This Is All (37 page)

How strange a school is when it’s empty, I thought, as I brought a chair so that I could organise the novels without bending down. A tomb without bodies but full of sleeping ghosts which the slightest sound might waken. Even the smell is a decaying relic of gamy life. The air is tethered. The silence is heavy. Its key is melancholy E minor. (Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, a favourite which Will had given me on CD as a New Year present, is in E minor; the second movement would fit the bill precisely.) To be in tune with the place I felt I should lay myself out on a table like one of those stone corpses in ancient churches, with a pillow under their head and a little dog at their feet, their hands on their chests in the prayer position, and a memorial inscription carved beneath them, of which mine would read ‘Here lies the body of Cordelia Kenn. She died as a student of what, why and when.’ I smiled to myself at this dippy thought and at the glowing memory of writing my first proper poem in the

I did some more thinking. These are my conclusions:

First, it would be pointless having the words
poetry
and
prose
if they did not mean something different.

Second, poetry and prose are both made of words.

Third, therefore, because they are different, they must use words in ways that are different from each other. This difference must be one of the most important things about them.

Fourth, both poetry and prose must mean something, because they are both made of words. But they
mean
in different ways. (What are these ways?)

Fifth, if poetry must
be
and
not mean
, then prose must
mean
and
not be
.

After more thought I prefer to put it like this:

Poetry means what it is. Prose is what it means.

[I showed the above to Ms M. Her comment was: ‘Very clever, Cordelia. But now you must show me that it is the case.’

Lordy lordy, there is no pleasing some people! Sometimes I could quite go off her.

However, I do have to admit that I am not at all sure what this means, even though I wrote it. How odd that you can think something out only when you write it down, and how it can feel right even as you write it down, even though you don’t understand it yourself and even though you’ve written it. (There are too many
even
s in that sentence but I don’t care. All this thinking has given me a headache so doing any more can just wait till I feel like it.)]

>>
Not Mean, but Be (
Part III
) >>

lovely dawn. ‘Seek me … Seek me.’ Perhaps it was because of this and being on my own with Ms M. in the lull of the empty school that I couldn’t now understand why I had felt so upset the day before. How easily emotions can diddle you! How fickle they can be! How swayed by a change of circumstances! Why did it matter that Dad and Doris would marry? What, I wondered, should I tell Ms M.? How much? Or nothing at all?

‘Put some music on, if you’d like,’ said Ms M., as if reading my thoughts. I hoped she had because it meant there was a special intimate link between us. I chose Bach’s Concertos for violin and oboe because they would keep the school’s ghosts at bay, and because they reminded me of Will, who liked them so much he hoped he might play them with an orchestra one day. (‘Hope springs eternal’ comes to mind, but still!)

Just as important, I knew Ms M. liked it. One of the features that made her lessons so different was that she sometimes played music she thought would help us when we were in the wrong mood for work or couldn’t concentrate or were upset, or just to celebrate an occasion, like one of our birthdays or the return of someone after an illness. She also decorated her room with flowers every week, great bunches of them in galvanised buckets suspended in brackets she’d screwed into the wall on either side of the whiteboard and in the corners. There was a Carica pawpaw tree growing out of a terracotta tub beside a window, its top touching the ceiling. She enjoyed telling new arrivals it was hermaphrodite and must be treated with the care due to old age. (I don’t know how old it really was; she’d brought it with her from her previous school. And, hermaphrodite or not, it never produced any fruit.)

Typical of her was how, one day just before exams, when we were all in a fash and jaded from revision, she invited all the girls of our two parallel classes to bring in tops we were fed up with or didn’t wear any more so that we could have a

Helping yourself

Why are people so cagey about masturbation? Why do they giggle when it’s mentioned, or go coy or sneer or blush or make fun of it or refuse to talk about it?

I’ve done some research and have decided that these are the main reasons why most people think masturbation is wrong or are embarrassed by it.

1. Masturbation is a form of self-abuse.

2. It is self-centred and therefore a selfish act.

3. It can be addictive and can damage you if over-indulged.

4. Some religions are against it. They say it is an act of disobedience against the law of God.

I shall take each of these points in turn and then write about my own experience.

1. I do not understand why something that gives pleasure and does no damage to yourself physically or to anyone else should be condemned as ‘self-abuse’. In what way are you abusing yourself? I mean, it’s not like cutting yourself or refusing to eat. You aren’t harming your body, quite the opposite (see below).

And it isn’t like hitting someone or even swearing at them. You’re not forcing yourself on anyone else.

In fact, it’s a gentle and a private activity, which, as Izumi (who is not embarrassed by talking about this subject) told me once, helps to make you more beautiful because it evens out the energies in your body and relieves the tension in your nerves and your brain. She said it makes your complexion smoother and I’ve noticed this is true about myself.

2. It is true that masturbation is something you do for yourself and on your own. But I don’t agree that it’s selfish. It’s something you do for yourself in the same way that you feed and bathe your body and go to the lavatory and take exercise, which you are not considered selfish for doing on your own. It is something that helps to keep you in good shape. In

top-swap. Next day she got rid of the boys to a teacher we called Mr Shouty (the chavs adored him, as well they might, he being the male version of chavishness; he could work himself into an oleaginous sweat while entertaining them with his bullish performances). And we girls held our swap. This required trying-on and showing, and caused eruptions of giggles when an inappropriate garment met an outrageous figure, and thus generally let off steam and revitalised our spirits. As for the boys, after suffering Mr Shouty’s peevishness because he’d been deprived of his adoring chavs, they were only too glad to get back to us, and the chavs, who never failed to seize a chance to show off, voted to give them a catwalk parade of their newly acquired tops, which provided an excuse to flaunt their boobs, and gave the boys licence to ogle them unashamedly, so that they too ended the lesson feeling revived and ready again for the exam slog. As for Shouty, his ebullience was not only restored but uncontainable after this titillation, and he made his exit bull-horning the line, ‘When’s the next one, girls?’ Which of course roused in the chavs a vocal and vaginal deluge. During all this, Ms M. sat under her pawpaw tree and observed the goings on with the indulgent air of a tribal chief. Next lesson she returned to her usual rigour. I think it was such care for us, combined with her uncompromising insistence that we do our best work without let-up, that we all received good exam grades, even those of us who perhaps hadn’t the nous to deserve them. (Will said this was a bad thing, because it gave people an inflated idea of their capability. My view was and still is that it’s better to encourage people to reach for more than they can manage. In my opinion, you should always go for things that are too difficult for you. Or, as Mr G. K. Chesterton put it, ‘If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.’)

When I’d finished the book cupboard Ms M. made coffee and asked me to help her collate and staple together pages of

fact, in my opinion based on my own experience, and Izumi and Will agree with me, a proper use of masturbation helps to make you
less
selfish. It does this because when you feel satisfied, as after a good meal or refreshing exercise or a good sleep, you feel better about other people and are more ready to listen to them and help them.

Not that people always masturbate only when they are on their own. But I’d never done it with anyone else until Will asked me the other day to let him see me do it. He was curious to know how I did it and what I looked like while I did it. I was a bit shy when he asked, to be honest, but I showed him because I wanted to please him. And then I asked him to return the favour, which he did. Then I taught him how to do it to me and he taught me how to do it to him, and this added to our pleasure, because it seemed to both of us such a privilege, an honour even, to be allowed to share such an intimate, private activity neither of us shared with anyone else. There was nothing selfish about this. It was a gift to each other that made us feel closer and more special to each other than ever.

3. It is addictive, etc. This is a silly point, because almost anything you can think of can be addictive or bad for you if you over-indulge in it. If you over-indulge in eating you get obese and ill. If you over-indulge in physical exercise you can strain your body in harmful ways, which have long-lasting effects, especially in your old age. There’s nothing different about masturbation in this respect.

4. I do not understand why some religions are so against it. My dictionary says that another word for masturbation is ‘onanism’. Apparently, it’s called this after Onan, the son of Judah in the Book of Genesis in the Christian Bible, chapter 38 verse 9. I’ve looked this up. As far as I can make out, Onan was made by his father to go to his dead brother’s wife and have sex with her in order to produce a child. But Onan didn’t want to make her pregnant so he had sex but ‘he spilt

some photocopied course notes. One of those chores that require no thought. We sat opposite each other and settled into the robotic rhythm of factory workers.

After a while Ms M. said without introduction, ‘I suggested you try Murdoch’s
The Nice and the Good
. I was wrong. You’re not ready for her. You’d only dislike her and might never try again. Which would be a pity. I wanted you to read her because I like her so much. It’s always a mistake for a teacher to push her own tastes onto her pupils before they’re ready. I should have known better.’

A little miffed that she thought I wasn’t up to reading this author she admired so much, I said, ‘Why am I not ready?’

‘Some books, some writers, all the best ones in fact, make demands. You have to be prepared for them. You have to have read other books that lead up to them. Or someone has to give you clues that help you understand and enjoy them.’

‘Couldn’t you give me some clues about Murdoch?’

‘Better if you read some other books first.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Well, Jane Austen of course.
Sense and Sensibility
, I think, to start with. Virginia Woolf.
To the Lighthouse
definitely. One of the great novels. And as it’s a set book for you this year you’ll have to read it anyway. Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
. Or maybe you’ve read that already?’

‘No.’

‘A. S. Byatt’s
Still Life
. She’s like Murdoch but her situations will be more recognisable to you. And she’s more naturalistic, more fixed to the realities of everyday life, whereas Murdoch only seems to be. And it’s a lovely book. It’s also long, and you need to get in training for length with Murdoch. Who else? … Muriel Spark will tone you up for irony and wry humour. They’re more obvious in her books than they are in Murdoch’s. She’s not compassionate either, which Murdoch is.
The Girls of Slender Means
, I think, rather than
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
.’

it
on the ground’. They’re so mealy-mouthed in the Bible that they can’t say he withdrew before he came and spilt his sperm on the ground. Apparently, God didn’t like him for doing this so he killed him. Well, it seems to me that what Onan did has nothing to do with anybody else nor can I understand why God should be angry with him for refusing to impregnate a woman he did not love and did not want to have a child with. These days that would be considered admirable, not a reason to be killed. It is barbaric to force a man to make a woman pregnant when neither of them want it. So this is obviously a silly reason for giving masturbation a bad name.

Reading the story again, I can see that the reason God was angry was not because Onan wouldn’t make his brother’s wife pregnant, but because he had spilt his sperm on the ground. That is, he had
wasted
it instead of making sure it had a chance to make a baby. But for heaven’s sake! There are millions of sperms in one ejaculation. And my Will can do it three or four times every twenty-four hours. I can’t make a baby with him every time. I’m stuck with making one every nine months, and that would not be a wise thing to do anyway. He
could
make a baby every time, so long as he had a different woman every time. But who thinks that would be right? So when Will masturbates and gets rid of some sperm, how can it be thought to be a waste? His body gets rid of it anyway, whether he masturbates or not, just like my body gets rid of some eggs every month. It’s how we keep our sperm and our eggs healthy. We get rid of the old stuff. So that argument is rubbish as well.

Probably some religions are against it because they seem to be against anything that gives pleasure. I think pleasure is good. In fact, I think pleasure is
necessary
to a healthy life. I’ve already indicated why I think it does no harm, but I have some more thoughts about this: