Pilcrow (38 page)

My hatred of everything German began to turn into its opposite. The language made such satisfying demands on the tongue and the lips and the palate, while German fingers brought deep relief and warmth. Soon I was listening out for her footsteps in the corridor. The clop of her clogs made my heart lift even before I could see her. It was wonderful for me to lie down and have Gisela conjure delicious pangs from my flesh.

She in her turn was impressed by the National Health Service of which she was now a part, saying simply, ‘In Charmany your parents would have to pay.’

The standing-up parts of our sessions weren’t quite so much fun. I had a sort of horizontal vertigo after Miss Krüger’s lessons. That time left scars. I clung to the wall and resisted any attempt to coax me into walking. Small distances seemed absolutely terrifying. Gisela would crouch a little in front of me and sing out, ‘Come just so far, Hänschen,’ and I would make myself trust her. As I tried to do as I was asked, I experienced something that was either a hallucination or a revelation of the true nature of matter. It seemed to me that as I inched my foot forward, the ground came into existence to meet it, and dematerialised again the moment I took another pace and moved on. This was either an intuition of quantum physics or a side-effect of eating Liquorice Allsorts.

I would manage the daunting distance to Gisela. But then she would move away the same distance and tell me again that I needed to come just so far. So I would say, ‘I think you lied to me, Gisela,’ and she would say, ‘I lied from love.’ Sensibly she broke the daunting task down into manageable slices of effort. Then finally she would turn me round and say, ‘Look! See how far you have been!’ And the distance would be impressive enough for her loving lie to disappear from my mind.

I became ambitious under her influence. A tricycle was the next adventure. I learned to move the pedals through part of their arc, and then to back-pedal so as to do the same thing again. I really wanted to ride a bike, but was told it was impossible. I didn’t see why. My
determination
won approval from the faction that regarded refusal of a wheelchair as the greatest virtue in someone like me.

It seemed to me that riding a bike would be relatively easy. Riding it, as opposed to starting or stopping. When the pedals were
horizontal
I would jiggle down against the ratchet for an inch and a half, then back-pedal slightly and repeat the process. Setting a rhythm was crucial. I managed to get another inch or two of drive down onto the pedals by lifting my bottom up.

So Shmitty would always walk beside me. Walk and then run. One of the joys of riding a bike in CRX was that so much of it was on a slope. I could get up a fantastic speed in some corridors. Shmitty would be panting, saying that she had never had a patient who made her work so hard.

Of course riding the bike was insanely painful, but there came a time when the joy and sensation of freedom it brought reached a
certain
level, and drowned the pain. Or rather, it was still pain but it changed key, and when I had got the bike moving properly the pain was in the key of triumph. It was well worth it, even though my legs felt very locked and deadened after Gisela lifted me off at last.

I had a cactus on the ward. It did nothing. It did nothing in a really big way. It was inert even for a cactus, and cacti aren’t the most
entertaining
of plants. It didn’t help that I was watering it. Watering it and then, when that didn’t seem to do any good, watering it some more. I dare say I’d only been given the cactus in the first place because of its ease of maintenance. If so, my needs were
misunderstood
. I didn’t want something that survived despite my neglect. I wanted something that thrived entirely because of love and care. Somehow my rage to make things grow escaped people’s notice. I wanted active responsibility for life, not mere curatorship. In those terms, having intervened and failed (by watering a desert plant, thereby killing it) was a better outcome than learning the bad lesson of laissez-faire.

I was serving notice of an important character trait, the need to keep something alive beside myself. Into that disobliging cactus I poured energy that would have sustained a whole extended family, a menagerie, a harem. It was Gisela who broke the news to me, saying, ‘Your cactus I think is dead.’ We lifted it from the pot and the stench of rotten vegetation was overwhelming. But the cactus didn’t die in vain. I asked Gisela to translate a special sentence for me into German. I wanted to know how to say, ‘You smell like my old cactus.’ Gisela laughed, but it wasn’t the sort of laugh that means no. She told me I should say, ‘
Du stinkst wie mein alter Kaktus
.’ She coached me until my pronunciation was perfect. Then I’d say it to doctors I
didn’t
like, under my breath at first and then with more confidence, out loud. It was my revenge for the way they were always producing incomprehensible sentences of their own.

I didn’t know it, but some of the doctors were trying alternatives to cortisone. In 1958 we had all been prescribed phenylbutazone, under the trade name of Butazolidin. I memorised every medical word I came across, and I’d taught myself to read upside down, so I could decipher what the doctors were writing down. It was no good asking them – they wouldn’t tell you. Poor Geraldine went all red and itchy, so the drug was stopped for everyone. It’s true that it can kill white blood cells, it can hurt bone marrow in some people, it can lead to aplastic anæmia. Certainly its side-effects were more obvious than those of steroids, and they could be severe in ten per cent of
people
. It’s just that I can’t help feeling it was a better drug for the ninety per cent who could tolerate it than what they were on. It certainly wouldn’t have stunted them.

I’m not talking selfishly at this point, since I wasn’t on cortisone in the first place. It’s the rest of my generation that I wonder about. Cortisone was insidious. Cortisone was the worse drug in the long run. Still, phenylbutazone was banned outright in 1970, so I’m in the minority on that one.

I was put on Enseals after the Butazolidin fiasco, and stayed on them for a very long time. Enseals were coated aspirin. The outer shell came off after it had passed through your stomach, lessening the chance of hæmorrhage in the stomach lining. Presumably it did less damage to the jejunum, duodenum, and so on down the line.

Gisela didn’t teach me German in any systematic way, but she’d often get me to say something during one massage session and explain its meaning at the next, when it had sunk in as pure sound. It’s a teaching method that I’ve become rather attached to. She knew how to intrigue me with arcane and archaic knowledge, appealing to the latent cabbalist in me. It’s as if she intuited my special interest in
surplus
or non-standard letters – residue of the battle over ‘Æ’– and showed me the old-style umlaut, which was two angled flecks over the vowel, like double inverted commas. Also the old-fashioned sign for a doubled consonant, a line over (for instance) the m in

I concentrated as hard as I could during official lessons, and wished there was school from morning till night, but learning from Gisela was different. I absorbed sounds first and meanings later, while her wily hands kneaded and released. Her massage was the only treatment I had received to date which had no other object than to make me feel
better
. Very few of the procedures designed for me were ever explained, but here was one that explained itself. I’d always wanted to be a teacher’s pet, but there was never a teacher I could worship without reservation. Now I settled very happily for being a physio’s pet instead.

During weekends at home Mum continued to give me her own style of instruction, mainly on social matters. Bourne End was a world where she was beginning to get a toehold. It had never been
run-down
, but now it was becoming increasingly smart. There were rumours that an actor or two was thinking of moving in. It wasn’t clear whether this was a step up or down for the area.

We lived on the Abbotsbrook Estate. She trained me not to say we lived ‘on an estate’ but to spell out our status clearly. Our cleaning lady, Mrs Ring, did live on a council estate, and there was a world of difference. I wanted to be like Ring. I loved her directness. Mum and Dad were always saying they were short of money, and I found out that Ring’s rent was fourteen shillings a week. I decided that if we lived in a council house we might pick up the habit of saying what we meant.

I was developing a class-consciousness which was a distortion of my parents’ already distorted view of things. I never liked ‘our kind of people’. I was convinced that a room full of working-class people would be really quite exciting. If a working-class woman didn’t like Doreen Parsons from Mum’s Bathford days, she’d call her a miserable cow, not ‘Oh you poor sweetheart!’ I thought Doreen Parsons would really rather be called a miserable cow, because later on, if she changed her ways, she might be told she was a Little Gem or something like that. If the first comment was sincere, then so would be the second.

If Mum and Dad were saving money on where they lived, Ring could still pop round every day, do a bit of cleaning and then have a cup of coffee (she didn’t drink tea) and a chat with me. We would often have a good old chinwag while Mum was out, and I was looking forward to more of the same. Small talk and comfortable silences. ‘I saw that
Night of the Demon
,’ she might say, ‘That was nice, yeah …’

One day Mum caught me slumming with Ring, leaving the ends off words, saying ‘Mmmmm’ with the appropriate intonation rather than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. She gave me stick. ‘You are not to talk to Ring like that. It’s fine for Ring, but Ring is Ring and you are you. You
couldn’t
live with people like that. Not really.’

Then one day in the village, with Mum pushing the Tan-Sad, we saw Ring and her young son Graham, which for some reason Ring pronounced ‘Grarm’. They didn’t see us, so we shadowed them for quite a while. It felt strange to be spying on her like that, but it was a treat for me not to be noticed. Suddenly Ring told Grarm off and then whacked him. In fact she whacked him first, saying ‘Take that!’, and told him off afterwards. The whacking was just to get his attention. Then she marched him off, still howling. For the first time I saw the draw-back of expressing your impulses without restraint.

Mum was shrewd enough to capitalise on my shock. ‘That’s what happens with some people. If that was me, I’d have said, “John,
darling
, I
have
asked you more than once not to do that …”’ I didn’t say I’d rather be whacked and have done with it. I couldn’t fetch the words up in all sincerity.

According to Mum the danger and the problem wasn’t with the working class, though, it was with suburban people and the nouveaux riches. The Delamare family who lived nearby were a good case in point. ‘I’m not fooled by the French veneer for one minute,’ said Mum. ‘Their very name is a trick to make you think they’re upper when they are most certainly not.’ It was Suburbans who felt
uncomfortable
with the working class, since that was where they had come from so recently.

Mum said that with each month that passed, it was getting harder to tell who was who. Many suburban people were intelligent, and some of them were even ‘nice’. They were getting university degrees, moving into schools and hospitals and working out the rates on your house. They weren’t dunces. In fact Suburbans tended to have extremely high IQs, and they adapted very quickly. More than
anything
they wanted to be thought of as Uppers. They would go to any lengths to achieve that imposture.

However, upper people mustn’t despair. There were secrets that would always elude Suburbans. At this point Mum reverently led me to the tabernacle of her particular cult, her stationery box. She put it on the table, tapping it with a proud finger. This was what decent
people
stood for. This was pure embossed justification. She opened the lid.

‘Just take a look at our printed notepaper, JJ,’ she said, pulling out a sheet. ‘Some things can’t be counterfeited.’ I did as I was told. Our printed notepaper had the address on the right-hand side with a downwards slope:

I already felt a little let down by that fourth line. Bucks? Why were we being so shy about the full glory of our home county? Returning from one of our first trips in the Vauxhall, I was sure I had spotted a signpost as we crossed the border which announced ‘The Royal County of Buckinghamshire’. ‘Why can’t we put that on all our
letters
,’ I asked, ‘and make everyone who writes to us put it on the
envelope
?’ I must have been taking time off from my anti-monarchism that day.

I argued and argued. ‘Why not? Why can’t we? We can if we want to!’ I was only silenced by Mum shouting, ‘Well we just can’t and that’s all there is to it.’ I went into the deepest possible sulk for some time after that. Again I discovered that the best way to undermine an idea was not to oppose it but to put your heart and soul into
endorsing
it.

In fact my eyes had deceived me, hardly surprisingly considering my awkward position in the car and my restricted ability to turn my head. It turned out that Buckinghamshire wasn’t the Royal County. That was Berkshire. My geography wasn’t up to much – how could it be, when I spent so much time immobilised? I loved maps, but was vague about how they connected up with the larger world of which I had seen so little.

Later I worked things out to my own satisfaction. Everyone knew that the Queen lived in Buckingham Palace, so the link between
royalty
and Buckinghamshire was fundamental. It was unnecessary to spell it out any further. Leave that sort of crudity to the desperate
parvenu
that was Berkshire.

Whichever was the Royal County as between Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, I also realised that the two addresses of CRX, one in each county, allowed it an indeterminate status. In a republican mood, I could use one return address, but on days when I thought the Queen was really rather pretty I could be gracious and use the other.

Re-entering the notepaper debate, I asked, ‘Shouldn’t “Bucks” at least be “Buckinghamshire”?’ Mum said it was important not to show off when it came to printed notepaper. Not that it would be wrong to put in the full name of the county, but if she did that there would be too many letters in the word and then she wouldn’t be able to have her ‘Little House’.

I asked her why she didn’t ask to have it printed like this:

I liked a nice justified left-hand margin – and then Mum could have the county spelled out in full.

‘Jay-Jayee …’ Mum said, and I was happy to see that she was in a tender mood. When she was like that it was wonderful. I could
forgive
her any mistake in the world, and I was more than happy to fight against the whole suburban world if that was what she had wanted me to do.

‘Jay-Jayee,’ she said again, with a playful smile curling up one side of her mouth, ‘I don’t think you’ve been listening to a single word I’ve been sayee-ing, have you? Take another look at the notepaper. Can’t you see Mum’s Little House?’

We seemed to be playing some sort of game, which was good, but however hard I looked at the subtle eggshell paper with its bold blue printing, I couldn’t see anything which resembled a ‘Little House’. I knew the secret was right in front of me, a thrilling feeling. The Queen’s Velvet watermark was winking at me invisibly. I didn’t need to hold the paper up to the light to see it. I knew it was there, and there was something else there too, just waiting to be seen. I was on the brink of great things, but I couldn’t see a Little House anywhere.

‘All right, Jay,’ she said. ‘Let’s tackle this from a different angle. Now let’s see. Take a piece of paper and draw me a little house.’ I hoped she was going to give me a sheet of notepaper to do my drawing on, but art work was never my strong point and I couldn’t blame her for being thrifty. She tore a sheet off an ordinary white notepad, but then she handed me her Parker fountain pen filled with blue Quink, which made me feel that this drawing would be special after all.