Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

‘Well, I’m not going to show you!’

‘You can’t tell me and then not show me. That’s not fair.’

‘You just have to trust me.’

‘Well I won’t. You showed me your ears, remember.’ If she’d exposed the one hole, surely she could do the same with the other. ‘You’re just going to have to show me where the taily goes. Or else I won’t believe you ever again.’

‘You can believe what you like. I’m just trying to save you getting into a muddle later on.’ I wondered why she was so shy about showing me the pocket, really . Perhaps she had a little taily of her own.

The only bit of the story I liked at all was the idea that the bag beneath my taily (the family word was ‘scallywag’) was full of seeds. Otherwise it was obviously rubbish.

Dot-ditty-dash

From Miss Collins’s point of view I must have been a faintly alarming child to teach. Teachers usually like a responsive pupil, but in me the hunger for knowledge had got entirely out of hand. Mine was a desperate case. It wasn’t just that I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know anything, anything at all.

Miss Collins brought a little portable blackboard with her, which I thought was a thrilling piece of equipment. I loved the dot-ditty-dash noise the chalk made as she wrote, and the way she wiped the board with a hanky tucked into her sleeve. The noise of her dancing chalk was like the tapping of Morse code. Dad had a proper Morse tapper which he let me use, until Mum said that I was getting too excited. He said that to be really good at Morse you actually had to think in the code. He was probably thinking in Morse the whole time.

Miss Collins was rather set in her ways — not a surprising thing, considering that she had spent most of her life in charge of rooms where she was hardly likely to be intellectually challenged. Her lessons were set pieces, well rehearsed and forcefully delivered. I remember one rather dramatic lesson, about the family life of a vowel.

It went like this: baby ‘i’ used to be taken for walks by his parents. They held his hands on either side as they strolled along. Then one day the wind came along and blew off his hat — his hat, of course, being his dot. To demonstrate, the Collie Boy puffed up her slack cheeks and blew on the blackboard, while she wiped off the dot with the board-rubber. Twice more she blew, and with each puff she wiped away the letters on either side of baby ‘i’. The wind blew away his parents!

Hatless and abandoned, baby ‘i’ was engulfed by shame, and there his childhood ended. His hat was lost for ever, and his parents weren’t there to hold his hand any more. He was doomed to grow up into a capital letter — that is, an adult — and to make his way in the world alone.

It’s not the most obvious way to think about the alphabet, is it? I don’t think I’ve invented the element of trauma and isolation — little ‘i’ as part of a joined-up world, then when maturity strikes having to come to terms with bereavement and solitude. I stands alone. I stand alone. Italics convey an extra emphasis on disgrace, the stricken capital staring down at its feet.

Apart from the Freudian scenario, there was something close to bad taste in Collie Boy spelling out this little drama to me. I was taking a bit of a break from standing up, myself. It was a treat even to be propped up, so that I could see the blackboard properly. Was it tactful of Collie Boy to remind me that even lower-case letters led a more active life than I did? She was teaching a standard lesson, not going to the trouble of tailoring it to the pupil.

The challenge of mashed potatoes

My writing was hopeless, but my devotion to books was intense. In fact Miss Collins became alarmed by how quickly I learned. My reading age was galloping ahead, since I had so little else to do. It couldn’t be good for a five-year-old to be rattling through Beatrix Potter, or so she thought. She would intervene. It didn’t seem to occur to her that normal development was no longer a possibility, and she must build on what she found. If I was racing ahead in one area, she should be glad rather than place obstacles in my path. In most respects I was falling far behind, and would never catch up.

Miss Collins’s treatment of my rampant reading was very much in keeping with the doctors’ treatment for the underlying condition that caused it. The remedy for the excessive stimulation I was creating (to replace the stimulation that had been taken away) was to take it away. I hope this philosophy has fallen into the contempt it deserves. Miss Collins decreed that my access to books should be rationed, and the appetite for reading which worried her so much indulged for no more than half an hour a day.

It was absurd that mental inactivity should be supposed to be beneficial, but then it was also an absurd proposition on the physical level. I was being kept in bed for reasons of fashion. Bed rest was the panacea of its time. Just as there were people with certain specific conditions who happened to benefit from blood-letting when that was the vogue — people with hypertension, gout, polycythæmia — so there may have been people who benefited from bed rest. I wasn’t one of them.

The 1950s was a period which put a lot of faith in the healing powers of tedium. Taken to extremes, of course, this principle yields a mystical insight, but I don’t think that was the idea at the time, the hidden wisdom of the system. So patients with mild digestive troubles, for instance, would be put onto a bland diet, religiously avoiding roughage until their systems could hardly deal with anything more challenging than mashed potatoes.

The fad for prescribing bed rest in hospitals and convalescent homes didn’t really pass until the late 1960s. Even then, it was phased out for economic reasons, not because the professionals lost faith in its effectiveness. It simply cost too much to keep people horizontal and in limbo. It was expected that mortality figures would go up when the beds were cleared, freed up for patients with acute and actual needs, the only doubt being how much. In fact death rates went down. It turned out that bed rest had been killing far more people than it saved. Pulmonary embolism was murdering people in their beds.

So much for physical bed rest. The arguments in favour of mental bed rest hardly exist. I don’t believe that imposing inertness on the mind as well as the body would have improved the well-being of a single patient. My mental vitality had been forced underground by physical inactivity, and rather than rejoice that the current was still strong Miss Collins tried to pump concrete down into the culvert where my life now ran.

After the rationing of books time passed more slowly. I think time passed slowly in the 1950s anyway, for everyone, not just for me. Still, I had The Tale of Two Bad Mice safely memorised, and odd stretches of Pigling Bland .

Beatrix Potter revealed new aspects of herself when I considered her with my new style of attention, without the book in front of me. I was less involved, and saw things from a greater distance. Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, the anti-heroes of The Tale of Two Bad Mice , are confronted in their own way with the illusions of the world. Exploring a dolls’ house, they find food aplenty in its kitchen. Hungry, they settle down to eat, but the ham, the lobster and the bread are all made of plaster and stuck to their plates, a discovery that the mice greet not with religious resignation but with vandalistic fury.

Pigling Bland’s name was delicious in itself. Those clustered consonants — gl — bl — had a globulous poetry to them. My favourite sentence went ‘Pigling Bland listened gravely, but Alexander was hopelessly volatile.’ I didn’t know what all these words meant, but still I felt I was being nudged towards something. I wanted to be one of those who listened gravely. When I was allowed my daily ration of reading, of course, I preferred to tackle books that I didn’t already know. If ever I’d been dilatory in my reading, idly browsing from story to story, then that time was in the past.