Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

It wasn’t long before Dad got a job, though it wasn’t a great success. His employer was Centrum Intercoms, and he was supposed to be a salesman. He just wasn’t pushy enough, and in any case he didn’t really believe in the product. It was the wrong sort of product, for one thing. Communication wasn’t really Dad’s thing, in fact it was close to being the opposite of his thing.

There has never been anyone with so little of the salesman’s temperament. The more he praised a product to a potential customer, the more he despised it in his heart, and over time the contempt seeped back into his patter. There was a pile of paperwork to be done, until one day he simply walked away from the job. He came home exultant, and Peter and I giving him a great welcome. I imagine Mum’s feelings were more mixed. The less earning power Dad had, the greater the place Granny could claim for herself in our lives.

Shooting the rapids

The most constant thing in my life at Vulcan, apart from lessons, was the saga after lights-out. By now it was very markedly eroticised. Gunfights and cattle-rustling had been eclipsed by a sexual free-for-all. Over time I had developed my own way of describing things. I knew the word ‘penis’ but wasn’t sure if the other boys did, so I said ‘John Thomas’ instead, which was how the nurses in CRX had referred to those parts. I still used the words ‘taily’ and ‘scallywag’ in my head most of the time, but was trying to out-grow them. I certainly wouldn’t use them in these surroundings. I knew and liked the word ‘vagina’ but felt it would tend to make the proceedings a bit clinical, when the whole point was to be outrageously dirty.

I was a sort of orchestral conductor, drawing out the filthy music in everyone’s head, the dorm itself my instrument. I gloried in my powers. I could send my audience to sleep dreaming of hot steaming home-cooked food, or I could get the room so keyed up it was as if the whole humming chafing collective was going to break loose and shoot the rapids.

No one else ever played ladies’ parts, but I often doubled up. One night we realised we were a villain short. It was decided that Terry would play that, though he was usually Rip, till he said he’d get muddled if Rip had a fight with the villain. I volunteered to be Rip and the lady. Then one night I was not only Rip and Mum/Miss Willis but also a bar floozie with big bosoms. One scenario started with Rip making love to the floozie (me making love to myself in two vocal registers). Then the villain — Terry — was going to come along and punch Rip on the nose and fight him and knock him out. To start with I was going to scream as the floozie (quietly so no matron would hear) because the villain was scaring me, but then he would seize me in his strong villain arms and I would be overwhelmed by passion. Our love-making would have to be quick. We knew that we were destined to be parted. Perhaps the posse was thundering towards us even as we kissed. Opposite sides of the fence, a love that could never be, and yet this violent throbbing moment was perfect in every way, a memory to take with us for the rest of our lives.

I had to find the right voice for each character. As the action became more complicated it became necessary to sketch it out ahead of time. Before the scene began I had to give the dorm a certain amount of briefing, bossy little impresario that I was.

‘Give me plenty of time to get going on the love scene,’ I told Terry, ‘before you come in and start making trouble … I’ve got some really juicy ideas for tonight. Then in the show-down — punching noises, everybody, plenty of “ what the —? ” and ‘ I’ll larn ya! ”’ Punching noises I wasn’t good at. Roger Stott was the expert at those. ‘Okay, pardners, let’s roll.’

Love was my speciality, though. For me, the sexiest of all words was darling . I experimented with its pronunciation, shifting the stress between the syllables, alternating dárling and darlíng. ‘Oh darlíng, I luff you — yes, darlíng, touch me in every place, oh, oh, oh I wish you had more fingers on ze hand and more hands on ze body. Now take your John Thomas and push it deep into my crack … and when it’s in there, please take one of your fingers — any one — and slide it into my botty and I’ll push my finger into your botty also, oh dárling, I am in so much love I could die like this …’

The holiday in Looe with Dorrie had left a legacy, undoubtedly. In our cowboy stories the formula ‘This town ain’t big enough for the both of us’ had pretty much been made obsolete by ‘When I see a hole like that in your bum, it makes me want to stick my finger up it — know what I mean, boys? ’

Sometimes for variety I told a ghost story instead. I improvised freely, and though my plots didn’t always hang together I could certainly brew a spooky mood. One night, just when I was saying, ‘And then SUDDENLY —!!’ with no real idea of what the sudden thing might be, there was a terrific twang and a strong smell of burning. Something skittered across the floor, and a number of boys cried out in fear.

We called a matron, who turned the lights on. There was a mark on the floor which looked as if it was caused by scorching. By daylight we could see more clearly what had happened. Raeburn had left one of the Wrigleys on the re-charger. The fuse had blown and then somehow bounced across the floor. By then, though, my supernatural authority was unassailable. Facts couldn’t dent it.

Amnesia was killing Paul

One of the boys was so scared he said he wouldn’t sleep another night in that haunted dorm. It was Stevie Templeton, known as Half-Pint. The nick-name wasn’t really to do with his height (relatively few people at Vulcan were standard in size or shape). It was because his father ran a pub. So Stevie was moved to another dorm, and Julian was moved in.

I don’t know if there was anything fishy about this dream come true. Julian didn’t claim in so many words to have arranged the whole thing with HQ, by booby-trapping the fuse of the charger, pressing the remote-control button when he heard (through a hidden microphone) that my story had reached a suitable stage, but he certainly took credit for the transfer.

I felt a little guilty about having driven Stevie from the dorm, if that was what I had done. He was an athetoid spastic, unable to control his movements, and Julian was much quieter company. No question about it, there was a certain amount of relief.

It wasn’t just the charger. None of the wiring was reliable. At Vulcan we were always having our own power cuts, on top of the general ones. Once one happened in the middle of the night. People went on sleeping. What else would they do? Why bother to wake up, just to find that the lights aren’t working?

Paul Dandridge, a year senior to me, slept on in his dorm like everyone else. The difference was that he started to die the moment the power went off. He was the severe polio case who did ‘frog-breathing’ during the day. He literally swallowed air — with a distinctly froggy expression — instead of breathing as other people did. At night, of course, he couldn’t swallow air the way he could during the day. When he fell asleep his breathing would stop, so at night he was connected to a respirator.

The respirator made no sound when the power went off. Just the opposite. Its hum and swish died away. The dorm was quieter than it had ever been since Paul arrived. Paul just stopped breathing — or rather, he didn’t start. It was all very peaceful. Then Abadi Mukherjee, in the next bed, woke up.

Not only did he wake up, he understood immediately what was happening. Only a few seconds had passed without power, but already amnesia was killing Paul in his bed. He was dying of forgetting to breathe. Nothing had replaced the mechanical wheeze of the respirator that had stopped, not Paul’s day-time gulping, let alone the smooth rise and fall of a normal boy’s sleeping chest. Abadi had very little time to reverse this trend of dying.