Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Granny was always a vivid figure to me, though not in the oppressive way that she was to Mum. I stood up to her sometimes. I knew no better.

In superficial terms, Mum made a very odd choice of womb. In a way she never managed to get free of the womb she had chosen. She was like the baby bird that can’t peck its way out of the egg.

I remember Granny squashing Mum flat one day just by re-hanging the washing while she was out. Granny went out into the garden and calmly unpegged every item, putting it back up the way it should be, without argument or mercy. Mum came and told me about it. She almost cried.

For one of my bed birthdays Granny gave me a doll. I’d said I wanted one, and of course what I wanted was a doll in a pretty dress, with lovely long hair and eyes that opened and shut, framed by long dark lashes. At the time this was not what boys were supposed to want, and my birthday wish was greeted with a certain amount of discomfort.

Granny made herself busy, and fulfilled my wish in a way that was more than half a thwarting. I got my doll, but it wasn’t at all what I had in mind. It was a little soldier in a tartan kilt. Thinking about it now, I realise that this was an unusual plaything for the period, perhaps even a specially ordered object, certainly not something that you would find on a shelf in the newsagents. Granny had gone to the top man, or to some toymakers par excellence , to secure what she wanted me to want.

I sort of liked it. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t cuddle it very much. I went through the motions, rather. No one had the vision to give me the ordinary thing that I wanted, without substituting their own version of what I should have asked for. It’s funny, really, that family members should stamp on the only faint manifestation of interest in the female body I ever had. Question of bad timing, I suppose.

What I wanted was a female doll I would call Mandy. Mandy would wet the bed. She would share my shame over that lonely malady, over which I cried so often. The boy doll didn’t do that. Dolls of the period were rather unstimulating in general. I also wanted my doll to do a tuppenny, and I wanted to watch her do it. I was ahead of my time. The market wasn’t ready for defæcating dollies.

Educational dud

Another reason, the most secret reason, for wanting Mandy instead of Hamish was to get a chance to see the hole where a man put his taily. The boy doll, being tailyless, having hardly so much as a bump beneath his kilt, was an utter dud from the educational point of view.

Granny’s manner with me in conversation was formal but not condescending. ‘Laura always suffered from the fidgets,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to see that you are different.’ Laura was Mum, and I wasn’t different at all, I liked nothing better than a good fidget, but it seemed a bit of a waste when there was someone in the room.

Talking to Granny was very different from talking to Mum. It may have been true that I could wrap Mum round my little finger, but Granny was not to be moulded, by me or by anyone else. She lived by her rules, and expected everyone else to abide by them too.

At home she kept bees and grew strawberries. I said that I loved strawberries, quite innocently, with no idea that I was asking for trouble. ‘John,’ Granny said, ‘you should love your parents, but you can only like your food.’

I was enjoying our conversation, and decided I’d have a go at getting round Granny. ‘Granny?’ I asked. ‘Can you like food lots and lots ?’

She hesitated. ‘Well,’ she said, drawing the word out to three times its normal length. ‘I suppose one could .’

‘But if you can like strawberries lots and lots, it’s almost the same as loving them, isn’t it?’

‘Almost. But not quite — and remember, a miss is as good as a mile.’ This was one of the most serviceable proverbs in the adult armoury. Granny wasn’t going to any great trouble to keep me in line.

‘But if it’s almost the same as loving it, why can’t you just say you love it?’ This was where I played my little trump card. ‘You always say don’t ever waste anything, and I’m only trying to do what you say. I’m being careful with words. Look! “ I-like-straw-be-reez-lots-and-lots .” That’s wasteful compared to saying, “ I love straw’bries .”’

There was some shameless cheating going on here. To make my case stronger I dragged an extra syllable out of ‘strawberry’ in the wasteful example and contracted it back to two in the economical one. Eight syllables as against four. Surely I had her on the run?

It’s true that she was very much taken aback. But then she said, ‘Rules are rules. There are lines that need to be drawn.’ When I asked, ‘Why?’ she snapped back, ‘They just must.’ In fact the rules had changed. It was no longer legitimate to argue back, no longer a good thing to stick to your guns and use logic. Now the game had to stop, just when I was starting to enjoy it. For form’s sake I protested, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to dodge the strongest rebuff available to the adult brain and tongue: ‘ You just can’t, and that’s an end of it! ’ Logic was out of the window, logic had its back to the wall and so did I.

Even so, I admired adults like Granny for their ability to impose arbitrary limits, to say ‘so far and no further’ without having to give a reason. I decided to stop being a child as soon as possible, so that I could do the same, being reasonable when it suited me and jamming on the brakes when it didn’t.

I’m cheating even now, as much as I did then when I squashed and stretched ‘strawberries’ to suit the case I was making. When I had the argument about syllables with Granny, I didn’t actually know the word ‘syllable’. Miss Collins hadn’t got to them yet. Instead I made do with the term ‘word-bits’.

I had asked Mum what the right name was for word-bits, but she said words were made up of letters. That was all there was to it. I said there must be another word. For instance, I explained, Mum has one wordbit, Granny has two and cauliflower four. The number of letters in a word was something different.

Mum couldn’t think of the word. Her education had been extremely patchy, and her younger brother — Roy — was the one who had been designated as clever. Mum would never be able to earn Granny’s respect by using her brain, and I think she just stopped trying. Now she became flustered at her inability to retrieve the desired term. Perhaps I should have noticed with sorrow that she didn’t feel able to hold her own mentally with a five-year-old boy, but I was too frustrated by not getting an answer to my question.

Any fool can mind a child

The way my mother had been brought up by Granny could just as accurately be described as a keeping down. When Mum was little, Granny hired domestic help, at a time she could hardly afford it. There was a curious patch of no-money in the family history. Mum had coincided with it. Some nights Granny would crawl upstairs to bed on her hands and knees, not just because the house was old and the stairs were steep, but because she had starved herself to feed everyone else, and she was too dizzy to stand up. Only much later did Mum realise there was something perverse about Granny’s domestic arrangements, and when she did it really wounded her. Bad enough to be raised by a father who barely seemed able to see her, having eyes only for her younger brother. It was worse that her mother paid someone to come in and look after the children, freeing Granny herself to concentrate on the more important business of cleaning the house. Mum grew up in a household where there might just as well have been a motto in cross-stitch over the fireplace, reading HOUSEWORK IS A SERIOUS ENTERPRISE, and a companion piece on the opposite wall declaring ANY FOOL CAN MIND A CHILD.