Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

In fact I’m sure that Ellisdons only went in for this bit of typographical fancy-work in an attempt to raise the general tone, just as it described a remarkably wide variety of toys and devices as ‘educational’.

Miss Collins was flustered for a good long moment. Then she said firmly, ‘That’s not a letter at all, John. That’s just a way of writing things down, quite different.’ She must have felt she was on weak ground here, since what she had said described letters precisely. They’re just ways of writing things down. ‘What I mean to say is it’s old-fashioned. We don’t write like that any more. It’s correct to write Mount Etna, E-T-N-A.’ I wasn’t in the slightest bit convinced, and I have to say that I took the whole thing rather personally. Miss Collins should never have tried to make a liar out of the Ellisdons catalogue.

In fact I had a funny sort of love-hate relationship with spelling. At that stage I could have gone either way, towards pedantry or indifference. I remember how silly I thought some of the spelling rules were. Why did we need rules anyway? I verry much wonted to rite things owt the way they sownded, and then evrywun wood no wot wee wer torking abowt.

Still, I applied myself to the task of learning the rules, despite a few despairing moments. The spelling of ‘meringue’ was so impossibly distant from the sound of merang that I thought it just wasn’t fair. And there were more exceptions than rules, which offended my sense of things. Why wasn’t the curved returning stick which aborigines threw, as featured in the Ellisdons catalogue, called a boo-meringue? Once again Miss Collins couldn’t give me a satisfactory answer.

A saltation of tits

A year or two after I started to be ill, someone had the idea of fixing a mirror to the end of my bed, a swivel mirror adjusted to an angle that let me look out of the window. At last I could see the birds that squabbled on the window-sill in the early morning. They were blue tits and not wrens at all. I wish I had been able to observe them more closely, since this was the time that blue tits were making a remarkable breakthrough. There’s a word for this: a saltation, a sudden evolutionary leap within a species. Not an exultation of larks but a saltation of tits. Admittedly the word is usually applied to appearance, whereas the breakthrough was one of behaviour, as birds adapted to the human environment.

It was like one of Æsop’s fables, which I enjoyed being read so much. ‘The Fox and the Grapes’. ‘The Ass and the Grasshoppers’. I didn’t know at the time that the name could be spelled using the rare Siamese-twin vowel I loved so much, which would have been useful corroborative evidence in the case of Ellisdons v . Collins.

In Æsop’s version it would have gone like this. ‘Here’s one you’ll like,’ Dad would say. ‘“The Tits and the Robins”.’

It would have to be Dad telling me the story because Mum had no real interest in natural history. Dad, though, was a good observer and loved the Latin names of things.

‘Once there were some tits and some robins living near a village. The tits ( Parus cæruleus ) lived as couples when they raised their chicks, but when that was done they spent the summer in groups of eight to ten, flitting from garden to garden. The robins ( Erithacus rubecula ) stayed where they were, fiercely defending their territory. The tits chattered about everying and nothing, while the robins kept themselves to themselves. The tits thought the robins were stand-offish and the robins thought the tits were suburban.

‘Both groups of birds, the tits and the robins, drank milk from the top of milk bottles, where it was really cream. This was years ago, John, when milk bottles didn’t have tops at all. The cream was much richer than anything nature provided for the birds’ tummies. Not all of them could digest it, but it was such a potential advantage for the birds to exploit this resource that natural selection favoured those who could.

‘You see, John, birds are really nothing more than little æroplanes. And here was an unlimited supply of aviation fuel.

‘Then one day the birds found that they couldn’t get at the cream. There was a hard shiny film sealing off the rich treat they liked so much. It dazzled them and frightened them too. Nature is hard, John, and human beings are unsympathetic. They wanted all the cream for themselves. They didn’t want to share it with any of the birds, not with the blue tits and not with the robins either.

‘Those were hard times for the birds, both P. cæruleus and E. rubecula . Winter cost them dear. They hadn’t forgotten how to feed themselves, but they were close to starving without the rich food in those bottles. Not all of them lived to see the spring.

‘They were resourceful and clever birds, both species equally. They kept returning to the milk bottles with the shiny tops. By summer they weren’t afraid of them any more, but they were no nearer to getting the cream again.

‘But it is in the nature of birds to peck, and to be fascinated with their own reflection. It turned out that the shiny bottle-top was not only a mirror but a drum, returning a fascinating echo. Every now and then a tit or a robin pecking at the surface would make a tear in the silver foil. After that, with the cream so near and smelling so sweet, it was an easy matter to enlarge the tear and get at the creamy treasure.

‘The difference was what happened after such a happy accident. The tits, spending their time as a group, chattered and spread the knowledge amongst themselves. Soon they all knew how to get at the cream. They called out to their neighbours, “Peck at the shiny place — soon your beak will be full of cream!”

‘But when a robin happened on the cream he kept the knowledge to himself. And when other robins heard the tits calling they sang back, “Keep your distance! Clear off! Come no closer! You’re no robin, but if you don’t clear off I’ll give you a red breast you won’t forget in a hurry!”

‘And that is why all tits and very few robins know how to get at the cream they all like so much. The tits keep the secret alive by spreading it far and wide, but the robins lose the secret by keeping it to themselves.

‘And the moral of the story is: Never be too proud to listen to gossip .’ Not something that Dad would have come up with in a thousand lifetimes, but I can’t help that. A fable needs a moral. It was one thing I particularly liked about Æsop’s fables, that the morals were so explicitly pointed. I was at the age for that.

I myself was experiencing something like a saltation in reverse. The mobility of my joints was so impaired by this stage that I could hardly even lay claim, for practical purposes, to an opposable thumb. Garden birds were making breakthroughs, but I was backsliding.

Thanks to the mirror I could watch Mum going shopping down the lane, and I could watch for her to come back. Bathford was a steep street, and we were at the top. I could see all the way down. The address was actually 5 Westwoods, Bathford. The street sloped so steeply down from where we were that I thought that ‘ford’ must mean a very high place. It was only much later that I learned there was a connection with water.

The mirror was a comfort in some ways, a reprieve even, but in another it only made me more anxious, as I waited for Mum to come back with her shopping basket full. I worried about her. I was afraid that she wouldn’t come back, not because she would run away but because she would be run over. She always seemed to be looking at the ground as she trudged off. She wasn’t paying attention.

For a boy deprived of childish company the wireless was a handy stand-by, either when Mum had to go out or when there was a programme we could listen to together. There was one programme which was specially for us, called Listen with Mother . The lady always asked, ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ which was very well-brought-up of her, but to start with I didn’t know how to answer. I knew that it was always wrong to tell a lie, but it was sometimes rude to tell the truth. I was neither sitting nor comfortable. I lay there squirming in a cleft stick of manners and morals while the lady waited for my answer. It was always a bad moment. Then she took pity on my embarrassment and said, ‘Then I’ll begin.’