Pilcrow (16 page)

The new words to ‘Frairer Jacker’ were my introduction to a
particular
sort of power that lay in words. Not the obvious power of a spell, but the self-abolishing magic of a mantra. Something which becomes meaningful only when the meaning has gone from it. It was plain that Granny didn’t subscribe to the melancholy-flower idea. Life for Granny was a nettle to be grasped, grasped and then made into soup. I learned to do as she said, to relish while we sang the silly music of the words.

If I didn’t really get the joke in the new words, I wasn’t offended that it wasn’t funny. Not many jokes are. It’s optional. Most jokes are like the ones in Christmas crackers, and produce only bafflement or groans. But it did bother me a bit that a whole phrase could mean two things. What I could enjoy in a single word I feared as a larger
principle
. When things meant more than one thing, a process was set in train that would end in them meaning nothing at all. It was the same with the biscuits that Mum dipped in her morning coffee. They came from a tin bearing the words ‘Peek Frean’. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked Mum, once I’d learned to read it. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, John, it’s just the name of the makers.’ Peek Frean seemed more freighted with meaning than a mere name should be, but I couldn’t pin its significance down. Then the name became a series of nonsense shapes and sounds. Peek Frean Peek Frean. The words dissolved in my mind just the way the biscuits lost their texture when Dad dunked them, so that a crisp edge became a gummy flap.

Dad didn’t spend much time with me, and when we played together there was likely to be a practical lesson involved. His mind was attuned to experiment rather than pure entertainment. He placed a magnet under some cardboard and showed me how the iron filings fell into a fated shape. Then he moved the magnet under the card. I loved the way the flakes of metal fur crawled into new arrangements.

He played me musical glasses. He brought wine glasses into my room on a tray and made them sing at different pitches, by filling them to different levels and rubbing the rim with a wet finger. He taught me to see the agitation of the water in the glass, throbbing in little surges as the note was produced. I couldn’t decide whether the particles in their focused swirl were chasing the finger or trying to run away, but I was fascinated. This was science and music and magic all rolled up in one. Mum came to hear what the eerie noise was, and Dad tried to show her how to make the glasses sing. Even though he gave her precise instructions, she couldn’t produce a note, which annoyed Dad or gave him satisfaction or both.

I knew better than to ask Mum or Dad himself about his being ‘peculiar’. Dad had got married, hadn’t he? – which meant he was cured of his peculiarity. Or if he was still peculiar, then at least he was a peculiar married man. At the time that counted as a sort of happy ending. Marriage being curative in itself, the end of the journey. Marriage didn’t solve everything, but in those days it did at least contain everything. Bachelor and spinster were larval forms of life, and only married people could claim to be grown up.

Mum and Dad never knew anyone divorced, socially. There were no bad marriages in those days, none so bad they couldn’t be endured. None that were talked about as failures or allowed to unravel in
public
. There wasn’t trial separation and giving-it-another-go and
staying-together
-for-the-kids, there was only marriage.

Marriage was the rest cure then, for relationships between men and women. Marriage was bed rest for couples. Lie down as man and wife and wait to feel better. If after a while it doesn’t seem to be working, then keep trying for another few years. As long as it takes, in fact.

Later Mum told me that while I was spending those years in bed she had many times considered gassing us both. The way she talked about it, she was almost apologising for her failure of nerve. She
didn’t
feel she deserved any credit for resisting suicidal temptation. She still thought it would have been better for us both to be dead. Speak for yourself, Mum! But at least I understood then why she was so
fascinated
by the gas fire. She wasn’t mesmerised by the grille and the colours of its combustion. She wasn’t looking at the fire at all, nor the colours of its fading. What drew her eyes was the stiff little tap in the pipe that came out of the wall.

Looking back on those years, it isn’t Mum I feel sorry for, even if she was playing with thoughts of suicide, but Dad, so little a part of the household. His projects were so peripheral, apart from his moments of glory lighting rockets on Bonfire Night. The pleasures of the house happened in his absence, even when his belongings made them possible, like the Brummell Tie Press, so that we played in the shadow of his outrage if our games were found out.

One day Mum sat on my bed softly crying, and I tried to find words to reassure her. ‘It’s all right, Mummy,’ I told her. ‘I really don’t mind being ill.’ I even think I was telling the truth.

Mum was starved of activities that didn’t centre on me. One thing that kept her sane in those years was breeding budgerigars. From knowing nothing about it she rapidly became something of an expert, even an authority. She got the idea from a magazine, I think. The
article
promised ‘hours of pleasure for a modest outlay’, which turned out to be no more than the truth. Those birds produced a vast net profit of joy. It must have been wonderful for Mum to find a world in which she excelled, and which she didn’t have to share with anyone else, though she chose to share it with me.

If I’d been consulted I would have preferred a pet anaconda or else some baleful insect. I wanted to create a relationship with a very alien creature. Knowing Dad’s unsentimental love of nature I tried to sell him on the idea of a pet scorpion, but he said gently, ‘I’m afraid even I draw the line somewhere.’

It was probably a minor joy of keeping birds for Mum that Granny feared them. Perhaps it was even a major incentive. Granny said birds were dirty, but really she was afraid of them getting tangled in her hair. She would make sure that Mum checked the cages before she came into a room, and she’d disappear if Mum announced that the birds needed to be let out to stretch their wings. Mum didn’t exactly tyrannise the tyrant, but it was a treat for her to have Granny at her mercy in any way. It was something she never got tired of.

Budgies gave us a lot more to talk about, but they also extended Mum’s world without the drastic step of taking her out of the house. As word got round that Laura Cromer knew what she was doing, budgie people would telephone for budgie advice. It was a wonderful change for her to be giving out support and information, after
becoming
so knowledgeable in such a remarkably short time. The
satisfactions
of budgie breeding even took the edge off her life-long need for sympathy. When she did find herself in a waiting room full of strangers, she might go down the new and sunlit path of budgie
happiness
rather than the muddy pot-holed track of tragic children and their illnesses.

I learned a few things myself, from picking up the conversational crumbs from Mum’s bird table. I learned that if budgies got out of their aviary they almost never got back. They starved because they had never learned to find food for themselves. Being fed by man had stunted their instincts, and so an aviary must have both an inner and an outer door – to act as a sort of air-lock. I remember a weekend of banging and frayed tempers which must have been the time that Mum and Dad built just such an air-lock. The intoxicating smell on Dad’s hands, for which I had no name, can only have been sawdust.

Mum liked the blue birds best. They were the best talkers, and they looked heavenly. Literally heavenly, as blue as the blue of Heaven. ‘What’s more,’ she said, ‘they match your eyes exactly. God has not taken your beautiful blue eyes from you …’ Up to that moment I hadn’t known that there were illnesses which could make your eyes change colour.

Budgies, unlike ladies, really didn’t have ears. Mum showed me by manœuvring one of her birds, gently stroking his feathers and down against the grain until I could see the tiny little hole where the sound went in. The bird in her hand was very good and didn’t mind at all, but I felt sorry for him. I thought that hearing something with a hole instead of a proper ear would be like eating tomato soup with a fork.

On special occasions, if the weather was warm, I would be allowed to spend part of the day in the garden. Dad would carry me out there to enjoy fresh air and warm weather. He settled me comfortably, but then he looked at me with a rather sarcastic expression and said I was lolling there ‘like a pasha’. I thought I’d better not ask what a pasha was. Some sort of slug perhaps. He must have been in a good mood all the same, because he volunteered to play ‘I Spy’, even if there was a catch. All the ‘I Spy’-ing he did was of plants, and since he knew all the Latin names as well as the common ones, I had no chance of
guessing
them. Dad loved plants and was good at making them grow. If he’d gone to university (if the War hadn’t come along) he’d have
studied
biology, specialising in botany.

I remember one particular day of lying out in the garden. Mum told me that the sky that day was a special colour, not just blue but
azure
. The word tasted beautiful in my mouth. I didn’t need a perfect sky to entertain me, though. It was pleasure enough to connect up dim sounds that I heard from my room, particularly when the back door was open in warm weather, with the activities that produced them. The scratchy whisper of a rake from the garden two doors down, the bite and chop of the same man’s hoe.

I don’t know if Mum had been distracted on her last visit to the aviary, but there was a sudden flutter and we saw that two budgies had escaped. They didn’t waste time. Soon they were soaring upward, and it became difficult to pick them out from the sky which so
perfectly
matched them. It was extraordinary to see their ascent into
freedom
, and I imagined I could share the exhilaration they felt.

Mum was naturally very upset, and I tried to reassure her. I found it very hard to believe that those glorious soaring birds would not
survive
. I couldn’t disregard the hard logic with which Mum had described their fate, but I was somehow convinced that this was a
special
case. It wasn’t even that I selfishly wanted them to return. I just felt that in this one case the birds would be discovered, captured and cared for all over again. The moment was so happy for them. It just couldn’t be death they were escaping into.

When her birds started to nest in their boxes, Mum was
transported
. Our small world was greatly enlarged when she officially became a Breeder. She loved all her feathered babies, and yet blues would always be her favourites, being the best talkers. They made the best pets and the best friends – females had a tendency to deliver painful nips. Mum loved to talk about the ‘blue cere’, a phrase I instinctively loved myself without knowing what it was. It sounded such a wonderfully grown-up word. Mum couldn’t wait for the Blue Cere to come, and nor could I. All I knew was that it would be a great day for our budgies when the Blue Cere arrived. Their lives would be changed in some way I couldn’t imagine. I visualised the Blue Cere as a sort of springtime Father Christmas, wearing blue rather than red.

Mum had a deep connection with her birds and even with their eggs. She could tell the signs that meant a clutch was about to hatch. She would become very keyed up. The excitement even rubbed off on Dad, who would pop in to tell me the news every time a hatching was taking place. Hatching wasn’t always a happy event. One day I could hear that an argument had started between them, even if I could only hear snatches of it:

‘No, I’m not going to
chuck it out
! How can you even suggest it?’

‘If it can’t get out of its egg, the bird will never be a good breeder, and most likely …’

‘I don’t care, Dennis – for me that is
murder
.’

‘You’re far too sensitive, m’dear! Quite ridiculous …’

‘And don’t tell me about your blasted kittens. Just don’t!’

During his childhood Dad had become used to drowning unwanted kittens in buckets of water. ‘Nothing to it, m’dear. Just do it the moment they’re born, though, or then you’ll get attached to them and you’ll never be able to do it …’

The argument I overheard had been about one particular egg. The bird inside had managed to crack the shell, but had been too exhausted to get any further. It had lost its fight to be born. It was very scrawny and weak, and it had been rejected by the mother. How would it find its way back to life after that? Dad insisted nature knew best about survival, and from what I saw of the condition of the bird it was easy to feel he had a point. Newborn budgies aren’t exactly pretty at the best of times. They’re scraggy little pink things, but this one was positively unsightly.

Mum paid no attention. The baby had rights, and if it had been rejected by its mother, then she would take the mother’s place. Dad pleaded for her to be sensible, warning that her attempts to hand-feed the runty chick with special food were doomed anyway. It would all end in tears (one of his favourite phrases). She dismissed his
arguments
, making out that she wasn’t really going to any trouble. Since she so often got up in the night for me anyway, what was another
little
creature to care for?

And then the little bird failed to die, even began slyly to thrive. Little by little it grew, until there was no doubt that it had turned the corner. It loved Mum, and chirped in its little rasping voice whenever she came near. Never was imprinting more richly deserved. The baby bird had been rejected not only by its mother but by the other birds in the aviary, so it became my companion by default. The little bird had nobody, and so the little bird had me. ‘Is it a boy bird or a girl bird?’ I asked Mum.

‘I don’t know.’

This was rich. This was marvellous. Much as I wanted to know the answer to my question, I was vastly tickled by Mum’s inability to decide the issue. Sorting creatures into the right categories was so much her special subject. She had cleared up my confusion over nurses not being ladies, and she had tactfully led Miss Collins away from the goaty group to which I had assigned her, returning her to the rightful sheepish company. And now she had been stumped by a little bundle of chirping fluff!

Mum explained that you couldn’t tell the gender of a budgie until later. That’s where the blue cere comes in. The cere is the soft, waxy swelling at the base of the upper beak, which develops as the bird grows to maturity. Blue for a boy, tan or brown for a girl. Of course I couldn’t wait that long. I wanted to give the bird a name, and I wanted to call it ‘him’ until the case was proved the other way.

‘I really don’t mind if it’s a girl, Mum,’ I said, ‘I’ll love him anyway. Him or her. Even if it’s a girl and it pecks. But can it be a boy for now?’ Mum must have thought it likely that our bird was a boy, because he bobbed his head in the way that is characteristic of males. If he was female he would have been quieter, but bossy. So we assigned maleness to him for the time being, ‘on approval’, as it always said in the Ellisdons catalogue.

Dad made out that he was indifferent to the bird’s existence, but he was the one who came up with the name that stuck. The bird became Charlie. Then it was only a question of waiting for the blue cere to confirm or invalidate our assignment of gender. The change happens at between eight months and a year old, but Mum was looking long before that. Dad said, ‘You’re being ridiculous, no one can tell so early,’ but Mum said she knew what to look for. She had an eye for such things, and said she didn’t care what the books said. When the blue cere appeared, it was visible only to Mum at first. Then it became as plain as the beak on his face. There was no doubt about it. Charlie was still a boy and still Charlie.