Cedilla (42 page)

I would have liked to tell her that her case wasn’t so bad. Ramana Maharshi’s own mother had a lot more on her plate. After her boy had run away from home she had no news of him. When she learned he was living on the holy mountain Arunachala she sent his brother to bring him home. When that didn’t work, she went herself. Seeing he was immovable, she stayed herself. She put herself in charge of feeding him, not a very satisfying position given his indifference to food.
He would refuse titbits or extra portions, saying that he ate through a thousand mouths and needed no special treatment. Mum wouldn’t have enjoyed running a kitchen on that basis.

One of the great advantages of my spiritual orientation was that I didn’t have to read the newspapers. I could ignore the urgent daily shrieks which die down into the moan we call history. I made sure everyone knew that I was uninterested in politics of any stripe or spot. Dad made the point that a lot of people had gone to a lot of trouble (fighting and dying, activities along those lines) to make sure that I had the right to vote.

I refused to be manipulated by such pieties. I dare say that I confirmed the impression he had already formed, that despite my departures from statistical norms I was a typical member of my spoiled and clueless generation. He wasn’t completely wrong, of course. He couldn’t be expected to notice the difference between the prevailing attitude (make love not war, don’t trust anyone over thirty) and mine:
Love and war, age and youth, are no more than the
tricks Maya plays. Dualistic thinking is a trap, whose bait and jaws are
made of the same ‘substance’
.

I had never had any interest in the War as a child. Men in uniform were (and are) an entirely separate subject, objects of a feeling that was religious in its own way. War was boring. You choose the womb – the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
is clear about this – at a pinch you choose the penis which pays visits there, but you don’t have to take an interest in the stories which are attached to the organ.

Indifference is the supreme goal of any sensible religion, but it certainly gets on people’s nerves along the way! Dad would grit his teeth and say, ‘I’ll have you know that if the bulk of the population had been similarly minded, we’d now have Herr Hitler in charge, or someone even worse.’ It might have given me pause to be told that Herr Hitler routinely destroyed the physically defective, but Dad didn’t pass that on.

People had given their lives for me and what thanks did they get? None. If people die deluded about the way the world works they have
to start all over from the beginning. Do not pass Go, though perhaps I mean Stop. Do not collect (be dissolved in) Nirvana.

The general election called for June 1970 gave Dad’s grumbles a new sharpness of focus. Voting age had been lowered to eighteen as of January of that year, which meant he had not one but two sons who were entitled to enter the electoral fray for the first time. Never mind that I had indicated I was above such illusory convulsions.

‘My godfathers!’ I heard him saying to Mum. ‘The little twit is planning to throw away his vote. But not if I can help it. The proper way to throw away your vote, m’dear, is to spoil your ballot paper in the voting booth. Nothing else shows the proper respect for the democratic process. And if he’s really hell-bent on being difficult, that’s what he’s damn-well going to have to do.’ It isn’t hard to say things like that out of my earshot if that’s what you want. Obviously I was meant to hear him, and to know what I was up against.

Mum gave a little sigh of exasperation at her son’s intransigence or (giving her the benefit of the doubt) the intransigence her husband and her first-born seemed to share. Mum had never got round to reading the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
, or she would have realised that the resemblance was purely coincidental.

To my face Dad was more politic. ‘Look here, Chicken,’ he said, ‘Mum and I both admire you for standing up for what you believe in. We’re only asking you both to vote, to show you’re adult by exercising this privilege. We would never try to tell you
how
you should vote. That’s not the point. It’s the voting that counts. How you vote is entirely your affair and nothing to do with either of us.

‘Naturally, if you wished to show a little solidarity with your parents and the cause of common sense in the face of the current countrywide opportunity to make a stand, by voting for the Conservatives, we would feel gratified. It would also not go amiss with Muriel’s sewing class. There are rumours that you’re going to the bad, what with your vegetarian crusades – giving teachers at your college an earful about bull-fights and what-not – and Mum could do with something positive to report. Anyway, as I said, it’s the voting that counts. Where you make your mark is entirely a matter for your conscience.’

On the day itself Dad gave me a ten-bob note, telling me that Peter could push me to the polling station, and we could stop off
at Thorne’s Stores in the village. I could buy a strawberry Mivvi and Peter could have some ham, freshly sliced. ‘Tell him he can eat it just as it is, with no bread, no roll, nothing like that. I know he loves to eat it that way. I’d be grateful, though, if he didn’t actually cram it into his mouth straight from the slicer, though I know he would given half a chance. At least let the shopkeeper put it in a bag! Otherwise it’s Liberty Hall … just don’t tell your mother.’

It was strange that Dad gave the instructions to me rather than Peter, who was so much more likely to follow them. Dad must have thought, after the procurement of a first-class return ticket to Madras, that his secular authority was beyond question, but I couldn’t let even gratitude sell me down the river. I had a duty to thwart him.

Don’t tell your mother
. This warning didn’t apply to Dad’s undermining of democratic process, which was blatant and undisguised, but to his giving permission for Peter to eat ham publicly in a vulgar style, news of which might also get back to Mum’s sewing circle, the way everything else in the proximate cosmos seemed to.

The Cromer brothers arrived at the polling station with the taste of corruption on their lips, animal-salty in Peter’s case, dairy-sweet in mine. After we had established our identities Peter tried to push me over to the polling booth, but we were intercepted. It wouldn’t be right for Peter, under cover of giving help, to see how his brother cast his vote. Inwardly I chuckled – the authorities being so concerned with the little proprieties, while substantial wrongdoing was taking place beneath their very noses! I was pushed to the booth by an official who helped me stand, so that I could reach the voting surface, where I would make my crucial mark with a stubby pencil on a string, and then turned his back theatrically, as if we were playing a children’s game of some kind – Elector’s Footsteps, perhaps. Pin the Tail on the Candidate.

When we got home there was no formal debriefing, though Dad certainly wanted to know how the virgin voters had ‘got on’. I assured him that the day’s Mivvi had been particularly delicious, and Peter loudly sang the praises of fresh-sliced ham. Thanks, Dad!

More information was required. Though Dad had announced it was none of his concern how we would vote, it was a different matter when we had actually expressed our preference in the matter of national politics. The moment the deed was done any privacy was forfeit.

‘Do you want to tell me how you voted, boys? Not that it’s any of my business.’

‘Conservative, Dad!’ sang out Peter.

‘Good lad. John?’

‘Labour, Dad.’

‘
Labour?
’

With that stubby little pencil I had pierced him to the heart. I had refused to support the powers of light against darkness. Dad gave a sort of growl, and though he didn’t lay a hand on me he came close. He grasped the handles of the wheelchair and pushed me roughly to my bedroom in disgrace, muttering, ‘You can stew in your own juice, you little turncoat!’ Peter had left the brakes of the wheelchair locked, and Dad had to wrestle to get it in motion. For a long moment his rage discharged electrically through the chair. It was a close thing. If the wheelchair hadn’t had rubber tyres I might have been cooked by that human lightning.

The whole adventure was thoroughly satisfactory. My period of house arrest as a class traitor would have been more arduous if the side door, which had a ramp installed for my benefit, hadn’t been wide open as usual throughout.

As it turned out the next day, Mr Heath turfed Mr Wilson out of Downing Street even without the help I had been supposed to give him, but that wasn’t the point. The point was probity, even if Peter and I defined that notion differently. He had retained his integrity despite the ham because he had been going to vote Conservative all along, while my conscience was easy as long as I hadn’t done what Dad wanted.

Our votes cancelled each other out, of course, so Dad had spent his ten shillings for nothing. If he hadn’t intervened in the first place, Mr Heath (or strictly speaking our local Tory candidate) would have had one more vote under his belt. All Dad had accomplished was the transfer of a Mivvi and a few ounces of ham from a deep freeze and
a fridge respectively into the digestive systems of his sons. Dad was indeed a master conjuror and manipulator, a wizard of action at a distance, but only when dealing with grocery items on a small scale.

I hadn’t really changed my thinking about politics, and I wasn’t entirely motivated by the desire to get one over on Dad. I merely applied the teachings of Ramana Maharshi to the question. If a dream hunger requires a dream food then a dream election deserves a dream vote, and it certainly shouldn’t be a cheaply corrupt one. You couldn’t accuse Dad of losing his touch with his sons, since he had never set out to cultivate such a thing. But he might have chosen slightly more adult bribes if he wanted to suborn us. Show some respect!

A few days later the precarious equilibrium of my pilgrimage arrangements was upset all over again. One morning there was a knock at the door. Mum went into the hall wearing the cat. This was a fairly new arrival, a neutered male called Sultan – Mum left females alone but had males briskly disarmed, exercising summary powers in this area uniquely. Sultan liked to drape himself round her shoulders like a stole, even while she was doing the washing-up, his tail slowly lashing with contentment. I could hear a low murmur of voices, then a double thump as Mum brushed Sultan off her shoulders. Apparently this was too serious a conversation to be shared with a living fur stole. Or with me.

Once again there was a huddle and a confab just inside the front door, whispers and mysteries. This time it wasn’t Dad and Mum who were talking but I soon recognised the intonations of the new arrival. It was Pheroza Tucker, an Indian lady from the other end of the Abbotsbrook Estate.

Sultan came in to me in the kitchen, rather put out, but I set my stick at an angle to debar him from the consolation of my lap. Cats are too proud to sulk, but he wasn’t pleased with the turn of the day. Meanwhle I tried to tune in to the hushed voices inside the front door.

Being excluded from conversations is bad for the character. It makes you construct conversations in your mind that would justify
your being excluded. Plans to put something in your tea and be shot of you for good.

The murmurs in the hall yielded ominous snatches of sense – ‘What a blow for his hopes’, ‘How am I supposed to tell him?’, ‘Best just to come out with it.’ ‘I’d ask you in for a cup of tea, but I’ll have to break the news to His Nibs.’ I had a right to hear all this at first hand. It was humiliating to be on the edges of something which clearly concerned me first and foremost. I suppose I could have sidled into the hall, but sidling isn’t really a strong point, and it would have been the work of a moment for Mum and her visitor to step out of the front door and frustrate me again. If I sidled implacably on, they had only to float off into the depths of the garden.

At last the front door closed, and Pheroza was gone. It seems a little strange, looking back, that I took so little interest in an Indian neighbour and family friend. But I knew that Pheroza was a Parsee – who had married out of her religion – rather than a Hindu, without knowing exactly what a Parsee was. It’s almost as if I was being protected from distraction. If I’d known more about the Parsees and their rituals, who knows what might have happened? There’s fire involved in much Hindu observance, but nothing that can hold a candle to Zoroastrianism, where even the place of worship is called a fire temple. My pyrolatry might have become dangerously inflamed. It’s odd to think I had so little interest in India outside the life and teaching of Ramana Maharshi.

When Mum came into the kitchen I pretended to be taken up with Sultan, chiding him for the sour mood to which I had contributed. She stood behind me and I could hear the crackle of a newspaper with an unfamiliar smell. She took a breath and passed it to me at last, appropriately folded. It was the
Times of India
. The death of Arthur Osborne was announced, not in a small advertisement but in an article on the front page. The headline described him as ‘a good friend of India’.

She waited for me to read it and meekly asked, ‘What will you do?’ If her first reaction had been relief, at the prospect of such a body blow to my trip, she was politic enough to leave it in the hall.

What would I do? I didn’t know. I would go anyway and take my chances, I supposed. Or turn my face to the wall.

That evening I watched Mum as she wrote a letter on her beloved headed notepaper. Sultan was keeping to the garden, and a different animal member of the household was seizing its chance, a yellow bird without a name. I don’t know why the naming mechanism broke down. Normally the name is the first thing you think of.

The bird without a name perched on the end of the pen while Mum wrote her letter. There was nothing she could do to get rid of it – she would literally throw it away, pick it up and throw it across the room, and it would always come fluttering back while she muttered ‘Shoo!’