Pilcrow (42 page)

There were definite things I wanted from a new school. At CRX the hospital was the sun and the school the moon. A lot of the time it had hardly been visible. It was a pale, almost theoretical presence. Education was required by law rather than pursued with passion. I wanted a place where lessons wouldn’t just be fitted in around the routines of a hospital, where education wasn’t always giving way to medical science.

The new school had a strange name. It was called The Vulcan School. It also had a sort of subtitle amounting to a technical
description
: ‘A Boarding School for the Education and Rehabilitation of Severely Disabled but Intelligent Boys’.

When I had been told about Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital all I needed to know was that there was a school on the premises. Then I was happy to be on my way. After CRX I wasn’t quite so trusting. I had learned to be afraid. Mum and Dad had to do a little selling of its advantages. There were three main attractions to Vulcan School, as they presented it to me:

How like me? Exactly like me?

No, but boys who need a bit of help getting around and doing things for themselves.

All of this was true. Farley Castle was indeed a crenellated pile, although built in the eighteenth century as a folly, rather than earlier on as a defensive stronghold. It had been owned by Colonel ‘Mitch’ Mitchell-Hedges, an adventurer and explorer (less romantically a
collector
of English silverware), who had lived there with his adopted daughter Sammy. The legend was that he never had less than half a million in cash on his person at any time.

The school had been founded by Marion Willis and Alan Raeburn. Alan had a special feeling for disabled boys – he had lost the use of his legs during the war when a tank rolled on him. And yes, his sister Margery held the strings of Andy Pandy and made him move. It
wasn’t
a particularly dazzling piece of puppetry. Andy Pandy didn’t move a lot more fluently than I did.

Points 1 and 2 didn’t make this funny-sounding school seem all that attractive. Number 3 had more weight. Uncle Mac, alias Derek McCulloch, Chairman of the Board of Governors of Vulcan, was the most immediately familiar figure outside family for any British child of the time. He presented
Children’s Favourites
on the radio (though plenty of people still said ‘wireless’). He was the voice of Muffin the Mule. Uncle Mac pervaded Saturday mornings at CRX. We would listen raptly to the Light Programme when he was on. Admittedly much of the silence on the ward every Saturday morning was explained by the fact that one or more of us had written in to the BBC with a request for Uncle Mac. There wasn’t an official league table, but everyone knew Sarah Morrison had had her name read out on the radio more than anyone else. That was Sarah all over.

Uncle Mac’s catch-phrase was the way he signed off at the end of a programme: ‘Good-bye children ….. everywhere.’ It was the pause that made it so distinctive – that drawn-out ellipsis. Definitely five dots rather than three. Uncle Mac’s radio programmes were central to our experience of radio and of life on the ward, and a school whose board of governors was chaired by this avuncular mystic couldn’t help getting a boost in my mind.

The songs that Uncle Mac played came to carry a huge freight of emotion by association. Hearing one of your favourite songs on a Saturday morning could make a difference to the whole weekend. I liked Danny Kaye’s ‘The King’s New Clothes’, because it was more or less rude. I liked ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ because it was
frightening
. I liked ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ because it showed someone else believed in magic. I liked ‘The Animals Went In Two by Two’ because it was easier than reading the Bible. I liked ‘The Runaway Train’ because of the happy ending (
the last we heard she was going still
…). I liked ‘Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats’, despite its failure to win me friends at CRX, because it was in a sort of code. I liked ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ because I thought they would be waiting for me in CRX woods, providing I could dodge the Teddy boys from Ward Three.

I liked ‘I’m a Pink Toothbrush, You’re a Blue Toothbrush’ because the guru Max Bygraves helped me see that love doesn’t mind if you’re different. I liked ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ because there was no resisting the idea of mice in clogs. I liked Lonnie Donegan’s ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ because it meant I could sing in Cockney, even in earshot of Mum, without getting a scalding. I liked ‘Little White Bull’ for the same Cockneyphile reasons – I was careful to pronounce ‘little’ with the proper glottal stop as ‘li’ul’ – and also because I was in love with Tommy Steele. I kept asking Mum when I’d be old enough to have my hair dyed blond to match his. I liked Rosemary Clooney’s ‘This Old House’ (she didn’t realise how much she loved the house, and would be
really sorry
when she left it) because it served her right.

I loved ‘Dem Bones Dem Bones (Dem Dry Bones)’, for reasons that had nothing to do with the words. What got me was the bounciness of the rhythm, the thrilling male voices calling out in gospel style, and the percussion that mimicked clockwork, either running down or being wound up.
The hipbone’s connected to the – thighbone, the
thighbone’s
connected to the – kneebone
. I made no connection between the bones in the song and my own, which were very connected indeed.

Mum and Dad told me that Uncle Mac had lost an eye and part of a lung in the Great War, and then lost a leg in a car smash-up between the wars. I thought he must be clumsy as well as unlucky, but it was as if they were giving me a present. ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ they asked. Not wonderful that he was disabled, exactly, but wonderful that he led such an active life no one would know. He didn’t let missing a few bits and pieces hold him back. It took a bit of getting used to, the idea that Uncle Mac and I were supposed to have things in common. I wasn’t missing any bits, but so far being disabled was doing a grand job of holding me back. I was too disabled to be a doctor or a scientist or anything important, but somehow I didn’t seem to be disabled enough to cut any ice with the
Busy Bee News
.

The new place had to be better than CRX. ‘I expect you’ll miss having girls around,’ said Dad, with a roguishness that wasn’t really his style. He made it sound as if being the only boy in a group of girls, all of us disabled, made me a sultan with a harem. No I would not miss having girls around (I was forgetting my engagement to Sarah, of course, and being disloyal to Mary’s memory). However bad boys could be, they could never be as spiteful as girls.

I made out to Mum and Dad that the Uncle Mac factor was the clincher, but there were other things going on in my mind. Peter with his love of planes filled me in on the school’s name. The Air Force had three V-bombers – the Vickers Valiant, the Handley Page Victor and the Avro Vulcan. The Vulcan was their longest-range bomber. It could fly 4000 miles at 50,000 feet. It was also known as the Tin Triangle (which made me think of those less inspired pieces of technology, Ansell’s tailor-made walking pods). As far as Peter was concerned, I couldn’t do better.

For a long time, too, I had prayed to God for a boy companion whom I could love and who would be my special friend. I had strong ideas about this, not all of them derived from Enid Blyton. Boys played together and chummed up. When they had a scrap they would always seem to end up rolling on the ground, two as one, their legs interlocked and their arms wrapped round each other. My special friend was going to be physically normal or almost normal. Of course at the beginning we would spend a lot of time in tender loving embraces, but when passion had ripened into something more mature, the real quest would begin. It would be daring and
dangerous
. He would fight the enemy on the physical plane and I would take care of the ghosts, spirits and ghouls. Vulcan School would be the ideal place to find this soul-mate, among the Intelligent Boys. The place was clearly the answer to my prayers.

My mind gave Vulcan School the thumbs-up, but my body had other ideas. It started playing a mean trick on me that I thought was ancient history. I had chewed those linen sheets and spat them out, I had frotted myself against them ecstatically, and now I was wetting them like a baby.

Rather surprisingly, bed-wetting attracted no punishment in CRX. My sheets were changed without complaint or reproach. I could even enjoy the state between waking and dream, that strange shoreline that can seem deeper than the sea. I could luxuriate in the feeling of warm wetness seeping all around, knowing the sheets would be changed before the pee got uncomfortably cold. I was very ashamed, all the same, and knew perfectly well that at Vulcan School this would never do.

I also snored incurably, a vice which I thought I could get away with in the absence of other night-time vices but hardly in
combination
. I was confident that boys, intelligent boys, would be more understanding and generally nicer than girls, but bed-wetting and snoring would hardly be a passport to big-boyhood. I was well enough versed in the literature to know that in boys’ schools they gave you nick-names. They would be bound to come up with
something
that would advertise both my vices. I badly wanted to start with a clean sheet but I was sure I was doomed to swap Wally Snorts for something worse.

Snoring and wetting the bed. No great inventiveness would be required on the part of my fellow intelligent boys. They would call me ‘Snorwetta’ but no, ‘r’s and ‘w’s didn’t really go together like that. They’d just drop the ‘w’ and I’d be known as … Snoretta.

A boy who sounded like a piggy version of Henrietta. I would never be allowed into proper boyhood, Julian-and-Dick boyhood. I’d be chained by girlhood again, as I had been at CRX, where a posh accent was considered girly. Ansell and some of the other staff had always said I sounded nice and not girly at all, but I hadn’t been
living
and sleeping with Ansell, unfortunately.

In my time of limbo between institutions, when I hung between a hospital set up by someone who didn’t believe in pain and a school that might have been named for my benefit by Bomber Command, there was one memorable day. The Mad Major put in a personal appearance at last – he was invited to lunch. Who by? It can only have been Dad. There was a conciliatory edge to his usual patterns of behaviour in the run-up to the event, as if he knew he had arranged something that went well beyond the call of marital duty.

Peter and I knew it was an important occasion. Each of them kept complaining about the fuss the other was making about something very ordinary. Mum said, ‘I don’t know why Dad is so keyed up about seeing this dull old friend of his,’ but it wasn’t every day she folded napkins into the tricky Bishop’s Mitre shape, following the
instructions
in her old copy of Mrs Beeton’s
Household Management
. The book was a cast-off of Granny’s – in fact it was less a book than an
oppressive
hint, printed and bound. It was an old edition, old enough to list the duties of the ‘tweeny’, which included cleaning the back stairs. Every time she opened up the book Mum must have reproached
herself
for having neither a tweeny nor back stairs to turn her loose on.

Meanwhile Dad was saying, ‘I don’t know why your mother has to make such a song and dance about a visit from an old comrade-
in-arms
. Still, you know what she’s like.’ Indeed we did, but we also saw the look in Dad’s eyes which meant he was wondering if he should ask her if his tie was smart enough. He might even be considering the drastic step of wearing the cuff-links she had given him for Christmas. Peter asked, ‘Is he really mad? Is he doolally loony? Will he bark?’ Mum said she wouldn’t be surprised.

‘Shall I call him Major Mad or Mad Major? Which is proper?’

That was going too far for Mum. ‘Neither is proper, neither is polite. You’ll call him …’ – suddenly she didn’t seem certain herself – ‘Major Draper.’

‘Kit is pretty relaxed about the “Mad Major” routine, m’dear,’ Dad broke in. ‘So he should be, with some of the things he’s done in his time. And do you know, he’s working on his life story for a book? It should make fascinating reading.’

Mum answered only with a sigh and told him to get out from under her feet. The most consistent strand in all the stories about the Major was his unreliability, and Mum took it for granted that he would be late. She had started issuing ultimatums soon after breakfast on the great day, saying, ‘I hope you don’t expect me to wait lunch for him – we eat at one sharp.’ And then he arrived, soon after eleven o’clock. We could hear the gravel of the drive being displaced by unfamiliar wheels. Peter made to dash out, but Mum restrained him. Dad went out alone. The welcoming committee was a one-man show.

When the Major came in, I was shocked to see how old he was. He was closer to Granny’s age than Dad’s. I wasn’t old enough myself to understand that someone who had held a pilot’s licence since 1913 couldn’t be any younger than that. I suppose he was in his late sixties. He was tubby, with a face that managed to be flabby and big-chinned at the same time. He was mainly bald. He wore thick glasses. His teeth seemed strange.

He looked from me to Peter and back again, as if he wasn’t sure which was which. I’ve loved people for less – but the pantomime has to be done exactly right. He passed the test. Finally he fixed on me and said, ‘You must be the son and heir.’

He turned to Peter and said, ‘And you must be the runner-up.’ There was a gleam around his teeth which was kindness, perhaps. The same gleam flickered in his eyes, behind the lenses which unkindly piggified them. ‘I even think there may be a baby somewhere near.’ This was a joke, since Audrey was just then screaming the house down. ‘I know one of you chaps loves school and the other’s not so sure. That’s you, I fancy?’ he asked, looking over at Peter. ‘I’m
shoulder
to shoulder with you about that, old man. Hated every minute. Couldn’t wait to get outdoors and into the open. Perhaps you feel the same way?’ Peter was tongue-tied. Mum wasn’t much better, when she came in carrying Audrey. She was at a double disadvantage,
trying
to quiet a baby and wearing her apron, red-faced from the heat of the kitchen.

The Major had hardly arrived before he swept Dad off with him to a nearby pub for what he called a ‘sharpener or two’, saying brightly that they’d be back in good time for lunch. This time Peter couldn’t reasonably be restrained from dashing out to see the Major’s car. Unusually, Dad took control of the wheelchair – something normally that happened only on our nature-study expeditions with the
Tan-Sad
. Otherwise, though, I would have been stranded inside the house, and I enjoyed the rare paternal push.

The Major’s car was an old-fashioned one with running-boards. He let Peter stand on one of them when he started off, driving very slowly and looking back anxiously to make sure he’d jumped off safely. Peter made a show of falling over and rolling in the dirt, but luckily he did it very unconvincingly, after a clean landing, so the Major and Dad could drive away with clear consciences.

Nothing had actively gone wrong as yet, but Mum was too far down the path of having a bad time to retrace her steps at short notice. By the time Dad and the Major rolled happily back just before one, she was seething. Dad seemed puzzled by her antagonism, but it was too late for him to be taking Lessons In Mum, though I could have taught him a few. It would certainly have been better tactics on the men’s part to arrive shame-faced and contrite at half-past. There’s nothing a martyr likes less than being ritually installed among the kindling, not tied to the post but grasping it firmly behind her back, and then no one having the common politeness to strike a match.