Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Later Mum explained that the lady couldn’t hear me and I could say anything I wanted to as an answer to her question. So I would shout out, ‘No! I’m lying down and it hurts!’ and sometimes Mum would even join in with the mockery of dear Daphne Oxenford.

You’ve won fair and square

My mind had only two gears, and one of them was idling, though ‘instinctive rudimentary meditation’ sounds more flattering. The other gear was overdrive. My brain raced wildly when there wasn’t enough to tax it. There were things on the wireless which set off chains of thought that flailed and skidded, giving my mind no traction. There was one song that came up every now and then on the Light Programme which I loved to pieces, though it was so strange on first hearing that I struggled to make sense of it. A man and a lady were singing together, but they weren’t being sweet to each other. They weren’t being what Mum called ‘lovey-dovey’ (something she didn’t like). They were singing and fighting at the same time. It wasn’t the singing that was beautiful — the lady was really only shouting in tune. So it was a quarrel as well as a song. They were being rude, in a way, but they sounded happy at the same time, and they sang in turn, waiting for the other person to sing the next bit, so in another way they were being polite even while they were fighting. It was a real puzzle.

The song didn’t come along on the radio every day, it didn’t even come along every week, but sooner or later I would hear ‘Anything you can do I can do better’, and then Mum would know to turn the wireless up right away, without being asked, even before the song got as far as ‘Sooner or later I’m greater than you’.

I concentrated as hard as I could. There was a bit in the middle of the song which I found particularly baffling, though being baffled was all part of the thrill of the song. ‘Can you make a pie?’ the lady asks the man, but when he says, ‘No,’ she says ‘— neither can I.’ I couldn’t stop giggling. It was heavenly.

It was so terribly funny, but why, exactly? First of all because of the singing and fighting, which made it different from any other song. Then because they sang so fast. That was clever and it was fun for me to try to copy them.

The whole song was quick. But the bit that I learned to listen out for was very very quick. It was so quick that ‘quick’ wasn’t really a quick enough word for it, whatever it was they were doing. There would be a word for being more quick than quick, but I didn’t know it.

It was dazzling. I was following the quick argument in my mind, wondering who would be the winner. Then when the lady asked, ‘Can you make a pie?’ I applauded her in my mind. I didn’t really mind who won, but I had a lot of sympathy for the lady. She couldn’t win a physical fight with the man, so it would only be fair if she won this one. Ladies have different ways of winning. When she mentioned pies I gave her the crown in my mind.

The line that went ‘Can you make a pie?’ was obviously the clincher. Everyone knew that ladies knew how to make pies (Mum specialised in cakes but she could certainly make a pie), and so I applauded her silently, saying, ‘Bravo, Madam! You’ve won fair and square!’ to myself. The matter was all settled and jellified when the man said, ‘No,’ and I thought that now the argument must be over for good.

Except that I wondered how the song could go on if the argument was over? It couldn’t just stop in the middle, but I didn’t see how it could go on either, with the pie question settled so conclusively.

So when she said, ‘Neither can I,’ it was a total opposite surprise. It took me completely aback, and I couldn’t stop giggling. I was laughing and also a little sorry for her, thinking to myself, ‘Oh you poor lady! You’re supposed to be winning this argument, oh dear! Yes I know it was very fast, and you had to think of all those things quickly, I really don’t know how you sing so fast and so clearly — I wish I could do that! — but surely, surely you’re supposed to think of something you can do if you want to win the argument? I suppose, like me, you thought you were a general sort of lady, and that as a general lady you could make pies because that’s what ladies generally do. So you asked the pie question without thinking about it properly first.

‘Then as soon as you had asked it, you realised that whereas most ladies could make pies, you for some reason could not. That was sad, and also a little dangerous. If you weren’t a general sort of lady and couldn’t make pies, he might not be a general sort of man and maybe he could , and then the argument would go right the other way and then you’d be well and truly dished. But once he’d given his answer, and it turned out he was a general sort of man and clueless about pies, don’t you think that under the circumstances you could have told a very small lie? The man would never know, and wouldn’t be likely to want to come and watch you cook one, and even if he did, he would have to make an appointment like we all do when we go to hospital or the doctor, and if that happened you could learn to make a pie in an hour or two, couldn’t you? Someone like my mum could give you a lesson. So if you had lied, nobody would ever have known!

‘But you were a very honest lady, weren’t you? Like an angel, you couldn’t tell any sort of lie, however small it was…’

All this convoluted reasoning took place in a flash. It can’t have been conducted in words, because so much verbalisation wouldn’t fit into the second or two it took the people to sing that bit of the song. In my imprisoned and restricted body, I was having an intense session of mental gymnastics, and hearing the clever-quick-fighting song made me feel on top of the world.

I tried to explain all this to Mum, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t make her see what I saw or hear what I heard in the song. I was a chatty enough chap, but my tongue lagged far behind my thoughts. Each thought seemed to come faster than the last one, but each word arrived with more and more of a delay. What was going on in my head was like a disembodied squash game, with the balls having minds of their own. It was like a chain reaction of mental particles. The way each ricochet had more pace and spin than the last one would have been frightening if it hadn’t also been exhilarating.

Of course I had entirely missed the point that if the lady hadn’t told the truth the song wouldn’t have been funny, so perhaps I wasn’t being that clever after all.

There was something else I got from the song, other than the experience of having my thoughts bounce so nimbly from lobe to lobe of my brain. The lady said, ‘Neether can I,’ not ‘Nigh-ther’. And nobody scolded her . Mum smiled along with the song, as if that was perfectly all right. If anything, the lady was the one doing the scolding. She had the last word and won the argument.

The knowledge that some proper people said ‘Neether’ was bound to come in handy for a later argument of my own. I didn’t make the mistake of coming out with it right away. Patience is a virtue, virtue is a grace. I was learning to have a few tactics, and to keep my powder dry. So all in all I got a lot of ammunition from Annie Get Your Gun . I’m sure I learned more from Irving Berlin than I ever did from the Collie Boy.

Invalid privileges

Two things happened towards the end of my years of bed rest which had a knock-on effect on my future, although I wasn’t really party to their importance at the time. One was that my dad sat down on the bed, and the other was that Mum picked up a magazine while she was waiting her turn at the dentist.