Cedilla (14 page)

I exploited the physical characteristics of the Tan-Sad, and the way it shaped my encounters with others. If I spoke softly, people had to lean over it to hear me, and then the charm could flow at full pressure. I learned how to sweep even teachers off their feet with the water cannon of intimacy. By the third week every teacher except Mr Jardine was calling me John, and I became John to him by the start of the next term. Only the horrendous Mr Waller stood firm in the face of sentimental pressure. Mr Waller was immune to every strain
of personality magic I could come up with. He once logged a formal complaint against me for wearing a coloured shirt. I was the only pupil whose shirts had to be specially made, but I was allowed no compensating fun. It’s not as if adhering to the letter of the uniform code would help me blend in.

Of course there was something ridiculous about my quest for Christian-name status at roll-call. For years I had been fighting to be treated as a normal boy, but the moment there was any danger of it happening I threw myself into a campaign for exceptional status.

The day I was called ‘John’ at roll-call at last, I couldn’t stop smiling. I would never be filigree Valerie, but I was no longer denounced as Cromer. I was worming my way into the heart of the place.

Burnham Grammar School gave me what I wanted in the way of education. I don’t necessarily mean that it was an educational hothouse, although I have no complaints. The hothouse doesn’t suit every plant. The great thing was that Burnham really was a school – a school and only a school. It wasn’t anything else in disguise. That was what I wanted. After so much time spent at schools that were really hospitals, or converted tennis courts, or folly-castles, it felt thrilling and holy to be going to a school that was only a school. A school disguised as a school! Glorious double-bluff. To be absorbing knowledge in a building designed, however unambitiously, for that purpose and no other.

I thought, back then, that each phase of my life would make a clean break with the last. In that respect I was like an ignorant student of history, imagining that everyone woke up Victorian one day in 1838. In fact the phases were anything but distinct, with much continuity across alleged ruptures. My ramshackle vehicle trundled across every seeming abyss.

In Hindu iconology there’s an image, called the Nataraja, of Shiva dancing in an aureole of flames. His left leg is elegantly, forcefully raised. There are two technical terms attached to this image,
Lasya
and
Tandava
.
Lasya
describes the gentle side of Shiva’s dancing,
Tan
dava
its savagely violent aspect. One style corresponds to creation, the other to destruction. I expect lesser gods are also involved. Hinduism has a crowded cosmology, and there’s always room for one more on the casting couch.

It stands to non-reason that creation and destruction are always converging and swapping places – that’s what makes it a dance! Dualistic thinking is hard to shake off for anyone brought up on it, but with a little practice the gates of logic come off their hinges and then at last I believe in God the Either, God the Or and God the Holy Both.

At Burnham Grammar I had everything I could possibly want, in terms of visual display. I could see something which I had been missing time out of mind. Horseplay – a sacred thing to me, almost. I couldn’t exactly take part in the rough life I watched, but I was sustained by it. Watching was my part in it. I coveted an unruliness I couldn’t muster myself, yet I didn’t feel excluded. It flowed through me as well as around me. I experienced it as a reconnection. After years in which I never made and hardly saw an action that wasn’t carefully considered, I could watch my fellows every day running riot in the spontaneity of their bodies. My eyes filled up with the sights I craved, and my ears were gloriously assaulted by the bedlam din of play.

I was fascinated by the way the boys moved. I loved the frantic shuffle they used when they were late for a lesson but in full view of a master who would tell them off for running. I could see boys dashing along a corridor and turning a corner at full tilt, sliding and scrambling on the polished floor like unshod skaters but somehow not coming to grief – coming to joy, rather. I could watch a boy run down a corridor and leap without warning on another’s back. The other boy might stagger, might let out a shout of protest, but instead of collapsing and crying for medical help, as was his right, this victim would grasp his attacker under the thighs and turn assault into piggy-back, sometimes setting off at a canter as a compound beast in search of further collisions, charging with raucous laughter into the ranks of jeering infantry. Cautionary bellows from the staff seemed to be a necessary ingredient of the scene. The uproar would have been much more subdued without their contribution, increasing the pressure of high spirits by keeping the lid on. All this was what made normal education so special.

Mobility is wasted on the able-bodied, just as youth is wasted on the young, which is exactly the way it should be. Even at slower speeds, I saw with wonder that able-bodied boys of my age didn’t walk with the scrupulous poise they might have been taught by physios. They took orthodox posture for granted and experimented with every possible variation and perversion on it. They would stand for long minutes at a time on the outside edges of their feet. They would scuff their shoes with every step, taking revenge on their parents for buying footwear which had to renounce any claim to fashionability if it was to qualify as smart enough for school. A flapping sole or a heel entirely worn down on one side was an achievement rather than a disaster. Part of me was horrified by this abuse of shoes, part of me was thrilled.

Some boys walked without touching their heels to the ground for more than a fraction of a second, balanced always on the balls of their feet, though I had no way of knowing if this was an affected showing-off gait which they abandoned when no one was looking. It’s never a walking style you see on women, or on men over about thirty. Does that mean that gradually the period of heel contact extends, as the burdens of life increase, until one day that forward bounce congeals into a trudge like anyone else’s?

Compared to the way things were at Vulcan, the caste system at Burnham was simple. I existed at the same distance from everyone else in my year, a greater but still uniform distance from anyone above or below me in the school. It puzzled me for a while that an asthmatic boy in my year was treated as if he was made of glass, when I was used to asthmatics as the supermen of Vulcan School, but I soon got used even to that.

After the first week or so,
Savage, Paul
and
Savage, Patrick
, identical twins, more or less monopolised the job of Tan-Sad command. This was unofficial but became a recognised thing. It became their job to manhandle my vintage wagon, recruiting assistants as necessary, and to make sure there was always the required sea of boys beneath me on the stairs in case of a slip-up. I assume they elected themselves for the task by virtue of being a team, ready-made. They had shown their affinity for each other by choosing the same womb, and they coördinated their duties with confidence and even panache.

For the first half of the first term, I found it impossible to tell which Savage was which, but after that I was amazed that anyone could ever muddle them up. There was a period when I got confused if I saw only their backs, but that soon cleared up, and soon I could recognise them from any angle. They were identical twins who didn’t look a bit alike, once you could see it.

We would sometimes run a sort of sweepstake. There was money to be made. People would bet on whether I could tell the twins apart from a single body part displayed round the edge of a door. Betting against me was a mug’s game. Their hands were genuinely easy to tell apart, not just for me but for anyone, since Patrick played the guitar and therefore kept his right fingernails long, for plucking purposes, and the left ones short, for fret work, while Paul kept his all anyhow. But I could even tell the difference when a bared knee and a bared elbow were offered me round the edge of a door. It helped that scuffling sounds and suppressed giggles behind the door might announce that the body parts on offer were a mixed bag – Paul’s knee, say, and Patrick’s elbow.

If Burnham was an ordinary school, then it followed that I was an ordinary schoolboy. This was a bit of a shock, though the logic was strong. Nobody before Burnham had seriously suggested that a piece of work I did could be improved in any way. At CRX and then Vulcan I had seemed almost freakishly clever, but then the educational aspect of those institutions was partly ornamental. No one expected us to do anything in the outside world except, possibly, to survive it, so my reputation as a brainbox was fairly meaningless.

School work in my past had a more or less optional status. It was more to keep us happy – which it did, it kept me very happy – than to broaden our world in any meaningful way. At those two schools my intelligence had been on the receiving end, year after year, of slightly alarmed little pats. At Burnham Grammar there was no question of it being treated so tenderly. My brain was pummelled, as if by a relentless physio, brusquely kneaded and squashed until it fought back by gaining in mobility and resource, flexing in the end quite fiercely. It was quite a shock to the system, and the sharpest shocks were administered by Mr Klaus Eckstein.

My interview with Mr Ashford had contained no formal academic
assessment, but Dad had mentioned that I liked German. He passed this on as if it might disqualify me in some way, and Mum had chipped in with her own little qualm, saying, ‘I’m afraid he doesn’t eat meat.’

Mr Ashford disregarded my dietary eccentricity and simply said, ‘Then I expect you’ll be taught by Mr Eckstein. Quite a character. You’ll either like him or you won’t.’ These formulas reliably indicate unpopularity.

Klaus Eckstein was a portly man, with whiskers sprouting in all directions. He had no small talk. In my first lesson with him one boy tried to lay an ambush by saying, ‘My father says the only good German is a dead German.’ There was still a lot of this sentiment around, but I was a little shocked to have it spelled out in this way. Eckstein simply snarled back, ‘Tell your father he is wrong! Even the dead ones stink.’ A horrible, wonderful thing to say, and I was shocked all over again. I didn’t understand that there were people who could be described as German, refugees and survivors, whose feelings for their homeland were not sentimental.

Eckstein wore a garment that I’d never seen before, and rarely enough since – a suède waistcoat. He took snuff, tapping the yellowish powder onto a mysterious hollow which appeared at the base of his thumb when he contorted it in a particular way. Then he sharply sniffed up the soft clod of powder. Eckstein kept a hanky handy for the inevitable sneezes, but even so his waistcoat became encrusted with grains and stains. Suède seemed to be a material perfectly chosen to welcome into its nap a mist of volatilised mucus suspending particles of ground tobacco. The flecked waistcoat and his snuff habit gave him a spicy smell, like gingerbread gone wrong. Perhaps Eckstein thought his snuffbox and waistcoat made him seem like an English gentleman rather than a startling exotic – but what would an English gentleman have been doing on the staff of Burnham Grammar? Such a person would have been no less exotic than Eckstein himself.

Eckstein made a point of being stern and abrasive and rude, but I wasn’t going to let a little thing like that deter me from getting into
his good books. After his lesson one day, I apologised for how poor my German was, how deficient my general education. This sort of performance I knew to be foolproof: build yourself up and the world will rush to tear you down, but if you tear yourself down the rush is all the other way, to make repairs. Except that Eckstein had not signed up to this convention. He glared and said, ‘Indeed. Your German is appalling, as are most things about you. You’ll never be much good at it unless you can get yourself to Germany somehow and stay there for a year, a season at the least. A horrible country in many ways, but the only place that foolish English boys can be stripped of their bleat of an accent.’

I tried to take this in my stride, telling myself that the compliments when they came would be sweeter for the wait. Buttering people up had always been my bread and butter, and I wasn’t going to be cured of the habit just because I’d been fed a mouthful of dry crumbs. ‘I’ll try my hardest, sir. And sir? Since
Ecke
is the German word for corner and
Stein
is the German for stone, perhaps you, Mr Eckstein, will be the cornerstone of my German education?’ I had been practising this little aria of flattery for days.

He gave a grunt. ‘Not unless you dig down into the rubble of what you think you know, and lay some proper foundations. Your accent is
execrable
.’ I knew it could hardly be so bad, since the native tones of Gisela Schmidt, star physiotherapist of CRX, throbbed behind every syllable, but I had to salute the mileage Eckstein got from the packed consonants of his chosen adjective. ‘You’ll never be any good unless you can get yourself to Germany and stay there until it all sinks in.’ He didn’t acknowledge with his tone that there could be any excuse but laziness for my not heading immediately to Germany, and getting stuck in to the sort of
Deutsches Leben
they don’t tell you about in
Deutsches Leben
or any other book, German Life away from the page.

Eckstein belonged to a strange category of teacher, those who can frogmarch pupils to excellence without ever sullying their mouths with a single word of praise. One of his tricks was to say to a pupil, ‘With all due respect,’ adding with no change of tone: ‘which is none.’ Following up a standard piece of wheedling good manners with some bad manners all his own. He was extremely unpopular. I loved him from the first.

One bit of regression connected with living at home was my lack of bathroom discipline. I can’t fault the National Health Service, which provided me with some equipment at about this time, by paying for a wheeled commode made to my measure. I even remember the name of the man who made it, a Mr Heard. After the trouble he went to, it’s only right to commemorate him. It was such a pleasure to have something that really was tailored to my requirements – even NHS hips seemed to be off the peg. I wish Mr Heard had made those! But I was happy enough with my trolley upholstered in maroon leatherette.