Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

One isolated case isn’t any sort of scientific sample. I have no evidence to back up my indictment of steroids, as they were administered in the 1950s and ’60s, beyond the fact that my friend Sarah had a mental age of ten when I met her in the 1950s, and the same mental age in 1972. The drug had stopped her bones from hardening as much as mine had, but at the cost of making other things soft as well. By the time she died, Sarah had been prattling to her dolls for a good fifteen years. Steroids had stopped her growing up. They’d even stopped her from out-growing her toys. Thanks to the medication she was given, her second childhood came hard on the heels of the first. They were like the sentences tough-minded judges sometimes pass on hardened criminals when they want to make an example of them, running consecutively without remission.

There were definite things I wanted from a new school. At CRX the hospital was the sun and the school the moon. A lot of the time it had hardly been visible. It was a pale, almost theoretical presence. Education was required by law rather than pursued with passion. I wanted a place where lessons wouldn’t just be fitted in around the routines of a hospital, where education wasn’t always giving way to medical science.

The new school had a strange name. It was called The Vulcan School. It also had a sort of subtitle amounting to a technical description: ‘A Boarding School for the Education and Rehabilitation of Severely Disabled but Intelligent Boys’.

When I had been told about Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital all I needed to know was that there was a school on the premises. Then I was happy to be on my way. After CRX I wasn’t quite so trusting. I had learned to be afraid. Mum and Dad had to do a little selling of its advantages. There were three main attractions to Vulcan School, as they presented it to me:

1. It’s in a lovely old castle, like something from a fairy tale. A famous explorer used to live there, but now it’s a school for boys like you.

How like me? Exactly like me?

No, but boys who need a bit of help getting around and doing things for themselves.

2. The headmaster, Mr Raeburn, is the brother of the lady who does the puppets on television. Yes, that’s right, Margery Raeburn pulls the strings for Andy Pandy.

3. Guess who helps the school to get money? Uncle Mac!

All of this was true. Farley Castle was indeed a crenellated pile, although built in the eighteenth century as a folly, rather than earlier on as a defensive stronghold. It had been owned by Colonel ‘Mitch’ Mitchell-Hedges, an adventurer and explorer (less romantically a collector of English silverware), who had lived there with his adopted daughter Sammy. The legend was that he never had less than half a million in cash on his person at any time.

The school had been founded by Marion Willis and Alan Raeburn. Alan had a special feeling for disabled boys — he had lost the use of his legs during the war when a tank rolled on him. And yes, his sister Margery held the strings of Andy Pandy and made him move. It wasn’t a particularly dazzling piece of puppetry. Andy Pandy didn’t move a lot more fluently than I did.

Points 1 and 2 didn’t make this funny-sounding school seem all that attractive. Number 3 had more weight. Uncle Mac, alias Derek McCulloch, Chairman of the Board of Governors of Vulcan, was the most immediately familiar figure outside family for any British child of the time. He presented Children’s Favourites on the radio (though plenty of people still said ‘wireless’). He was the voice of Muffin the Mule. Uncle Mac pervaded Saturday mornings at CRX. We would listen raptly to the Light Programme when he was on. Admittedly much of the silence on the ward every Saturday morning was explained by the fact that one or more of us had written in to the BBC with a request for Uncle Mac. There wasn’t an official league table, but everyone knew Sarah Morrison had had her name read out on the radio more than anyone else. That was Sarah all over.

Uncle Mac’s catch-phrase was the way he signed off at the end of a programme: ‘Good-bye children ….. everywhere.’ It was the pause that made it so distinctive — that drawn-out ellipsis. Definitely five dots rather than three. Uncle Mac’s radio programmes were central to our experience of radio and of life on the ward, and a school whose board of governors was chaired by this avuncular mystic couldn’t help getting a boost in my mind.

The songs that Uncle Mac played came to carry a huge freight of emotion by association. Hearing one of your favourite songs on a Saturday morning could make a difference to the whole weekend. I liked Danny Kaye’s ‘The King’s New Clothes’, because it was more or less rude. I liked ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ because it was frightening. I liked ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ because it showed someone else believed in magic. I liked ‘The Animals Went In Two by Two’ because it was easier than reading the Bible. I liked ‘The Runaway Train’ because of the happy ending ( the last we heard she was going still …). I liked ‘Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats’, despite its failure to win me friends at CRX, because it was in a sort of code. I liked ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ because I thought they would be waiting for me in CRX woods, providing I could dodge the Teddy boys from Ward Three.

I liked ‘I’m a Pink Toothbrush, You’re a Blue Toothbrush’ because the guru Max Bygraves helped me see that love doesn’t mind if you’re different. I liked ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ because there was no resisting the idea of mice in clogs. I liked Lonnie Donegan’s ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ because it meant I could sing in Cockney, even in earshot of Mum, without getting a scalding. I liked ‘Little White Bull’ for the same Cockneyphile reasons — I was careful to pronounce ‘little’ with the proper glottal stop as ‘li’ul’ — and also because I was in love with Tommy Steele. I kept asking Mum when I’d be old enough to have my hair dyed blond to match his. I liked Rosemary Clooney’s ‘This Old House’ (she didn’t realise how much she loved the house, and would be really sorry when she left it) because it served her right.

I loved ‘Dem Bones Dem Bones (Dem Dry Bones)’, for reasons that had nothing to do with the words. What got me was the bounciness of the rhythm, the thrilling male voices calling out in gospel style, and the percussion that mimicked clockwork, either running down or being wound up. The hipbone’s connected to the — thighbone, the thighbone’s connected to the — kneebone . I made no connection between the bones in the song and my own, which were very connected indeed.

Mum and Dad told me that Uncle Mac had lost an eye and part of a lung in the Great War, and then lost a leg in a car smash-up between the wars. I thought he must be clumsy as well as unlucky, but it was as if they were giving me a present. ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ they asked. Not wonderful that he was disabled, exactly, but wonderful that he led such an active life no one would know. He didn’t let missing a few bits and pieces hold him back. It took a bit of getting used to, the idea that Uncle Mac and I were supposed to have things in common. I wasn’t missing any bits, but so far being disabled was doing a grand job of holding me back. I was too disabled to be a doctor or a scientist or anything important, but somehow I didn’t seem to be disabled enough to cut any ice with the Busy Bee News .

The Tin Triangle

The new place had to be better than CRX. ‘I expect you’ll miss having girls around,’ said Dad, with a roguishness that wasn’t really his style. He made it sound as if being the only boy in a group of girls, all of us disabled, made me a sultan with a harem. No I would not miss having girls around (I was forgetting my engagement to Sarah, of course, and being disloyal to Mary’s memory). However bad boys could be, they could never be as spiteful as girls.