Adam Mars-Jones: Pilcrow

Those home-made rocket launchers were the only bit of do-it-yourself I remember Dad doing. They fitted his definition of manly activity while serving the purpose, for once, of something wonderfully useless.

I wasn’t allowed to light fireworks or handle sparklers, and I can see the sense of that. The pyrolatrous glint in my eyes can’t have been much of an inducement to take a chance on me behaving responsibly.

Mum and Dad both smelled of smoke even when it wasn’t Bomfire Night, but underneath that Mum smelled like me and Dad didn’t. Mum and I had marked each other, as dogs mark lampposts. I smelled of the milk she had made inside herself, and she smelled of the milk I had taken in and then burped softly over her shoulder while she patted my back. Dad smelled different entirely.

I remember being held in my father’s arms at a fruit stall in a market. I was reaching out towards a bunch of bananas and saying the word ‘Gee!’ with a hard ‘G’. My word for bananas. What I meant when I said ‘Gee!’ was partly ‘lovely bananas, want bananas’ and partly something else. It was partly ‘I love my daddy’s smell and the feeling of being in his arms.’ It was only much later I wondered if the brand name Geest had been stuck onto the bananas, so that I was instinctively reading the word, remembering my letters from a previous life. Geest of course being the Dutch for ghost or spirit.

Baby Bear bounce

One day when I was three Dad borrowed my favourite red ball, flew over the garden and dropped it down to me from his plane. This would be the house in Bathford, outside Bath, at the top of a hill. Perhaps it was his farewell outing in a Tiger Moth, a training biplane manœuvrable at low speeds which was coming to the end of its long service life around then. Can I really have caught my red ball cleanly, without help, on the third enormous bounce? There was a Daddy Bear bounce, that seemed to go right back up into the sky it had come from, then a Mummy Bear bounce, up to the level of the tree-tops this time, and then a Baby Bear bounce which was just right, at hedge height. A bounce for each of us, and into my waiting hands. This was an extraordinary happening, needing to be replayed again and again in my mind until it took on a dark varnish of meaning.

I feature quite strongly in the early pages of the family album. Later on I’m relegated to the sidelines. I become awkward supporting cast for other people’s birthdays and holidays. But Mum and Dad had quite a lot of photographs taken when I was three, by Cyril Howes of Bath / Abbey Churchyard / Telephone 60444 , so I go out in a blaze of glory as a photographic subject. Then later they couldn’t bear to sort through them critically, getting rid of the ones that weren’t so good. Knowing that my life from that point on had nothing in common with what went before.

As a three-year-old I was a cheerful active child, happy to play with my bricks while the photographer worked away, with a little gallery of memories that didn’t need chemicals to be developed and fixed — the happiness of a good session at potty, the pride of peeing a winning arc, and the physical stimulation of being in Dad’s arms, reaching for the suggestive fruit par excellence , all too obvious object of desire. Unzip a banana.

Then my life began. My life acquired its sruti -note — the fundamental drone that underpins a raga, the part of the music that isn’t even part of the music. The Sanskrit word has come to mean ‘authority’. Hindu cosmology is particularly compatible with musical analogies. It’s not so much the Big Bang as the Big Twang, a primal throb underlying every variation of pitch and timbre.

My life began with a fever. The pain came only at night, to start with. Starting in the knee. Hot and dizzy. At two in the morning I’d be screaming, then by breakfast-time I would almost have forgotten. All childhood illnesses are dramatic, but this was more dramatic than most. I would scream for quite a while without stopping, and I couldn’t bear for my knee to be touched. Mum gave me aspirin, so many that once I saw two Mums coming into the room.

The fever played hide-and-seek with doctors. Mum would take me to the local surgery, but by then I was fine again, running around merrily, impatient to be read Beatrix Potter, to start fires, to eat dirt when I could get it. The doctor may have wondered if this was an obsessive mother making too much of things. He said, if you’re really sure, call me out the next time it happens. If you’re really sure.

We didn’t have a car, but we did have a phone. Not everybody did, but we did, though it didn’t get much use in daily life. So the next time it happened she phoned him, her heart pounding as much from her own daring at disturbing a doctor’s sleep as from the screams of her first-born. When he came he could see for himself how inflamed it was, how much pain it gave.

It was beyond him. I needed to be seen at a hospital, where they would do tests. I’m taking you to a nice hospital, Mum told me. What’s that? A place where they stop you being ill. But I’m not ill. I’m a good soldier. I’ve only got a sore knee sometimes.

I was taken to a place called Manor Hospital, where they prodded and poked. It wasn’t a nice sort of place at all. When we arrived, I asked if my mum could stay as well. Because I asked that, it was put into my notes — as she later saw — that I had ‘an unnatural attachment’ to my mother. What would have counted as a natural attachment, in a three-year-old full of pain being left to be poked and prodded by strangers?

Mum came with me to the ward, but the moment I was put in bed she left, not saying a word. I watched her grief-stricken as she walked away. Her shoes made a sharp clopping noise on the floor, and the tight skirt of the period required her to take short steps, so that she seemed to take ages to abandon me. She didn’t even turn round at the last moment to give me a little wave, as love would have compelled her to do.

I felt deserted by her, and aggrieved by the hospital’s ways of doing things. They had put me in a bed with sides, a hospital cot. Did they think I was a baby? And now Mum who could have explained it all to me had gone away.

She came to visit the next day, and when I sulked and wouldn’t speak to her she cried, explaining that she was only doing what she had been told to do. The hospital said it was for the best to leave without saying good-bye. Mum had trained as a nurse, which may have made it harder to argue with hospital rules. She had no training in how to be the mother of a patient.

Spiritual carbon monoxide

A clean break was prescribed as the least distressing procedure. It avoided the heart-ache of protracted leave-takings — tears, pleading. It prevented Scenes, and Scenes never did anyone any good. Better for the children in the other beds, certainly, if Mum walked off without a word, as if she couldn’t wait to be shot of me.

There are things, though, which clean-break theory ignores. A child who imagines himself delivered into the hands of cruel strangers, for no fixed term, has an altered body chemistry. In his sleep he breathes out dismal vapour — spiritual carbon monoxide. Better for my ward-mates to have witnessed a scene of squalid sorrow, with me howling and begging Mum to stay, than to have taken into their lungs the low fog of desolation and abandonment which I exhaled that first night.

Mum tried to cheer me up. Did I like it here? No I didn’t. I wanted to go home. Children cried in the night. I didn’t like the cereal. There was only Corn Flakes for breakfast and fried bread, which I hated. Why couldn’t I go home, where there was Weetabix?

The third day she brought along some Weetabix, to give me a taste of home. A little bit of continuity between my new life and the old. When she asked a nurse for a bowl and some milk she was told that Weetabix wasn’t allowed.