Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

‘I shouldn’t think so, Dennis. Why do you ask?’

‘I was just thinking … if it wasn’t so obvious that she never opens a book from one year’s end to another, I’d say she’d been reading far too much H. E. Bates.’

Mum laughed nervously, as if she didn’t quite follow. It was understood that since she didn’t drive she should beguile the time for Dad on long journeys with undemanding conversation. She was under instructions to talk but not to prattle. The border between these activities is hard to establish.

If Mum didn’t take up conversational space then Peter and I would infallibly get on Dad’s nerves by reading out every road- and pub-sign we passed, just as we had on the outward journey (‘Wethered, Dad!’, ‘Arkells, Dad!’).

Sometimes it was painful to listen in to Mum’s strained talk, but this time I was glad I had. I made a note of the name. If H. E. Bates wrote stories about people like Dorrie and Cee-li-aaaaah then I wanted to read them. There was a public library in Bourne End, and I was already a regular customer, though it was Mum who liaised with Mrs Pavey, the excellent librarian, ordering books for me and bringing them home in her bicycle basket.

Dad raised an eyebrow when he saw my library copy of The Darling Buds of May . He said it was Bates’s earlier work, stories written under the pseudonym of Flying Officer X, which was really worth reading, but I didn’t care. I was gorging on warmth and earthiness until it almost revolted me. It made Enid Blyton seem a little feeble, and though I felt a pang of disloyalty I over-rode it. I needed to know that there were people like Dorrie and the Larkins, who didn’t hide their feelings as a matter of course. At this point books were telling me more about life than life was.

I needed to know there was life beyond Bourne End. I couldn’t afford to keep life at arm’s length — my body would do that all by itself. I hugged to myself the idea that if I escaped Bourne End and let myself run to seed like Dorrie, constipated only in the literal sense (those fried eggs), in all other respects lusty and open to impulse, there might be a boy-friend somewhere in the wood-work for me too. I would never tire of looking at the dirt beneath his finger-nails.

Peter and I wondered when we should start pestering Mum and Dad to take us to Dorrie’s in Cornwall again. We didn’t get very far. The excuse they gave was that Gipsy had pined for us while she was in kennels, and had lost a lot of weight. Dorrie didn’t accept pets, which Mum thought was a bit of a nerve, abandoning the consistency of her position in the heat of the moment. If Dorrie did accept pets, Mum would have had to find another excuse to fob us off with.

A ban on limbo-dancing

Back at school for the autumn term, I continued my worship of Alan Raeburn. I would write out my fantasies about him (using the intimate spelling Ræburn ) — and very innocent they were too, cuddles and caresses. Even so, the moment I had finished writing I covered the paper with my strong UHU adhesive and folded it over, so that my love would only be discovered at the end of time, the secret bursting from its chrysalis of glue.

All the same, I allowed myself to worship one other teacher. Mum had told me that how well you did at a given subject depended on how well you got on with the teacher. If you liked him a lot, then you could learn anything without even trying. By that criterion Mr Nevin could have taught me anything from quantum physics to origami.

Nevin was a Canadian, tall and rugged, who taught English. He was a great lover of the outdoors, of adventure and canoeing, and he took me out in my wheelchair a lot. One minute he could be talking about gerunds and parsing sentences, then we would be in the woods making a fire. He would turn over a log and call me over to see the larvæ of a stags’-horn beetle. He was a man who was whole and could turn his hand to just about anything. Every other person I had ever met in the world seemed twisted in some way. I had never realised until I met Mr Nevin just how straight, noble and god-like a man could be. I wasn’t ready for a guru but I was more than ready for a hero. I could ask him anything and he never minded. Why should he mind? There was nothing he didn’t know.

There were plenty of woods around the school, and we would spend a lot of time there, though I don’t think we can have been alone together quite as much as my memory likes to think. Mr Nevin built big bonfires, using brushwood and leaves to start with, then moving on to logs. We had a proper camp fire, up to the highest cowboy standards. In winter Mr Nevin would produce warm wraps for us both, and cups of steaming drink to keep out cold.

His stories were full of nature, and of the wonder of all things Canadian. The way the leaves turned yellow, crimson and even blue in the autumn. About (a word, incidentally, which he pronounced as ‘aboot’) how cold it got there. If we thought our winters were cold, we didn’t know what we were talking about.

Dad was good at talking about nature, but not much interested in my thoughts and feelings. Mr Nevin was strong in both departments. He had the knack of drawing me out without seeming to pry, though it was only near him that I was shy in the first place. His own physical poise played a part in this, the sense that he was completely at ease in the world. I told him I had learned about sundew plants when I was five, and had cried over the sad fate of the insect trapped inside. Then I thought about how helpless and immobile normal plants were, and how superb it was that a few of them had learned to pounce.

He leaned back while I spoke, entirely relaxed. Weak sun threw patches of light on his face, and then he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, ‘Well if that interests you, John, we have pitcher plaants aplenty …’ He lengthened the ‘a’ in ‘plants’ but didn’t twist it as Americans seem to do. ‘When I go home during the holidays I’ll bring one back for you if you like. I’ll have to hack it out of the ice, of course, but I’ll bring it back. Maybe we could set up a little garden for you at your height. When spring comes you can look after it and watch it grow.’

What could Raeburn offer me compared to this? Here was a man in the fullest sense of the word, a lover of the outdoors, knowledgeable, humorous, strong.

I asked him could I have his address in Canada and he said, ‘Sure,’ and wrote it out like this:

Ben Nevin

Rothesay

New Brunswick

Canada

‘Is that it , Sir?’ I asked, and though he nodded I still couldn’t believe it. When I looked at the few addresses I had in my collection, my adoration grew. My own address was:

John Cromer, Esquire

Vulcan School

Farley Castle

Farley Hill

Swallowfield

Nr Reading

Berkshire

England

I lived in a tiny little country but I needed eight lines to tell the postman where to take my letters. Ben Nevin lived in a vast land, but all he needed was four lines. Take away his name and the country, and that left two. I couldn’t get over it. I cross-examined him, and he guaranteed me he had given me his full and correct address, just as it appeared on his passport. Even so my faith was weak. In the hols I wrote him a letter to test the theory. My love grew to infinity when I received a reply. I cherished the fact that his name differed only by a letter from Ben Nevis, the highest point in Great Britain (though a dwarf peak by Canadian standards), our little local Himalaya.

A man whose beauty exceeded that of all other men was going to return to a vast country where he was so well-known that just three words on an envelope would find him, and part of his time he might be hacking out a pitcher plant just for me. I realised he might never do it, but I told myself that it didn’t matter. The fact that the idea had occurred to him even for a moment was intoxicating.