Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Then Roger Stott took me inside and showed me a sort of cubicle, a fairly dismal space but one without which the Castle could hardly last a day as a school for the disabled. This was the lift. All the dormitories were upstairs.

Farley Castle may have had the privacy Raeburn and Miss Willis were looking for, but it was desperately short of amenities. You could say it was a folly twice over — once when it was built and all over again when it was converted, in the teeth of its unsuitability for the purpose, into a school for the disabled. The school itself was disabled, and there were aspects to living in a fairy-tale castle which came close to a living nightmare. CRX had been much more practical in disabled terms, being an enormous bloody bungalow straggling along a corridor, with treacherous slopes and any number of traps but no actual stairs.

The lift at Vulcan wasn’t even big. It was nowhere near big enough to serve the needs of such a place, and had been squeezed in by the sacrifice of half the space of the back stairway. It had a weight limit of only 350 lb. Roger Stott explained that it was very slow, when it worked at all. ‘When the engine’s kaput,’ he said, ‘old Rabies has to crank the mechanism by hand. I can tell you he gets awfully red in the face!’ Old Rabies! I was thrilled to be at a proper school at last, with official nick-names and everything.

When the school started up, there hadn’t been a lift at all. Admittedly there had only been one pupil, so it was hardly a problem. This was the legendary Kim Derbishire, prime mover in Vulcan’s creation myth. I would hear a lot about him in the days to come. Kim was pretty much able-bodied, having only infrequent epilepsy and mild spasticity in one arm and a leg. He could help with washing-up, cleaning and even carpentry. In keeping with the active role he played at the school, he had always called the co-principals Marion and Alan. Roger said he still visited the school every so often. One day I might meet him.

As he showed me the hall where we would be taking our meals, Roger passed on some of the colourful history of Farley Castle. There was a Grey Lady who had lost her lover while alive, and came looking for him every so often after her death. When a new boy arrived at the school, she had the habit of seeking him out to ask if this stranger had any news for her. You’d think I’d have grown out of childish scares by this stage, after the years of nonsense about Vera Cole, but I was thoroughly alarmed. It was going to be hard enough to keep the bed dry that night without a supernatural visitation.

Roger went into a little more detail. ‘The Grey Lady drags her chains behind her as she searches for her loved one. I don’t know why she should be dragging chains, myself, the daft old thing … in fact, I’ve heard it said that her chains sound more like someone rattling an old sweet tin full of keys and coins. And she’s learned to imitate the voices of the boys.’

‘However does she manage that?’ I asked. I wasn’t cottoning on very quickly to Roger’s kind hints of reassurance. He had to spell things out more clearly.

‘The Grey Lady visits after lights out on the first night of term. About 9.30. And when all the new boys are quaking in their beds, she recites her poem. It’s not a bad poem, actually — I suppose she’s had plenty of time to get it right. Then she gives out the most bloodcurdling howl. It’s so loud it almost sounds like a whole lot of people howling.’ He lowered his voice. ‘And you’d better be a good little chap, and scream along with the rest of the new bugs.’

He took pity on me, that’s what it comes down to, and initiated me into the hoax. Did he really say ‘new bugs’, or was that something I’d picked up from my reading? Perhaps it was something I demanded to be called, on my first day of secondary school, my first real school-day, the ritual insult that certified my belonging.

I don’t exactly remember when Mum and Dad left, which suggests that the induction process was smoothly managed. I had no sense of being abandoned. And as evening drew on, I was buoyed up by the knowledge of the Grey Lady ordeal which was in store for all the unsuspecting new bugs but me. I was also so tired that I thought I might sleep through her visitation anyway.

At supper I had a chance to assess the full range of the school’s intake. There was a large handful of able-bodied boys like Roger Stott, who helped with the actual running of the place, and there was a small handful of boys who could do next to nothing for themselves. These were the ones with degenerative disorders, who needed help even to eat. It was Vulcan’s proud boast that it imposed no upper limit on the severity of its pupils’ condition, though they should at least be stable. That was hardly the case with these few wan souls, fading away almost visibly. The mouths to which food was lifted in patient spoonfuls hardly reacted to the approach of nourishment.

Roger poured me a glass of water from a large jug, but he didn’t meet my eyes. I wasn’t disappointed by that — though if I was going to drink without help I was going to need a more manageable vessel, something with a handle. It fitted in with what I expected from a real school. Roger had broken a rule by telling me about the bogus haunting. I cheerfully accepted that he might never acknowledge me again.

As bed-time approached, I found that Roger hadn’t been exaggerating when he told me that the lift was hopelessly slow. The problem wasn’t simply the speed at which it moved. There was only room for one wheelchair at a time, and even so the foot-plates had to be removed. Some of the boys needed electric wheelchairs, which didn’t have removable foot-plates, so those pupils had to be transferred to a pushing chair for the journey up a level, while their chairs stayed below or were carried upstairs separately. The Tan-Sad, despite its lack of motor, was actually bulkier than an electric machine, so I had to be transferred myself. The master in charge looked at it with something like fascination. ‘That’s a very interesting buggy you’ve got there, I must say. Perhaps you won’t mind swopping it for something a little nippier?’ I wouldn’t mind at all. In fact I couldn’t wait.

Even in a pushing chair riding in the lift wasn’t comfortable. Passengers with working knees could tuck their legs neatly away, but I had to be propped up almost vertically to fit in the cage. Vulcan was a small school, but it took a good three minutes to get even a pushing wheelchair into the lift and up to the first floor, so the evening transfers (and of course the reverse journeys in the morning) took up a great deal of time.

My new home was in fact the Blue Dorm, and Roger was the AB assigned to it, which was thrilling, but I knew better than to presume on his acquaintanceship. My peers must judge me, and Roger would not intervene. As I lay in my bed after lights out in my new home, getting used to the dark and fearfully trying to gauge my bladder’s intentions, a voice spoke out. It wasn’t the Grey Lady making an early entrance. There was nothing other-worldly about the voice or what it said. It came from the boy in the next bed. What he said was a single word. He said, ‘Rip.’ I thought I knew what he meant, I certainly hoped so, but I didn’t dare to respond.

A purty fair shake-down

There was a pause, and then another voice said ‘Ned.’ Then I knew for certain what was coming next, and I said ‘Kelly’ at the same time as the fourth boy in the room. Some sort of game had started, but I didn’t know what kind, or what came next. I waited in high excitement. Then the first voice said, more confidently, ‘Waaaal, this seems like a purty fair shake-down, pardners … think the posse heard us?’ And we were off.