Authors: Adam Mars-Jones
A swarm of smart and rather flustered young men surged towards us. This was customer service at the highest pitch of professionalism and nervousness. By the time we left the premises, barely two minutes later, I was clutching in my hand a Joshua Taylor credit note for twenty pounds.
We had set out to make people more aware of the difficulties faced by people in wheelchairs, and ended up doing rather well out of it ourselves. Accidentally we became a protection racket. Up to the very moment the credit note was pressed into my hands, I had no idea we were in the extortion business, and nor (I’m sure) did Rebecca.
I let her keep the credit note. I didn’t feel I had any right to share it – it was like her carob bar. The Day of Action had been her idea, after all. She was much more likely to find something she wanted to buy at Josh Tosh than I was, and when she did she would be able to carry it home with her to Newnham. It cost me a small pang, all the same, to say goodbye to it. It was only money, of course – in fact it wasn’t even money, being a credit note. But twenty pounds went a long, long way in 1971.
When Rebecca had delivered me back to A6 Kenny I didn’t know what I felt, not just about our windfall but about the whole Day of Action. Day of inaction, more like. It was the only day in my life when being disabled was my job, no more and no less. At first this was embarrassing for me, but I grew to enjoy the feeling of being the advance guard of an army of wheelchairs which would trundle smoothly into every last cubicle of the city, glide up every stairwell.
My exclusion gave me a strange sort of authority, and no one thought to ask, ‘What good would ramps do you anyway, John? Unless the gradient is undetectable you’re no good on a slope – you’ll always need assistance anyway. So why all this fuss?’ Now my hectic day of employment was over. I had clocked off, and the difficulties of
my daily life no longer stood for anything outside themselves. They lost their audience and their power to stir the soul.
Looking back on it, the strangest part of the day was the little squabble over Rebecca’s name at lunch. It was as if I felt threatened in my niche (what niche? I didn’t have any such thing!). Some part of me seemed to think that a gay occidental Hindu with Still’s Disease was beaten at his own game by a Welsh-speaking vegan named after transvestite rioters, soundly thrashed in the struggle for supremely specialised status.
We’re all in the same minority. Minority of one. That’s what Maya tells us, anyway.
I tried to keep in touch with Rebecca. It would have been nice if she had kept in touch with me, but perhaps the credit note stood between us. I couldn’t do anything about that. All I could do was invite her to dinner, though it meant taking a lot of trouble. I had to find a non-dairy meal which was worth eating, for one thing, and that could be assembled using no more elaborate equipment than the frying pan banned in Kenny. The most alluring dish I could come up with was
imam bayildi
, or ‘the imam swooned’ – an aubergine stew with a lot of garlic in it, so fragrant that the imam (the legend has it) swooned when he opened the lid of the pot. I would have loved to see what effect it had on a vegan sociologist. It wasn’t a practical meal, though – it needed more than a frying pan.
My major discoveries at Cambridge were Thomas Mann and the aubergine. Hard to estimate their relative importance, but I think the aubergine wins on points. Only a madman would read
Buddenbrooks
every day, or even every month, while a regular intake of aubergine is entirely sane.
I decided on a rice-and-aubergine improvisation with some cashew nuts in it for the contrast of crunch, stained the dish with tomatoes, turmeric and chilli (the purple-grey of cooked aubergine is its least attractive feature), a sort of Indo-paella or Ibero-biryani, and I invited Rebecca by way of the college post, giving her a choice of dates and times.
Other people’s social lives, I can see, involve the fluent exchange of little favours. Come to dinner – no, we came to you last time, come to us. Fine as long as the difficulties are equal for both parties. It seems
natural that I should always be the guest, but only to other people. This body is a bad host, but I’m not. So I periodically move mountains to set a modest plateful before an acquaintance. It’s either that or break off the friendship before it has a chance to get established.
If I’m only ever a guest then I’m a charity case, and I won’t have that. Why shouldn’t I be charitable too? Let’s forget for a moment that from another perspective ‘I’ am as unreal as the body whose limitations I disparage. A dream hunger requires dream food – a dream cut requires a dream bandage – dream sociability requires a dream party. Still, at this time I sometimes felt like the social equivalent of a Doodlemaster machine, trying to construct the flowing shapes of a connected life out of the bare straight lines of what was possible for me, the fiddly intractable knobs that leave only horizontal and vertical traces.
Then on the appointed day Rebecca didn’t turn up. I waited an hour and a half, and then mounted an expedition to the Porter’s Lodge to phone Newnham. I said it was an emergency, which it could easily have been. It seemed perfectly likely that Rebecca had tripped in the bathroom and was lying there on the floor with a subdural hæmatoma, leaking her life away. Why else would she miss her appointment with a vegan paella? A Newnham porter was sent to rout her out. Eventually she came to the phone herself, not bleeding intracranially in the slightest bit. ‘Sorry sorry sorry,’ she said in a tone of voice that carried more exasperation than regret.
There was nothing irretrievable about the situation, or there wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t gone on to say, in the same grudging tone of voice, ‘I knew there was something I had to do.’ That tore it. That ripped up the social contract and threw the scraps in my face with a sneer. It turned out that having dinner with me was something Rebecca ‘had to do’, like getting vaccinated or going to the dentist. From her point of view my paella, so carefully considered that it was like thought itself on a plate, tender thought sending up its fragrant steam, was no more than a chore. And that was really the end of Rebecca as far as I was concerned, and veganism was tainted by
association. I might reap the benefit of a calf’s stomach-scrapings from time to time, and indeed I eat honey without giving much thought to the sorrows of the bees who made it, but at least if you invite me to dinner I turn up.
It was her loss – particularly as I’d done a little research into the homœopathic remedies for facial reddening. I could have worked wonders, and now we’ll never know.
The Day of Action for disabled people was the high point of my political involvement as an undergraduate. It’s true that I signed a petition of protest when it turned out that the college kitchen was serving South African cling peaches, supposedly blacklisted at the docks but brought into the country hugger-mugger by scab labour on barges, but that was about as engaged as I got.
Those were great years for revolutionary behaviour by students, for demos and sit-ins, but I was largely a spectator. I didn’t really subscribe to the reality of the world we were supposed to be changing. I wasn’t profoundly opposed, either, just unconvinced that there was any point in using Maya to fight Maya. On one occasion, though, I got caught up in quite a dust-up.
I don’t even remember what the issue was. I may never have known, and I dare say I wasn’t the only one to be storming the barricades without much clue about the nature of our cause. In the wheelchair I was a fellow-traveller by definition. Oh, we were against oppression, against discrimination, for liberty and the people, but as for what it was actually about, well, search me.
All I knew was that without any active decision I was being pushed along Kings Parade as part of a large and vocal crowd. We were shouting, ‘Down with –’ something. We were strongly opposed to something. And we wanted something too. When did we want it? We wanted it now. We were all agreed on that.
Then the crowd parted in front of me to reveal Graëme Beamish, looking distinctly anxious, asking if he could have a word. He was wearing a gown but it hung down unevenly from his shoulders. I imagine there’s just the one size. I was startled, but had no control over the momentum of the group. Graëme had to keep up with us as best he could, shouting in my ear as we trundled along in our cavalcade of slogans. ‘I wonder if you realise, John,’ he shouted, ‘that you make
rather a potent mascot for any cause that chooses to brandish you? I would take it as a personal favour if you took no further part in this “demo”. Just say the word and I will deliver you back to your room.’
He maintained the charade of fuddy-duddy. He was getting out of breath, but still he managed to generate a little bubble of personalised heckling within the ideological fervour of the event. ‘You are being exploited. Your companions do not have your interests at heart. If you oblige me in this matter it will greatly strengthen our working relationship – I should say, our
connection
…’
He didn’t need to spell out what he meant by that. He would approve the installation of a telephone in my room, despite his heel-dragging in the past.
‘I’m not a child, Dr Beamish,’ I said sternly, as I was wheeled willy-nilly towards the Senate House in my pram. ‘There are political matters at stake here.’ Still, it was an astute choice of bribe.
‘I’m sure there are, John, and I’m also sure there are better ways to resolve them than rash action. At least give me your word that you won’t go through those doors. I must insist on extracting your promise. Nothing else will satisfy me.’
‘Very well. I promise not to go through the Senate House doors.’
‘Very good, John. I’m glad we understand each other.’ He peeled off from the group at that, saying, ‘I’ll be speaking to you soon.’ He made a fleeting gesture with his hand by his head which could have represented the holding of a telephone receiver, before he changed it into a genial wave with no specific meaning.
It cost me nothing to make my promise. My party was visiting the Senate House more or less in a tourist capacity. It seemed possible that a few acrobatic activists might breach the defences of the university’s symbolic centre, but the rest of us would entertain ourselves, as was the way with student politics, by chanting and shouting catch-phrases about our vast power and the imminent collapse of the establishment.
When the Senate House came into view we saw that this was not going to happen. An occupation was in full swing. It turned out, as
a barrage of murmurs instantly informed us, that the authorities had forestalled destruction of property by leaving the doors open. They had borrowed drastic tactics that might be thought of as historically Russian, evacuating their capital city and leaving it hollowly in the possession of the invading hordes.
We were actually singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ as we rounded the corner. The song died in our throats when we saw that there was a real chance that we would. It was a terrific disappointment. We had banked on being thwarted, and being back in our rooms in time for tea, seething with a gratified discontent. Now the revolution we had pressed for so blindly was awaiting our next move.
It’s true that one functionary had been left behind, but his rôle wasn’t to fall under bayonets but to ask us politely not to walk on the grass. Most of us obeyed, but I didn’t, or rather the person pushing the wheelchair didn’t. I was familiar with the way those handles could sometimes transmit a subtle libertine impulse.
Now there was nothing to stop me entering the Senate House except the promise I had given only minutes before. It had cost me nothing to make that promise, but now it would cost me something to keep it. I was very much caught up in Maya at this point, unwilling to go down in history as someone unworthy of the moment, someone who had missed the storming of the Bastille by popping into the shop for a pastry. Dramatic events like this were rare in any case, and normally excluded me as a matter of course.
I put the brakes on – not literally. I called out ‘Wait!’ and our little cavalry charge pulled up short while I pondered the options. How was I going to reconcile conscience with the need to satisfy my curiosity?
Easy. You don’t have to be a lawyer, a Jesuit or a diplomat to wriggle out of commitments that don’t suit you. I had given my word that I wouldn’t pass through the doors of the Senate House. I would use the windows instead. Not a very elaborate bit of wriggling, as wriggling goes.
My party took no persuading. A scout went into the building to prepare the way. Soon a window was opened from inside and I was hoisted up bodily and passed in. It wasn’t a relaxing experience, since the windows of such a grand ceremonial building were large and high off the ground. Even on the way up I wasn’t sure that there were reliable
hands ready to receive me. I had a long moment of queasiness suspended over the window-sill, being transferred between teams of supporters. Then the thing was done. I had kept my narrow promise while disregarding its broader meaning.
While I was teetering over the sill I experienced a biblical twinge. The whole scene was full of New Testament echoes. Was it when one meeting was so crowded that Christ had to enter by this unorthodox route? Or did a sick man’s family resort to extreme measures to get their kinsman to the top of the queue? Either way, I was a bit shaken by the parallel, once I’d detected it. If your initials are J and C, it’s just the sort of thing you need to be on your guard against.
Inside, there was an atmosphere of celebration. People smoked dope and played guitars in the academic holy of holies, where students were admitted only for rites of passage, matriculation and graduation. But there was also an earnest side to the occupation. I remember a board being put up with a list of teach-ins and debates, from ‘By Any Means Necessary – How to Make a Molotov Cocktail Without Blowing Yourself Up’ to ‘Sister Power – The Lessons of Radical Feminism’. A crèche was signposted, though there wasn’t a child in sight.