Pilcrow (10 page)

She bustled out of the room but she was back in a minute or two. ‘I’ve asked Dad. He says it’s very nice and not rude at all.’

‘What sort of nice? How can it be nice? It must be horrid.’

‘Let me think of something you really like. That’ll help you
understand
.’

She fetched Dad’s Mason Pearson hairbrush and softly brushed my hair with it. ‘When Daddy does the thing with his taily, it’s even nicer than this.’ How could it be nicer than this? Then she spoiled it by saying, ‘He puts it in where the baby comes out.’ Both of us had lost track of the fact that there was a lady involved, and that she had a place for Dad to put his taily, and that the lady in this case was Mum. I tried to concentrate on this important part of the absurd story. Making an effort to sound like Dad myself, no nonsense, all business, I said, ‘I think I’d better see this pocket where the taily goes.’

‘Well, I’m not going to show you!’

‘You can’t tell me and then not show me. That’s not fair.’

‘You just have to trust me.’

‘Well I won’t. You showed me your ears, remember.’ If she’d exposed the one hole, surely she could do the same with the other. ‘You’re just going to have to show me where the taily goes. Or else I won’t believe you ever again.’

‘You can believe what you like. I’m just trying to save you getting into a muddle later on.’ I wondered why she was so shy about
showing
me the pocket,
really
. Perhaps she had a little taily of her own.

The only bit of the story I liked at all was the idea that the bag beneath my taily (the family word was ‘scallywag’) was full of seeds. Otherwise it was obviously rubbish.

From Miss Collins’s point of view I must have been a faintly
alarming
child to teach. Teachers usually like a responsive pupil, but in me the hunger for knowledge had got entirely out of hand. Mine was a desperate case. It wasn’t just that I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know anything, anything at all.

Miss Collins brought a little portable blackboard with her, which I thought was a thrilling piece of equipment. I loved the dot-
ditty-dash
noise the chalk made as she wrote, and the way she wiped the board with a hanky tucked into her sleeve. The noise of her dancing chalk was like the tapping of Morse code. Dad had a proper Morse tapper which he let me use, until Mum said that I was getting too excited. He said that to be really good at Morse you actually had to think in the code. He was probably thinking in Morse the whole time.

Miss Collins was rather set in her ways – not a surprising thing, considering that she had spent most of her life in charge of rooms where she was hardly likely to be intellectually challenged. Her
lessons
were set pieces, well rehearsed and forcefully delivered. I
remember
one rather dramatic lesson, about the family life of a vowel.

It went like this: baby ‘i’ used to be taken for walks by his parents. They held his hands on either side as they strolled along. Then one day the wind came along and blew off his hat – his hat, of course, being his dot. To demonstrate, the Collie Boy puffed up her slack cheeks and blew on the blackboard, while she wiped off the dot with the board-rubber. Twice more she blew, and with each puff she wiped away the letters on either side of baby ‘i’. The wind blew away his
parents
!

Hatless and abandoned, baby ‘i’ was engulfed by shame, and there his childhood ended. His hat was lost for ever, and his parents weren’t there to hold his hand any more. He was doomed to grow up into a capital letter – that is, an adult – and to make his way in the world alone.

It’s not the most obvious way to think about the alphabet, is it? I don’t think I’ve invented the element of trauma and isolation – little ‘i’ as part of a joined-up world, then when maturity strikes having to come to terms with bereavement and solitude.
I
stands alone.
I
stand alone. Italics convey an extra emphasis on disgrace, the stricken
capital
staring down at its feet.

Apart from the Freudian scenario, there was something close to bad taste in Collie Boy spelling out this little drama to me. I was taking a bit of a break from standing up, myself. It was a treat even to be propped up, so that I could see the blackboard properly. Was it
tactful
of Collie Boy to remind me that even lower-case letters led a more active life than I did? She was teaching a standard lesson, not going to the trouble of tailoring it to the pupil.

My writing was hopeless, but my devotion to books was intense. In fact Miss Collins became alarmed by how quickly I learned. My
reading
age was galloping ahead, since I had so little else to do. It
couldn’t
be good for a five-year-old to be rattling through Beatrix Potter, or so she thought. She would intervene. It didn’t seem to occur to her that normal development was no longer a possibility, and she must build on what she found. If I was racing ahead in one area, she should be glad rather than place obstacles in my path. In most respects I was falling far behind, and would never catch up.

Miss Collins’s treatment of my rampant reading was very much in keeping with the doctors’ treatment for the underlying condition that caused it. The remedy for the excessive stimulation I was creating (to replace the stimulation that had been taken away) was to take it away. I hope this philosophy has fallen into the contempt it deserves. Miss Collins decreed that my access to books should be rationed, and the appetite for reading which worried her so much indulged for no more than half an hour a day.

It was absurd that mental inactivity should be supposed to be
beneficial
, but then it was also an absurd proposition on the physical level. I was being kept in bed for reasons of fashion. Bed rest was the panacea of its time. Just as there were people with certain specific conditions who happened to benefit from blood-letting when that was the vogue – people with hypertension, gout, polycythæmia – so there may have been people who benefited from bed rest. I wasn’t one of them.

The 1950s was a period which put a lot of faith in the healing
powers
of tedium. Taken to extremes, of course, this principle yields a mystical insight, but I don’t think that was the idea at the time, the hidden wisdom of the system. So patients with mild digestive
troubles
, for instance, would be put onto a bland diet, religiously
avoiding
roughage until their systems could hardly deal with anything more challenging than mashed potatoes.

The fad for prescribing bed rest in hospitals and convalescent homes didn’t really pass until the late 1960s. Even then, it was phased out for economic reasons, not because the professionals lost faith in its effectiveness. It simply cost too much to keep people horizontal and in limbo. It was expected that mortality figures would go up when the beds were cleared, freed up for patients with acute and actual needs, the only doubt being how much. In fact death rates went down. It turned out that bed rest had been killing far more people than it saved. Pulmonary embolism was murdering people in their beds.

So much for physical bed rest. The arguments in favour of mental bed rest hardly exist. I don’t believe that imposing inertness on the mind as well as the body would have improved the well-being of a single patient. My mental vitality had been forced underground by physical inactivity, and rather than rejoice that the current was still strong Miss Collins tried to pump concrete down into the culvert where my life now ran.

After the rationing of books time passed more slowly. I think time passed slowly in the 1950s anyway, for everyone, not just for me. Still, I had
The Tale of Two Bad Mice
safely memorised, and odd stretches of
Pigling Bland
.

Beatrix Potter revealed new aspects of herself when I considered her with my new style of attention, without the book in front of me. I was less involved, and saw things from a greater distance. Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, the anti-heroes of
The Tale of Two Bad Mice
, are
confronted
in their own way with the illusions of the world. Exploring a dolls’ house, they find food aplenty in its kitchen. Hungry, they settle down to eat, but the ham, the lobster and the bread are all made of plaster and stuck to their plates, a discovery that the mice greet not with religious resignation but with vandalistic fury.

Pigling Bland’s name was delicious in itself. Those clustered
consonants
–
gl
–
bl
– had a globulous poetry to them. My favourite
sentence
went ‘Pigling Bland listened gravely, but Alexander was hopelessly volatile.’ I didn’t know what all these words meant, but still I felt I was being nudged towards something. I wanted to be one of those who listened gravely. When I was allowed my daily ration of reading, of course, I preferred to tackle books that I didn’t already know. If ever I’d been dilatory in my reading, idly browsing from story to story, then that time was in the past.

Even when reading time was up I liked to have books near me. They became symbols of themselves. After the Collie Boy my love of books was deeply ingrained, and I would never again take them for granted.

There was a pattern set by her edict. There have been times in life when people have pointed the way for me, but more often I’ve only been able to find my path by spotting the pile of rubble in front of it. The roadblock was actually a signpost. Every time I’ve been told that some activity was unnatural, I was actually been being shown that this was where my nature lay.

In the meantime, there was printed matter which didn’t need to be read. I loved the paintbooks which were printed with tiny dots of latent pigment, waiting for the stroke of a wet brush to make their colours appear, like cactus flowers. In fact Magic Painting of this kind was the only painting I was competent to do. My elbow had more or less seized up, and my wrist felt the loss of that movement. The wrist joint itself was no great shakes in terms of flexibility.

I loved the ‘Spot the Difference’ puzzles in comics. They were like a more sophisticated continuation of the beloved old games of ‘I Spy’. The puzzle page was always the first one I turned to, the moment the comic was in my hands. I never had the patience to save it up, to ration it so that it would last for the whole of the week. Sometimes as a special treat Mum would draw me a home-made one, to tide me over between publication days. I didn’t mind the fact that in a puzzle drawn freehand, there were always more differences detectable than Mum had meant to put in.

There was a picture in a comic that made a deep impression on me at this time. It was the simplest possible image, of a boy sitting on a roundabout in a playground. There was nothing special about him, but in my mind he was the Sit-Upon Boy. He could sit on anything, whenever he liked, while I could only lie. It was a sort of crush of envy. I felt such pangs of yearning, to be him, to do what he did.

In my daily half-hour I wanted to read proper grown-up books. Far from protracting my childhood by putting the brakes on my reading age, book-rationing drove me further forward into precocity. I didn’t always want stories. My favourite books were ones which explained the world, preferably all of it. Over several months I absorbed great swathes of
The World We Live In
by Arthur Mee. I would often lavish my whole half-hour on that book, as long as Mum sat by me to help me with the harder spellings and tell me what words meant. We had a little routine about the book before we started. I’d say, ‘Who wrote this book, Mum?’ And she’d say, ‘It’s by Mee,’ and I’d say ‘Clever Mummy!’ We never tired of that – at least I never tired of that.

When the half-hour was up (and I could hardly pretend that I
didn’t
know the time, with Jim’s outsized radioactive watch permanently on my wrist) Mum would read to me from the book I loved so much. I listened gravely. She held up the book for me to see the pictures. It was absolutely thrilling. I loved the pictures of trilobites and wanted to keep one as a pet. There was a section called ‘The Pageant of Life’, which was a phrase I loved, even before Mum explained that a pageant was a sort of procession with everyone dressed up. The best chapter of all was the one on the sun. It had a lovely pull-out bit that showed just a wedge of the sun and how big (how small!) the earth was in comparison. I loved the pull-out pages in
The World We Live In
and dreamed of a book whose pages would fold out again and again, till the pages were bigger than elephants’ ears, and then fold back neatly to be put away. A book that was huge and tiny at the same time.

I felt my mind stretching, as my body was forbidden to do, when I imagined how big the picture of the sun would have been if they had shown more than a wedge. The book would hardly have fitted in the room!

My body was subject to pinpricks and broadsides of agony, but from time to time my mind had pains of its own. Growing pains,
perhaps
. One night I woke up terrified that the sun was going to run out of fuel. I screamed for Mum who said of course it wasn’t. There was nothing to worry about – but I remembered the open fire at Granny’s house in Tangmere, and how she had to add coals to it every few
minutes
, using a wonderful tool like a giant pair of sugar tongs. I
remembered
that at Granny’s house I wasn’t allowed to touch the coal tongs because they were dirty, nor the sugar tongs because they were clean.

If Granny’s fire couldn’t burn for more than a few hours without going out, how was the sun any different?
Nothing
could burn like that and not get smaller. But Mum said our gas fire was different from Granny’s open fire, which was old-fashioned. She asked me if I had ever seen her having to add gas to the fires in our house? I had to admit that I hadn’t, but I stuck to my guns. Arthur Mee specifically compared the workings of the sun to a domestic coal fire, so it would have to run out sooner or later, wouldn’t it? Mum picked up the book and showed me a wonderfully reassuring sentence: ‘The Sun has enough fuel to go on burning indefinitely.’ Of course I was only
reassured
because I thought ‘indefinitely’ meant ‘for ever’. It’s a good job I didn’t know I was being kept in bed ‘indefinitely’ myself. Neither state was strictly speaking everlasting. One day I would leave that room and one day the sun would run out of fuel, too. Bed rest wasn’t going to be for ever, but it came close enough. It gave me a good working model of eternity.

When the half-hour of my ration was used up, and Mum had things to do so she couldn’t read to me, I would ask her to twiddle the knob of our big valve radio until it picked up words in a foreign
language
. Then I could find my own stories in the unfamiliar syllables. I loved it if there was a foreign radio play on, with unfamiliar
speech-rhythms
, dramatic music and mysterious sound-effects. I would come out with my own brand of rapidly-spoken gibberish, gabbling away and chortling all the time. I asked if I could learn to speak foreign, and Mum said, ‘No you can’t!’ which didn’t disappoint me as much as I made out. I wasn’t searching for sense but for magic. I didn’t want to understand so much as surrender, to something beyond knowledge with which I felt affinity.