Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

‘Jay-Jayee …’ Mum said, and I was happy to see that she was in a tender mood. When she was like that it was wonderful. I could forgive her any mistake in the world, and I was more than happy to fight against the whole suburban world if that was what she had wanted me to do.

‘Jay-Jayee,’ she said again, with a playful smile curling up one side of her mouth, ‘I don’t think you’ve been listening to a single word I’ve been sayee-ing, have you? Take another look at the notepaper. Can’t you see Mum’s Little House?’

We seemed to be playing some sort of game, which was good, but however hard I looked at the subtle eggshell paper with its bold blue printing, I couldn’t see anything which resembled a ‘Little House’. I knew the secret was right in front of me, a thrilling feeling. The Queen’s Velvet watermark was winking at me invisibly. I didn’t need to hold the paper up to the light to see it. I knew it was there, and there was something else there too, just waiting to be seen. I was on the brink of great things, but I couldn’t see a Little House anywhere.

‘All right, Jay,’ she said. ‘Let’s tackle this from a different angle. Now let’s see. Take a piece of paper and draw me a little house.’ I hoped she was going to give me a sheet of notepaper to do my drawing on, but art work was never my strong point and I couldn’t blame her for being thrifty. She tore a sheet off an ordinary white notepad, but then she handed me her Parker fountain pen filled with blue Quink, which made me feel that this drawing would be special after all.

Chemical storms

I felt honoured because Mum had always drilled into me that fountain pens adapt to the writer’s hand. You should never write with a pen that belonged to somebody else, and you should certainly never lend yours to anybody.

Taking the sacrosanct pen I drew a little box, put in two windows and a door, and topped it with a roof. I added a chimney with smoke coming out. For me a house without a chimney hardly counted as a human habitation. People need smoke — it’s a mystical given. ‘Very good!’ said Mum. I looked at my little house which was very good, apparently, if not quite good enough to deserve the Queen’s Velvet in her Historic County of Buckinghamshire. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘take away the walls, windows and doors and tell me what’s left!’ I couldn’t exactly take those bits away, so I shifted the paper and made a few more quick Parker strokes. I said, ‘It leaves a roof and a chimney with smoke coming out.’

I still couldn’t see anything in Mum’s headed notepaper like this pictogram, so I screwed up my eyebrows and scratched my head with my stick. Mum’s puzzle was turning out to be quite a poser. Perhaps I’d under-estimated her brains. To give myself more time to think, I popped open the tube in which I kept my Liquorice Allsorts and flipped one up into my mouth. My aim was much improved by this time, practically perfect.

Mum gave me an encouraging smile. ‘Try looking at how the telephone number is done,’ she said, so I had another good hard look. On the left of the page I read:

Bourne End 1176

though it didn’t look like that at all. It wasn’t horizontal. It sloped as steeply as the corridor at CRX just by the main entrance. If that ‘Bourne End 1176’ was part of the Queen’s Highway in the Historic County there would be a sign before it bearing a giant exclamation mark and the words CAUTION / STEEP HILL / 1:3.

If Dad was driving up that hill he would pray that it was a good dry day and that the Vauxhall had a decent amount of tread on its tyres. He would give the throttle all he’d got even before he reached the ‘B’, and then he just might make it to the ‘6’ at the end of the ramp, pointing all the way up to the moon. The blood was pounding in my ears as I imagined the scene and I felt almost faint.

The telephone number sloped upwards like this: /, and the way Mum had the address printed out made an imaginary line sloping like this: \. When when you put them together you saw something like this: /\.

Bingo Jai-Jaiya Hallelujah and Allah-Be-Praised! I had seen the roof of the little house at last. My imagination must have been severely inflamed, because for a moment I could see an imaginary chimney and imaginary smoke coming out too. I was incoherent with excitement for a good ten minutes. Mum was pleased to have made a convert but still rather taken aback. I seemed to be even more obsessed about the importance of the right stationery than she was. I told her that we must get the house notepaper redesigned. After the present batch had run out, we were going to have the address done just the way she had it, but with one vital addition — a printed housetop with a chimney, and smoke coming out of it.

I wanted to start writing letters there and then to all and sundry, so as to use up the old stock of notepaper, now obsolete. At that moment I felt I could write letters tirelessly all day, until there was no paper left. ‘Let’s starting writing lots of letters, Mum!’ Good though her mood was, Mum wasn’t going to indulge me any further. ‘Don’t be silly, JJ,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my notepaper just the way I want it. And it’s not cheap. It’s not for wasting on letters that aren’t important.’ She wouldn’t let me use so much as one piece, and this threw me into a stark depression.

She took back her Parker pen, as if she regretted breaking her own rules by letting me touch it, boxed up the Queen’s Velvet and put everything away. The only consolation for me was that she tucked my very ordinary sketch, done on very ordinary white paper, into the box as well.

I felt completely exhausted after all the stationery excitement. My moods went wildly up and down. Emotions fizzed like sherbet on my tongue and then tasted of ashes. At the time I thought that childhood was like this for everyone. One more reason to wish for it to be over, although another part of me was terrified of growing up. I wished there was a way to stop being a child that didn’t involve becoming a grown-up.

Moods are complex constructions, chemical storms. Part of that chemistry was to do with sugar intoxication from my Liquorice Allsorts. A child’s metabolism is finely balanced, easily knocked off its kilter. The tube from which I shook them was involved. It was a metal screw-top Smith Kline & French tube passed on to me by Mum or Muzzie. It was much harder to open, and much more satisfying, than the packet they had originally come in.

I didn’t pay any attention to what had been in those tubes before. It was something prescribed without a murmur, after all, to anyone who was feeling a bit run down, a popular general pick-me-up. A standard tonic — Muzzie called it ‘petrol for the nerves’. It was benzedrine, racemic amphetamine, and the powdered residue from the tablets had settled on my Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts, dusting each one with a stimulant coating. That was why I so often chattered nonsense at a terrific rate, and then felt sullenly exhausted. No wonder my mood would lift off like a rocket and come down like a stick. Muzzie, Mum and I were all on speed. In that sense we were all upper people.

Forces both inside and outside me seemed to push me towards a new and alarming stage of life. My taily was whispering in my ear, telling me secrets deeper than anything Charlie knew. It was pointing the way into the future, with a slight leftward slant. When everyone in the ward was on rest time taily showed me how to enter a heavenly and forbidden world. When I manœuvred a cold pillow between my legs and pressed taily against the cool flaxcloth, it showed me how to be a player in a silent orchestra.

I had never seen a man’s taily, and could only imagine what such a thing would look like. There seemed no likelihood that it would match mine in any respect. At CRX there was little opportunity for groin-watching. The staff were mainly female, and the men I saw, whether doctors or porters, wore white coats or overalls. It was at weekends in Bourne End that I could look more closely at the middle parts of men.