Pilcrow (63 page)

Jimmy treated me like a grown-up, which was a new feeling. By this time, though, I had some downy hair on my top lip. This was called ‘bum fluff’, which was a lovely idea. I liked to imagine nice curved bottoms planted all over with the same soft wheat.

Shaving seemed an attractive idea, all the same. Lots of the other boys were doing it, and it made sense for me to serve my own
apprenticeship
in face-scraping. I set out to acquire the proper equipment. One of the achievements of the Raeburn–Willis régime was the
provision
in the hall of easels on which newspapers were displayed. The papers would be slid under a string running down the centre of the easel, and after that they could be read with minimal assistance from the hands. Those who really couldn’t manage by themselves could always ask someone else to turn the pages. As Raeburn said, ‘Why should the reach of a boy’s mind be held back by the reach of his arms?’

It was on Saturdays that I paid most attention to the press. There were any number of special offers advertised on a Saturday, and I
hadn’t
lost my taste for retail action-at-a-distance, familiarly known as mail order. I still sent off for the Ellisdons catalogue, though it was no longer so perfectly on my wave-length. I noticed that in these degraded days Ellisdons now offered a reproduction of the Brussels Squirt Boy, whose more usual name is the Manneken Pis.

It was from the
Daily Mail
one Saturday that I sent off for an
electric
razor of my own, costing 25/-. I liked the
Mail
because Dad despised it, just as I treasured my
Reader’s Digest
annual all the more after he told me its motto should be ‘Let Us Do Your Thinking for You’. There was one article in the annual, called ‘The Eyes which Nothing Can Escape’, about the tracking powers of the Aborigines of Australia, whose title gave me a shiver I now recognise as religious.

Of course, when the electric razor arrived it needed a certain amount of modifying, so that I could actually use it. My arms were at the wrong distance and the wrong angle. The school handyman, who was called Mr Wilby, was rather capricious – sometimes he would do things right away, and sometimes he seemed able to put simple tasks off for months. This was the background to one of the school sayings –
Boys will be boys, and
Wilby Wilby Wilby
. On this occasion he made no difficulties and came up with a satisfactory solution. In fact it was the same solution as the one he devised for my toothbrush. He lashed it on a stick with the help of a bracket, and then I could manage. Then I could reach my face with it. Soon I was shaving my top lip with the best of them.

Special toothbrush, special electric razor. In my case ‘special’
usually
turned out to mean ‘on a stick’.

It stands to reason that if I could spend enough time with Jimmy to be lent books and (theoretically) prostitutes, then Luke Squires could have made my acquaintance in the same above-board way. If he didn’t, it was because he didn’t want to. He positively preferred the hole-and-corner. The underhand was his element. Perhaps he thought Jimmy’s approach rather pedestrian, and Luke was anything but pedestrian. He flowed past in his unique chair, often only glimpsed from the corner of my eye before he vanished. He had told me that I knew where to find him, but then he took care to make himself a liar by disappearing the moment he was sighted.

Even a chance meeting would take a lot of planning. Everything had to take account of school time-tables, and things grew complex when the boy you wanted to bump into was in a higher class, having his own friends and his own priorities. I couldn’t just knock on a door and arrange a meeting.

Chance did its own mischievous time-tabling, most memorably one morning by the serving hatch where the morning milk or coffee was dealt out. I had needed to pass some urine fifteen minutes before the end of a lesson, and had been given permission to go to the toilet. I went along the corridor to the sliding door in the assembly hall and did what I had to do. I didn’t linger over it, but by the time I had
finished
there were only seven minutes left of the lesson. When I opened the sliding door of the classroom with my stick, the teacher said there was no point in my coming back in now, disrupting everybody’s
concentration
just to sit at my desk for those few minutes. I might as well wait in the assembly hall. That’s where I was when I heard the bell, and the rush of wheelchairs preparing to escape from classrooms. Of course the able-bodied boys were first out.

Roger Stott was there in a moment, standing at the counter. Then Luke came gliding along. I’d noticed that he always stood up out of the chair, supporting himself with his arms on the bar counter. He liked the chair to be pushed aside so he could have a chance to stand. He managed very well as long as he could lean against a wall. Roger managed things very diplomatically, ministering to weakness
without
advertising his strength. He never forced himself on the people he was supposed to help, but stood casually to one side when a boy wanted to emerge from his chair, in place to lend a hand if the boy lost his grip and was in danger of falling over.

So there was Luke, propping up the shelf of the milk bar while we all waited for the hatch to open. Chairs and ABs were piling up behind us. Luke was at the front of the queue, directly in front of me, while Roger, tactful chaperone of the disabled, stood to one side. I looked at Luke’s bottom from the vantage-point of my wheelchair. It looked as if it had been squashed flat by the long hours he had spent sitting. I was overwhelmed by pity for the pressures of its restricted life, and the desire to give it comfort with a good old grope.

It was quite an ambitious project, but not impossible. I knew all the boys in the queue would have their eyes fixed on the hatch, through which came the clatter of preparations and the tempting smell of powdered coffee. Staff members were served their coffee
elsewhere
. Luckily my wheelchair had automatic brakes, or the attempt at seduction would have had no chance at all. As it was, I could nudge smoothly forward and then lock myself in place. I wasn’t worried about Roger Stott noticing. After the letter-writing scene in the Blue Dorm I knew that he wouldn’t be shocked – he might even get a kick out of helping perverse excitement along. It’s wonderful how quickly, on the right occasion, an innocent vessel can fly the Jolly Roger and the chaperone turn procurer.

Normally a groping hand must have the palm as its main sensor, that being where the nerve-endings are concentrated. The only way I could have brought my palm into contact with Luke’s buttocks was if the Willis–Raeburn Alliance had provided a couch for the purpose in the assembly hall by the serving hatch, on which boys could be installed face down for exploration. This was unlikely, for all Raeburn’s broad-mindedness, and in any case the protruding legs of the waiting boys would block the coffee queue. Besides, where would the challenge be then, the sense of achievement against the odds? Stolen apples not only taste sweeter, they are ravishingly smoother to the touch.

I would rely as usual on the backs of my hands, cast against type as conduits of ecstasy. I didn’t even try to look around to check who might be able to see what – not that my unyielding neck would have helped very much if I had. I was relying on Roger to stand where he would screen us from the idly curious. I murmured sorrowfully, ‘How creased your trousers are, just here on the seat,’ and embarked on a full slow grope along Luke’s bottom. I tried to move the backs of my hands with a sensuous waggle.

Luke turned his head round on its flexible neck, and when he saw me supporting him by the seat he smiled. At that moment the
serving
hatch was yanked open and light streamed around his head,
gilding
the tousled strands of his yellow hair. I was overwhelmed with sensory riches. The chakra in my groin was singing and dancing, and I was dazzled by the way light seemed to be streaming right through that beautiful head, not just round it.

Luke murmured, ‘That’s very helpful – my legs get tired so quickly. Do you mind just staying there for a moment while I adjust my balance?’ I took this for licence to extend the radiant moment of groping. Not only did the sunlight seem to be streaming through Luke’s head, it seemed to be streaming through mine. Eventually Luke signalled that he needed to sit down. I edged the Wrigley
backwards
, and Roger helped him back to his own chair. I established myself at a table to recover from the excitement. Roger brought over my coffee a few minutes later, but I hardly needed to drink it with the way my body was humming to itself. Roger nipped smartly back to the hatch, since as a helper he was entitled to any milk and coffee left over in the kitchenette. Luke, of course, had disappeared. I seemed to have exactly half of the wherewithal to establish magical control of him. I had the spell to make him vanish. That was infallible. All I needed was the spell to make him appear – out of the wood-work. I began to get an idea about that piece of conjuring.

There had always been gaps in the curriculum at Vulcan, it seemed to me. I was always top at languages, and very full of myself until Trevor Burbage mentioned that his sister studied the hardest
language
in the world. It was called Sanskrit. I was incensed, and
persuaded
him to accompany me on the long trek out to the school sand-pit. Then I scratched marks in it with a stick. ‘That’s
sand-script
,’ I said grimly. ‘It’s not so hard.’ Trevor said rather
patronisingly
, ‘There’s a bit more to it than that, you know, John.’

‘Please can I have a Sanskrit teacher?’ I asked Miss Willis, Mr Raeburn and even Ben Nevin, who was still there at the time. No I couldn’t. The school was in desperate straits. It was no time for extravagant spending. Mr Nevin had done his best for me. He ordered
A Sanskrit Grammar for Students
, by A. A. MacDonell (Third Edition, 1927), for the library, and told me I could keep it as long as I liked. But that wasn’t at all what I wanted.

Even when there were teachers and facilities my rage for learning was denied. One of my grudges against the school had always been that I wasn’t allowed to have piano lessons. My musical grounding as a listener had begun early and was reasonably good. It went back to Bathford days and the Deadwood Stage a-riding all over the hills, and the couple of swells who had to get away from the City Smells (always made me laugh like mad!), not to mention Ten Tiny Fingers.

On the serious side there was Mozart’s Clarinet Con-chair-toe and also Puccini’s
La Bohème
, which I found difficult at first. It was in a language I didn’t understand, but I knew when a good bit was
coming
. A lone lady cried out about half-way through, ‘Fo-do kala fa-
za-mee
,’ (as I heard it) and I said to Mum I must learn those few words properly and what did they mean? Mum said she didn’t know so we made some up which went ‘I’ve got a pain in my tummy’. At the end they all joined in and sang thickly, and by the time it got to that bit, I was flying. (All this thanks to Jim Shaeffer’s gramophone).

CRX had built on this modest foundation, but Vulcan seemed to do its best to quash my enthusiasm, despite such a promising
background
. When I said I wanted to play the piano, I was offered a choice between the tambourine or the triangle. Then a lady came and played a marimba for us once. It was so beautiful. It had a lovely
golden-brown
resonance. The sound just hung there glowing. Deciding that this was nearly as good as a piano, I said could I have one to play, and they said yes. Yes! But when it arrived it was only a rotten little
xylophone
, with no resonators. It wasn’t even a true xylophone since the bars were metal. It was just a horrible little thing with a tinny sound. I felt stupid just being near it. When I mentioned the piano again, explaining I knew the names of the notes already, they said it simply wasn’t on. My hands didn’t have sufficient span. I would be wasting a teacher’s time.

My love for the piano was unkillable, and I played it whenever I had a spare moment. No one gave me a lesson, no one showed me how, but I worked out a few things for myself. There was a music room in the new classroom block, so I could get access to the piano there relatively easily.

It was true that the only comfortable span I had on the keyboard was C– G, a fifth (with the left hand), but if I did ten minutes of
exercises
or ran the hot tap in the toilet and soaked my hand in it, I could manage a sixth (C– A). On a really good summer’s day I could reach a seventh on the white keys, although it meant that my right hand had to take a break from picking out the melody to force the reluctant
fingers
apart. At that extremity of my stretch the fingers in the middle, the ones between my thumb and little finger, froze and refused to bend, so I couldn’t play any notes in between. At the furthest limit of its working, the whole hand threatened to close down, and once again I had to despatch the right hand to assist, this time with unlocking.

Mind you, of my two hands it was the left that had the talent. The right hand was far more restricted, and could only manage two notes at the same time if it played them with the index and little fingers. I’d have been much better off with the capabilities of my hands reversed, or else with a piano re-strung for my convenience, the bass on the right-hand side, where I could pick out single low notes, and the treble at the disposal of my more agile left hand.

Even so, I learned some chords and worked out for myself some passable arrangements of simple pieces and a few popular songs. The great thing about a good tune is that the whole thing can be present even in the barest bones. It struck me, though, that something was still not right. Every time I took my fingers off the keys the music died as though it had never been.

Then I discovered the sustaining pedal. With that discovery came a new world of sound and resonance, and I revelled in it. There was a draw-back, naturally: with the sustaining pedal down I could only play the bass notes, the ones for the left hand. If I tried to get my right hand into play to carry the tune, my foot slipped off the pedal and the sound died again.

I’m fond of my toes. Sneakily they’ve held on to quite a bit of movement. They can manage quite a vigorous wiggle at short notice, but since they’re the only moving parts of my legs I can hardly expect them to make up for the deficiencies of the rest. I could usually
manage
to hold the pedal down, but there was no question of pumping it up and down, not with the toes alone. I could use my leg as a wedge but not as a working lever. I used the sustaining pedal like the Shift Lock key on the typewriter when I wanted to treat myself to a binge of capital letters.

Although the staff kept snootily silent about my efforts, I wasn’t actively barred from playing. Sometimes I might find another boy by my side, listening in. If it was faithful Roger Stott then I’d ask him to keep an eye on my right foot, and when he saw it waggling, to work the sustaining pedal for me. Once again he acted as my personal remote control. It was amazing what a difference it made to the wholeness of the music.

My favourite piece to play on the piano in the Music Room was something called ‘
Plaisir d’amour
’. It was more or less respectable – call it semi-classical. I think it was a proper piece of old-fashioned court music, re-hashed for the folk craze then in full swing. Joan Baez seems the right name in this context. I think she was the guilty party.

Once, though, while I was playing ‘
Plaisir d’amour
’ on that piano, a choir of little matrons formed up behind me, three of them, and started crooning, ‘’cos I can’t … help … Falling in Love, with, You …’ It’s the same tune, or near enough. I think it was re-vamped (
re-re
-vamped, really) and given new words for an Elvis Presley film. Hearing the joy in those little matrons’ voices made me want to give it all I had, and so I played the tune again from the top, somehow managing to ignore the pounce of pain in my back.

The Wrigley was an altogether superior item to the E&J, in terms of speed and reliability, but it had one major draw-back. You could easily swing the foot-plates of the E&J to one side, so as to have access to the piano pedals. The Wrigley was a much sturdier piece of
equipment
, without being highly strung. It could move at a hell of a lick, though the reflexes of the staff were disappointingly swift and I
hadn’t
yet scored any direct hits. They all took evasive action, as if they’d taken a special course in wheelchair avoidance. If I’d managed an impact, the effect would have been considerable, for just the same
reason
that the Wrigley hampered me so much at the keyboard. Its
foot-plates
were rigid. There was no possibility of approaching the piano’s controls. At a posher school, of course, I might have had a crack at a grand piano. Everyone knows grands have more leg-room.

Quite apart from its effect on any listeners I might have, ‘
Plaisir
d’amour
’ could put me into a trance. Luckily for me, the bass part
didn’t
play chords all at once. They were broken up in triplets, and since the tempo was slow I could strike them one by one without straining my left hand. Then my right, for all its inadequacies, could float the tune on top. When the sustaining pedal was down, everything blended into a coloured pattern you could almost see. Without Roger Stott (or some other stand-in) to hold that pedal down, it was a futile exercise. The level of beauty did a nose-dive. I might just as well have been a chicken pecking at the notes. The Wrigley brought any
number
of improvements to my life, but it blighted my little career as a pianist.

I’d already noticed that Luke always seemed to turn up when I started playing ‘
Plaisir d’amour
’. If he was the genie of the school, then that tune was the rubbing which called him out of his magic lamp. I dare say that comparison came to me because we had done
Ali Baba
and the Forty Wheelchair Thieves
as our school play one year.

He had wanted to learn to play ‘
Plaisir d’amour
’ himself, so I reversed my wheelchair out, to let his in, but I couldn’t seem to teach him and after a while he asked me to start playing again. The Sunday after our mystical moment by the serving hatch, I was playing the piano in the Music Room and mourning the decline in my
performing
skills.