Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

She did this very early on in her life in Bourne End, even before the re-wiring of the house was finished. Heather people can’t leave well alone. It was the only way Mum knew of settling into a new home. To make a cat feel at ease in new surroundings, you butter its paws — by the time it has licked them clean, it will have settled in. To work the same magic with Mum, all you needed was unconventional neighbours and the phone number of the NSPCC.

The visitor from the Society gave the Freemans a clean bill of health. There was no cruelty going on at that address. Mum found this out when she phoned up again, to learn the result of the swoop. She was shocked, rather disappointed by the fallibility of the organisation. ‘Don’t they have eyes in their heads?’ she wanted to know. ‘Those awful parents must have made their boy lie.’

I’m afraid I got the giggles. I was in an odd, hectic mood, something which came on me abruptly every now and then. My thoughts rushed after each other so fast they seemed to collide. ‘I don’t think so, Mum. We’d know if he lied, wouldn’t we?’

‘Would we? How?’

‘His nose would grow!’ I thought this was the funniest thing anyone had ever thought of.

‘You do talk nonsense sometimes, JJ.’ Which had already been remarked on at CRX. She bent down with a sigh to pick up a Liquorice Allsort which she had accidentally flattened beneath her foot. I quite see that I could sometimes be exasperating to live with.

I was going through a Liquorice Allsorts phase at the time, though I preferred to decant Bassetts’ noble confectionery from the packet into my own containers, tubes passed on to me by Mum and also by Muzzie. I was teaching myself to flick them into my mouth — otherwise I’d have had to use a fork — and my accuracy was improving, but a few inevitably ended up on the floor.

At CRX we were regularly lectured on the evils of eating sweets. After the years of wartime and post-war rationing, parents found it hard to turn the clock back by rationing their children’s sweet intake. The CRX dentist, Mr McCorley, ranted particularly against Opal Fruits when they came in. He thought them highly pernicious, with their squishiness, their way of moulding to the teeth and clinging there while their stinging sweetness was absorbed by the tongue, as if they were sticky slugs actively sensing the tender pulp behind the enamel — but Liquorice Allsorts were little better in his book.

Sarah’s sweet habit contributed to some quite severe decay. Mr McCorley gave her some fillings, numbing her mouth with cocaine. She must have had an allergic reaction — what she told us about it made me fear the dentist more than anything. When it was my turn to have a filling, years later, McCorley asked, ‘Shall I deaden it with some cocaine?’ and I said, ‘No thank you, it doesn’t agree with me,’ like the vicar refusing an offer of sherry.

The cocaine would have been made up in paste form, labelled FOR DENTAL USE ONLY and kept locked in a safe between treatments. Altogether a missed opportunity.

Revenge of a sort

I have to say Magda Freeman was remarkably good about the whole business of Mum’s denunciation to the NSPCC. She didn’t hold a grudge. She can’t have been in much doubt about who peached on her, but she didn’t stop being neighbourly. Peter and I liked her, much to Mum’s annoyance. Perhaps that was revenge of a sort.

Magda knew the way to our hearts. Later, when Peter was a Boy Scout, she gave him things to do in Bob-a-Job Week. He did her weeding while I sat by in the Tan-Sad. There was nowhere I could go without my brotherly engine. When she gave Peter his shilling at the end of the afternoon, she gave me tenpence of my own, for supervising him. And I wasn’t even a Boy Scout! Which meant I didn’t have to pass on the money to a charitable destination. If I had known I was getting paid to watch Peter work, I’d have enjoyed it more, and I’d have tried to wear a proper supervisory expression.

If I’d been told that an Austrian was a sort of German, I wouldn’t have been so trusting. Mum certainly missed a trick there.

We had a television at Trees by this time, although Mum didn’t let us watch ITV on it. I far preferred the commercial channel when watching at CRX, and pestered her about it. She explained that reception would naturally be good at CRX because of the transmitter up Hedsor Hill. On the Abbotsbrook Estate, on the other hand, which was after all near the river, the ‘other channel’ was so fuzzy it was unwatchable. There was no point even trying to tune in. Why she thought closeness to a river interfered with reception I don’t know. There was more involved than picture quality, clearly. Mum wanted to keep ITV out of reach on principle. Borrowing her terminology from radio, she called it ‘The Light Programme’, as opposed to ‘The Home Service’ (the BBC). Sometimes she complained that ‘your father has been watching the Light Programme again!’ which should have tipped me off to the possibility of watching ITV at home sooner than it did.

By Abbotsbrook stream on the way towards Marlow there was marshland, fascinating to Dad but of no interest to Mum. I only remember her coming that way with us the once, and that was for her own reasons. She had broken a mirror and was trudging behind us with the shards in a bag. Seven years’ bad luck! The size of the mirror doesn’t make a difference, apparently. This one was only a hand mirror, though quite a large one. Instead of accepting the sentence of doom passed by her belief system, Mum was trying to weasel out of it. The bad luck could be neutralised, according to the small print of her faith, by putting the pieces in running water. So she had kept them in the bath, with the tap running, and now she was going to dispose of them safely in the river. Somehow I had even less patience for Mum’s superstitiousness when she tried to dodge the bad luck she had invented.

Our party made an incongruous caravan: a rationalist (Dad) pushing a mystic (me), with an irrationalist bringing up the rear. I don’t remember if Peter came along, but if he did he would have added to the philosophical variety, being in those days pretty much a pagan.

On every other occasion Dad and I explored those parts alone. There were places I would rather have gone, but Dad was very methodical, preferring to examine a single habitat under different conditions. I was fickle and impatient — so the moment I heard from Miss Reid that sundews, plants that ate insects, grew wild on Chobham Common in Surrey I wanted to go there right away. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. As soon as I got home for the weekend I started pestering him, while he was still unloading the car, and he snapped at me. ‘Get out of my hair, you pesky little nit!’ he said, and I went crying to Mum.

The car was new, or at least new to us, a Vauxhall estate of our own. Perhaps the transaction was smoothed in some way by dear Joy Payne. Estate cars were a very new idea then (though nothing less would have accommodated the Tan-Sad) and Mum cautioned Peter and me against boasting about ours. I don’t know who she thought we would try to impress. It was really only her old worry about the word ‘estate’ with its two meanings, the upper and the working class. Casual acquaintances might not realise right away that this was an Abbotsbrook Estate car.

‘It’s so unfair!’ I told Mum when we got inside the house. ‘When you and Dad told me about sundews it made me cry because I felt so sorry for the fly. Then when I got used to the idea and asked where I could find one you both said you hadn’t the slightest idea. Then I go and find out on my own where I can get one, and now he tells me I’m a pesky little nit who gets in his hair. It’s not fair!’