Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

When I looked at them both, the improvement was very noticeable. In fact the first one was awful, but my teacher hadn’t said so. She had used words of encouragement and helped me climb out of my own mess. This enlightened style of teaching was entirely new to me. There’s an old proverb that goes, ‘The harvest called learning requires the rain called tears.’ My art teacher at CRX gave me my first indication that the sun might get a look in from time to time.

Mr Turpin must have seen some potential for study in me. He taught me English, managing to get through the barrier of my childishness. His biggest challenge came the day he said, ‘Today we’re going to do some poetry.’ He gave me a book and said we were going to read ‘To Autumn’ by someone called John Keats. He’d got as far as the first two lines before I collapsed into laughter. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’ he read, ‘Close bosom friend of the maturing sun’. I just howled. Oh what a lovely writer John Keats must have been. Bosoms bosoms bosoms. And how grown-up Mr Turpin was to be able to say ‘bosom’ without laughing.

Mr Turpin looked at me kindly and smiled. I said, ‘Is it a poem about BOSOMS, sir?’ and collapsed back into my laughter. Even before I’d come to CRX I’d known that ‘bosom’ was a real word and also a rude one, though the home word we used was ‘boozzie’. Turpin explained that ‘bosom’ was a word of many meanings. He didn’t make the mistake of any actual reference to biology. I think he repeated bosom-bosom-bosom many times in an attempt to lull me into being bored with the word, but it made no difference. It was just as funny every time. Eventually he said we’d move on, and the rest of ‘To Autumn’ got rather more of my attention than the opening lines.

I was almost totally blind to the lost songs of spring, although I thought the barrèd clouds blooming the soft dying day were great, since I learned from Turps about how you could use accents in a word to make another syllable. I decided that accents and funny letters would become a speciality for me from then on. Deep down my pleasure was more typographical than literary.

Bosom bosom bosom

At home I would walk around the house saying bosom bosom bosom , cunningly incorporating the word into proper sentences, to see if anyone in the family could keep a straight face. As it happened, Mum wanted a word with me on a very similar subject. She told me that Muzzie was going to have an operation because her bosom had grown far too big. The phrase ‘Muzzie’s boozzie’ was full of giggly music, but I soon understood that this was a serious thing. I tried to pass the word to Muzzie that I couldn’t see anything wrong with her boozzie. In fact I liked it. It made her into a lovely pillowy sort of mum for Sarah, while my Mum was more a straight-up-and-down sort of mum. Muzzie was like a great walking cuddle, and I was sad that she wanted an operation to take away something that was so much part of her, as far as I was concerned.

Life was very fine with Miss Krüger gone, until we were told that her replacement was coming. I had a dreadful thought. Maybe the new one would be German too. I had to know. I asked Heel, because I knew she would tell me the truth, and she said, ‘As a matter of fact she is, John. Miss Schmidt. Why do you ask?’

Then the sun was altogether hidden, and I went into a decline which mystified those who had charge of me. There was no one to connect my withdrawal with the impending arrival of a new pain-choreographer. The new physio would be a Miss Krüger with fresh tricks, that’s all. I knew it. Only this one would be smart enough to keep her thieving mitts off other people’s knitting supplies, and she’d make us dance as we’d never danced before.

I had a week of misery, unable to eat or tell anyone what the matter was. I was a perky little bird in the normal run of things, but the news knocked me right off my perch and I stopped singing. Also eating. On the ward if you didn’t open your bowels, you’d have to take Senokot, but if you didn’t eat you were just told not to be so fussy.

The day of my first session with Miss Schmidt I was back with the old Miss Krüger-pool feeling — let’s get this over with. I heard her before I saw her, because she was wearing clogs, and Mum said only people from Yorkshire wore clogs, so my first question was, ‘Are you from Yorkshire?’ even though I was fairly sure Yorkshire wasn’t in Germany, and she burst out laughing.

Within ten minutes of meeting her I was singing again. She was a jolt of joy and a living delight. Apart from anything else, she did massage. It was Heaven. My body wasn’t exactly being pampered, but it was being worked on in a respectful way. It was being talked to, not punished or even lectured for its failure to coöperate. Miss Schmidt started me on a whole series of love affairs. One of them was with massage, and another was with the language she spoke. She would chatter in German while she kneaded subtly away. It sounded lovely, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She said, ‘ Machst du mir Kuh Augen? ’ ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. She wouldn’t translate what she had said until I had repeated it back to her and got it by heart, and then she told me it meant, ‘Are you making at me cows’ eyes?’ Then I understood, although I told her that in English we said sheep’s eyes.

In German the look of love seems to be bovine rather than ovine. Neither image flatters the love-struck. Of course I was making cows’ eyes, sheep’s eyes, at her — take your pick. I looked at her the same way Sister Heel looked at the budgie who made life worth living, ray of feathered sunshine. If I had been Charlie I would have been displaying the posture I had taught Heel to recognise: head plumage standing up, side plumage fanned out. Eyes closed to slits. Happiness in full feather.

I had so many reasons to be thrilled and goggling. Because Miss Schmidt had a lovely clear complexion, because her hands knew how to talk to my body in a way that wasn’t any sort of scolding, because she was German and even so she wasn’t holding my head beneath the surface of the hydrotherapy pool.

I got up the nerve to ask her what her first name was. It was Gisela. She let me call her that. Adults letting children call them by their first names wasn’t common in those days anywhere. In hospitals it was as rare as undercooked vegetables.

On our second or third session, Gisela starting reciting something with a soothing, tantalising sound and rhythm. I asked her what it was. It is a poem. A nursery rhyme. And I said: ‘Teach me please!’ What I meant was for her to tell me what the poem meant, but again she did something much better. First she taught me the poem as pure sound. My favourite part sounded like ‘Gink a line’. Only later did she supply the meaning, and by then the German words had put down little radicles of their own. They had begun to be rooted. Once again it turned out that medical staff had lessons of their own to teach.

The poem went:

Hänschen klein

Ging allein

In die weite Welt hinein:

Stock und Hut

Steht ihm gut,

Ist ja wohlgemut.

Aber Mutter weinet sehr,

Hat ja nun kein Hänschen mehr,

Da besinnt Sich das Kind

Läuft nach Haus geschwind.

The meaning, when she told me, was something like:

Little Hans

Went alone

Into the wide world beyond:

Stick and hat,

He’s very pleased with himself.

But Mother is crying bitterly,

She hasn’t got little Hans any more.

The little boy thinks again

And runs very quickly back home.

She couldn’t have chosen a more illuminating text. I liked the image of Little Hans with his stick. I had a stick of my own, not to walk with but to point to things or nudge them towards me. Also to scratch my head where I couldn’t reach.