Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

A warm tie pointing upwards

What I liked best of everything I saw was pressed black trousers. I loved the neat seam running through the middle of the shapely lump. I thought the taily would be equally neat and pressed and cloth-like. More like a warm tie pointing upwards than anything made of flesh.

The beautiful young men in my fantasies were still the ones I had admired with Mary. I’d been faithful. They were the ones from the Famous Five: Julian for preference. I imagined him asking me along on an adventure, to a cave or some such place. Then he would send the others (including Timmy the dog) out on a recce. Julian would clear his throat and say, pretending calm, ‘You know why I sent the others away, don’t you?’

My heart hammering, I’d say, ‘To uncover the mystery?’

He’d smile as he opened his arms and legs to me at last. ‘The only mystery here is you and me …’ I had Dick in reserve for when Julian’s aura was exhausted. In third place, as emergency fetish, Rollo the gipsy from the Rupert annuals. The gipsies, oh. The raggle-taggle.

My loyalty to old friends might seem rather pitiful, as if I was hallucinating on vanilla ice cream in the absence of stronger stuff. It’s true that like everyone else in the 1950s I wasn’t exactly bombarded with sexually inviting images, but this line of thinking doesn’t do justice to my imagination, or to Enid Blyton’s either. I wasn’t surprised when I read up on her later, to find that the Queen Bee was a rather racy figure in her own way. Tennis parties in the nude and so on. I don’t think she was actively beaming arousing thoughts down the hill to me from where she lived, but she was a livelier figure than she has been given credit for. Her characters were bound to reflect that sensuality, once she left Andy Pandy and Big Ears in the nursery and started writing more freely about the Famous Five.

Masturbation corrupted my character, but only incidentally. It wasn’t the act itself, but the extremes I had to go to in order to practise it undisturbed. I didn’t even do tuppenny in private, so how was I going to talk to taily without eavesdroppers? Rest time was an oasis only in theory. Now we were older none of us did more than doze, and I had the feeling of female ears tuning in to every little move. The solution was to break the rules. Only if I misbehaved seriously and often would I be exiled to a side ward, where I would have the leisure to explore taily properly.

I had to learn taily’s language. Masturbation for me has to come from the shoulder, apart from the odd finger-flick. More satisfying, usually, since my hips could generate virtually nothing in the way of thrust, was to hold the sheet against myself. I learned to excite myself without actual touch, using a stream of charged images to urge myself on to the dry lightning, the thrilling discharge of nothing yet. Thanks to Ansell, the electrical storms of pre-adolescence were provoked by contact with the finest Irish linen.

It was a different sort of sin against those linen sheets that most often got me banished to a side ward in the first place. Early on in my time at CRX I had learned that linen was more or less edible. I could suck a patch until it went soft and then chew a bit off. Then I’d spit it at the wall to see if anyone noticed. Paper was also useful for this purpose. First I chewed it to soggy pap and then spat it at the wall. Once it had dried, it stayed stuck there remarkably firmly. But linen was my spitting material of choice. It’s a paradoxical textile, resistant to high temperatures but vulnerable to friction and nibbling. I have to admit there was an addictive aspect to my bad habit. I was drawn to those sheets like a moth to a flame, like a moth to a winter woollie. The staff might not notice the spat-out whitish lumplets on the wall, but they could hardly miss the nibbled edges of the sheets. I hope that Ansell never knew how I insulted the luxury textile that she insisted we have, a two-pronged assault with teeth and taily.

Later on in my school career I learned that I wasn’t alone in the animal kingdom — weaver birds, house martins, ants and termites all used the same technique. By then I had grown out of my vice, but I felt retrospectively vindicated. I wasn’t such a masticatory anomaly as I had seemed to myself and others. I may even have been inspired by my budgie in the first place. Charlie was a dab hand at chewing things, including cloth and paper. On one famous occasion he had made short work of a ten-shilling note Dad had left unattended, chewing it into little balls of brownish pulp. It was a tremendous feat, on a par with a human being chewing up (and spitting out) the Bayeux Tapestry, but Dad didn’t appreciate it.

By this time I knew the rules of CRX. When my body became a man’s, or at least stopped being a boy’s, I would be moved to Ward Three. The prospect terrified me. It wasn’t that I loved the girls on Ward One, but I had decided I didn’t like boys either. I had overheard a nurse saying, ‘They’re all Teddy boys in there.’ Mr Turpin the headmaster was the form teacher of Ward Three, and I didn’t mind him, but he didn’t sleep on the ward. I knew because I asked him, and he said he went home to Mrs Turpin. Teddy boys were exactly as terrifying as teddy bears were wonderful. Teddy boys were wild. They came out at night. How could Old Turps protect me then? I decided I would be better off staying where I was.

Mrs Pullen, who played the piano thickly and sang, ‘Where there’s a king with a golden crown, riding on a donkey,’ now taught me English and Essays. She tried to soothe my terror by telling me that she also went to Ward Three to teach. I couldn’t understand how she could go there and live. The Sister of Ward Three was known to be a dragon — and don’t even think of looking for a heart of gold beneath those scales. It didn’t help that I was told, ‘No nurse will wipe your bottom on Ward Three, so you’d just better work out a way of doing the job yourself!’

I’d stay where I was, Wendy or no Wendy. One of the compensations of the school being such a secondary presence in the institution was that it had no power to coerce. If I dug my heels in, they couldn’t make me move. So Mr Turpin went on coming over to teach me in Ward One. He must have thought I was being very silly, but he didn’t make me feel bad about it.

In fact Wendy had in some strange way lost her power. It wasn’t exactly that she had mellowed. Her body turned out to have another trick to play on her, besides the one that had brought her to CRX in the first place. She had always had a strange dentition, though as she didn’t make her way in the world by smiling it wasn’t the first thing people noticed. Her front right tooth (left when you looked at her) was almost twice as wide as its neighbour on the other side of the median line. It had a groove in the middle, if you looked closely, but no real division.

Disturbed odontogenesis

Double teeth are caused by disturbances during odontogenesis, the lovely word that only means the birth of teeth. They run in families. A geminated tooth is one where two teeth grow together, though each one still has a root canal. In true fusion, the tooth germs unite before the calcification process has begun, and the result is a tooth with a single root canal. There’s also a variant known as concrescence, when the fusion occurs in the embryo when the cementum layer of the root is forming. The technical terms of dentistry have their own special magic — really, the whole vocabulary is glorious once you lift the veils of fear and pain which shroud it.

Wendy couldn’t wait to lose that big tooth, that monster gnasher. When it finally happened she was delighted. She wouldn’t have expected compensation from the Tooth Fairy in exchange for a body part she detested so much. If anything I imagine her leaving a tip under the pillow to cover the cost of disposal. She waited for the adult teeth to erupt, hoping they would be separate and normal. None came.