Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Behind the scenes she went on trying. The built-up shoes we all wore were very uncomfortable. One of the therapists who fitted them seemed to think that was as it should be. ‘If they don’t hurt they can’t be remedial, can they?’ she said. Blisters and calluses were commonplace. When we complained she padded them with cotton wool, entirely the wrong material for the job. In my mind I had a picture of something that would have the right effect, a sort of squashy wood which I had seen somewhere as a tile on a wall. Surely something like that could be cut to size? When I discovered, long afterward, that cork insoles were perfectly common items I was amazed all over again at the cluelessness of CRX in certain departments.

One day Ansell had my feet properly measured in every detail. She told me there was a man in Maidenhead who was going to make me a special pair of shoes which wouldn’t pinch the way the National Health ones did. They were an incredible price, but somehow she had wangled the funding. She was a very powerful woman in the rheumatic field.

‘What makes these shoes special?’ I asked.

‘They’re Space Shoes, John. They’re what people will wear in space. They’re designed by scientists.’

She certainly knew how to appeal to my tastes. I was going through rather a space-travel phase at the time in terms of my reading, with a particular love of the Kemlo books ( Kemlo and the Martian Ghosts, Kemlo and the Star Men and so on). Kemlo was a boy who had been born in space, and so he didn’t need to breathe air. I tried to train myself to do without air like him, holding my breath for longer and longer periods, just as I had learned to inhale through one nostril during my bed-rest years. Of course this time it wasn’t rough-and-ready pranayama . This time it really was John being silly.

Then the Space Shoes arrived, and I hated them. They were comfortable all right — it wasn’t that. They were closely moulded to the foot, and gave excellent support. But it was like the percussion tripods all over again. The man who had designed them had forgotten that I needed to look vaguely human. I wouldn’t have minded looking like a space man, but not a space monster. I refused to wear something that looked like a puffball mushroom. Wendy would show no mercy.

Ansell tried to talk me round. She even said, ‘I can just see that space boy Kemlo wearing something like these,’ which at the time I thought was simply a lucky guess. Of course it’s more likely that she’d consulted Mary in hopes of finding a way to get me to like the horrible Space Shoes.

I wouldn’t wear them. I was adamant. ‘Sometimes, John,’ said Ansell, ‘I wonder if you really want us to help you.’ I can’t blame her. For the second time she was having to put away something that had taken a lot of thought and organisation. Since the Space Shoes had been made to my exact dimensions, they couldn’t be offered to anyone else.

All in all, it looked as though I would be exempted from the painful duty of walking. Because of the virtual immobility of my hips it was obvious an ordinary wheelchair wouldn’t help me. Instead I was issued with something called a Tan-Sad, a sort of raised baby carriage with a broad foot-plate and four fixed wheels. The manufacturers were pleased with their work, and had put a little plate on the Tan-Sad with their name on it, and a design of a rising sun.

The Tan-Sad was indeed the dawning of a new day for me. It didn’t look inviting, but it was beautifully comfortable once you were in it. There were pillows and cushions aplenty. It was semi-reclining, so I could see much more of the world than when I was horizontal. I could imagine myself lying down again by tilting my mind backwards, or sitting up straight by tilting it forward.

It had its draw-backs, of course. I couldn’t get into it by myself, but had to be lifted in and out. Because the wheels were fixed it couldn’t go round corners without being manhandled. It was forward or backward, take your pick, but it was certainly a step up from stretchers and trolleys.

Silent worship

At some stage I decided that Mary and I would be getting married. Purity was the keynote of the married state as I imagined it. I was strongly influenced by one of the songs that Miss Reid used to sing. It was called ‘Silent Worship’, and I decided it was about the sort of pure person I might marry:

Did you not hear my lady,

Go down the garden singing?

Blackbird and thrush were silent

To hear the earlies ringing

O saw you not my lady out in the garden there

Shaming the rose and lily for she is twice as fair.

Though I am nothing to her,

Though she must rarely look at me,

And though I could never woo her,

I will love her till I die.

Surely you heard my lady

Go down the garden singing,

Silencing all the songbirds

And setting the earlies ringing.

But surely you see

My lady out in the garden there

Riv’lling the glitt’ring sunshine

With the glory of her golden hair.

Mary’s hair was more mouse than gold, but still the song seemed to fit. She was the right sort of lady. If I was ever going to have a lady, it would have to be like the lady of the song, the sort of lady who would never allow a man’s taily anywhere near her. There would be none of that taily and pocket nonsense between us, but we would be great companions and we would help people by raising money for charity.

Of course the word wasn’t really ‘earlies’. At the time I heard Miss Reid sing the song, my vocabulary was lop-sided. I knew ‘quadriceps’ and ‘blue cere’, but I didn’t know ‘alley’. I wasn’t going to put my hand up (or wave it, anyway) and ask about the ‘earlies’ with Wendy ready to pounce on any weakness, so I let God tell me what they were. They were ethereal spirits who were really really early getting up. They were so gentle and so fragile that their existence was more precarious than a spider’s web. They could only be heard in crepuscular morning. The song of the Earlies took place between this world and the next, between darkness and daylight.

With the exception of Mary, and possibly Sarah too, the CRX kids were too low to be able to hear the Earlies. Wendy would pass boiled sweets round after her parents visited, and then when our mouths were full she announced proudly that she’d left her bum dirty earlier on and wiped the sweets against it. How would she possibly hear the Earlies? Her ears were sealed with wicked wax.

I told Mum about my plans and she looked thoughtful. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be better suited to Sarah?’ she asked. She wasn’t seriously weighing up Sarah as a marriage prospect. It was more that she and Sarah’s mum had struck up a friendship of their own. Sarah’s mum would come to visit driving a Volkswagen. I knew about this extraordinary car, because sometimes on her visits Sarah and I would be pushed to the end of that quarter-mile corridor to sample the delights of the WVS canteen, staffed by Mrs Carpenter of the Squashy Thumbs.

The squashy thumbs

Her thumbs really were squashy, and she always invited us to play with them. She would reach across a big red hand to us. Our fingers left little dimpled marks on her thumbs. They stayed visible for quite a while. I enjoyed the game so much it never occurred to me to ask why it happened. I only thought it must be nice to have a bit of plasticine always with you. Possibly she suffered from a circulation disorder, causing some sort of œdema. At the time it seemed almost appropriate that someone who worked in a canteen should take on some of the characteristics of dough, and I thought that the only ill people in hospitals were the patients. I hardly understood that grown-ups could be ill too. Didn’t children have the monopoly?