Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

‘Yes, of course, Mr Clifton,’ I said. I was as exasperated as anyone else with the intractability of the Tan-Sad, and I wasn’t so very interested in the shop in the first place. All the same I didn’t want Mr Clifton to feel that I thought he had a lot of tatty stuff in there, so I said, ‘I can’t see round that corner! Can you keep a few of those things for the January sale?’ and Mr Clifton said he would see what he could do.

Mum pushed me outside into the fresh air, delightful after the fug of the shop. I thought that was an end of it, but as soon as she’d put the brakes on she went back in. My heart sank when I heard her shouting and wailing, while Mr Clifton pleaded with her not to misunderstand.

‘Misunderstand? Misunder stand?? ’ she wailed. ‘Oh no, Mr Clifton, I most certainly do not misunder stand , in fact I under stand only too well. You don’t want either my son or myself in your shop, that’s what I under stand . Good day to you, Mr Clifton!’ She pushed me home, sobbing all the way and entirely forgetting to buy bread and vegetables. After gathering her strength with a cup of tea she started on a telephone marathon, telling all her friends and neighbours, the Feet and the Paynes and of course Muzzie, exactly how awful Mr Clifton had been. ‘I ask you,’ she would say, ‘can John help taking up more space than a healthy boy? Isn’t he entitled to a little fun at Christmas too? Now he’s very upset, and small wonder.’

John wasn’t upset in the slightest. Except that John didn’t enjoy being used as a sort of amplifier for other people’s emotions, though he was having to get used to it.

I don’t think Mum set out to organise a punitive boycott of Mr Clifton’s Toy Shop, but more than one of the phone conversations ended with her saying, ‘Well, if you think that’s best. I wasn’t going to suggest it. But that awful man can’t say he didn’t ask for it. See how he likes it, when the boot’s on the other foot.’

I tried to soften Mum’s attitude, but she told me not to make excuses for that horrible man. The next time she picked up the phone I found I was incorporated in her monologue all over again: ‘John tried to tell me he didn’t mind — as if he could pull the wool over a mother’s eyes! He’s such a sweet boy. He hates to see me upset.’ Nothing is so crushing as a reputation for being noble, and I wasn’t being noble at all. I just didn’t care. If I’d been barred from a bookshop things would have been different. I’d have organised the boycott myself.

I’m not trying to suggest that Mum exaggerated the toy shop affair so as to be sure she would get plenty of offers of lifts to Maidenhead to do her Christmas shopping there. The emotional turmoil was its own reward and anything else was just a fringe benefit.

Dregs of humanity

What made things awkward for Mum was that Mr Clifton was such bad casting as any sort of villain. People who choose to run toy shops in genteel towns are rarely the dregs of humanity. When Mum next took me into Bourne End, she crossed the road with the Tan-Sad so that we didn’t have to pass the toy shop, but Mr Clifton must have been watching out for us. He came trotting out of his premises and crossed the road to greet us.

He seemed very agitated. ‘Ah, Mrs Cromer,’ he said, ‘I’m so glad to have caught you. I felt so bad after our … discussion the other day. I wanted to let you know that I’ve re-organised the whole shop. Everything’s so much better now. I’ve put some hooks in the walls and arranged things higher up. The customers can see everything now — you’ve really done me a favour.’ His smile was ghastly. ‘Please come and see how much space there is, for everyone . And do please bring young Master Cromer.’ Then he trotted back to the shop he had transformed to win back the favour of our scanty custom.

I wanted to see the new arrangement very much, and assumed we would call in on the way back from our shopping. Instead Mum chose a route which by-passed the shop altogether. ‘Aren’t we going to the toy shop?’ I asked from the depths of the Tan-Sad. ‘No, JJ, we’re not.’ She sounded very unhappy. ‘I just can’t face Mr Clifton after all the things I’ve said about him.’

I didn’t get a Meccano set for Christmas, and I didn’t get a snake either. I got nasty white mice in a wooden cage, on straw that smelled of wee. In fact they smelled like Ivy. I hated them. I wailed, ‘Where’s the present you said I would like ?’ The mice disappeared and were never seen again. Instead I was given a First Aid Kit. That was more like it. It had been planned as my birthday present but it was brought forward in double-quick time. It was a black box with a key and various dummy medications. Back at CRX I became the ward’s community doctor, and soon ran out of supplies. I filled the empty bottles with dolly mixtures from the shop, carefully divided by colour. Dolly unmixture. Dolly mixtures unmixed by me and revealed as wonder drugs, placebo steroids without side-effects of any sort.

I thought perhaps Mum would take me to Clifton’s for the sale in January, but still we kept away. I was back at CRX by the time I heard Mr Clifton had died of a heart attack, in February. I was sure it was my fault, at least partly. I could have tried harder to get Mum to accept the olive branch which Mr Clifton held out to her, with such pleading in his voice. I was supposed to be the one with the unreliable heart, but it was Mr Clifton who hadn’t been able to stand the strain of trying to do business with the Cromers.

The life-jacket of the future

It wasn’t just the Decca Gramophone Company who treated the unfortunate children of CRX to presents, or at least to surplus stock. There was a businessman, a tycoon even, who had invented a new sort of life-jacket, which you didn’t have to inflate. It was the life-jacket of the future, destined to save thousands of lives. Little windows in the jacket expanded when wet. He gave the hospital a whole batch, for use in the hydrotherapy pool, for the poor children who couldn’t support themselves in water in the normal way. Sister Heel and Miss Withers did a great job of building up these magic jackets in our minds. The staff would be able to pick one of us up and throw us into the pool, and we’d be absolutely fine. Even if we landed head down, the jacket would turn us right way up in no time, and then keep our heads safely above water.

It may have been clear to the staff at the time that this was at least partly a publicity stunt. It didn’t occur to us. Private enterprise was tapping into a rich vein of pathos, but we who were that vein had no inkling. The new apparatus was tested, of course. The hospital authorities didn’t take such claims on trust. It was tested on me.

I assumed that I was chosen because of my charm, intelligence and good humour, but although these may have been taken into consideration I was missing the point. I was the lucky volunteer because I hadn’t been medicated with steroids. The illness having raged, my bones were almost ideally dense. My natural buoyancy was close to zero. I was the least floatable of an unfloatable bunch. This body pulls me under. In water my bones felt softer, all the same, like the canes which Miss Reid soaked overnight for basket weaving.

There were quite a few people gathered round the pool for the test. I don’t think it was exactly a press call or photo opportunity — such things were in their early days then. The life-jackets were a lovely yellow colour. They were all technically Small, since they were being issued to children, but the one they put on me seemed very big just the same. It laced up, and there was so much cord left over that it went round me several times.