Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Pecking obedience

I was soon bored to tears at CRX, though Ansell was kind enough to look in on me. I put sustained pressure on Mum to give me a convalescence present. I had my heart set on the miracle toy of the period, the Doodlemaster. ‘It’s suitable for anyone from eight to eighty and it’ll give me hours of instructive amusement,’ I told her, familiar with the sort of things it said on the boxes toys came in, and knowing the royal road to a parent’s heart and pocket. She gave in before I drove her round the bend, but only just before.

It’s impossible to convey at this distance the mystique of the Doodlemaster. The best way of describing it might be as a Stone Age video game. It looked like a flat little television of red plastic, with two white knobs. Between them these knobs controlled the movement of a stylus which pressed on the underside of the screen and scraped off an aluminium-powder coating to make patterns. Your design was restricted by the impossibility of either correcting mistakes or lifting the stylus off the screen. When you had finished your drawing, after everyone had politely goggled at it and guessed what it was, you turned the Doodlemaster upside down and gave it a good shake, to redistribute the silvery grains ready for the next drawing.

This was an absurd choice of toy to beguile my convalescence, though I had only myself to blame. What it was in essence was a wrist-humbling apparatus. Children with two fluent and flexible arms and hands were reduced to the level of robot toddlers with crayons bolted to their fists. Each wrist was demoted to providing a single element, vertical or horizontal, of a complex movement. It took even gifted students hours to be able to produce a passable diagonal, let alone a flowing curve. Those fabled Zen Masters we’re always hearing about, who think nothing of drawing a perfect circle with a single brush-stroke, would have been driven to foaming fury by the frustrations of the machine.

My wrists were humbled already, and it was hard labour for me to get even a straight line out of the Doodlemaster. Soon my fingers ached with futile twiddling. My right hand was the more adept, since the elbow on that side had movement, but accomplishment on the Doodlemaster was necessarily on the level of the weaker arm. My right wrist had no power to raise my level. Instead the left one dragged me down. It was even more humbling when I had to ask passing nurses to turn the fiendish device upside down on my behalf, to give it the ritual shaking that prepared the screen for my next abject failure of doodling.

Essentially it was a machine that simulated disability, by making a simple accomplishment daunting, and I was the last boy in the country to need that challenge just then. I already knew what it was like to have cursive shapes clear in your mind, and to produce only jagged scratches. That was my experience of hand-writing. I so much preferred the pecking obedience of a typewriter to anything my fingers could manage unaided.

The Doodlemaster passed automatically into the suppler hands of Peter, without actively being given to him, when I came home from hospital. Soon he could do a passable Egyptian pyramid, while my drawings in that line were more in the stepped, Mayan style. They were ramshackle ziggurats. Peter would sit with the Doodlemaster and the toddling Audrey both on his knee, allowing her to work one knob with both little fists. It was clear that soon even the baby of the family would out-perform me on my convalescence toy.

Shortly afterwards the makers of the Doodlemaster were taken over by an American company and the device was renamed the Etch-a-Sketch. My only consolation in the whole episode was that at least I owned a first-generation machine.

Audrey was a very watchful child. She had a lovely smile, but from the moment she discovered her frowning muscles those were the ones she used most. From the start it was as if she had set herself to cracking the code of the strange family in which she found herself. I wished her luck with that ambitious and deceptive project.

If Mum had hoped for a child who would never leave her orbit, unlike her boys who were bound sooner or later to join the world of men, then she was disappointed almost from the start. Mum proudly announced Audrey’s first word as ‘Mum’. In fact it turned out to be ‘merm’, her version of ‘worm’. She loved the worms in the garden, and would bring them indoors at every opportunity. Dad was delighted by her interest in the natural world, though of course it was too early to tell if she was a little biologist or just a little madam. I don’t know whether Audrey ever ate her beloved merms, or even ate much dirt, but sometimes she would come in with her mouth streaked with mud. Perhaps she knew by instinct what would agitate Mum most.

Mum was having a hard time with Audrey just then, during my convalescence. This was a toddler who was just beginning to get into everything, and would resort to tremendous tantrums if thwarted. Mum couldn’t do anything with her. I had the brain-wave of taking some of the microscopic sweeties called hundreds and thousands, dividing them by colour (which was a bit of a fag, admittedly) and then arranging them in separate compartments of my Junior First Aid Kit — one of my most treasured possessions, a Christmas present which I was slow to out-grow. Then I would look at the bawling Audrey, make great play of selecting the colour appropriate to her mood, and balance a single tiny pill on my finger.

She would come over to take it from me, calmer already. Her mood sweetened and stayed sweet. I had discovered some sort of colour cure — call it chromotherapy by placebo. Cromer therapy, even. The effect was so marked that Mum thought it somehow abnormal. She asked me to stop dosing Audrey with magic beans, and got Dr Flanagan to prescribe something instead. Flanny gave her Distaval, the brand name of thalidomide. Which worked perfectly well, I admit. It’s a valid drug as long as you aren’t pregnant.

It must have been at about the same stage of my convalescence that Peter taught me a huge lesson. He was being given a lesson himself at the time, and I don’t think he ever knew how much he taught me that morning. It was a Saturday, and he was enduring the piano lesson which was perhaps the low point of his week. Dad was reasonably musical, and even played the organ for services in Little Marlow Church. The vicar was a Mr Jayne, who had the mannerism of ending prayers with the formula, ‘a-through Jesus Christ Our Lord’. I pointed this out to Peter, and from then on we listened out for that moment, beginning to giggle before there was anything to giggle at. It sound like a holy sneeze.

At Dad’s insistence Peter was sentenced to piano lessons, but he didn’t prosper at the keyboard. Now I listened in on his lesson, though that makes it sound as if I made a positive choice. It was more that I didn’t go to the mighty effort of moving out of earshot. From CRX I knew the layout of the keyboard, and even the names of the notes, but of course I was never in the running for lessons of my own.

There was a note in the music which Peter was playing that never quite happened. He seemed to hit every possible note on either side of it, and then his teacher would say ‘Again,’ not with irritation but with a sort of suppressed sigh. Irritation would have been more bearable.

In my mind I felt I could see his hand making the required stretch. In fact I could see my own hand — my hand as it should have been — striking the note fair and square. It seemed very unfair that I had the musical awareness and Peter the working parts.

I lived with this comfortingly tragic view of destiny for perhaps as long as ten minutes. Then it occurred to me that Peter might be seeing in his mind exactly what I saw in mine, his hand reaching for the right note. It’s just that he couldn’t make his mental image into a reality. In that respect we were as one. Despite their differences of constitution the brothers were looking down at an identical disobedience. Was it likely that I was the only intuitively musical soul in the family, and the only one who couldn’t address the keyboard competently? Life wasn’t fair, it seemed to me, but its unfairness followed certain rules.