Cedilla (70 page)

One triumph had its roots in a moment of outrage. As I was working my knife and fork down into my plateful of food one day in Hall, they came across something which felt like a special sort of bread, resistant but also squishy. I was intrigued. Evidently Chef had excelled himself, and all for the benefit of the little Modern Languages student in the wheelchair. I thought that before I took a bite I would just peek under the topping to see what this fascinating elastic bread was. It was a steak. It was an animal slab, and I went berserk. I’m sorry (very slightly sorry) to say that I howled for this heinous object to be taken out of my sight.

The massed carnivores of the college watched it go, incredulous with sorrow. They mourned its passing, except that mourners don’t usually lick their lips. Even I could see that this was a shining specimen of the flesh feast, succulent, cooked to perfection – I hadn’t eaten at the Compleat Angler all those times without knowing what steak should be like. Granny might make a little road across her plate, but Peter laid down a four-lane highway over as many plates as were put in front of him. I imagine this superb atrocity was destined for High Table and had been blown off course. No wonder my fellow students looked on in such anguish. They would never see such a meal in their academic lifetimes, and I was sending it back with shrill squeals of protest.

Next day the college Chef came to interview me about my preferences. ‘I’d like to make a special list of what you can and can’t eat, sir!’ This was a diplomatic breakthrough, this embassy to the untouchables. The outcastes were being wooed. Nato was reaching out a tentative hand to the Warsaw Pact.

The ‘special list’ was simple enough.
Can eat: non-meat. Can’t eat:
meat.
That was it, essentially, but it seemed best to go into detail and
make positive suggestions. Just to be on the safe side I mentioned that vegetarians couldn’t eat anything which had been in contact with aluminium, and he gravely wrote down this also.

From then on Chef paid special attention to the herbivores. The other two got the benefit without the shock of being ambushed by that steak, buried like a landmine of animal tissue beneath the innocent tomato topping. In a college of notoriously awful food, the three of us – the one per cent – dined in something like luxury. The minority is always right, of course, but rightness doesn’t usually tingle in the tastebuds as it did in ours then.

It wasn’t long before the carnivores noticed the general superiority of our rations. A deputation approached the Bursary to request vegetarian food. Request refused – if they had wanted to register as vegetarians they needed to do so before arriving in college. This was entirely unfair and very pleasing. On the one hand, every new vegetarian is a gift to the world. If there’s one religion that should be allowed to proselytise, it’s vegetarianism. On the other hand, the deputation didn’t represent a change of heart but a sly bid for better grub.

We lonely three were conscientious objectors who had faced down the stigma of refusal, while they were like volunteers who wanted to desert now that they had seen what life was like in the trenches of institutional catering. They were sent smartly back to the front, and we conchies held steady at one per cent.

Mum wasn’t much of a letter writer by this stage of our lives, but she did send on to me a note from Mrs Osborne. Apparently Kuppu had wished me to be informed that if I ever returned to Tamil Nadu she would look after me for the rest of her life.

This was a sweetly shocking thing to hear. The contrast with Cambridge life was very great. A gardener’s wife in India could pledge herself, after a few short weeks of acquaintance, to serving me as long as she had breath. In the West my value to anyone else was not high, and my needs were strictly my own.

Dad was never much of a correspondent either. A letter from him was always something of an event, and his first letter to me at Cambridge was by his standards a hysterical document.
A bit of a facer,
frankly … timing could be better … not as if they’re short of a bob or two. 
He had received a bill from Downing. He sent it along for me to look at. Should he pay it? Why should he? But how could he not? Little ripples of alarm churned up the preferred flatness of his letter-writing manner.

The bill was for the expense of fitting a rail over the bath on my staircase. It was accompanied by a compliments slip from the Bursar, but no refinement of stationery could soften the blow. The bill was for ninety-two pounds. Dad didn’t know whether to pay it, to refuse point-blank or to challenge the amount. And neither did I. None of the alternatives had the slightest appeal for Dad: being taken for a fool, defying authority and waiting for the bailiffs, or haggling like a carpet-seller in the souk.

Even so, this was a thunderbolt which was in some ways almost refreshing – an antidote to brooding, something out there in the world that damanded immediate attention.

Ninety-two pounds! It was an outrageous sum of money, as Dad knew very well since he had paid for the very similar (if not identical) over-bath rail at Trees. It was clear that Downing had given the work to some top-drawer contractor, then passed the mark-up on to us. It wasn’t even as though the college had been required to provide a hoist. I had brought my own. Technically I suppose it was Dad who had brought it along, loading it in the back of the car that had escorted me to Cambridge. It was made by the same Everest and Jennings who had made my first electric wheelchair, inferior predecessor of the Wrigley, and it wasn’t anything fancy. It was really only the motor from one of their chairs, lightly modified. Instead of the relays required to power a chair, there were two strings, a green and a red. Green for Go and red for Stop. Heaven help you if you’re colour-blind – but not in itself an elaborate piece of equipment.

I didn’t even understand the principle behind sending Dad a bill. Was the idea that we would sell the rail back to the college when I left, minus depreciation calculated on some standard basis, or were we entitled (perhaps required by law) to rip it out and take it with us out into the wider world? Would we be sued for negligence at a later date
if we left the Cromer family rail – a horizontal funicular only suited to the most unadventurous sightseer – disfiguring Downing’s handsome bathroom ceiling?

Dad had no one to ask, but I did. Every Cambridge college assigns to its students an official whose job is to defend their interests, against the college itself if need be. This is their tutor. I was up against exactly the sort of situation for which the tutor system was designed, so I went and complained to mine.

When I say ‘I went and complained’, of course it wasn’t as simple as that. Nothing is ever that simple. To get help from my tutor I needed an appointment with him, and to get an appointment I needed help from someone else, someone to carry notes back and forth on my behalf. The system was essentially the same as what Mrs Osborne used to send messages in Tiruvannamalai, except that she had the benefit of a large stock of boys clamouring to be chosen. Perhaps the simplest method in Cambridge would have been to send someone with a message to my tutor’s pigeon-hole in the Porter’s Lodge, but there was no guarantee of a swift response and I felt that this was an emergency of some diffuse sort.

I had been assigned a tutor on the same basis as everyone else, which was splendidly egalitarian but unrealistic, since what I really needed was a tutor with rooms at ground level. As it was, I had to be carried up two flights of stairs before I could begin to make my case. Each time I asked someone for such a favour of portering, I felt I was depleting my stock of social credit in the college, and well on my way to becoming a nuisance.

I was already forfeiting any possibility of getting a good review for my time as an undergraduate, the sort of favourable verdict that goes
A thoroughly successful experiment! An object lesson in how social inclusion
can be made to work …

We hardly knew he was there
.

The physical remoteness of my tutor was another version of institutional tunnel vision, like the bellpush that Marion Wilding of Vulcan School always mentioned as an example of the thoughtlessness of the outside world, well in reach of everyone but the disabled people it was installed to help. Still, if Mohammed will not come to the mountain then the mountain must come to Mohammed. The mountain was
always having to stir stumps in my Cambridge days. The mountain had a fair few miles on the clock before long.

It would have been a relatively easy matter for my tutor to descend from on high and meet me on my level, except that the thought never entered his head. Perhaps this was thin-end-of-the-wedge thinking, which I first encountered in Manor Hospital (my first hospital ever) over the contents of a cereal bowl: if John has Weetabix everyone will want it. To my mind this argument has yet to be sufficiently discredited.

If John Cromer’s tutor makes an exception in his case, undergraduates will start expecting tutorial visits in the pub. Or in the bath.

Let them eat Weetabix, I say.

My tutor’s name was Graëme Beamish. He didn’t actually use the diæresis in the spelling of his name, but I felt it was required, to indicate that he was pronounced Graham rather than Grime. I supplied the symbol in my mind, out of typographical courtesy.

When I was finally admitted to his presence I explained about the bill and the worries it had caused. His response was drily chafing in a way that I discovered over time was characteristic of him, but was certainly a little disconcerting on first exposure. ‘This seems rather a poor augury of our relationship, John, if I’m to be expected to intervene in every little dispute your family has with tradesmen. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on this occasion, as long as you can assure me that you will notify me before you undertake any further structural alterations to the fabric of the college.’

In retrospect I think he was ill at ease with the rôle of tutor, actually rather shy in his dealings with people, and protected himself with a sort of performance. He took on the character of academic in a comedy some years out of date. It wasn’t that he was old – probably not far into his thirties. Perhaps he felt that he would lack authority as a don unless he was actively, indefatigably donnish.

After he had got his little tease out of the way his advice was clear and helpful. ‘Tell your father that this bill is
not
, repeat
not
to be paid. The problem will be induced to go away. Mr Gates our splendid Bursar will see to that, though it is to be admitted that he knows nothing of this as yet. Leave it to me to break the news to him.’ As I came to learn over time, ‘splendid’ was Graëme Beamish’s unvarying adjective
for officers of the college and the university, and possibly for every person on earth. Like a word in classical Chinese its actual meaning in any single case had to be inferred from context and intonation.

I reported back to Dad that the bill was to be ignored. On clear nights, though, when the psychic acoustics were good, I felt I could hear between chimes of the Catholic Clock a high scratchy noise which carried on the wind all the way from Bourne End, and represented Dad’s heroic efforts to wrestle with his nature and history. What a struggle it must have cost him, to disregard a clear demand from an established authority! His hand must have ached for his pen and his chequebook. Without Dr Beamish’s countermanding order, he would never have ignored a bill, however unjust.

A few days after my interview with Graëme Beamish, a college porter knocked on my door and asked when it would be convenient for the Bursar to pay a call on me. This seemed a worrying development. Mohammed was coming to the mountain – quite possibly with a vengeance. I had contested a demand for payment, and now an inflamed Bursar was seeking me out in my warren to demand redress.

I was certain the threatened visit was about the blasted ceiling rail. I imagined I would be summonsed to some sort of disciplinary hearing of an ancient and intensely ritualised type – the Cambridge equivalent of a court-martial or a consistory court, a tribunal fiscal-academic, conducted in Latin or Norman French. No doubt the Bursar was required to attend in person to pass my doom upon me. On the day of reckoning the massed bursars of the university would make their way from their colleges to the Senate House, wearing full academic dress, carrying slide-rules in their left hands and red marker-pens in their right, with black caps or enormous bird-masks on their heads. Possibly Aldous Huxley’s
The Devils of Loudun
, which I had read not long before, contributed to this rather hysterical imagery. It had certainly given me nightmares.

In the ancient heart of the university I would have my Post Office pass-book formally impounded, my wheelchair sold from under me. The Vice-Chancellor himself would draw near, to make ninety-two
little snips in my gown with a tiny pair of inlaid shears. Academic gowns didn’t have to be worn on a daily basis, but perhaps I would be issued with one for this single occasion, for a proper pantomime of disgrace.

Of course nothing of the sort happened. Mr Gates the Bursar had come on a different errand. The ritual that concerned him wasn’t arraignment by bailiffs in regalia but matriculation, which seemed to be a sort of initiation ceremony for undergraduates. He said, ‘I hear tell that you’re not planning to attend matriculation … which would be a great pity.’ I wondered how he knew. Perhaps I had failed to return some vital chit.

‘Do you mind if I ask why not? I’m sure we can help you with any problems.’ His voice was hoarse and rasping, oddly tender. He seemed genuinely preöccupied with his unreal ceremony, though it was even less plausible than the one I had dreamed up. As a Downing bursar he had inherited the stigma of a scandalous absconding. Through his voice the disgraced office seemed to plead to be trusted again.

As he talked his eyes ranged over the room, but I had the impression that he wasn’t spying on me but rather the reverse. It was as if his eyeballs had been greased. This must have been his practice when mingling with the student body. By keeping his gaze on the move, not stopping to register any one thing, he was hoping to avoid the known horrors of undergraduate life. In this way he was able to absent himself from such sights as forgotten coffee mugs with lids of fur, resembling accidental exhibits of surrealist art. He could walk right past the extra-terrestrial’s lost sock camouflaged as an oozing prophylactic.