Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

I never really got used to the multiplicity of matrons at Vulcan School, matrons of all moods and sizes. At CRX Matron had been an overwhelming figure and a name of great power. As a Hindu in the making I should have rejoiced at the multiplication of deities at Vulcan, but the reality was different. It was like the moment in Fantasia when Mickey Mouse, sorcerer’s apprentice, hacks the enchanted broom to pieces — only to find that each separate splinter reconstitutes itself as a new broom, toting a pair of pails in a maddening imitation of life.

Protective fugs

The Blue Dorm in Farley Castle was on a corner of the building, and I think it must have been on the north side. In winter it was bitter. I remember Raeburn explaining that a dorm was for sleeping in, not living in. He thought that waking up in a cold room encouraged a boy to move about a bit, to get his circulation moving at a good rate and warm up naturally. Quite how a boy with his joints ankylosed was supposed to initiate this beneficial process was never made clear. Winter mornings in the Blue Dorm were hellish.

The shock to my system was total. In Bathford days Mum had kept my room good and warm. At CRX Sister Heel made sure the radiators earned their keep. I had spent most of my winters in a series of protective fugs. Not any more.

Waking up and being able to see your breath was only the start. The first job for the staff was to get boys out of bed and onto the toilet — and the Blue Dorm’s toilet was in a turret. It was the only toilet in the school whose door was too narrow to admit even the slimmest wheelchair. If the dorm was a ’fridge then the turret was a deep freeze. I’m not convinced that even Pippo Freeman from Bourne End, that boy of seasoned wood, could have stood up to the rigours of the cold in the Blue Dorm’s turret.

I wouldn’t wish the experience of defæcating when your body can’t stop shivering on anyone. Then there was the wiping of the bum with hard dry crackly paper. The sensation ranged from awful to perfectly bearable, depending on the niceness of the matron on duty. Sometimes I was just left on the seat. After I’d opened my bowels I just got colder and colder, because the matron who had put me on the seat had forgotten all about me. My bum would go numb. I could call at the top of my voice from that cold turret, but no one heard me. Perhaps no one wanted to. I thought about what it would be like to die on that toilet seat. One day I even decided that it would be better to die than to be left like this. I wondered, if I did die, how long it would be until anyone noticed. I seemed to be getting more and more unimportant every day.

Once it was a kind matron, Gillian Walker (always called Gillie), who forgot to come and get me off the toilet. She was the nicest of the nice, a rose in the spiky desert of the Vulcan garden. I remember once I wanted a mosquito bite on my ankle scratched, and it turned out there were different moral approaches even to this small request. Gillie’s school of matronly thought held that carers should only do what was best for the boy (and scratching would only make the irritation worse), while there were other matrons that would oblige without comment. I remember Gillie Walker saying with real dismay, after I’d gone behind her back to be scratched by another matron, ‘But John, you don’t understand, I care a lot more than Mrs Lewis does!’ She was actually quite upset.

When Gillie remembered me at last, having obviously become involved with another boy’s needs — it wasn’t as if she’d gone to the pictures — she came running. She cried, ‘Oh John darling , you must think me absolutely beastly ! I’d understand if you never ever forgave me!’ It was easy to say, ‘Of course I forgive you, Gillie,’ and even to add, ‘I could forgive you anything.’ It really didn’t matter as long as there was some tenderness in there somewhere, even though I was numb and sore and had pins and needles in unexpected places.

It was obvious that Gillie and the Big Matron, Sheila Ewart, known as Biggie, were aware of the indignities we were undergoing. They set themselves to soothing us with kind words and gentle touch.

Judy Brisby, though, had a different approach. She was the one who had dismissed my appendix pains as namby-pamby wallowing. While Biggie and Gillie tried to take the edge off the Spartan conditions, Judy preferred them good and sharp. She used the morning routine as an opportunity to transfer her own inner pain to the boys. I had a sense of this even then. During the bum-wiping process a boy had the chance of reviewing his karmic bank balance with her over the past week. The more sycophantic and dishonest he had been, the better for his bum’s sake. I learned to be a toady, which was the part I felt I had to play for a long time after I left the school. My motto had become You wipe my bum, and I’ll kiss yours .

On a winter morning it was the duty roster which determined how the day would begin, whether discomfort would be intensified by cruelty or melted away with tender words. Biggie would come in smiling, and say, ‘Time to get up, boys.’ The smiling wasn’t forced, and it never stopped. She’d rub her hands together and say, ‘It’s very chilly bom-bom today, boys!’ still smiling. She loved to say that — chilly bom-bom. To make a game of the awful cold. ‘Yes, it’s very cold indeed this morning. I’ll get you boys up one at a time. The others can stay in bed until the first boy is finished. Now then, someone has to be first, I’m afraid, so who will it be? John, you’ve had a lie-in for a few days so it’s your turn to be first. OK then, bedclothes off! Come on then, let Biggie give you a little cuddle, but we can’t stay here all day, can we? That’s better.’ And she’d push me along to the dreaded turret.

‘Oh my dear, yes I know it really is a horrid cold toilet seat, isn’t it? Just stay in your wheelchair for a minute. Let Biggie sit on the toilet for a few seconds first to take the chill off … There, that’s a little better isn’t it? Oh this horrid paper! Let Biggie rub it together like this to soften it a bit … Let Biggie breathe on it to take the edge off. I really must see Miss Willis about having a little heater put in these toilets.’ It was one of Biggie’s quirks that she put the word ‘little’ in almost every sentence. ‘They’re bitterly cold, even for me, and I’ve been up since six o’clock and had my cup of tea …’ Motherly she clucked away, wondering if it was right for boys to have such hardship, and what the inspector would say if he paid a visit in the cold season. Biggie was a bustler if ever there was one, a bustler and a prattler, and the nasty moments passed without our even noticing.

A Judy Brisby start to the day was different. No boy would be allowed extra time in bed. If Judy Brisby was going to get us up we had no warning at all. The bedclothes were whisked right off all of us, not just the first to be got up. Lying in bed shivering without bedclothes was just as bad as being plonked on a frosty toilet. Small bodies can’t retain their heat, as Judy Brisby must have known, particularly small thin bodies, which was all we were likely to be on the Vulcan diet. I was one of the smaller ones, but none of us was exactly pink with warmth on those mornings.

Any boy who complained about the shock of the cold soon learned to put up with it. Complaints only led to even harsher treatment in the toilet, to vicious scrubbings with hard paper. I’m sure I’m not the only one who lay there fantasising about a contraption that would lift the bedclothes back onto our bodies while Judy was out of the room. Professor Branestawm was the man for the job. I loved the books in which he appeared. I liked logic to fly free, without the downward tug of common sense. Professor Branestawm would design us a subtle system of ropes and pulleys which would yank the bedclothes off again at Judy’s approach, so that we were helplessly exposed to the cold. The way she liked us to be. Meanwhile the contraption would vanish into the walls.