Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

I had lost my taste for having my appearance captured since my triumphant photo-session with Cyril Howes of Bath . I was no longer a responsive model. If I didn’t have my shoes on and a hand to hold I couldn’t stand up, which seemed to vex Mr Fisk, but eventually even the rigid hospital régime took account of my circumstances and allowed me to wear shoes. Someone held my hand at the edge of the photograph, where it wouldn’t obscure what they were interested in. It was never explained why there had to be photographs, and how the pictures that Mr Fisk took ended up in the hands of the doctors. It’s not hard to understand, once you’ve been told. But you do have to be told.

I had the impression at that age that children were somehow automatically naked, as if it was a stage adults had grown out of. There was some sort of dividing line, and beyond that you need never be unclothed again. You might even be lucky enough to wear a uniform, but in any case being grown up would mean an end to nakedness. Till that happy day arrived, I would have to be photographed naked and childish by Mr Fisk four times a year.

While my wheelchair-sitting skills were still in their infancy, I started attending the hospital chapel. It was only another Nissen hut, half-sized at that, but it had a wonderful atmosphere. At first I thought you couldn’t go to church unless you were able to sit up, but the monks told me that wasn’t so. They volunteered to take me in on a stretcher. I remember being pushed along the corridor to the chapel on a trolley. It was a long way to go — a bit of an expedition.

In the little chapel I waited to hear a piano, perhaps even an organ, but there were no instruments. The singing was unaccompanied. I couldn’t see the point, for about ten seconds, but then I got it. A different sort of feeling to the music. The monks were lovely. One of them said, ‘If you can’t manage the hymn book, I’ll hold it for you.’ He sat next to me on the trolley and it was wonderful. I didn’t know whether he was really allowed to sit by me on the trolley, but I reasoned that although this was all hospital and the chapel was inside it, you could also say it was God’s House and the hospital had no say-so. God would protect the monks from worldly scolding.

Invisible stubby quills

The monks were Benedictines, wearing brown tunics and scapulars with hoods, based at Nashdom Abbey which was either on the estate or very near. Their heads were shaved and I wanted to touch. Once I asked if I could, and the monk didn’t answer but just bent his head down for me to explore. It was so delicious. I touched his shaven head. I stroked the consecrated scalp. To the eye the surface was smooth but to the hand it was nothing but tiny prickles. It wasn’t a polished shape like a marble sculpture, it was a field of invisible stubby quills. What I saw was only a small misleading part of things. I realised that touch was probably the best guide to the world, but that was where I was most disadvantaged. I would have to navigate by other means. Only on special occasions would the truth be palpable. I’d had the courage to ask to touch once, and once was permitted, once was ordinary human curiosity. Even Weetabix had been allowed once. More than once was something that would be frowned on in the long run.

Even so, I enjoyed the monkish tenderness and the atmosphere of contemplation. In those chapel services there was no one telling you to repent, or commit yourself, or put money in a dish. For once they didn’t dissipate the essential mystical experience. If all Christianity lived up to that depth of presence, I’d be fonder of it now.

After its shaky start, my experience of social life on the ward could only improve, but the up-turn wasn’t sudden or steep. It would be nice to think that bullying played no part on a ward of sick and disabled children, but it was more or less the foundation of our little society. The ringleader was the girl who had pronounced me stiff and twisty the day I arrived — Wendy Keach. Physical violence wasn’t the basis of her power on the ward, but she showed that psychological torment can be just as effective. It certainly took the shine off Peter Pan for me, having such a nasty Wendy on the premises.

Wendy’s lieutenant, the one who supposedly ate children, was Ivy Horrocks. How desperately we tried to be in good with the two of them! Otherwise we’d be on their list of victims. Neutrality was never an option. When I say ‘we’ I should really come clean and say ‘I’. Not everyone was so cowardly.

There was a television on the ward, but it was only turned on for about half an hour a day. I remember seeing Bill and Ben , and a programme about the Abominable Snowman which scared me good and proper. There was a lot of talk among us about where the words on the screen went when they disappeared. The most popular answer was that ‘little men’ wound them round from the back of the set. Little men did a lot of odd jobs. Little men must also be responsible for cutting our poo into those little sausage lengths, though the idea of men living inside people’s bottoms took a little getting used to. Nobody told us different. Little-man theory prevailed by default.

The thing I liked best of all about television was the way the image collapsed, when the set was turned off, into a mystical dot which hung there for a surprisingly long time. To date, the behaviour of the valves touched me more deeply than any programme.

The school was much harder to find on those premises than the hospital. This was a school in the fifth dimension, a shy and fugitive institution. The hospital was sure of itself while the school was tentative in the extreme. The hospital advanced to meet you, the school melted away at a moment’s notice, abandoning its weaker claims. I wasn’t well up on Broadway musicals — I knew only the one song from Annie Get Your Gun . Otherwise I might have been reminded of Brigadoon , and the village in the Highlands which appears for a single day every hundred years. Still, if there was no sign yet of school, there was plenty to learn. There was Ansell and ‘The illness has raged’, and there were other early lessons. I learned that I was something called Posh. My accent betrayed me to Wendy, but so did my choice of words. I said ‘lavatory’ for toilet. I soon learned to roughen up my vocabulary and even my accent.

I learned to use words like ‘shit’ and ‘bum’ instead of tuppenny and BTM. There’s something to be said for the direct approach, after all. And of course tuppenny is only rhyming slang, isn’t it? ‘Tuppenny bit’ equals ‘shit’. I wonder if Mum and Dad even realised the vulgar roots of their genteel expression. Although it does add up in a way, the idea of spending-a-penny doubled.

Even after ‘lavatory’ had gone down the pan, Wendy found other ammunition. She never ran short. If for instance you have developed the charming notion, as a child beginning to speak, that the holes in your nose are called ‘snorts’ rather than nostrils, and if your parents have indulged your delightfulness by adopting the word themselves on the rare occasions when nostrils must be talked of, and if you then experience a drastic shift of company, forgetting that home words must stay in the home, then you will very quickly learn your mistake. Wendy snorted with derisive laughter, till the snot almost ran out of her nose-holes.

Régime of terror

With the meagre materials to hand Wendy ran quite a little régime of terror. She was sly in extracting secrets she might use to her advantage. She was convinced that I had a middle name, despite my denials, and that it would be a goldmine of mockable ore when I was finally made to reveal it. She tricked me by claiming to have an embarrassing middle name herself — mine could hardly be worse than Buttercup, could it?