Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

The rest of the Woodlarks week wasn’t nearly as much fun. I didn’t enjoy sleeping on the ground. The discomfort didn’t bother me all that much — it wasn’t as if the beds at Vulcan were anything but basic. I just didn’t like the knowledge that I couldn’t get up without help. At a pinch I could get out of a bed unaided, but not up off a floor. When I was older and read Kafka’s Metamorphosis it brought it all back to me, that helpless beetle feeling. I especially didn’t like being helped in intimate things by the ordinary lovely boys. I preferred the school matrons because I was more relaxed. It didn’t seem so crushingly important that they should like me. I wondered whether looking after us was a punishment, and if so what the lads had done to deserve it, looking after disabled boys instead of being out with the girls they liked so much. You always wonder what helpers have done to draw the short straw.

On other nights Luke wanted to repeat the activities of the first, but I wouldn’t let him. If he persisted I would pretend to be having a bad dream for the benefit of the people in the other tents, shouting and mumbling until he was scared off. Then of course I had to hold my bladder all night, because I could hardly wake Luke up and ask him to pass the pee bottle without offering something in return. I resented the idea that I was a sort of buffet for him to nibble at whenever he felt peckish. After our elaborate courtship on the school premises I felt I deserved better than to be treated as a sort of midnight feast in a sleeping bag.

I certainly learned to fuck that week, though. By the end of it I was the fuckingest fucker who had ever fucked. Every sentence was stuffed with fucking . I didn’t know what the word meant, but its rhythm was a very addictive addition to my conversational repertoire. When Dad was driving me home in the car I told him that having a camp fire at night was fucking great, food cooked outside was fucking tasty — mind you, the ground was fucking hard for sleeping. I loved my new word. It could make itself at home in any part of a sentence.

Dad didn’t say anything. He pulled over and parked with care, signalling and using the mirror, and then he gave me a good clout on the ear. I was stunned, and really didn’t know the reason why.

Dad seemed to calm down once he’d shut me up so effectively. When we were nearly home he said, ‘Be sure to try out your new word on your mother. I’m not sure she’s ever heard it …’ Did he think I was born yesterday? If he wanted to upset Mum, he could fucking well do it himself.

The tensions between Mum and Dad weren’t exactly tucked out of sight, even though they were never talked about. Raeburn and Miss Willis managed to maintain a façade much more skilfully. We pupils of the school were unaware of any differences between them. It’s true that someone had once heard her saying, ‘Alan, please don’t,’ when he was about to let loose with the Board of Education, whether from squeamishness or real disapproval. Otherwise the co-principals kept up a united front.

Then suddenly all that changed, and each of them dealt the other a terrible wound. Each felt betrayed, though the betrayals were different in kind, one professional and one personal.

Old Rabies is tying the knot

The rumour came round the school’s bush telegraph, so that I felt like somebody near the end of the circle in a game of Chinese Whispers, hearing a formula so garbled it bore no relationship to the original. ‘Old Rabies is tying the knot with Ponky-doodle.’ What on earth could that mean? A little later it was made official. Alan Raeburn was marrying Millicent Baxter, she of the sensitive sniffer and the blue-pencilled swear-words. There was going to be a party laid on to celebrate the happy event.

By chance Kim Derbishire, the school’s first pupil, primal Vulcanian, was paying a visit just then. He attended the party. To me he was a figure from legend. I was trying to get the meat of a walnut out of its shell, wrestling with the little vice provided for the purpose. A crotch wrapped in brown corduroy entered my field of vision. The very limited movement of my cervical spine made it hard for me to look at tall boys’ faces. It was a pain in the neck. It was much easier to look at their groins. With an effort I followed this particular pair of trousers up to the shirt and beyond, to his smiling face. He reached into the nut dish and picked up a handful. There was a noise like bones crunching and I realised to my amazement that he was breaking them in one hand. He handed them over to me with a gallant flourish, and then he quietly continued his walk round the dining tables. He was like an ambassador or minister, but to me he was little short of a god.

Kim radiated sex appeal, not musk but aura. Everyone except Miss Willis knew that Kim was having nightly trysts in the school library with one of the new helpers, little Dagmar Bosch from Oberammergau who hardly came up to his shoulder. It wasn’t hard to pull the wool over Marion’s eyes when it came to her pets. And if Kim didn’t get enough of a frisson from having sex after lights-out on the premises of his old school, he could tickle himself even further with the thought that Dagmar’s brother had played Christ in the Oberammergau Passionsspiel.

Marion’s eyes had been shining all evening at the engagement party for Millicent and Alan. Emotion wasn’t necessarily out of place on such an occasion, but of course it depends on what the emotion is. She seemed very restless, moving from place to place, but she happened to be near me when the speeches started, and I could hear quite clearly what she said.

‘Oh Alan, please, don’t do this to me. I can’t bear it.’ Then with a sob she hurried away.

It was the smallest possible outburst, swallowed up by the noise of the party, a genteel death-rattle kept well back in her throat. Teachers learn to project as a matter of course, clarity of articulation an occupational requirement, but this was something that her divided larynx fought with, half to shout out to the castellated roof-tops and half to swallow down like a cyanide pill. Even in a culture that hated scenes above anything, where murmuring ‘For God’s sake, m’dear, don’t make a scene’ could bring all but the most hysterical or actively foreign to their senses, it didn’t count as an unwarrantable parading of emotion.

‘Oh Alan, please, don’t do this to me.’ Very similar words to what she had said when Alan had brandished the Board of Education that time, and just as ineffectual. Alan turned a deaf ear to Marion. He hadn’t laid down the B of E then, and he wasn’t going to give up pretty Millicent Baxter now.

Marion uttered only a handful of words, unheard by the man to whom they were addressed, and then she dashed from the room. It was hardly Dido’s lament.

Seen from another angle, of course, Dido’s lament was exactly what it was. The wail of a woman departing from love and life. All will be darkness soon … It was even the ‘ Liebestod ’ from Wagner, but played in the key of Brief Encounter .

All the same, Miss Willis would not have wanted to think of herself as Dido. Dido was selfish. Dido didn’t look beyond her own needs. She was a distraction on the way to Æneas’s true destiny (as I had learned at Vulcan) which was the journey to Italy and eventually the founding of Rome. By this reckoning Dido wasn’t Marion. Dido was Millicent. Dido put love before duty, and did all she could to divert a great man from his true course.

In the version of the story being played out at Vulcan School, Dido was triumphant. Dido won. She detained him on his way to where he was meant to go. She would want children, she would want a home. Marion Willis was keening from the other corner of the triangle, voicing all the spectral sorrow of a city that would not now be founded, the lasting utopia where the disabled and able-bodied would find common ground, and where Miss Willis would wake up next to Alan Raeburn, kiss him and hand him his canes.