Cedilla (63 page)

I had experienced years enough of impertinent probing, the finger delving anally, accompanied by the question, ‘Does this hurt? And
this? How about this?’ If not, why not? Whatever answer I gave seemed to lead to a healing bullet of wax being inserted into my back end … but now I had left the baleful land of suppositories far behind. Hello to repertory, goodbye to suppository. You won’t be missed.

The homœopathic doctor who treated me becomes an angel in my memory. One moment this was a health professional, the next it was one of the seraphim or cherubim. Whichever has the six wings. It’s the only piece of biblical imagery which gives the Hindu gods, with their comprehensively unorthodox anatomy, a run for their money.

I don’t count the great beast in Revelation, with the seven heads and ten horns, which just sounds as if the maths has gone wrong. The angel in Great Ormond Street was definitely one of the winged horde. With twain (s)he covered her face, with twain (s)he covered her feet, and with twain – just the prehensile tips of the wings – (s)he turned the pages of the repertories.

Normally I have a good memory for doctors and their ways. Which ones make real eye-contact, and which prefer to do their business at one remove. The ones for whom medicine is a harsh crusade, the ones for whom it is a losing battle. But of this doctor, the arch-homœopath, I remember nothing, not even gender, angels being beyond such things. It’s the glorious therapeutic system I remember instead, and the way it treated me.

Homœopathy sums itself up in a single Latin phrase, which exists in two versions.
Similia similibus curantur
– like cures like.
Similia
similibus curentur
– let like cure like. I prefer the second version. It’s the verb form that gets me. It’s a jussive form, though whether ‘the jussive’ is a mood or a voice or a tense I couldn’t say. It’s the same form that exists in ‘Let there be light’, or
Fiat lux
, the one moment in the Bible that seems to me beyond argument, the Jewish version of the
sruti
-note. That all-powerful urging from the heart of the matter.

At the back of my mind, in all my dealings with homœopathy, lay the feeling that if orthodox medicine wasn’t all that there was, then the same might be true in other departments of life. Perhaps I’m not exaggerating when I look back and remember reasoning that if homœopathy could work as a system of therapy – if not for everybody, perhaps – then perhaps homosexuality was workable also. Alternative
or complementary. Not wrong but right in a different way.
Similes
similibus amentur
.

When my amazement subsided, I found that the angel was asking me the most novel question of all. ‘Why did you think you became ill?’ That was all that was said, and yet it was revolutionary. In my fifteen years and more of Still’s Disease, no medical person had voiced the idea that the disease had happened to a person, who might have made sense of it in his own fashion. With the emphasis on the past. Not ‘Why
do
you think you became ill?’ but ‘Why
did
you think –?’ What was the explanation that one-time person gave himself? I hadn’t thought about it for years – it had never been a worked-out thought – but I had an answer ready, as if in fact I had been waiting all this time. I answered, ‘I thought it was because I had eaten a dirty red Spangle in the garden, when Mummy told me not to.’ I thought I had become ill because of a sweet I’d found in the garden and recklessly eaten, in defiance of all Mum’s instructions about hygiene, what was nice and what was nasty.

The angel simply wrote it down with the answers to the other questions. In homœopathic terms it wasn’t pivotal, merely part of the material for diagnosis. But I felt as if an ancient cyst in my memory, a little recalcitrant bubble of crystallised toxins, something that had been part of my material being all this time, had suddenly liquefied, bobbed to the surface and silently burst. Once I’d called it to mind, it vaporised, but without being asked that question I would have carried around the husk of guilt and shame indefinitely. Now it had no more personal application than the sort of children’s rhyme Audrey brought home from the school playground.
Chew, chew, chewing gum,
Brought me to my grave, Mother told me not to chew, And still I disobeyed …

After my visit to Great Ormond Street, I was even more of a devotee of Hahnemann and his view of life. The remedy I was given, a Johnsized glass tube containing pillules of
Silicea
30, had been lovingly chosen after the most individuated assessment of my medicalised life. It was a transcendent masterpiece of diagnosis, but it didn’t make the slightest impression on my dandruff. Efficacy wasn’t necessarily one of the virtues of the system I loved, and scurf would be with me for a few years yet.

Mum’s packing on my behalf before I went to India had been tender as well as anguished. Before I left for Cambridge it had a definite air of last rites. She handled my unimpressive possessions as if she was clearing a dead person’s room, while the corpse looked meekly on.

It was herself she was mourning, of course. If life for her had become synonymous with looking after me, then my leaving home could only be a sort of death.

Her attempts at making the best of things were almost more up-setting. ‘I dare say you’ll make lots of new friends who will invite you to their homes … but perhaps you’ll spare us a couple of days at Christmas.’ My dreams were indeed on that level – I would be swept into a social whirlpool and would forget family entirely, pursuing more congenial illusions. It was only when I heard Mum echoing my inmost thoughts that I realised how unlikely it all was.

On the afternoon I arrived as a student, we drove in convoy. I was at the wheel of the Mini, and Mum and Dad followed in their own car with my things. Sometimes they let me put two or three cars between us before they caught up with me.

I felt I could hear Mum and Dad wrangling in the æther, as if I was tuned in to some hellish family radio station impossible to turn off. The name of the programme would have been
Family Un-Favourites
. ‘Shouldn’t you catch up with him, Dennis?’ ‘For heaven’s sake, m’dear! John knows his way around, you know. He’s not going to get lost – he came here for his interview.’ ‘That was ages ago. Not everyone’s as good with directions as you think
you
are …’

It turned out that the college nurse was watching out for my arrival, perched in the Porter’s Lodge. She was a part of the welcoming committee. Not a welcome part, as far as I was concerned, but Mum greeted her warmly, as if a weight had been lifted off her heart.

I sulked, though the passive emotional states aren’t particularly effective coming from those who are assumed to be passive by decree of fate anyway. My sulk became intense without becoming any more noticeable. Was I not a standard member of the student body? And was this standard treatment? Would she be watching over us all in
the same attentive manner, tucking us in and giving us our doses of cod liver oil?

It was obvious that I didn’t need nursing. After all, if I had needed nursing then Downing College would have chosen someone else – someone who didn’t – to have the honour of being their first disabled undergraduate. They didn’t want to make work for themselves, after all.

I can’t help feeling that there’s something only semi-respectable about nurses who don’t work in actual hospitals or surgeries. A college nurse is like a ship’s surgeon or a vet attached to a circus – the position simply reeks of dark history, of secret drinking or worse. I don’t know what medical arrangements exist in a flea circus, but perhaps the same type of character is drawn to that environment too, entomologist down on his luck, whiff of formaldehyde on the clothes if not the breath.

Assuming I didn’t have such a prejudice already, then this must have been the moment I acquired it. This particular college nurse wouldn’t have lasted a minute under the command of Sister Heel or any other of the dragons whose nostrils I had seen shoot out jets of disciplinary flame. Not only did this person wear a cardigan, she had dropped cigarette ash on it while she waited, puffing away in the Lodge with the porters. The starch had gone out of her, or never been properly absorbed, as it must be, from the fibres of the uniform right down into the nervous system.

Once she had officially greeted me, she had two questions to put: was I on any medication? No, as she must already have known. Did I know the name and address of the GP assigned to me by the University? I did, it had been in the paperwork – Dr Buchanan at the Trinity Street practice. Then she went about her business, having accomplished precisely nothing. I thought that if she was going to be there at all, she should have the good manners to take my temperature and blood pressure, to pester me about my last bowel movement. Either do the job or don’t – but don’t just hover!

The porters were expecting not only me but the Mini. If there was an undertone of suspicion in their welcome, it attached to the car not the disabled student. If there’s one thing that college functionaries know in their bones, it’s that undergraduates don’t have cars – or
those who do keep very quiet about it. If I was going to have a car, then I was almost being a spoilsport by owning up to it. Much more fun for the authorities to catch me red-handed at the wheel and drag me before a disciplinary board. Still, any hard feelings didn’t last. The Mini was expected just as much as I was. There was a parking space designated for it, inside a back entrance of the college, accessed by Tennis Court Road. From there it was only a few yards to my room.

The room was Kenny A6 – 6 being the room, A the staircase, Kenny the Court. If you’re looking at the doorway of A staircase from Kenny Court, then my room was the one with the first window on the right. Porters and others keen on brevity could just scribble ‘KA6’.

It was almost a suitable place for me to live. Almost. So take your pick of proverbs – beggars can’t be choosers, or a miss is as good as a mile. There were a couple of steps at both the front and rear entrances, so access wasn’t easy in either direction, and impossible in the wheelchair.

The back door at least had a handle I could operate, and although there was no handrail I could lean against the wall to assist my transfer between levels. The front door of A staircase was impossible for me to manage unaided. It had one of those hydraulic piston arrangements at the top, a door-closer of savage power. I think I’ve heard that device referred to as a ‘muscle’, though that may not be its technical name. In any case, it outclassed anything my muscles could accomplish.

I would have to get into the habit of going in the back way, after parking the car. The proximity of the car park made it simpler to come and go by the back door and the back entrance than to pass through the heart of the college.

I might have developed more
esprit de corps
if my day-to-day dealings with Downing had amounted to more than refuelling trips to the Hall.
Esprit de corps!
That’s one of the bits of French I do like. The spirit of the body – it’s irresistible. Can it also mean the wit of the body?

The room was marginally Johnable. It was on the very edge of Johnability. I dare say it was the pick of the bunch in terms of Downing’s
available stock, and there was no legal obligation for the college to take me at all – it was either a social experiment or an act of academic charity – so I could hardly complain. At least it was on the ground floor. It would do. It would have to.

On that day there were hundreds of fresh undergraduates installing themselves in their rooms, and most of them had the help of their parents to settle in, whether they wanted it or not. In the weeks before term began I had been looking at the map of Cambridge that I had bought when I came for my interview, making myself familiar with the town’s geography, and I knew that in hundreds of rooms from Newnham to Girton, from Clare to Jesus, fathers were looking out of the window and preparing to separate a five-pound note from its fellows in their wallets, and mothers were feeling the thinness of the sheets and inspecting the stains round the plugholes in the washbasins.

I was twenty, which made me older than my academic contemporaries. Even so, here I would have a sensation I had been deprived of and had longed for. As a freshman I would be part of a generation. The closest I had come to a generation before this was a ward, then a dormitory, then a class. This was a society on a much larger scale.

In this new place, though, it would be up to me to make my own contacts. Cambridge University was an institution, but not like any I had known before. This would be a place of elective affinities. I wouldn’t have company and competition thrust on me without having to make the effort. Friends, lovers, enemies. They would be all my own work.

Mum and Dad were part of a generation, too, on this day, the generation of parents settling their children in at university. I suppose the occasion must have been clouded for Dad by the sense that I was receiving a privilege which he had been denied. I couldn’t do anything about the War and the forfeiture of his further education, but I could at least include him in my privilege by letting him settle me in. If I was impatient for my new life, I was well enough brought up to humour my parents on the last day of the old one. Mum laid my clothes out in the little chest of drawers, squeezing everything into the top drawer. The lower drawers being more or less out of reach.

The small room was dominated, if not actually usurped, by a large
Parker-Knoll reclining chair. This wasn’t college issue (anything but!) nor a surprise, since it was another manifestation of Granny’s equivocal bounty. I had contributed £2 on the usual basis – this was not a present but an investment in my future.

Under normal circumstances the porters might have kicked up a fuss about the delivery of an item of furniture for a freshman’s room several weeks before the beginning of term (Granny liked to get things done in good time). The circumstances were not normal, but this was no sort of concession to the needs of the disabled. Granny was the abnormality, and this was a concession to her. She rarely used ‘My good man’ as a form of address, but she seemed permanently capable of it, and people would do almost anything to head her off before that point was reached.