Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

I felt almost sorry for her, in my folly, and I gave up my secret. I tried to give it some historical context by referring knowingly to the bouncing bomb, but I needn’t have bothered. ‘Wallis’ became ‘Wally’, and that was what she called me from then on. Wally Snorts. Wally did not then mean ‘idiot’ as it does now, but still I flinched every time. I tried calling her ‘Buttercup’, though my heart wasn’t in it, and she simply said, ‘Did I say Buttercup? My mistake. My middle name is Jane. It’s a rotten sort of name, isn’t it?’

Somehow she heard about my meeting with the matron of the whole hospital, the empress in purple. She told me I was a poshie and a sissy and that I was ‘sucking up to Matron’, when I would never have thought of such a thing. It was an impossibility. It would have been like sucking up to God. After that she sometimes called me Little Lord Fauntleroy and sometimes Archie Andrews after a ventriloquist’s dummy very popular on radio at the time.

That tells you all you need to know about the 1950s, really, that millions of listeners would tune in to a programme in which a man they couldn’t see pretended to make his voice emerge from a dummy that was likewise invisible. Julie Andrews played the dummy’s girlfriend, Beryl Reid his catty friend Monica. In the heyday of Educating Archie there was a whole little industry making souvenir mugs, ties, soap, confectionery and scarves. When clothes were still rationed,

Archie had been given an allowance of 50 coupons a year to acknowledge the contribution he made to national morale. Archie and his manipulator, Peter Brough, even performed privately for the late King and the princesses. After the show they asked him to take Archie’s head off so that they could see how it worked. Later the King remarked that there had only been one beheading in his whole reign, and his daughters had insisted on watching the whole thing.

When the show made the logical transition to a visual medium, to television, it wasn’t nearly so successful. People preferred the imaginary illusion to the real one. And they say the British have no taste for mysticism!

The Archie Andrews nick-name was particularly galling because I thought of myself as one of nature’s ventriloquists rather than one of her dummies. I had pined for the teach-yourself-voice-throwing book advertised in the Ellisdons catalogue, but finally been stern with myself. It didn’t fit my requirement that everything I sent off actually did something, preferably something spectacular, when it arrived.

Normal blue ink

When Mum wrote to me, she had a particular way of writing the address. She would use normal blue ink to write ‘Ward 1’ on the envelope, and then instead of ‘Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital’, she would write ‘Canadian + Memorial Hospital’. But she’d change to red ink for the ‘+’. A red cross instead of ‘Red Cross’. That was her special way of writing the hospital’s name. She made it into a sort of game between us.

There was no guarantee that so wayward a variation of the address would be accepted by Her Majesty’s postal service. It could easily have been returned. The Post Office were sticklers to a man, in those days before postcodes, after which stickling became more idiosyncratic, but they colluded with her little flight of fancy.

I learned to say ‘C.R.C.M.H.’, even to think it that way, always with capitals and the right pronunciation. C full stop R full stop C full stop M full stop H full stop. Then one day I was wheeled to an office in the hospital, where a clerk needed to fill in a form on my behalf. He asked me about my previous addresses, and then where I lived now.

Proud of knowing the right answer, I said ‘C.R.C.M.H.,’ complete with all stops. I looked up at the man, waiting for my pat on the back. Well done John! You’ve shown you’re not hopelessly volatile but are able to listen gravely. Instead he said, ‘That’s rather a mouthful, don’t you think, John? I’ll let you in on a little secret. Up here we just write “CRX”. Much easier, isn’t it?’ ‘Affirmative,’ I said, using Dad’s forces form of words, which Mum found so exasperating (‘Why can’t you just say “Yes”?’).

To tell the truth I was rather crestfallen to be corrected after so much brain-washing, but the clerk made it up to me by saying, ‘Keep quiet about it, though — don’t go telling the other kids on the ward.’

It wasn’t altogether clear whether CRX, as I allowed myself to call it in my mind, was in Buckinghamshire or Berkshire. I badgered people to be definite. I didn’t enjoy living with uncertainty in those days, and it didn’t seem too much to hope that there was a definite answer in this case. But there wasn’t. Letters could be sent to me either on ‘Ward 1, Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Taplow, Bucks’ or ‘Ward 1, Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Taplow nr Maidenhead, Berks’. Post could be sorted in either place. In effect I spent several years of my life in a place with an indeterminate location. My first feeling was that I had a right to a definite answer, one way or the other, but then I came to enjoy the fact that things weren’t so simple.

I liked the idea that I could go on holiday without moving. When I started writing a letter, I could ask myself, ‘Where do I want to be today?’ before I wrote the return address. The ‘Bucks’ form usually seemed clearer and more direct than the ‘Berks’ one, but my mood could change. Depending on which form of the address I used (always assuming my correspondent respected it), the letter of reply would pass through one sorting office or another. Action at a distance, always an attractive idea. The letter would pass under the eyes and hands of a different set of Post Office employees. One lot might process it more quickly than the other, but even if they didn’t I would know the letter had come a different way. There was an extra edge of pleasure in the wait for the postman. Even at my most megalomaniac I had to concede that it was the same postman making the delivery, whichever route I had decreed for the letter to use.

There was a doubleness, too, about the name of the estate, or at least its pronunciation. There were two versions racked with class nuance, both of them at odds with the spelling. Mum said only suburban people said ‘Cleeve-den’. Upper people always said ‘Clivv-den’ (just as Mum always said ‘upper people’). The only thing both parties would have agreed on was that the name wasn’t pronounced ‘Cliveden’, the way it was written, and they would have joined in laughing at anyone who knew no better.

In fact I remember Ansell saying ‘Cleeve-den’, which meant she was probably suburban, but then again she could be absolutely terrifying. I knew that suburban people were characteristically shy and uncertain (like Mum, deep down, with her longing to know what was right). So I began to realise that as long as you used enough force of character, you could be as suburban as you liked.

Cheese on toast

The third Norn in the welcoming committee, besides Wendy and Ivy, was Sarah Morrison — an entirely different character. She had been curious about me, like the others, and had joined their sortie but most of the time she went her own way. She was largely immune to the pressures of the Wendy gang.

I didn’t find this out for a little while. We were cut off by illness from playing together, and from the natural mechanisms of community-building. Receiving hydrotherapy in the same pool, for instance, isn’t necessarily a social opportunity, though in the right circumstances it can be. It was there that Sarah Morrison made friends with me, while we were waiting for our turn in the pool, by whispering that if you blew off under the water and took a good sniff, it was just like cheese on toast. When we were waiting to be taken out of the pool, she urged me to try it. She shuffled up next to me and then we both did blow-offs and politely took turns to have a sniff. The best part was feeling the bubbles of gas percolating through my trunks and tickling my spine as they rose to the surface. I couldn’t bend over to get a proper noseful but I got an adequate sample. I didn’t think the resemblance to cheese on toast was close, myself, but I wasn’t going to spoil a friendly conversation, even one carried on in an up-draught of digestive gas. It was a rite of passage. I had always wanted a blood brother, though the ritual of cutting frightened me, but for the time being I was content with a blow-off sister.