Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Whipser-Nade

A more important occasion for me personally was a visit to Whipsnade Zoo. It wasn’t even my first exposure to the Zoo — I’d been there before, on a trip from CRX, but this was the important occasion.

I remember being proud on the previous visit that I knew to give the name two syllables, along with Sarah, while Wendy and her crew said ‘Whipser-Nade’. Even the nurses at CRX made the same mistake. All the same, that first visit wasn’t a happy one. The Elephant House had a wall in front of it, which adults could look over, while children had to be lifted. I was waiting my turn to get a view when some non-CRX kid jostled in front of me and scrambled up on the broad foot-plate of the Tan-Sad to see for himself, as if I was more parapet than person. He trod heavily on my foot, which swelled up and was sore for a good ten days.

I don’t even remember whether I got to see the elephants that day. It hardly matters. I don’t have an elephant’s memory, but some things will stay with me as long as this body does. I experienced what it would feel like if an elephant stepped on your foot, not even noticing, and that’s not something anyone forgets.

On this second visit everything was different. I saw a keeper with a snake round his shoulders. He was wearing it. It must have been a young python, recently fed and pleasantly drowsy. Everyone else was hanging back and saying it gave them the creeps, but I wanted to wear a snake too. There was no bravado in this, for once, it was a physical longing entirely separate from the desire to impress. I put my hand up, and I think the teacher in charge must have made a more obvious signal because the keeper came over to me right away.

As often happens to me when I want something really badly, I swallowed my voice and the keeper had to lean over to hear. Then even before I had asked if I could have the snake on me, the python moved its head my way. It was as if it understood. As the keeper helped the snake to unwind from him and wind onto me, he said, ‘Don’t worry, ’e’s perfectly ’armless!’ though I hardly needed reassurance. The rest of the Vulcan party laughed uneasily. I’m not even sure they got the feeble joke.

With a snake round my neck, I felt crowned and complete. There was an instant bond. I understand that this requires explaining. Snakes have found an ecological niche for themselves where legs would only get in the way, and we’re prejudiced against such a radical bit of stream-lining. I myself have warmed to the world of the cold-blooded, starting from that moment at Whipsnade, with the snake warm round my neck.

Cold-blooded is a rather loaded term, of course. Just go to the desert and see whose blood is hotter, the snake’s or the human being’s. See for yourself which organism struggles to keep to a comfortable operating temperature. The more respectful word is ectothermic. The point is, that every time I say python or cobra , I’m like a well-bred teenaged girl saying ‘pony’. With that undertone of crush. Pash. Thrill.

It wasn’t a spiritual lesson I had at Whipsnade. It’s easy to say that the snake, limbless but absolutely whole, was there to show me the way. The immature python round my shoulders would never have as much dexterity as I did even with my clumped fingers, but its adaptation to life was absolute. Who would dare to say or even think that a snake was disabled? All perfectly true and perfectly irrelevant. What I felt wasn’t a sermon in reptile guise but a piercing sensation, a deep satisfaction that was also an intensification of longing.

Charman clean and Charman dirty

The main satisfaction within the walls of Vulcan was still the night-time story-telling. After I had broken through the gender barrier, there was no holding me. First of all the temptress became German. It helped that my range of German cliché was a little wider than ve-have-vays-of-making-you-talk. I remembered Gisela Schmidt, for instance, saying that CRX was ‘not Charman clean, but clean’. Also ‘In Charmany your parents would have to pay.’

There was Charman clean and there was Charman dirty. I made the temptress say, ‘I want your hand to squeeze my bosoms,’ but she wasn’t a cheap trollop, she was a woman in love. After the bosomsqueezing was done (with the dorm chorus providing any number of unlikely pneumatic noises) she said tenderly, ‘Oh Darlink I luff you.’ That went down a storm. Effectively I was the Marlene Dietrich of our little after-lights-out repertory theatre.

I don’t think I can have seen any of Dietrich’s films on television at that time, but whenever I’ve happened to tune in to one since, it has seemed like familiar territory. So perhaps there was some subliminal memory of Destry Rides Again or even Touch of Evil in those ignorantly erotic improvisations, some whiff of Tanya (Tanya with her chilli!), of Frenchy, in those love scenes, those luff scenes which came so close to getting out of hand. When the temperature started getting too high I would interrupt my flagrant self and her lover in the character of Mum, knocking on the door with a feast of curried stew and thickly buttered bread, and endless cups of tea.

Then over time the mother figure mutated into Miss Willis, the mum who was actually on the premises. I incorporated some of her mannerisms into my performance. For instance I consciously let my cheeks go slack, to duplicate the unmistakable Willis wobble.

Marion Willis and Alan Raeburn were very much the mum and dad of the school. In a sense they were like a couple of newly-weds who had fallen in love with a derelict castle while on honeymoon and had bought it on impulse, without being able to change a fuse. Farley Castle was their folly à deux , though of course they weren’t married. Marion was older, and bulk limited her romantic appeal. They were no less a couple for that. They were married to the same vision, a vision which led them into areas of which they had previously known nothing.

The qualifications that Mr Raeburn and Miss Willis had for running a disabled school were really very simple. She was a teacher, and he was disabled. After the War, Alan Raeburn had studied at Cambridge, then gone to Barts Hospital to train as a doctor. He contracted TB, which closed off that particular career path. He was working half days in a local office when he and Marion got to know each other. He had a car, an adapted Morris Minor, but no garage, so Miss Willis let him share hers. They started talking about the tragic mental thwarting of intelligent disabled boys. The Education Act 1944 was a step forward — it imposed an obligation on local authorities to provide schooling for the handicapped, but grammar-school education was not available. They decided that was the standard they would aim for.

If Farley Castle wasn’t technically derelict when they acquired it, still everything needed looking after. The bottom kept dropping out of the Aga. It didn’t take much to block the outside drains, and it took ages to clear them. Manholes ran in a chain from the front door and outside the kitchen windows, all the way to a cesspit in a neighbour’s field. The manholes were so widely separated that sometimes one set of rods wouldn’t reach, and the co-principals would have to borrow a spare set from the Post Office at Farley Hill. Once, in fact, the postman was persuaded to break off from his round of deliveries to lend a hand with the unblocking.

There were always problems popping up to surprise the co-principals. They had some woodland cleared on the other side of the road from the school, but the workmen hired to fell the trees had ignored the instruction to refrain from making bonfires. Neighbours rang up to complain that smoke was working its way underground towards them. I remember more than once watching with incredulous delight as firemen tramped gingerly over hot ground, tracing the fire by little spurts of smoke popping up in front of them. What a boost for my pyrolatry! Perhaps in the next life I’ll come back as a little rogue flame, and not as a person at all.