Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

I concentrated as hard as I could during official lessons, and wished there was school from morning till night, but learning from Gisela was different. I absorbed sounds first and meanings later, while her wily hands kneaded and released. Her massage was the only treatment I had received to date which had no other object than to make me feel better. Very few of the procedures designed for me were ever explained, but here was one that explained itself. I’d always wanted to be a teacher’s pet, but there was never a teacher I could worship without reservation. Now I settled very happily for being a physio’s pet instead.

During weekends at home Mum continued to give me her own style of instruction, mainly on social matters. Bourne End was a world where she was beginning to get a toehold. It had never been run-down, but now it was becoming increasingly smart. There were rumours that an actor or two was thinking of moving in. It wasn’t clear whether this was a step up or down for the area.

We lived on the Abbotsbrook Estate. She trained me not to say we lived ‘on an estate’ but to spell out our status clearly. Our cleaning lady, Mrs Ring, did live on a council estate, and there was a world of difference. I wanted to be like Ring. I loved her directness. Mum and Dad were always saying they were short of money, and I found out that Ring’s rent was fourteen shillings a week. I decided that if we lived in a council house we might pick up the habit of saying what we meant.

I was developing a class-consciousness which was a distortion of my parents’ already distorted view of things. I never liked ‘our kind of people’. I was convinced that a room full of working-class people would be really quite exciting. If a working-class woman didn’t like Doreen Parsons from Mum’s Bathford days, she’d call her a miserable cow, not ‘Oh you poor sweetheart!’ I thought Doreen Parsons would really rather be called a miserable cow, because later on, if she changed her ways, she might be told she was a Little Gem or something like that. If the first comment was sincere, then so would be the second.

If Mum and Dad were saving money on where they lived, Ring could still pop round every day, do a bit of cleaning and then have a cup of coffee (she didn’t drink tea) and a chat with me. We would often have a good old chinwag while Mum was out, and I was looking forward to more of the same. Small talk and comfortable silences. ‘I saw that Night of the Demon ,’ she might say, ‘That was nice, yeah …’

One day Mum caught me slumming with Ring, leaving the ends off words, saying ‘Mmmmm’ with the appropriate intonation rather than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. She gave me stick. ‘You are not to talk to Ring like that. It’s fine for Ring, but Ring is Ring and you are you. You couldn’t live with people like that. Not really.’

Then one day in the village, with Mum pushing the Tan-Sad, we saw Ring and her young son Graham, which for some reason Ring pronounced ‘Grarm’. They didn’t see us, so we shadowed them for quite a while. It felt strange to be spying on her like that, but it was a treat for me not to be noticed. Suddenly Ring told Grarm off and then whacked him. In fact she whacked him first, saying ‘Take that!’, and told him off afterwards. The whacking was just to get his attention. Then she marched him off, still howling. For the first time I saw the draw-back of expressing your impulses without restraint.

Mum was shrewd enough to capitalise on my shock. ‘That’s what happens with some people. If that was me, I’d have said, “John, darling, I have asked you more than once not to do that …”’ I didn’t say I’d rather be whacked and have done with it. I couldn’t fetch the words up in all sincerity.

According to Mum the danger and the problem wasn’t with the working class, though, it was with suburban people and the nouveaux riches. The Delamare family who lived nearby were a good case in point. ‘I’m not fooled by the French veneer for one minute,’ said Mum. ‘Their very name is a trick to make you think they’re upper when they are most certainly not.’ It was Suburbans who felt uncomfortable with the working class, since that was where they had come from so recently.

Mum said that with each month that passed, it was getting harder to tell who was who. Many suburban people were intelligent, and some of them were even ‘nice’. They were getting university degrees, moving into schools and hospitals and working out the rates on your house. They weren’t dunces. In fact Suburbans tended to have extremely high IQs, and they adapted very quickly. More than anything they wanted to be thought of as Uppers. They would go to any lengths to achieve that imposture.

However, upper people mustn’t despair. There were secrets that would always elude Suburbans. At this point Mum reverently led me to the tabernacle of her particular cult, her stationery box. She put it on the table, tapping it with a proud finger. This was what decent people stood for. This was pure embossed justification. She opened the lid.

‘Just take a look at our printed notepaper, JJ,’ she said, pulling out a sheet. ‘Some things can’t be counterfeited.’ I did as I was told. Our printed notepaper had the address on the right-hand side with a downwards slope:

Trees,

Abbotsbrook,

Bourne End,

Bucks.

I already felt a little let down by that fourth line. Bucks? Why were we being so shy about the full glory of our home county? Returning from one of our first trips in the Vauxhall, I was sure I had spotted a signpost as we crossed the border which announced ‘The Royal County of Buckinghamshire’. ‘Why can’t we put that on all our letters,’ I asked, ‘and make everyone who writes to us put it on the envelope?’ I must have been taking time off from my anti-monarchism that day.

I argued and argued. ‘Why not? Why can’t we? We can if we want to!’ I was only silenced by Mum shouting, ‘Well we just can’t and that’s all there is to it.’ I went into the deepest possible sulk for some time after that. Again I discovered that the best way to undermine an idea was not to oppose it but to put your heart and soul into endorsing it.

In fact my eyes had deceived me, hardly surprisingly considering my awkward position in the car and my restricted ability to turn my head. It turned out that Buckinghamshire wasn’t the Royal County. That was Berkshire. My geography wasn’t up to much — how could it be, when I spent so much time immobilised? I loved maps, but was vague about how they connected up with the larger world of which I had seen so little.

Later I worked things out to my own satisfaction. Everyone knew that the Queen lived in Buckingham Palace, so the link between royalty and Buckinghamshire was fundamental. It was unnecessary to spell it out any further. Leave that sort of crudity to the desperate parvenu that was Berkshire.

Whichever was the Royal County as between Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, I also realised that the two addresses of CRX, one in each county, allowed it an indeterminate status. In a republican mood, I could use one return address, but on days when I thought the Queen was really rather pretty I could be gracious and use the other.

Re-entering the notepaper debate, I asked, ‘Shouldn’t “Bucks” at least be “Buckinghamshire”?’ Mum said it was important not to show off when it came to printed notepaper. Not that it would be wrong to put in the full name of the county, but if she did that there would be too many letters in the word and then she wouldn’t be able to have her ‘Little House’.

I asked her why she didn’t ask to have it printed like this:

Trees,

Abbotsbrook,

Bourne End

Buckinghamshire

I liked a nice justified left-hand margin — and then Mum could have the county spelled out in full.