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Mrs Adcock used to set me ‘Fun Homework’. She’d dish out arithmetic sums which looked awful, but the answers would come out as 44444, or maybe your very own telephone number. Seeing something so nice and familiar was my reward for working so hard at the sum. She’d play endless word games with me, and I enjoyed trying to catch her out. If I found a word which Mrs A didn’t know – which wasn’t easy – she was genuinely delighted rather than put out. You’d get a ‘thank you’ and a ‘that’s another one to add to my list’, and even a small present. Peter was still suspicious of her, so he would deliver me and then come back for me at an agreed time. It would take more than a batty old neighbour to make him think homework was fun.

At one stage my vegetarianism hit something of a crisis, not a lapse of principle but an intensifying of temptation. I had weaned myself with great effort off Mum’s dumplings and gravy, a dish that she made particularly well, but there were times when I came close to backsliding.
The smell made my salivary glands turn traitor, drenching my mouth with pleasure in anticipation. Mum told me that if I wanted dumplings and gravy all I had to do was take them onto my plate. There would be no vulgar crowing. Not a word would be said. ‘You know I can’t make vegeteerian dumplings for you, John,’ she said, ‘because the recipe contains suet, which naturally you can’t eat.’ Mrs Adcock urged me to hold firm against the pounce of the inner carnivore.

A few days later a knock came at the front door. Standing in the porch was a boy carrying a plate with a metal canteen cover on it. He said this was a gift from Mrs Adcock and must be eaten straight away. Mum brought it in and set in on the kitchen table in front of me. Even before she raised the lid I could smell a warm wholesome aroma. When she did I could see fluffy dumplings smothered in a thick veg soup, lounging next to something that looked like a chop, but was actually a Granose ‘steak’ out of a tin.

Mum banged a fork down alongside the food and told me that I’d better get on with it. She didn’t repeat her warnings about not eating anything cooked by Mrs A, but her silence was hardly neutral. I hesitated, and then I decided that if there was poison anywhere in this set-up it wasn’t in the food. I took a tentative nibble at a dumpling. There was nothing wrong with it. There was nothing wrong with any of it. This was manna made manifest in farinaceous form, proof of the power of prayer. Dumplings from heaven.

Mum turned her back on me while I ate, and when I had finished she snatched the plate away from me and started scrubbing fiercely at it in the sink. It was as if she wanted to scrape away any molecular trace of Mrs Adcock’s kindness. Then she sent Peter to take it back, with the canteen cover, to where it came from. It was as if she couldn’t bear to have these objects in her house a moment longer than she could help. She sent no message of thanks, though I’m sure Peter was too polite not to deliver one.

Clearly it wasn’t pleasant for her to have a neighbour send me a treat, on a number of levels. To have food delivered into her very kitchen, as if this was Meals on Wheels for a deprived (poor) person. To have an atheist (or agnostic) demonstrate Christian charity, not to mention imaginative sympathy. Mum had no reason to feel grateful for being multiply shown up. Yet on this question the enemies were
on the same side. I was too thin for my own good, and something needed to be done about it. Oddly, being underweight only seemed to signify if you were a vegetarian. Mum was a case in point – theoretically an omnivore, but not much of a vore of any sort. A nullivore if anything, or a paucivore at best, depending on the day and her mood.

Isn’t Queen Mary supposed to have given Gandhi a poke in the ribs on the occasion of their meeting, saying he needed to put some meat on his bones? All right, I’m making that up, but I had always been told by those who claimed to know – including the staff at CRX, Flanny and my parents – that those who ate no meat had feeble bodies and feebler brains. Mrs Adcock was proof to the contrary.

This lady who had been a vegetarian since her teens had also worked on magazines and made her own dress designs. She had toured the world in search of textiles, getting as far as China. Her brain fizzed with energy. She loved mathematical puzzles and word games, not only solving them but setting them. She knew every card game that had ever been invented – for heaven’s sake, she was even immune to cyanide, as her wasp-killing technique proved. She had been a conscientious objector in the War, though women had to make quite a fuss about it for their objections to register, since they weren’t expected to fight in the front line anyway. Mrs Adcock was that precious thing, a pacifist who likes a good dust-up.

It was never hard to rekindle my relationship with Mrs Adcock. Our rapport was never a thing of blazing glory, but there was some steady combustion going on. It was a sort of smouldering friendship. It might seem to go out altogether for months or even years, but it never needed much encouragement to break out again. Just a little fuel would make it burn brightly. I still tried to make a note of new words to pass on, even if we were neither of us as easy to impress as we had once been. When I read
Gardening for Adventure
in hospital it gave me a bright bouquet of verbal novelties to present to her, or to relay in notes delivered by Peter. Mrs Adcock was perfectly familiar with
abortifacient
, but clean bowled by
emmenagogue
(used to describe anything which promotes the menstrual flow). Peter never stayed longer than the minimum, and always turned down coffee and tea. I worried sometimes about his lack of adventurousness, which seemed partly a sort of brotherly inhibition. My rôle was to chafe against the limits
of my world. He seemed to atone for his wider opportunities by not taking advantage of them.

When I started visiting Mrs Adcock again in 1968, while studying at High Wycombe Technical College, she hardly seemed any older. She had all her own teeth, she had all her own wits. By this time her vegetarianism had taken a new crusading turn. She was campaigning against factory farming, and got me to take out my own membership in the society she had joined.

She had stopped drinking milk, since she couldn’t be sure of the well-being of the cows involved, so that the milky Nescaff she served was now based on Coffee Mate. I took a discreet look at the ingredients on the label, and wondered how long she could get by on dried glucose solids and powdered hydrogenated fats. Milk had been the core of her diet. She only picked at other things.

There was hardly a vitamin or ghost of protein in her body, but there was nothing wrong with her drive and sense of purpose. In fact she had far more of a plan to change the world than either Mum or Flanny. She was expanding her range of activities and her areas of operation. So much for the low energy levels of herbivores. Not content with opposing the cruelties of the domestic food industry she had foreign barbarism in her sights. She was revolted by bull-fighting in Spain, which she wanted banned. If the Spanish had such a taste for blood, let them jab skewers in each other, and then talk about the dark glory of the sport.

I don’t think bull-fighting had many defenders in Britain at the time, but by bad luck one of them was my Spanish teacher at the college, Dawn Drummond. She had lived in Spain and explained that we had it all wrong about bull-fighting. For a Spaniard going to a bull-fight was no more exotic than going to the bingo in Britain, though a great deal more profound and poetic. She had attended many
corridas
. It was a mistake to think bull-fighting was based on cruelty. In fact it was an exquisite moment when the matador came in for the kill.

I did my best to represent the bull’s point of view in class but had made no headway. Dad had been chased across a field by a bull, but
it didn’t make him wish the animal any harm. The matadors had no such grievance.

Miss Drummond said the matador used a special knife for the job, very sharp but surprisingly small. She even told us the Spanish word for it, but my mind refused to store it. Mentally I withheld my assent from the technical vocabulary of ritual killing. She said that the bull was completely exhausted by this stage, and frankly, after all the jabs he’d received from the picadors, finishing him off so cleanly was an act of mercy.

She held an imaginary knife in her hand and plunged it into the bull’s imaginary heart, from which the astral blood spurted green. A macabre glow lit up her face with momentary incandescence, right in front of the eyes of the class. I felt I had seen an appalling transformation, which turned Miss Drummond into a blood sister of Miss Mitchell-Hedges gloating over her crystal skull at Vulcan School, draining the psychic energy from the pupils to feed on.

It’s only fair to say that there were other elements in Miss Drummond’s portrait of Spanish culture. There was flamenco, which I dismissed from a position of total ignorance. I couldn’t accord much respect to a style of movement which seemed to me to resemble bad-tempered tap-dancing, a ritual re-enactment, in frothy dress and high heels, of the stamping my sister did when she didn’t get her way. A choreographed tantrum. Then there was
gazpacho
, whose praises Miss Drummond constantly trumpeted, with digressions on recipe variations permissible and impermissible.

I was the closest the Cromer family had to an adventurous palate (if you bear in mind that eating meat is not an adventure). Mum greatly disliked the taste of olive oil, which I relished. I could even enjoy, or certainly tolerate, garlic, so
gazpacho
should have been well within my experimental range.

I don’t know whether the barrier was physiological or mental. It’s true that my body’s temperature equilibrium is easily upset. After a few minutes in the hot part of the new conservatory I would overheat and take some time to recover. I felt sure that drinking cold soup would sabotage my metabolism from within – yet I was the same John Cromer who liked to leave the bedroom door open on the coldest days.

I couldn’t face the idea of ingesting the icy liquid. On a hot day I
didn’t want a chilled drink, though of course ice cream is in a different category. Ice cream rewrites the rules. And I take tiny bites, tiny sips, tiny slurps as it melts.

In any case I rejected the idea that Spanish culture boiled down to this – soup, stamping and savagery. What about St John of the Cross, Cervantes and Lorca? I was particularly attuned to St John of the Cross and the notion of
La Noche Oscura del Alma
. In Hindu thought, there is a dark night of the soul as wide as the cosmos which lasts a hundred thousand years. There’s a special word for it.

I could find excuses for Lorca’s bloodlust, but none for Miss Drummond. She never actually praised Franco in class, but said darkly that we shouldn’t believe what we read in the papers. You had to live in a country to know what you were talking about.

But wasn’t it on Franco’s orders that Lorca was killed? I wasn’t the only one in class to be horrified by Miss Drummond’s enthusiasm for the bull-fight, but when there were muffled protests she told us we were making judgements in ignorance. Anyone who had the courage to attend a bull-fight with an open mind would certainly be converted.

When I reported all this to Mrs Adcock, she immediately pulled out her own fighting equipment. A pen and a piece of paper. An envelope and a stamp. The pen in its own way was also a specialised weapon, with a deadly edge.

‘I’m going to write to the principal of your college about this,’ she said. She took down the relevant names. With anyone else I might have thought I was being humoured, but I knew Mrs Adcock would make good on her promises. In fact I wasn’t sure whether I wanted this hoo-hah to happen. I had been more or less tortured at CRX and at Vulcan school without mounting any sort of protest. Was I really going to take Miss Drummond to court for her perverted interest in the shedding of ruminant blood? It made more sense to keep my head down and concentrate on my A-level. Unfortunately the slogan ‘anything for a quiet life’ practically guarantees rebirth after rebirth, with no remission from the cycle, so I had to stick to my guns.

About a week later Mum answered the telephone. It was the principal of the college. When I next came in, would I be kind enough to report to him? He would make sure that Miss Drummond was there also.

I wasn’t looking forward to the meeting. When I saw Miss Drummond in the corridor she seemed tense and looked dreadful. She had never looked exactly well, even at the beginning of term, but now she looked positively ill. There was no colour in her face at all.

‘John,’ she said with false warmth, ‘why on earth didn’t you tell me more clearly about your objections? I would have been happy to explain at greater length if only you had given me the chance. Now you’ve gone and upset an old lady for no reason at all. You shouldn’t be sneaky, John, not go around three corners. If there’s anything you have to say you should just come out with it.’

The principal behaved in a friendly manner towards me. It took me a little while to realise he wasn’t greatly exercised by the dispute in front of him as a disciplinary matter. He was closer to being an amused spectator than a hanging judge. I started to consider the possibility of giving him something to see.

I said I did have one question, and the principal said, ‘Go on, then, John. Ask away.’

‘Would it be an act of mercy if I broke Miss Drummond’s neck, providing I had been kind enough to break all her fingers and toes slowly first, and as long as thousands of people were watching? Would that be
exquisite
?’

Miss Drummond drew in her breath as if she had been slapped. It had been a bit of a mistake for her to have characterised Mrs Adcock as a frail victim. After that she could hardly denounce me as the cat’s-paw and mouthpiece of a vegetarian terrorist, which would have been far more accurate. It was something of a put-up job. I had more or less been coached by Mrs A, though I hadn’t been sure I’d be able to go through with it until the moment I opened my mouth. Now there was nothing very much Miss Drummond could do to regain the initiative. The principal said, ‘We won’t keep you, Miss Drummond. I know you have a class to teach.’ Whether he was letting her off the hook or twisting the knife in the wound I really couldn’t say.