lead him to break off our experiment. I was becoming excited by our entwined posture, and couldn’t help myself from pushing myself against Alan in a way that wasn’t particularly Buddhist.
It was a strange experience, all the same. There was so much of him. In fantasies my sexual partners – Blyton’s Julian, Rollo from the Rupert annual – were the same size as me. They didn’t extend beyond me, or protrude in awkward ways. Admittedly Julian Robinson at Vulcan was a big boy, but in our most memorable encounter, with a kindly observer providing the motive power, the feeling of a sensual pulsation was only part of the hilarity of the total event.
Now I was pressed up against a young man several inches taller even than Julian, and fully in charge of his parts. I seemed to occupy only an intermediate zone of this enormous physique. I felt cheated of the full picture – I was getting only fragmentary impressions of his body, while the warmth poured into me through his clothes.
I could hear the gurgling of Alan’s stomach, as a digestion at the peak of its young powers smoothly converted pasta salad into radiant heat and the faculty of embracing. ‘Just to let you know where I stand,’ he told me. ‘I have a strong aversion to queers and their ways. I shouldn’t be prejudiced, but there it is. Any sort of poovery gives me the creeps. At least I’m honest about it.’
He told me he’d been briefly involved with an organisation called the Monarchist League, whose members were strongly in favour of the monarchy, obviously, but not the monarchy we actually had. They believed the Queen was an impostor of some sort. He had been to one of their dinners in a house in Trumpington. At the end of the meal, after elaborate toasts to the rightful royal family, he had seen a man put his hand between another man’s legs. He took the only proper action available and fled the premises, quite fast I imagine since his legs were long.
I wanted to wriggle up and be close to Alan’s face, and also to wriggle downwards and be aligned with his crotch. I couldn’t do both, so I made my choice. I chose down. Belatedly Alan detected the erotic vibration in what we were doing. ‘Now John,’ he said, ‘I must remind you that if I thought for one solitary second there was anything sexy for you in this, I’d be out of here like a shot!’
I’m fine about being sly, but flat dishonesty isn’t really in my nature, so I said, ‘Then I am very sorry, Alan. I have to confess that you’re making me as randified as anything.’ I resigned myself to the interruption of this delightful adventure, pushing myself against him one last time.
Strangely, though, just when I had come clean he started to make excuses for me. ‘Yes, well, John, you should understand that you are a person who D. H. Lawrence would say is very “alive in the groins”. It’s nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about at all … Greatly to your credit, in fact. Human beings are only animals, when you get right down to it.’
I blessed the holy name of David Herbert Lawrence, about whom I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I adored Women in Love, particularly the wrestling scene by the fireside – unclothed apotheosis of the tender grappling I had dreamed of in my sickbed and coveted as a Burnham schoolboy. This very encounter on institutional carpet was the closest I could ever hope to come to recreating it. I had taken an oath not to see the film, because I wanted to imagine the faces of my choice on the bodies of Gerald and Birkin. Some things are sacred, and I wouldn’t let Ken Russell wrestle me away from the casting couch of my fantasies.
It was Lady Chatterley’s Lover I shied away from. Somehow I didn’t think Lawrence’s plan, when he put Lady C’s husband in a wheelchair, was to indicate that he was alive in the groins.
Alan kept faith with our Buddhist experiment until he started to get pins and needles, and that was as close as I got to Alan on the physical plane. It turned out that a little grounding went a long way.
The consolation prize for me was news of this amazing club called the Monarchist League. I had no interest in the royalist aspect either way. For me the hand between the legs was the good bit. Surely it must be the core value of the organisation? I didn’t dare to ask any more questions, but I became obsessed with the idea that hands were being thrust between legs only a couple of miles away. Once I even drove the Mini out to Trumpington and pestered innocent pedestrians, saying, ‘Excuse me! Could you possibly direct me to Headquarters of the Monarchist League?’ Nobody knew, or they were all in on it and weren’t accepting new recruits.
The friendship didn’t exactly fizzle out, in fact it flourished in its own way, but I have to own up to a little disappointment. Perhaps it was simply that the polarity of the discipleship had switched, now that the enlightenment was flowing all the other way, and Alan was delving into homœopathy with a diligence I couldn’t match.
I didn’t consciously take credit for inspiring him, any more than I would have congratulated myself, after introducing bacillus culture into milk of the correct temperature, on having invented yoghurt, but isn’t that always the way? The cry goes up of ‘The ego is dead!’, but when you look around it is the ego which has shouted the words, and is even now measuring itself for coronation robes. Perhaps there was pique at the way my small expertise had been superseded. I had yet to learn the deep spiritual significance of disappointment.
I felt sadness at the defeat which was thrown into relief by this small triumph. The real discipleship was my relationship with my guru, and however exciting and revelatory I managed to make my reminiscences of India, I knew that some longed-for process of kindling, of catching fire at last, had not in fact taken place despite my conviction of flammability. The quest and its goal seemed further away than ever.
I almost longed to be proselytised by those of other religions, so that I could have my convictions honed by the abrasion of alien creeds. In fact I didn’t suffer unduly from the attentions of the God Squad – it was as if I had been inoculated by that clumsy first approach from the apostle Colin. Others weren’t so lucky. One lovely gentle student called Chris Charnock, reading English, who had religious feelings that weren’t fully formed, felt so persecuted by the evangelical wing of the university that he had a sort of nervous breakdown. I didn’t know him very well, but we had enjoyed some vague spiritual chats, and he had lent me his copy of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy. Now he couldn’t stop weeping and had to be sent home. He didn’t come back the next term. I felt sorry to lose an ally, someone with whom in time I might have shared my own feelings of falsity and strain, but I was glad for him that he was away from what had been for him a place of torment. Nothing could have been more damaging to this shy mystic, feeling his way towards his inklings, than to be lectured on hell and its fires.
Downing had a chaplain, but I had little contact with him. He was very tactile, and I don’t mean anything sinister by that. It’s just he was very keen on the hugs and pats, which I don’t find it easy to discourage (there’s never an electric fence around when you need one), and on one occasion he took a small liberty. He ran his hand over my starveling and lop-sided beard, saying with a twinkle, ‘John Cromer, you’re only half a man, aren’t you?’, which I found rather wounding. I should have stood up for my peculiarity and my faith both, by saying, ‘I take that as a compliment, chaplain. Ardhanishvara is Lord Shiva represented as half man and half woman. It’s your loss that callow Christianity has no time for such subtleties of incarnation. The interest is all in the half-tones.’
Sometimes I missed the evening meal in Hall and went out to eat with a group. The favoured destination was a cheap place called the Eros on Petty Cury. One reason for the low prices was that it occupied relatively undesirable premises on the first floor, which necessitated much human machinery to get me upstairs and downstairs again at the end of the meal. The descent was frightening since cheap wine was likely to have boosted the confidence of my porters at the expense of their coördination. The staple dish was moussaka (can it really have cost only six shillings, thirty new pee as we practised saying?), but the Eros also offered a ‘Florentine’ pizza, topped with spinach and a rather sinister, glistening fried egg.
That wasn’t the reason, though, for my never ordering it. I have nothing against pizza beyond the fact of its being unitary. Admiral Nelson never ordered pizza either, and the reason is obvious. Two good arms are required to dismantle the savoury disc. Of course Nelson had Emma Hamilton, but for once she was no substitute. There’s no getting around it – having your food cut up for you beyond the age of five is bearable only in surroundings of relaxed intimacy, and not always then. A plate of pasta, on the other hand, by the generosity of its composite nature, offers tendrils to the questing fork. Even to the fork that twirls ineptly in slow motion.
The restaurant was hardly one which Granny would have recognised as such, what with the chipped plates and the unmatched cutlery. But there was one little waiter, from the Philippines I think, who was vaguely reminiscent of the waiter at the Compleat Angler, so expert at buttering up a woman who prided herself on immunity to flattery.
This Filipino would sometimes ask an undergraduate for a phone number as well as his address on the back of a cheque. This was in the days before cheque guarantee cards, when no pledge more formal than an address was required. He certainly took the name of the establishment at face value. The god of boyish desire threw arrow after arrow into his heart, till it must have had the pitted texture of a pub dartboard.
I was the only one who seemed to notice the glaring inappropriateness of the extra request. This waiter only asked the pretty ones for this detail, and was perhaps shrewd enough to ask only parties whom wine had fuddled. Not shrewd enough, though, to realise that the numbers he was given were never more intimate than those of the public phones on some privileged staircases, which took incoming calls. The best he could hope for was pot luck. Perhaps the right person would pick up the phone and hear the plaintive murmur of ‘Here is Eros boy. You are nice James?’
Some of the letters which the porters kindly delivered to A6 were government circulars to do with decimal currency, which would be introduced in February of 1971. These circulars with their jaunty tone nevertheless managed to suggest that decimal currency was an impossibly difficult challenge for young, old and everyone in between. I determined to master it. Time is an illusion, absolutely right – but that’s no excuse for being stuck in the past.
By the time my Heffers bill for the term arrived I was well ahead of the game. Laboriously I converted all the sums from pounds shillings and pence into New Pennies, and wrote out a cheque accordingly. There’s a thin line between being cheeky-charming and getting people’s backs up, and I don’t always know which side I’m on. Heffers returned the cheque, with a wry covering letter saying they were impressed by my preparedness for change, not to mention my computational skills, but would I mind replacing the old cheque drawn on the new system with a new one drawn on the old?
The tides of history were rising over Britannia’s knees on the big old dirty copper penny, but she hadn’t been swept away just yet. I can’t help feeling it would have been more fun if Heffers had given me credit as a pioneer of the new world of sensibly divisible money, by holding on to the cheque for a couple of months, till it ripened into legal validity.
When I went home for the Christmas vacation I didn’t know what sort of welcome I would get from the family. By the family I mean Mum. The others were dependable in their ways. Peter would be quietly happy, Audrey would blow hot and cold, and Dad would greet me absently, as if he was pretty sure he knew me but couldn’t remember the context.
I even considered staying in Cambridge over the vacation, though Hall would close down and I would have to cater for myself. I would also need my Tutor’s permission, which pretty much ruled it out. Graëme Beamish had obviously made a resolution, well ahead of the New Year, to refuse any further requests from the occupant of A6 Kenny. I made a resolution not to put his resolution to the test.
In the event Mum was warm and gracious, very much on best behaviour. It seemed that at last she accepted me having a home elsewhere. I wouldn’t keep coming home if she made it an ordeal when I did. It made a difference that she was having great trouble with Audrey.
Audrey was hardly more than ten, but her wilfulness was phenomenal. She would never back down. Sometimes I think she was frightened by her own anger. She wasn’t alone in that.
The present I remember most fondly from my twenty-first birthday (it did for Christmas as well) was a purse containing twenty-one fifty-pence pieces. The coins were legal tender already, as ten shillingses, though I felt honour-bound to wait until decimalisation dawned to spend them. This was from my other grandmother, Dad’s mother. We hardly ever saw her. By this time she was retired, living in a part of Edinburgh called Hunters Tryst, which I loved even before I learned that it was pronounced to rhyme with ‘Christ’. She was a rather childlike creature who had spent most of her life running her own little gift shop, specialising in glass animals. She was always feeling sorry for people and giving them ridiculous discounts. Not much of a businesswoman. Eventually the shop burned down, and we learned that it had never been insured. She seemed remarkably calm about it, saying that she had had fun out of it for years and years without doing anyone any harm, and that was the main thing, wasn’t it?
Perhaps no one can watch everything they care about going up in flames without feeling a certain lifting of the spirits. Few of us get the chance to find out, and so we pay lip-service to the notion of catastrophe.
She said she would have liked to send me the full twenty-one pounds, but her funds wouldn’t stretch so far. I was very pleased with my stack of coins. Peter too was impressed by my new purse bursting with freshly minted heptagons, and asked who had given it to me. ‘Granny,’ I said, and then, seeing his incredulous expression, ‘The other one. Nice Granny.’ There was no implied criticism of the one who came first in our minds, the ur-Granny, who wouldn’t have thought much of an unconditional gift. For her, presents came into the same category as kites, balloons and aprons, having strings attached by definition.
Dad’s mum loved animals even when they weren’t made of glass. As a child I asked her, where do the animals go? Go after death. And she said, ‘I’m sure there’s a little corner of heaven God keeps for animals.’ A paddock in paradise – why not? It’s what Nice Granny would have provided herself.
The only limit on her niceness was that she didn’t love her children. Nature and strangers but not her own children. A worm in a jar was ‘a perfect lamb’ (as she had said once), but her own children were perfect nuisances. When children got to be about eight years old they began to be bearable to her – they were allowed to say goodbye to her then, gently clasping the tip of her outstretched finger.
Luckily there was Midge to bring them up, a local girl who had joined Nice Granny’s household when she was twelve and never left. When Nice Granny was getting old Midge said she wanted the house, and Nice Granny said, Then you’d better have it.
Understandably Dad had no more than a pained fondness for his mother, and a deep though resentful bond with Midge. If it turned out that his mother hadn’t put anything in the will about Midge getting the house, he would certainly have seen her right.
I spent a lot of time getting my thanks about my birthday down on paper, which was probably wasted effort. There’s nothing that introduces a false note into a thank-you letter more reliably than actual gratitude. It’s a container that can accommodate almost anything more easily than what it was specifically designed to hold. A sincere thank-you letter is a live chick pecking its way out of a dyed egg on an Easter table-decoration, and giving everyone a turn.
Returning to Cambridge after Christmas didn’t exactly feel like a home-coming, but there were fewer possibilities for explosion and upset on Kenny A staircase than in Bourne End. It was too peaceful to feel like home. I almost felt I was getting to know the ropes.
Jean Beddoes had started to confide in me – not about private matters, though I could have compiled a fair-sized dossier on her husband’s health from what she let slip on the subject, and I picked up a certain amount of information about her money worries. It was more when she felt out of her depth as a bedmaker that she would come to me for advice. One day, for instance, she told me that she didn’t know what to do about a student on my staircase. Should she report him to the college authorities, or was it none of her business? She couldn’t make up her mind.
The student in question, Dexter Hoffman, was known to me, since he would stay talking over coffee and cigarettes when everyone else had gone. At last I would simply tell him to go. He was impervious to hints, but oddly docile when given a clear directive.
Hoff was reading philosophy, though our discussions were not philosophical in any obvious sense. Dexter (always known as ‘Hoff’) was known as a conversationalist, meaning that he paid only the slightest attention to what anyone else said, just enough to turn the talk back to the rut of his preference when it deviated.
Hoff was a college character whose foibles were much discussed. He filed his collection of albums by an esoteric system which remained mysterious in its details even when the general principle became known. The record at the extreme left was Love’s Forever Changes, while the one at the other extreme was An Electric Storm by White Noise, a group known only to Hoff, or so it seemed.
Privileged guests would be challenged to put the record on Hoff’s turntable back where it belonged in the ranking. It was considered a triumph to be only ten places off. The criterion was ‘heaviness’, a quality which obsessed the student population but had never before been systematically considered. The Vietnam War was heavy, Blind Faith were heavy, the prospect of getting a job and joining an oppressive Establishment was undeniably heavy, but no one before Hoff had even attempted to rank them comparatively.
It wasn’t clear if he was serious about this, or making one of his jokes. Since he rarely laughed at other people’s jokes, and never at his own, it was hard to tell. About his albums he seemed to be serious. Forever Changes earned its place by being ‘deep’ but not heavy. An Electric Storm, on the other hand, was absolute heaviness, a sort of Kelvin zero. As he put it, ‘If you listen to the last track late at night and you’ve smoked some shit, you can think that it’s you that’s dying.’ And this was not a dreadful warning but a recommendation.
Our conversations, though, were about sex. He was a ladies’ man of some obsessiveness, though his preferred term was ‘girls’. He was always smuggling girls into his room at night and sneaking them out again in the morning. He strongly opposed co-education (technically, co-residence), and thought it would never come to pass in Downing.
From his philandererer’s perspective, co-residence would take all the excitement out of his conquests. As he explained it to me, ‘If you can just click with the girl in the next room, well – where’s the challenge in that?’ It was a question of sportsmanship. When the grouse moor is right next to the gun room then there’s nothing to brag about in bagging a huge tally.
If there had been women on the premises, he would still insist on hunting abroad, on principle. Well, partly on principle – it was also a lot easier to stop girls hanging around after he lost interest if they didn’t live there in the first place.
I did wonder whether Hoff was really the womanising sensation he claimed, but his word was broadly accepted on the matter. Some dissidents suggested that girls took their clothes off just to get him to stop talking, though others questioned whether even such a drastic measure would necessarily shut him up. ‘They expect me to try it on,’ he would say. ‘They’d never forgive me if I didn’t. They’d take it personally.’ He took his rôle very seriously, though I didn’t think it was strictly necessary for the smooth running of the town, or even the nurses’ hostel.
He had a strange hairstyle, though it was probably more of a refusal to have a hairstyle. His hair was naturally frizzy, and he both let it grow and tamed it with a savage parting, so that the ensemble looked like a cottage loaf which has risen unevenly. Of course women often like an element of helplessness in men, but I doubt if that was part of the plan.
Most of our conversations were about women’s thoughts and feelings, which might seem an unlikely interest for a womaniser. But think about it: at a conference of safe-breakers the subject of discussion wouldn’t be money, bullion and booty but rather tumblers, alarms and time-locks. In the same way Hoff was preöccupied with women’s emotions and ideas – everything he had to get past before the marvellous mechanism swung open at last, and he glimpsed the ingots of shining pleasure stacked high on the shelves.
Hoff had an elaborate typology of women (girls). There were virgins, there were half-virgins and according to him there were some girls who had never been virgins at all. There were Clean Dirty Girls and Dirty Clean Girls (his particular pets), but there were no Dirty Dirty Girls. He explained: the Dirty Dirty Girl, the girl who matched a man in appetite and even outstripped him, was no more than a legend or fabulous beast, the unicorn of sex.
Charm played no part in his technique. He stunned women with a bolt of indifference, and after that he could do what he liked with them. According to Hoff, there was nothing a girl found more reassuring in a man than absolute unreliability. But it did have to be absolute. Mere dithering wasn’t enough. She had to be able to count on his unreliability, and there Hoff had never been a disappointment. I don’t know whether all women fitted this pattern, or the ones who interested him.
There are other fabulous beasts than unicorns, of course, and I began to wonder if the Dirty Dirty Girl, if she ever actually turned up with her cornucopia of desires, might not be the sort who turns men to stone, basilisk of the bedroom. If Hoff ever met her, would he tell us about it? Would he be allowed to keep the power of speech after that encounter?
I was fascinated to be having such technical discussions with an unashamed sexual predator, of a breed that was coming to be labelled the Male Chauvinist Pig, which didn’t die out but certainly changed its spots, finding new ways of presenting bad behaviour.
I noticed how clean Hoff was, on the occasions when he carried me, still talking, to the lavatory (where he would raise his voice a little so as to be sure of reaching me in my stall). He was at least as clean as Alan Linton, but while Alan would certainly have given his armpits priority Hoff paid attention also to fingernails and (most likely) toes. Perhaps his secret was nothing more than the combination of low morals and good hygiene – hardly the secret of life or anything else, though admittedly unusual in that place and at that time. It was, additionally, a combination which might attract those fabled Addenbrookes nurses.
Hoff was a philosopher as a matter of academic fact, but economics loomed more largely in his daily life. He ate only the statutory minimum of meals in Hall, but liked company while he ate, so he would call in on me in A6. I don’t know if he was rich or poor, but he was certainly thrifty to the point of madness. His diet was carefully calculated, made up not of the cheapest foods in absolute terms but the ones which met his body’s needs most efficiently. Everything was calculated down to the last penny-calorie.
He had established to his own satisfaction that tinned cod’s roe represented the best investment in terms of protein. He called it prole caviar, and would eat it straight from the tin so as to save on washing up. The proteinous beige-pink slab in the tin, or the lump of it in his spoon, had the visual texture of soft wet brick and a faint meaty smell.
I didn’t mention that I had been to a school where actual posh caviar was delivered at intervals, thanks to the Queen Mother’s interest and bounty, and later fed to pigs. I had started to clam up about my past. Every little incident seemed to need so much explaining, and I could hardly keep trotting out the whole saga. No one at Cambridge was curious about how I had got there anyway. I might just as well have been some sort of life-form cooked up in the Cavendish Laboratory and stored in A6 Kenny to await testing.
Hoff also favoured tinned ham risotto, not necessarily a dish which Italians would recognise or claim credit for. This too he ate from the tin, unheated, gaining access with a small opener, no more than a blade with a flange, which he worked round the edge of the tin with a vigorous rocking motion. Under the jagged lid, when at last he lifted it, were yellowed grains of rice and reddish cubes of ham. Among them nestled amber pearls of fat.
All these tins, heavy with karma even when empty, went into my waste-paper basket. Mrs Beddoes would frown as she retrieved them, though she must have known without needing to ask that these were not relics of binges on my part.
Girlfriends weren’t exempt from Hoff’s mathematical calculations, though in that department of economic affairs I think the unit was the pound-orgasm rather than the penny-calorie. A girl who gave him the full penile thrill for less than fifteen shillings (though no doubt he was learning to say ‘seventy-five new pence’ like everyone else) would stay on his books.
So when Jean Beddoes expressed worry about Hoff I thought that perhaps a conquest of his had left some incriminating item in his room – panties in the bed, perhaps, at the least. Perhaps a number of pairs. Then she said, ‘I think Mr Hoffman must be a fascist. A proper fascist.’
This was a startling thing for a bedmaker to say in 1971. It wasn’t a startling thing for an undergraduate to say, of course. By this time the word was an entirely unspecific term of disapproval – it wasn’t necessary to wear jackboots in the street or celebrate Hitler’s birthday to earn the label. Jumping the meal queue in Hall was quite enough.
Mrs Beddoes, though, must mean something different. ‘What makes you think so?’ I asked. Miserably she produced something from her pinny pocket. It was an item of clothing – I’d got that right. Not panties, though, or anything else belonging to a girl. It was a bundled pair of socks. I turned them over awkwardly in my hands, completely baffled. Mrs Beddoes reached over to unroll them and exposed the shocking truth. The socks – black, nylon – were neatly labelled with blue Cash’s name-tapes, and the name they carried was BENITO MUSSOLINI.
‘It isn’t just his socks,’ she whispered. ‘That name is on everything he wears.’
Mrs Beddoes didn’t actually think that Hoff was wearing a dead dictator’s nylon socks, but she certainly thought the name-tapes represented a homage to sinister politics. I tried to talk her round.
I explained that it wasn’t any more ominous that he had the Duce’s name on all his things than that he had it in his socks. It only meant that the minimum order for Cash’s name-tapes was a hundred, and that he was a dab hand with a sewing-machine, no doubt smirking as he stitched smugly away.
I managed to persuade Mrs Beddoes that it was just the sort of silly thing Hoff would do, a stupid prank that only a clever person would dream up. I think I did her a favour by persuading her that this wasn’t a matter for the college authorities. Any investigation would show Hoff up as an idiot, nothing worse, but it would make her known as an oppressive snoop, and the word ‘fascist’ would settle on her for good.
I tackled Hoff directly about the name-tapes, the next time he sat near me in Hall. He seemed delighted to have caused so much confusion and distress, but also made out that he was making a serious philosophical point. If labels served the purpose of distinguishing one person’s property from anyone else’s, then Mussolini name-tapes would do the job just as well on A staircase as Hoffman ones.
He boasted of other footling projects. He had posed as Joseph Stalin to procure library tickets and opened a Post Office account in the name of Karl Marx. His long-term goal was to persuade a bank to set up an account for himself as Mussolini, without changing his name by Deed Poll or Statutory Declaration, which he regarded as an inadmissible short cut.
Hoff was above such fetishes (and extravagances) as Christmas presents, but others were more sentimental. I was clearly making an impact on Downing, to judge by the fact of receiving as presents not one but two copies of Christy Brown’s Down All The Days, an autobiographical novel by an Irish spastic whose condition (doubly athetoid) was particularly severe. I suppose one could have been for Christmas, the other for the birthday which trailed along behind Jesus’s.
I don’t think they were telling me to count my blessings, exactly, though Brown’s disability certainly put mine in the shade – this was cerebral palsy beyond anything I saw at Vulcan.
I tried to like the book, at least I think I did. I didn’t care for the style, though, which was all rather clottedly poetic, as if the poor man was afflicted by an inflamed blarney duct on top of his other troubles. My reservations about the book must have made me seem churlish and hard to please. It was as if I’d been served the vegetarian option in a restaurant, and had sent it back just to be difficult. Bad John, wicked John. So ungrateful, after all the trouble people have gone to. A wicked part of me speculated that if they’d met Christy Brown in person, rather than through a book, they wouldn’t have been able to understand a word he tried to say. And perhaps that was the way they preferred it.
I didn’t need to wait till spring to get started on another Voodoo Lily. Providentially the bulbs were available at the seed merchants. The bulbs were as eager as I was. They were even attractively priced, perhaps because they were so ready for planting they were jumping the gun. The protuberance on one had already started to seek the light. I bought that one in preference to any other, knowing there wouldn’t be so long to wait. Next time Whiffy Barry wouldn’t miss his inflorescent cousin. He promised to come at a moment’s notice.
When the day of the second Voodoo Lily’s flowering arrived I sent Whiffy Barry a message to come at once. Mrs Beddoes took a keen interest in what was going on, and was very willing to run the errand for me. Like any victim of a practical joke, she couldn’t wait to see it played on someone else, not realising that Barry as a botanist was well prepared for what had caused her so much dismay.
She returned to tell me that Mr Barry would be along soon. ‘Today of all days,’ she said, ‘he’s taking a bath.’ She hoovered the room, then settled down in the Parker-Knoll with a cup of tea. She was enjoying herself. It wasn’t every day she could eavesdrop on a miniature botanical congress, convened to inspect the plant which had played such a mean trick on her.
I took another look at the star of the show. Sauromatum’s purple-and-brown-spotted hood reared up like a cobra behind the glistening spadix. The smell was entirely disgusting, but there was a deep spiritual message latent here. If I had described the smell to Bhagavan as disgusting, he would certainly have replied, ‘Disgusting for whom?’ Then I would have had to enter the deepest sanctum of awareness, embarking on the vichara (Self-Enquiry). The answer was that it was disgusting for me. And who am I?
It wasn’t disgusting if you were a fly, that was for certain. I pretended to be a fly and tried to tell myself that the smell was beautiful, but still I felt sick. I asked Mrs Beddoes to open the windows to their widest, which she did rather unwillingly – there had been no such concession when she was the one being tested – but the smell was still overpowering. It took a lot of determination to stay in the room.
Then there was a knock at the door and Barry came in. Mrs Beddoes was so much at home by now that she gave a happy little yawn and a wave of the hand. Barry had done more than just take a bath. He had smartened himself up considerably for his date with Voodoo Lily. He was wearing tight (and crisply ironed) black flannel trousers and a white shirt. He had the instruments of dissection in one hand and a clipboard in the other.
He grinned and shifted his legs a bit, making the rough shape of his genitals materialise and then disappear in a way which would have been irresistible if I had found him the slightest bit attractive. I may live my life at what is cock level for most people but still I have my standards.
He put his things on my cluttered table, while I made my way over to the window-sill. From there I invited him to join me. Not only was he clean, but he was wearing some sort of perfume or cologne which I found tantalising. The high notes were flirty and fleeting, but the bass notes were deep shadows, like a grotto cool with ferns on a hot summer’s day. If I closed my eyes and let my nose stand in for all the other senses, I might even begin to be aroused by the information it passed on. Perhaps I had been too hasty in dismissing this lonely botanist as ‘Whiffy Barry’.
Suddenly there was a connection between us. I was susceptible to him in ways I hadn’t expected, yes, but I also had the sense that he was susceptible to me, as if he was in a mild hypnotic trance. An astral umbilical seemed to link us on this malodorous morning, threading through our navels and groins, weaving a cat’s-cradle of chakras.
Patrly this had to do with the psychology of touch. Young English men of the period were so unaccustomed to touch, ordinary nonsensual human contact, that when it happened – and with me it had to happen – they were oddly disoriented, lightly bewitched. It was as if I had flown under their radar and disarmed them. I could give a young man’s hand and arm a tug in a certain direction, and it would follow my lead. It had nothing to do with a dormant attraction to other men – in fact I suspect it worked best with those who, like Barry, had never had such thoughts. If this was voodoo then it was quite ordinary everyday voodoo. It functioned perfectly well without the help of the lily whose foulness we were gathered to analyse.
I did realise, though, that however many times I went to Sanders Seed Merchants in Regent Street Cambridge, and however many Sauromata guttata I paid for and set a-growing, I would never happen on anything as promising as this delightful situation again.
What had started out as a simple project of botanical research had forked deliciously. Now I had two experiments on the go simultaneously. I was confident I had enough mental power to be able to divide my attention cleanly in two. Yes, I would examine the anatomy of this araceous species, but I would also do what I could to satisfy my curiosity about the lie of the land in Barry’s trousers.
All the time we probed S. guttatum I would be pumping power into my personality-magnet, which had seemed so defective these last few months. I would tug him about into any position I wanted. It would be child’s play to come up with any number of creative adjustments of posture – because ‘my arms can’t reach that far’. I could do the heavy lean against his leg, mentioning that it was vital for me not to lose my balance. Of course there was no real coercion involved. Whenever he wanted to, Barry could wriggle out of any entanglement, but I had the sense that my little magnet was working again at full power, and today he would go along with anything I suggested.
After a while, as he became more deeply hypnotised, a Gulliver immobilised by the thousand tiny threads of my suggestion, we would enter into Union. Barry was already intoxicated with touch, his whole body reverberating with longing. He was only a whisker away from swimming with me in the Ocean of Desire.
I knew my magic would only work if I was alone with the hypnotic subject, and here was Mrs Beddoes sitting in my Parker-Knoll savouring the last gulps of her tea and perhaps even contemplating the making of another cup. I asked her if she hadn’t got more rooms to clean, and she said no, she’d got an early start and cleaned out the other students’ rooms while I was sleeping. She batted away every hint I could come up with that we should be left alone together to do our research.
‘I wouldn’t miss this for worlds,’ she said. I was sure she was innocent of any byplay, but it was almost as if she knew exactly what was going on, and was having a rare old time thwarting me. ‘You’ve got me so curious about this plant, Mr Cromer. I can’t wait to see what it is that makes it pong so.’
From the Parker-Knoll where Mrs Beddoes was sitting with her tea she had a direct view of Barry’s legs and everything that lived between them. If I was to make any real progress, I must come up with a way of blocking her view.
Barry was ready to make the first incision into the inflorescence, but he hesitated and deferred to me. After all it was technically my Sauromatum. He offered me the scalpel and asked if I would care to dissect the flower according to his instructions. This was good manners and the answer was actually yes – I desperately wanted to do it, to feel what a surgeon feels. But my mind was grappling with the question of what to do about Mrs Beddoes.
I said, ‘No, that’s all right, Barry. Things like this should be left to the expert – which is clearly you in this case. But let’s think clearly here. We must ensure that conditions for the experiment are optimal. You had better stand exactly where you are. Make sure that you hold the bulb in your left hand and cut the flower with your right. We had better stay here right near the window, because we’re going to need a strong light. Don’t move, because I’m leaning against you and I shall lose my balance otherwise. Wait a minute … if I put my hand on your leg like this, the position is perfect.
‘Now then … it’s going to be vital that we take notes during this operation, so I’ll hold your clipboard in my right hand …’
From my contorted position, holding a clipboard at the required angle was nearly impossible, but somehow I managed to prop it against the window shelf.
With the crucial equipment in place (the clipboard, angled just so) both experiments could proceed as planned. I gave thanks for the human inability to see round corners. Mrs Beddoes made a half-hearted attempt to raise herself and come over for a better view, but I told her to stay exactly where she was. ‘This is a very delicate and sensitive thing we are doing here,’ I said, with an authority which surprised me. ‘You stay put. I don’t want you upsetting the experiment. Besides, didn’t you say yourself that you got up early and did all those rooms? Take some rest, enjoy your cup of tea, and leave us to work. It’s our turn!’
So that was the set-up. With the Beddoes blocked by the clipboard in my right hand, I was half leaning out of the wheelchair. The araceous flower was winking luridly up at us, cradled in Barry’s left hand, while he held the scalpel in his right. My left hand was putting significant pressure on his right leg, and the black-trousered mystery between his legs was looking up at me invitingly. Just a short distance more, and both probes, the coldly metallic and the blood-hot, would be gathering data.
With my attention deliciously divided between the two explorations, I took the calculated risk of trifurcation. Mrs Beddoes used to tell me that I had a real way with people, and now was the time to put it to the test. I stretched out a mental finger to soothe her forehead and persuade her to relax. I sent a subliminal whisper across those few feet to lull her into a timely snooze.
As Barry slit the inflorescence with his scalpel I shifted myself into a better position (better in every way) by cupping my left hand over his crotch. His groin came up to meet my palm of its own accord, and fascination froze us in that position. His hand too froze as the blade went in. We might have been carved in stone, except that two hearts were pumping away inside the double statue, and Barry’s stone penis throbbed inside his taut and freshly ironed slacks, tugging the creases out of alignment.
Mrs Beddoes must have dozed off in her armchair as instructed. She was snoring softly. I hoped that at least she had put her mug down.
Barry’s vocabulary became technical as he cut into the vegetable flesh. Most of the Latin terms eluded me. Still, I could see for myself that the entrance to the flower was like the opening to a cave. The inside was black and mysterious. The only way we could get a proper look was by cutting a cross-section. Once this was done, I could see that the entrance was lined with cells which were waxy in character and pointed only in one direction.
Voodoo Lily certainly gave the illusion of being carnivorous. She reminded me very much of my old friend the pitcher plant. There was also a series of jagged spikes just inside the cave entrance. Barry explained that this was the secret of the seeming ‘bad smell’. All it took was the swapping over of a single molecule. The spiky configuration presented the greatest possible surface area so as to maximise the efficiency of the process. As the original odour passed over these keys, the molecular exchange converted its perfume into the smell of carrion or stale urine, giving Mrs Beddoes every excuse for thinking that one of her ‘gentlemen’ was a bed-wetter.
Barry held S. guttatum up to my nose and gave it a gentle squeeze to diffuse the foul fragrance. For a few seconds there was perfect symmetry in Creation, with squeezes above and squeezes below. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘Have a good sniff …’ He didn’t say, ‘Give me a good squeeze while you’re at it,’ but by that stage it could be taken as read.
I was as nauseated as ever by the stench of the flower but thrilled by the extra squeeze I was licensed to give with my left hand. ‘Now,’ he said, putting the bulb down again, ‘if I’m not very much mistaken…’ – deftly he cut away the spiky keys – ‘deep down this flower doesn’t have a bad smell at all. With the pheromone-exchange matrix out of the picture, I think you’ll find that the object of our study plays a different tune …’ He held it up again, squeeze upon squeeze. ‘Go on … inhale deeply. Take your time.’
This time my olfactory brain was flooded with heavenly scent, and all the richness that the word lily conveys. My head reeled and I experienced God, but my hand didn’t forget its lower business. Barry seemed entirely caught up with the respectable side of our scientific project, or perhaps he too had the knack of processing different streams of information separately.
Mrs Beddoes began to stir from her rêverie. I could hear the soft thump of her mug being returned to the table. At last she came over to take a look, and this time I didn’t try to stop her. My cock dwindled back to an unembarrassing size, and Barry and I moved smoothly on to erudite botanical niceties.
‘So, Barry, to sum up – can you understand how a lay person might think of the flower as carnivorous?’ I asked, borrowing the manner of a television interviewer, as if I hadn’t been kneading his privates mere seconds before like a baker in a hurry. We played out the scene in full, jointly explaining the mystery to an amazed bed-maker.
‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s an elementary mistake, but very understandable. The essential oil manufactured by the plant is sweet and alluring, but not to a fly. So the plant needs to use a trick to make the fly believe that there is rotting flesh nearby. As I told you, it’s a very simple molecular switch to make the conversion to this odour. The flower’s only interest is in getting itself pollinated. It just so happens that a trapped fly struggling to get out provides just the right amount of jiggling to attach the pollen. There are species native to Britain which use the same sort of technique – lords-and-ladies, for instance.’
‘That’s cuckoo-pint, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. Arum maculatum. Just like this exotic beauty here, the flower isn’t equipped to eat the fly, but sometimes the fly dies of exhaustion before it can escape. If it just stayed where it was and bided its time, it could escape later on, once the flower had slackened its grip. But flies don’t think of that!’ In fact the whole procedure seems to be an evolutionary dead-end. Dead flies don’t pollinate – unless the system depends on a super-fly with greater endurance, which subsequently spreads the pollen further than its inferior siblings would have managed.
‘Well at least the fly died happy,’ mused Mrs Beddoes who had become thoroughly fascinated with the proceedings by this time.
‘Oh no, dear lady,’ Barry said sharply, in a way that was almost rude. ‘We humans may find the carrion smell disgusting, but it’s nectar to a fly. The fly imagines that it’s going to fulfil its own desire by following the “stink” – its drive to reproduce itself by laying its eggs. However, once past the matrix, the entrance, it finds there is nothing rotting there at all, only a sweet smell. And since the plant’s real perfume is not so nice for the fly, we could say rather that the fly died in Hell!’
This was quite enough for Mrs Beddoes in the way of botanical lecturing. She produced her duster from an apron pocket. If she had really done all her housework early, then this was a little piece of theatre. I’m not sure she ever did anything that would have qualified in Granny’s view as dusting. The worn yellow duster was as symbolic in its own way as a freemason’s trowel.
‘I mustn’t let the whole day run away from me, must I?’ she said, and took from another of her apron pockets an item much more central to her practice as a cleaner, an aerosol of air freshener. Her fondness for it was natural, considering that she cleaned the rooms of young men with hardly the faintest idea of how to maintain themselves. She gave the room a parting squirt with the aerosol, moving her arm in a large half-circle, then a series of loops in our direction, or towards the stench that had already been dissected out of existence. She was so generous with the volatilisation of industrial fragrance that she walked through a cloud of it on the way out, and set herself coughing. Perhaps the coughing prevented a strange thought from coming any further forward than the back of her mind: If I didn’t know better, I’d think Mr Crow-maire was giving the other chap a thorough squeeze of the privates …
It was only after she had gone, as Barry began to pack up his equipment, that we stopped being at ease with each other. Mrs Beddoes hadn’t been an impediment to the scene between us, as I had thought at first, but an essential ingredient in our tiny erotic drama, the spectator who didn’t see a thing. In those days my sexual imagination was at least as attuned to the creation of a tableau as to any actual intimacy.
Of course eroticism is only the Ego’s vain attempt to unite with the Self. The ego itself is a paradoxical amalgam of inert body and the true Self. The aim is admirable, but the ego gets it all wrong. Watching the ego try to wrestle reality into submission is like watching Laurel and Hardy move a piano. They’ll move it all right, but you won’t be able to get much of a tune out of it afterwards.
As for the scene with Barry, I didn’t regret that it had lacked an actual sexual climax. Release of that sort would have taken away from an excitement that remained infinite because it never toppled over into the reality that is all illusion and disappointment. It was a wave that never needed to break.
I might imagine in those days that I wanted openness of expression, closeness of rapport and meaningful glandular release. What I actually enjoyed was this sort of mixture, hiding and flaunting simultaneously, which was only a new twist on being invisible and incredibly conspicuous at the same time, my normal state.
Although I saw Barry around, and we talked very happily about our common interests, I never had the faintest whiff of desire for him thereafter. The beauty of Whiffy Barry – that too was an inflorescence which blossomed and shrivelled in a single day.
I was especially in need of diversions like the dissection of Voodoo Lily, since I already knew that my field of study was a dead end. Not a dead end in general terms but a dead end in my particular case. Under neath gruffness a mile deep Eckstein had been too excited by my academic prospects to give me the guidance I needed. He passed the buck. Perhaps he was relying on my chosen university to warn me of the disillusionment that lay in store.
A. T. Grove had been so exclusively interested in my mobility that he hadn’t offered me the benefit of his advice about my course. I ended up having to learn the hard way that disability debarred me from making real progress in the study of my chosen languages.
I was able to reconstruct the way my interview should have gone, if it had been designed to lay the foundations for an undergraduate career rather than to assess my ability to go for a coffee at Snax on Regent Street without depending on the wheelchair. Because a wheelchair saps independence of outlook (as everyone knows who doesn’t need one), without which the human spirit withers away.
What A. T. Grove should have said was this: ‘John, you need to be aware that certain courses of study presuppose certain abilities that are not merely intellectual. Your chosen subject, Modern and Mediaeval Languages, is intended to immerse you in a foreign culture, so that you end up being able to spend large parts of your mental life in Spanish or German. The finishing touch applied to this process is a period of residence abroad.
‘Klaus Eckstein strongly champions your cause, in a way that hardly chimes with his continued insistence that your German accent is terrible. But I suspect that even he has not looked far enough ahead. Your independence of mind is a condition that does not extend to your body.
‘How will you be able to manage abroad, when that time comes? It is difficult enough for us to place students in suitable households without the additional burden of meeting your special needs. You are hardly in a position to risk immersion in a foreign culture, when you can hardly keep your head above water in your own.
‘If you do try to live abroad, you will be living in a bubble of artificial behaviour. Your exposure to a foreign culture will be for practical purposes nil. A genuine traveller can take a cable car to a beauty spot in the mountains without a second thought, while the only cable car with which you are likely to be familiar while you study for a degree will be the one, whirring and trundling, which conveys you from your wheelchair to the bath on A staircase, Kenny Court, Downing. I do not say this to be cruel but to save you time.
‘Klaus Eckstein has painted a vivid picture of the hazards of travel on Spanish trains, warning you that it is polite, just as it would be in Britain, to offer to share any food you produce – but that you must be prepared, as you need not be in Britain, for people to accept your offer with alacrity, producing forks and spoons from their pockets and having a good old tuck-in. But how will you be able to experience this for yourself?
‘Consider. A language student with what we consider satisfactory conversational skills in German goes to stay in a family-run Gasthaus in Thuringia. He explores his surroundings, which means in practice that he becomes familiar with the excellence of German beer, thanks to the Reinheitsgebot, the purity laws of 1516, which prohibit adulteration of any kind. He has more than enough German to keep on ordering more beer.
‘In the mornings his head is full of hammers, and he can hardly dare to look at the lavish breakfast his solicitous landlady brings to his room. He drinks the coffee gingerly, and takes a few tentative nibbles at a sort of roll which crumbles to dryness in his mouth.
‘The breakfast tray, however, holds far more than merely coffee and rolls. It is as if his landlady is trying to save him the expense of eating for the rest of the day. There are hard-boiled eggs. There are slabs of pale cheese the size of small books, if the books were pale and sweaty. There are churned and rendered meats – swollen sausages and motley slices. There is a higher presence of offal in these productions than he would welcome even without the hammers in his head. The purity laws in Germany seem to stop with the irreproachable beer. In the butcher’s shop anything goes.
‘He can face none of it, not even the second half of his roll. But it’s out of the question, the height of rudeness, to reject so lavish and considerate a morning offering (the rates of the Gasthaus are extremely reasonable). So he stows the food away in his suitcase, planning to dispose of it in some better place at a more convenient time.
‘The next morning the hammers in his head are if anything heavier and more efficient at blotting out thought with their crashing. The breakfast tray presented to him with a flourish is even more disheartening, because he is feeling yet worse than he did the day before – and because there is even more food this time. The landlady has taken his tray-clearing performance of the day before as a challenge. In retrospect he has miscalculated by not leaving at least some of the eggs on the tray, the cheese perhaps, certainly the meats of ill omen. Too late now, though. He has no alternative but to repeat his breakfast-hiding trick. Day after day the problem recurs, but the time when he might empty his suitcase never presents itself.
‘In the common spaces of the Gasthaus, as the week goes on, the landlady becomes both glowing and skittish, a preening hausfrau, making admiring comments about the healthy appetites of the English, comments which his better-than-average conversational skills enable him to acknowledge gracefully, and to deflect.
‘It is at the beginning of the second week that a reek from the cupboard draws the landlady, while cleaning her charming young guest’s room, to the cupboard and the suitcase it contains. Opening the case, she is confronted with a black museum of the previous week’s breakfasts. All her thoughtful kitchen gestures are mashed together in various states of decomposition. The delicacies she had prepared to sustain this cherished guest on his explorations of her beloved locality have been dumped into the vastly inferior digestion, assisted only by flies, of his luggage.
‘The student is out all day, which leaves the landlady many hours to perfect the outburst of grievance with which she will greet the guest who has insulted her hospitality. When he returns, dog-tired after a day of hiking, he will be faced with a problem for which no primer nor phrase book could prepare him. The words pour out of her like the waters of the Rhine in spate.
‘It is now his task to find the words to explain to his landlady why he has disposed of her breakfasts as if they were sordid secrets. Only the right words will stop this solid lady, steaming with rage, from knocking him down her front steps. A large vocabulary and a secure grasp of tone will be required. A good accent will help, to be sure, but only if every other element is in place.
‘We are worlds away here from such rudiments as “Can you tell me please the way to the station?” or indeed “‘Brecht’s genius is to make an élite feel like the rabble, and a rabble like the élite.’ Discuss.”
‘That, my dear John, is why we send students abroad to perfect their language skills. They must learn to manage with no protective barrier between them and the local inhabitants. You can never be in that situation. You must take that protective barrier wherever you go. You cannot expect to plumb the depths of another culture when you need a rubber ring to keep afloat in your own.
‘My advice is that you should consider applying to the college and the university, but with the intention of reading English. Then there need be no delay in admitting you, since a year at High Wycombe Technical College slaving over Spanish will not be required of you.’
And while he was at it, the A. T. Grove in my fantasy might have saved me from another poor decision. He might have added, so softly that I wouldn’t quite be sure he had really said it, ‘Please don’t have a bone cut as a way of pleasing others. Your knee already does the job adequately – the job is only part-time – and your friend either loves you or does not. Love is not fussy about knees. That is the truth of it.’ Fatherly.
When I realised that it was pointless to pursue my course to the bitter end of a degree, I felt let down to a certain extent. False hopes had been encouraged. I would have to finish Part One just the same, and satisfy the examiners at the end of the year. It was hard to see this as a purposeful endeavour, or a meaningful use of my time.
But at least (I thought) I would be able to conclude my undergraduate career in record time. Modern and Mediaeval Languages was a one-year Part I, English a one-year Part II – so I would get my degree in two years flat.
I had mixed feelings about this truncated course. I wasn’t happy enough at Cambridge to want to stay any longer, but what came after Cambridge? In any case I had paid too little attention to etymology for once. The course for a Cambridge degree is called the Tripos, which derives from the Greek word meaning three-legged. A two-year degree, apparently, would be an absurdity exactly equivalent to a two-legged stool. So I would have to spend two years on Part II of the English course.
I could see that it would have to be English. I had grown to love both Spanish and German. They were strong flavours, Rioja and Riesling exploding on the palate, though the analogy is pure swank since I had tasted neither, and my inability to drop into a bodega or Weinlokal to remedy my ignorance was very much to the point.
Now I would have to wean myself back onto the small beer of my native tongue. The mild and bitter.
I had always been a literary reader. My mind was retentive, particularly of poetry, though I can’t really take the credit for that. My childhood tutor Miss Collins gave me a real incentive, when she restricted my reading time and took the books away. After that, my memory worked overtime, in case it happened again. I could recite reams by heart.
I didn’t anticipate much of an academic challenge. English was widely regarded as a soft option. My broader European perspective would give me a significant advantage. In the Tragedy paper, for instance, which was compulsory, I would ramble on about Büchner. I’d always had a soft spot for Büchner.
I had made a head start by having a poem published in an undergraduate literary magazine. It was called ‘Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Wheelchair’. The title went Wallace Stevens one better. I had loved his poetry since Klaus Eckstein had thrillingly recited, ‘Let be be finale of seem / The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.’ I probably make too much of the parallels to Hindu thought in Stevens’s metaphysics, but they exist. They’re real. Or at least ‘real’, which is as much as any of us can hope for.
There may never have been a time when it was possible for a poem, legibly written or competently typed, to be rejected by an undergraduate magazine – with or without modernist flourishes and a disability-pathos undertone. If there was such a time it certainly wasn’t the early 1970s. Standards were much lower than those on Woman’s Own. I make no claims for the quality of my poem. I hope no one is ever mischievous enough to disinter it.
The magazine was called Freeze Peach. I don’t think the editors wanted to produce a magazine and then devised a suitably clever name. More likely that they thought Freeze Peach too good a name not to have a magazine attached to it. The originators of Woman’s Own, their eyes less clouded by Maya, avoided this mistake. Freeze Peach stumbled on as far as a third issue, then died in a ditch. I take no responsibility for that, though my contribution probably didn’t help. If the magazine had kept going a little longer, I would have tried to lumber it with another opus (in the same vein of manipulative pluck) entitled ‘Not Waving but Downing’. One more case of the title coming first, the actual artefact being an optional afterthought. I was getting on the magazine’s wave-length, by writing a poem that was entirely parasitic on its title.
My taste was more adventurous in poetry than in prose. If I had been asked then what was the most important book published in the twentieth century, I would have answered ‘Ficcíones’, in unison with every other self-respecting Cambridge undergraduate of the period – and Borges’s Spanish is indeed crisp and fine. But the books I read more than any others were Roald Dahl’s collections of admirably sick short stories. Books have always been awkward objects to me without exception, but I managed to tuck my copies of Kiss Kiss and Someone Like You out of sight behind more impressive-looking volumes, just like everyone else.
Theoretically the person to consult in my perplexity was my tutor Graëme, but that was obviously not going to do any good with the way things stood between us, and I wasn’t going to grovel. Humble pie is no dish for vegetarians (historically, numble pie). The filling is deer guts, if you really want to know. I didn’t consult Graëme, just told him what I had decided. He gave a mannered little sigh and said that it was a matter of statistical fact that English students were more prone to nervous breakdowns than those who read Modern Languages. He hoped that my change of academic direction didn’t qualify as a cry for help in its own right.
I didn’t anticipate that the change of subjects would be too jarring. I was better integrated into the life of the college than I was with my department, though that wasn’t saying much. Still, the Mini had become almost the Downing taxi. I was often being asked to ferry people around, and I enjoyed doing it.
The risky parts of air travel are take-off and landing. The dangerous moments when conveying bone china by hot-air balloon are loading and unloading. Why should wheelchair-based car trips be any different? I was vulnerable while my helpers were conveying me from room to car, and much more so on the return journey, at the end of the day above all, when alcohol had a bit part in the drama, and sometimes the leading rôle.
It vexed me that Downing was a castle of learning strongly fortified against its own residents. Returning from an evening out, early enough for the back gate to be open, I was faced with a barrier, a vertical stanchion blocking access for cars. Dons with parking privileges were issued with keys which let them unlock it and hinge it down out of the way, this lone fat prison bar blocking the Mini’s liberty. I shared their parking privileges but not their right to a key, without which parking privileges didn’t amount to much.
I asked for a key at the Porter’s Lodge and was told that I should apply through my tutor. Did I imagine the look of wry amusement which ricocheted around the room, bouncing off the notice boards and arrays of pigeonholes? They might have had the manners to wait until I had gone, my tail between my legs, and then they could have murmured quite audibly, ‘And a fat lot of good that will do you, as everyone knows!’ The nicest of the porters said that a key wouldn’t make all that much difference anyway, since I couldn’t manhandle the post myself – which made me wonder why I had ever thought him the nicest. If I had a key then my passengers would do the physical work for me, and the social bubble would be preserved that much longer. When I had to go by way of the Porter’s Lodge people tended to mooch off, and then I would have to recruit someone to return the key anyway.
One evening I came home late with a slightly rowdy party. We had made a ritual journey across the modest urban lawn of Parker’s Piece to pay our respects to Reality Checkpoint – no more than an elaborate Victorian lamp-post, really, ornamented with a motif of dolphins, but universally known by the phrase painted on its plinth. By common consent Reality Checkpoint offered reassurance to those who got lost while voyaging strange seas of thought alone and artificially bewildered by drugs. It was a pilot light to rekindle the snuffed spirits of those trapped between dimensions.
Then nothing would content the group but to play games with the traffic lights, or rather with the mechanism that made them change. There was some sort of sensor buried under a heavyweight rubber strip, which counted the cars passing over it and triggered the lights to change when a predetermined number had been reached. This seemed to the group an astoundingly sophisticated piece of technology and also (here I parted company from the general mood) something that cried out for a bit of tampering.
A lot of good my dissidence did me. The idea was to bounce the wheelchair back and forth on the decision-making flange, persuading it that cars were massing in large numbers and that the lights must therefore change. There was no logic to the use of the wheelchair, since weight was the issue and John plus wheelchair was lighter than any one of my companions, but then the logic of the group was purely alcoholic. The evening had been alcohological for some time, and I looked up at the events unfolding around me with a sour sobriety.
Returning to college had an edge of melancholy and resentment for me. My passengers didn’t necessarily share this mood, and would get up to pranks and high jinks. All very amusing, until someone fell over my foot.
Someone. Mentioning no names. You know who you are – don’t you, Stephen Morris?
All right, it wasn’t quite as innocent as all that. My pals were busy uprooting the stanchion, and though I hadn’t exactly put them up to it I was silently cheering them on. The stanchion was quite feebly rooted in concrete, like an ailing tooth, and it came out quite suddenly, which was when Stephen stumbled backwards and fell over my foot.
I had been all in favour of vandalism until I was vandalised myself. Still, I had a couple of weeks of significantly easier access to my room until the repairs were done. By then my foot had stopped hurting quite so much, and the world and I were back at our usual loggerheads.
Even so the Mini brought more joy than anything else. There were many trips in that little car which resembled rehearsals for world record attempts in the human compression category. Only the observers from the Guinness Book of Records were missing. We were always fitting one more person in. And then one more.
If the Mini was 120 inches long, 55 wide and 53 high (though obviously you have to discount the distance between the ground and the bottom of the car), then you subtract the measurements of the boot and the engine and you get … my maths isn’t what it was, but I’d estimate the interior volume as being between 127 and 134 cubic feet. Call it 130. Not a lot when, like most of my passengers, you’re built like a Greek god, except for your English inability to look people in the eye, or anywhere near it.
There might be as many as four outsized knees jammed up against my back in the driver’s seat, so close that I could feel the freckles on them. If ever I did take the Mini for a drive on my own, it seemed to ride unnaturally high on its axles. When the suspension didn’t bump it felt as if there was something wrong.
All this driving placed a lot of strain on my shoulder, which could freeze even in the warmest weather. Three-point turns were my nightmare – despite Dad’s best drilling, they tended to have five or seven points. So one summer evening my passengers sweetly relieved me of the need to perform them.
There were four of them, strapping boys who had been playing cricket on Parker’s Piece before I drove us all to Midsummer Common for a pint in a pub they liked. They wore their hair at a timidly daring length, creeping down over the collar, enough to needle their parents when they visited Cambridge for the ritual of Sunday lunch at the Blue Boar – roast flesh carved from the trolley, and is it so hard to find a proper tie? – but far too short to impress their contemporaries.
The pub was popular, and parking spaces were very limited. ‘Just stop here,’ said one of the party, and they all got out, innocently slamming the doors with a force driven from the shoulder and suited to flinging a ball or wielding a bat. If the windows had been closed I imagine my eardrums would have burst. There’s an anvil in the ear, you know, and those doors banged like hammers.
After a little chat in murmurs the lads took up positions round the car and simply picked it up, taking advantage of those open windows to get a good grip.
They lifted the Mini as if it weighed nothing at all. It wasn’t a heavyweight among cars, admittedly, and now it was transfigured and airborne, levitated into the balmy Cambridge evening by eight beefy arms. I’m a leg man myself, a leg man to my fingertips, but I have to say that I enjoyed watching the arms I could see from the driving seat, the tanned ones and the pale with freckles. I could see white shirts with rolled-up sleeves, and summer sweat staining the armpits. There are days when the world seems entirely peopled with giants, but this was an evening when I felt I could meet anyone’s eye and hold anyone’s gaze.
After they had parked the car and I had struggled out of it they picked me up in a compact version of the same formation and conveyed me in state to the outside seating area of the pub. It was like riding in some human sedan chair.
Local people had grazing rights on the Common, and while we sipped our drinks we could hear horses tearing up mouthfuls of grass, that placid ripping. I like the way horses’ eyes are set in their heads, on a soft edge in a long skull. That’s a particularly pleasing touch.
These young men were cider drinkers, leaving me with my half of bitter to claim maturity of taste. Their green palates preferred apple sweetness to the truthful bitterness of hops. I spent most of the evening perched on one broad knee or other. I would have one sturdy arm wrapped round me while the other hand took care of the precious pint of cider. Dandled by the group I listened to the conversation with abstract rapture.
Young people at university at that time behaved as if they spent their days in the underground youth culture of resistance and revolution, surfacing only rarely to deal with The Man (by attending a lecture or supervision). Every now and then they might have to have lunch with those aliens their parents. Asked what they were going to do with their lives, students would give rambling answers in which the words ‘kibbutz’, ‘start a band’ and ‘underground newspaper’ stood out.
Lads like these cider drinkers, sons of doctors and solicitors in county towns, mumbled less convincingly than most. Their hearts weren’t in it. The turmoil of youth and social upheaval would pass like the measles, leaving most of them unchanged, without even a scar. What’s that folksy saying? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree (unless it’s wrenched tenderly off the branch to make cider). This was a period when the apple was determined to turn into an orange or a pomegranate. I loved this attitude all the more because I couldn’t share it. This banana doesn’t change his spots.
Even among themselves these young men stuck devotedly to the generational clichés. Asked why he had turned up late to play cricket, one of them said, ‘I couldn’t get my act together.’ ‘And what act was that, pray?’ I wondered to myself dreamily. ‘Billy Smart’s Circus? The Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Is it too much to expect that you be punctual, since you’re installed in a body that anticipates your every wish?’ I’ve always been slightly cracked on the subject of timekeeping. I admit it.
In fact I was enjoying myself too much to make trouble. As I was passed from lap to lap over the course of the evening, I tried to see if there was even one of these young groins that didn’t stir when sat upon at the proper angle. In every lap there was a hydraulic response ignored by its owner. Young flesh salutes a change of pressure. It’s a purely barometric pleasure.
Meanwhile I enjoyed their stoical conventionality, their casual social weight. These were men as reliable as the rhythms of a hymn, sung by a congregation with most of its mind on Sunday lunch. Was there also something left over from public-school loneliness, the residue of tears after lights-out? I like stolidity and stolid men, the slow processing of emotions. It’s a great luxury not to respond right away. The redhead of the group must have been told three times a week since he went to kindergarten that his colouring gave him an ungovernable temper, and he was still stupendously phlegmatic.
At the end of the evening I was carried back to the car in the same processional fashion as I had been delivered to the pub. I loved being so high above the ground yet feeling so safe. Even if one of my bearers stumbled the others would keep their footing. When I was at school at Vulcan, one of the boys had tried to run away to be a truck driver’s mate – perhaps this was really what he wanted, not just rough company and the dream of sounding the horn, but the elevation of the cab.
The Mini certainly had a comical aspect to eyes enlightened by drink, hemmed in so snugly by its neighbours. It looked like something dropped from the sky, or else thrust up by stage machinery. After I had been slid tenderly into the driving seat, my four porters picked up the car again, disengaging it from its narrow space and then serenely rotating it in the middle of the road, to save me the trouble of making the turn myself. The evening was still light, and there was no real need to turn the headlights on, but I did it for the sense of occasion.
Why is this memory so radiant, verging on the radioactive? It wasn’t just the beauty of the young men which powered my joy. Of course mammals spend a lot of their energy trying either to generate heat or to lose it, and there’s something peculiarly inviting to happiness about those moments when we are at one with our surroundings without having to work to make it so. Our bodies can turn off the fans and radiators for a while. We stop squandering energy to maintain the status quo. Summer night a case in point, bringing the human body close to the bliss of the reptile, organism which submits without a struggle to the conditions in which it finds itself.
There were more specific inducements to happiness. The smell of earlier sweat, relatively fresh but dried in, voluptuously blended with grass smells, released and combined with new secretions as the young men exerted themselves in an improvised sport calling for a different sort of teamwork. The slightly laboured breathing of healthy young people, within earshot of each other, trying to pretend to be that little bit fitter than they were. The sound of cricket boots on road metal, long paces, regular gait, the crunch of the little nails on their soles, ominous, military, but also like little boys wearing Dad’s shoes and wanting to sound just like him, striding with a manliness maintained by conscious effort. There’s so much poignancy in the state of trying to be a man, nothing remotely comparable about being one.
The boy nearest to me outside the driver’s window, the stolid redhead, was suffering from singultus. In Latin a sob, in English no more than a hiccup. He had the hiccups, and those tiny spasms translated into a strangely seductive rhythmic lurch of the whole vehicle. The involuntary movement hiccups gave his arm had a knock-on effect on his neighbour, the lad outside the passenger window. Their positions made eye contact hard to avoid, and then other factors entered in, cider and laughter. The cider caused the hiccups, it amplified and distorted the laughter, and soon the whole body of the car was faintly vibrating with the hilarity of those who carried it. The infinitesimal rocking that comes from being slightly out of step in a concerted task was subjected to an interference pattern of hiccups and laughter. Waves rippled back and forth, disrupting themselves and each other, complex functions on a graph of exhilaration.
I was whispering ‘Mush!’ to a team of very English huskies, on eight strong laughing arms, eight cider-drunk hiccupping legs, as if I would never need to deal with life on the flat, and yet I didn’t really want to linger. I enjoyed a brief swirl of people in carbonated moments, as long as the bubbles were guaranteed to burst. I liked to be held and then passed on.
I was still dictating terms to Maya, and she always agreed to them, but she does that, doesn’t she? She gets you caught in her trap by letting you design it yourself. She gives you a free hand. She plays along.
Mum and Dad were only mildly disturbed by my proposed change of subject. Of course I didn’t present it as any sort of defeat. I could tell them perfectly sincerely that Cambridge had enjoyed a glorious history in English studies for much of the twentieth century, and Downing had been near the centre of all that. It was Downing, after all, that had given F. R. Leavis a professorship. Leavis, the heretic guru of English letters, who had founded and edited a massively influential magazine. That magazine had been called Scrutiny – the Cambridge word above all others. The unscrutinised life was not worth living and the unscrutinised text had no place on a serious person’s shelves. Vast and merrily crackling was the critical bonfire of the deficient.
At that time Leavis was in retirement but could still be glimpsed occasionally. I didn’t mention that the one time I had seen Leavis he was walking briskly down Senate House Passage on a chilly day with fanatical vigour and remoteness, wearing a sports jacket and an open-necked shirt. He picked up his feet like an aggrieved heron, and I was sure he would spear me if I got in his way, wheelchair or no wheelchair. Anyone less life-enhancing would be hard to imagine, but naturally I didn’t pass that impression on to Mum and Dad. I simply said I would be in safe hands, experiencing the full flow of a great tradition. Of course, Leavis had eventually severed his links with Downing in the usual austere huff, scattering excommunications in all directions like black and baleful confetti, but again, there seemed no need to relay such a minor detail.
My proposed academic trajectory – from Modern Languages Part I to English Part II – felt disjointed, a wrong turn in a life that couldn’t afford one. It seemed absurd that I could travel single-handed across the world (though I don’t wish to slight the many strong arms and lifting hands which helped me on my way) to pay my respects to my guru in India, but not pursue my studies as I wished at an educational institution that recognised me as worthy to attend. It was absurd but there seemed to be no way round it. Trudge on, pilgrim.
The exams for Part I, when they came, felt anything but momentous. I sat the papers in a sort of academic quarantine (the same drill as for my A-levels) with an invigilator for my own exclusive use. I was segregated from my fellow examinees because of the clacking disturbance of the typewriter and also because of my privilege of extra time – bags of it. I was allowed 50 per cent more time than my fellows because of the physical inconvenience of the process, though I never used anything like that much. I’d call out ‘I’ve finished’ as soon as I properly could.
It seemed only fair that I should have a bit more time, but all the same I chafed against the extravagant allowance. It seemed so imprecisely worked out, as if the authorities were really saying, ‘Give the little chap an easy ride – he doesn’t get many of those.’ I would have preferred a more precise system, with observers making the calculations on a case-by-case basis, so that I would be allowed, say, 3 hours and 13 minutes, and not a second more. I didn’t want favours – I wanted a time-and-motion-study man to follow me around for a week, and then to stand sternly over me during the exam with a stopwatch. I mean, are we taking this seriously, or are we just amusing ourselves?
I imagine that standard invigilators survey the room with an impartial sternness. My personal invigilator would tend to give me encouraging smiles, which I didn’t enjoy. I was afraid that this goodwill might escalate into actual patronage, that he might fetch me a cup of coffee and a sticky bun to keep me going, and then slide across specimen answers to the questions or correct my grammar.
Towards the end of that summer term Alan Linton brought me a present. He kept telling me that discovering homœopathy had changed his life and given him a direction. He was in my debt. I was rather prickly about friendship at that period, not wanting people to get too close in case I ended up relying on them, and if Alan hadn’t been safely leaving Cambridge I dare say I would have bristled.
He delivered his present to A6 after Hall one evening. It was a piece of cake. ‘It’s a funny cake,’ he said, making his eyebrows shoot up and down à la Groucho Marx, twitching, ‘if you get my drift. Very funny indeed.’ Meaning that it was made with marijuana. I felt very alienated by the general drug culture of the time, but this was an irresistible offer. I turned down joints with the excuse that I only smoked Spanish cigarettes (and not just any Spanish cigarette either), feeling that Cannabis sativa was rather dragged down by its association with Nicotiana tabacum. Now I could have a transgressive nibble on the sly, and no one would be any the wiser.
‘And this is to go with it,’ Alan said, reverently producing a record from a plastic bag. It was his treasured copy of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. If albums were as good as their titles, it was already my favourite record. He made clear that the dope cake was a gift, but the record was only a loan. He must have realised that an album was a difficult object for me to manage – tape cassettes, reliable and easy to handle, would soon replace them, and I for one couldn’t wait – so he put it on my stereo, perched on top of the spindle, ready to go.
He also left me something called a Dust Bug, a perspex lath with a sort of toothbrush and a miniature plush roller mounted on it, which was supposed to sit on a little rod, held in place on the surround of my turntable with a little rubber sucker, but I decided not to bother with that.
I set up the turntable with the arm that steadies records on the spindle over to the right, so that when the side had been played the needle would return to the beginning. I knew that marijuana distorted the sense of time, and I wanted to make sure that the music would last for the whole of the experience.
It made sense to eat the cake before I sat down. I was pleased to see that it was moist. I broke it into pieces which would sit snugly on the fork. I closed my eyes while I chewed the cake, savouring the slightly dusty flavour, trying to decide where spice ended and cannabis began. I got the stereo under way and was settled in the Parker-Knoll by the time the second track started. The album was famously profound and poetic. Now I would make up my own mind.
By the time the needle reached the end of the side I had remembered that I was likely, in the course of the coming intoxication, to become atrociously hungry. That much I had learned about the effects of the drug. It would make me into a monster of appetite, and all I had to appease the monster was a Mars bar tucked away in a desk drawer. I should really have been keeping it in a fridge anyway, as a homage to the Mars bars of my childhood, but there were no fridges for students then. I decided not to wait until the eating mania struck before I fetched it. I should make the trip while I was still Mr Jekyll, more or less in charge of my faculties, before Mr Hyde took over and started bellowing for ratatouille.
Even as Mr Jekyll I had trouble foraging for the hidden snack. The Mars bar felt oddly springy in my hand, like something made of an elastic syrup, or as if there were a thousand Mars bars in a loose association, so that I picked up just the first one, and there was an appreciable delay before the others caught up with it – and then of course there’s always a straggler.
Finally I was back in the Parker-Knoll in the relaxed position. I had pulled up my drawbridge and was alone on the ramparts with the phenomenon of tender howling (against jazzy strings) that was Astral Weeks. I already knew this was the record I had been waiting for all my life. It blue my mind. It blew through my mind. It blew my mind.
I didn’t know how many times the needle had traversed this amazing music. I had no idea what time it was anywhere on earth. I only knew it was time to eat the Mars bar.
If I’d given it more thought, I would have cut the bar into chunks or slices and used a fork. As things stood, with my arm extended to its maximum and my teeth angled forward (it certainly felt as if my teeth were angled forward) I could just about nibble the front quarter-inch of the Mars bar. I got the giggles, remembering something that I’d heard a girl asking rather coquettishly in the Whim on Trinity Street – ‘Why do Mars bars have veins?’ I suddenly saw that this was a question that needed to be asked.
A Mars bar does indeed have veins, chocolate tubes breaking the surface of the bar, as if caramel was circulating through them, supplying the nougat core with vital nutrients and access to unthinkable sensations. The whole ridiculously penile confection was alive. It was a soft hard-on. It was Cadbury’s Flake that had the fast reputation, and its adverts always portrayed Flake-eaters as oral nymphomaniacs, but the Mars bar was every bit as concupiscent. It was shameless, and it knew what it wanted.
What a tease it was! But two could play at that game. By now I’d eaten as much as I could reach of the bar. It would have to wait for its consummation. I decided to put the rest of it down while I worked out how to convey it to my mouth. My coördination must have been affected by the action of the drug, because I immediately managed to nudge it off the arm of the Parker-Knoll and onto the floor. It annoyed me that I had been so clumsy, but there seemed no point in mounting a rescue expedition just then. The Mars bar wasn’t going anywhere.
Now my thoughts were tending in a different direction. It was time to masturbate. It wasn’t really my idea, and it certainly wasn’t Van Morrison’s. I felt it was the Mars bar’s idea. Those five inches of chewy sweetness had put ideas in my head.
With a little effort I retrieved my own organ from my flies. In the position I was in I could just about flick my fingers against the glans. My mind wandered, though, and I kept losing the thread of arousal. Then suddenly I was ejaculating, without the usual run-up, and with the pleasure oddly scattered and silvery. It was the anagram of an orgasm. A morgaso, perhaps, or (stroke of genius, this, I thought) Om ragas! I suddenly wished I had one of Dad’s crossword puzzles within reach. In this state, surely, I would be unstoppable – though of course, since I’d added extra letters in my anagrams, I was only on my normal dismal form.
I sat there for a few seconds, then decided that I shouldn’t put off the cleaning-up operation any longer. I wriggled to make contact with the lever of the Parker-Knoll. Nothing happened. It wouldn’t budge. That’s when I realised that the drawbridge had malfunctioned and I was trapped in my plushly upholstered castle. The Mars bar on the floor wasn’t going anywhere, and nor was I.
I began to get cold, particularly in the groin area, where I was slick with genetic information, the signed confession of my self-abuse. I tried to doze. It was hopeless. The Dream-Cloud was out of reach. Van Morrison burbled lyrically on, unperturbed by my desperate situation. He kept on singing at me that he was beside me (‘and I’m – beside – you –’) with the most extraordinary intensity, but that was no real consolation. I was beside myself. My fear, of course, was that I’d still be marooned in the Parker-Knoll, pubes crackling with my own dried seed, Mars bar skulking on the carpet like a bowel movement, when Mrs Beddoes arrived to do her morning rounds.
I must have slept. I woke up in the early morning chilled to the bone. I gave the lever of the chair one last try and it yielded. The drawbridge swung smoothly down and I was free. It was as if I had been applying pressure in the wrong direction. I suppose that’s possible.
The first thing I did was to turn the stereo off. Then I had hell’s own job cleaning myself up. Finally I wriggled under the Dream-Cloud to get warm.
And that was pretty much the beginning and end of my student experience of C. sativa. It was also the beginning and the end of my Van Morrison phase. I had listened to Side One of Astral Weeks (‘In The Beginning’) non-stop between about 8.30 and 5.15 the next morning. I never got as far as Side Two (‘Afterwards’). ‘In the beginning’ was more than enough. In the beginning just about finished me.
When Mrs Beddoes came I groaned, and she cleaned round me with theatrical tact. She asked if I needed the doctor and I made stoical noises. When I woke up again it was after eleven.
Like every other undergraduate I had formally been assigned a doctor, in my case one at a medical practice in Trinity Street. I can’t say I was impressed. He didn’t know anything about Still’s Disease, and by now I suppose I was used to doctors who had the good manners to pretend they knew more than me.
I was used to Flanny’s little ways by now, and whatever her other shortcomings she was a good sport when it came to prescribing drugs. So I let her do the donkey-work of writing my scripts. There was no point spending the time it would take me to break in a new medical professional just for term-times, when I had Flanny so well trained.
During the summer holidays of 1971, though, Flanny took a holiday of her own, so I saw another doctor in the same practice, Dr Bailey. The summer break was the ‘long vac’ in Cambridge parlance, and certainly I anticipated a long vacuum which medication might help to fill. I thought this new chap might not be so biddable, so I decided to play safe.
What I wanted was a prescription for Mandrax, a widely prescribed drug of the period, much maligned since then. I still give it high marks. To me it’s pretty much the Jesus Christ of prescription drugs (meaning no offence, or not much). Mild and loving, but reviled and rejected, and all for trying to help.
The name, granted, isn’t well chosen. Whoever came up with it must have had mandrake in mind, which isn’t reassuring, and then finished off with a Bond-villain flourish (isn’t Drax the baddie in Moonraker?). Give a drug a bad name.
It’s not actually one of the barbiturates, though it shares some of their properties. The great thing about Mandrax is that you can take an awful lot of it with very little in the way of side-effects. Naturally the question of ‘side’ effects is wholly subjective. What’s at the side depends on your angle of vision. Some people lead decidely off-centre lives, and a side-effect can be right up their alley.
Above a certain dosage I might get a sort of nomadic paræsthesia, with tingles and patches of numbness lazily playing over my body. To tell the truth I rather enjoyed that. It was like having slowly rolling goosebumps, and goosebumps are only a mild case of horripilation, which is one of the signs testifying to the presence of God. Mandrax offered no more than a simulation, but I enjoyed the experience anyway, this synthetic merry-go-round of skin sensation, a slow swirling where my body met the world. Emotionally it detached me from a world that was only posing as real. Since the body is no more than a screen, it makes sense to project onto it something you enjoy.
But don’t just shuffle down to the local fleapit without checking what’s on! It shocked me that young people would smoke, sniff or inject anything they could get their hands on, taking untested substances into their bodies with total abandon. I found the general drug culture of the time very alienating because it was so different from my own. Didn’t they have any standards, any finesse? Even in terms of transgression I preferred the drama of the subverted prescription to the flat illegality of hashish. And I always liked the reliability of standard strengths and dosages. None of the uncertainty you get with your street muck.
When I was preparing for my appointment with Dr Bailey I decided I would take no chances. I didn’t write down Mandrax as such on my list of requirements. I didn’t even use its generic name of Methaqualone. This was a time for heavier disguise. By now I knew my way around the Monthly Index of Medical Specialities, the MIMS, pretty well. It’s pretty much a GP’s Bible. I’d seen it on Flanny’s shelves, and noticed how well-thumbed it always was, though of course it’s not for sale to the general public. Gamekeepers do like to keep ahead of poachers, don’t they? But it’s better sport if both groups are well-informed.
A nurse at Addenbrookes had given me an old copy, and sometimes I’d scrounge one from my GP when I needed to check dosages. There could be no better way of keeping tabs on the profession with which this body has linked my destiny, and I didn’t need to be madly up to date. The rate of change wasn’t so very frantic then, and I could keep pace with the professionals without too much trouble.
Ever since CRX, where Ansell had laid aside her tenderness to reel off technical terms to her colleagues, I had coveted the medical manner. Knowledge isn’t power, whatever people say. Knowledge is power’s poor relation, at best. It’s the consolation, if not the booby prize. Still, it was all I could aim at. I might never become a doctor, but I could reasonably hope to sound like one. I could mimic the preoccupied expression, the technical drone.
I knew from my studies of MIMS that Boots the Chemist had its own private version of the drug, in two fractionally different formulations called Melsedin and Melsed, so I plumped for one of those instead.
Melsedin and Melsed. They haunted me, that pair of near-identicals. I knew from experience that it was perfectly possible to be in love with just one of a pair of twins, feeling no more than warm indifference to the other – and people seemed to have strong preferences as between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, though to the outsider’s eye and palate it’s all just treacly carbonated water. Melsed or Melsedin? I tossed a coin.
It seemed to me, as I looked at my little slip of paper, that the Mandrax, even wearing its carnival mask as Melsedin, looked a little suspect, so I added Dexedrine in first place on the list. Dexedrine I cared less about but still enjoyed. I had moved on since the days of involuntary binges on amphetamine-tinged hundreds and thousands. I could say no, and I could do without perfectly easily. I was confident in my willpower. I was struggling to do without sugar at the time, no easy thing for vegetarians, who tend to have a weakness for sweet things.
Dr Bailey might baulk at either the Dexedrine or the disguised Mandrax, but he was unlikely to withhold them both. Finally, as a gesture towards clean living, I put down ‘Redoxon 1000 mg’ – a gram of effervescent Vitamin C, a good all-round tonic for the system. Now there were two guilty faces in the line-up of medication, one undisguised and the other masquerading, along with a radiant innocent included to raise the general tone of the group.
In person Dr Bailey seemed more like a handler of animals than a human doctor. He was very burly, ripe for the wrestling of steers. He can’t literally have worn a butcher’s apron, though that’s how I picture him. There was an oar hung up on the wall in his surgery, trophy of a university past. When he learned I was at Cambridge he asked which college, and then ‘How’s their rowing?’ He seemed shocked that I had no idea. As far as he was concerned, there was no excuse for not knowing about torpid heat-bumps, times and regattas. All that nonsense – he did go on.
Then Dr Bailey saw my little manifest of pharmaceuticals and his face went long. He was troubled by what he saw. Finally he laid his pencil against one of the items on my list and said, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Someone with your low body weight needs to be extra-careful about dosages.’
The 1970s was the golden age of prescribing, as far as I’m concerned. It was all downhill after that. Dr Bailey was like the man in the Australian beer advert, who blames the bottle of sweet sherry (the ladies’ choice) for the collapse of his truck’s axles, after he has loaded it to the gunwales with crates of lager. Dr Bailey was an Australian at heart. The toy truck of this body was due to be fully loaded with Mandrax, but that didn’t worry him. It was going to be supercharged with Dexedrine, which would set the engine pounding, but that too was fine. He worried that I might be overdoing it with the Vitamin C. It turned out that it was the only innocent in the line-up who had no alibi. A whole gram of Redoxon? Was that wise?
I promised I would be careful. Scout’s honour.
The summer passed in tingling and numbness. The summer passed. Peter was off on his travels, and the Washbournes were on a Greek island. I imagined them in adjacent deck-chairs, him reading about Buddhism, her engrossed in a Regency romance, highly compatible in their own syncopated way. On my own I felt shadowy and fraudulent. I seemed only to be able to meditate with an audience.
I remember at one point Audrey poking me quite hard with a ruler, just to get a reaction. I didn’t give her the satisfaction, and she went away. I was expecting her to return with something else from her pencil-case, the compasses perhaps. I thought I would probably react to them.
Insects and other small deer had made no inroads into my flesh. Not only did I chew my food without prompting, I put it in my mouth myself. It seemed foolish to imagine that I was travelling so far inwards, à la Maharshi, that my surroundings had become a matter of indifference to me. I was just Mandied up.
She must have found some other distraction, because she didn’t come back. Mum never acquired the knack of withholding a reaction, so she was probably Audrey’s next port of call. There was a sort of hysterical escalation to their confrontations, which would only end when Mum said, ‘You leave me no choice,’ picking up the phone and asking the operator to connect her with the Remand Home.
Then Audrey would go down on her knees pleading not to be sent away, and after a proper interval Mum would think better of it and put the phone down. It was always very melodramatic. Obviously Mum didn’t mean it (children don’t vanish into the disciplinary system quite so smoothly, and anyway isn’t eleven a little young?), and I don’t think that Audrey believed for one moment that she did. It was more that the charade of an ultimatum allowed her to back down without loss of face. It was only after exhaustive exploration of anguish and disgrace that she could find any sort of calm.
I had the same college room for all three years of my undergraduate life. I stayed put in A6 Kenny. This was a significant concession. Other students were shunted all over the place during their time at the university, while I only needed to get used to one set of arrangements. Even so, of course, the human context changed around me, and I was deprived of the little arrangements that had grown up with the people I knew. P. D. Hughes, for instance, went to Lensfield Road, which was very sad. My set of immediate connections was destroyed as decisively as if a child had swept a cobweb away with a stick, and I had to start spinning the old charm-threads from scratch.
Still, there were compensations to the process of starting all over again. I was an initiate, an adept, and could often answer freshmen’s questions. I learned to presume on my seniority when it came to asking for little bits of portering. I told myself it was the new-bugs’ privilege to oblige me. I owed them nothing for their trouble. I cultivated mild insensitivity, a much healthier thing than spending your whole time conscious of being in the world’s debt.
Belatedly I was beginning to find my feet. With my change of course I could tell myself I was a freshman all over again, only this time I could play the system a lot better. I attended the Societies Fair on my own. Second-years normally gave the whole jamboree a miss, since their social lives needed less propping up, but I threw myself confidently into the maelstrøm of the Corn Exchange. I hitch-lifted without any trouble. In fact it was intoxicatingly easy. Why wasn’t it always like this? I suppose because this was a meandering and a milling crowd, rather than a bustling one. I tried different approaches. Everything seemed to work. I felt like a gambler on a winning streak.
For a short time even the corniest lines brought me a smile and a hand on the tiller. ‘Hey, man, can you help me keep on truckin’ to the next stall but one?’ That worked more than once, on those with hippy pretentions. Drawling ‘Sister, Do You Know the Way to San José?’ produced as much of a beam on one young woman’s face (oddly reddened, a drinker’s face on someone who was little more than a girl) as if I’d stuffed a handful of fivers into the pocket of her coat, a military coat which was far too big for her. She pushed me where I wanted to go and then took my name and college address. She said she’d be in touch. The wheelchair ran perfectly without the need for a motor, chugging smoothly on a distillation of goodwill.
I made a beeline for the Zoology Club, which I was charmed to learn held ‘conversaziones’ rather than meetings as such. That was what was missing from my Cambridge life – conversaziones. Then, as I negotiated the loudly echoing spaces of the Corn Exchange, idly wondering which human ripple I would graciously allow to carry me forward, I could hear a subdued rhythmic chanting. It struck me immediately as ominous, before I could make out a word.
Eventually I could make out the slogan being broadcast: Two Four Six Eight – Gay Is Just as Good as Straight. Crazily I thought that everyone would look at me, that my blushing in that confined space would spark an explosion. It wasn’t so much a blush, more of a heart attack displaced on to my face. And so soon after I had mentally disparaged another human being for undue redness of complexion!
I experienced horripilation, yes, and lowered body temperature, but none of the other classic signs of the proximity of God. What I felt was the proximity of terrible fear. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Every now and then the chant was replaced by another, which went Three Five Seven Nine – Lesbians Are Mighty Fine. This was much less threatening to my peace of mind. In any case, since it was uttered by male voices exclusively, the slogan gave the impression of hearsay rather than any great conviction.
I can’t explain my panic flight. I seemed to have lost a lot of confidence. As a Vulcan schoolboy I had been positively cheeky when confronted with evangelicals, taunting Billy Graham’s minions with their gnawed fingernails and penchant for hell-fire. As a freshman I had groped a botanist in the presence of my bedmaker. Now I had relapsed. I had become re-infected with depressive strains of narrow-mindedness, guilt and shame. Perhaps it’s an indication of how low my state of being actually was, during this my higher education.
With a heavy heart I realised that sooner or later I would have to come to terms with the Cambridge Wing of the Gay Liberation Front, or CHAP, as it was actually called, rather than drive round Trumpington looking for the Monarchist League. But not just yet. Perhaps my dread was based, deep down, on something quite simple. This was one group whose rejection I wouldn’t be able to shrug off. If they wouldn’t have me, who would? If these untouchables refused any contact with me then there was no further to fall.
In the meantime, their slogan echoed in my head for the rest of the day. The trouble with such ear-catching formulations is that they’re so vulnerable to rewording. After Two Four Six Eight my mind kept supplying starker conclusions for the couplet.
Cheery Chants Won’t Change Your Fate.
Join and Feel the Force of Hate.
Not to mention: John Will Never Find a Mate.
The red-faced young woman who had taken my address at the Societies Fair tracked me down in my Kenny lair a few days later. She was tiny and elfin, with masses of red hair and many scarves. She wore glasses with octagonal lenses, which were fashionable at the time. I dare say she was modelling her style on Janis Joplin, as so many women did in those days, except that she didn’t have the hips for the job, and somehow I doubted that she’d ever drunk anything stronger than Earl Grey. She did have a lot of vitality, though. She lit up my room like a little auburn bonfire.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said, as if we’d bumped into each other on the street. ‘Good to see you again. I was just wondering – would you like to be part of a Day of Action for disabled people?’
Would I? I didn’t know. What would it involve? I played for time, saying, ‘I really don’t know – some of my best friends were disabled, of course.’ This wasn’t even true, not since the day I had left Vulcan School and started to sink slowly into the mainstream.
She said, ‘You might enjoy it. We’re planning a consciousness-raising event, though actually it may turn into a zap.’
‘Very good. What is a zap?’
‘You really don’t know? Oh, man … a zap is a piece of direct action intended to open people’s eyes and bring about radical change.’
‘Can you give me an example?’
‘Easy. You know the drinks containers there used to be deposits on, so that you could return them and get a refund? Big business wants you to throw away your bottles and buy new ones. So consciousness-raising would be getting everyone to realise that this is wasteful and stupid, and zapping would be dumping, let’s say, a million bottles outside the headquarters of Coca-Cola.’
‘I see.’ The idea of being dumped outside an uncaring institution had a certain appeal. Perhaps this dynamic waif would chain me to the railings outside Downing and set in motion some very overdue radical change. ‘Can you give me some more details?’
‘We plan to do a comprehensive survey of facilities in Cambridge – shop, restaurants, pubs. To see whether disabled people are fairly treated. Whether they can get into those places, for a start.’
I was impressed. It was the first time in Cambridge I’d had any inkling of social consciousness along these lines. ‘And when is it, this day of action?’ I asked.
‘Well, let’s see,’ she said. ‘When are you free?’
That was her way of letting me know another important detail: between us, we were the Day of Action. There was no one else, but I didn’t think that was necessarily a bad thing. It made choosing our Day relatively easy and unbureaucratic. We settled on the next Saturday. She thought a busy day in the shops and the streets made the point about the exclusion of people like me more vividly, and I’d always had trouble solving the problem of the Cambridge Saturday.
Her name was Rebecca. She said she was reading Sociology, and perhaps this was her fieldwork, but that didn’t put me off. I was raring to go, impatient to be excluded from shops I had no interest in entering.
Our first port of call on the Day of Action was W. H. Smith’s in Market Hill. Rebecca wanted to buy a clipboard, to lend a more formal edge to our inspections, but it made sense to treat the shop as our first official port of call. Someone held the door open for us, and Rebecca did her best to get me inside, but the task was beyond her. There wasn’t really a step, more of a ridge, but she was too little and too light to nudge me over. ‘Looks as if we’ve got our first failure to record,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’ What else was I going to do?
By the time Rebecca came back with her clipboard, an assistant from the shop had come over to me. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and Rebecca answered for me. ‘This young man can’t get into your shop.’
‘Well, that’s easily taken care of, miss. I’ll give him a hand.’
‘And what’s supposed to happen if he doesn’t have a friend with him? How’s he supposed to get help when he’s stranded outside the shop?’
‘I don’t know, miss. He could shout, or ask someone passing by to alert a member of staff.’
‘And how is that supposed to make him feel, when he has to go to such trouble even to get inside?’
How was it supposed to make me feel, come to that, being used as an object lesson in this way? I felt a warm and nasty glow. Shouldn’t I being doing some of the talking? But Rebecca was in full spate. ‘Do you want this young man’s custom or not?’
‘We want it, I expect, up to a point. What is it he wants to buy?’
‘Nothing at the moment, thank you. But I’ve bought one of your sturdy and economical clipboards, and I’m writing down what you say about your disabled customers.’
‘Are you from a newspaper?’
‘No. Why? Do you only care about disadvantaged members of the public when a reporter takes an interest?’
‘Not at all,’ said the assistant, beginning to get angry at last. ‘When this young man wants to make purchase – which isn’t today, apparently – he can rely on our most devoted attention. Thank you!’
‘Thank you!’ barked Rebecca, grabbing the handle of the wheelchair and giving me rather a jolt as we set off to our next targeted business. ‘What a lackey! What a running dog! The sooner everyone like that gets stood up in front of a wall the better for the rest of us!’ She seemed to be in a high good humour, all the same, and looking forward to the next ideological scrap on my behalf.
As we went from place to place we started to vary our approach. Sometimes I would get up out of the wheelchair, with her help, and try to totter in to premises that resisted me with every blue line on the architect’s plans. We got a lot more attention after Rebecca started to mention that she was writing a piece for Broadsheet. It wasn’t much of a lie – it was as hard in those days to get an article rejected by a student newspaper as a poem. If she had ever written such a thing up it would certainly have appeared.
I tried to get a look at Rebecca’s face whenever she was in my line of sight, which was usually at times when she was using me as a reproach to a heartless world of business. I had decided that my first interpretation of her facial redness (the demon drink) had been prejudiced and wrong. Some redheads do have rather brickish complexions, of course, but I was working on a different theory. My diagnostic nose twitched and my pencil burned to label a vial of pillules.
After a few more skirmishes with lackeys and running dogs I was beginning to get hungry. I wondered which restaurant or café we were going to patronise and upbraid. It seemed fairer, somehow, to be pointing out the defects of establishments we actually wanted to attend, though embarrassment would run much higher in a place that offered atmosphere as much as food and drink.
There was also a budgetary element involved. We couldn’t afford the Blue Boar. In fact we settled for the Corner House on King Street. Rebecca seemed much less committed to the struggle than she had been in the shops that morning, which was partly explained when she said that there was nothing on the menu she could eat, since she was a vegan.
‘Oh, I’m a vegetarian too,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure we can find something.’ I had misheard her, and now she misheard me in her turn.
‘You’re really a vegan?’ she asked. ‘I thought I was the only one in Cambridge. I’m certainly the only one in Newnham.’
‘Really? There are three of us in Downing, and I thought that was a pretty feeble showing!’ Then the word she had used finally sank in. ‘Hold on – what was it you said? You’re a vegan? What’s that?’
‘I thought you said that’s what you were!’
‘I’m a vegetarian. What’s a vegan?’
‘A vegan is a vegetarian with a bit of backbone. Sorry, that’s what my parents say but it’s true, isn’t it? Good luck being high and mighty about your lifestyle when you keep cows and hens as your slaves.’
I’d never thought about it in quite those terms, and it was a novel sensation having the ethical rug pulled from under me, when I had become spoiled by the feel of those cashmere tufts of ideology between my toes. Rebecca abandoned the disabled-access project for the time being, sitting me down to instruct me in living without cruelty instead. She took only a contemptuous glance at the menu, which was laminated and greasy. Even licking the menu at the Corner House could make you complicit in what she explained was called zooicide, the killing of living things.
‘Vegetarians are really fifth columnists, aren’t they? They commit zooicide just as much as the outright flesh-munchers. Where do you think the milk you drink comes from? Do you think the cows had no other plans for it? That they sent their calves away to school, perhaps, and had a surplus? Wake up! And how about cheese? Don’t you know what rennet is? It’s used to coagulate cheese, and it comes from a calf’s stomach! Isn’t that disgusting? Calves don’t give it away out of charity, they only want to use it to digest their own food, but then they’re killed and the lining is scraped out of their stomachs. S-c-r-a-p-e-d out. And all so that you can order a cheese omelette and feel pure. Slavery and slaughter on a single plate! Meaning no offence.’
‘Taking none,’ I said, through gritted teeth. I had indeed been about to plump for the cheese omelette. It was as if she could read my hungry mind. Admittedly the rennet question had bothered me from the moment I had heard about it. In those days vegetarian cheese seemed a purely theoretical possibility, like the eternal light-bulb and the razor blade that never lost its edge, neither of which big business would let us buy. I couldn’t find it in shops and I couldn’t expect even the most punctilious college kitchen to track it down.
Rebecca explained that her parents had been ‘almost’ founder-members of the Vegan Society, certainly among the first hundred to sign up. Her parents were Welsh speakers who had met, classically enough, at an eisteddfod. She herself had been brought up avoiding dairy produce as well as meat. Her body was uncontaminated with the pain of other species. In that respect she was like the hero of Roald Dahl’s story ‘Pig’, except of course that he ends up hanging from a hook on a conveyor belt in an abattoir with his throat slit open. I hope I haven’t spoiled the story for you.
The moment she mentioned her parents, Rebecca’s voice started to betray the Celtic lilt for ever associated with Dylan Thomas. Perhaps it was true that she had avoided all dairy products from birth, but she hadn’t altogether been able to steer clear of Under Milk Wood.
I had to ask Rebecca to attract a waitress’s attention so that I could order my fifth columnist’s lunch, my feast of indirect animal suffering. The waitress was trying so hard to treat me like everyone else, not staring or anything, that I could have set fire to my hair and she wouldn’t have looked my way, telling herself it was all part of my unfortunate condition. ‘Plain omelette, chips and salad, please,’ I said, my voice a chastened whisper. I was still abusing the chicken, but cow and calf had a provisional reprieve.
Part of me, the part that loved rigour and clarity, found this new doctrine of eating very appealing. What a shock it would give Mum and Flanny if I returned to Bourne End saying No to a whole new range of foods! What consternation in the kitchen and the surgery. At the same time I had to acknowledge that as a vegan child in the bed-rest years, refusing to embark on Mum’s scrambled-egg boats, I would simply have faded away, my precious Christmas-present watch dangling loosely from my shrivelled wrist.
Perhaps I would stay where I was in the pecking order of eating after all, dismissed by one camp as a faddist and by the other as a gutless fellow-traveller of slaughter.
When my omelette arrived, Rebecca graciously consented to share my salad. She even helped herself to a few chips, after sniffing one to assure herself that it hadn’t been fried in an animal fat. Her nose could infallibly settle that question. After the main course she produced something she described as a carob bar from her pocket, some innocent treat which she understandably didn’t offer to share. I asked her the Latin name, which she didn’t know. That was a relief (it’s Ceratonia siliqua, for the record). I was feeling oddly competitive.
I had expected to discuss Rebecca’s symptoms over the lunch table. Did the red patches on her face itch or perhaps throb? Were they hot or cold, even numb? Did the sensations vary with the time of day? Each answer would narrow down the possible diagnosis until a remedy was found, as in a classic detective story – except that there would be no need to finger a culprit or even name the crime. I wouldn’t have to use the (admittedly pretty) word ‘Rosacea’.
M. L. Tyler in Homœopathic Drug Pictures uses a lovely quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson to explain the method: ‘I only saw the things you did / But always you yourself you hid.’ Seeing the symptoms is plenty, as long as you see them clearly enough, and learn to make the crucial distinctions between apparent similarities. Colonel Mustard in the Library is given the relevant pillule, dusted off and helped to his feet. It’s not a dramatic story, granted, but something much more worthwhile, a happy ending. All friends again.
Rebecca addressed herself to the carob bar as if she was eating a shaft of sweetened sunlight. Was she more self-righteous than me? Not necessarily. Was she making a better job of it? Definitely.
I went on the offensive in a slightly indirect way. ‘Rebecca isn’t a very Welsh name, is it?’ She seemed very pleased with the question. ‘If you mean it sounds Jewish, then perhaps you’re referring to the theory that the Welsh are the lost twelfth tribe of Israel.’
Are they, by Jove!
I couldn’t begin to explain why I was so preöccupied with her ethnic identity. If it turned out that she put on a pointy hat between lectures and used her spinning-wheel to make the strings for harps why should I care?
‘In any case I’m not sure you know what you’re talking about. Rebecca and her daughters are important figures in Welsh history. They rioted against the English oppressor in the 1840s. They burned down toll-houses and terrorised the gate-keepers.’
‘And what did the men do while the women ran wild?’
She looked at me rather pityingly. ‘It was the men doing the rioting.’
‘But I thought you said …’
‘“Rebecca and her daughters” were men. They wore bonnets and petticoats over their working clothes. They took their name from Genesis – something about “possessing the gates of those which hate them”. Farmers taking cattle to a nearby market town might have to pay six tolls. It was a group identity. They were all “Rebecca”. Have you seen Spartacus?’
‘No.’
‘Never mind, then.’
‘And did the brutal Establishment crack down as it always does?’
‘Not really. A commission was set up which was more sympathetic to local people and established County Roads Boards instead.’
‘Power to the people,’ I said hopefully, but I think Rebecca had realised that my political consciousness didn’t run either broad or deep.
Her carob bar was more or less Rebecca’s lunch, while if I was still hungry I could always order (for instance) an ice cream – even if it was little better in the moral scheme of things than a candied pig’s trotter, or a bunch of South African grapes visibly dripping with the blood of the oppressed.
Rebecca’s exposition of dietary virtue had distracted us from the main thrust of our Saturday, but in the afternoon we got back into our stride. In fact we made so much of a splash at Joshua Taylor, Cambridge’s poshest department store (universally known as Josh Tosh), that we came rather unstuck. By now our approach had become very slick. Perhaps our lunchtime conversation had put Rebecca back in touch with the preaching intonations of her forebears (though there must be a few Welsh folk without the pulpit in their veins). Meanwhile I had acquired the knack of helplessness – and it’s definitely a knack, whatever anyone tells you. It was only in the afternoon that I got the hang of it. It felt like filling my nappies on principle, long after I’d mastered potty-training. I just looked around as if I’d never seen a door before, as if I’d been protected from the harsh truths of the entrance-way.
Meanwhile Rebecca’s journalistic credentials had escalated from Broadsheet by way of Varsity to the Cambridge Evening News. As she helped me ostentatiously into the trendy-young-man section of the shop, which had a dandyish name all its own – ‘The Peacock’, the shop’s bold response to the vibrant and trendsetting ‘Way In’ men’s department of Harrods – we caused consternation. I don’t think it was because there was nothing in the shop I could conceivably wear, bar a few scarves. Perhaps word had gone round the retailers of Cambridge city centre that a man in a wheelchair and a reporter were asking embarrassing questions.
We didn’t look like what we were, ill-assorted acquaintances enjoying an odd sort of day out under the umbrella of idealistic agitation. We looked like the advance party of a journalistic exposé, preparing the ground for the camera crew. We caused alarm, but it wasn’t too late. We could still be bought off.
A swarm of smart and rather flustered young men surged towards us. This was customer service at the highest pitch of professionalism and nervousness. By the time we left the premises, barely two minutes later, I was clutching in my hand a Joshua Taylor credit note for twenty pounds.
We had set out to make people more aware of the difficulties faced by people in wheelchairs, and ended up doing rather well out of it ourselves. Accidentally we became a protection racket. Up to the very moment the credit note was pressed into my hands, I had no idea we were in the extortion business, and nor (I’m sure) did Rebecca.
I let her keep the credit note. I didn’t feel I had any right to share it – it was like her carob bar. The Day of Action had been her idea, after all. She was much more likely to find something she wanted to buy at Josh Tosh than I was, and when she did she would be able to carry it home with her to Newnham. It cost me a small pang, all the same, to say goodbye to it. It was only money, of course – in fact it wasn’t even money, being a credit note. But twenty pounds went a long, long way in 1971.
When Rebecca had delivered me back to A6 Kenny I didn’t know what I felt, not just about our windfall but about the whole Day of Action. Day of inaction, more like. It was the only day in my life when being disabled was my job, no more and no less. At first this was embarrassing for me, but I grew to enjoy the feeling of being the advance guard of an army of wheelchairs which would trundle smoothly into every last cubicle of the city, glide up every stairwell.
My exclusion gave me a strange sort of authority, and no one thought to ask, ‘What good would ramps do you anyway, John? Unless the gradient is undetectable you’re no good on a slope – you’ll always need assistance anyway. So why all this fuss?’ Now my hectic day of employment was over. I had clocked off, and the difficulties of my daily life no longer stood for anything outside themselves. They lost their audience and their power to stir the soul.
Looking back on it, the strangest part of the day was the little squabble over Rebecca’s name at lunch. It was as if I felt threatened in my niche (what niche? I didn’t have any such thing!). Some part of me seemed to think that a gay occidental Hindu with Still’s Disease was beaten at his own game by a Welsh-speaking vegan named after transvestite rioters, soundly thrashed in the struggle for supremely specialised status.
We’re all in the same minority. Minority of one. That’s what Maya tells us, anyway.
I tried to keep in touch with Rebecca. It would have been nice if she had kept in touch with me, but perhaps the credit note stood between us. I couldn’t do anything about that. All I could do was invite her to dinner, though it meant taking a lot of trouble. I had to find a non-dairy meal which was worth eating, for one thing, and that could be assembled using no more elaborate equipment than the frying pan banned in Kenny. The most alluring dish I could come up with was imam bayildi, or ‘the imam swooned’ – an aubergine stew with a lot of garlic in it, so fragrant that the imam (the legend has it) swooned when he opened the lid of the pot. I would have loved to see what effect it had on a vegan sociologist. It wasn’t a practical meal, though – it needed more than a frying pan.
My major discoveries at Cambridge were Thomas Mann and the aubergine. Hard to estimate their relative importance, but I think the aubergine wins on points. Only a madman would read Buddenbrooks every day, or even every month, while a regular intake of aubergine is entirely sane.
I decided on a rice-and-aubergine improvisation with some cashew nuts in it for the contrast of crunch, stained the dish with tomatoes, turmeric and chilli (the purple-grey of cooked aubergine is its least attractive feature), a sort of Indo-paella or Ibero-biryani, and I invited Rebecca by way of the college post, giving her a choice of dates and times.
Other people’s social lives, I can see, involve the fluent exchange of little favours. Come to dinner – no, we came to you last time, come to us. Fine as long as the difficulties are equal for both parties. It seems natural that I should always be the guest, but only to other people. This body is a bad host, but I’m not. So I periodically move mountains to set a modest plateful before an acquaintance. It’s either that or break off the friendship before it has a chance to get established.
If I’m only ever a guest then I’m a charity case, and I won’t have that. Why shouldn’t I be charitable too? Let’s forget for a moment that from another perspective ‘I’ am as unreal as the body whose limitations I disparage. A dream hunger requires dream food – a dream cut requires a dream bandage – dream sociability requires a dream party. Still, at this time I sometimes felt like the social equivalent of a Doodlemaster machine, trying to construct the flowing shapes of a connected life out of the bare straight lines of what was possible for me, the fiddly intractable knobs that leave only horizontal and vertical traces.
Then on the appointed day Rebecca didn’t turn up. I waited an hour and a half, and then mounted an expedition to the Porter’s Lodge to phone Newnham. I said it was an emergency, which it could easily have been. It seemed perfectly likely that Rebecca had tripped in the bathroom and was lying there on the floor with a subdural hæmatoma, leaking her life away. Why else would she miss her appointment with a vegan paella? A Newnham porter was sent to rout her out. Eventually she came to the phone herself, not bleeding intracranially in the slightest bit. ‘Sorry sorry sorry,’ she said in a tone of voice that carried more exasperation than regret.
There was nothing irretrievable about the situation, or there wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t gone on to say, in the same grudging tone of voice, ‘I knew there was something I had to do.’ That tore it. That ripped up the social contract and threw the scraps in my face with a sneer. It turned out that having dinner with me was something Rebecca ‘had to do’, like getting vaccinated or going to the dentist. From her point of view my paella, so carefully considered that it was like thought itself on a plate, tender thought sending up its fragrant steam, was no more than a chore. And that was really the end of Rebecca as far as I was concerned, and veganism was tainted by association. I might reap the benefit of a calf’s stomach-scrapings from time to time, and indeed I eat honey without giving much thought to the sorrows of the bees who made it, but at least if you invite me to dinner I turn up.
It was her loss – particularly as I’d done a little research into the homœopathic remedies for facial reddening. I could have worked wonders, and now we’ll never know.
The Day of Action for disabled people was the high point of my political involvement as an undergraduate. It’s true that I signed a petition of protest when it turned out that the college kitchen was serving South African cling peaches, supposedly blacklisted at the docks but brought into the country hugger-mugger by scab labour on barges, but that was about as engaged as I got.
Those were great years for revolutionary behaviour by students, for demos and sit-ins, but I was largely a spectator. I didn’t really subscribe to the reality of the world we were supposed to be changing. I wasn’t profoundly opposed, either, just unconvinced that there was any point in using Maya to fight Maya. On one occasion, though, I got caught up in quite a dust-up.
I don’t even remember what the issue was. I may never have known, and I dare say I wasn’t the only one to be storming the barricades without much clue about the nature of our cause. In the wheelchair I was a fellow-traveller by definition. Oh, we were against oppression, against discrimination, for liberty and the people, but as for what it was actually about, well, search me.
All I knew was that without any active decision I was being pushed along Kings Parade as part of a large and vocal crowd. We were shouting, ‘Down with –’ something. We were strongly opposed to something. And we wanted something too. When did we want it? We wanted it now. We were all agreed on that.
Then the crowd parted in front of me to reveal Graëme Beamish, looking distinctly anxious, asking if he could have a word. He was wearing a gown but it hung down unevenly from his shoulders. I imagine there’s just the one size. I was startled, but had no control over the momentum of the group. Graëme had to keep up with us as best he could, shouting in my ear as we trundled along in our cavalcade of slogans. ‘I wonder if you realise, John,’ he shouted, ‘that you make rather a potent mascot for any cause that chooses to brandish you? I would take it as a personal favour if you took no further part in this “demo”. Just say the word and I will deliver you back to your room.’
He maintained the charade of fuddy-duddy. He was getting out of breath, but still he managed to generate a little bubble of personalised heckling within the ideological fervour of the event. ‘You are being exploited. Your companions do not have your interests at heart. If you oblige me in this matter it will greatly strengthen our working relationship – I should say, our connection …’
He didn’t need to spell out what he meant by that. He would approve the installation of a telephone in my room, despite his heel-dragging in the past.
‘I’m not a child, Dr Beamish,’ I said sternly, as I was wheeled willy-nilly towards the Senate House in my pram. ‘There are political matters at stake here.’ Still, it was an astute choice of bribe.
‘I’m sure there are, John, and I’m also sure there are better ways to resolve them than rash action. At least give me your word that you won’t go through those doors. I must insist on extracting your promise. Nothing else will satisfy me.’
‘Very well. I promise not to go through the Senate House doors.’
‘Very good, John. I’m glad we understand each other.’ He peeled off from the group at that, saying, ‘I’ll be speaking to you soon.’ He made a fleeting gesture with his hand by his head which could have represented the holding of a telephone receiver, before he changed it into a genial wave with no specific meaning.
It cost me nothing to make my promise. My party was visiting the Senate House more or less in a tourist capacity. It seemed possible that a few acrobatic activists might breach the defences of the university’s symbolic centre, but the rest of us would entertain ourselves, as was the way with student politics, by chanting and shouting catch-phrases about our vast power and the imminent collapse of the establishment.
When the Senate House came into view we saw that this was not going to happen. An occupation was in full swing. It turned out, as a barrage of murmurs instantly informed us, that the authorities had forestalled destruction of property by leaving the doors open. They had borrowed drastic tactics that might be thought of as historically Russian, evacuating their capital city and leaving it hollowly in the possession of the invading hordes.
We were actually singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ as we rounded the corner. The song died in our throats when we saw that there was a real chance that we would. It was a terrific disappointment. We had banked on being thwarted, and being back in our rooms in time for tea, seething with a gratified discontent. Now the revolution we had pressed for so blindly was awaiting our next move.
It’s true that one functionary had been left behind, but his rôle wasn’t to fall under bayonets but to ask us politely not to walk on the grass. Most of us obeyed, but I didn’t, or rather the person pushing the wheelchair didn’t. I was familiar with the way those handles could sometimes transmit a subtle libertine impulse.
Now there was nothing to stop me entering the Senate House except the promise I had given only minutes before. It had cost me nothing to make that promise, but now it would cost me something to keep it. I was very much caught up in Maya at this point, unwilling to go down in history as someone unworthy of the moment, someone who had missed the storming of the Bastille by popping into the shop for a pastry. Dramatic events like this were rare in any case, and normally excluded me as a matter of course.
I put the brakes on – not literally. I called out ‘Wait!’ and our little cavalry charge pulled up short while I pondered the options. How was I going to reconcile conscience with the need to satisfy my curiosity?
Easy. You don’t have to be a lawyer, a Jesuit or a diplomat to wriggle out of commitments that don’t suit you. I had given my word that I wouldn’t pass through the doors of the Senate House. I would use the windows instead. Not a very elaborate bit of wriggling, as wriggling goes.
My party took no persuading. A scout went into the building to prepare the way. Soon a window was opened from inside and I was hoisted up bodily and passed in. It wasn’t a relaxing experience, since the windows of such a grand ceremonial building were large and high off the ground. Even on the way up I wasn’t sure that there were reliable hands ready to receive me. I had a long moment of queasiness suspended over the window-sill, being transferred between teams of supporters. Then the thing was done. I had kept my narrow promise while disregarding its broader meaning.
While I was teetering over the sill I experienced a biblical twinge. The whole scene was full of New Testament echoes. Was it when one meeting was so crowded that Christ had to enter by this unorthodox route? Or did a sick man’s family resort to extreme measures to get their kinsman to the top of the queue? Either way, I was a bit shaken by the parallel, once I’d detected it. If your initials are J and C, it’s just the sort of thing you need to be on your guard against.
Inside, there was an atmosphere of celebration. People smoked dope and played guitars in the academic holy of holies, where students were admitted only for rites of passage, matriculation and graduation. But there was also an earnest side to the occupation. I remember a board being put up with a list of teach-ins and debates, from ‘By Any Means Necessary – How to Make a Molotov Cocktail Without Blowing Yourself Up’ to ‘Sister Power – The Lessons of Radical Feminism’. A crèche was signposted, though there wasn’t a child in sight.
There was also a tremendous sense of anticlimax and loss of purpose. We had made our point, hadn’t we? Whatever it was. Couldn’t we go now? No, we had to stay put indefinitely, or the whole event would fizzle.
Perhaps I was a mascot, but I was also a nuisance, bleating for veggie food when there were other priorities. I said I couldn’t be expected to live on chips indefinitely. The idea seemed to be that it was a privilege to make sacrifices for the Revolution, and mine was eating Wimpys. I wished I had a book with me, and wondered if I could come up with a medical excuse for leaving in the morning. I could say there was medicine in my room which I needed to take (but what if someone offered to fetch it?).
Early the next morning the proctors arrived and drove us from the building. We hadn’t done much to barricade doors that had been left open in the first place, and were dazed by sleep and cheap wine. It was a textbook bit of tactics – wait until the enemy is off his guard, and then scour him from the city you have pretended to cede to him. I do seriously wonder if the Vice-Chancellor at the time wasn’t in fact a military historian, seizing the chance to demonstrate the eternal relevance of his speciality.
I was asleep on the floor in the library, with someone’s coat as a mattress, when the cry went up of ‘It’s the pigs!’ Someone blearily picked me up and ran with me. Neither of us had time to put on our shoes. It didn’t matter that I was barefoot. It mattered rather a lot that he was wearing only socks, since he slipped on the staircase and dropped me.
This time there was no human providential mattress to break my fall, as at Burnham, no stoutly built Marion Wilding to absorb the impact as at Vulcan. I gave up the effort of constructing the illusion of time and space. I dropped my knitting needles, and the skein of consciousness bounced softly across a cold hard floor, unwinding as it went.
The next time I was up to the chore of creating my surroundings, I was in Addenbrookes Hospital with an unfamiliar man, formally dressed, sitting on a chair by my bed.
I don’t remember the fall itself, nothing from the moment of being routed out of the library and heading towards the stairs. If I try to force my memory all I get is an academic version of the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin, with the shiny shoes of faceless proctors replacing the implacable boots of the Tsar’s soldiers, the wheelchair standing in for the baby-carriage as it bounces helplessly down. Of course it didn’t happen that way – I wasn’t in the wheelchair, and there was no massacre on the Senate House steps. There was no massacre on the Odessa Steps either, for that matter, but there is now. That’s just the way Maya works.
The slightly daunting man by my bed introduced himself by saying, ‘I’m one of your nasty proctors.’ Which made me feel a little queasy and a little guilty too. My voice sounded very tinny when I answered, as protocol demanded, ‘And I’m one of your revolting students.’ Was he a guard or an interrogator-in-waiting? Perhaps my tutor had told him to hold me fast until he came in wrath.
My next concern was for the wheelchair and what had happened to it, but there it was beside my bed. This was a lesson in itself: the wheelchair had followed me to my new address like a faithful pet. My shoes too had made their own way. It all went to prove one of Ramana Maharshi’s favourite teachings, that self-enquiry is the only priority. Everything else takes care of itself.
They wanted to keep me in Addenbrookes for a night or two, under observation, but I didn’t see the fun in that. They did an ECG, which I consented to – for all the good it would do them. An ECG is all very fine, but it’s a standard procedure designed to measure a standard organ. What else could it be? But my heart is not standard. My heart is my own. Under my first diagnosis, of rheumatic fever, there was worry that my heart would be permanently damaged by the infection I was supposed to have.
Under my second diagnosis that worry was made moot. As my joints began to follow new laws during the ill-advised period of bedrest, the chest cavity was squeezed and skewed, and the heart followed suit. My heart has adjusted to new conditions, but it’s anyone’s guess how well it has maintained its functions. My diaphragm, the heart’s body habitus, is irregularly shaped, which makes the echoes hard to interpret. I have yet to meet a specialist who could decide from my ECG readings whether my heart was on its last legs or likely to beat its little drum another billion times. We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we? Household items seem to know when their guarantees run out. Perhaps I’ll feel the existential twinge which in a washingmachine immediately precedes the outpour of dirty water onto the kitchen floor.
I couldn’t wait to get out of Addenbrookes, mainly because my digestion demanded it. The wheelchair had followed me to hospital, not so the loo chair, and I badly needed to defæcate. Nurses are all very well, some of them even know their business, but I’d rather do my business in my own way.
The disturbances were serious enough for the university to commission a report into them. It commented with displeasure on dis order ‘during which a student was injured’. That’s me. If you can’t make the headlines, at least make the footnotes. It’s my only real presence in the official record between the rites of passage of matriculation and graduation, and I’m being used as a stick to beat my radical generation. No mention of the fact that it was the university’s own crackdown which caused the incident. We were snoozing happily in the library before then, safe and sound. Even without the report, though, my telephone would have been back in its original category, as far as Graëme Beamish was concerned. A lost cause. And Cambridge is not the natural home of lost causes – Oxford claims that distinction.
During the Easter holidays, in consultation with Peter, I decided it was time to try the substance which had fascinated me for so long, mescaline, which was on offer in a local pub. It would be silly to have my heart conk out with my curiosity still unsatisfied.
We had done a lot of research, one way or another. Peter wasn’t much of a reader, but I had read bits of The Doors of Perception to him, and he had spent the previous summer hitch-hiking round California and asking a lot of questions. He volunteered to be my psychedelic chaperone, and I could think of no one better for the job. I felt entirely safe with Peter, and it made sense for him to see the effects of the drug at close hand before he slipped into the unknown himself.
We decided to avoid Easter week itself. Even if you think you’re not a believer, that story is so strong that it’s bound to percolate into your opened mind, even if you avoid, say, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. You’d better not be playing on the railway when the express comes through, or your consciousness will be flattened like the pennies we used to leave on the tracks.
We secured our supply well ahead of time. It was mescaline I was after. LSD-25 sounded exactly like what it was, something made in a laboratory, lacking any tradition of use, an industrial product originally intended for a different purpose and opportunistically diverted when it turned out to have surprising properties. This hardly corresponded to my sense of the sacred. I wanted a proper rite of passage, dissolving the appearances and inducting me into a higher order of meaning, not some brute of a rocket which would twang me up into the mental sky to find my own way home.
Luckily there was a dealer at the Castle pub in Windsor who supposedly sometimes had mescaline. I didn’t have a sense of wrong-doing, so there was no frisson about being a stone’s throw away from the Queen’s residence. I would have liked her blessing on the enterprise.
The dealer in the pub was rather ratty-looking and couldn’t keep his eyes still. ‘Not here, not here,’ he muttered, and led the way to the lavs. Peter had spoken a lot about the importance of setting for the encounter with hallucinatory reality, but the same rules applied, I felt, more generally. My ingrained sense of the integrity of an event made me sit through all the end-titles of films. Why would it be content with a drug experience that began in furtiveness and indignity? I wanted solemnity, if not priests in robes then some closer approximation to masonic regalia than a greatcoat with some buttons missing.
I had to generate the sense of sacrament more or less single-handed, though Peter was sympathetic from behind the handles of the wheelchair. ‘What do you have for me?’ I asked gravely, but the only answer I got was ‘Two for a pound.’
‘Is this mescaline?’
‘Yeah, yeah, good stuff. How many d’you want? Two for a pound.’
‘Two doses, please.’
‘Is that two or four, then?’
‘Er … two, please. Pay the gentleman, Peter.’ The moment the money had changed hands, our friend grabbed a piece of hard Izal toilet paper from the cubicle and screwed it up round two little pills. Then he shoved the tawdry little packet into Peter’s hand and scarpered. It was all a far cry from the enlightened heyday of the Catholic church in Mexico, the slices of peyote button offered up in all reverence at Communion long ago.
On the day itself I would trust Peter to choose a suitable spot, scenic and not too frequented. He was the one in the family who was best at buying birthday cards – from a young age he had been able to match the image to the person perfectly, and this was really only an extension of that. We had decided that the Tan-Sad was the suitable vehicle. It was better suited than a wheelchair to rough ground, and we were mindful of all the horror stories about people having ‘trips’ who thought they could fly and threw themselves off buildings. Once I was in the Tan-Sad I wasn’t going to throw myself anywhere.
The timetable of the psychedelic event took some working out. We knew the whole experience could last many hours, and we wouldn’t necessarily find it easy, living at home as we were, to hide the signs of my derangement. Since the earlier stages were the most intense, it made sense to spend them away from Trees. The later stages would be less conspicuous. On the other hand, it would be an inefficient way to make use of our time away from home if we waited to be out of the house before starting things off. So it was agreed that I should take the pill after breakfast. Half-pill, rather. We had decided on the basis of my body weight that a half would be plenty. Peter was confident that he would be able to read the signs of the drug taking effect, and would whisk me away before my behaviour made it obvious to the untrained observer.
Peter hustled me into the Tan-Sad and had me out of the house in ten minutes flat. I didn’t know what signals I had given off, and was rather startled. Apparently I had been making the shapes of words but not saying them, even when Mum wasn’t nearby. I wasn’t convinced that there was anything so very odd about this, and Peter himself had noticed that Mum could every now and then (less as we got older) work out exactly what we were thinking.
Still, it did no harm to be careful, and there was some watery sunshine. The place Peter had chosen was next to a pond near a sort of miniature weir, but well away from home and also Mrs Adcock’s. While we were on the move I experienced a certain amount of peripheral swirling, but when I was installed by the pond nothing seemed changed. Of course the picture-postcard prettiness which Bourne End possessed in such large measure is always an unstable quality. There’s always a bit of the postcard that seems to show where a body has been buried with a bone sticking out. After a while I said, ‘That’s a pound down the drain, Peter. I honestly think it was a dud. People are such twisters …’
Peter wasn’t so sure, but he was getting a little bit bored and he wanted to go and buy a bag of sweets from Mr White’s. I said I’d be fine.
The ducks on the pond were very talkative that day. One in particular kept making very meaningful quacks. I quacked back – but then I always do. Seconds later everything had changed and I was in the middle of a distinctly tetchy conversation. I was speaking Duck! An instant later, I was corrected. I was speaking Drake. The languages diverge in the matter of verbs, with females using entirely different forms.
What I was being told was that stale bread was a very poor food for any bird. I was being given instructions for wrapping up worms in leaves and tying them securely with knots of grass. I was trying to explain that this level of preparation was beyond me when a hand came round from behind the Tan-Sad and clamped down on my mouth.
I thought I was being kidnapped. I could almost smell the chloroform. Of course it was only Peter, back from Mr White’s with his sweets, trying to stop me from quacking at the top of my voice.
I calmed down then, and realised that the mescaline had come on very strongly. I made an effort to relax, and waited for the optical effects to die down. There was a sort of shimmer sweeping back and forward, an effect of tessellation as if small units were trying to assemble themselves into bigger ones, and sometimes the sunshine made everything unbearably spangly. Then as I tried to tune in to the deeper patterns of creation the distractions died away.
I tried to focus on Mescalito, the spiritual embodiment of the mescal plant (Lophophora williamsii). I don’t know if it was Mescalito – I assume so – but the god came out of a tree and started saying, ‘If you want to prove yourself, I have some friends here who I can’t do any more for. They need help with some simple things, answers to basic questions. How to carry on. Will you help them?’ I said I would, honoured to be trusted with such a responsibility.
I could communicate with the god’s friends at once, though perhaps not entirely in language. The first one I spoke to was called Sally – but then it turned out that they all were. She was very agitated, but I managed to calm her down. I had to explain about grafting and propagation, and there wasn’t much time. These creatures, whatever they were, needed help to reproduce, though it wasn’t clear that childbirth was involved. I saw four or five generations come into existence, and the elders die. Over time I was venerated for the help I brought and after four hundred years they wove me a crown of wisdom.
My awareness changed character when Peter started to push the Tan-Sad again. It was getting cold, and he had covered me up with his windcheater. It was time to go home.
Back at Trees Peter carried out the really clever part of our plan, borrowing a record of Mum’s and putting it on the old player we had in our room (when Audrey didn’t borrow it, that is). I lay there peacefully as the music turned to sculptures of perfume in my head, sifting through the events of the day.
My mind received in drips what would have swamped it at a greater rate of flow. I understood now who the Sallys or Sallies were. There were personifications of the willow, also known as the sallow or salley (I knew a Yeats poem about the Salley Gardens) – in fact the weeping willows round the pond where I had been reclining in porous rapture that day. Salix sepulcralis.
Why those particular willows should have difficulty propagating themselves I didn’t know, since under normal circumstances they take root readily from cuttings and indeed anywhere that broken branches lie on the ground. But there it was. Mescalito had been concerned for them. It suddenly struck me as wonderful that the cactus god should reach out in fellow feeling to the willow, despite the remoteness of their families and the huge disparity of habitat.
I had a sense of the willow as a somehow œcumenical tree, contributing impartially to conventional and alternative medicine. The sap is heavily charged with the salicylic acid which gives us aspirin, grand-daddy of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. But why would anyone seek a remedy for colds and fevers in the willow to start with? Because it grew, as was symbolically appropriate, in cool damp places. That was before the two branches of medicine separated, and started to pretend that they didn’t share a root.
Peter had left the record sleeve propped up where I could see it. The photograph showed water in movement over a riverbed of large stones. The music expressed a serene turbulence of its own, if I’m any judge of these things. Moura Lympany playing Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. Nicolai Malko waving his willow wand in front of the Philharmonia Orchestra.
It was our idea that classical music and illegal drugs couldn’t both be present in the same room, at least in Mum’s view of the world, and so that Rachmaninoff would wash all suspicion away. An inspired notion, as long as it didn’t catch on too widely and become discredited. Dear Marje, I’m at my wits’ end about my teenaged son. He’s started listening to Beethoven. Is he taking drugs?
The soloist’s name was a magic spell in its own right, whether I was in my right mind or the righter one brought on by the drug. Moura Lympany. Those syllables struck my mental membranes with the rippled impacts of liquid timpani.
Over time I had to modify my ideas about the drug I had ingested. It was a matter of simple mathematics. It would have needed 500 milligrams or so of the active ingredient of Lophophora williamsii to deliver the organic version of such an experience. It would have been a substantial tablet, and not the little pill I had bought, which must therefore have been LSD. I had a moment of hallucinated insight, connecting the synthesising of salicylic acid in 1897 by Felix Hoffmann with the synthesising of lysergic acid by Albert Hoffmann in 1943. Might not the Hoffmanns be father and son? Well, no they couldn’t, since in reality Albert’s surname has only the one n. I was reluctant to leave the domain of the drug, where everything links up and nothing is superfluous, nothing dangles.
It wasn’t sensible to regret my change of subject. The results from my Part I exams had told their own story: a First for my German oral, an Upper Second for my spoken Spanish. A Lower Second overall. Reading Modern Languages had indeed been a lost cause, while reading English was merely a losing battle. Even my strengths (as I saw them) did me no good. An American lecturer came to lead a seminar on Thomas Mann, which I attended. The professor made a meal of the last sentence of Mann’s story Mario and the Magician, saying it was a wonderful ending and the key to the meaning of the whole. Fine, but make sure you’re using an accurate translation. The last sentence in German contains the clause ‘ich konnte und kann nicht umhin’, meaning ‘I can’t think otherwise’, or simply ‘I have to agree’. The translation on which the prof was placing so much weight said the opposite – ‘I don’t think so’, or something of the sort.
I put up my hand to explain that the translation was defective, and the prof just said again, ‘Such a wonderful ending.’
‘It can’t mean what you want it to mean. It’s not possible in the German.’
‘Uh-huh,’ was the best he could manage at short notice. Then he regrouped his forces and said, ‘Literature can accommodate any amount of ambiguity. That’s a great thing. We must agree to disagree. There’s no dishonour in that. And I thank you for your contribution.’
We didn’t agree to disagree. We disagreed about our disagreement. Ambiguity is one thing, ignorance is another. He couldn’t admit to being wrong on the facts of language. He was reduced to pretending that his interpretation could overrule the text, and there was dishonour in that. When he said, ‘Thank you for your contribution,’ it was another twisting of language, this time of the English language (so he had fewer excuses). What he meant was closer to ‘Piss off, you little wretch, and next time you have a bright idea keep it to yourself.’
I was rather disillusioned about the way the academic world worked. I was naïve. Small boys don’t enjoy it when their sandcastles are swept away by the tide, particularly when an even smaller boy deputises for the tide, on his first day at the beach.
Not everything in the English department was so uninspiring. I attended some of Muriel Bradbrook’s lectures on Ibsen. She was the Mistress of Girton who had wanted to protect her charges, if not from sex then at least from its repetition, by locking the doors at ten o’clock. As a lecturer she insisted that we couldn’t understand the plays unless we understood the geography of Norway. She would rather we looked at pictures of fjords than volumes of criticism.
I found this exhilarating, until I started to think it was just another version of what I had heard in the Faculty of Modern (and Mediaeval) Languages. Nothing short of total immersion is any good.
One German word which had the power to reproach me was a fashionable one in English at the time, gestalt. All I had in the way of a life was a series of interlocking routines – bedder, Hall, lectures, yoghurt manufacture – with none of the feeling of an organic whole. My summer enlightenment had faded like a tan.
Perhaps I had as strong a claim as anyone to the word gestalt, since I at least knew its derivation from the Old High German stellen, meaning (to locate the core of a cluster of ideas) to shape. My life had no controlling shape.
Still, there were pockets in my week that gave me pleasure and some small sense of belonging. I had got into the habit, for instance, of drinking a half-pint of beer at the Cambridge Arms on a fairly regular basis. Perhaps as often as twice a week. It was my first experiment in having a ‘local’, a step on the way to the stranger state of actually being a local. The Cambridge Arms, on King Street, was pleasantly nondescript. The public bar at least didn’t attract much of a university crowd. King Street itself was modest, not exactly a back street but mainly used by university people as a short cut, or for sheer relief when the glory of the colleges became too much to bear.
The public bar of the Cambridge Arms had the advantage, from my point of view, of an outstandingly friendly and coöperative Australian barman. He was called Kerry Bashford, and after a while we evolved a routine. I would park outside and sound the horn in my trademark pattern, the series of blasts which spelled out Om Mane Padme Om, and Kerry would come out and help me get into the wheelchair, after lifting it out of the boot of the car. He lifted the chair one-handed, swinging it in an effortless arc. He was quite unselfconscious about his strength and the grace it produced. I liked the fact that he didn’t suddenly freeze up with the realisation that he could do such a lot with his body that I couldn’t. Why is it supposed to please me when people hunch their shoulders to atone for being tall, or restrict their movements to apologise for being flexible? There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your body. I would if I could. I do when I can. It’s much easier to see that the body is an illusion if you’ve actually spent some time there.
Kerry always insisted on fitting the wheelchair with its footplates. I didn’t usually bother asking people to do this – say what you like about ankylosed joints, but at least they don’t need support. There was something motherly about Kerry’s attention to detail in this, as if he wanted me to be turned out at my best, the equivalent in wheelchair terms of adjusting my bow tie.
Kerry was a Jehovah’s Witness from Newcastle, New South Wales. My first tame Jehovah’s Witness, though he’d more or less grown out of that strange faith. He had fair skin and a big broad face, with a scrawny beard more or less holding the whole unstable gestalt together. He told me of a time when he’d gone to an open-air pop concert back home and been so sunburned he went a sort of purple. To finance his European adventure he had worked on a gang repairing railway track. His was the sort of skin that will never take a tan, wrapped round an antipodean boy slow to take the hint that peeling is not how epithelial cells say Thank you, we enjoyed that.
Kerry would always be reading Howards End out of sight behind the bar, but he wasn’t exactly spoiling for literary chat. If I asked whether he was enjoying the book, he’d just say, ‘Bloke can write,’ sometimes with neutral appreciation, sometimes dogmatically. Once he even struck the closed book lightly with his fist, but the verdict was always the same. Bloke can write. He wouldn’t be coaxed into detail. He’d said all he had to say.
Kerry was very good at anticipating my needs without making me feel like part of a social worker’s caseload. Even on my first visit he didn’t need to be told that I needed my half of Abbot in a glass with a stem or a handle. Not a straight glass which calls for a capacious fist.
On subsequent visits he came up with the game of giving me a free half of Abbot on the basis that I was required to declare it fit for drinking. I would take a slow suspicious sniff of the bouquet of esters, then a small sip, which I swilled around my mouth. I pushed my lips forward like someone trying to kiss himself on each cheek in turn. Then I would pass judgement, as if I was an itinerant palate retained by Greene King to check on the standard of their products, a roving taster. There are worse jobs.
The real-ale movement was in its cradle in those days, but it was possible to pick up a few technical terms and use them knowingly. I would praise the maltiness and depth of the brew, but wonder politely if the original gravity of this batch was really the stipulated 1048. Gaining confidence, I would announce that I could detect the cannabinoids in the brew, explaining that hops are after all members of the lovely hemp family, the cannabinaceæ.
Playing to the balcony to some extent, I might point out that cannabinoids were not illegal as such, the legal maximum for possession being twenty microgrammes. This enlightened legislation was to protect real ales, and it showed admirable consideration on the part of the Government.
Perhaps Kerry and I were flirting with each other in some way. It isn’t always easy to tell. Usually we respected each other’s boundaries, though one day he surprised me by asking if I had a spare key for the car. I agreed that I had, and he asked me to bring it along on my next visit and lend it to him for a few days. I agreed, but I must have looked unhappy because he said, ‘Relax, mate – no offence, but if I was going to swipe a car I’d swipe a nice one.’ The next time I saw him he gave the keys back, but with a difference. Now there was a sort of amateurish welded flange extending the body of the key sideways by a couple of inches.
I was very touched. Kerry had seen that it was difficult for me to turn the key in the lock, and had made modifications for my benefit. Over the years lots of people had seen me struggling with the car keys, but he had actually done something about it. Many had observed but only one had undertaken an empathetic metalwork project.
Then early one evening, one spring Monday, the whole modest idyll unravelled. Half-way through the half-pint that I had (after much ritual gargling) pronounced fit for drinking, I became aware that the pub was getting crowded. It began to smell much more like a pub, as if a huge disembodied tongue of beer-breath and ashtrays was lapping our faces. A bunch of students had come in, animated though not quite rowdy. They were all talking at once, but I didn’t take too much notice of that. In any university town there are more talkers than listeners.
One of them plonked himself on the other side of my table, and then set a pint glass in front of me with a crash. ‘We’ve ordered one too many …’ he said. ‘You have it.’ His face was flushed and there was something not right about his eyes. He had trouble focusing. His hair was dark, but his skin was almost eerily pale and shiny. Like the others, he was wearing a scarf, in fact they all wore the same scarf, but I didn’t pay much attention to their tribal insignia. Their tweed sports jackets were enough to make them stand out in the public bar of the Cambridge Arms.
I tried to say that I didn’t need any more beer, since my small body weight made half a pint a sufficiently intoxicating dose for one session – and I wouldn’t be able to lift such an awkward glass to my lips in any case. The newcomer didn’t seem to be listening, though, so I stopped trying. I shot a glance over to Kerry at the bar. He was picking the appropriate coins from the helpless thrust-out hands of one of the recent invaders. Alcohol is a compulsive pickpocket, and from these lads it had already filched arithmetic, or else the ability to recognise the coins of the realm.
The man at my table took a huge gulp of his beer and frowned. ‘Haven’t seen you on the river… perhaps you’re not a wet-bob?’ To this day I don’t know the meaning and derivation of wet-bob. It may have been a specialised Cambridge word, but not one that was used in my little circles. ‘With your build you’d make a decent cox.’ My jaw has a certain amount of mobility, though dentists are always complaining, and I’m sure it dropped. It must have. He called out, ‘Benny! Come here! I’ve found us a cox!’
Benny turned out to be the helpless payer at the bar. He wore his hair in a centre parting. Choose this style and you are more or less insisting that spectators assess your degree of facial symmetry. Barely one face in a thousand is regular enough to pass such a test – this wasn’t one of the privileged few. As he came over, he was bellowing, ‘Two and tenpence a pint, Wop! Not a bad price!’ He was still thinking in shillings and pence, after more than a year of decimal currency. Perhaps the new system would always elude this group.
Benny slammed his glass down onto the table with even more force than his friend had, following it with a packet of cigarettes. The general level of noise was becoming hard to bear. He thrust his face into mine. ‘Is this your cox, Wop? I’m not sure he’s got the lungs for it. Give us a sample, why don’t you? Sing out STROKE … STROKE! … STROKE!!’ I begin to detect a whisper of sense under all the bellowing. In rowing, wasn’t the cox the compact lightweight person who sat at the end of the boat and shouted? So I was clearly in no possible sense a cox.
I didn’t sing out as directed. I made my position clear. Actually I was having a quiet drink. For all the notice they took I needn’t have gone to the trouble of speaking aloud. The one called Benny took from his pocket a stopwatch on a loop of dirty string and hung it around my neck. ‘Now you’ve got the tools of the trade at least. But you need to work on the voice projection or no one will hear a bloody word you’re saying.’
Then it was the other’s turn to speak. ‘Perhaps we should introduce you to your eight. But first, what’s your name? John? Very good, but we’ll mostly call you Cox. This is Benny – Benny the Dick. Christened Benedict, hence Benny the Dictator.’ He put on an ingratiating ecclesiastical singsong. ‘Benedicite benedicatur, Benny’s a benevolent dictator.’
This was a baffling change of gears. Might they be a gang of rogue classicists on the razzle? ‘And I’m Thomas da Silva, known as Wop on account of my dago name, at your service. Delighted.’ I wasn’t delighted but dismayed. They weren’t at my service, in fact I seemed to be at theirs.
‘Have you explained the rules to your man, Wop?’
‘No Benny, I thought you’d like to do that.’
‘Fine.’ He took a cigarette from the packet on the table, but instead of smoking it he tucked it horizontally under his nose, holding it in place by curling his lip upwards in a way that suggested hours of practice. Then he started to rattle off information at amazing speed. The restrictions placed on his vocal apparatus by the prehensile-lip trick made him sound like what Dad would have called a silly ass, giving the noun a long vowel as service protocol demanded.
‘The King Street Run. Classic university tradition. Bit of fun. Separates boys from girls, boys from men, sheep from goats, your top Wop from the regular dagoes. Basic idea: eight pubs, eight pints. Easy as pissing off a log. Refinement: time limit. Eight pubs, eight pints – in an hour. Rate of one pint every seven minutes and thirty seconds. I know – sounds easy. Reward: special tie, respect of peers and inferiors. Complication: eight separate pubs, so journey time to be factored in. Seven journeys of, say, two minutes each – fourteen minutes in all. Leaving in fact … forty-six for drinking proper. Eights into forty-six: no idea. Five and a bit, maybe. Hence importance of stopwatch. Your department.’ Effortlessly he overrode my protests, my footling squawks.
‘Further complication: peeing forbidden during event. Penalty: letter P embroidered on trophy tie. Humiliation. One chap went to the other extreme, peed almost continuously, tie almost invisible beneath embroidered Ps, comic effect. Great success. Sort of trick only works once.’ I suppose he was doing a compound Monty Python impersonation, combining every mad major and silly-walks minister from that programme. With my lack of up-to-date television awareness I thought of the Pickwick Papers.
As I watched Benedict’s little act, my own upper lip curled spontaneously upwards. It’s possible I looked mildly demented. Then he gave a sharp upward nod which dislodged the cigarette. He caught it smoothly in his mouth and lit it.
‘Don’t worry, we’re only doing a practice run today. Peeing permitted.’ I was glad of that, since the half-pint of Abbot had run swiftly through my system and was now anxious to move on.
I watched his smoking style admiringly. Benedict caught my eye, smiled, and then ran the lighted tip of his cigarette, with agonising slowness, across the palm of his hand, just where it met the bottom of his fingers. He never stopped smiling. Then he winked at me.
Thomas da Silva leant towards me and breathed admiringly, ‘Benny has the hardest calluses on the river. Isn’t he remarkable?’ No doubt, but this was not a party trick I coveted.
‘To be frank,’ Benedict went on, ‘we’ve done a certain amount of practice in private before this dummy run. Don’t expect too much from us. We’re not after a record time.’ He lifted the stopwatch from my chest and took a look at it. ‘Tempus fuckit, men! Time to go!’ He left the watch where it was, though, around my neck. He seemed to have forgotten it.