Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Julian seemed rather a little boy who mostly sounded like a little girl. I’d prayed to God to send me a special friend called Julian, but this wasn’t the one I had ordered. He was gentle and quiet, not the sort to push himself forward, full of secrets and fantasies. I managed not to notice that we might be rather compatible, and dismissed him as a kid.

At the end of the second term a number of us had a pow-wow about things to do when we all came back after the holidays. Lessons were so deadly boring it was unbelievable. The teachers were ogres and sadists. We all said so, and perhaps I was the only one who found many of the lessons thrilling, and some of the teachers lovely. I said, ‘Who’s got a chemistry set? When we come back, why don’t we all bring our chemistry sets with us?’ The idea made an instant impact. I had visions of lovely smells to come, much pungently holy smoke. Smoke always a mystical substance, however foul.

Life in Bourne End was more fun now that Peter was strong enough to push me greater distances. The funny looks we got when we were promenading round the town made us at first subdued, then mildly defiant. We started singing an old song that had been played to death on the radio. It went, ‘Edie was a lady, although her past was shady …’ We sang it all round town, but it was more fun to ramble a bit further.

Just beyond the border of the Abbotsbrook Estate was the railway track. It was always a thrill to cross that line, in case the train came speeding along. We heard stories of boys putting pennies on the line, waiting for the train to come along and flatten them till they were paper-thin. Peter had seen such transubstantiated pennies, and very much wanted to own one. Mum absolutely forbade it. ‘If a policeman sees you’, she said, ‘you’ll have to go to prison, or at least a Remand Home.’ I knew by then that prison would always be a hopeless dream on my part, but I agreed to set Peter a good example. Besides, there were other ways to get into trouble.

A little further along there were some house-boats, some of them very smart, and further on there was the UTSC, the Upper Thames Sailing Club, which was ultra-posh. The yachts looked so very pretty that it was a kind of meditation to go and watch them, but there was a sign with a stiff warning, that only permit holders were allowed Past This Sign. Very official and daunting. Peter said it would be all right once they ‘saw the wheelchair’. People seeing the wheelchair always helped. They’d let us in to watch the boats any time we wanted. The wheelchair was an Open Sesame — but not to this Marina of Wonders. They saw the wheelchair and still they told us to clear off. We were just as bad as other boys, undifferentiated vermin, and in retrospect I take this as a compliment. I wasn’t singled out.

Sometimes when the coast was relatively clear we’d venture in. Once we were spotted and shouted at. Peter speeded up, since this was obviously one of those occasions when ‘You there, come here at once!’ meant ‘Run like hell’. We ran all the way through the UTSC, past the warning sign posted to deter vermin coming in the other direction. Now we were in exile. We couldn’t return the way we came and had to go home the long way round. We were expecting a scolding from Mum, but she turned round and rang up the UTSC to scold them . She said we were merely doing what all boys do, all hearty and adventurous boys (and I admit I glowed at hearing this description). If anything had happened to us, she would have held the Club entirely responsible for its callous attitude. ‘Haven’t you ever been young?’ she wanted to know.

One day we found a twisty road that wound up a steep incline. How Peter managed to push me up there I’ll never know. I was no great weight, but the Tan-Sad was a real handful. We thought if we just carried on we would soon reach the sea.

We took with us an I-Spy book about the countryside, wanting to identify many unusual things, so as to get a high score and perhaps send our findings to Big Chief I-Spy who would send us a certificate and publish our names if we were the champion observers. We longed above all things to spot a Colorado beetle, not only because it carried a whacking great point score but because you had to report it to the police if you did.

There was a pretty spooky feeling about that steep and winding lane, and particularly about a little house some way up and on the right. We called it the Witch’s House, and the rule was that you weren’t allowed to speak until you had passed it. Otherwise you’d wake the Witch and she’d cast a spell on you. After we had passed the Witch’s House and it was safe, Peter would open his mouth and sing loudly, ‘Meadie was a lady’ and I sang back ‘… although her past was shady’. Edie had become Meadie, for some reason.

We would go up Elm Lane and into Chapman Lane towards Flackwell Heath. There was a haunted wood further up on the left where we used to go and make a den. One day Peter was grubbing about in the leaf mould and found an old wooden foot. It was rotting away. We were sure that Meadie had in fact had a false leg. She’d left it in this wood (Meadie had now become the Witch). She was bound to be coming back for it, probably any minute now. We gave ourselves a good scare, and Peter got me back down the twisty lane as fast as he dared. We vowed never to go back there alone.

Instead we took Dad with us to show him the haunted wood. We saw no evidence of witchery — we couldn’t even find Meadie’s wooden foot again, which made us think she’d taken it back. Instead we saw something just as other-worldly and far more beautiful, a great cloud of cinnabar moths fluttering in dappled sunlight. Dad explained that there was plenty of ragwort there (genus Senecio , family Asteraceæ, jacobæa the most likely species), the exclusive host plant of the cinnabar moth’s caterpillars. There must have been a massive hatching.

Peter rolled his eyes when Dad explained about nature, but I couldn’t get enough. He explained that ragwort, which is related to groundsel, is poisonous to livestock, especially horses — it attacks the liver. The plant has a bitter taste which alerts animals not to eat it, but still it can get through their defences. Either a single early leaf (in which the bitter taste may not have developed) is eaten as part of a mouthful of grass, or else a clump of leaves is eaten and then spat out, but then inadvertently returned to by the same animal or another. The bitter taste dissipates once the leaf is dead, but the toxicity remains.

Meanwhile the cinnabar moths, immune to the toxin and also impregnated with it, broadcast with their beautiful red colour the protective status of their poisonous, their magnificent untouchability.

Fun with Gilbert

I wasn’t sure the others in the dorm would remember about the chemistry-set project, but on the first day of the next term we all had our sets laid out on the beds to compare well before lights out. There were a number of different makes. Julian had a Lotts Chemistry Set and I had ‘Fun with Gilbert Chemistry’. The picture on the box made Julian’s set look very grown-up. My picture wasn’t too bad but the word ‘Fun’ on the box made my set seem childish, and ‘Gilbert’ was hopeless. I could see Julian brightening up when he saw Fun with Gilbert, and my heart was glad.

Once you had the boxes open, the situation wasn’t so clear. Julian took the lid off his set, and showed off its range of little cardboard cylinders with plastic insert lids. Perhaps he didn’t know that the little barrels containing his chemicals were made of cardboard, but I did. I knew, but I was biding my time.

My set opened up properly, on hinges — it didn’t have anything as make-shift as a lift-off lid. The hinged lid on ‘Fun with Gilbert Chemistry’ doubled as a protective cover, and there were two sturdy drawers beneath. The right-hand drawer held twenty-one glass bottles of a decent size, labelled and stoppered with metal screw caps. The left drawer was divided into two tiers, the top one holding slender test tubes full of chemicals. They too were labelled, and stopped with cork bungs. Not wanting to waste space, Gilbert (whoever he was) had thoughtfully put two grades of litmus paper behind them. The bottom half of the set had a shelf with holes in it to hold test tubes. With a lavish hand Gilbert had thrown in eye droppers, filter papers, instructions and tweezers. There were also some strips of magnesium ribbon.