Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

I felt a little sorry for Alan Raeburn, all the same. My love was still there under the layers of UHU glue, even if it was always ebbing and flowing between him and my other secret lover Ben Nevin, but now I felt ashamed that I had ever wavered in my devotion to this man with the blue-grey eyes who had told me secrets about the gods of Olympus and trusted me to be discreet. His lack of popularity made me feel that it was a duty for me to stick up for him, if only in my mind.

Knickers at half-mast

The winter of 1962–3 was one of the coldest of the century. The temperature didn’t rise above freezing for months. Yet I don’t remember the Great Freeze as being any worse than other winters at Vulcan — in fact it was rather more endurable. We heard a lot about extreme conditions. Birds for instance were starving to death in their hundreds of thousands. It’s just I don’t remember it being any colder. It wasn’t that I had become used to low temperatures. Heaters were found for the dormitories (they didn’t reappear the following year). Even Judy Brisby suspended her habit of pulling the bedclothes off every boy, not just the one whose turn it was to be washed first. No heating was possible for the lavatories, of course, but a stricter régime of watchfulness was instituted, so that there was no chance of a mishap. It wouldn’t be good for the fund-raising that was such a perpetual headache for Raeburn and Miss Willis for a severely disabled thirteen-year-old such as myself to be found frozen to death on the lavvie, knickers at half-mast round his blue and useless ankles, rigor mortis subtly replacing rigor vitæ . Not quite the pretty tableau at the end of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl . I still think the coldness of the Blue Dorm lavatory in winter was an absolute beyond the understanding of Kelvin. Weather conditions, extreme or mild, had no power of addition or subtraction there, though the temperature had a moral aspect. Biggie when she entered could raise it ten degrees.

In all weathers we had fire drill, but that was lovely. It catered to my need to be held. Raeburn and Miss Willis took the risk of fire seriously, as was proper for those in charge of a large old building full of boys who couldn’t save themselves. There was a fire escape running from a room in the north-west corner of the Castle, and alarm bells at each corner. My love of fire was close to unconditional, but stopped short of a desire to be burned alive, so I would have taken part in these disaster rehearsals willingly enough in any case. In fact fire drill was a treat rather than a labour, thanks to the large chute that ran from a first-floor door at the south-east corner of the building down onto the lawn.

The more able-bodied boys would simply throw themselves down the chute, howling with pleasure, to be caught at the bottom or land on piles of cushions. On one occasion a nervous boy hung back, perhaps frightened by the howls of those ahead, and clung so tightly to the top of the chute that Raeburn had to detach him by main force. In the event his shrieks of distress had changed, by the time he was half-way down, to screams of joy.

Those of us who were more disabled would ride on the laps of teachers, deafening ourselves and our companions with excited noises as we rushed downwards in the dark to the small circle of light at the bottom. In the event of a real emergency I imagine the staff would be expected to re-enter the building, if possible, to help a new batch of disabled boys to reach safety, while those already rescued grumbled about the unfairness of grown-ups having extra turns.

With my luck, I tended to go down the slide on the laps of people I didn’t care for, so that the joy of the sensation was diluted by resentment of the company. More than once it was Mr Lewis the history teacher who was my fire-drill partner. He was so bony it was like going down the chute on an iron bedstead. What I wanted more than anything else never happened — for Ben Nevin to take me on his lap and plunge with me down the chute. If it had happened, I would have been very tempted to die of happiness before we reached the bottom. As Hindus know, the last moments of a life affect the beginning of the next — it’s not a full stop, hardly even a comma, the sense runs on — and with such a death I’d have a head start on the next go-round, or would be promoted to bliss without the chore of further flesh.

Motes of fantasy sifting

Perhaps it was because the reality of the school had so many sharp edges that fantasy flourished so strongly there. Motes of fantasy sifted in through every chink in the windows (and God knows there were plenty of those) and drifted under the beds. I’m inclined to think that there was something congenial to fantasy in the air, or in the water, or in the soil of the place. The Castle had been a fantastical edifice from its foundation. Realism never really got a look in. Farley Castle was a castle in the air that had only touched down for a moment. Soon it would float away again. Raeburn and Miss Willis would never succeed in tethering it, unrealistic as they were in their own way.

This was a period when a new strain of fantasy was emerging, preoccupied with spies and gadgets. The James Bond novels had been around for quite a while, and now a film had been made of one of them. Everyone claimed to have seen Dr No , though I don’t know that they could have. Perhaps some had elder brothers who were able to give an account of the high points. Even I learned, when asked which was my favourite bit, to say, ‘The bit where the lady came out of the sea,’ and to look as sly as I possibly could.

The strangest places could be colonised by fantasy. One was the cramped lift, along with the shaft in which it moved. It was featureless, unless you count a plaque acknowledging the contribution made by The Commonwealth Fund for Crippled Children. Even Judy Brisby had the grace, when she saw me looking at it, to say, ‘It’s not the nicest word, is it?’

The lift was a sort of non-place in which we spent a lot of time over the years. It was just waiting to be transformed. A whole mythology came to encrust the lift-shaft, and I can claim to have given it its start. I seemed to be able to spin the most fantastic yarns after lights out, and there was no reason to be inhibited by daylight. Perhaps my style was a little cramped in our cowboy fantasy with its frequent pornographic excursions, our buckskin Kama Sutra passion play. It sometimes made me feel a little type-cast as a personified bosom, a yoni ready for any lingam , the girl who gets swamped with hormones while she’s cooking, and has to fit in a passionate love-making session with a hunky cowboy in the pantry, timing things so she can repeat her climax as many times as possible, before emerging without a hair out of place when the mistress returns in her wagon or the cakes start to burn.

By day I could mine a new vein of dreaming. There were nooks and crannies in the brick-work of the lift-shaft which gave imagination a finger-hold. My idea was that you could use the crannies to deposit and pick up letters as part of an international network of spies. You would have to roll them up very tight to poke them through the concertina grille of the lift itself. It became a challenge and a thrill for the more able-bodied, spiced by the prospect of losing a finger as the cage ascended or descended. I wasn’t physically able to make the drops myself, but I explained the system to people who weren’t in on it. ‘I’m not supposed to tell you this,’ I’d say, looking around with as much suavity as I could muster. ‘I’m an agent myself. It’s worked by compressed air. Every so often they turn the pumps on, and all the letters disappear with a great WHOOSH! I’ve seen it happen.’