Thomas da Silva had finished his pint and now pointed a finger at mine, which of course I hadn’t touched. ‘Have you finished with that, old man?’ I nodded and he picked it up. ‘You’re sure?’ He drank it in one long gulp while Benny looked on admiringly. ‘Our secret weapon,’ he said proudly.

‘Don’t forget your stopwatch,’ I said. ‘How do you mean?’ he said. Then they were off.

We were off, rather. Of course they hadn’t forgotten the stopwatch. They hadn’t left anything behind. They were taking the stopwatch (and me) with them. I barely managed to grab the crutch and the cane.

‘You chose the cox, Wop,’ said Benedict. ‘You can drive him.’

Thomas da Silva wasn’t in a fit state to drive anything. He was young and strong and clueless, ‘unsafe at any speed’ as a famous book title of the time put it. He was topping up his bloodstream with alcohol faster than a dozen livers plumbed in parallel could have hoped to clear it. He pulled the wheelchair roughly free of the pub’s furniture and charged the door with it.

From behind me came a muffled cry of ‘Oi! What the hell are you doing?’ Kerry was registering a protest. But what could he do – leave his post at the bar to give chase? Make a citizen’s arrest of the whole bladdered squad? A citizen’s arrest had already taken place on those premises, and I was the party apprehended.

Pushing a wheelchair isn’t much of a knack – say I, who have never done it – but it does require two things that Thomas was past managing. One: coördination. Two: attentiveness to the mental state of the passenger. Within seconds of propelling me on to the street, he gave the wheelchair a wild turn and came within an inch of ramming my car with my ankylosed feet. Mine! My car! My car as well as my feet.

Though there were footplates on the chair for once, my feet projected beyond them, and my own bodywork would have sustained as much damage as the Mini’s panels. I shouted out ‘That’s my car!’, but already Thomas was bouncing me at speed down King Street. He pressed down on the handles, with the result that the small front wheels reared up, and I reared up with them. Not for the first time, I thought of Luke Squires’s wheelchair at Vulcan, and the great advantages of having the small wheels at the back. From Thomas da Silva’s point of view, our progress may only have been a disorderly trot. From mine it was a boneshaking slalom.

When we came to the next pub – I never saw its name – Thomas da Silva would have used me as a battering ram on the door if I hadn’t screamed to alert him. He seemed to think that every pub door in Cambridge, however solidly built and firmly closed, was actually one of those hinged-slat arrangements you see in saloons in Westerns. He was in a Wild West of the mind, striding towards the high noon of alcoholic meltdown, but it was my feet that would have bitten the dust if he had gone through with his original plan. My hips had been operated on, but my knees still had no play in them, so my feet led the whole demented parade. They had no choice. There was nowhere I could stow them out of harm’s reach. It wasn’t much of a help that I had managed to grab the crutch and the cane. There was no point in me using them to guard my feet. In the event of an impact they would simply be rammed into my upper body.

Write Off Tuesday

Luckily the rest of the disordered group caught up with us, and Benedict opened the pub door courteously enough to admit the wheelchair. Of the group he was the one who still seemed on speaking terms with his wits. I decided it was him I must cajole and address if I had any hope of release.

The air in the new pub was sour. Emptying the ashtrays was clearly a chore that was left till after closing time. It was more crowded, and our erratic group ended up being crushed in a corner. I cringed as Thomas pushed me across the space, cheerfully calling out, ‘Mind your backs!’ The tables didn’t sit true, so that when Benedict plonked a fresh round of monstrous pints in front of me, beer slopped over and dripped onto my lap. There would only have been a few drops if I had been able to get out of the way, but I had to sit there while the rest of the little puddle followed at its leisure. Even a fair-minded person glancing at my trouser-front would assume I had lost control of my bladder.

I tried a sidelong whisper at the member of the group who seemed marginally the most trustworthy. ‘Benedict …?’

‘Yes, Mr Cox.’

‘Who are you? I mean, who are you, as a group?’

‘We’re Write Off Tuesday.’

‘And Write Off Tuesday is what?’

‘All the splendid intellectual specimens you see around you. A total of eight.’

‘Aren’t you seven?’

‘Really? Then we’ve lost one. Explains why there keeps on being one pint left over. Not that Wop minds. He’ll always tidy up. He’s good that way. Tidy boy.’

‘Yes, but who are you all? What is the nature of your group?’

‘Well, we were recently described, by the Master of Peterhouse no less, as a right-wing think-tank …’ I knew just enough about politics to understand that this was quite an accolade. In any assessment of academic figures at the time the Master of Peterhouse would rank as an exemplary figure, a reactionary’s reactionary. Then Benedict seemed to reconsider, almost going cross-eyed from the effort of dredging up the memory, and corrected himself: ‘Hold on. Not a think-tank … a right-wing drink-tank.’

‘And what does it mean, to “write off” a day of the week?’

‘You skip it altogether. You make sure it leaves no trace on the memory. Don’t you agree that Tuesday is an inherently boring day?’

I thought I had found a flaw in his argument, and asked as gently as I could, ‘You do know today is Monday?’

‘Yes. Another culpably drab day.’

‘So you’re writing off Monday?’

‘No, my dear Cox, you’ve missed the point completely. Try to pay attention. It’s all to do with preparation. Preparation is the key. To write off Tuesday effectively you have to start the day before. If Monday is properly squashed Tuesday doesn’t even begin.’

‘I see.’ By this time Thomas da Silva had moved off, perhaps to visit the Gents – a place I myself needed to visit – so I was able to concentrate hypnotically on Benedict. ‘Would you mind moving that ashtray away from me? The smell makes me feel rather sick.’ It seemed to make sense to impose my will on him in small matters before brokering my separation from the group, just as a conjuror will make coins disappear before tackling doves or elephants.

‘Of course, old fellow, old boy, old man, cox of the good ship Write Off Tuesday.’ The hypnotic experiment was successful as far as it went, but it didn’t go far. Yes, Benedict moved the ashtray away from me, then the next moment he took a cigarette from his packet, lit it up and moved the ashtray smoothly back into range, without giving it a thought.

It was time to change up a gear, in terms of the hypnotic mechanism. ‘Would you be kind enough to take me for a pee? I can’t manage on my own.’

‘Can’t you? What a pisser that must be! Very bad luck. Of course I’ll lend a hand.’ I tried to hold his eyes steady by fixing them with mine, but they kept slipping sideways. I felt as if I was losing my touch. He made no move to get up. Then, just as I was getting a grip on his eyes with mine, Thomas came back from the Gents. He shouted out, ‘Cox! What time for this leg?’ I told him I had no idea and he laughed wildly, saying, ‘You’re a write-off as timekeeper, Cox, which makes you perfect for the job!’ He grabbed the handles of the wheelchair. We seemed to be off again. I hissed at Benedict, ‘Can’t you push me? Thomas isn’t exactly in charge of his faculties.’

‘Of course he’s not! That’s the whole point. Haven’t you been listening? Wop, are you going to be especially careful with our cox here?’

‘Of course I am.’

Of course he was not. As we left the pub, Thomas da Silva was shouting, ‘Those ties are as good as ours. In the bag! Hardly a challenge for drinkers of our stature.’

Benedict sounded a marginally adult, cautionary note.

‘Men, we must avoid at all costs pre-incubatory gallinumeration.’

‘Yes, Benny, we know,’ replied Thomas da Silva. ‘Hatching cunts … I beg your pardon, Counting chickens before they’re hatched.’

‘Exactly so.’ The rogue-classicists theory was gaining ground in my mind.

As we turned towards the next pub, Thomas manœuvred the wheelchair – I assume by accident – so that one wheel was in the road while the other remained on the pavement. Then he started to push me at great speed in that precarious position, with the wheelchair straddling the kerb. If the footplates hadn’t been on, thanks to Kerry, my feet would have been receiving the savage scraping in their place. As it was, there was a tremendous noise of metal in agony, and I’m sure there was a fine display of sparks for the benefit of the people behind.

A titillating cloud

I closed my eyes and tried to recite Om Mane Padme Om in my deepest interior spaces. It seemed such a long time since I had sounded the mini’s horn in that mantric rhythm to summon Kerry Bashford. My rickety old mantra was supposed to act as a brake on my engagement with spurious reality, or at least a clutch to disconnect me from the apparent impulses of the world. Now it was acting as an accelerator if anything, intensifying my mundane feelings of anxiety and alarm. Om-Mane-Padme-Om, OM-MANE-PADME-OM … OM-MANE-OH MY GOD! … What happens if Thomas notices the way the wheelchair is tilted and tries to put things right without stopping? I’ll be pitched out of the wheelchair, that’s what, old Uncle Tom Mantra and all.

My nose registered at one point that we were passing the coffee shop (in fact The Coffee Shop) on King Street. The caffeinated aroma hung around like a titillating cloud. I concentrated on the traces of a drug which seemed entirely benign compared with alcohol, in whose stupefying distortions I was so hopelessly embroiled. Like many another student in those years, I had met coffee-lovers of both the jug and filter factions, devotees of both Java and exorbitant Blue Mountain. My own favourite was Kenya Peaberry. Even the name was satisfying. It had a leguminous twang. In those years the caffeine god made at least as many converts as the marijuana god.

Then we were past the coffee shop and the vivifying aroma disappeared. I had nothing to cling to but the shreds of my mantra. I couldn’t reach the armrests, to hold on to those. The stopwatch bumped painfully against my chest. At last I managed to grab it with one hand, to stop it knocking against my racing heart.

Exasperation is a rather junior emotion, a secondary impulse, but even so it is possible to feel it on a vast scale. That was what was happening with me at this point. I wasn’t a child. I was a grown-up. I was of drinking age. As it happened, I even wanted to be in a pub. But I wanted to be in the pub of my choice, the Cambridge Arms, not a sordid den chosen by cretinous carousers. I was a consenting adult – I could even have relations with my own sex under certain conditions. I did not consent to having my day written off by dipsomaniac louts, however steeped in the classical languages. What made these clods think they could override my wishes?

The fact that they could. The fact that they had.

There were shouts behind us, and a yelping sound nearer home, which turned out to come from my own throat. We had nearly overshot the next pub on the via dolorosa of the King Street Run. At least the rest of the party mucked in to rescue the wheelchair from its unstable footing, though so many hands pressing down on the handles made it buck like a rearing horse. I couldn’t hang on to anything. I just clenched my teeth, so hard that I thought I must be shedding flakes of enamel.

I have no memories of the next pub we visited. That’s not exactly a failure of memory, more a refusal to register anything in the first place. I closed my eyes before we entered the place, and I kept them shut. This was my shot at passive resistance to the absurd caravan that had swept me up into its pilgrimage of intoxication. I couldn’t veto the proceedings, I couldn’t even register a protest vote. All I could do was abstain. Of course I wasn’t paying a special tribute to Gandhi – all my resistance is passive. All I have is my small No. No to pilchards, No to Billy Graham. No to Write Off Tuesday.

I kept my eyes closed and took no part in conversation, if the mass of cross-purpose non-sequiturs endlessly being repeated around me could count as conversation. Since no one was willing to take me to the toilet, I concentrated my mental powers on reversing the normal renal function, so that urine was driven back into the kidneys which had distilled it, and then back into the bloodstream. Better poisoned blood than soaked trouser. There was a jukebox in this pub. A vintage song was playing. ‘All Right Now’. By Free. Perhaps that was a good omen. Free right now. But when does Maya ever play fair?

There was the usual interminable routine of getting beers. From the muffled thud at close quarters I could deduce that once again I had been included in the round. Beer I didn’t want in a glass I couldn’t lift. Then Thomas da Silva and Benedict sat down, one on each side of me.

‘Cox? Cox?’

‘What’s his name? His actual name?’

‘Never caught it, Benny.’

‘Do you think he’s asleep?’

‘Might be faking.’

‘Why?’

‘To get out of buying a round?’

‘Don’t judge him by your own low standards, Wop. I think he’s really asleep.’

‘Maybe the poor little chap can’t hold his drink. Maybe that’s it. We should wake him up. COX! COX!! What a terrible thing to have to live with. Imagine not being able to hold your drink! Another thing, Benny. Have you noticed? There’s something not quite right with his legs. It’s more than just being small.’

‘Car crash?’

‘I expect so. Hurt his arms too, poor bugger.’

‘I’m not sure we should wake him. Maybe he’s better off as he is.’

‘Don’t be stupid. We have a certain responsibility here.’ This was Thomas da Silva talking – my abductor-in-chief.

‘Nothing’ll happen to him if we just leave him be. Someone will look after him.’

‘We can’t take that chance. And how will he feel if he wakes up and finds we’ve abandoned him? We don’t want to perform auto-prosopectomy thingummy … sorry, vocab all gone. It’s all Etruscan to me … Don’t want to cut off our nose to spite our face.’

Give the man his dignity

‘Good point. He wouldn’t want to miss being there when we cross the finishing line. In fact … do you think we could apply for him to do the Run with us, on the actual day, and get a proper tie on half-pints? Maybe a half-sized tie. Seeing as he’s so small?’

‘Dunno. It’s always a pint for him, isn’t it? I suppose he doesn’t want to get special treatment. Give the man his dignity, Benny. Leave him some pride. Let him make his own choices.’

‘No, think about it, Wop. This is serious. You and I weigh, what, fourteen and a half stone the day of a regatta? Fifteen stone the next day, obviously …’ These figures seemed fantastic. Is it possible for hefty but not freakish-looking youths to weigh so much, or were they joking? ‘And Cox is going to weigh no more than, what, two stone?’

‘Two stone? Are you sure? He has to be heavier than that!’

‘All right, three at the outside. Call it three. So for every pint we drink he can drink … a lot less. Try it the other way round. For every pints he drinks, we can drink, what, ten? Five, anyway. We can’t let him go on drinking pints just to keep up with us. He’s going to kill himself. He may be in a coma already.’

Then they were both shaking me and roaring ‘COX! COX!’ There was nothing much I could do but open bleary eyes before their shaking became too painful on my shoulders. Then we were off to the final stages of the King Street Run.

Pubs that hosted the early pints of the Run might be reasonably grateful for the custom involved. Pubs towards the end of King Street, and the Run, had drawn short straws. They might value Varsity trade, but not the sort represented by Write Off Tuesday, sozzled and more than likely to puke. There were no longer a full eight pubs on King Street, so the Zebra, round the corner on Maids Causeway, had been requisitioned for the last two pints. Its publican was less than thrilled.

He intercepted us. He was a large, imposing man, wearing a V-necked pullover with a shirt and tie underneath it. The voice that emerged from his large neck was soft and deep, perfectly friendly but not to be trifled with. ‘Are you on a bender, lads? Some sort of competition? If so I don’t want your business. I don’t want your mess. I’ve seen enough sick at this address. If you throw up I’ll give you a mop, but that’s my limit.’

The assembled members of Write Off Tuesday tried to head off resistance with a synchronised display of undergraduate arrogance. They didn’t do a bad job, considering. They squared their shoulders and drew on surprising reserves of physical control. Benny said, ‘By no means, landlord.’ He indicated me. ‘Our handicapped friend here requires a pint of your best bitter. We will keep him company out of good manners, but we are hardly in any sort of competition.’ This I suppose was strictly true, if the whole appalling expedition was a rehearsal. And they weren’t in competition with me.

I wondered, after what had been said in the last pub, when it was that Benny had noticed that I was disabled. Perhaps it was a wild guess, a piece of pure bluff. It was just my luck that this new insight gained us admission to yet another pub. The landlord hesitated, then stepped aside. ‘Just one pint, mind.’

Perhaps trade was bad enough for him to fear being put on a blacklist. Certainly there were fewer than a dozen drinkers present. Unless placated, I might put the word out on the disabled grapevine that these were premises which could usefully be fire-bombed come the next Day of Action.

I clung to the idea, despite everything that had happened, that given time I would be able to impose my will on my kidnappers. All I needed was a quiet moment to get the psychic electromagnets going and work my personality magic. But the quiet moment never came.

Any sobriety the group had been able to muster on their way into the pub soon deserted them once we were inside and had been served. Thomas da Silva’s face was now by turns red and sweaty-white, at the mercy of the swilling beer inside him. Every few moments he would fill his cheeks with air and breathe out unhappily. He looked like someone with numbed lips trying to whistle. He whispered loudly to Benedict, ‘We need to have two pints here, Benny. This is only pub number seven, and we need to tot up the full eight pints. It’s the magic number. The full gallon, or no dice. No dice, no tie.’

Benedict shushed him. ‘We’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe if Cox orders the next round the landlord will oblige. I don’t know why he’s being so snot-nosed. With a shabby place like this you’d think he’d be grateful for the business.’

‘About time Cox paid his whack anyway. I don’t approve of freeloaders, do you?’

That was it. I could endure no longer. My small No was suddenly too big to be contained. They’d been going too far from the moment they had entered the Cambridge Arms, but now they were beyond the pale in absolute terms. I pitched my voice at a level that a cox would only need on a windy river with a flight of jet planes roaring overhead, and I bellowed, ‘Shut up this instant! I NEED TO PEE!! Right now!’

‘All right, little man, no need to shout,’ said da Silva. ‘You’re quite right, though, we should attend to our cox. Our cox!!’ Finally there it was, out in the open, the double meaning that had been hovering over the conversation for so long. He fought off an attack of the giggles. ‘I could do with a bit of a slash myself.’

As he was clearly the most unstable of the group, I tried to head him off. ‘Perhaps Benedict could oblige …?’

‘He has better things to do, my lightweight friend. He has important cigarettes to buy.’

‘I can wait.’

‘I thought you couldn’t. Isn’t that what you were just saying?’ He looked hurt. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘Your driving can be a bit erratic, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘I’ve got the hang of your buggy now. I’m sure of it.’

I broadcast a general appeal. ‘Anybody care to give me a hand to the Gents?’ But Thomas da Silva had already grasped the handles, and we were off. The door to the Gents swung freely, or else it would have been agonising when he used my feet to push it open. I started panicking the moment I saw the wet floor of the Gents. A slippery floor is a death-trap in my book, much more so when I’m landed with an assistant who can hardly stand up himself.

Pure jets of desperation

‘Do you mind if I go first?’ he said. ‘It turns out the need is rather urgent.’ He unzipped his trousers without waiting for an answer. I gritted my teeth somehow as a fierce bolt of liquid escaped him, bouncing noisily against the porcelain of the urinal. ‘I know, I know … not a good lookout for a tie with no Ps on it. But I expect it’ll be all right on the night.’

The pressure of the urine-stream was so intense that like any other substantial fall of water it created a drifting veil of moisture, a fine mist which stung my eyes but cooled the backs of my hands. For a second I was transported back to the sea front at Bognor Regis, on a walk from Mr Johnson’s Home, safe in the care of people who knew what they were doing.

I was so frantic to urinate myself that I had something close to an out-of-the-body experience. I felt I could see myself from above thrashing miserably about in the wheelchair, flailing my arms through their limited arc like a defective clockwork toy, a drummer whose sticks have been taken away. My mundane bladder was churning, and suddenly my astral body leapt upwards. Normally this can only happen in unconsciousness, with the arrival of a dream of knowledge, but I soared above the body on pure jets of desperation.

Then Thomas da Silva finished his business and it was my turn. He came round to the front of the wheelchair, stooped and grabbed me. It’s not a good lifting position. It squashes me, it’s bad for the lifter’s back, there’s nothing to be said in its favour. I never allowed it in normal life, but then I had been not allowing things for almost an hour now without making the slightest impact on what is alleged to be reality. More frightening than being lifted in this way was the prospect of being dumped back in a chair that could easily roll backwards. There was some hope of a safe splashdown if I could at least get him to put the brakes on.

‘Put the Brakes On, Please! … BRAKES! … BRAKES!!’ I bellowed. I tried to pattern my intonation on the nurses at CRX, whose capitals and exclamation marks were palpable in their delivery.

Thomas da Silva didn’t understand, or at least paid no attention. He lifted me roughly, agonisingly, by my armpits and yanked me towards him. There was a moment when his balance faltered, and the wheelchair (with the brakes disengaged) slid sharply backwards away from me. I had a limited choice: either to lean backwards, on the off-chance that the wheelchair, sentimental about our long association, would wait for me, or forward, into the grip of a tottering unmindful drunk. I leant forward with my full two or three stone (which at this stage of my life even Maya assessed at four-and-a-half), and Thomas fell backwards.

This was both a lucky and an unlucky fall, depending on who you were. If you were Thomas da Silva, unlucky, since he fell on his back (unable to break his fall with hands that were fully occupied with me), with his head unpleasantly close to the trough of the urinal. Lucky if you were me, since I landed on top of him. Otherwise I could have been badly injured or even killed. It wouldn’t have taken much to break my neck.

Landing on top of Thomas da Silva’s stomach was like doing a belly-flop onto that fantasy item of the time, a water-bed. The pressurised liquid with which my landing-cushion was filled was beer, of course, and not water, but the same hydrostatic laws applied. We were both winded for the moment, so there was no interference from breathing. The liquid was driven out to the edges of the organism, then surged back rebounding.

My luck was about to change. Thomas took a slow rasping intake of breath, then his insides gave up its struggle to contain what in his folly he had taken in. He gave a groan, and the groan became torrential.

Obviously the jet of vomit didn’t reach the wheelchair, far across the room, and slam it against the opposite wall. That was only the picture in my mind. Now I was experiencing something that was as far from my circumscribed reality as a water-bed. I was riding a roller-coaster. I didn’t like it. I wanted to get off. Though Thomas politely turned his head away from me, I was perched on a set of abdominal muscles which were being trodden on by a huge internal foot, and the violence of the ejection, its muzzle velocity so to speak, was awe-inspiring. From my skewed point of view he was a geyser rather than a human being, a personified hydrant of swill.

I thought it would never stop, and then it did. He was sobbing with the effort of it. Otherwise there was silence, apart from the drip of cisterns refilling. My arms were hurting. I can’t lie flat on my front, the joints don’t permit it.

Up to this point the evening had been a disaster in every way, but now it became something worse. A disgrace. I urinated on Thomas da Silva. There was no element of retaliation involved. I wasn’t saying, You soil me, I soil you. I just couldn’t hold it in. For so long I had been engaged in a battle of wills with my bladder, while no one helped or listened. Now this body had its triumph and my bladder won. Thomas’s vomit had sprayed far and wide, but he had been considerate enough to turn his head away from me. My released urine had nowhere to go but downwards, though capillary action ensured that the cloth of my trousers absorbed its fair share.

And to think I had been worried that the beer-drips on my trousers in the Cambridge Arms would make people think I had pissed myself!

Thomas didn’t move while my bladder added the finishing touches to the tableau of degradation. It seemed highly likely that he had passed out. My mantra flowed more cleanly in my head now that the tempo of events had slowed.

The landlord came wearily into the toilet where the two of us were wallowing in the failure of our bodies to contain themselves. He asked, between his teeth, ‘Gentlemen, may I have the telephone numbers of your tutors?’ Then he said, ‘I thought I’d seen everything there was to see in these four fucking walls. But I was wrong about that, wasn’t I, gentlemen?’ The expletive was painful to listen to, since it seemed unhabitual.

A basset-hound with a secret sorrow

He picked me up from the stinking cushion that was Thomas da Silva and propped me competently against a wall. Unfortunately he didn’t hand me my crutch and cane, which would have made me feel less helpless. Was it really likely that I would make a dash for it, if my utensils were left within reach?

The landlord looked from Thomas to me, directing his remarks in my direction, where they might have some effect. ‘If you find you have somehow forgotten those telephone numbers, gentlemen, I’m sure your colleges will be happy to supply them.’ He looked like a man who had come to a decision. To retire from the publican’s dismal trade, perhaps, to sell at a loss or simply walk away. He looked like a basset-hound with a secret sorrow. His breathing was the very respiration of exasperated reproach. Then he stood up and walked out of the urinal. He left us to think about our shortcomings as human beings, though Thomas wasn’t doing much thinking. It wasn’t his style.

The landlord had done me a service by picking me up off the floor, but I was in a very awkward position. Leaning against a wall without crutch or cane I was as helpless as a beetle on its back. In fact I had time to think, as urine seeped downwards from my crotch, that even after his traumatic metamorphosis Gregor Samsa could have run rings round me.

It seemed that the other members of Write Off Tuesday, prudently treacherous, had disappeared. They weren’t far behind Thomas in terms of drunkenness, but some profound wastrels’ instinct must have enabled them to leave the premises while his vomit was still actually airborne. Benny had seemed to be the conscience of the group, but not every group has a conscience.

To my astonishment Thomas opened his eyes and got to his feet. I could have sworn he was in a coma. He didn’t look at me, propped up against the wall as I was like a rank-smelling broom. He didn’t look around him at all. His eyes were entirely blank, but there was a lurking awareness in there somewhere, and a furtive purpose. I swear that he shook the worst of the mess off himself, the ejecta and excreta. Like a dog, more or less, except that he bounced feebly on the balls of his feet to start the dislodging process. Perhaps rough tweed, the material of his sports jacket, is especially prized for this resistance to defilement. Then he lurched with grim concentration towards the door and left.

This was one more betrayal, of course. Leaving me in the hands of the enemy was as bad as abducting me in the first place, but I was fully compensated by the joy of being alone, however uncomfortable, ashamed and malodorous. The landlord might never be the president of my fan club, but he was certain to be better company than the polyglot hearties who had just absconded.

Even so, Thomas as he left reminded me sharply of Julian Robinson from Vulcan. There was no physical resemblance, and loyal Julian would never have walked out on anyone. But Thomas walked out with a tottering stiffness, as if he didn’t trust what might happen if he allowed his knees to bend. It looked for all the world as if he was wearing calipers.

A plump trout on the scales

Left on my own in the squalor of the Zebra’s toilet, I cheered myself up with memories of Julian. We had ended up as good friends in the school, to the point where we had pet names for each other. Despite my childish gloating over the superiority of my chemistry set (Fun With Gilbert) over his (Lotts for Tiny Tots), the human chemistry between us was good. Julian and John became Tooley and Tonny. We were sublimely innocent of the overtone of tool.

I don’t know why we didn’t go into the toilet cubicles, which were distinctly roomy, being designed to accommodate a wheelchair plus a person, but we didn’t. Perhaps we relied on the sliding doors in the toilet block, which weren’t lockable, to give our explorations the tension they lacked. Julian would lean against the wheelchair for balance and unzip himself, plonking his prize member onto the armrest like a fishmonger slapping a plump trout on the scales. I would squeeze it and prod it for a few minutes in the interests of science and then say, ‘Now put it away. I’ve seen plenty.’ Unresentfully Julian would return his parts to privacy.

Then we would discuss how best to leave the toilet block without arousing suspicion. This seemed to be a friendship rooted in fantasy, and our solution was a rather far-fetched one. We decided that the best alibi for our risky intimacy would be to stage a fight in the corridor. I’d say, ‘Look here, I’d better knock you over when we’re in the hall.’ And he’d say, ‘Good idea.’ So I would steer the Wrigley so as to graze him, and he would cannon into the wall, shouting with outrage. Then I would cruise away at high speed, leaving him to shake his fist in my wake. I’d steam off as if I couldn’t care less what happened to him. This routine became slick with much practice – you go that way and I’ll go this – but I don’t see that it can ever have fooled anyone. Nothing could be fishier, in fact, than these aggressive displays of indifference.

I was left, though, with a certain fondness for the atmosphere of urinals, which came in handy in the public lavatory of the Zebra pub. It can’t have been long before the landlord came back. Self-pity had yet to become entrenched. He was carrying cloths and towels, and a hose, which he attached to a tap in the basin. He had his sleeves rolled up. He was wearing Wellington boots and an apron. Seeing that I was alone, he let out a disgusted sigh, but set to work on cleaning up as best he could. Sensibly he started with the wheelchair, whose wheels had been well sprayed by Thomas da Silva’s own hose of second-hand beer. It wasn’t as vile as it might have been. The vomit was really only beer, though tainted by digestion. Still, a little of that gastric-juice smell goes a long way.

I hoped he would come to me quickly, before I started sliding down the wall and had to scream for help.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said wearily, ‘if this only happened once a year, say. But these days hardly a month goes by without something like this. When I took on this place I was told all this drinking-club rubbish was dying out, but I’ve seen no sign. Aren’t you all supposed to be smoking pot? Shouldn’t you be on a demo?’ It was soothing to be addressed in generational terms, to be treated as a standard aberration.

At last it was my turn. He dried the wheelchair off roughly and sat me in it. I thought he might be tempted to use the hose on me too, in the manner of riot police, but he changed over to cloths and warm water.

‘I have to admit you’re a novelty, though …’ he said. There was a curious intimacy to those moments, intensified by the lack of eye contact. ‘I thought I’d seen most of the gimmicks. There’s a pack of toffs who do the Run on pints of champagne. The Pitt Club, they’re called. Champagne makes a bit of a change from beer when it’s puked up … but not as much as you’d think. Tell me, do you think this sort of thing happens a lot in, say, Ely? Do you think it happens at all? It’s just I’ve had my eye on a pub there. Perhaps now’s the time … Those lads aren’t your friends, you know.’

At last I had my chance to explain. ‘I know they’re not my friends. That’s what I’ve been trying to say the whole time. I’ve never met them before.’

He frowned as he went about his work. ‘I see.’ I found the deliberate tempo of his actions soothing. Most people who get that close to me are flustered and fidgety. All his movements had the buffered ease of a strong arm pulling pints. ‘And because you’ve never met them before you obviously can’t give me any of their names.’

He assumed I was subscribing to the Colditz code of old-style undergraduates in trouble in the town, who would volunteer only name, college and tutor’s phone number, however gruelling the interrogation. Everyone knew that the police had little authority over university affairs, and couldn’t even enter the colleges without permission. ‘I hoped you weren’t going to be so loyal. Loyal and stupid. What’s your college, sir?’

‘Downing.’

‘But the missing gentlemen aren’t from there?’

‘Not that I know of. Never saw them before.’

He shrugged but didn’t press the point. Nor did he make any comment about an idiosyncrasy of the way I dressed in those days. Having my laundry done and taking regular baths made the basics of hygiene simple in certain respects. I economised on others, because of the great awkwardness of dressing and undressing unaided. I solved the problem of vests by not wearing vests. I solved the problem of underpants by not wearing underpants. I solved the problem of socks by not wearing socks – since I walk relatively little, my shoes don’t have much chance to rub. I had pared my costume down to shirt, trousers and shoes. In winter I didn’t go out much.

432,000 years in the dark

‘Did they shout out “Dead ants!” every now and then? And then lie flat on the floor?’

‘No, that’s about the only thing they didn’t do. What would that mean?’

‘Fitzwilliam. Never mind.’ His manner had a cosy gloom to it, as if he was an undertaker from a family firm. ‘Look, I haven’t any clothes for you to change into. You’re about three times too small. Best I can do is wipe you up, then stuff some toilet paper into your trousers to keep you dry.’

‘That seems more than fair, landlord.’

‘Don’t call me that. Arthur Burgess. Call me Arthur. Is that enough toilet paper?’

‘Yes, thank you. Arthur. I think it is. By the way, I don’t want anything to do with that stopwatch’ – whose case he had wiped, whose string he had rinsed – ‘please keep it.’ What did I want with a stopwatch? As Hindus know, we’re in the depths of the Dark Age, the Kali Yuga, set to last 432,000 years. Time is going quite slowly enough.

Arthur hesitated, until I added, ‘Perhaps they’ll come back for it. Perhaps that’s how you’ll nab ’em.’

Arthur Burgess put no pressure on me for my tutor’s phone number. Unfortunately there was no one else I could call for help. The Mini was a good distance away, and I wasn’t in a strong position to ask favours from someone who had already cleaned me up.

I had made no special effort to remember the number, but after my childhood tutor Miss Collins restricted my access to books I had come to rely more and more on memory, just in case I had to manage without books again. By my Cambridge days, it required an act of will for me to forget a phone number. I was half hoping Graëme would be out, though I had no idea what I’d do if he was.

He was in. There are probably better times to be told that you need to retrieve a soiled student from a pub urinal than when you have just finished dressing for a formal college dinner, but the timing was not of my choice. It wasn’t long after 7.30, though to me it felt like midnight.

Graëme turned up wearing evening dress, though the trousers had a hint of a flare and the lapels of the jacket were broad and edged with velvet. Fashion was involved, in some tentative professorial way. I could almost hear Mrs Beamish cooing, ‘Even academics can make a bit of an effort, you know, darling!’ as she lured him (without benefit of a credit note) into The Peacock, the dandy-magnet cradled inside Cambridge’s own little department store, Josh Tosh, foreshortened Harrods of the Fens.

By mutual instinct, Arthur Burgess and I retreated from first-name terms the moment Graëme made his appearance. The situation was unsavoury enough without being overlaid by an element of collusion or practical joke. As he wheeled me out of the Zebra, I called out politely, ‘Thank you, landlord,’ as if the whole evening had gone as planned. A refreshing half-pint in my local. Arthur for his part greeted Graëme with the words, ‘A student of the old school, sir. Won’t peach on his fellow sinners,’ in the tone of voice of someone offering professional condolences.

Arthur had thoughtfully overlapped some bar-towels over my legs and lower body, to hide the damp patches. Thanks to these I had an almost festive aspect as we trundled back down King Street. They were brightly coloured, in red and green. We might have been doing something for charity – we might have been sponsored by the brewery. In November rather than April, I might have been a Guy in effigy being pushed to Parker’s Piece for burning, particularly since loose strips of toilet tissue were escaping from my waistband, touch paper waiting for a match.

From behind me, as he pushed, Graëme Beamish was saying, ‘I’m disappointed that you’re taking this attitude, John.’

My free will had still not been returned to me. I seemed to be stuck with other people’s scripts, this new one an especially dull affair of the solidarity of miscreants.

I came close to biting my tongue. ‘What attitude is that, Dr Beamish?’

‘This Bridge-on-the-River-Kwai not-telling-tales attitude. It’s rather old-fashioned, isn’t it? Rather … square.’

I was longing to tell tales for once. What did I care if Thomas da Silva and Benedict Whoever were thrown in the river, or put in the pillory and pelted with fruit? But I was unable to retreat from the uncompromising stance that had been foisted on me. I had missed my moment, and now I was stuck with being loyal to the disloyal. My arms still ached from my brief sojourn on Thomas da Silva’s belly.

A spent blob in my mouth

In my frustration at being taken for a martyr, I started rolling my eyes and sticking my tongue out, in a way I would never have done if Beamish and I could see each other’s faces. For all I know he was doing the same thing himself, in annoyance at the disruption of his evening, which would have added an extra fillip to the entertainment value of our progress down King Street. It’s not considered polite for wheelchair-users to install wing mirrors, attached by stems to the armrests, so that they can monitor the expressions of those who push them, but really I don’t see why.

My mantra had lost all its stabilising power. It was like a piece of chewing gum so long masticated it had turned into a spent blob in my mouth. No point in thinking of that. Instead I took a symbolic revenge on Beamish for his lack of understanding by visualising the bottom of his kitchen cabinets, seen on my only visit to his lovely home in Barton. I have my own point of view, and can witness any number of flaws that are hidden from the taller world. It’s one of the little privileges of wheelchair travel, to be underlooking at the overlooked. The paintwork under those cabinets was pockled and peeling. Steam from a thousand boilings of the kettle had left it looking shabby and leprous. Shame on you, Beamish.

It’s well known that the disabled are compensated for their losses, in the currency of another sense. The blind have particularly acute hearing – though, oddly, as experiments have proved, they hear less well in the dark. As for me, I have a photographic memory for the undersides of kitchen cabinets.

When we were back at the Mini, once he had helped me in and loaded the wheelchair in the boot, Dr Beamish disappeared in his turn. His duties were over. He could get to his college dinner only a little late, with a story to tell if he cared to, ready to worship the little divinities of his academic cosmos, the sherry god and the claret god, madeira god and port god.

I felt the stigma of my incontinence very keenly, despite being a victim of circumstance. A disabled person can’t have a moment of weakness in that department without it becoming a permanent part of the picture. It’s a character flaw in waiting. If I’d been able to, I would simply have disposed of the evidence and thrown the soiled items away, but trousers were not things I owned in mad profusion.

It wasn’t so very long since I had dared to defuse Mrs Beddoes’s fears about my leaky self by turning them into a joke. The game with the Voodoo Lily didn’t seem quite so funny any more. Perhaps I had been tempting fate, giving Maya a poke in the ribs.

In fact Mrs Beddoes took my emergency laundry in her stride, returning the bar towels (those flags of my disgrace) neatly folded, along with my trousers clean and fresh.

One comfort was that my relationship with my tutor was so poor that nothing could damage it. When I had paid that visit to his home in Barton, and the secrets of his kitchen’s undersurfaces were laid bare to me, we had been on better terms. This was statutory university hospitality, and a group of us had been invited. I had been hoping for a spot of sherry myself. As holy water to the baby’s head, so sherry to the undergraduate throat. It is the sacramentally required liquid. What hope for the christening when the font is full of Lucozade?

It wasn’t Lucozade that Dr Beamish had provided for his moral tutees but something just as inappropriate. Tinned beer. That’s no poculum sacrum! That doesn’t begin to qualify as a holy tipple.

He had chosen a strange moment to drop the mask of fuddy-duddydom. Perhaps the charade was harder to keep up on his home turf, with his baby daughter screaming heartily from upstairs.

He was a besotted father, as well as perhaps a sleepless one, which would explain why he failed to censor himself while rhapsodising about the joys of fatherhood. ‘It’s the most amazing thing,’ he said, ‘not something I expected at all. Maybe with a boy but not a girl. She plays with herself the whole time. She never stops! It’s wonderful the way she fiddles with herself, just strumming away day and night!’ His voice had all the dry wonder of Patrick Moore’s on The Sky At Night describing a new constellation.

There was silence sudden and total. The professor’s dry-as-dust mask had dropped good and proper, and all parties were immediately frantic for it to be back in place again. We wanted freeze peach, but only for our generation. Graëme faltered, but made a noble attempt at recovery by saying, ‘As a scientist I’m fascinated … there’s more to life than crystalline solids, after all!’ Then he started refilling people’s glasses. Normal service of bufferdom resumed as if nothing had happened.

It had been his one experiment in talking to a group of students as if they were adults and equals. He didn’t make that mistake again. His donnish persona had its disadvantages, but at least it saved him from enthusing in public over the fiddling habits of his little girl.

Regimental goat

After the evening of Write Off Tuesday, I never parked the Mini in that favoured spot again. I never crossed the pub’s doors, nor sounded my horn for admission in the ceremonial style that had become customary. I dropped Kerry Bashford a postcard thanking him for his many kindnesses, but I never learned whether he was working his slow and appreciative way through the whole canon, or had special reasons for choosing Howards End. I never deepened my knowledge of the effects of a Jehovah’s Witness upbringing on the resilient young, because I never saw him again. I forfeited the precious sense of welcome I had when Kerry settled me at a table and went to pour the half of Abbot Ale with the proper solemnity.

I had been a well-known figure in my way at the Cambridge Arms, pontificating about cannabinoids, hops and the Houses of Parliament, but I had been press-ganged into a lunatic troop under everyone’s nose. This was my fault. Had Write Off Tuesday even noticed that they were kidnapping me? They simply didn’t classify me as a creature that might have ideas of its own, and yes, I was responsible. I had made it happen. Yes, they had been drunk and out of control, but I had conspired with them against myself.

That was the point. Brooding on the incident afterwards, long after any taint had cleared from the wheelchair, I had to see their side of things. They hadn’t turned me into a mascot. I was a mascot already. I had volunteered. I had turned myself into a character in the Cambridge Arms public bar, pronouncing on the quality of the ale while people tried not to look at the way I ate peanuts.

The answer was in my hands. No more pretence of belonging to a place or an institution. I would have to change my ways. I must refuse the rôle of mascot. Once you’ve accepted mascot status no later refusal is possible. I must find a part to play less demeaning than the gonk on a teenaged girl’s counterpane, or the regimental goat trotted out on parade, presiding ceremonially over rituals in which it has no part.

Perversely, the incident pushed me in a direction that I had refused for a long time. It made no sense to be living in fear of attending a Gay Liberation meeting, when a quiet half-pint in a familiar pub could lead inexorably to incontinence, social disgrace and vomit in the treads of my tyres. I wasn’t safe anywhere, so I had no excuse for not living dangerously.

Since I had been unable to locate the Monarchist League, with its promise of groping without slogans, I would have to make my peace with CHAPs. The organisation’s contact details were given in many student magazines, and even the Varsity Handbook. There was a telephone number, but I couldn’t imagine explaining my history and situation down a wire to a stranger in the exposed acoustic of the Porter’s Lodge. There was an address also, in Glisson Road, where a meeting was held on alternate Tuesdays.

I made myself ready to attend my first gay group meeting like someone preparing a suicide, making sure the garage is airtight or that the beam will bear a noose. I looked up the address on the map, and made a few recces and dummy runs. I realised that there could be no question of hitch-lifting on this occasion. I could just about face an appointment with my unknown peers, but I couldn’t imagine hijacking a passer-by to help me make the transfer from car to wheelchair to front door, and then having to explain everyone to everyone else. Sexual panic was plenty without social embarrassment on top.

On this occasion I would have to make my own way from car to front door. It followed that I would be dispensing with the wheelchair and proceeding under my own power, with crutch and cane. It was just about possible that I would be swept along on a tide of arriving Uranians, frolicsome intermediates with jewels in their hair who would swirl me up the steps and into the premises without me having to say a single word, but it made sense not to bank on it.

In fact when I arrived in the car there was no one on the street. I was able to park only a few feet from the house, and made my way laboriously out of the car and on to the pavement. While I was struggling, a pedestrian appeared, a woman pulling a shopping trolley. She stopped and peered into the Mini’s interior, almost leaning over me in her desire to inspect the coachwork. I imagine she had been brought up with the idea that it was rude to stare at people, and was desperately trying to find an innocent object for her curiosity. Not finding one, she smiled uncertainly and went on her way.

It took me a little time to reach the door. There was a bell-push. Should I use it, or rap on the door with my cane? Which was it to be? Rat-a-tat-tat or Rrring rrring? I hadn’t considered these options in advance. If I used the cane on the door perhaps the assembled inverts would panic, suspecting a police raid, and escape round the back. I decided on the bell, but couldn’t get a sound out of it with the tip of the cane. Perhaps its mechanism required greater force or a better angle. I would have to climb up. There was only a low step leading up to the front door, but that was enough to make the attempt a bit of an expedition. This felt appropriate. It seemed to fit. The hero confronts his fears and enters the lions’ den unarmed. He shouldn’t expect a butler with a ramp or a block and tackle.

I decided that my ascent of the step was best managed with my back to the wall. That felt safest – falling backwards is a frightening prospect. I would turn round again when I had reached the proper level. I approached the step from the side. By leaning away I might be able to raise my foot to the right level. My new hips were splendid pieces of equipment. They would surely power this contortion. It more or less worked. I got one foot up onto the step. It was the next move that defeated me. The angle between my legs was already at its maximum. How was I going to shuffle along until I could (somehow) hoick up the other foot?

I was standing there, unstable and stranded, when a man approached the doorway from the street. There was something ghostly about his appearance. He was wearing a white suit, and there was hardly more colour in his face than in his costume. He departed from the human norms in other ways. If he was ghostly, then he also seemed mechanical. He was like a dapper robot. This apparition looked at me entirely blankly, then turned the door-knob and walked in. He didn’t slam the door, but it closed against me with what felt like a click of ultimate exclusion. So much for the welcome of my peers.

Had he really not seen me? Had he mistaken me for an architectural feature? Perhaps he thought I was some wonky and misplaced caryatid. Actually there’s a word for a male caryatid. I may as well assign myself the right gender. A wonky and misplaced atlas or telamon.

Half a minute later, the man was back. In that short interval he had regained some human faculties, a little facial colour and freedom of movement. The robot had been oiled, the zombie had been warmed to room temperature. He asked if I needed a hand.

I did.

I didn’t need to be carried over the threshold, just steadied over the small step. His grip on me was uncertain, as if he had just laid down a mighty weight, so that his whole body was still twanging with the relief of tension. I can tell a lot about a person from the way he or she holds me – even if I’m always half-consciously hoping for the physical assurance of the motorcycle policeman who carried me to my seat at the Royal Tournament on an expedition from Vulcan, the one who was warm steel. This one was overstretched elastic.

An emergency siesta

The man in the white suit set me down reasonably gently on a sofa in a spacious room, with the kitchen and living room knocked together in the way that was beginning to be standard. He sat down next to me and whispered, ‘My name’s George.’ ‘John.’ ‘I’m sorry I walked past you earlier on, but …’ Then someone shushed him, and his explanation had to wait. There were perhaps fifteen people in the room, only two of them women.

One man, sitting at the kitchen table, was saying: ‘What happened was this. My dad and I went to the cinema and saw The Music Lovers – you know, the one about Tchaikovsky? Ken Russell. Anyway, the film brought a lot of things to a head for me, and after we’d gone home I said to Dad, “You know the man in the film? I’m like that. He’s like me.” By which I didn’t mean that I had a big tune in my head at all times, though God knows that’s also true. I meant I didn’t love women. I loved men. Glenda Jackson would be a huge mistake.’

Between every phrase he made eye contact with a different person round the table, drawing out a thread of sympathetic attention.

‘Anyway, Dad didn’t know what to say or do. So what he said and did was to yawn in an exaggerated way, and to say he was tired and was going straight to bed.’

By now we were all nodding our endorsement of his story, making little encouraging noises at regular intervals.

‘He wanted to end the conversation, but he didn’t want to reject me. He didn’t throw me out of the house. He didn’t stalk out of the house himself either, slamming the door behind him. He managed to find somewhere else to go, even if it was only his bedroom, and he shut the door very gently behind him. He needed to give himself some breathing space. The only thing was … the funny thing was that we’d been to an afternoon showing, and it was still only about five … He’d come over all Spanish all of a sudden, and taken an emergency siesta. He went to bed in the middle of the afternoon just to get a little breathing space …’

There was a silence. I wasn’t altogether sure whether I’d been trusted with a traumatic experience or entertained with a droll anecdote. I wanted to say, ‘So what happened next? Did you talk about it the next day? Is everything all talked out now? What about your Mum?’, but as a new arrival I thought I’d better wait to see how every one else responded.

I think my instinct was sound. There was a concealed sort of etiquette in operation. The person who seemed to be in charge of the meeting was an upright man in a houndstooth jacket, in his late twenties perhaps. He thanked the speaker and said he was delighted to see a few new faces at the meeting. He brought a tray with mugs of tea on it over to where I was sitting next to George, and introduced himself as Tony. Addressing himself to George, he asked if he’d like to say something himself. George swallowed hard and said he’d rather just listen if that was all right. ‘Of course, of course – get your bearings,’ said Tony and went back to the kitchen side of the room, where a man in a yellow T-shirt was sitting. This man reached up inside Tony’s jacket and stroked him softly on the belly. Granny was always stressing the importance for men of leaving the bottom button of their jackets undone, but I’d never seen the point till now.

George had taken two cups of tea, one on my behalf, and was looking around for somewhere to put them. He whispered, ‘That’s what I was trying to tell you. I was so nervous coming here that I hardly even saw you out in the street. I’m so sorry. I’d decided I would go through that door if it was the last thing I ever did. Then when I got inside and found I was still alive, I realised I’d left you out there. I went out again saying I’d be back in a moment, but I think our host thought I’d lost my nerve. I wonder how long he’d have waited before sending out a rescue party?’

Another voice spoke up from the group round the table. ‘I’ll tell you what happened to me,’ it said. The new speaker had a much more confident delivery, an almost actorly confidence. George put both mugs down on the floor at our feet.

‘I’d given myself a deadline to tell my mother I was gay. This was a few years ago. I wasn’t living at home, but I was staying with her for a few days. I’d decided that this was going to be it. Time for revelation. Zero hour. I had no reason to think she was prejudiced. She had a couple of friends who were in the theatre, and as if that wasn’t enough they worked for an antique dealer when they were between acting jobs. She was always saying how terribly amusing they were, what great fun, and I thought that was probably a good sign. It’s just … with her own little boy – the little prince – it might not be quite so much fun.’

As if to emphasise the difference between himself and the previous speaker, he kept his gaze fixed on the mug in his hands, not looking up at any of us, confident of his ability to hold us without the assistance of eye contact. It was like an audition piece. And he meant to get the part.

‘I get terrible fits of cowardice, you know, but I was determined to see this through to the end. To make sure that I didn’t back out, I’d written my mother a letter and sent it, so I knew I would have to speak out before it arrived. I couldn’t just go on putting things off. I’d decided that to leave myself no escape hatch I would send it by recorded delivery. That was the only sensible thing to do. Otherwise I’d be tempted to hang around the front door and pounce on the letter, and then I’d have put everything off again, which I was beginning to find unbearable. I was getting so tired of not being able to respect myself.

‘The morning arrived for the letter to be delivered. I’d been awake since the early hours. I could hear Mother move around the kitchen, and still I couldn’t get up. I felt as if I was paralysed. I’d been doing a bit of drinking, and I was hungover, but there was more to it than that. There was a weight on my chest and I couldn’t stir from the bed. Mum was doing some ironing, for some reason, and I felt as if her iron was going back and forth on my chest, and scalding me with the knowledge of my own worthlessness. And Mother was singing as she did the ironing. Singing! She was cheerful, innocently happy, on a day that I was going to turn into blackness for her. Total eclipse. The light of her life was going to go out. And what was she singing, I ask you? She was singing “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”, that’s what …

‘I forced myself to rise from the horizontal. I swear it took as much effort as actually levitating. I forced myself up from the bed, by raw willpower, making myself confront my doom. To cast the shadow that would blight her happy song.’

By this time he had started swirling his coffee mug, gently at first and then more decisively, so that the brown liquid in it began to rise up in a slurring tongue, coming just to the lip of the mug. Theatrical tour de force. If his control of his movements lapsed, even for a moment, then coffee would slop onto the table and perhaps the floor. We were all spellbound, host Tony’s hand tightening anxiously on a dishcloth.

In trousers and also in tears

‘And then the doorbell rang. I shouted out “I’ll get that,” and started across the floor of my bedroom. But exactly at that moment I was laid low by a violent access of diarrhœa. Imperative diarrhœa – the runs at their most runny. I’m not exaggerating when I say that if I’d gone to answer the door I would have shat myself, and that is really not how you want to start an intense family conversation.

‘So I had an ignominious session on the lav, where all the tension I’d been forcing myself not to feel expressed itself in the most rudimentary terms. And then I stumbled into the kitchen, where Mum was frowning as she took a piece of paper out of its envelope…

‘What I’d planned to send her was the baldest possible statement. Fifteen words. IF YOU’RE READING THIS THEN YOUR SON IS A COWARD AS WELL AS A BUGGER. But then I thought that was a little crude, really. Dear Noël would have winced a bit, wouldn’t he? It wouldn’t do any harm if I took a little trouble over expressing myself elegantly, though the whole idea was that she would never have to read it. It wouldn’t make any difference, but it would be good for my self-respect. The plan was that I’d speak out like a man before the letter was delivered, and sign for the recorded-delivery packet with a virile and unshaking hand while Mother screamed the place down in the middle distance. I would exchange a glance with the postman, that glance that all men use to mean Women … how can we hope to understand them when they don’t understand themselves?

‘So what Mother was reading was just a teeny bit less direct. I swear her lips were moving as she read out loud, 

MY FIRST IS IN QUEST BUT NOT IN GRAIL,

MY SECOND IS IN DUGONG BUT ISN’T IN WHALE,

MY THIRD IS IN ERIC AND ALSO IN ERNIE,

MY FOURTH IS IN VOYAGE AND ALSO IN JOURNEY,

MY LAST IS IN TROUSERS AND ALSO IN TEARS …’

He looked around expectantly, raising his eyebrows, but his audience didn’t catch on quickly enough for his liking. ‘I’ll give you another ten seconds, shall I? Oh, for God’s sake – Queer! I was giving her the clues for Queer. MY WHOLE MEANS YOUR SON IS ONE OF  THOSE QUEERS.’ His eyes went back to the contents of the mug. ‘As I say, I’d been drinking rather a lot … I’m not sure there was alcohol of any description left in the house by this time.

‘So I finally open my mouth and hear myself coming out with the words I’ve longed to say (and dreaded to hear) for so long: “Mother, there’s something I have to tell you …” Only she says, “Shhh! dear, I’m concentrating.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the piece of paper in her hand. “Can’t it wait? Someone’s sent me a word puzzle and there must be a prize for it – why else would they go to the trouble of sending it registered? I wonder what the prize is! Don’t just stare, darling, give me a hand …”’

At this point he looked up from the swirling coffee in his mug and winked at me, with such precision that it was like watching the interior workings of a camera, the shutter flashing down and back. The wink seemed to be saying, ‘That’s the way to do it. That’s how you do a telling-your-parents story.’ As if the proper delivery of the anecdote was all that concerned him.

This time there were follow-up questions: ‘So what did she say? Did she work out the riddle? Or did you manage to tell her first?’ But he seemed to have lost interest in his life history now that the performance aspect was over. He said matter-of-factly, ‘Oh, I told her myself. It turned out she was relieved if anything. From the way I’d demolished the drinks cupboard she was afraid I was going to tell her I was a dipso …’

This wasn’t remotely how I had visualised my first gay meeting, but really I shouldn’t have been surprised. I should have anticipated something of the sort. What I’d expected was somewhere between an orgy and a prayer meeting (with readings from Oscar Wilde). But if I’d used my common sense I would have realised that in a university town there was likely to be an element of performance in people’s testimony, a certain amount of showing off. The bantam displays of the ego weren’t going to be suspended just because people were exploring a taboo identity. Rather the reverse. In some people it went into overdrive. Sexual self-disclosure was something of a competitive event.

‘What do you make of that?’ George whispered.

‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to keep very quiet and hope nobody asks me any questions.’

‘Same here.’

In fact testimony hour seemed to be over. Our host Tony stood up again. ‘Apologies for repeating myself, but not everyone was here when I did the welcome.’ This was for our benefit, for George and me. ‘So here goes again: Welcome to CHAPs. This is an independent forum where issues of sexual and political liberation can be freely discussed and worked through. We’re not affiliated with CHE or with GLF. I can’t emphasise enough that this is not a university organisation. Gay people in all Cambridge are invited to attend and challenge our prejudices if they feel excluded in any way. Of course Tony and I met when we were students – my lifemate is also called Tony, which is handy because he’s not very good with names – but if we wanted to stay in our own little world we would never have founded CHAPs. I’m the Co-ordinator, by the way, and Tony is the Secretary. This is our house, and I hope you feel welcome. Tony, are the snacks ready?’

The Tonys were home-makers, and their kitchen turned out wonders. Grisly wonders, on this occasion, laced with blood – pâtés and terrines. I nibbled awkwardly at some crisp curling sheets of Melba toast, to show willing.

George and I made small talk for half an hour. He worked for Eaden Lilley, Cambridge’s less glamorous department store, in China and Glass. If Joshua Taylor was the Harrods of Cambridge, Eaden Lilley was its Bourne and Hollingsworth. He thought everyone at the meeting was a bit young. There only seemed to be one person in his own age group, mid-thirties.

Music Lovers man and Recorded Delivery man held court at opposite ends of the kitchen space. No one came to talk to us. There was no welcome apart from the statement of welcome. Welcome was a policy rather than a fact at that address – or perhaps the snacks were supposed to do most of the work. One or other Tony kept offering us snacks until George got tired of eating them (and flicking the crumbs from his white suit) and I got tired of waving them away.

George lived in Chesterton, and would have driven to the meeting if he hadn’t been so nervous he was sure he would crash. He had walked instead. ‘Will you be coming back?’ I asked.

‘Will you?’

‘I will if you will.’

So it was agreed. I’d give him a lift to the bus station, but in the future he would pick me up from Downing. In the Mini George said, ‘Meetings like that are all right for a student like you, you’re a brainbox. I’m different. I don’t want to talk about issues of sexual and political liberation. I want to find a nice boyfriend, someone calm and sensible and nicely dressed, and I want my mother to ask us to dinner after the first few years, when she’s got over the shock.’

I was in no great hurry to go public with my own fantasies of fulfilment. I suppose I wanted a boyfriend. Calm and sensible – why not? Nicely dressed – I didn’t care one way or the other. As far as Mum went, fine by me if the shock never wore off. No dinner invitations wished for in either direction.

I didn’t want to lose my heart to a straight man if I could help it, and I certainly didn’t want a beauty, of whom in any case only one or two ever showed their faces at CHAPs meetings. I didn’t want to go down Cyrano de Bergerac’s road. I know everybody is supposed to love Cyrano de Bergerac, but I don’t. What a fraud! As far as I’m concerned, he’s just Pinocchio gone to the bad. His nose is so swollen that no one notices the effects of yet another lie, and it’s so long since he’s told the truth that he doesn’t remember what it feels like. If there was ever a talking cricket to give him sound advice, he’s long since ground it beneath his riding boot or skewered it with his sword.

Cyrano is brave, honourable and unsightly. He isn’t desirable, and this is horribly unfair because he is beautiful where it really matters, on the inside. External beauty isn’t the real thing. It’s a distraction.

With whom I shared my liver

So does he fall in love with a woman with a club foot or a boss eye? Does he even fall in love with a flawed paragon – the woman who would be lovely if her ears were a little smaller, her ankles less thick? No, he falls in love with an acknowledged beauty, the hypocrite, and of course it’s taken as read that her inside is as beautiful as her outside. Because her outside is beautiful. Cyrano doesn’t want a fairer world, he wants an unfair world that lets him in, but he blackmails the world into sobbing on his behalf. Well, my eyes are dry.

The alliance of cowards I made with George to go to CHAPs meetings had obvious advantages, but there were also some drawbacks. We were treated as a sort of couple. Once a Tony came over and said, ‘Tell me, where did you two meet?’ And I said, ‘Here – the first time either of us came to a meeting.’ The Tony almost purred, as if he couldn’t be happier about us. There was occasional mild pressure on George to offer some personal testimony, but I was exempt. Everyone could see that I had nothing to say.

In theory there was no age discrimination at CHAPs meetings, in fact there were constant tirades against its evils, but the subtle fan of wrinkles round George’s eyes and the slight thinning of his hair disqualified him from full participation in the life of the group. In the same way, the group’s goal of reaching out to the town and not just the university didn’t stop him from being patronised somewhat, as if he might need subtitles during discussions.

It suited everyone to think of the two of us as an indivisible subsection of CHAPs, a sort of internal splinter group. This was disconcerting for both of us. He wasn’t used to the full blinding spotlight of invisibility, and I wasn’t used to sharing it.

We were a couple without ever having been an item. The group invented a closeness for us, though I doubt if anyone wanted to think about how we fitted together. We were a sort of Darby and Joan couple. Or I might have been the rather withdrawn fellow, yawning and grumbling, who always seemed to tag along when one of the original Siamese twins (Was it Eng or Chang? I should really look it up) wanted to play billiards. If ever I ran into a CHAPs member in town he’d be sure to ask, ‘Where’s George?’, as if I’d unaccountably mislaid the twin with whom I shared my liver.

It helped to establish this coupled image that on our second visit George said, ‘John had tea in the yellow mug last time – can he have it again?’ So someone nicely ensconced on the sofa went bright red and surrendered the mug for my use. There was nothing special about the mug, though it wasn’t too big and the handle was a good shape for me. I could have made do with most of the others, but I didn’t want to correct George when he was going to so much trouble on my behalf.

But after that the yellow mug loomed larger and larger. It was absurd. There was any amount of chafing along the lines of ‘Use any mug but the yellow one, that’s John’s, you’d better not get on his bad side.’ Once the yellow mug couldn’t be located right away, and the place was pandæmonium. I said I didn’t mind, any mug would do. Finally it was found lurking in the sink with the rest of the washing-up. The blessèd mug was given a priority cleaning, polished with a tea towel until it squeaked. Then it was filled with tea and offered to me with a triumphant smile, as if some desperate disaster had been headed off at the last possible moment. All the people in the group seemed to compress their sense of my singularity and then stuff it into the ruddy mug. As if what made me different wasn’t John needs a wheelchair to get around, but John’s very particular about his favourite yellow mug. Bit of a prima donna, you know.

I even managed to drop the yellow mug once, though I was solicitous of the Tonys’ floor and waited until the mug was empty. Unfortunately I’m not far enough off the ground to break crockery reliably. I dare say Edith Piaf had the same problem, but her flinging talents were far beyond mine.

At our second meeting we made the acquaintance of Ken, the group’s one-man intellectual vanguard and ideologue. It was obvious from the first glance that he had been typecast in the rôle by his looks. He was squat and entirely bald, which was not then a possible avenue to attractiveness, being only voluntary among the fearsome tribe of skinheads. In Ken’s case it was beyond his control, thanks to childhood alopecia after measles. Without his glasses he might have been able to lead a normal life, but baldness plus strong glasses, strong enough to make his eyes look small, could only mean one thing – ferocious intellectualism.

It didn’t matter that he wasn’t necessarily the cleverest person in the group. A style of combative extremist theory became his lifeline, the vindication of his off-putting appearance. He spoke at length about sexual evolution, about unstoppable changes in society which would lead to heterosexuality, poverty and war becoming obsolete. We were the first wave of a new creation.

There was a certain amount of mismatch between the jaunty acronym of CHAPs and its rather hard-line name, the Cambridge Homosexual Activism Project. It was no secret that the name had been hammered out to justify a desirable set of initials. If anyone had been able to come up with a better name for the group then it would generally have been accepted, as long as the acronym could stay. I thought ‘homophilic’ might do for the H and ‘assimilation’ for the A, but hesitated to make the suggestion. Only Ken liked the austere ring of the name, and would have liked to use it in full on every occasion. There were frivolous elements in the group that sometimes seemed close to sniggering at him.

I had more or less crawled on hands and knees to my first meeting, as to a place of healing or punishment, Lourdes or Golgotha. What I had found, as I gradually realised, was closer to Mum’s sewing circle in Bourne End, although no single stitch was sewn. I suppose it was more of an unpicking circle than a sewing circle. I tell a lie – a few stitches were sewn. I had a Greek tapestry shoulder-bag which I had bought in the market, like a huge external pocket marginally easier for me to rummage through than anything actually attached to my clothes, and a member of the group sewed a discreet lambda onto that.

Thread of exasperated fondness

Our leader Ken seemed to have a nickname, though people were careful not to use it in his hearing. At first I thought it was Sarge, which didn’t seem quite right since his manner, even at its most dogmatic, was more pleading than authoritative. It turned out to be Serge, still puzzling although his earnestness might have seemed a Russian quality.

Finally it was explained to me – Serge meant Blue Serge. The material used to make certain uniforms. Our doctrinal leader had a thing about policemen. This explained a number of references that had been unclear to me, murmurs of ‘Evening all’ and ‘What’s all this, then?’ when Ken turned up or launched into an aria of dialectic.

There was a certain amount of whispering behind the Tonys’ backs also, though their crime wasn’t ideology nor a taste for the constabulary but a more sinister sort of backsliding. George and I had been elected as a couple, we were a couple designed by a committee, while the Tonys were something much more threatening. They were an exclusive couple, exclusively composed of Tonys. Tony sports-jacket and Tony Jesus-sandals. Tony corduroy and Tony denim. Tony economist and Tony piano teacher (ex-organ scholar). I don’t shine at this sort of description. The truth is that I resent having to do it. Why should I sift through the various individuating traits – precise shade of eye colour, stature, mannerisms – to convey a vivid impression when all anyone needs to say to pick me out, apparently, is ‘John’ and then ‘You know, John in a wheelchair.’

The Tonys would sit on the sofa sometimes holding hands, not just one hand each, but doubly grasping, softly squeezing. Theirs was not an open relationship, which might have muted the criticism. Their relationship was air-tight, and no draught of eroticism from outside could flutter its curtains. This counted as degraded imitation of the heterosexual couple, itself degraded, and might easily have led to censure if it wasn’t that the group had nowhere half so convenient to meet.

Never mind that this level of domestic devotion didn’t actually remind us of any heterosexuals we’d ever come across. Certainly nothing I had experienced of the heterosexual tyranny corresponded to what I witnessed between the Tonys. Mum and Dad never held hands or stared into each other’s eyes. Even their neighbours in what seemed better marriages didn’t moon over each other in the slightest bit. They would give the lovey-dovey a wide berth, occupying their separate corners at the Black Lion. It would have been a canny observer who could pick out the couples, following the thread of exasperated fondness to predict who would drive home with whom.

It’s true that there was an irritating element to the Tonys’ togetherness, an unstated refrain of What would have become of me, if I hadn’t found you? We were all aware of it, but our objections were probably not political.

They were houseproud, they made quiche. Quite apart from the fact that men didn’t cook back then, quiche at the time was far from being a cliché, it was something of a showpiece of kitchen skills. Larks’ tongues in aspic would hardly have caused more wonderment. People at meetings stuffed themselves, but still I think the Tonys’ kitchen skills counted against them. Equal rights for sexual minorities and the search for a perfect savoury custard flan were seen, back then, as incompatible goals in life.

Eventually I summoned up the courage to tell the Tonys that their quiche smelled rather good, and was there any chance of their making a vegetarian one every now and then? After that my attendance became devoted. I didn’t want to risk missing one of their meat-free evenings, but didn’t quite have the nerve to phone up in advance to check.

I resolved not to join in the ritual slander of our hosts. The gossipy members tended to be young and flighty, often making little experiments in effeminacy. Ken himself was always talking about revolutionary androgyny, but the idea seemed very theoretical as it emerged from his thick neck. The flibbertigibbets of the group had their own idiosyncratic ideas about defying the patriarchy. Their revolutionary programme involved shop-lifting make-up from Josh Tosh. If there were other aspects I never heard about them.

I’m not a gossip and I don’t enjoy tittle-tattle. It’s not a moral position so much as a physical fact. Having an inflexible neck cuts me off from that whole aspect of the world. Gossip is only a pleasure if you’ve got supple vertebrae. I don’t find it easy to follow the social mechanics of a group. I can’t turn my head to deliver an aside, or catch the fleeting expressions on people’s faces when they think they’re not being observed. Peripheral vision isn’t enough unless you can keep it moving, pouncing on all the giveaway nuances at the edge of events.

An appropriate punishment for gossips might be blinkers or some sort of neck-brace arrangement, inhibiting the flow of information, though the effect might be paranoiac delusions. Certainly if I try to imagine what goes on around me, socially, in any sort of detail, I inevitably imagine people whispering against me. It’s a direct consequence of lack of mobility, and there’s not a lot to be done about it.

If people were considerate enough to arrange themselves in front of me like a group photograph, tallest in the back row or else crouching in the front, looking only at me, not exchanging signals among themselves in any sidelong manner, then I dare say I’d enjoy parties as much as everyone else does. It doesn’t seem a lot to ask. Perhaps we could arrange things on a rota basis – social life the majority way for fifty-five minutes an hour, then everyone adopting their positions at a given signal to arrange things to suit me. I could blow a little whistle. In the meantime, the simplest way for me to be part of a conversation is to rule it.

The sacred fluids are kept in trust

Sometimes there were guest speakers at CHAPs meetings. One was an anthropology graduate who gave a presentation about the very warlike Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea. According to this noble tribe, semen should never be wasted. Even such rituals as rubbing it into one’s hands or capturing it in an old Redoxon bottle would be unacceptable by their standards. These ways of cleaning up would qualify as dirty in their own right.

The student who told us about the Sambia wore a scarf so long that it fell below his knees, despite being coiled twice around his neck. The ends were bedraggled from being trodden on, by his own feet and those of others. He hunched his shoulders and held his elbows back while he spoke, as if he was longing to drive his hands into the pockets his jumper lacked. He was clean-shaven, except for little patches of whiskers high up on his cheekbones. He looked like a woodland creature from an early draft of The Wind in the Willows.

He started off by explaining that among the Sambia the transfer of semen to ladies’ vaginas was extremely limited and hedged about with taboos. The main sexual practice, crucial for the initiation of young males, was fellatio.

When Christians arrived, they were unenthusiastic about this tradition. They regarded the older members of the tribe as beyond help, but succeeded in building a chapel and enticing quite a number of young boys away from the Sambia and into their own curious practices. This process continued to the point where the existence of the tribe itself was in danger.

Our little radical Rat or Mole had our attention by now. He ended by quoting the defiant words of the headman of the Sambia:

‘These Christians are taking away our culture by building a chapel and converting our males.

‘It is a sin for my semen to be wasted. Women can only be approached at prescribed times and in the correct manner.

‘We will never defy our culture and waste our sperm. When the missionaries take our young men away, what are we to do? The only thing we can do after that is make a hole in the ground and go and fuck that when we need to have release. Tell me, is that all they will leave for us?

‘I tell you, these Christians make out they are so god-like. Accordingly to them we are only primitive savages who cannot be saved, but shall I tell you something?

‘One of our boys went over to these Christians and consequently never learned our initiations and our ways. Do you know what? A year or two after he had defected, a girl in that compound was raped … That is unthinkable amongst our peoples. All our women are loved and cherished here. They do not even know what rape is. No atrocity like that happens here. If it were ever committed, the punishment would be death. What is so “civilised” about those people?

‘In our tribe we fully know and understand the way we are made by the gods. If that boy had been here, he would have been initiated into drinking the semen of his elders. When he reached puberty and started to make his own sperm, he would have a younger boy to drink his semen for him, and when the younger boy grew older he would have another boy to service him, and so on. Thus the sacred fluids are kept in trust among our peoples … To this degree we respect the gods and all our wonderful life.’

Despite his diffidence, our guest speaker held us spellbound. Even the ping of the timer on the Tonys’ electric oven, arriving in the middle of the lecture, had no power to break our concentration.

I dare say that like most of the life-changing texts of the 1960s and ’70s – Desiderata (‘Go softly’, and so forth) or the ‘Cree Indian proverb’ (‘Only when the last tree has died and / The last river has been poisoned and / The last fish has been caught, / Will we realise that / We cannot eat money’) – this plea was more or less made up. It doesn’t even matter. The text changes your life not by virtue of being true but because you are ready for the transformation it announces.

In Hall, as the academic year wound down, I heard people talking about their plans for the summer. One person was going to work in a pub in Argyll, another had found work repairing slate roofs on a farm in Cornwall. And what were my plans? Not quite in that class, though ambitious enough in their way. I would be spending the long vacation in the bosom of my family, trying not to choke on the bullying nipple of Mum’s need to look after me despite all protests.

Dancing with eyes averted

There was a rather hectic atmosphere as May Week approached. I had already noticed that students made a point of breaking up their love affairs near the end of a term. A little wave of tears would break over the undergraduate population just before Christmas and Easter, and then the heartbroken would go home to mope with their families, casting a pall on the celebrations. May Week, though (which lasted more than a week and took place in June), was high jilting season, particularly for third-years, many of whom seemed determined to wipe the emotional slate clean before they moved on into the ‘world’ and the next stage of their lives.

I dare say there were a few women who called the shots, but it was more of a female fate in those days to start May Week as the cornerstone of your boyfriend’s existence, and to end it more in the rôle of a stepping-stone, one on which he had wiped his shoes in passing.

Tickets for May Balls were very expensive, since they included food, drink and entertainment from mid-evening till dawn. Many couples had bought tickets well in advance, deposits had been paid for the hire of evening dress, so they went through the festivities despite the fact of rupture. Champagne, Pimm’s No.1 cup, whole roast boar, smoked salmon, all to be endured rather than enjoyed, at a sombre carnival that was like a wake without a body (unless you count the boar). I heard enough accounts of these events to be able to build up a composite picture. Couples would hang on grimly till dawn, dancing with eyes averted, then trudge away from the pleasure-grounds through a tide of plastic glasses and discarded kebabs. Really it was a relief not to be going. I counted my blessings. I don’t like tears and don’t like silences that seethe with reproach.

Not that there was much silence on the night. If the Nasty Thing had survived so long, the ambient vibrations would surely have done it in. I remember a slow blues that seemed to have twelve hundred bars rather than the specified twelve. Sometimes between numbers I could hear a more distant uproar, presumably Pembroke’s Ball or perhaps even Emmanuel’s, according to the dictates of the breeze. Homerton was also a possibility, I suppose, though the Balls at women’s colleges had the reputation of being a little more restrained, even staid. They were rumoured to serve vegetarian food and hire trad jazz bands. These were highly effective passion-killing measures even when imposed separately. In combination they made the successful production and maintenance of an erection, its shepherding to a climax, a practical impossibility.

Finally the echoes of sobbing died away from the courtyards of the golden colleges. Spilt emotion evaporated relatively quickly from ancient flagstones, but for quite a while many undergraduate hearts would feel an affinity with the lawns where marquees had stood, drained to yellowness and marked by the sharp heels of hollow revelry.

I stayed in A6 just as long as I could. I would have loved to convalesce at Mr Johnson’s Home in Bognor, but from health there can be no convalescence. Any other sort of institution might take me in but wasn’t guaranteed to let me out. Finally there was nothing for it but to face the family, with nothing to shield me but a thick sheaf of the strongest prescriptions I could think of, endorsed with the autographs which Flanny distributed so freely.

Peter was away on holiday. He took a train to Inverness and spent the summer hitch-hiking round the Highlands. Audrey was in residence, but we had never really been friends. She was in a state of wildly excited transition, spending most of the time with her best friend Lorraine Leeming. They would walk around with rolled-up tights stuffed into their tops, modelling the soft shapeliness to come. They would shout, ‘What God has forgotten we stuff with cotton!’ then roll on the floor shrieking with laughter, till their makeshift busts were squashed flat.

Looked good in a kaftan

The rest of the time they would write cheques in each other’s favour. Pay Audrey Cromer Two Million Pounds. Pay Lorraine Leeming Two Million Pounds. It was always two. A single million wasn’t enough for these plutocrats in the making. They were too young to have chequebooks so they drew their own from scratch. Freed from the constraints of plausibly representing legal instruments of exchange their cheques grew physically large, sometimes made up of several pieces of cardboard taped together.

The closest thing I had to allies in Bourne End were the Washbournes, Malcolm who shared my spiritual interests and his wife Priscilla who warmly mocked them. ‘Call me Prissie,’ Priscilla said from the first, meaning I suppose that she wasn’t. Wasn’t prissy, that is.

Mum seemed to think that the Washbournes were only trying to be youthful and trendy by being friendly to me, sucking up to the young, as if I was obviously a waste of an older person’s time. I said to Dad once, I don’t think Mum is very keen on the Washbournes, and Dad said, ‘Let’s face it, John, your mother isn’t very keen on anybody.’ Which was true enough but didn’t help in the short term.

The women were different types, and had no use for each other. Everyone always complimented Mum on how thin she was – how did she manage it? What was her secret?

Her secret was not eating. No great mystery. And to Prissie’s eyes Mum was actually too thin, a monument to appetite repressed. ‘You need some meat on your bones, Laura dear,’ she said once, which I think Mum never forgave. In her own eyes, if she wasn’t thin, she wasn’t anything.

Prissie for her part made her mark in the short period, a half-decade perhaps of heyday, when undernourishment was not quite compulsory and the phrase earth mother had an edge of awe rather than disdain. She looked good in a kaftan, the only one I ever saw (in that age of kaftans) who did. She could carry herself.

Prissie lived in bare feet – I don’t know why that way of putting it sounds so strange – though she would reluctantly put on shoes to go to the pub, slipping them off the moment she was ensconced with a drink.

From Mum’s point of view, of course, she was simply obese. I heard her mutter once, ‘That woman! Even her earrings are fat.’ She particularly disapproved of Prissie’s love of going barefoot. Mum seemed to think that shoes were necessary, like moulds for jelly, to stop the feet from spreading. Prissie would find, when she finally acknowledged the need for shoes, that she couldn’t force her feet back inside them.

I would often go out to the pub with the Washbournes. In fact I’d give them a lift. Prissie would be terribly appreciative, saying what a relief it was to be able to drink and not worry, since I was so responsible. She would keep up a running commentary in the car, saying, ‘John, you are miraculous. You must be the best driver in the world, that’s all I can say. I mean, there hasn’t been a peep out of Malcolm all this time’ – perhaps two minutes – ‘but when I’m driving he winces and groans the whole time. And now look at him – he’s blushing. Rather sweet. That must be your doing. I haven’t been able to get a blush out of him for years.’

‘How marvellous,’ she went on, ‘that you can park anywhere you like!’ – since I had the benefit of my parking permit from the council, an orange card with a revolving indicator inside, on which I could show how long I expected to be away from the car.

‘How long do you think we’ll be?’ I asked. ‘Not long,’ said Prissie, ‘we’re just having a drink or two,’ and I told her to set the clock for four hours, just to be on the safe side. The joke of the whole rigmarole being that the Black Lion was only walking distance from home, for them anyway, and there were no restrictions on parking in any case.

The comedy continued inside the pub. Malcolm would install me on one of the high bar stools. I was conserving my funds, which meant I would order water with a dash of lime cordial, costing all of 4p, and nurse it all evening if need be. I’d buy a packet of peanuts for entertainment value. At one time peanuts had been provided free in a dish (a powerful dehydrating agent, and so hardly an unselfish gesture from the management), but people had been seen wrapping some up in a napkin for later, and that was that.

Rather than treating me to round after round, the Washbournes thought it was better sport to encourage me to do my party trick with the peanuts, flicking them into my mouth. Then they’d egg someone on to betting that I couldn’t still do it – and stay on the stool – if I had ‘a proper drink’. In this way I got a certain amount of free alcohol and became discreetly merry. When the second packet of peanuts arrived I might eat them out of Malcolm’s hand, funnelling my lips forward in a delicate trumpet, leaving his hand completely dry. Prissie, drinking her Campari, would say to no one in particular, ‘Really it’s just the other way about, you know. It’s Malcolm who eats out of John’s hand. Almost sinister, but what’s a girl to do?’ She sounded supremely unbothered, but then it took a lot to bother her.

She was affectionate to Malcolm but didn’t in the least defer to him. There was sarcasm there, which he accepted and even seemed to enjoy. He was the breadwinner and she didn’t work, though the description ‘housewife’ didn’t remotely suit her. Their twins Joss and Alex were about to start at a fashionably progressive secondary school, and they had long been encouraged to explore other social contexts, or – as Mum would have it – ‘farmed out’ on the slightest pretext. Prissie was like a rich field lying fallow after her single (double) crop, not in the least beholden or unfulfilled, an earth mother who wasn’t unduly addicted to the presence of her children. She certainly didn’t mother Malcolm. I suppose she mainly mothered herself.

Eventually Prissie Washbourne played a walk-on part in the big drama of that summer, the family crisis which was all about me, though I hardly noticed it at first. When I say that she had a walk-on part, I mean a little more than that. She walked up the drive, she knocked on the French windows and she shouted a bit, refusing to go away. But her appearance on the scene, her splendid interference, made everything move up a gear and become more colourful, positively psychedelic in its emotional hues.

Dimly I had noticed that Mum and Dad were having one of their rows, which could simmer on for days. I also registered that every now and then they would seem to address me as much as each other. In some strange way they seemed to take it in turns to badger me. Could this really be happening? It was unlike them to coöperate so smoothly on any enterprise. I wondered vaguely what it was all about. Sometimes, of course, they sent messages to each other through me, bouncing messages off my bonce like schoolboys flicking paper pellets. I let them get on with it.

I had the good sense to absent myself mentally. There’s some debate about whether you should have your eyes open or closed when you’re meditating. It’s a question that often came up among Bhagavan’s adherents and disciples. His answer was that it didn’t matter – should you even know whether your eyes are open or not? That’s just the sort of Western binary opposition that Bhagavan is so good at dissolving.

As if the phone could detect movement

Who is that wants to know? Trace that impostor to his lair. Is it even fair to describe your eyes as ‘open’ when they are absorbing the infinite deceptive variety of Maya, and ‘closed’ when you are perceiving the world in its reality?

Still, it seems very likely that during those days at home a lot of my meditating was done behind open eyes. Even when I wasn’t meditating my attention wasn’t completely attuned to the externals. Whenever I drifted back into my alleged body and took up the reins of mundane vision things looked very much the same. Mum and Dad might have changed places, but they were still taking turns to badger me. The sun might have moved round a fraction, the shadows might fall a little differently, but really that was all.

At one point the pot plant on the table seemed to blossom with a sudden movement, almost a lunge. The great red trumpets of its blooms seemed abruptly larger and more lustrous, which suggested that I had dropped a stitch, or even a whole row, in my knitting together of time and space. The plant itself had featured in earlier disputes between Mum and Dad, with her calling it an amaryllis and him insisting it was technically a Hippeastrum. Mum said he was being ‘predantic’, a mistake which set Dad off on a fresh bout of correction. I’m my father’s son in these matters, which is no doubt why I chose Mum’s womb, wanting to be brought up in a properly pedantic environment, among precise taxonomies and word-use sanctioned by dictionary. I vote for Hippeastrum.

I seemed to have regressed, to the point of needing to be taken to the loo, though it had been second nature for me to manage by myself for years. Mum would escort me and wait in the background while I performed, but there was a sort of truce until she pushed me back into the sitting room. Then it would start all over again – whatever it was.

I knew that there had been a knocking at the door earlier on, and even that it had gone on for some time, while Mum and Dad stopped talking and more or less stayed rigidly in their places. I even knew that the phone had rung a few times, and that Mum and Dad hadn’t answered it. Again they had stopped talking and stayed frozen where they were, as if the phone could detect movement even without being picked up. Then they started right up again the moment it stopped ringing.

I was being asked a lot of questions, or else being asked the same question many times, in slightly different forms. In the course of my engagement with the vichara, the self-enquiry, I’d decided that if you were a non-dualist, resisting the division of reality into This and That, body and soul, real and unreal, then it followed that you couldn’t answer any questions that were put to you, which always rested on assumptions of that kind. I’d read in a book the suggestion that when confronted with a false set of alternatives, you should reply simply ‘Mu’, meaning ‘Your question cannot be meaningfully answered, since it is the product of a misconception. Please examine your premises afresh.’

So when Mum said, ‘Is it your bag or not, John? We need to know,’ I giggled and answered ‘Mu.’

The giggle was there because when anyone of my generation, however estranged from the groovy, asked if something was your bag, it meant ‘Do you like it?’ Is Acid Rock your bag? Is Buddenbrooks your bag? Is the vichara your bag? From my point of view the vichara was the bag in which all other bags could be stored without taking up any room.

The vichara – the only question. Who am I? (Who is it that asks this?) I understood now why I had gone to see The Who in Slough and not some other group. I needed to devote myself to the question of The Who.

And when Dad said, ‘It’s a simple enough question, John. Don’t be mulish. For the last time, is it your bag?’ – the giggle was no longer a temptation but the answer was still Mu. With another annoying giggle because saying Mu got me called Mulish.

At some stage Mum asked me what I wanted for supper, as if this was an ordinary day, which it obviously wasn’t. She put the question in an exasperated voice, admittedly, but that wasn’t such a rare event. And perhaps this time I didn’t answer ‘Mu’, because she said, ‘Better not have eggs again, John, you know how binding they are.’ Om Mane Padme Om. Om Mane Padme Om-pa-pah. I kept losing the thread of my threadlessness, my immersion in blissful absence. I wished Mum and Dad would let me be. I wish they’d let me Be.

‘If it’s your bag, John, then what’s in it is also yours, isn’t it?’ Mu – Mu – Mu. ‘That’s only logical.’ Exactly. Logic based on false premises can only generate nonsense.

Everything happened that day in stages which didn’t quite follow on from what had gone before. They were like reels from different films. I wondered idly if Bhagavan had ever used that analogy. Or they were like different versions of the same scene, not properly edited for continuity.

At some stage Audrey came back from a friend’s birthday party. A twelfth birthday, I expect. We heard her being dropped off in the drive, saying her goodbyes and thank-yous as nicely as Mum could wish. As she let herself in, Mum and Dad greeted her with ‘Nice party, dear?’ Anyone could tell that they weren’t really interested, they were only marking time. They were waiting for her to go to her room, so that they could carry on whatever business was being transacted where I was.

Reels that don’t match

Audrey didn’t go to her room just yet. She went into the kitchen, and then she came to have a little chat with me. Meanwhile Mum and Dad busied themselves nonsensically. Mum started picking up magazines and putting them away in the rack where they lived. The moment she had finished, Dad started searching through it, as if suddenly he couldn’t live without reading a particular article. Mum made one of her many noises of exasperation and went over to fiddle with the telephone. It vexed her that the cord was always getting snarled up – she thought that Dad gave the receiver a half-turn when he answered the phone, and another half-turn in the same direction when he returned it to its cradle. She blamed him for charging the cord with kinks, even if she could never catch him at it. She knew full well that at her mother’s house the flex wouldn’t dare to stray from its spiral.

I roused myself a little and agreed to participate in the illusion of time, out of politeness to Audrey, but strictly on a trial basis. She was wearing a purple party dress, and had been allowed to put on nail polish. Her movements were smooth and assured. Quite a little pile of books, placed on her head, would have stayed there safely in balance.

I hardly recognised her. I had missed a few stages. Of course I hadn’t been paying much attention, to her or to anyone else at that address. In any case girls between about eleven and sixteen always resemble films like the one I seemed to be in, made up of reels that don’t match. The genre switches from fairy tale to love story, and sometimes to horror movie. A world of princes and ponies can suddenly be filled with screaming banshees.

I remembered that in the past she had hated party games, and asked if there had been any.

‘A few specially horrible ones,’ she said over her shoulder as she went to the kitchen.

‘None that involved kissing, I hope?’ She made an odd stylised sound, which I took a few seconds to understand without benefit of visual clues. I imagine she was miming a retch, with or without the embellishment of a finger pointing down her throat, though the whole display was as far removed from what it represented, human emesis, as something in classical Japanese drama.

Actually she sounded less disgusted than she would have done the previous year. She was going through the motions a little bit. It wouldn’t be all that long before the kissing games were the only ones that interested her. I imagined she would play them as ruthlessly as she did all the others.

‘Sally’s mum made her invite all the boys from our class,’ she said, ‘but only three of them came.’ I could hear the clatter of a plate. ‘The really pathetic ones.’

Audrey was reading from her own little script while Mum and Dad took a reluctant break from their interrogation of me. The noises from the kitchen continued as she went about some mysterious domestic business. There was the sound of her pushing a chair against the kitchen counter so she could reach something from a high cupboard. Then I heard a familiar scrape as she pulled a particular tray out from beside the fridge, where it lived.

When she came into the sitting room, she was carrying a tray of treats for me. She had taken her party trophy, a slice of chocolate cake, and cut it into cubes, pushing a cocktail stick into each cube. It must have been the little box of cocktail sticks which was kept in the high cupbard. She set down the tray in front of me, where it rested snugly across the side-pieces of the wheelchair. All this was done with the grace of a hostess rather than the conflicted sweetness of a sister. She was growing up.

She was playing a part, of course, but so were Mum and Dad, and at the moment I preferred Audrey’s.

As she came out of the kitchen with her tray of cubed cake, I saw her in a new light, despite the Mayan darkness of that afternoon. As she moved through the sitting room to the wheelchair, threading her way through the distortions of family life in her party dress, bearing her tray of John-adapted cake, I began to think for the first time that perhaps she had known, better than any of us, what she was doing when she chose the womb. Perhaps she would pick her way through everything that was wrong and out of kilter with the family. The gala purple nail-polish lent her gestures a self-conscious overtone – a finishing-school or ladies’-academy touch. She looked like the serene housewife in a television advert serving canapés to her guests. Her hands were going before her into adulthood. They were leading the way. Their movements were taking on the sophistication of things practised in front of the mirror, time after time, until they were effortless.

She gave me a smile which changed in mid-flight, becoming gravely enchanting, an expression with two distinct phases like a two-stage rocket – as if an air hostess had suddenly thought of Grace Kelly. She was growing up more or less as I watched.

My mouth was dry. My lips were sticky as I tried to mumble the chunks of cake. Audrey fetched me a glass of water and then, great refinement of refreshment, a damp flannel. She wiped my mouth with it.

Lemon juice in her eye

I don’t mean to idealise Audrey’s performance too much. She knew perfectly well that Mum didn’t want her around, though she can’t have had much clue about the interrogation that was taking place (I certainly didn’t). Audrey was giving comfort to the accused in a way that was guaranteed to cause irritation.

Mum said, ‘Audrey, your room is like a pigsty. You promised me you’d tidy it up the moment you got in from your party, remember? Now’s the time.’ Audrey said, ‘Yes, Mum,’ very demurely, but she gave me a wink. I think it was a wink – she hadn’t quite got the knack as yet, not quite in control of the facial machinery, so it was a rather wild spasm and she looked as if she’d got some lemon juice in her eye.

My habit was to hoard my various tablets in term-time so I had plenty when I went home. Alertness seemed a waste of time at that address. To be compos mentis was a mug’s game, or so I thought, and exposes you to all sorts of nonsense. Well, yes, but the same is true of a medicated doze.

Audrey went upstairs to her room at last. She put a record on the record-player and played it eleven times in a row. It was David Bowie’s maddeningly catchy and childlike ‘Starman’. She was playing it louder than she was allowed, but I fancy she had a canny sense of the disruption in the household, and what it enabled her to get away with.

Or she may simply have been trying to blot us all out, or even sending a message to the starman in the song, who was supposed to be waiting in the sky after all, to say that she needed immediate rescue. The last record she had played so many times on the trot had been ‘When You Wish upon a Star’. Or perhaps ‘Would You Like to Swing on a Star?’ I see now that the star theme was a constant.

The interrogation began again. The bust-up of summer 1972 was about what all proper family rows are about – sex and drugs. In that respect it was exemplary. And still Mum and Dad got completely the wrong end of the stick. They could have got the wrong end of a marble. They were going by what they had found in my Greek tapestry shoulder-bag, with its discreet embroidered lambda, hanging invitingly from the handles of the wheelchair, not what they would have learned if they’d talked to me.

They thought I was on dope, simply because they had found a couple of roaches in the tapestry shoulder-bag. Pitiful stubs of joints long gone. Fossils – antiques. They should have been in the Fitzwilliam Museum, properly docketed: Marijuana leavings of the Unknown Student, early 1970s. Private collection. My collection, though, was no longer private.

Mum and Dad wanted to know how long I’d been using reefers. The demon weed, wrecker of young lives, bringer to its knees of the undergraduate brain. Cannabis sativa, a plant I respect for its hardiness, but not one that has ever done much for my consciousness.

They didn’t actually bother to ask if the joints had anything to do with me. Even a policeman would have done that, just for form’s sake. Mum and Dad jumped to conclusions instead. They jumped to their own confusions.

They really were the leavings of the Unknown Student, if he (conceivably she) was even a student. How much control did I have over the Greek tapestry shoulder-bag, really? It was anything but a private preserve. Friends thought nothing of using it as a communal asset, a shared pocket, even a portable dustbin. What were their reasons? Laziness, disorganisation, reluctance to spoil the line of their trousers by putting things in pockets of their own. So there was nothing unusual about people slipping their joints into my bag for safe-keeping, or their roaches for eventual disposal (which of course they never got round to).

If I had no control over what went inside the bag, the same was true of what went on it. Members of CHAPs who lost their nerve in mixed company, for instance, would slyly pin their more confronta-tional badges to its unprotesting weave. After a while it was almost armour-plated with revolutionary slogans, GAY IS GOOD, SAPPHO WAS A RIGHT-ON WOMAN and, more mysteriously, THE ENGLISH THINK LIBERTY IS A SHOP ON REGENT STREET.

I hadn’t much enjoyed my bag becoming a dumping-ground for the flotsam of the counter-culture. I particularly resented the one that said HOW DARE YOU ASSUME I’M HETEROSEXUAL? being transferred from the denim of my colleagues to the faintly stinky wool of my bag. In common with the world at large, no one in the CHAPs revolutionary echelon assumed I was sexual in any way whatever. That was one issue of exclusion that was never going to be freely discussed and worked through in our little independent forum on Glisson Road. No one ever asked about my erotic past, or imagined that I might run to such a thing as a present, perhaps even a future.

The pin fastenings on the backs of the badges were well beyond my powers to undo. When I arrived home for the summer it was a priority to have them removed, but Peter, the obvious choice of helper, had already left on his travels. I had to draft Audrey in for the job, though I wondered what she made of the slogans. She didn’t need telling that this was something to be kept quiet. That didn’t worry her – she liked a secret, did Audrey.

Looking back, of course, I would have done well to ask her to sanitise the contents of the bag as well, but I hadn’t realised there was anything in the bag that might cause embarrassment. I had forgotten my lack of privacy, on two fronts. It didn’t occur to me that Mum and Dad would search through my reticule with their prehensile digits, screeching and tut-tutting as they went, like moralising spider-monkeys.

‘Are you on drugs, John?’

Mu. ‘Just tell us. We want to help.’

Mind your own Mu.

‘Are you on drugs?’

Well, of course I was on drugs. Ask a silly question! The only question was what kind. I had steered clear of hallucinogens since my trip to the Salley gardens, and I wouldn’t have considered indulging without Peter there to lean on. But I was self-medicating as if there was no tomorrow. I was self-medicating because there was a tomorrow, and I wanted to take a short cut, avoiding today, even if tomorrow turned out to be no better. There was always the day after tomorrow, and the day after that.

The black dot marks the tree line

I had learned my lesson from Write Off Tuesday, to the point where I was able to write off whole clumps of days, and all without a drop of liquor passing my lips. Everything that was entering my system was legitimate and prescribed, but those are judgements which are subject to revision, and in any case, legitimate and prescribed can be very different from sane and sensible.

When Flanny first took charge of me she put me on mefenamic acid, trade name Ponstan. It’s a member of the aspirin family – call it the family’s rich eccentric uncle. She also tried me on Doloxene, which is the trade name for dextropropoxyphene. That was all very well for a while, but then I was in the market for something stronger. So she moved me up to Fortral (pentazocine), which has been a controlled drug for ages now but wasn’t then. In that innocent time there was no warning black dot against such things in MIMS, meaning ‘restricted’. It had an unblemished reputation. It was freely prescribed, and no one ever said it wasn’t good at its job.

In those days the MIMS was very straightforward about side-effects. It didn’t hesitate to spell them out. The Monthly Index was lagging behind the times. There were a good few toxicomanes out there (apart from me) for whom the desired effects were only part of the story.

These days the MIMS is very cagey about (for instance) hallucinations, for fear of tipping the wink to people who are actively seeking them out, homing in on the extras and indifferent to the main thrust of the drug. One man’s poison is another man’s meat. One man’s sideeffect is another man’s illicit buzz.

These were perhaps no longer the nursery slopes of analgesia, more like the middling pistes, but still far below the dizzy peaks of Mount Morphine. The black dot in MIMS marks the tree line, if you like, the point where the chill becomes permanent and life approaches the point of no return.

If the phrase ‘a cocktail of drugs’ had been invented by this time, I hadn’t heard it, but I was already a dab hand with the shaker. While I was playing doctor with myself in this wholly irresponsible fashion Audrey would sometimes pester me to let her play nurse. She was a good girl. She wanted to help. In fact earlier in the day I had let her help me get my tablets out of their bottles.

Medicine bottles weren’t childproof in those days, they were only John-proof. My hands can’t easily deal with any assignment much more challenging that manipulating a snapdragon. Pressing the cheeks of the flower, making its jaws close and then open again. That’s my style. Audrey helped me to line up the numerous antidotes to the day, Maya’s little cancellations of herself. Her expression was solemn and eager, as if she was concentrating on a tricky exam question.

There was a mocking symmetry about the whole operation, all the same. Maya was having fun at my expense. In the past I had dosed Audrey, when she was a fractious child, with hundreds and thousands, sorted by colour and consequently charged with magical power. Now she was lining up the medication for me in her turn. The drugs weren’t sweeties any more, though I was wolfing them down no differently. I was treating the medicine cupboard, lavishly stocked from the local pharmacy, as if it was the Pick’n’Mix counter at Woolworths.

Analgesics kill pain, and any excess of such drugs performs a function that can be every bit as valuable, mopping up consciousness, promoting oblivion. By this stage I couldn’t honestly have said which part of its operations was the more precious to me, suspension of joint pain or of the poisonous boredom of home.

My drug use could slide in a single dose from the medical to the slyly recreational. In terms of pain I had my good days and my bad days. That summer I preferred the bad days. On my bad days I could gobble down the hundreds and thousands of nothingness with a clear conscience.

A great advantage of the wheelchair was that it masked many of the effects. If my movements were poorly coördinated, who would ever know? Not everyone expected prodigies of mental alertness from me either. At home with Mum and Dad, ritual exchanges were the norm. I could fit in perfectly well while being, to be blunt about it, off my head half the time.

So much for drugs. There was also a sex-scandal component to the family bust-up of summer ’72, and again it had its origins in the tapestry shoulder-bag. That bag grassed me up pretty thoroughly. It provided the authorities with evidence of more than one kind. There were any number of occasions in which my CHAPs acquaintances could have availed themselves of the convenient storage I innocently provided. Josh Tosh had entrances on more than one street, and could be used as a short cut. This short cut would inevitably turn into a long one, since we would end up dawdling by the perfume counter to try out fragrances from sample spray bottles. If I tried to hurry the party up, I too would receive squirts of clashing fragrances, asked which I liked best. There was sometimes a certain amount of rummaging in my bag, which meant that I was being used as a sort of mule in a narcissistic, mercifully small-scale shoplifting operation, smuggling an expensive bottle of Eau Sauvage or some such elixir past the gates of the shop and into the street.

A stray copy of Nigel

There was no cologne forgotten in the Greek tapestry shoulderbag, but it turned out to contain, along with the ancient roaches, a magazine. It was a picture magazine, and the pictures were of young men arranged in dreamy poses on piles of cushions, wearing socks and not a lot else. Looking sultry, if thumb-sucking strikes you as a maddening come-on. Some CHAPs fellow or other, some friend of a friend of a friend, had slipped this tentative smut into the community pocket and forgotten to retrieve it. So there I was, delivered into my parents’ hysteria by a stray copy of Nigel. Or was it Rupert?

I can remember only too well. It was Jeremy. Mum brandished it at me often enough, waving it in my face as if she was a street-hawker trying to get me to buy the bloody thing rather than a mother losing her always elusive sense of proportion. ‘Where did you get this? Who else knows about it? Who sold you the drugs? Who sold you this filth?’

I wasn’t going to admit to them that the magazine wasn’t mine. I refused to be ashamed. Of course it was stupid that Mum and Dad would think I had a secret life based round those insipid images. If I was going to overcome all the practical obstacles in the way of getting hold of a dirty magazine, I’d want something properly vile for my trouble. And someone who looked as if he’d been shaving for more than a week. Mum and Dad were both angry and upset, but through the chinks in the oblivion I had so patiently contrived for myself I could detect a complicating emotion. In some way Mum was partly blaming him for the rotten way I was turning out.

Once again the Inquisition was on the wrong track. If Mum and Dad had wanted a sex scandal, they could have had one, and it would have been a little bit spicier than a few pictures of dreary ephebes languid on the pillows. I’d broken the law in a public toilet on the A505 outside Royston, on the way home from Cambridge. It wasn’t a private place, and still I had dared to have carnal congress with another man. No one had interrupted us, so my exhibitionistic streak was mildly frustrated. I wanted to shout out to the shocked air of Trees, Abbotsbrook Estate, Bourne End, ‘It only lasted a few minutes and it happened in a public bog, but it was bloody beautiful!’ Knowing that the words ‘bog’ and ‘bloody’ would have as much impact as the deed itself.

The man who was my first real sexual partner said something wonderful to me. It wasn’t wonderful in a conventional way. He didn’t say, for instance, ‘People fear you and turn away from you, yes, and they are right to do so, since love flows in implacable streams from your eyes and loins alike. Your gaze and your desire pierce the fogs of matter. You must forgive people for feeling inadequate to such splendour.’ What he said was a thousand times better. He said, ‘If anyone comes in, I’m helping you out, okay, mate?’ Mate! We mated and he called me mate. He certainly was helping me out, though no one disturbed us so I couldn’t pass this revelation on. He was helping me out and no mistake. Afterwards he helped me to wash my hands. I let him, though I didn’t feel the need of any cleaning up. I didn’t feel soiled. I felt elevated, charged up. This too I would have liked to pass on to Mum and Dad, not in a spirit of boasting, but humbly wishing to share.

About the time that even the most ardent fan of androgynous pop might have been becoming sick of ‘Starman’, Maya took a surprising turn. The scene that I was absorbing through drifts of medicated meditation suddenly shifted in a way that made me sit up and take notice.

My dud of a mantra froze in mid-repetition. It had never been a really effective transcendental tool since India – it had developed a slow puncture, but now it just went phut. Prissie Washbourne was shouting through the French windows, ‘Laura? Dennis? Is John all right? I’d like to see him, please.’ She wasn’t shouting out of rudeness, but because the music from Audrey’s room was so loud.

Mum went to the windows to block any possible view into the room, and called out sharply through the French windows, ‘He’s fine,’ adding in an undertone, ‘Though I can’t see that it’s any of your business.’ Perhaps it occurred to her that Prissie might have heard this comment, despite the lowering of her voice. She sang out more sweetly, ‘Prissie dear, why don’t you come to tea tomorrow? Or at the weekend?’ Upstairs, Audrey must have realised that something out of the ordinary was happening. She took the needle off the record at last, and the sudden silence made the adults self-conscious.

Prissie carried it off well, though. Her voice was firm as she said, ‘I’d like to see John now, Laura. I’d like to know what has happened to him. In fact I think I’ll just sit here on the lawn until I’m satisfied he’s all right.’ At this point Dad cantered to the French windows and roared, ‘Go away! You’re not wanted here!’ through the gap. Then he slammed the windows and locked them.

He and Mum bundled me out of the room, charging into my bedroom with the wheelchair, then hauling me roughly out of it and laying me on the bed. They seemed possessed. The arrival of an external threat intensified the sinister impression of teamwork. It didn’t seem right that they were working so smoothly together. It was unprecedented. The soothing deadlock of their marriage had been violently broken, and the combination of drug scandal, sexual delinquency and an interfering neighbour had turned them into pantomime villains.

They actually hissed ‘We’ll deal with you later’, before they rushed back to the sitting room. If the railway track had been any nearer I dare say they would have tied me to it. Perhaps they were saving that for later. I could hear them opening up the French windows again to shout at Prissie. Then the needle returned to its groove upstairs and David Bowie took up his invocations of the starman in the sky all over again.

As I lay on the bed I tried to grasp what was happening, working from first principles. For Prissie to intervene so forcefully she must have grounds for worry. So how long had it been since I had left the house? Prissie wasn’t the hysterical type, and she wasn’t used to seeing me every day. This pointed to a long absence from the world. Had I been indoors being harangued for days on end, while I wrapped myself in the shawl of my drug use and the tatters of my mantra, trying ineffectively to concentrate on the blooming pangs of an amaryllida-ceous plant?

Calligraphy in the sky

It was only then that it occurred to me that I might have been held hostage for quite a few days. This nuance of life in Bourne End might have escaped me, disguised by a madness that had become familiar.

While the shouting continued, ‘Starman’ maintained its monopoly of the turntable, but Audrey came downstairs to find me. If it was Audrey. It seemed not to be wholly Audrey. The girl who had geometrically modified some left-over party cake for my benefit was already somewhat different from the girl I was used to, but the one who came into my room was different again. She was determined and full of purpose. Her purpose was to help me escape. She would help me get to the garage and into the car.

I can’t explain the change in her, except in terms of the song she’d been playing so loudly upstairs. Not the song in itself but the message that rode on those frequencies, the signal below the signal. Ramana Maharshi had exerted himself once again for my benefit. The guru acts with obliquity and tact, and Bhagavan’s miracles in his lifetime were always discreet. They didn’t draw attention to themselves but shaded in with their surroundings. If there was a storm, for instance, and anxious devotees asked when it would stop, Bhagavan didn’t go out and shout down the elements in the style of certain spiritual showmen (such as Sai Baba, a holy man with a streak of ham a mile wide), he would just say, ‘I think it’s clearing up now,’ as anybody might, but those who were waiting to embark on journeys could pick up their luggage with confidence. The magic of the smallest intervention – homœopathy all over again.

The reason for this is actually expressed in the lyric of ‘Starman’: a personage from another dimension would like to meet us but he thinks he’d blow our minds. A very elegant exposition of the guru’s polite use of a screen, a filter to protect us from rays too strong. When he was communicating with me in one of my dark times at Cambridge, the guru had tenderly ventriloquised Kafka. Now, with Audrey as his instrument, he was vibrating in sympathy with the voice of David Bowie, singing from the inmost marrow of the song, the core, where neither writer nor performer had ever been.

I tried to gather my wits. I asked her how long I’d been stuck inside the house, but all she said was ‘Far too long. It’s time we got you out of here.’

Before I could ask her to be more specific (had it been three days? more?), she had picked me up and carried me to the garage. She didn’t look strong, but she managed. The last time I could remember her trying to pick me up was when she was about five. She had gone through a phase of wanting to lift me because she saw Peter doing it (very put out when she was told she was too young). Now she had her moment of heroic porterage – for a few steps, and then our mode of motion became the conjoined stagger-hobble.

It would have been easier for us to take the wheelchair, but Audrey seemed to know exactly what she was doing. It’s more common for the guru to speak through a person than physically to take over, but perhaps that’s what was happening. It’s true that Audrey was soon breathing heavily and making little grunts of effort, but the presence of the guru is also a great strain on the organism that houses it.

I prayed fervently that Mum and Dad would keep on bawling at Prissie, and that she went on answering back. If the showdown played out too quickly they would see that I was gone and intercept me double quick. I thought that Prissie’s earth-mother persistence, once roused, would see me right. Failing that, I prayed that Mum would wail, ‘I’m at my wits’ end’ and rush upstairs. The stair carpet was worn thin by the scuffing of hysterical feet.

Audrey helped me out of the kitchen by the rear door and round the side of the house. There was a side-door there leading to the garage. Of course there were stops along the way for changes of grip. She had to prop me up against the wall while she opened the back door, and again when we came to the garage. One more time when she opened the door of the car. But the moment we were in was so concentrated that everything seemed to happen in a single breath. To me that’s supporting evidence for this being actual intervention – not to minimise Audrey’s bravery and desire to help. Godhead itself is content to take the line of least resistance. Even Sai Baba didn’t make the lightning do calligraphy in the sky or dance in lazy loops. He worked in the grain of the wood.

In normal life Audrey wasn’t afraid of the garage, but she was certainly afraid of the creatures that lived there. Spiders. Never before had she been so blithely indifferent to the presence of arachnid arthropods. Proof positive, as far as I’m concerned, that she wasn’t at the controls. She was growing up fast, but it’s a slow business overcoming phobias or (more likely) becoming more skilled at hiding them, better at coming up with cover stories.

Audrey slipped me smoothly into the blessed Mini and whispered, ‘Good luck, Godspeed.’ Except it wasn’t going to be quite as simple as that. I had to break it to her that I didn’t have the car keys. They would be on the hall table, where Mum put them in her periodic fits of confiscation.

The car keys were one of our little battlegrounds, cause of many a tussle. I liked to leave them in the ignition of the Mini in the unlocked garage, but she was all against it. I reminded her that she was always saying that one of the reasons we had moved to the Abbotsbrook Estate was that it was safe from thieves – unlike the long-ago married quarters they had lived in when I was a baby, where her wedding-ring had been stolen from the sink where she had been doing the washing-up when she looked in on me for five seconds to make sure I was all right …

Mum said that leaving the keys in the car was asking for trouble, but how was it any riskier than Peter and me sleeping with the door open? Not that I said so, for fear that she would act against that privilege also, in the name of consistency.

So the hall table was where the keys would be, and Audrey must go back for them. She swallowed once or twice at that, but she was still game and guru-guided. For the two short minutes she was away, I tried the worn-out syllables of Om Mane Padme Om one more time, but they did nothing to slow my racing heartbeat. My mantra was like a tyre worn smooth. It had no grip. Really, I would have done just as well with ‘Starman’, or indeed ‘When You Wish upon a Star’.

Contrary to Dad’s precept in his guise as my driving instructor, I hadn’t backed the Mini in. I had been lazy and would have to take the consequences. I was facing the rear wall of the garage. I would have to back my way out. This would be a type of manœuvre that doesn’t feature in any driving test that I know of – the emergency start.

Audrey was frankly panting when she came back from the house. She’d been running. She thrust the keys into my hands. ‘Hurry up,’ she wailed. ‘They saw me. Go! Go now! They’re going mad in there …’ I had the sense that things had returned to normal. The divine whisper had said what it had to say, and we were on our own now. At any moment Audrey’s eyes might slide towards the dark corners of the garage and she would start to hug herself nervously.

That was when we heard the gravel smartly crunching, and Dad closed the garage door. I could see his sports jacket in the mirror of the Mini, the triangle of neat hanky in his breast pocket, before the daylight was cut off. Of course it hadn’t been very bright inside the garage before, but the sudden darkness made Audrey whimper. I started the engine, blessing the general reliability of Maestro Issigoni’s economical masterpiece, and switched on the headlights. Audrey wasn’t comforted by the brightness. It made her cower in a corner of the garage. The divine wind which had filled her sails had well and truly blown itself out. I shouted ‘WATCH YOURSELVES OUTSIDE!’ as loud as I could over the sound of the engine and waited five seconds, as timed by two breakneck Om-Mane-Padme-Oms, so that Mum and Dad at least had time to act on the warning. Then I found reverse and backed out of the garage.

Warmed his astral cockles

I didn’t smash the doors open, but of course ‘John nudged the garage doors open at quite a speed’ has as little prospect of finding an ecological niche in family history as ‘John nearly scorched the greenhouse.’ John smashed, John burned – that’s the official version.

I admit that the doors swung open pretty briskly. I was far more afraid of losing momentum than of doing damage to fixtures and fittings. The doors swung open as far as the hinges allowed then rebounded. As they closed again, they feebly retaliated for the initial impact by scraping the sides of the Mini. Between the first and second impacts I had a glimpse in the mirror of Mum and Dad reeling backwards. Rage was still ruling Dad’s facial muscles, but Mum’s expression held a sort of agony of worry. It was too late to build on that.

I had always coveted the ability to slam a door at the climax of an argument, and now I had my wish. It’s true I slammed the garage doors open rather than shut, but that’s a technicality. It was well worth waiting for. The noise was marvellous.

In the exhilaration of the moment, the terrible longed-for moment of breaking with my family, I did the finest three-point turn of my driving career. It was textbook. It would have cheered the shade of John Griffiths himself, patron saint of the disabled driver. Not the ghost of a graze on the garden gate or posts. It would have warmed his astral cockles.

As I turned the car I could see Audrey slinking out of the garage and back to the house. Mum and Dad kept pace with the Mini but didn’t get too close, as if they were trying to herd some unfamiliar beast back to its cage, not sure whether it would actually charge them. As I came round the side of the house I saw that Prissie was still sitting on the lawn. She stood up and brushed the grass stems off herself, smiling at me incredulously. I stopped the car by her. The passenger door wasn’t properly closed, so I was able to push it open with my stick. As I did so I barked, yes I barked a magnificent cliché out of the window. I had earned it. I for whom drawing the curtains in the morning was quite an enterprise had taken part in a scene of action. There had been shouting, threats, divine intervention and a getaway car. I had also, whether or not Dad noticed, performed a driving manœuvre that would have met his highest standards.

I barked: ‘Let’s get out of this madhouse, Prissie!’ No guru was needed to give the script any polishing at that point. Of course Prissie lived only down the road, she came on foot and could have left the same way, but she scrambled in, sitting awkwardly on my cane and gleefully shouting ‘Fuck, what fun!’, and we were off.

I’d have had a go at spinning my wheels and giving the gravel a good scatter if I hadn’t been afraid of spoiling our exit by stalling or running the Mini into a wall.

Suddenly Prissie said, ‘Stop, John! Stop the car!’

‘I’m not going back there, Prissie,’ I said grimly.

‘Of course you’re not. Better stop now, all the same.’

Turning round to observe the Cromers frozen in their tableau of conflict, she had seen Audrey running after us, pushing the wheelchair. Clever girl! I wouldn’t have managed very well with that particular hostage left in enemy hands.

I don’t have enough experience of intensely dramatic scenes to know if anti-climax always comes along for the ride. Perhaps Mum shared my feeling, and did what she could with the modest resources at her disposal to keep the emotional temperature high. She threw one of her shoes at us. I’m not sure if it had slipped off her foot or if she had taken it off expressly. It was one of those funny summer shoes with rope soles. Mum had displaced all her griefs and furies onto the flinging of an espadrille. In my memory of that afternoon it bears the perfume of solar amber as it describes its modest arc from Mum’s infuriated hand, the Ambre Solaire sun-cream she rubbed into herself while she basked in the filtered sunshine of the conservatory.

When Audrey had caught up with us, I said to Prissie, ‘Can’t we take her with us?’

‘Not unless you want to see me in jail.’ I knew she was right, but it was important that she said it out loud. I wanted Audrey to understand that my hands were tied. I couldn’t return the favour of rescue.

Prissie got out and loaded the chair in the boot, leaving us to say our goodbyes. I might not see Audrey again until she came of age and could make her own decisions. When there’s a decade’s worth of age-gap between siblings, conversation doesn’t often run smoothly. She looked now like a tired and frightened child. I wondered how much she remembered of what had gone on in the last fifteen minutes, hoping that there would be some balm left behind by the guru when he departed. It wouldn’t be fair if she suffered after-shocks of intervention.

Then I realised that I had been given a cue, the same cue as hers, and from the same benign source. Ramana Maharshi’s influence persisted like the Cheshire Cat’s discarnate smile. This was the twinkle without the guru, the starman remotely beaming.

‘Let the children use it …’ I said gently. ‘Let the children lose it …’

I waited for her to finish the refrain. Her eyes went very wide, so that she seemed to be regressing after so much precocious growing-up. ‘Let … all the children boogie?’ she said at last, with an upward intonation, as if after all those listenings she still wasn’t sure of the words.

If Prissie had second thoughts about being the catalyst of my freedom, she didn’t admit it on the (ridiculously short) drive to her house. I asked, ‘Will Malcolm mind if I stay at your house for a night or two?’

‘Stay as long as you like,’ she said. ‘He’ll be thrilled.’ This hardly seemed possible, though she didn’t seem to be joking. With her I never quite knew. ‘He’s always saying he needs someone to talk to. Listen, John, do you love your mother very much?’

I did my best to be honest. ‘I try not to.’

A suitably plumbed bolt-hole

‘I think that’s sensible. Best to get along without her. She doesn’t really want you to have a life of your own.’ It was shocking to hear something like that, something I had come to believe, stated so calmly by someone outside the family. ‘I do feel sorry for Laura,’ Prissie went on, ‘but she doesn’t own you and she shouldn’t try. I’ve learned the hard way with the twins – your children are not your children, and all that – they are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. Kahlil Gibran, you know. Preachy stuff and no mistake, but Malcolm adores it. So be warned. If you get him started on the glories of The Prophet I’ll phone Laura to come and pick you up. Understood?’

I thought I could abide by this condition of residence. When we got in, Prissie couldn’t wait to get unshod. She had been wearing stout walking shoes which looked particularly wrong on someone almost caricaturally free-spirited. I imagine she had chosen them as much to cope with the formality of confrontation as for the discomfort of gravel.

The twins Joss and Alex, now twelve, had been farmed out in France, spending the summer in France to improve their language skills, so there was room to spare chez Washbourne. In her own way Prissie seemed to share Dad’s idea of the importance of pushing chicks out of the nest, though she made sure that they had a parachute of money and some useful addresses.

Chez Washbourne was relatively similar to Trees, though the downstairs facilities only ran to a lavatory, not a bathroom. Granny had missed a trick by omitting to fund an extension at a neighbour’s house, so as to provide me with a suitably plumbed bolt-hole in case of family crisis.

Malcolm came home from work on his usual train to find a houseguest installed, a house-guest who was both easy and difficult. Easy in himself (let’s hope), difficult by virtue of his needs. Without the bum-snorkel the lavatory would be a bit of a challenge. I decided to go easy on the Washbournes’ food, at least until my indispensable utensil had been restored to me. I envy the hauteur of cats at stool, the way they dissociate themselves so successfully from basic acts. By that reckoning my experience is canine. With me it’s all shameful straining, wagging my tail and hoping to be forgiven for being such a dirty dog. I would also need to be helped upstairs every now and then to bathe unless I was to smell like a young goat.

Prissie hadn’t bothered to alert her husband by phone of the dramatic changes in Cromer family life. ‘Malcolm, darling,’ she said, ‘Laura and Dennis have completely lost their senses. There was nothing else I could do. They’ve always been, shall we say, remarkably uptight, but this time they were downright crazed.’ That was as close as she got to explaining herself to the man of the house. He took it completely in his stride. I thought this rather splendid, coming as I did from a household where Mum forgetting to warm the plates before a meal could cast a pall that might not lift for days, even if no word of reproach was uttered.

The rest of the conversation was equally off-hand.

Malcolm: ‘Is there a chance of their coming to their senses any time in the foreseeable future?’

Prissie: ‘Not really.’

Malcolm: ‘That’s all right, then.’

I thought that was splendid too.

My full-blooded participation in a family showdown (once I’d actually worked out that I was being held against my will) came at a certain price. My shoulder froze after all that driving out of garages and down driveways, that adrenalin-boosted three-point turn. I would have been happy to be excused driving for a few days while my shoulder loosened up, but I was determined not to cut a helpless figure in this new household. The Washbournes for their part were anxious to reassure me I wasn’t being a burden, so there were all sorts of errands cheerfully suggested and accepted that both parties could happily, I dare say, have done without.

I was in pain and I was separated from my supplies of Fortral. It would be exaggerating to say that I was in withdrawal, but I certainly missed my pharmaceutical crutch, the crutch that formed a sturdy enough tripod with my actual crutch and cane.

Prissie treated the whole situation as an adventure and a joke. She looked out some paper knickers for me, which she’d bought for a holiday in Greece to save the trouble of laundry, though Malcolm in a rare assertive moment had refused to wear them. Sniffing a pair, she claimed that they had absorbed the aroma of olives, even a distant whiff of retsina.

I couldn’t expect to go on with my dissolute Cambridge ways, doing without socks and underpants, while I was a guest in someone’s home, but my heart sank at the prospect of those disposables, with their thin thread of elastic and doubtful absorbency. Still, I had company. Prissie insisted that Malcolm wear the paper pants too – this was her revenge for his lack of coöperation on the Greek holiday. If they were good enough for me, she said, they were certainly good enough for him, and this time he didn’t put up a fight.

By now I had given an account of the row over the contents of my shoulder-bag, feeling that those who were offering me sanctuary had a right to know the crimes of which I stood accused.

Prissie said, ‘Malcolm can go up to Soho at the weekend and pick up some queer filth for you. You can wait that long, can’t you, John? But he’s not normally a very inspired shopper. Best to give him an exact title, or else give him a general subject area and sort through his haul later on. As for the cannabis, we’re very moderate users here. A few puffs every month or so. I’m sorry we’re so unadventurous. Tell us what you need and we’ll try to get it.’

I could never quite make up my mind whether she was telling the simple truth, cracking jokes or engaged on some sort of double bluff. No more was said about Malcolm’s proposed Soho pornography trawl, and nothing was smoked in my presence that would have shocked the author of Gardening for Adventure. The household’s actual level of taboo-breaking was low. Malcolm’s bookmark seemed stuck in the early pages of Last Exit To Brooklyn, a landmark work, an earthquake of the mind guaranteed to shock and horrify, but not necessarily to hold the attention.

The next morning a letter arrived for me, in the early hours, with the words BY HAND written on the envelope. It’s a phrase that has always puzzled me. Could people not have worked out by themselves that an unstamped envelope had not been delivered by the postman? And doesn’t the postman deliver by hand too?

The letter was from Dad. He took me to task about how much I had hurt Mum by my bad behaviour, Mum who had devoted her entire life to me. The phrase was doubly underlined. Of course that was the whole trouble, as Dad could see in more lucid moods – devotion (as she interpreted devotion) inflamed and corroded her character.

The lair he shared with her

Dad’s letter gave offence in its turn. He must have got out his ruler to make those double underlinings under ‘her entire life’. Truly I knew the depth of my disgrace when I saw that the full panoply of the family stationery was ranged against me: best notepaper, fountain pen and ruler – the bell, book and candle of the writing-desk. Another passage showed a complete refusal to accept reality: ‘I don’t know what you said to Audrey to get her to help you, but I hope you’re ashamed of yourself.’ Even he had seen there was something mysterious about Audrey’s participation, but he was temperamentally inclined to look for the working of sinister rather than radiant forces.

Worldly powers rule by consent, and I didn’t consent to these rulings. Nor did I take kindly to being told I should buck up my ideas and apologise to Mum, or else everything I had left behind would be ‘put in sequestration’. Dad seemed to savour the legal formula with a bailiff’s solemn gloating.

I showed the letter to Prissie. Her reaction was to send Malcolm round to Trees in the car, to beard Dad in his lair and ‘thrash things out’ with him man to man. Malcolm had instructions to demand the return of my possessions (that’s why he was to go by car, to carry off my reclaimed goods). I wasn’t at all keen on this line of approach, and Malcolm certainly flinched from the mission proposed for him. Eventually, though, he realised that bearding Dad in his lair presented fewer risks than thwarting Prissie in the lair he shared with her.

He came back with my things, seeming faintly stunned by the success of the project – and rightly so, since thrashing things out man to man is one of the least successful courses of action ever devised. Prissie seemed almost disappointed, though she rallied and teased Malcolm about his great bravery. He wouldn’t go into detail about the encounter, but said that Dad hadn’t made difficulties. He was reasonable in the end – and I don’t think divine intervention has to be dragged in for everything mildly surprising, only the epic departures from precedent.

It’s unlikely the guru was working overtime. Normal service had resumed. It was probably enough for Mum to be out at the shops, or at her sewing circle, for Dad to come to his senses and side against her, with almost anyone.

If she was at the sewing circle she wouldn’t be mentioning the recent traumas. She was in no hurry to join their troubled ranks, the parents whose children drank till they passed out, or went through handbags for money to buy drugs.

I was glad to have my books restored to me, but the bum-snorkel had been top of the list of my needs. Its return was particularly welcome. I hadn’t been looking forward to an extended period of bathroom wheedling in that house of wayward welcome.

I was fascinated by the workings of the Washbournes’ marriage. Prissie didn’t believe in giving Malcolm too many choices. In the matter of their children’s names, for instance, he had been given free rein, but within a very restricted area. It was Prissie who had selected the names Jocelyn and Alex for the twins, with her stubborn jokiness persisting at the most serious moments. It was up to him to attach these ambivalent tags to the children when they arrived (a boy and a girl, as it happened). The names were like strips of litmus paper which only turned pink or blue when touched to an actual child.

Malcolm never seemed to feel undermined or embarrassed by Prissie’s bossiness. I felt that this was a healthy marriage despite the lopsided distribution of power, much healthier than Mum’s and Dad’s, where the rôles were conventionally assigned but eaten away from inside. In practical terms Dad had no more assertiveness than Malcolm did, but he spent a lot more time and energy simulating the proper male behaviour.

I suppose Malcolm and I, kitted out in our disposable knickers, were Prissie’s babies that summer, in the absence of Joss and Al. In fact things worked out pretty well. She sent Malcolm on a second expedition to Trees, since some clothes and medication hadn’t found their way to my new address. This time his reception was distinctly frosty, since it was Mum who answered the door. She told him that family life had been quite tricky enough before he put his oar in. His ‘oar’ presumably being Prissie! It was a bit much to blame him for her actions, since she was so obviously an oar unto herself. Still, nothing was said about refusing me my things, nothing about sequestration or distraint of goods.

One morning the postman knocked on the door, not because he had a parcel to deliver but because he wanted to know why my car was parked outside, four doors from home. This sort of thing is the reason people want to live in small communities, until they do. Prissie said brightly that I was having a change of scene. A rest cure.

I wouldn’t put it past the postman to have knocked on the door of Trees for more information, which would have been a bad moment for Mum and no mistake. But what was I supposed to do – cover the Mini with turves and branches?

At first I tried to keep my distance from Prissie. My emotional distance, of course – there wasn’t much I could do to avoid her physically. Better the mother you know than the mother you don’t. I was afraid I would turn into her confidant willy-nilly, going from being a captive at Trees to being a captive audience at Heron’s Gate.

While she painted her toenails

In fact Prissie was a fairly undemanding companion. She read the romantic-historical novels of Georgette Heyer much of the time, so she didn’t pester me with conversation. Of her chosen author she would say, ‘Georgette Heyer really does write wonderfully well, and you can usually tell quite early on (not that I mind) if it’s one that you’ve read before …’ She really enjoyed buying a more serious novel, something by William Golding or Margaret Drabble, and then going right on reading Georgette Heyer instead. Playing truant from a real engagement with life, like someone keeping an important visitor waiting while she painted her toenails.

You could often catch her looking with simple pleasure at her own pink feet. I say you could catch her at it, but there was nothing furtive about her appreciation of herself. If she became conscious of my gaze she would meet it, with a further flowering of her smile. She would lean her head back and stroke her own plump throat in the same admiring spirit. This was all rather disconcerting – we’re all so used to people who are on bad terms with their bodies that anything else comes to seem slightly mad. Of course the body is unreal, but you really sit up and take notice when someone wears it well.

Prissie told me about a famous flight of fancy – that Heaven would be like eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets. Her own equivalent of this, she said, was reading Georgette Heyer to the sound of the Jacques Loussier Trio playing Bach. It wasn’t extravagant. Those who couldn’t afford her modest Heaven could easily order its ingredients from the local library.

The weather was fine, and she’d often take me out into the garden with her. That was a little odd, being so like the garden at Trees and so very unlike it. I’d be trying to meditate, or perhaps simply dozing, and I’d hear scraps of conversation that might have been Mum and Audrey in the garden of Trees, and echoes of ‘Starman’ (now charged with purely human meanings) carried on the breeze.

In its way this was an idyllic period. The Washbournes weren’t vegetarians or anything like it, but they catered to me without fuss. Their loose hippie allegiance tended to exclude meat from their table, at least in blatant slabs, though mince might pass muster (flesh once safely granulated dips below the ethical radar of so many). From that summer I remember avocado pears (which we ate, I think, every day) and the deliciousness of French bread, the surprise of French cheese, the revelation of olives both black and green.

Prissie had been the first person in our social circle to risk the technical marvel of Gold Blend (freeze-dried granules, imagine!). Later, Muriel Foot got in on the act on behalf of the sewing circle, joining the Licensed Victuallers’ association for the sake of wholesale prices and buying tins of Gold Blend the size of waste-paper bins, despite the palaver required to decant granules from the tin into manageable jars.

At Downing I practised a little religion of ‘proper coffee’, but the Gold Blend at Prissie’s, made with hot milk, offered its own pleasures.

I felt guilty to have left Audrey vulnerable in Trees, house of misrule, but hadn’t she always known how to wind Mum round her little finger? Surely she wouldn’t have lost that skill. Perhaps things would be easier for her in my absence. It was perfectly possible that Audrey had on some level wanted me out of the house, which wouldn’t in the least invalidate the miraculousness of her intervention.

Peter came back from his travels to find a home transformed. He hated it. He would call in morosely on Prissie’s house on his way to or from work, and begged me to ask her to take him in also. I had to explain it wasn’t on. This was a sanctuary for one, rather than a mass adoption programme. There wasn’t a vacancy in the Paper Pants Club.

The household in Trees now contained two males who hated scenes in their different ways and two females who, in their different ways, required them, Audrey hell-bent on winning (unless the guru in passing had changed her habits), Mum bagsy-ing the rôle of tragic victim. The emotional barometer of the household would be stuck on Stormy for some time.

Up to this point Peter’s plan in life had been summed up by Granny (who was baffled by it) as: Earn some money. Get on a train or a plane until it’s gone. Start again.

But now he made the decision to move out himself and find somewhere else to live. So perhaps I can take credit, by leaving the house under such a cloud, for clearing the skies for Peter and letting him escape his rut of travel and return. Unless my long residence in the house is to blame for his slowness in taking up his birth-right of independence – so deep and foundational was fraternal loyalty in his make-up.

When Malcolm came home from work he’d usually sit with me rather than his wife. He’d even hold my hand and close his eyes, while Prissie idly mustered food in the kitchen. Mum had never got to grips with avocado pears. Of course we’d seen them in shops. They had been talked about. They were even on the menu at the Compleat Angler where Granny stayed, but how to manage them at home was beyond Mum. I had tried to reassure her that it couldn’t be hard to know when the enigmatic objects were ripe, but Mum was convinced that there were tenderising protocols withheld from laymen outside the restaurant trade, and that Peter wasn’t telling.

Prissie, on the other hand, actually had bowls in avocado colours, a darker green on the outside, creamy-pale within. When she came back in to the dining room where Malcolm was holding my hand she’d ask sweetly, ‘Is this homosexuality, Malcolm?’ He’d simply say, ‘You don’t understand, darling. I get such pure energy from John.’

‘Don’t mind me,’ she said, with the same large calm. ‘Just carry on with your canoodling. The wife is always the last to know, of course. And it serves her right.’

What went on between me and Malcolm wasn’t canoodling so much as low-level mystical chat. Perhaps Malcolm felt piqued that I had gone to India, where my guru was, and talked about his plans to visit his own inspiration, Don Juan, in Mexico. He had read Carlos Castaneda’s books, which Penguin published and which adorned almost every student’s shelves those days. Later they were exposed as ‘fakes’ – the inverted commas seem appropriate because it’s a hard position for someone like me to defend, that time and space, life and death, are all unreal, but Carlos Castaneda is more unreal than any of these and must therefore be shunned. If you’re not careful you can end up saying that the unreality of Carlos Castaneda’s mystical claptrap is the only real thing in the whole of Maya.

Finch, Pearsall & Mephistopheles

I’m afraid we got into something that was almost an enlightenment competition. I’d quote something Ramana Maharshi had said, and he’d quote something that Castaneda’s Don Juan had said, though we were neither of us tremendously up on our subjects. Under the influence of peyote Castaneda had a vision of Mescalito, seeing him as a green man with a pointed hat. I decided not to mention that I had gone him one better by being granted an interview with Mescalito, and had been trusted with some important dendrological work.

At one stage I remember intoning, ‘Those who know do not speak;’ and while I was taking a breath at that semi-colon, he completed the aphorism with ‘those who speak do not know.’ Then we smiled enigmatically at each other.

This was the shallowest of profundities, filched from Alan Watts’s Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, also published by Penguin – worse still, filched from the blurb about that book printed at the back of another one. Prissie looked up from her Heyer and gave us her own little smile, which recognised us as spiritually pretentious fakes, bluffers to our very souls. Certainly her relationship with Georgette Heyer was more authentic than ours with Alan Watts. We didn’t even realise, while we parroted Zen quotes, how neatly they summed us up.

If Prissie overheard Malcolm telling me, not for the first time, that advertising was killing his soul, she would say, ‘Malcolm, darling, that’s the whole point of the enterprise. Why do you think your firm is called Finch Pearsall & Mephistopheles, for heaven’s sake? If you haven’t sold your soul yet, it’s because nobody wants it. Face it, Malcolm, you’re a lost soul, you’re not damned at all. Only lost souls wear Hush Puppies. The damned have a lot more style.’ These, though, were tender squabbles, quite outside my experience, with all the rancour on the surface.

While I stayed chez Washbourne I tried to ration my intake of liquids, so as not to have to go to the toilet too often. I didn’t overdo it. There was no virtue in dehydrating myself in a warm season, parching my kidneys just to avoid embarrassment. It made sense to discipline my bladder so that I could last the night, like a well-trained dog, to spare the household the duty of emptying a pee bottle. Gradually I worked up to a steely continence. In fact I may as well admit that since then I have often used the call of the bathroom as a way of getting some good earthed contact, whether with strangers or old friends. Nothing breaks the ice like embarrassment in a bathroom.

I could hardly expect there to be no repercussions from the rupture with Mum and Dad, but I hoped not to have to deal with them until after the vacation. No such luck. One day the phone rang and Prissie told me it was for me. Her voice was rather hushed. ‘Who is it?’ I mouthed, and she answered in a whisper, ‘Perhaps a bishop?’

It was Graëme Beamish, my tutor.

‘John,’ he said, ‘please find it in your heart to forgive me for disturbing you in the well-earned rest of your vacation. Then I will try to find it in mine to forgive your mother for disturbing the peace of mine.

‘I would have left her letter unanswered were it not for the fact that I am taking next term as a sabbatical. It didn’t seem fair to pass on to my replacement the obligation of dealing with as tricky a customer as I have come across in my experience as a tutor.’

I could hear regular metallic impacts in the background, from which I deduced that Dr Beamish was finding amusement in setting Newton’s Balls a-clack.

‘I’m not referring to you, John, though you yourself do not offer the authorities the easiest of rides. I mean your mother.

‘As you may not know, your mother has written to me roughly every two weeks of university term since you first came up.

‘John? Are you there?’

‘Yes, Dr Beamish.’ I was very shocked to learn that Mum had been so hideously active on what she imagined to be my behalf. Knowing that my tutor had been screening me from her interference for the last two years felt almost as bad as being pushed down King Street by him with a stranger’s sick caking my wheels.

‘Shall I continue? I hope I’m not interrupting any important activity. The file on Cromer, Mrs L is even larger than the one on Cromer, J. For some time her idea was that I should forbid you from changing your course of study. Now it seems that your family has exploded in some way. I have to say I have no interest in how you all get on with each other. I propose simply to read you my reply to your mother’s latest letter so that you know where you stand. Is that agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

‘“Dear Mrs Cromer, I am sorry to learn that John has fallen victim to sexual deviance and drug addiction. These scourges do unfortunately claim a small proportion of undergraduates, and not always the unpromising ones, during their years of study. The evidences of wrongdoing which you mention, however, came to light during the vacation and on private property: as such they cannot be said directly to involve the College or indeed the University. If John is found in possession of further caches of smut or illegal narcotics I will, of course, inform you at once. I myself had always imagined that his temptations were the more traditional ones of strong drink and bad company.”’

I could hear a self-satisfied smile in his voice, and could imagine him looking at me over the tops of imaginary half-moon glasses, while he congratulated himself on the neatness of this oblique reference to my kidnap at the hands of Write Off Tuesday.

He was certainly getting his pennyworth of revenge for an evening when he was made to feel uncomfortable in the Senior Common Room, sniffing the air from time to time and checking his smart shoes for traces of undergraduate vomit.

Eats doctors for breakfast

‘“As for your suggestion that he should receive medical treatment, although it is true that the University has access to the ‘top men’ in many fields, most of them indeed the products of our system of education, it is my impression that John knows almost as much as any of the health professionals with whom his difficult history has brought him into contact. Some say that he eats doctors for breakfast, others that he merely chews them and spits them out, without going to the trouble of swallowing.”’ It is perhaps true that I was impatient with the general practitioner assigned by the university to preside over my health. Dr Beamish paused, as if trying to detect down the telephone wire whether his bufferish persiflage was succeeding in making me squirm.

‘“There seems no pressing need to add to the list of casualties, unless of course John’s academic progress begins to suffer. If and when that happens, we will certainly seek medical help.”

‘Does this reply seem satisfactory to you, John?’

‘Perfectly satisfactory, Dr Beamish. Thank you.’

‘Not at all, John. I shall see you in the new year, after my sabbatical term. But please go easy on my replacement. Not everyone has my inner strength.’

All in all it was a fine show of donnish humour, in a style which I imagine has changed little over the decades, even the centuries. I had to be grateful to Beamish for fobbing off Mum and Dad with his elegant mockery, even if it did sting me a little in the process. To judge from his sardonic references to drink and so on he regarded me as having good character more or less by default. Mechanically unable to sin rather than either virtuous or vicious on the level of morals.

With the Washbournes’ permission I phoned Granny. I wasn’t sure which way she would jump, which was of course just the way she liked it. Her tone was predictably crisp from the word go. ‘Halnaker 226.’

‘Hello, Granny, this is John.’

‘Good morning, John.’

‘Have you heard from Mum lately?’

‘Indeed I have not. We are not in morbidly regular communication. Laura seeks to shield me from good and bad news alike. Luckily Peter retains some dim memory of his grandmother.’

‘Well, Granny, the thing is, we had a row and I’ve moved out.’

‘So I hear. People are always saying that blood is thicker than water but I can’t say I’ve noticed.’ Wonderful Granny, so unsuspectingly Hindu in her instincts! So right in thinking that the fluids of kinship have no metaphysical claim to viscosity. ‘Are you well placed where you are staying now?’

‘Very well placed, Granny.’

‘I am pleased to hear it. I take it your allowance has been discontinued?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘What sums were involved?’

‘Dad gave me £10 a month.’

‘I will maintain that level of stipend. Were there other expenses met by your parents?’

‘Only books.’

‘I see. I will carry that burden also, though I shall expect scrupulous accounts. Goodbye, John.’

‘Of course, Granny. Thank –’

But she had already put down the receiver at the Tangmere end. It’s true she was of a generation that didn’t necessarily perform expansively on the phone, but I think her brusqueness was more idiosyncratic. Granny just got a kick out of hanging up, without footling politesse. And for all the terseness of the conversation, that was my finances fixed, for the time being, without opposition or even haggling. It’s true that Granny liked any such arrangement to be provisional, renewed or withdrawn as she pleased.

In her financial conversations she could be oddly playful, even skittish. She might say, ‘I had a little investment, John, and nothing would it bear – not even a silver nutmeg or a golden pear, I’m afraid, though that would have been charming. But now the King of Spain’s daughter has paid me a rather nice dividend after all, and I thought I would send you some of it – not all the fruit from my little nut tree, but enough I hope to give you a pleasant taste.’ Or else: ‘I’m afraid my portfolio has caught rather a bad cold, John – it may even be ’flu – so we must both tighten our belts for the time being and hope for improvement. Portfolios are particularly susceptible to coughs and sneezes at this time of year, as perhaps you know. Cases of pneumonia have been reported in the Square Mile. We must watch and wait.’

I returned to Cambridge for the academic year 1972–3 as an honorary orphan (at least in my own mind), and deprived of the tutor who had protected me in previous years.

It was my chance to get a telephone installed. I seized it. I got to work right away. I wasn’t confident of putting one over on his replacement – I could all too easily imagine Graëme leaving a note saying THE ENDLESSLY PESTERING JOHN CROMER IS NOT TO HAVE A TELEPHONE HOWEVER ELOQUENTLY HE PLEADS HIS SPECIOUS CASE – but it was worth a go. And then it went like a dream. I had my paperwork with me: the original note from Roy Wisbey proposing it, not to mention my photocopy of the relevant section of the Disabled Persons Act 1971. The tender-hearted substitute asked for no documentation (locums are usually pushovers). My case spoke for itself. I should have asked for a fridge and a shower in my room while the going was good.

I remember nothing about Beamish’s temporary replacement except that he was a historian. As he opened my file and then Mum’s a look of amazement spread across his face. What a teeming archive of pathology he had in his hand! Such bad luck that it wasn’t from the formative years of a Beethoven or a Churchill.

‘How is your relationship with your parents?’ he asked.

‘Non-existent.’

‘Well, you’re already getting the maximum grant, so that won’t change. Do you have resources of your own?’

‘My Granny helps out.’ These few words painted a wonderfully pathetic picture. Granny would have given an elegant snort of glee at it.

‘I see that the Bell Abbot & Barnes Fund helped out in another … emergency. Do you want me to try them again?’

‘I suppose so.’ Said with the right amount of swallowed pride. In fact it was resentment I was swallowing, at the way the college had used an outside agency to reward its own greed, in the matter of the ceiling rail. And indeed Bell Abbot & Barnes came up trumps, matching Granny’s £10 monthly. I was now better off than I was before the bust-up, though I had to budget very carefully if I was to get through the vacations (and I had no idea where I would be spending them). God bless Bell, God bless Abbot and God bless Barnes. Bless their cotton-rich socks. Bless every fibre.

The Zeitgeist had me fooled

I was now an undergraduate of means. I was more or less flush. So when an English student called Robin Baines-Johnson I met at a Tragedy lecture asked to borrow £5, I gave it to him. He was already known to me at second-hand, since his uncle was the Governor of the Bank of England. He was a mini-celebrity of the student body. I hardly hesitated. If anyone in Cambridge – anyone in the whole world – was good for a loan, then surely it was the nephew of the Governor of the Bank of England! I entirely misunderstood the mood of the times. The Zeitgeist had me fooled good and proper. This was a period when all institutions were considered evil by student culture, above all those which were explicitly capitalist, and personal responsibility was felt to be a bourgeois perversion. I should have understood. The nephew of the Governor of the Bank of England was the last person in the country who would risk repaying a debt. Existentially it would be a disaster. It would strip him of his last shred of authenticity. At all events I never got my fiver back.

I didn’t really relax until my phone connection was installed. It didn’t seem impossible that Graëme would reappear from wherever he had gone, with a tan and a straw hat, a suitcase in each hand, specifically to hiss at the engineers, ‘Kindly disconnect that phone!’ In the event he stayed away, and at last I had a proper link with the world.

In one respect the timing was perfect. In previous years I would have had to tell Mum about the phone sooner or later, and then she’d have been calling me the whole time, sparing Dr Beamish and putting pressure on me direct.

I had some enjoyable little chats with the operator. In those days the telephone wire went straight into the wall, and if you put the phone off the hook you could be reported. They would put the howler on to get your attention. I used to enjoy teasing the operator, saying I had sabotaged the bell with a wire so I didn’t hear the bell if I didn’t want to. Technically this would have been tampering, and a punishable offence. I was living dangerously.

As a third-year I had lost some of my social fear. I was beginning to be anxious about the future rather than the present, wondering what life after Cambridge would be like. I couldn’t imagine it. Clearly, though, it was a good thing that returning to the bosom of the family was no longer an option. The family bosom was off limits and out of bounds. Family and I were giving each other the cold, the frozen shoulder.

One worthwhile ‘side-effect’ was that there was no need to worry about my reputation any more. I had nothing to lose. My parents already thought I derived sexual pleasure from pictures of youngsters lolling in socks.

Still, when someone at a CHAPs meeting first disparagingly mentioned the ‘meat market’ I thought, as a long-serving vegetarian, that these gloating carnivores were referring to an actual market where carcases were displayed, all the marvellous machinery of life impaled on a hook and cut up to be sold. In fact the reference was to the Stable Bar, off Trinity Street, a narrow premises where homosexuals not enlightened enough to attend meetings might be found. It had the look of a hotel bar, with plenty of red plush and folksy bits of beaming which looked fake even if they weren’t, and plenty of horse brasses to back up the name, though there would only have been the space to accommodate a single horse.

I never heard anyone refer to the Stable Bar in anything but damning terms, yet everyone turned up there at some stage, even Ken, though he looked rather lost. I saw the Tonys there once or twice, although they hardly noticed strangers and were the only people present whose motives were blamelessly social.

Ken only visited the meat market to spread the word about the group, to tell those writhing in the coils of the patriarchy the good news that there existed an independent forum, not far away, where issues of sexual and political liberation could be freely discussed and worked through. He would nerve himself with a couple of pints then spread the word from table to table. His reception from groups was sometimes mildly abusive, so he tended to gravitate towards single strangers, less prompt to defend themselves. There was something about him, as he advanced heavily towards people who often edged away or tried to avoid his eyes, reminiscent of Gladstone scouring Piccadilly for loose women to coax back to Downing Street for soup and Bible-reading. He had the same admirable and slightly suspect motives, even if his success rate in these mercy swoops couldn’t compete.

On Saturday nights George took to pushing me up to the street entrance to the Stable, then over its awkward threshold. He would pause outside the door of the bar to take a deep breath. Entering the premises with a wheelchair required careful choreography: a vigorous push to the door followed immediately by a judicious pressing down on the handles so as to clear the change of level before the door came back and bashed me, while also swinging the chair round to negotiate the cramped space inside the doorway.

Practical criticism

There was another reason for George’s intake of breath, every bit as understandable. The mass turning of heads was unnerving, though conversation didn’t stop. Nor did the jukebox stop playing, but its music seemed to be replaced for those crucial moments of appraisal by a drum-roll, the ominous linked paradiddles that precede a star turn or a public execution.

George pushed me ahead of him in the wheelchair like a hostage-taker advancing into police spotlights behind a human shield. I could hardly blame him for that, but my invisibility despite its impressive candle-power was only enough for one.

He shrivelled under the fusillade of judging eyes. This was scrutiny, if you like. This was practical criticism. No Leavisite concentrating the intellectual X-rays onto a page of Our Mutual Friend or Sons and Lovers could send out a beam of comparable intensity.

Of course George wasn’t particularly informed about the Cambridge tradition of English Studies. Nothing in his life of genteel retail had prepared him for this raking blast of icy assessment. Then its wave-length shifted as we were classified as unattractive and (worse) familiar. I can’t say I was too bothered, but then for me it was much of a muchness, more or less business as usual. It cost me nothing to absorb some of the impact, and I was happy to screen him from the worst of the mutagenic exposure, the crossfire from whole emplacements of appraising eyes.

When I wasn’t actually in the firing line, there was some fun to be had from noticing the nuances of the examination. Some people only looked at the bottoms of people with nice faces. Others only looked at the faces of people with nice bottoms.

I don’t remember making any new acquaintances at the Stable Bar, except when one man came over to me and said he worked in the University Library. He was good enough to tell me that I had a nickname at the UL. Toad of Toad Hall (Poop! poop!). Not the worst nickname in the world and yes, I dare say I could seem a little imperious when I sounded the car horn, to signal that the books I had ordered should be toted down to me.

While the leaves were still on the trees I began to be preöccupied with the ritual midwinter festival. Over the years I had borne various grudges against Christmas. First because it came round so slowly. Then that it crowded out my birthday by being so close to it. Next that it was too commercial. Then that it was too Christian. Now I felt that it came round too quickly. The Christ Child seemed to be bearing down on me at the wheel of his holly-trimmed steamroller, and this was the first year that he would find me out in the open, with nowhere to hide.

If I had been able to send a message about what I wanted for Christmas using Granny’s special system of chimney semaphore, a slip of paper burnt in the fireplace to give Santa his cue, mine would have been along the lines of Yule! Yule! Steer well clear! Come again another year!

Peter had found a job at a hotel near Bristol, an old coaching inn. He had accommodation there and gamely offered to play host, but I couldn’t quite see that as a practical proposition. So what were my options, realistically? Well, now that I no longer had a home, there was always a Home. A referral from my GP would be child’s play. No exaggeration would be necessary. It was a perfectly routine request. Still, I was in no hurry to meet the Ghost of Christmas Future, the many Ghosts of Christmases to come. What sort of person ends up in a Home at the time of year when even the most abject orphans are taken in? I wasn’t in any hurry to find out.

I decided that I would put myself about, socially, and accept the first offer I got, no questions asked. Call it Russian roulette, only played with Christmas crackers rather than the customary revolver. The trouble being that if ever I pull a cracker and win, it’s because someone is being kind and would like me to have a tie-pin.

Socially the hot spot of the moment was something called King’s Bop, that is, a disco in the cellar of a modern building in King’s College. Downing could offer no comparable attraction. King’s was ever a trendy hotbed. Girls had been sighted there, rare girls, girls never seen elsewhere. A different species from those who manifested themselves in common room and lecture hall, shop and street.

I had already experienced the event. Part of its fashionability lay in its unpredictable disc-jockey and part in its exclusiveness, since there were people at the door who were supposed to make sure that only students of King’s were admitted.

The policing of King’s Bop was hardly rigorous – someone at the door would politely ask for your locker number – but surely no one would question the right of the chap in the wheelchair to attend?

This was a reasonable hypothesis. It reached me, though, not as an abstract proposition or social experiment but in the form of an ambush after Hall one Wednesday evening. A little party wanted to make an attempt on King’s Bop, using the wheelchair’s magical powers as a pass-key, or else an enchanted textile, not so much a cloak of invisibility as a small trundling marquee.

I was a good sport about it. I would have screamed bloody murder if I had known I would be carried downstairs by people I hardly knew, but the trauma was well under way before I had any idea. The word ‘cellar’ had not been part of the approach that was made to me.

At the door we were waved through with smiles of embarrassment. The hypothesis was confirmed. The wheelchair belonged everywhere as well as nowhere.

The noise was extreme and made conversation difficult. There’s a limit to how far I can stretch to bring my ear close to someone’s mouth, and if all the bending is done by others then they must feel they’re part of something more like limbo dancing than chat. As for whether there were any rare girls in attendance, I really couldn’t say.

Indoor magnetism

I wasn’t expected to buy drinks since I had made the whole expedition possible, which I took as no more than my due. The beer was from kegs and served in plastic glasses, either to save washing-up or from fear of rowdiness. A glass without a handle or a stem is pretty much useless to me, and I was reduced (if I really wanted to wet my whistle) to having people hold up to my mouth the nasty beer in its nasty plastic glass.

The Mini was always an asset, but it turned out that the wheelchair had an indoor magnetism of its own. It stimulated and intoxified. People too awkward or shy to dance by themselves would grab hold of the wheelchair and push it about in rhythm, swinging me around with sickening force.

There were also people who would prise me out of the wheelchair and hug me to themselves while they danced. It seemed to be their feeling that the main deprivation in a life of restricted mobility was the experience of centrifugal force in raw form. My value to these dance partners may partly have been the low risk of treading on my toes. There was no factor working to reduce the speed and recklessness of our whirling.

I learned to spot the type. When I saw someone approach me with a particular look of glazed joy, I would start reeling off excuses, saying ‘I’m afraid I’ve got a cold,’ or even ‘I’ve eaten a bad mushroom and I’m going to be sick,’ though no threat of mucus, virus, even vomit in the pipeline had a reliably deterrent effect.

After that visit I had refused to consider a return, but now I had an agenda of my own. I volunteered, and though there was obviously something fishy about my change of heart no one worried too much. My fear of Christmas outweighed, just about, my fear of being dropped downstairs in a slapdash re-enactment of the Senate House occupation.

Almost the moment we arrived I was caught up in a piece of musical torture. The disc-jockey put on something which wasn’t even a single but an album track, and it wasn’t a recent release, but it had a stubborn popularity in student circles as a stereo showpiece. People used the song to make sure that their speakers were wired the right way round. It was a track called ‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ from the Steve Miller Band’s album No.5. The song had outlasted the album, which had been controversial when new (in 1969, I think), not because of any musical content but something written in small print inside the gatefold for the sharp-eyed to discover. It was dedicated to President Richard Nixon, a betrayal of hippy ideals only partly excused by the infantile phrasing. We luv you cuz you need it.

‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ starts with a sombre atmosphere rather than a tune as such. Then an electric guitar makes its entrance. The sound is supercharged with reverberation and echo. It’s also strongly directional. This golden noise is flung from left to right of the stereo picture. It’s an acoustic projectile which finds the target and hangs there for a moment, pulsing. Then the pattern repeats with the polarity reversed, the note catapulting back from the right to the left. Two more convulsions of the guitar and the song itself gets under way, murkier and less dramatic, less memorable in every respect.

In those days records were supposed to contain subliminal messages, Satanic commands played backwards – God is dead, Paul is dead, Kill the piggies till the piggies are dead. Thousands of undergraduate hours were spent dragging gramophone needles backwards through the final grooves of ‘A Day In The Life’, to yield everything from ‘We’ll fuck you like supermen’ to ‘The gardener was hellish unmathematical’.

No one ever implicated the Steve Miller Band in this practice, as far as I know, yet the opening of ‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ sent a strong message to a number of people at King’s Bop. The song told them Commandeer John’s wheelchair and propel it at high speed from one side of the stereo image to the other. Grant him the joy of embodying this king among riffs.

If I had known what was coming, I would have put on the wheelchair’s brakes, so it’s a good job I didn’t, because that would have made things worse. We were off.

Be careful of what you wish for – I had wished to ride the Ghost Train, and my wish was coming true in debased form as I was flung about in deafening darkness, all the more alarmed because no conscious attempt was being made to scare me.

After the performance there was an outburst of applause, which wasn’t really for John the human riff, the riff on wheels, though some came my way in the form of rough handshakes and shoulder-pats, but for whoever had abducted me. Nobody seemed to find it strange that I had so little say in my part of the floor show.

The disc-jockey responded to the happy hubbub by encoring the beginning of the song. Apparently I hadn’t been shaken up enough yet.

There was a scuffle behind me, presumably for control of the wheelchair. Everyone wanted a turn. Some beer slopped down my back. The worst part of the ordeal was the instant U-turn required to reposition me for the next guitar entry, and then the next. The wheelchair slewed sideways, as the struggle for control became more heated. I don’t know who won, I only know it wasn’t me. The blast-off to accompany the final guitar note was delayed by several seconds.

Now there was a concerted call for the song to be played a third time, insistent shouts of ‘Again! Again! Once more from the top!’ This time, though, I was spared. I think the disc-jockey must have seen the horror on my face and perhaps even regretted his part in a joyride with the joy taken out. I could hear people grumbling ‘Unfair!’, which seemed a bit much. What was so unfair about giving me a reprieve from being shaken to pieces?

No diamonds at all

Then the disc-jockey soothed the mood of the room by playing a single, and one that was even in the charts at the time. John Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’, that rather tentative anthem. ‘War is over’, yes, but only ‘if you want it’. A man and a woman danced together for a few moments, and then the man said, rather roguishly, ‘May we?’ Meaning, include me in the dance. I said, ‘Why not?’ and then they did. They really did include me. They pushed the wheelchair back and forth between them, but always smoothly, always with consideration for what it was like to be sitting in it. They didn’t seem quite student-y, though I don’t know in what way, exactly. They seemed like a proper couple. Then the man whispered in the woman’s ear, she shrugged and nodded, and then he was asking, ‘So what are you doing for Christmas, little man?’

‘Little man’ isn’t a phrase I’m any too fond of, but they seemed nice, and if it wasn’t for rough diamonds I wouldn’t have any diamonds at all. Sometimes the wheelchair acts as a lie-detector, and I certainly didn’t think they were messing me about. ‘Nothing much,’ I said, not thinking anything of it. ‘Come to ours, then,’ he said. ‘I’m Frank and this is Shirley. It’ll be a laugh.’ As I say, I didn’t take it seriously in the slightest bit, but Frank was very insistent, asking for my phone number (and getting Shirley to write it down on her hand). He said, ‘I know I’ve had a drink, mate, but I mean it. Come to ours for Christmas. That’s twice I’ve asked you drunk, and I’ll phone tomorrow to ask you sober. That’ll make it official.’ Just then a groan went up, not from me but from the whole packed room. The disc-jockey had followed ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ with Little Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool’. Frank didn’t seem surprised, saying, ‘Bill said he’d do that, but I didn’t think he’d see it through.’

It was a minor outrage in relative terms. One legendary night ‘Bill’, assuming it was the same character, played Velvet Underground’s ‘The Murder Mystery’ (an evocation of a bad trip generally agreed to be more damaging than the real thing) four times in a row, then followed it with ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, which by all accounts began to sound equally sinister.

People groaned at the Osmond song partly because they knew there was a fair chance they would wake up the next morning with that tune in their heads, and would have to be vigilant and avoid humming for the rest of the day.

Blow me down if Frank didn’t phone the next day and repeat the invitation, and by this time I was beginning to take him seriously. He said he and Shirley lived in a basement flat on Victoria Avenue, but we’d all manage somehow.

And in fact my first experience of a family festival without a family was a fair success, though once was probably enough for all parties.

Frank and Shirley’s basement was below a barber’s (Alley Barber’s, if you must know). I was expecting it to be dark, but hadn’t entirely reckoned on the cold and the damp. There was only an outside lavatory, across a little yard, which was a bit of a shock to the system. There had been indoor plumbing on Coronation Street for years. Frank’s record collection was enormous, though I wouldn’t have been surprised to see moss growing on the vinyl of records he hadn’t played for a while.

He worked in the record department of Miller’s music shop on King Street, an old-fashioned sort of business which sold instruments and hired pianos to students. He was in charge of the pop record section, which was smaller than the classical one, and his real interest was the even smaller section labelled New Wave & Progressive. There were only two racks, New Wave & Progressive A–L and New Wave & Progressive M–Z, though he was hoping they would expand to three.

The discount he got as a Miller’s employee explained the size of his collection. ‘I like a good beat,’ he told me, ‘but why settle for one when you can have two or three, all going on at the same time?’ We listened to Gentle Giant, to Caravan, to Gong, and of course to Frank Zappa, not only my host’s namesake but the uncrowned king of New Wave & Progressive M–Z.

The only sentimental moment of my stay came on Christmas Eve, when Frank played ‘Lucky Man’, a track from Emerson Lake & Palmer’s first LP. It was a sort of soulful folk song, with an anti-war message, and it acted on him like a thousand Christmas carols rendered down. He had been rolling a joint when the song started and he froze, though he must have known what was coming since he had just put it on. He wept openly all the way through and then sat still, wiped clean of emotion. If he had wanted to give that joint a festive touch he could have moistened the edge of the rolling paper with tears rather than the traditional saliva.

Shirley worked as a secretary at a firm of solicitors. I told her she should become a lawyer herself, but she just laughed. It seemed to me that once you got a foothold in the world of work there was nothing to stop you, but that wasn’t how Shirley saw it. She was very sure she wasn’t clever. ‘I’m hopeless,’ she said. ‘Frank bought me The Naked Eunuch for my birthday in June, and I still haven’t got past Chapter One.’ It was tantalising not knowing which of two famous books of the period she actually meant.

Shibboleth nut roast

Frank did most of the cooking, and came up with plenty of vegetarian basics. I had told him in advance that he should stick to his normal style of eating, and for form’s sake he had decided to roast a bird on the day. I was really agitating against that strange shibboleth nut roast, something that nobody much likes, a misunderstanding that has turned into an iron-clad ritual, with each party convinced of making a concession to the other.

And what could possibly be wrong with a plate of sprouts, carrots and bread sauce?

Everything went swimmingly until Shirley asked me, while Frank was making our omelettes, if I wanted to come with her to Midnight Mass. She said she was as lapsed a Catholic as it was possible to be, but she didn’t feel right not going on Christmas Eve, and I agreed. She warned me that Frank wouldn’t come.

I don’t think she’d realised that there was a difference between her going to Midnight Mass on her own and her saying that ‘we’ were going to Midnight Mass. He was obviously put out about it, though he wouldn’t own up. We begged him to come along, but of course that wasn’t the point. He should have been asked first. Finally he said he was going for a training run. Never mind that he’d been half asleep over his beer half an hour earlier.

It turned out that Frank was an exercise nut in between attempts to drink and smoke his way to oblivion. Now he pulled on his Dunlop Green Flash tennis shoes, which everyone understood in those days were the mark of the committed athlete, did a couple of stretches and toe-touches, and went out into the night. This was apparently his favourite way of working off a hangover, just as a joint was part of his winding-down routine. Smoking and drinking were known to be unhealthy, but the experiments that young people conduct on themselves are invariably designed to prove the immortality they assumed as first premise. What’s a flawed methodology between friends?

It was strange to be joining a congregation at the very Catholic Church whose off-kilter bells had haunted my insomnia from the first week of my first term. I might have enjoyed it if I hadn’t been worrying about the domestic tensions of the household I was installed in.

I had Frank and Shirley’s bed, while they slept on a pile of cushions. For extra warmth they zipped me up in a sleeping bag. Just as I was slipping off to sleep I thought there was a moment when the silence between them lost its sharp edges and became tender, but I didn’t have a lot to go on.

Shirley brought me breakfast in bed on Christmas morning. Hot chocolate followed by tomato soup – a rather harrowing transition for the taste buds, but effective in boosting body heat. I particularly remember from that morning a gesture Shirley made with her hand, like the one furtive smokers use to hide their cigarettes, except that (unflappable hostess) she was unobtrusively plucking from my sleeping bag a wandering slug, cupping it out of sight in her palm. I realised that this gastropod was a bit of a rarity, since the ones that don’t die in the autumn usually hibernate, but even so it didn’t rank highly as a Christmas present, despite the trail of mucous tinsel it left behind on the nylon facing of the sleeping-bag. Oh Maya, you shouldn’t have!

We had a no-presents pact, though in the manner of such things it involved a certain element of suspense. Only at the last moment of the day would it become clear if we had held our nerve. I had some globes of bath oil in reserve, in case she reneged, just as Shirley kept a box of Maltesers handy. In the end we were doomed, for all our good intentions, to exchange small spheres.

Frank seemed depressed, not by the mild upsets of the night before but by something that had been announced on the radio. Clumsily I tried to cheer him up, and Shirley didn’t make a much better job of it. It doesn’t mean anything, we tried to tell him. It’s of no consequence. He thought the world was being overwhelmed by commercialism and bubble-gum. What chance was there for a third rack of New Wave & Progressive at Miller’s?

What caused all this soul-searching was the announcement on the radio that ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool’ was Britain’s Christmas Number One. I thought it was par for the course, the world being what it is, Christmas being what it is, Little Jimmy Osmond being what he was. But Frank took it hard.

After lunch I proposed a visit to the Bot, knowing full well that it would be closed on Christmas Day, but needing to mount some sort of expedition. Frank came along, as I had guessed he would (unless perhaps I asked him to). He was fascinated by the orange cardboard indicator which went with my parking privileges. ‘That’s dead handy, that is,’ he said. ‘Everyone should have one of those.’ Rather missing the point, I felt, of the civic concession. ‘What do you call that? Your cripple clock?’ Well, no, I called it my orange thingy. I flinched at his phrase, though I don’t think it was meant aggressively. It was just the least attractive facet of a rough diamond catching the dim light of a winter’s day. I said those words to myself a few times, trying to neutralise them, cripple clock, cripple clock, but they were like a mantra in reverse, they refused to shed their meaning. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I call it the time machine.’ Hoping to override the appalling catchiness of his formula.

While Shirley and I went on our walk, Frank stayed in the car to have a smoke. It wasn’t immediately obvious why he couldn’t have done that while he walked with us, but it’s no news that men (in particular), though they hate to be excluded, prefer not to participate fully in other people’s lives.

For all the vividness of what I could show Shirley of the splendours of the Bot at that distance and in that season it would have been simpler to stay at home, ask her to close her eyes, and fearlessly describe. I was reduced to pointing vaguely with the stick, indicating the place where the Bot grew cannabis as an attractive herbaceous annual, with no sense of playing with fire.

When we came back there seemed to be a grin on Frank’s face, or somewhere near it. There was a preening twinkle that couldn’t be pinned to any individual feature but belonged only to the collective. He seemed to have cheered up in some way.

It was days before I noticed that he had embellished the orange thingy, the time machine, using a ball-point pen to change the units of measurement from hours to thousands of years. In all innocence he had recalibrated the instrument to help me navigate in the depths of the Dark Ages. Without in the least knowing what he was doing, he was reminding me that I was in it for the long haul. I was no time lord, but serving my time like everyone else in the Kali Yuga, unless my guru laid on a Tardis for my benefit, with modified controls.

Apricocks out of season

New Year was actually more traumatic than Christmas, not as an event but as a symbol. 1973 was the year in which my undergraduate exemption from life’s real demands lapsed and all bills fell due. I felt like Faustus towards the end of Marlowe’s play, when the soul on which he has borrowed so heavily must be repossessed. The bailiffs are on their way. O lente, lente currite noctis equi. In preparation for the Tragedy paper I had learned to admire the metrical skill of that interpolated Latin line, the dragging hooves of the first half while the reins are pulled back, the helter-skelter careering of the second. It wasn’t so enjoyable to be caught up in the same terrible rhythm, without having had any of Faustus’s fun. I hadn’t enjoyed legendary beauties or apricocks out of season, just a few fumbles. Nobody had even wanted me to sign on the dotted line in the first place. Slow down, my nightmares, galloping, galloping on.

Everyone else seemed remarkably calm about the end of their student lives, the deepening shadows in the academic grove. In my third undergraduate year I still took what everyone said at face value. It’s a good job I wasn’t reading philosophy, or this would have counted as an academic failing as well as a personal one.

An odd masquerade was going on as my contemporaries faced up to the end of their student lives. Academic work itself had been out of fashion for some time, thanks to the lingering effects of the ’60s. Application to books on any more than a casual basis went by the unsavoury name of ‘gnoming’. Everyone claimed to be aiming for a Third Class degree, though it was understood as a matter of brute mathematics that there weren’t enough of them to go around. Some unlucky folk would end up with Firsts. Life could be very unfair.

The incorrigibly interested or slyly ambitious would study in secret, working their way through books that they would defensively insist they had shoplifted. Everyone spoke the language of anarchistic disaffection in a cryptic counter-cultural Esperanto. Fashion demanded that those who had splashed out on tickets for a May Ball should claim to have gatecrashed the event by some providential set of circumstances, such as a stacked pile of chairs found by the river, handy stepping stones into the college grounds, while heavily armed porters patrolled elsewhere.

Any talk of jobs was disparaged, even by those who had quietly been making plans. At that period of all but full employment, when a Cambridge degree gave potential employers a throb of desire, any actual plan to enter the world of work was seen as a great betrayal. It meant selling out your dreams, giving in to what was variously called the System, the Machine, the Man, even (by those who imported their radical reading matter, buying it from an eccentric bookshop in town calling itself Cockaygne) Straightsville or Amerika.

As far as the rival party lines went, I was necessarily a dissident. I didn’t think that it would be a betrayal of counter-cultural values if I got a job. Nor did I think that it was my duty to make a contribution to the economic functioning of the country. I just thought it would be a bloody miracle.

My tutor, though returned from sabbatical, was aggressively neutral where my welfare was concerned, but I don’t mean to suggest that there was nobody paying me any mind. There was a definite sense of rallying round. Some of my supervisors started coming to A6 Kenny, rather than expecting me to toil over to their rooms. Not only that, a handful of fellow-students had mercy on me and started to take notes on my behalf (for the Tragedy paper, for instance) so that I was spared the ordeal of hitch-lifting to lectures. The only trouble was that there seemed to be an inverse relation between people’s helpfulness and the legibility of their handwriting. Often the simplest solution was to ask my helpers to read out their notes, and to make my own record of the re-enactment.

At the library I had those take-away privileges, while everyone else had to eat on the premises. Now I was benefiting from the academic equivalent of room service. It might seem that after three years the world had finally showed up in my room as promised, helpless to resist me, wanting its belly tickled. In fact these were emergency measures undertaken by kind people who rightly suspected I was close to throwing in the towel.

My levels of disposable energy had greatly diminished, though there was nothing obscure about how this had come about. For reasons of economy I had dropped first breakfast and then dinner from my schedule. Lunch became my only real meal, and that is not a regime on which the body thrives. I lost weight, and gained a certain perverse satisfaction from being in full charge of my appetite, if of nothing else.

To fill the metabolic crannies

Wealth is relative, wealth is subjective, and I felt poor. In strict monetary terms I was better off than I had been at the start of my university life, but my predicament was much more intractable. My only guarantor was Granny, and she wasn’t reliable in that rôle. She enjoyed having beneficiaries but soon got bored of dependents and was likely to punish them.

There was a recession going on, even if it was only in my head. I was no longer pushing the boat out. I was pulling the boat in. No more fancy cigarettes from Bacon’s to beguile my guests, and no more snacks to fill the metabolic crannies left empty by the catering in Hall.

In better times I had provided a finger buffet – slivers of Ry-King crispbread spread with cashew-nut butter from the Health Food Shop in Rose Crescent. This was hugely popular. I got through so much Ry-King that I could send off the required number of coupons for the clear-top plastic holder for their product which the manufacturers dangled as a temptation in front of eager consumers. It gave me pleasure to arrange the crisp rectangles in their tailor-made vivarium, and even got me thinking that I should collect the coupons for another and relaunch my menagerie with a new millipede to revolt Jean Beddoes – Son of Nasty Thing. Son and daughter in one.

A sizeable whack of my income in this period went on cashew-nut butter, which has never been cheap, but I considered it an expense well justified. I imagined that every savoury nutritious bite I provided was making converts to vegetarianism, lessening the demand for animal slaughter, when I was only pandering to the outrageous calorific demands of active healthy bodies.

I clung to the totem of ‘proper coffee’, despite the expense, preferring to limit my intake than permit a return to granule or powder. Real coffee was a currency I could use to repay those who came to share their lecture notes.

One of my helpers had hair of a strange dark blond and lips so absurdly full even an angel would want to bite them. He turned out to be half-Spanish, and so I ventured into his mother’s tongue if only to brush up my accent. That sort of brushing-up always feels rather fierce, less like grooming of any sort than scrubbing rust off metal using bristles of wire.

I enjoyed it, and was pleased when this young man mentioned a Spanish-language film that was playing at the weekend and had become some sort of underground hit. El Topo, ‘The Mole’ – could an underground film possibly have a better title? The director was Mexican, so the delivery of the dialogue wouldn’t be what we were used to, but we thought we could survive for a couple of hours without the ‘Castilian lisp’.

Strange film. It turned out to be an existential Western or something of the sort, perhaps an allegory, with lashings of startling imagery. Pretentious? Of course. I tried to keep my eyes away from the bottom of the screen so as to take in the dialogue without help, but I couldn’t altogether manage. In any case, El Topo can boast one of the great subtitles of all times – ‘When you came within 250 yards of my boundary fence, my rabbits started dying.’ That has to rank with the all-time greats. I’m thinking of the neighbour saying, ‘Look what eating nettles has done for her’ after the maid has started to levitate in Theorem, or the hero of Hour of the Wolf saying, as he (literally) walks up the wall, ‘Don’t mind me, it’s only my jealousy.’ The acknowledged classics, the ones on everybody’s list.

I sat tight while the film meandered luridly on. Of course I noticed that there was a lot of symbolic deformity involved, and that there was a strong element of brutality meted out to the wrongly shaped or oddly sized. I took it in my stride. I’m all for hostility against the disabled coming into the open. Let it show itself. It’s not me that’s going to be shocked by it. I signed up for normal life, and I don’t expect to be feather-bedded. I didn’t find it all that hard to disconnect from my everyday responses, and to take pleasure in this welter of punitive glory.

My escort, though, wasn’t just trying to blot out the subtitles but the whole of the screen. I could feel the misery pouring out of him. He winced and gave a little moan at the cruelty of each fresh tableau. In the darkness his lips were being chewed without outside assistance. Cruelly he raked the plump tissues with his teeth. I don’t know why he took it quite so personally – did he think I’d suspect him of dragging me to see this film specifically to cause me pain? Paranoia was mother’s milk in those days, but it was hard to believe that anyone had supped so deep. Perhaps it made things worse for him that (in a spirit of gratitude) I had paid for the tickets. The Spanish side of him had shrivelled away to nothing, and he was Englishness itself in his experience of social pain. The English feel embarrassment the way other peoples experience anger or desire.

So in a spirit of charity I groped him, leaning precariously over to interfere with his person. Anything to take his mind off his discomfort. More than discomfort – agony, really. Now if he wanted to cling to his paranoia he would have to suspect me of dragging him to see this film specifically so that I could knead his private parts. I confronted taboo with taboo, then we were quits. I’d rather take advantage, however feebly, than be lumbered with the rôle of injured party. It’s not natural casting.

It lets you cry

I began to think I had been slow to notice the way that invisibility could work in my favour. Spectators chose not to notice the most outrageous groping liberties being taken, when the groper was me. So after that, I started to become more reckless. It was hardly likely there would be any drastic consequences. What were the authorities going to do – send me down, rusticate me? It was much too late for disciplinary measures. And if I didn’t know where I would be living in a few short months’ time, then the authorities would have to hew out my place of exile first, before they could send me there.

It was already established that I had a certain amount of hypnotic talent, a personality magnet or minor force-field which could work wonders when properly aligned. The hypothesis was confirmed on a daily basis. I had a way with young males particularly. By this time I had found that I could use a little tug on a metaphysical sleeve to get a young man moving in the desired direction. Sometimes there would be no resistance at all, sometimes just a little, but no one was ever moved to say, ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ It’s a spell, of an elementary sort. Most people can work small enchantments, it’s just that they don’t know it, or they have more direct ways of getting what they want.

My method worked best with emotionally withdrawn ex-public-schoolboys ill at ease with their bodies, hungering for touch but powerfully estranged from it. There was no shortage of such in the Cambridge of the time – in fact this was a thumbnail sketch of the bulk of the student body. Changing my subject of study brought me in contact with a new crop of such young men. The English Faculty turned out to be a brimming reservoir of the susceptible, as far as I was concerned. Public schools were very much over-represented in the group, though not the household names, more the minor ones. Places with a little bit of history but not too much, a handful of eminent old boys to point to, rather than a lengthy roll-call of cabinet ministers, laureates galore.

I don’t know what these schools had done to their new old boys, but they emerged blinking into the world (or at least into Cambridge) almost wholly estranged from their own impulses, their emotions not even distinct enough to be called confused. I began to recognise the tribe. Undergraduates, often physically big and actively sporty, who hadn’t been keen to take me on my little trips to the lavatory found it in some strange way liberating. They would come back from our little expedition quietly thrilled, and would settle next to me, holding my hand and mooning at me with a blush of joy.

I seemed to be a specific trigger, like the music that ‘makes people cry’. It doesn’t make you cry, it lets you cry. But what was stopping you from crying in the first place, if you had some crying that needed doing?

I suppose it was no more than the famous ‘grounding’, a rush of reconnection with the species after being called upon to help a fellow being on a basic errand. Looking down at those big hands tenderly squeezing mine, their huge paws all warm, it was a shock to realise the fullness of their surrender. They were putty in my hands. For the time being they were under a spell. I began to see how much further I could take it. Under my ever-expanding cloak of invisibility a remarkable amount could be accomplished. I was a naughty Frodo Baggins who didn’t need to fear the searing eye of Sauron on him.

At some point it became hard to tell my advantages from my disadvantages. They tended to blend. It helps that in these matters keeping my distance has never been an option. Anyone who has dealings with me must get close, and physical proximity puts many of my countrymen into a light trance. By the time either party is fully aware of it, foreplay may have begun.

It’s true I never managed to coax a startled penis out into the open, while sitting in a pub or college bar, but I wasn’t far off. It was lack of dexterity that stopped me rather than a failure of nerve, but I didn’t deeply mind. An exhibitionist doesn’t really thrive in a setting where the most lurid transgressions attract no attention whatever.

Geoff. Keith. Simon. Charles. Hugh. It was surprising how many young men were interested in having a lie down at some stage, and a little genteel exploration. I would try to persuade them to leave the door open or at least unlocked. I was always keen to have a witness. I don’t think I ever actually made a dive at a person’s cock, but I’m sure I startled a few folk. When you’re dealing with someone whose very identity is supposed to be the Limited-Mobility Man, then the last thing you expect is a surge of randy purpose.

I can reach my cock when I really want to. It isn’t comfortable – if God had meant me to lean over, he wouldn’t have given me infantile rheumatoid arthritis – but I can certainly do it. If my organ of pleasure was as remote as my toes I’d be in a bad way, very much in need of acts of corporal charity. It’s just that, all things considered, if I’m going to make the effort, I’d rather touch someone else’s than my own. So it makes sense to wait for some susceptible person to have a kindly impulse and put his hand on my groin. Then I return the favour, groping happily away.

Perhaps some of these young men felt sorry for me. I felt sorry for them, come to that, if they needed to go to such lengths to gather up the scattered parts of their personalities. Obviously they weren’t virgins, but they had managed to become sexually experienced without developing the slightest emotional expressiveness. D. H. Lawrence would have understood perfectly. They were Gerald Criches to a man, even if one or two of them had probably read every word Lawrence ever wrote. As a minor university Birkin, I sometimes seemed to have my work cut out to make them whole.

After our little bit of fumbling, my playmates couldn’t wait to be gone, babbling excuses as they beat their retreat. It was sweet that they imagined I wanted them to stay.