Pilcrow (57 page)

Despite the subtle seethe of planning behind the scenes, nothing much came of the cruise. Caroline had followed her mother under the surgeon’s knife, and was now by all accounts much less top-heavy. She wasn’t fully used to her new centre of gravity, all the same, and part of the idea behind the cruise was that dancing on a boat made everyone’s movements reassuringly clumsy. She would be able to take to the floor without embarrassment. I think that was how the whole curious business was explained to me.

Anyway, it didn’t work. Either romance fizzled out early or the powder was damp from the beginning. Granny had listed the subjects in which Roy took particular interest, and Mum had passed them on to Muzzie. Caroline had lightly read up on them, being careful not to show undue independence of mind, but even so Roy was not to be taken out of himself. As Caroline reported to her mother, who passed the news on to Mum, ‘It was all jolly hard work, and Roy was strange. He was always polite and courteous to me, but his attention always seemed to be on … another man.’ Mum left the insinuating three dots intact when she passed this information on to me. I think it must have been a marginally censored version which reached Granny. I can’t see Mum retaining that punctuational innuendo.

I was slow to connect Granny’s reappearance with the fact that Dad had resigned from the Air Force. Wing Commander Cromer came back down to earth, with something of a bump. It was no small thing, as he discovered, to be looking for a job at forty-plus. He held onto his rank, of course, but it was a rather different thing to be a Wing-Co at an altitude of zero feet. There was no reason given for this drastic change of life. I doubt if I even asked. The reasons grown-ups gave for things never made sense to me anyway. Mum didn’t say in so many words that she put pressure on him. All she said was that a family needed a father. He couldn’t expect to go on a foreign posting and then walk in whenever he felt like it for a hero’s welcome.

Granny’s antennæ registered the shift in the family’s finances, and the new relationships it made possible. Mum and Dad would find it much harder to say ‘no’ to any offers she might care to make. They might even be made to beg. I swear she could smell an overdraft the way ogres in fairy tales smell an Englishman’s blood.

Mum and Dad were faced with the problem of what school to send Peter to now. One possibility was Sidcot School in Winscombe, North Somerset. We all went along along in the car for Peter’s
interview
. From the first breath I found the atmosphere of this school
wonderfully
comforting – it was an old Quaker foundation, though at the time I wouldn’t have understood anything by that. I was very happy for Peter if it meant he could have a new start in such welcoming
surroundings
, though I felt all the more isolated in my own schooling.

The headmaster of Sidcot, Mr Brayshaw, was both absent-minded and very much on the ball, a combination rather common among school-teachers. I thought he was beautiful. He gave Peter a sincere welcome. Peter was shy and I suppose traumatised, so he hung back. Mum was nervous and horribly humble, while Dad was almost
truculent
. You could almost hear him thinking, ‘Don’t think your
authority
impresses me, I’ve got some of my own if it comes to that. I’ll hear you out but that’s all. Just don’t expect me to kow-tow.’ In Dad’s book kow-towing was worse than being a sneak and a copy-cat and a bad sport all put together.

When Mr Brayshaw set eyes on me, he included me in the
conversation
quite naturally. He was wonderfully warm. He was like the dream uncle I’d always wanted, and more. In this lifetime I’ve
suffered
from a severe shortage of uncles. Roy was a dud uncle, really.

As he gave us the tour Mr Brayshaw kept saying madly positive things like, ‘Now there’s not really much of a step here,’ and, ‘This next classroom may be difficult, but I am sure we can find a way if we just put our minds to it … You know, we really only go in there in the winter. Most of the time the class just comes outside and sits under that tree over there, so that would be fine for John … I’m sure something can be arranged before winter comes …’

With much rambling and pottering he mapped out his vision of Sidcot School with John in it. The greatest problem as he saw it was the inaccessibility of the dancing class, but it was clear that if I had my heart set on learning to dance it would be made to happen
somehow
.

Mum was in a panic and going ‘ahem’ like mad, making the
humble
artificial double cough that meant she needed to be asked to speak, but Mr Brayshaw hadn’t risen to the rank of headmaster
without
knowing how to ignore a parent. He conducted the whole
interview
as if I was the only candidate to be considered, as if that had been the morning’s only task and theme.

When we wound up back in the headmaster’s study, Mr Brayshaw asked if we had any questions, just as if Mum hadn’t been trying to butt in for the last half-hour.

‘But Mr Brayshaw,’ she cried. ‘It’s John’s brother Peter who is applying to come to Sidcot, not John himself!’

‘Yes, I’m well aware of that, Mrs Cromer,’ he replied, ‘but I thought it would be rather nice for Peter if he could have his older brother with him, don’t you? It’s perfectly practical. He’s not on any dangerous medication, I take it? So it’s not a matter of medical
supervision
, just washing and dressing. Not a great deal of effort, I should have thought. Doesn’t seem much of an obstacle, as obstacles go.’

The twinkle in his eye made me jump up and down from my seated position, exploiting the residual flexibility of my spine. I waved my arms about and shouted out of turn, ‘Oh Mum, wouldn’t it be
wonderful
? Mr Brayshaw wants me to be with Peter! Please, please, oh
please
say yes!!’ Please let me escape from Judy Brisby and from the Board of Education. Please let me sit under a tree surrounded by love and understanding, where the harvest called learning will be brought on by steady sunshine. This was more like it. This was the old tune of No Such Word As Can’t played thickly on Sparky’s Magic Piano, not picked out with one finger. I was being offered something I would never have dared to ask for myself.

To Mr Brayshaw Dad said, ‘Well, we’ll have to think about that.’ But the moment we were in the car, he told me, ‘It’s not on. It’s a lovely dream, chicken, but it’s not on.’

‘But you said you’d think about it!’

‘I’ve thought about it. It’s just not on, and that’s that!’ How I hated those words. I was no longer a child, I wouldn’t thrash and scream and say, ‘You lied, I’ll never trust you again.’ I sat and thought about what could be learned from this unprecedented afternoon.

I looked at Mum and Dad in the car, bickering routinely over the map. For the first time in any of our lives we had encountered
something
genuinely unusual – disability being treated as unimportant, neither here nor there. And what was Mum and Dad’s reaction? Social embarrassment. Revelation had been greeted with fidgeting and changing of the subject. I vowed that the next time a path opened up in front of me, I would put the Everest & Jennings into the higher of its two gears and head straight for the gap. Then woe betide any toe which got in my way.

For a moment I had been grazed by happiness. Even so, I was happy that Peter had escaped his Colditz Castle and would be treated
tenderly
in a new school. I myself had learned something about ‘reality’. When the building-blocks of the world, those things we consider facts, seem to be most firmly chamfered and grouted one against another, then – exactly then – is when the wall will shiver and turn to liquid. I just had to be aware that when every obstacle had
disappeared
from view, Mum and Dad would invent new ones. With the path cleared in front of them and brilliantly lit, they would stay exactly where they were, pretending it hadn’t happened and there was nothing they could do about it, except to put the car in reverse and drive glumly home.

That I had been accepted as a pupil of a normal school to which I hadn’t even applied was a miracle. It was a full miracle, despite the fact that it hadn’t happened. Mum and Dad wouldn’t let it happen, and miracles don’t insist. That isn’t the etiquette.

The divine invitation is written on creamy card so thick no human hand can fold it – that is so. Its embossing stands so proud it casts a shadow. Also true. But nothing whatever happens unless you RSVP. Divine intervention isn’t a unilateral business. Miracles are consensual. I vowed that next time one was offered I would not cringe with the rest of my tribe. I would claim my place in the summer sun, under that tree.

Sidcot School turned out to be as good a school for Peter as it might have been for me. There was a lot of care about the place. Mum went to visit once and didn’t announce herself to Peter. She crept along the walls until she could see him talking to another boy. He had a cup of coffee in his hand and was standing very straight. The two boys were talking man to man. Then Mum showed herself and Peter turned back into an awkward little boy again.

The only trouble he got into at that school was when he was caught making wax copies of keys. He wanted the power to slip through the fabric of an institution, even one where he was happy – simply to melt away. He wanted to have the power of locking doors between himself and misery, in case misery came back to get him.

He was punished in an adult Quaker way, without anger, by the simple withdrawing of privileges. He accepted this punishment, also in an adult way, without complaint, with understanding. Dad was never prouder of him than in that manly acceptance of chastisement. I wish Dad had been a little less keen on self-suppression in his
children
, but then he was busy suppressing himself at the time, so at least he was being consistent.

It wasn’t long before Dad got a job, though it wasn’t a great
success
. His employer was Centrum Intercoms, and he was supposed to be a salesman. He just wasn’t pushy enough, and in any case he
didn’t
really believe in the product. It was the wrong sort of product, for one thing. Communication wasn’t really Dad’s thing, in fact it was close to being the opposite of his thing.

There has never been anyone with so little of the salesman’s
temperament
. The more he praised a product to a potential customer, the more he despised it in his heart, and over time the contempt seeped back into his patter. There was a pile of paperwork to be done, until one day he simply walked away from the job. He came home exultant, and Peter and I giving him a great welcome. I imagine Mum’s feelings were more mixed. The less earning power Dad had, the greater the place Granny could claim for herself in our lives.

The most constant thing in my life at Vulcan, apart from lessons, was the saga after lights-out. By now it was very markedly eroticised. Gunfights and cattle-rustling had been eclipsed by a sexual free-
for-all
. Over time I had developed my own way of describing things. I knew the word ‘penis’ but wasn’t sure if the other boys did, so I said ‘John Thomas’ instead, which was how the nurses in CRX had referred to those parts. I still used the words ‘taily’ and ‘scallywag’ in my head most of the time, but was trying to out-grow them. I
certainly
wouldn’t use them in these surroundings. I knew and liked the word ‘vagina’ but felt it would tend to make the proceedings a bit clinical, when the whole point was to be outrageously dirty.

I was a sort of orchestral conductor, drawing out the filthy music in everyone’s head, the dorm itself my instrument. I gloried in my
powers
. I could send my audience to sleep dreaming of hot steaming home-cooked food, or I could get the room so keyed up it was as if the whole humming chafing collective was going to break loose and shoot the rapids.

No one else ever played ladies’ parts, but I often doubled up. One night we realised we were a villain short. It was decided that Terry would play that, though he was usually Rip, till he said he’d get
muddled
if Rip had a fight with the villain. I volunteered to be Rip and the lady. Then one night I was not only Rip and Mum/Miss Willis but also a bar floozie with big bosoms. One scenario started with Rip making love to the floozie (me making love to myself in two vocal registers). Then the villain – Terry – was going to come along and punch Rip on the nose and fight him and knock him out. To start with I was going to scream as the floozie (quietly so no matron would hear) because the villain was scaring me, but then he would seize me in his strong villain arms and I would be overwhelmed by passion. Our love-making would have to be quick. We knew that we were
destined
to be parted. Perhaps the posse was thundering towards us even as we kissed. Opposite sides of the fence, a love that could never be, and yet this violent throbbing moment was perfect in every way, a memory to take with us for the rest of our lives.

I had to find the right voice for each character. As the action became more complicated it became necessary to sketch it out ahead of time. Before the scene began I had to give the dorm a certain amount of briefing, bossy little impresario that I was.

‘Give me plenty of time to get going on the love scene,’ I told Terry, ‘before you come in and start making trouble … I’ve got some really juicy ideas for tonight. Then in the show-down – punching noises, everybody, plenty of “
what the
–?
” and ‘
I’ll larn ya!
”’ Punching noises I wasn’t good at. Roger Stott was the expert at those. ‘Okay, pardners, let’s roll.’

Love was my speciality, though. For me, the sexiest of all words was
darling
. I experimented with its pronunciation, shifting the stress between the syllables, alternating dárling and darlíng. ‘Oh darlíng, I luff you – yes, darlíng, touch me in every place, oh, oh, oh I wish you had more fingers on ze hand and more hands on ze body. Now take your John Thomas and push it deep into my crack … and when it’s in there, please take one of your fingers – any one – and slide it into my botty and I’ll push my finger into your botty also, oh dárling, I am in so much love I could die like this …’

The holiday in Looe with Dorrie had left a legacy, undoubtedly. In our cowboy stories the formula ‘This town ain’t big enough for the both of us’ had pretty much been made obsolete by ‘When I see a hole like that in your bum, it makes me want to stick my finger up it –
know what I mean, boys?
’

Sometimes for variety I told a ghost story instead. I improvised freely, and though my plots didn’t always hang together I could
certainly
brew a spooky mood. One night, just when I was saying, ‘And then SUDDENLY –!!’ with no real idea of what the sudden thing might be, there was a terrific twang and a strong smell of burning. Something skittered across the floor, and a number of boys cried out in fear.

We called a matron, who turned the lights on. There was a mark on the floor which looked as if it was caused by scorching. By daylight we could see more clearly what had happened. Raeburn had left one of the Wrigleys on the re-charger. The fuse had blown and then
somehow
bounced across the floor. By then, though, my supernatural authority was unassailable. Facts couldn’t dent it.