Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Peter made a very willing lab assistant. The special equipment for one particular set of investigations was the empty tin of a Fray Bentos steak-and-kidney pie. I didn’t approve of the pie, and had eaten only a little of the pastry, but I heartily approved of the tin. It was circular and had sloping sides. When washed up it made a very decent crucible. Peter had been hoarding candles for some time on my instructions, and now he wedged them all in the tin and lit them in rapid succession. Soon they started to melt together and flame became general. We had made one giant candle with multiple wicks. Then under my direction he fed more combustibles into the flames, scraps of old wax and torn-up bits of cloth, until the whole tinful was boiling and getting really hot.

We weren’t being irresponsible. We were conducting our experiments outside in the open air, the way we knew we were meant to. We were behind the shed in the garden. The tin was safely on the ground, and we weren’t touching it.

There was only one moment when the experimenter couldn’t avoid getting close to the tin, and that was the moment when he was going to pour onto the tiny inferno a tablespoonful of cold water. The experimenter was really me, but Peter had to do the pouring. Doing things at arm’s length isn’t practical for me. The arm isn’t a standard unit of measurement, and mine don’t really count. I would operate Peter by remote control. I gave him the timing, saying, ‘Ready … set … GO!!!’

Light blue touch paper and retire immediately. I’d given him a proper briefing. He knew that he had to pour the spoonful of water in with a single rapid motion, then run like hell.

Gratifying little bomb

It all worked quite beautifully. Nothing happened instantaneously. There was a fractional pause which allowed Peter to make his escape. In that pause, the seething wax seemed to be assessing the cold water that had been dumped into it with a sort of elemental incredulity. It held its breath. Then it exploded. There was a marvellous caustic burp, a great rising cloud of steam and ash, and boiling wax was richly deposited on our clothes and any flesh they didn’t cover. I had the glorious sensation of having challenged Nature to a duel and survived. It was a draw. It’s true that there was a scrap of cloth which landed on my lap still burning, but Peter easily patted it out. He was as exhilarated by our discovery as I was myself.

It was all throughly worth while. From candle-ends and a pie tin we had fashioned a gratifying little bomb. I suppose Peter must have been a bit worried about the incendiary wax-shower and the burning shreds in flight, because he confessed to Mum in dribs and drabs while she was putting us to bed. He was always a good boy. She said nothing about it. She didn’t seem to take it in. She just smiled absently and said, ‘I’m glad you two amused yourselves.’ As if we’d been playing Scrabble.

The next day we did it all over again. Only this time a boy staying with neighbours insisted on being in on it. Parents didn’t keep children on a tight rein in those days, even in cities, and the Abbotsbrook Estate was no city. We told him it was dangerous. We told him it was only for big boys. I suppose Howie was about five — not nearly old enough to understand science. We told him to stay far back but he wouldn’t listen. Howie said if we didn’t let him see he’d tell his mother we’d hit him.

That was too much for me, and I said, ‘You’ll really tell your mum that I hit you?’ And he said, ‘No I won’t.’ He pointed at Peter. ‘I’ll say that he hit me and you bit .’ So we let him stay. Of course we didn’t let him pour the water into the tin, but he stood right next to Peter, watching, and he wasn’t so sharp at backing off.

He got very little of the wax on him, but of course he went howling off to his mother, and then she came round screeching, ‘How could you burn my baby?’ If Howie was five then he wasn’t a baby, or alternatively, if he was a baby she shouldn’t have let him out of her sight, should she? She wasn’t being at all reasonable.

Howie’s mum told the whole saga to Mum and soon Mum was bellowing, ‘What in the world did you think you were doing, burning poor Howie?’ A scolding can be just as bad as a scalding because you just have to stand there and pretend it doesn’t hurt. However unfair it is.

Mum absolutely denied that we’d told her the day before what we’d been up to. ‘Do you really think’, she said, ‘that I’d have let you play with fire if I’d known what you were doing, with or without Howie being there?’ It’s true we had been puzzled by how calm she was the night before. I suppose we twigged that she hadn’t taken it in, but we’d told her just the same. Wasn’t that the point? It wasn’t our fault that she was hypnotised and not listening. And what were we supposed to do when Howie started pestering us and wanting to be in on the experiment? Tie him up?

We had discussed tying him up, as a matter of fact, Peter and I, but Howie was the sort of child who runs to his mother about everything, so he’d be off complaining about that the moment he was set free. So really it made quite as much sense to let him witness our experiment and take his chances. He might learn something, even if it was only to listen to what bigger boys said.

I couldn’t seem to get the hang of how I was supposed to behave. Everybody kept on about how awful it was that I couldn’t do normal things, but the moment I made a normal bomb they came down on me like a ton of angry bricks. Mum’s face even looked like a brick when she shouted. I’d seen her plucking her eyebrows, anyway, hundreds of times, so I couldn’t understand all the fuss about Howie’s. She always said they grew back overnight.

Somewhere in this turbulent epoch I managed to find the time to fail my eleven-plus. Quite why we were all put in for this ordeal I don’t know. The results wouldn’t have made a difference to our futures either way — it’s not as if there was a grammar school and a secondary modern both reaching out for us, waiting for our results to see which institution would get lucky. I dare say participation in the eleven-plus charade was (like the entirety of our education) no more than a legal requirement.

I failed the eleven-plus. I don’t remember the details. Apparently I wasn’t as clever as everyone said, or at least not good at getting my brain across to people I didn’t know, who didn’t know me. I don’t even remember whether I used a pen, writing fast and with doctorish illegibility, or the typewriter, readable but painfully slow. Either way, in the separation of sheep from goats, I was officially a goat. I think we were all goats at CRX.

Not that it held me back. The eleven-plus was a sort of dummy exam, in my case at least. Failing it didn’t hamper my progress, any more than passing it would have moved me on. It turned out that a new school had already been thought of, to provide secondary education tailored to my needs, or my body’s.

I’d understood by then, without knowing the word, that Dr Ansell was an assimilationist. She felt that the disabled should — wherever possible — go to mainstream schools. She said she’d heard all the arguments about bullying, the sheer vulnerability of the handicapped (as we were then, before we became disabled), and she didn’t think much of them. In practice it didn’t happen. People got on with their lives. The arguments about bullying were all pretexts for a sort of fearful apartheid. It was touching that she assumed bullying would be a new danger for a child who had been a citizen of her little kingdom.

Even so, no mainstream school was proposed for me, by Ansell or anyone else. Perhaps I was just too disabled. I fell foul of the small print, of that ‘wherever possible’. Ansell had a splendid motto, very enlightened for the period: ‘Every child has his own disease.’ Even so, my own disease seemed horribly classic. I was text-book — but an old text-book, a pre-war or even Victorian text-book, from before the arrival of steroids.