Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Square balloons

It was like the time I spotted a square balloon at a CRX fête. It was floating straight up all by itself, so I knew it was filled with something cleverer than air. Dad explained to me about helium, and when I went on and on at him he promised to get me my own square balloon later on, perhaps hoping to shut me up. He didn’t know me very well if he thought I would forget. When I say square — technically I suppose cuboid. Straight edges, that’s the point. I put him under pressure to do the rounds over the next few months. Gamages. Hamleys. Harrods.

I had particularly high hopes of Harrods. Dad must have cursed the day he told me that Harrods could get you absolutely anything you wanted, even an elephant. I reminded him of that more than once. He could hardly say I didn’t listen to what he said. And hadn’t he told me that if you sent a telegram to Harrods, you sent it to Everything, London ? Wasn’t a square balloon part of Everything? Wasn’t a canister of dry ice part of Everything? I had seen these things with my own eyes. I wasn’t making them up. They existed.

There was also another expedition to the Theatre Royal, Windsor, this time to see the pantomime. I loved the frumpy Dame who was a man dressed up. It was wildly funny. There was one bit of dialogue I particularly remember.

Page-boy: ‘What’s your name?’

Dame: ‘It’s Gertrude. But you can call me Gert, and leave off the rude part.’

We howled. We thought that was absolutely killing. Marion Willis’s middle name was Gertrude. Those of the party with flexible necks craned round in their seats to look at her. She had turned the colour of a letter-box.

From then on she acquired the nick-name Gertrude. In my mind I sometimes called her ‘Marion Gertrude’, or rather ‘Marlon Gertrude’. I’d noticed early on that the co-principal of Vulcan School signed herself ‘Marlon G. Willis’. I asked her why she didn’t dot the ‘i’, and she said that in a signature you could do things like that. No one could tell you how you should sign your name. No one could over-rule you. This little revelation gave me one more reason to embrace the chore of writing by hand.

Even on the premises, Miss Willis had a talent for creating an atmosphere on special occasions. She enjoyed choosing a decorative scheme — sea creatures, say, or Spain — and went to a lot of trouble to make everything look magical. True, the high ceilings of the castle meant that her efforts didn’t have the impact they would have had in more compact quarters. I particularly remember one combined Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes, when for once my reactions weren’t entirely conditioned by the presence or otherwise of high-grade fireworks. The build-up towards the end of October was intense. We boys were given the job of hollowing out pumpkins for the Hallowe’en aspect of the festival.

Actually it was mostly mangel-wurzels that were dished out, which were so cheap they were almost free. The extracted guts completed their life cycle by being fed to David Lockett’s lucky pigs. I was fortunate enough to get a pumpkin, but even with this softer fruit I needed a certain amount of help. I knew exactly the effect I wanted to achieve. Making the nose, eyes and mouth was extremely satisfying — I made sure there were peggy teeth with the right air of menace. I was very particular that the top of the lantern was the top from my pumpkin and not another one, feeling that some of my fellow pupils were being negligent in not minding which lid went where.

Grace in the kitchen, who had taken our pumpkin guts to turn into a big pie, also made parkin and special biscuits. There were gingerbread men and toffee apples, baked potatoes and French bread. There was even a special bonfire cake. I think the whole presentation topped even Mum’s Scrambled Egg Boats when she pulled out all the stops on Bonfire Night. I loved the smell the candles made, as they toasted the pumpkin flesh from inside.

I made a secret wish that all the lights would be turned off so we could see the dancing faces, and almost the moment I made the wish, Marion Willis made it come true. I went into a trance looking at the flickering show. Even when bed-time came I didn’t want to leave. Since boys had to be taken up one by one in the slow lift, bed-time must have been an arduous business for the staff. But that night the kind matrons let me stay where I was for as long as possible, worshipping the lights. On that lovely night I may have been the last boy in the whole school to be put to bed.

We know what we’re doing

Whatever the quality of the school celebrations, I wasn’t going to miss the fireworks at Trees, and the only festival my family did consistently well. Since the triumph of Fun with Gilbert, my Bible had been Chemistry Experiments at Home for Boys and Girls by H. L. Heys, MA (Cantab). It was first published in 1949, making it my exact contemporary. I loved even its epigraph, which tapped into my hunger for primary experiences: ‘ Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do it. ’

Even better was the passage which read: ‘A recent Annual Report of His Majesty’s Inspectors of Explosives announces a large increase in the number of accidents caused by the illegal manufacture of fireworks.’ A whole career path opened up in front of me, bathed in a flickering chemical light. It was obviously just the job. This is Inspector Cromer of HMIoE. I’m afraid I must impound those home-made Roman Candles. They will be disposed of in controlled explosions by properly trained personnel .

We know what we’re doing.

I still wasn’t allowed to light fireworks or handle sparklers, and I suppose I can see the sense of that. Things that have to be done at arm’s length come too close.

The only dissident at those festivities was Mum, who turned into the personification of a damp squib. Once she said, after what had been one of Dad’s best displays, ‘I really don’t know why your father bothers. The Queen has the best fireworks — I thought everyone knew that. He’ll never even come close.’ She took a sort of pride in missing the point.

Gipsy would howl from the kitchen, not so much because she was scared of flashes and bangs as because she felt abandoned by her people, though able to smell them strongly through the door. Solitude is what dogs never get used to, though they put on brave faces.

Peter and I made lists of fireworks and marked them out of ten. We ranked them by a definite system.

The brand names of fireworks had an appeal distinct from the products themselves. There was a thrill in even the plainest: Standard. Then there was Brock’s, with its overtone of badgers. I never felt quite the same about Astra fireworks, though, after I learned they weren’t the Air Force’s own make — the RAF motto of Per Ardua ad Astra was inculcated very young in a household like mine. Then there was Pain’s. I thought that the name must be some sort of message. It was spelled differently from Payne, our neighbour Joy’s name, but I had the sense that a similar hint was being dropped. Once or twice a glazier’s van came to the Castle, with the motto Your Pane is Our Pleasure painted on its side, which may also have been significant. I tried to turn the pain in my joints into firework patterns, bright tracings against a background awareness like dark velvet, to go ooh and aah rather than ow and yikes and make it stop .

There was a separate set of ratings based on pure performance. Half our marks went for colour and half for sound, and there were bonus points for variability — doing unexpected things such as splitting off, changing colour, going from being pretty to being noisy, or starting off noisy and subsiding into prettiness. Brock’s were the tops — plenty of good colours and the best bangs. Standard were perfectly respectable fireworks, though at a level below Brock’s. Peter and I gave Pain’s the thumbs-down. The colours were so poor and bleached. They were anæmic — a potent word from my memories of CRX. They needed iron injections in the bottom and lots of spinach in their diet.