Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

This is a classic pattern. A double baby tooth is associated with a missing adult tooth. Wendy was very upset, but there was nothing she could do about it. The Tooth Fairy giveth and the Tooth Fairy taketh away.

Time drew Wendy’s teeth. It became possible to imagine feeling sorry for her, in the same way that it’s possible to imagine the square root of minus one, even after Mr McCorley had fitted her with a relatively convincing false tooth. Two false teeth, actually, so Wendy got at least part of what she wanted.

Despite not wanting to grow up, I had come to enjoy testing authority in small sidelong ways. I loved to have the last word. One day there was a film on the ward telly, with a group of men on an adventure. When one of the men was wounded, a lady who had come along (even though she’d been told this was an expedition for men only) tore a strip off her skirt to dress his wounds, using some disinfectant which she kept handy. He flinched and looked the other way while the music went very lovey-dovey indeed.

When night-time came (in the film) I couldn’t help myself. I called out to Staff Nurse, ‘Come quickly, come quickly!’ Then when she’d trotted up looking rather flustered, I said, ‘See! It’s night-time, and look! They’re sleeping in the forest. Why doesn’t someone come along and take those trees away? Don’t they know it’s dangerous to sleep near all those plants?’

Staff Nurse seemed a little flummoxed, but said the difference was that the people weren’t in hospital. I said, ‘One of them has just got wounded and that’s almost the same.’ Then she got quite shirty and told me about the Upas Tree. The Upas Tree gave out a gas which stupefied an already sleeping man. It would then bend its branches down, pick you up, digest you while you were sleeping and you would never be seen again. Within a day everyone would have forgotten that you ever existed. I should be grateful I only had daffodils and buzy lizzies to contend with, and not ask so many questions.

Of course the upas tree, Antiaria toxicaria , isn’t like that at all. Only the sap is poisonous, a sort of toxic milk, and you’d be waiting a long time before one got round to eating you. Even so, I was delighted. I admired carnivorous plants unreservedly, and the idea of a carnivorous tree thrilled me to the core.

My hand-writing was resisting all efforts to improve it. I didn’t see why I had to write things down. I wanted to live my whole life without having to make silly marks. If things were forgotten then so be it. The forgetting made way for new things to come along. Finally Turps had the idea that I should learn to type instead. Perhaps he had noticed my love of fiddling with knobs and buttons.

‘Typing’, said Miss Reid grimly, ‘is only for those who have learned to write properly first!’ As if this was tea-time, and typing was the cake reserved for those who had eaten up their bread and butter. I hated arbitrary objections like this — why couldn’t she just scream, ‘No you can’t! Over my dead body will you learn to type! You’re a pesky little nit!’? That would at least be honest.

‘Oh I don’t know …’ said Turpin. ‘Why don’t we let him try and see how things go?’

I suppose he was exercising his authority. Turpin and Reid weren’t exactly the best of friends. They’d had a minor territorial barney a few weeks before, so perhaps their backs were already up. Mr Turpin had come along to give me an English lesson, using a book by Ronald Ridout which I had loved. Reid had been very sniffy about it, saying she would never recommend that book.

Now Miss Reid went very red in the face, which didn’t suit her. ‘As you wish, headmaster,’ she said. ‘Teaching him such a skill, though, would lie Outside The Orbit Of My Assistance.’ It’s a lost art, I’m afraid, speaking in initial caps. ‘One must be careful not to set a precedent.’

I didn’t know what a precedent was, but it certainly felt like a variation on a theme of Weetabix. Allow him to type and they’ll all want to do it. Ward One will become a typing pool. ‘Perhaps you can find someone else.’

‘As a matter of fact I have someone in mind who I’m sure will be happy to help.’ I noticed that he too was red in the face. ‘Mrs Rhodes.’

‘I need hardly remind you that Mrs Rhodes teaches on Ward Three, and John is refusing to go there. If he wants to continue in his childish ways, then he shouldn’t expect to get adult things like typewriters as well!’ Her reedy voice was displaying an unattractive range of overtones, but I didn’t care. Turpentine and Reid were having a row, right there in the ward, and it was all over me!

At this point Turpentine went on the attack. ‘I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you, Miss Reid, to put yourself in John’s shoes?’ said Turps. ‘If you hadn’t been doing your best to hold him back for four years, he might be on Ward Three right now!’

This was outrageous, of course. He could just as easily have said it was to her credit that I didn’t want to leave her class. Poor Miss Reid had little enough status, and now it was being trampled on. A typewriter was imported from Ward Three, and so was Mrs Rhodes to teach me how to use all my fingers. Miss Reid learned a new skill of her own — looking straight through me. After all we’d been through together, the sins, the songs, the botany.

Mrs Rhodes had her work cut out. I remember her training me to type the word ‘alone’ correctly, dividing the work between my hands, rather than pecking haphazardly, but there were limits to what I could do. My hands were not like hers, and not only because she had long nails painted red.

I instinctively knew that if the point of her long fingernail hit anything hard, then it would give her a nasty jolt, and that if the hard thing was the key of a typewriter (manual, naturally, at that date), then it would just plain hurt. Even so her typing was rapid and bossy. Not only did her clattering fingers hit the right keys, but on each stroke the pointed nail would fit tenderly for an instant over the rounded key, like a cap designed to fit it, before the next command came from Mrs Rhodes’ brain and her fingers darted away to flirt with another key.

Scarlet shields

Between us we lowered our sights. Using all my fingers was not a possibility. She and the machine were made for each other. It didn’t respond to my advances in the same way. Since I had no movement in my left elbow, it was my left thumb and index finger which had the best access to the keyboard. In that position the smaller fingers were angled away from the keyboard.

On the other hand I could move my right elbow, so it made sense to exploit this splendid power, letting the fourth and fifth fingers take charge of the right-hand sector of the typewriter. I became a dogged and very happy four-finger typist, tapping out reams of drivel. It’s just that the four fingers I used were a motley bunch of digits, not crack troops like Mrs Rhodes deployed, with their scarlet shields, but ragged volunteers. Yokels with pitchforks, really.

For a while I could keep change at bay by sheer force of will. I could refuse to move to Ward Three and I could hypnotise Turpentine into coöperating. But then it turned out I couldn’t stay in Ward One. None of us could.

CRX was being struck by an administrative earthquake. We would all be moving, the girls and I. We wouldn’t be going far, though. We would only be moving from Ward One to Ward Two, and everything else would stay the same. I wasn’t drastically upset. It didn’t seem too much of an upheaval. Perhaps there weren’t enough Still’s patients any more to justify two whole wards. Now Ward One was going to become a maternity ward.

It wasn’t as if we had many possessions, and we weren’t expected to shift them ourselves. People cling to their routines, of course, whether they choose them or not. We would be exchanging one configuration of bed and wall and window for another, unfamiliar but essentially the same, and that was that.