Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Sarah called Mrs Morrison ‘Muzzie’. ‘Mummy’ was for the ward and the rest of the world, but when they were alone together it was ‘Muzzie’. I spent a lot of time with them, on the days when Sarah’s mum was the only visitor on the ward. When Sarah’s mum brought Sarah a present, she always remembered to bring something for me, so that I didn’t feel left out, but this was the best present she could possibly have given me, the sharing of the home word and pet name.

Mum enjoyed being in on the secret, but it was only going to be a matter of time before she revealed what she knew. Jacquetta Morrison was clearly an upper person, and everything about her was inherently interesting to Mum. Finally after the tea trolley had come round Mum said, ‘I know Sarah’s secret name for you, and guess how I found out?’

Jacquetta looked genuinely puzzled, and so did Sarah. They seemed to have no idea what we were talking about. Finally Mum and I had to announce the fact that Sarah called Jacquetta ‘Muzzie’, and still they looked blank. It became obvious that the name meant nothing to them. Mum covered her tracks by saying, ‘John comes out with all sorts of things nearly all the time.’ So much for loyalty.

‘But I’m telling you the truth!’ I stammered, getting very emotional. ‘Sarah wanted a lift and you lifted her all wrong, and Sarah said “Oh, Muzzie … “But if you don’t believe me, I don’t care! I haven’t told a lie, I know what I heard, Sarah said “Muzzie” — and if you don’t want to believe me, I couldn’t care less. From this time on I shall think of you as “Mrs Jacquetta Morrison, Mrs Jacquetta Morrison !!”’ I don’t know why I was getting so worked up, why the nick-name issue affected me so passionately.

I thought of Jacquetta as being old, at least compared to Mum, but that may have been partly due to the damage done to her complexion by the sun in India. Now she had a sort of faraway look and a younger, hesitant expression. ‘I don’t remember Sarah ever calling me that,’ she said haltingly, ‘but somehow … Well I don’t see why you couldn’t call me by that name, in fact it’s rather …’ True to her destiny as an upper person, Jacquetta was capable of letting a sentence trail away forever without reaching the final word ‘sweet’.

I couldn’t wait that long. ‘So you are Muzzie?!’ I said. By now I was blinking back tears of rage.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I don’t see why not. I am now. Muzzie. Yes. Why ever not?’ From that day on, Mrs Jacquetta Morrison was never anything but ‘Muzzie’ to both our families, to me and Mum and Sarah too. The name bedded down beautifully and became second nature, and I certainly felt I’d earned the intimacy. Mum too was grateful for the existence of the nick-name, perhaps more than me. She liked Sarah’s mother such a lot, but had never been comfortable calling her Jacquetta. It was an effort for her to embark on the presumptuousness of Christian names with such an upper person. Then Sarah’s mum said, ‘Oh, call me Ketter. All my friends do!’, making it ever so much worse.

Muzzie meant to put Mum at her ease, but the task was impossible. For Mum, dealing with someone so posh meant scrambling over a whole series of hurdles at every meeting. Now this casually intimidating instruction turned every conversation into an even more daunting event, a pole-vault of social aspiration. ‘Muzzie’ was a lifeline. What a relief! — it sounded safe and familial.

Funny rattly gappy

What I said was perfectly true. I had heard the word said. What I hadn’t taken into account was the larger context. In fact Sarah always called her Mum ‘Mummy’, whoever happened to be around. It’s just that one day she had slumped a little in her chair, as happened from time to time, and needed lifting back into a more comfortable position. Her mum was there, and she was the best person in the whole world to lift her, but there were times when even Jacquetta Morrison didn’t quite get it right, and this was one of them. She was lifting her daughter back into place into the chair, but not to Sarah’s satisfaction.

Sarah complained bitterly when a lift was badly managed. There was nothing strange about that. We all did the same. It was painful. This time, being impatient, she started to protest before her mother had finished settling her. ‘Oh Muzzzzie ,’ she said, almost groaning, ‘you’re doing it all wrong, now you’ll have to do it all over again!’ Her voice squeaked in a funny rattly gappy way while she was being lifted so ineptly.

She was the doll fanatic on the ward, with a large collection, but she had something in common with a doll herself. Her size was small even for that ward because of the early onset of the disease, and the subsequent impact of steroids. There are dolls that have little speakers in their backs, and they make an uh-uh-ah-ah-ah-uh-uh kind of staccato thrumming noise. Sarah’s diaphragm, under pressure, produced a very similar effect.

‘Oh Muzzie … ‘I had misunderstood. I overheard a chance event and turned it into a splendid secret. Life on the ward was not eventful, and we got our excitement where we could. Sarah called Jacquetta ‘Mummy’ and nothing else. While Jacquetta was in the process of lifting her difficult daughter, Sarah’s brain rapped out the words, ‘Oh Mummy, you’re doing it all wrong!’ but those weren’t exactly the words which came out of her mouth. She got out the ‘Mu—’ fine, but for the next bit Jacquetta must have been squeezing Sarah’s rib-cage in a funny sort of a way, forcing the air out just as it got mixed up with an emotional sob (Sarah was so looking forward to sitting correctly and comfortably) and then it emerged as a sort of distorted sigh. There may have been some congestion in Sarah’s lungs, as there often was. Anyway, the middle part of the word came out as a sighing ‘ZZzz.’ With that extra squeeze of Sarah’s squeeze-box the consonant was mutated. A bilabial dental came out as a voiced alveolar fricative, and that’s how Muzzie got her name.

Robot party trick

Muzzie gave me something in return for the gift of a nick-name, quite without intending it, just as I’d christened her by accident in the first place. She had always been generous on her visits, and careful not to leave me out of any present-giving. So one day she brought some new clothes for one of Sarah’s dolls, and for me she brought a little robot of green plastic, only about four inches high. Plastic toys were just beginning to come in. They were more expensive than tin ones at that time, and had a correspondingly higher status.

Then Muzzie showed me what the robot did. From Bathford days and the Ellisdons catalogue I’d always been strongly prejudiced in favour of toys that actually did something. What the robot did, if you put it on a slope or slightly slanted surface — such as a propped-up book — and gave it a tiny push sideways, was totter downhill, rocking inelegantly from side to side.

I stared and stared at my robot as it did its party trick. Muzzie couldn’t have made a better choice if my guardian angel had tugged on her arm in the toy shop and pointed it out.

The robot could walk. Not smoothly, not efficiently, but undeniably. It could walk. It didn’t have hips or knees, it had nothing more than a sort of rocker arrangement for a foot, but under the right circumstances it could walk. And so could I.

The problem was for me to find a suitable slope. Of course there was the corridor outside, but that was too far daunting. I set my sights on the ramp to the day room, but even that was ambitious. I was afraid of falling over before I’d managed my first tiny step. I’d seen what happened if you got impatient with the robot and made the slope too steep. It tipped forward and fell onto its front, that’s what.