Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

At CRX the school had been an after-thought, here it was a real priority. One boy, Cyril, would turn up to lessons pushed on his bed, lying on his stomach, the only position he could manage. But turn up he did. Later he was adopted by a husband and wife on the staff.

There was sincere encouragement for good work and jocular threats for bad. One threat I can remember came from more than one teacher in that first year at Vulcan: ‘If you can’t do better than that, you’ll have to go to Lord Mayor Treloar!’ I had no idea what Lord Mayor Treloar was — not any sort of hell-hole or bedlam, I don’t think, but simply a hospital with tuition (at Alton in Hampshire) rather than a real school like the one I was privileged to attend. The threat was effective despite its lack of clear meaning. I put my head down and I worked.

When it got around that I knew a little German and my accent was good, I was told I was just the right age to start learning in earnest. Learning German was never quite as effortless as it had been while Gisela Schmidt’s hands were working their wonders, but I made a good start. The knotty aspects of the language were like clenched muscles in themselves, tense nodes which had to be pummelled into relaxation. The drowned cactus of CRX flowered and fruited in its own sweet time. One thing I liked, with a love of definiteness which I’ve well and truly got out of my system since, was the way it was pronounced just the way it looked on the page. With French it seemed that you had to say what you didn’t see and you couldn’t say what you saw.

Not far short of trollops

One day during a walking lesson with Raeburn I voiced a worry I had had for some time.

‘Please, Sir,’ I said, ‘can you tell me about Vulcan? I mean the Roman god the school is named after.’

‘Well, John, he’s the god of fire and also of its human uses. So fire the element, and metal-working. He was known as the blacksmith of the gods. Not the most glamorous activity, I know, but an essential one, very much so for the ancients. Is that the sort of thing you want to know?’

‘Not quite, Sir. I was asking more about his family background.’ Which wasn’t quite the phrase I wanted. I knew what the brochure said about Vulcan, the official line: This god had been hurled from Olympus by his father and become crippled, but he had doggedly pursued the physical skill of metal-working, becoming the smith and armourer of the gods, and also renowned for his intellect.

‘I see.’ Raeburn’s grey-blue eyes were looking straight through me. ‘Well, John, I’m going to treat you as a grown-up. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve heard, or what you’ve read, and I promise not to fob you off with flannel. Does that sound fair?’

‘More than fair, Sir. I suppose what I’m asking about, sir, is really Jupiter and not Vulcan at all. Is it true that when Jupiter saw Vulcan as a baby, he thought he was so ugly he threw him out of Heaven? Really he wanted to kill him, but the baby was immortal so he couldn’t, so instead he grabbed the baby by the leg and threw him out of Heaven so he fell all down the sky. So he’s lame where Jupiter hurt him. He’s only handicapped because his dad hated him and couldn’t actually kill him. Is that true?’

‘That’s what the myths say, yes. But you must have noticed that none of the gods is exactly normal. They’re none of them well-balanced, even the Greek ones. I suppose Athena comes close, but she’s always playing favourites and she cheats when she gets the chance. Apollo seems to play fair, but even he’s a bit of a pill. I’m speaking frankly now, John, and telling you things that may not be in the Tales you’ve read, which water things down a bit. The gods are in and out of bed with each other the whole time — and with mortals. Sex-mad, the lot of them. Some of the goddesses aren’t far short of trollops. And as for Jupiter, who should be setting an example, he’s pretty much the worst of the lot. So we shouldn’t be too upset that poor old Vulcan doesn’t live up to our hopes. Do you see, John?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘We racked our brains to find a good name for the school, I don’t mind telling you. Marion was all for “Nelson” — one eye, one arm, changed the course of history and all that — but I thought we’d end up spending all our time explaining we weren’t running a training college for naval cadets. So I was rather bucked when I thought of Vulcan. There’s also the Greek version of the same god, Hephaistos or (to the Romans) Hephæstus, but I thought the school would have quite enough trouble making its way in the world without being difficult to spell.’

Even so, I was thrilled by the idea that if he had decided differently I might have been attending a school with the honorary twenty-seventh letter in its name. Already I was fighting the temptation to write his name with the same embellishment, as Ræburn . ‘But now you know more about the goings-on on Mount Olympus than dear Marion does, and I’d be grateful if you kept it that way. She’d be upset, you see, if she thought that the name we came up with for our school had made any one of our boys unhappy. She’s devoted to you all, you know.’ As I was devoted to Alan Raeburn.

In the summer of 1962 it was decided that my health was stable enough for the family to go on holiday. Our destination was Looe in Cornwall. Peter and I were thrilled. We had no idea what to expect from a family holiday, and the name of our destination was fantastic. For ages we’d ask, ‘Are we really going to [th’]Looe for a week?’ sounding the article as much as we dared. Loo was an even lower word than toilet. Peter said we might end up staying on Khazi Street, but we knew that was too much to hope.

When she married Dad, Mum must have been thinking of the foreign postings which would take her thousands of miles away from the mother she couldn’t quite reject. Looe wasn’t quite what she bargained, a poor substitute, almost a booby prize. I put the kibosh on world travel by becoming ill, which was hardly fair on her. I remember Granny saying once that Mum had married a uniform, and if that was true then she was fully entitled to the travel documents stowed away in its inner pockets.

The choice fell on Looe because friends of Mum and Dad had a guest-house there. Dorrie Mason was a former resident of the Abbotsbrook Estate who had retired to Cornwall after her husband died. Running a guest-house had always been her dream. Mum said it was an ideal situation. Staying with old friends meant that you got the best of both worlds, family atmosphere and reasonable rates.

It was a punishing drive in the Vauxhall, and we were starving when we arrived. Dad greeted our hostess with, ‘Awfully good of you to let us all stay here, Dorrie.’

‘Why wouldn’t I, Dennis? That’s why it’s called a guest-house! And so much nicer with old friends.’

Dorrie Mason was like Aunt Fanny in the Famous Five books, only more motherly. Her language was down-to-earth if not downright rollicking. Mum sometimes let Peter and me watch Coronation Street on the Light Programme — in fact she made us watch it, saying we shouldn’t be protected from knowledge of what low-class people were like. The Northern accents were hard to make out, and Dorrie’s was nothing like them, but there was a directness that I loved and recognised. Dorrie pounced on Audrey, who had slept for most of the journey, and swept her into her arms, delighting her by kissing her tummy with a noise like a whoopee cushion.

When she left the room to make tea, Mum whispered to Dad, ‘I don’t remember her being quite like that when she was our neighbour.’ Dad nodded wisely and said, ‘Shall I tell you what’s happened, m’dear? She’s reverted to type,’ and Mum nodded in the same style. Away from the genteel breezes of Bourne End Dorrie had become blowsy and coarse-grained.