Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Not that my investigations were very advanced. They were just that — investigations, carried out in a scientific spirit. Apart from the mystery of the ‘I’, unaffected by pleasure or pain, which was a mystery which couldn’t be broached with anyone I had ever met, tailies and what they wanted were life’s biggest enigma.

Sometimes I made a low wall with the bedclothes, with taily in the middle. I made it rise up stiff by thinking of boys playing with their legs round each other, then thought of nothing and watched as taily went down. It was so interesting to see that it didn’t go down smoothly, but in little steps — bob … bob … bob … — with a sort of elastic bounce. If I intervened with my mind before countdown had reached zero and taily had hit belly I could stop it from snoozing and make it wake up again. It was lovely, in a body which seemed to want nothing to do with my wishes, to have mental control of this little joystick.

I assumed that my taily was the only one of its kind, with this hydraulic capability. Everything about me seemed to be abnormal, so it would be rash to assume that anyone else’s taily had anything in common with mine. I couldn’t ask the doctors or nurses. I couldn’t ask my friends because they were all girls, and all sick boys did when they made their walls of bedclothes was put their toy soldiers all over the place and go blam-blam-blam … It seemed obvious that their tailies weren’t like mine, otherwise they wouldn’t build ramparts in the bedclothes for anything as stupid as blam-blam-blam. They’d be exploring bob-bob-bob just like me.

I felt that I was definitely damned for the fire, and almost wished they would just get on and do it now. Put me in the hospital incinerator, so that the smoke that had once been John could drift past the windows for the metaphysical diversion of another sick child. Miss Reid told us about holy people being granted visions by God. I closed my eyes and squeezed them together as tight as possible and asked for a vision. For a few moments I saw some pink and blue flowers, and there was a garden, and I even think Mary was in it, but the picture wouldn’t form properly. I decided I was not good enough to be granted a vision by God, which meant I was certainly damned.

At the same time some stubborn internal voice was protesting that they’d changed their minds about God. I hated U-turns more than anything. Don’t do a tuppenny in the bed whatever you do. Now we’re going to stick something up your botty and make you do a tuppenny in the bed. Don’t move whatever you do. Be a good boy and stay absolutely still. Now walk, walk, walk. Walking is what life’s all about! Now here’s a wheelchair — don’t walk without permission.

Hated parties

Now they’d played the same low trick on God. One week God was all-powerful, all-knowing and everywhere, the next he was a fraud and a failure: partipotent, partiscient and partipresent. I hated those parties. I wanted to go back to the omnies. I felt at home with the omnies.

If God was omnipresent he was in my taily as well as the telephone. He was taily as well as being everything else. I didn’t think God would let anyone go to Hell. And if God was everywhere, he was in Hell too, and then how could it be Hell? What did ‘Hell’ mean?

I was rescued from all this religious negativity by the very person who had got it started, Miss Reid. Christmas came round, tinsel and streamers were hung all about, a beautiful tree was brought into the ward, and all the kids went ‘ AAaaaah!! ’ Miss Reid sang,

All poor men and humble,

All lame men who stumble,

Come rest ye nor be ye afraid.

This was a song called ‘Poverty’.

Hope flared in my heart like an Ellisdons’ Mount Ætna. I wasn’t as poor as Wendy and her family, but I wasn’t far off. Sarah was rich, but she was pure which was the same as humble. I felt sure she was ‘poor in heart’. She had no interest in tailies unless it was in one of her disconcertingly dirty jokes, so that raised her score. As for ‘lame’ and ‘stumble’, well I passed that test with flying colours. Lame men hobbled around from place to place, but I was much more lame than the lame. I spent much of my time falling over. The time I spent falling over redeemed the time I spent talking to taily.

Miss Reid looked significantly at me when she sang about the lame men who stumble, just as she had when she was talking about the wheat and the chaff, but this time she was beaming with compassion. So yes, I was chaff and due to be burnt, but I was on my way to being poor, scoring top marks in the stumbling section, and as even Reid said, Jesus was most merciful and loved to rescue people. The song went on,

Then haste we to show him

The praises we owe him;

Our service he ne’er can despise

which clinched it. Jesus would see me right.

That Christmas Mum had the brainwave of giving me a tiny book — The Smallest Bible in The World , allegedly. Perhaps she got it from Ellisdons. At first it looked as though its teeny pages were covered in minute blobs, but Mum gave me a magnifying glass as well, and then I could read every letter. She followed it up for my birthday with a matching Webster’s Dictionary.

I didn’t enjoy being small myself, but I loved small things.

I loved the poem about Solomon Grundy. Everything from womb to tomb sorted out in the course of a week. I didn’t think it was morbid, I thought it was wonderfully tidy. It appealed to my taste for the small and definite. I hadn’t yet developed my love for the vast and indeterminate.

As for objects, the smaller they were, and the more they contained, the better. I had a blue money-box that was done up to look like a book, until you saw the coin-slot in the side where the pages should be. There was even a cut-out circle where you could post in a rolled-up banknote (fat chance!). Written on the cover was the motto Great Oaks from Little Acorns Grow , which more or less consecrated my fascination with little things, but I also loved acorns in their own right. They didn’t have to grow into oaks to prove their value to me. From the divine perspective but also from mine, they were already what they were meant to be. Acorns had nothing to prove to either of us.

I loved my tiny Bible and my tiny dictionary, but really I didn’t care what little books were about or where they came from. It was the dimensions I loved. They were books to swallow whole, to remember word for word. It’s a fact, though, that little books tend to have designs on their readers, and a lot of my favourites were from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Dad rolled his eyes when he saw them, and said, ‘My God! Now he’s reading tracts !’ I didn’t let him put me off the little books I loved.

A boy of wood

The next plot from us at Bourne End was a sort of big hut called a chalet. The Freemans lived there, Magda who was Austrian and Ozzie who wasn’t. Their son Pippo (his real name was Philip) ran around with no clothes on, which Mum thought was completely beyond the pale. They seemed to push him out in all weathers, naked, though it wasn’t clear if he was being actively punished or simply seasoned like a boy of wood. Magda certainly believed in the benefits of the cold.

Although the Freemans weren’t upper people as Mum understood such things (in fact precisely because they weren’t) she had a clearer grasp of how to behave towards them than she did with, say, our posher neighbours Arthur and Dorothy, the Feet. The way to behave with a family like the Freemans, with their chalet and their Austrian ways and their driving their shivering Pinocchio of a son out into the cold, was to get on the phone to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, day in, day out, till they finally sent someone to check on the goings-on in that sinister household.