Pilcrow (7 page)

It was in those days that I started talking to God, making prayers. Even the most selfish prayer is a little engine of hope. I prayed for small improvements rather than drastic transformations. At a time when I could only squirm from one side of the bed to the other, I’d pray that some day I’d be able to inch from one side of the room to the other. That would be enough for me. No sense in being greedy.

When Mum wasn’t reading to me, she would look at the fire. I could understand her fascination when the gas was lit, with my own pyrolatry so incandescent. I liked the way the honeycombed panels behind the grille glowed orange and pink as they grew hot, and held those wonderful colours, yearningly, nostalgically, for a long moment after the flame was extinguished. Perhaps I had a memory-inkling that
nirvana
in Sanskrit means the state of having been extinguished or snuffed – otherwise it’s a mystery that I should have been happy to see the fire I loved so much die down. Nirvana isn’t ‘extinction’ with all its ominous overtones, more an extinguishment (an indispensable word I’ve just made up) welcomed by the flame. But Mum would sit there for what seemed like hours on a warm evening, with her
knitting
on her knee unthought-of, looking at the fire when the
honeycombed
panels were pale and dead.

One of the games I played, Itches and Scratches, needed another player – Mum. It was fun, though the itch could often get out of hand. Any itch I had was likely to be in a part of the body I couldn’t reach, and I would have to ask Mum to scratch it. Having the itch scratched was sheer Heaven, but it wouldn’t be long before another itch broke out, and then Mum would have to scratch that one also. After three or four such itches, I seemed to be itching all over and would be wondering whether the game was so much fun after all.

Sometimes the game took on a new twist. It would happen that when I had an itch and Mum came to scratch it, the itch wasn’t affected in the slightest. Then Mum said, ‘Shall we try scratching bits of your body which don’t itch at all? Somewhere quite different.’ I could do a certain amount of scratching myself, and I discovered that if there was an itch somewhere on my right leg near the foot, then scratching part of my left arm completely cured it. The same trick only worked less well on the other side because I found it harder to scratch my right arm. What’s more, the phantom itch, when treated by remote control in this way, was much less likely to break out again.

I pestered Mum to tell me how this piece of body magic worked. She said she didn’t really know, but I could ask Dr Duckett next time he called. Dr Duckett was the local doctor, portly and fierce of
eyebrow
. He smelled of the little cigars he smoked, pungent little things. Weren’t they called Wills Whiffs? They were certainly whiffy. Once I heard Dad say, ‘Why can’t he smoke cigarettes, like a normal doctor?’, not meaning a joke.

Dr Duckett was a very good explainer. He thought for a moment after I asked him about the itches and then said, ‘John, you know how sometimes a light bulb has two switches, on different sides of the room?’

‘Oh yes!’ I had always been fascinated by such things.

‘If you turn on a switch near the door, the ceiling light comes on. Yet you could turn off the same light’ (well, I couldn’t, couldn’t have reached even if I was allowed out of bed, but I had seen it done) ‘by using a different switch right over on the other side of the room. Well, itching is to do with nerves, and in a way nerves are the body’s “wiring”. The wiring of the body is a much more complicated
business
than the wiring of a house, but sometimes you can put your
finger
on an itch-switch in a place you wouldn’t expect.’

Dr Duckett gave me so much to think about. No wonder I loved him. I decided that I’d try to understand house wiring as soon as
possible
. In the meantime I marvelled at the thought of all those little wires running through my body carrying every sort of command. Most of my wires, barring the odd sparky fluke, were connected
properly
and working well. I didn’t need to think of myself as completely ill. It was only part of me that was ill. I was partly well.

One day I would have a house of my own, a cheerful house much more colourful and full of life than the one I was stuck in now. I would have a house built entirely to suit my needs. I talked about it with Mum. She warned me that planning a house was a lot of work, and I was grateful for her ideas, but I made a secret alteration to her suggestions. When it really happened I wasn’t going to hire an
electrician
. I knew someone who would do it so much better. All the wiring was going to be done by Dr Duckett.

Dad was away a lot. It wasn’t a priority for the forces to give young fathers time at home. They weren’t feather-bedded. Sometimes he would send postcards, usually of æroplanes, but one he sent me was of a restaurant somewhere abroad. On the back he’d written:

He knew I liked everything that crept and crawled.

‘Love’ wasn’t part of Dad’s normal vocabulary, but he seemed to be able to write it down, though he did have to be abroad for the trick to work. As if the very word was in a foreign language, the custom of another country. A body of water had to intervene between us before the risk could be taken, the words ‘love’ and ‘Dad’ brought into
startling
proximity.

Dad wasn’t away all the time, and my nose was sensitised, even through several closed doors, to the strongly medicated smell of his beloved Wright’s Coal Tar Soap. In the flesh he could sometimes show a muted tenderness. I remember him sitting in my room once, resplendent in his uniform, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Mum asked me, ‘What do you want? Is there anything you want?’ I
couldn’t
say anything. Five times she asked me, and I wouldn’t speak. I just shook my head. Finally she knelt by the bed and leaned over so that her ear was near my mouth. I could smell her hair. Even so, a whisper was too loud for what I wanted and I wanted to put my hand over my mouth when I made the whisper. ‘I’d like to sit on Daddy’s lap.’ And very gently she picked me up and carried me over to my daddy and lowered me onto his lap. Gingerly he put his arms around me. I stayed there for a minute or two. I could feel a faint bunching in the muscles of his thighs, first one and then the other, as if he was
suppressing
an impulse to rock me. To dandle his first-born. It was absolute Heaven, to rock on the big warm muscles I didn’t yet know were called quadriceps.

He was away the first Christmas I was ill, and Mum had a guest, a young Canadian airman. Jim Shaeffer. He had hairy wrists, and he brought presents of an extreme generosity.

I don’t know how to account for Jim Shaeffer’s presence at that Christmas. I assume he was a contact of Dad’s, and there may have been charity involved in the invitation. But was it Mum who was showing charity, by taking a stranger in for the festival, or Jim Shaeffer, persuaded to offer the stricken mother a shoulder to cry on? If it was Jim, he made a good job of it.

I resisted him to some extent, partly because he called Mum ‘Ma’am’ not ‘Mrs Cromer’. It was too close to my own name for her – it seemed to place us in competition. I was sensitised to male presence anyway, in Dad’s absences. If anyone was going to be tall, if anyone was going to make a glass vibrate with the low register of his voice, it was supposed to be Dad.

Mum brought a couple of upright chairs into my room, and she and Jim had a glass of sherry together there. The Christmas tree had been put up in my room for a change. I had wanted an enormous tree, right up to the ceiling, but Mum had pointed out that we didn’t really have many decorations, and a tall tree would just look bare. Better to settle for a smaller tree properly dressed. She was right, and in any case the real pleasure of the tree came from its smell of
outdoors
.

I expect the sherry in the little glasses had a dusty taste from being opened the Christmas before and not drunk since. Jim hadn’t wrapped the presents he brought. I imagine he’d been told I wasn’t allowed to exert myself, even to the extent of fiddling with paper, but still he’d given thought to presentation. There was a proper grown-up gramophone, covered in snakeskin. This was already a wonderful gift – it would have been generous as a gift to Mum, let alone me – but he had gone one better by putting a further present inside it, so that even the gramophone became a wrapper for something else. He’d filled the inside of the gramophone with sweets. Even better: not ‘sweets’ but
candy
– thrilling alien sugar treats, when I had had little enough exposure to the British varieties. While the sweetness flooded my mouth, Mum started to unload her tragic troubles on Jim. Though I gazed at the Christmas tree in a sort of trance, I was familiar with what Mum was doing.

It was quite in character for Mum to recruit a stranger to share her griefs, spilling secrets and living off all the sympathy she could cadge. Chatting about her problems was a deeply ingrained habit, even before she had any problems to speak of. When I was a healthy
toddler
, she hadn’t hesitated to use me as bait.

Later she specialised in the waiting-room pounce, reaching mothers through their little ones. She had a fixation with babies, not entirely because they couldn’t keep her at a distance. Her love for small children wasn’t put on, it was perfectly genuine (and the younger the better), but she knew the strategic value of
baby-worship
. Mothers with babies couldn’t keep her at bay so easily, and once a tiny finger was curled round one of her own she was there for the duration. Then it would all come out: how lucky they were to have a normal healthy child. The mothers wouldn’t quite have the nerve to grab their babies and run. They were stuck with the long sad story.

She was a classic Heather type, as defined by the system of the great Bach. I know there are other contenders for the title of ‘the great Bach’, but as far as I’m concerned J.S. can’t hold a candle to Dr Edward, the father of modern herbalism. If it came to a choice between the
Well-Tempered Preludes and Fugues
and the
Twelve Healers
of 1933, I’m afraid I wouldn’t hesitate. In my book, the ‘Twelve’ are worth ten of the forty-eight.

The Bach guide sums it up perfectly, though Heather wasn’t
actually
one of the Twelve Healers in the original book. There were sequels which added nuances to the system of remedy and character type.
HEATHER: Those who are always seeking the companionship of
anyone
who may be available, as they find it necessary to discuss their own affairs with others, no matter whom it may be. They are very unhappy if they have to be alone for any length of time
.

There’s more up-to-date wording in one of the newer manuals, which lists positive aspects as well as negative. The positive aspects are:
A selfless, understanding person. Because of having suffered, is willing to listen and help. Can be absorbed in other’s problems and is unsparing in efforts to assist
. That’s Mum on a good day. It’s just that she didn’t have very many good days. The negative description runs: ‘
Obsessed’ by ailments, problems and their trivia. Always wanting to tell others about them, and about themselves. Sometimes weepy. Comes close – speaks close into your face – ‘button-holers’. Saps vitality of others, consequently is often avoided. Dislikes being alone. Makes mountains out of molehills. A poor listener – has little interest in problems of others
. That’s more like it. That’s the Mum I knew.

She wasn’t obsessed with ailments in the sense of being a hypochondriac – or rather, the element of hypochondria in her wasn’t to do with illness, exactly. It took the form of superstitiousness, which is really only a hypochondria of the spirit. Superstitiousness is entirely self-defeating. In Mum’s case, it did the opposite of what it was
supposed
to. It sealed in the dread it was devised to seal out.

So for instance she had the wooden outline of a magpie on the kitchen window-sill. It was her insurance policy against bad luck. If she ever saw a single magpie – ‘for sorrow’ – she could interpret it as really being a pair with the one on the window-sill. Two for joy. The old formula, tipping your hat to Mr Magpie. That’s superstition for you.

Of course it’s not mathematically possible to see two magpies as often as you see one, so the odds are stacked against joy. The wooden magpie was there so that she could cheat. She could tip her hat to joy, not sorrow, when there was just the one magpie in the garden. She managed not to notice that her little stratagem had installed a sorrow-bearing magpie right inside the house. If the wooden cut-out could count as a magpie for a second, then it was a magpie always. Despite her best efforts, sorrow was the resident emotion, joy the
visitor
that caught her unprepared. It came close to frightening her with the clap of its wings.

That Christmas, Jim’s lovely hairy hands held my attention even more than the baubles on the tree, but even at that age I knew you couldn’t just say, ‘I like your hands. Your hands are nice.’ It wasn’t a possible thing. He was wearing a watch, though, so I asked him what time it was.

In its way this was a trick question. Jim said, ‘It’s five twenty-five,’ and then I knew he wasn’t as important as my dad. My dad always said, ‘I make it five twenty-five.’ That was his power. He made the time, and Jim only told it. But I said I liked Jim’s watch, so he
wouldn’t
feel bad – and after all the watch was near the hairy hands. I
didn’t
so much covet the watch as envy it for its closeness to the hairy hands. Then Jim Shaeffer said, ‘It’s yours, pal. Happy Christmas!’

Mum looked shocked, and said something about it not being
possible
– it was just too much. Of course she was right, but I saw my chance and said, ‘I have a birthday in two days’ time! It could be a birthday present.’ Why shouldn’t the unfortunate timing of my birth work in my favour for once, enriching the harvest of presents? Instead of bilking me out of them in the usual way, when people made one gift do double duty.

So Jim said, ‘Happy Birthday then!’ I held my breath. I couldn’t imagine I would get away with it. Miraculously, Mum didn’t scold me for my greed and the generous impulse was allowed to stand, even if she was quietly embarrassed by it. I still have that watch
somewhere
, though it doesn’t run properly. Incabloc. But I do wonder what he would have given me if I’d said straight out that I liked his hands.

There was something wrong about that Christmas which I dimly noticed even at the time. There were too many presents, for one thing, which should have rung a warning bell, if not a full-change Treble Bob Major. Normally Mum was very definite about the risk of
children
being spoiled. In that she was a mother of her time.

It was long afterwards that I realised Mum was taking the brakes off the giving for a reason. Not because she was playing a part in front of someone she wanted to impress, or too shy to over-rule a guest. The hectic giving had a simpler cause. I had lost a lot of weight and seemed to be more or less fading away. Mum thought I was dying and wouldn’t see another Christmas. She relaxed the rules so as to make it really happen, not just as a figure of speech, that all my Christmases came at once. There was still just time for me to die spoiled, now that the damage it would do to my character didn’t matter so much.