Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

I had been wildly excited, after all, when I had read about the will-o’-the-wisp, nagging Mum and Dad to take me to see it, until it was explained to me that it wasn’t something you could see on demand. It was more an event triggered by certain circumstances. The real wisp would only appear in haunted marshes at night-time when there were few people around to be scared. I had hopes, though, that methane would combust spontaneously from all the tuppenny in the Vulcan School cesspit. That would be good enough for me.

The roof leaked after heavy rain. The co-principals would hear about it from a staff member on the receiving end of the drips, who would have had to hold up an umbrella in bed. The slates on the roof were brittle. The battlements weren’t held in place in any sensible way, they simply balanced there. Leaning against them would be enough to send them toppling.

Once Raeburn, inspecting the loft, found five starlings drowned in the water tank. With a heavy heart he summoned the county’s Medical Officer, expecting to be told to close the school down for a period. He wasn’t looking forward to the equivalent of evacuating a small town of dependent people. Luckily the MO of Berkshire merely advised the boiling of drinking water for a week or two. After all, no one had been poisoned so far, had they? No need to panic.

It was a strange experience to watch Raeburn climb the ladder to the loft. Miss Willis would stand below him, since he had no sensation in his legs, grabbing each foot in turn and placing it on the next rung. She had to do this both going up and coming down. Raeburn’s sister Margery might have been a professional puppeteer, but on these expeditions into the unknown areas of loft and roof it was Miss Willis who seemed to have usurped that rôle. Alan might not be putty in her hands, but at loft-inspection time he was at least half puppet.

Civilisation and the cripple

Raeburn took a kindly interest in me, and said he would give me private walking lessons. So at eleven o’clock most mornings we met in a classroom for twenty minutes. Supporting himself with an expertise which was beyond me, he helped me in the gentle art of challenged walking, telling me I was quite safe, not to worry, and assuring me I could not fall. His touch was very tender and I felt safe with his strong arms making a little cage around me or a bar for me to hold. I remember I could touch and hold that strong arm-sinew as much as I liked. Looking back, I realise he must have kept an arm free to hold on to his sticks, but I don’t remember it, and fortunately at that time logic drifted in and out of my world.

When the classroom was busy we met instead in his study. One day he caught me looking at a book on the shelves whose spine I could read. Its title was Civilisation and the Cripple — poignant juxtaposition. I don’t know if he was referring to that book at all, perhaps even paraphrasing, but at that point we had by far the most searching general conversation that I had had with anyone to date. Everyone was always telling me I was clever, except the eleven-plus examiners, but no one before him treated me as an adult. I suppose he was using me as a sounding board for his own inspirational little theories.

I remember him saying, ‘You and I are the judges of civilisation, in a way. If civilisation means anything it means looking after the weak, not getting rid of handicapped children by exposing them on the mountainside, as I’m afraid the Ancient Greeks did, for all their culture, and not by throwing useful human beings in the dustbin, as we sometimes do. Funnily enough the Aztecs — those are the chaps who used to live in what we now call Mexico — uncivilised people in many ways, but they looked after disabled people very well. They had the idea that people with … um, with deformities, were holy in some way, you know, dear to the gods.’

Nothing could have been better calculated to get me wildly excited, what with my blocked dreams of religious vocation, an occupation where it seemed my face fitted only in the little book where uniforms folded neatly down round a stuck-in photograph. ‘So were the handicapped people made into priests?’ I asked. ‘I’m not sure about that, John, but I’ll try to look it up for you.’ Perhaps he did, but he didn’t ever mention the Aztecs to me again.

Since then I’ve learned that Aztec enlightenment had its limits. They had a rather narrow definition, as it turns out, of the value of the disabled. Not so much intrinsic worth as usefulness in a crisis. The disabled were emergency supplies of sorts. The Aztecs looked after their deformed citizens with great care until there was a solar eclipse, and then put them right at the top of the list of the human sacrifices, to have their hearts cut out and their skin removed. A compliment of sorts, since only the choicest hearts and freshly bleeding hides could tempt the day-star out of hiding, but not easy to take in the right spirit.

Raeburn had changed tack before I could ask any more awkward questions about the Aztecs. ‘I know you’re interested in animals, John — well, sometimes naturalists find a bone, a lion’s leg-bone, say, and they can tell by looking at it that this bone had been broken but healed. What they can tell from that is that the other lions in the pride looked after the injured one, feeding it when it couldn’t hunt for itself, or else it would have starved before it could recover. Of course there are animals that have no feeling for their fellows, perhaps most of them don’t, but human beings do. They just have to be told how best to help. And if you and I in this country aren’t helped to make the best of things then I don’t think much of anything else our country does.’

So we were judges of our society, not the judged! This was an intoxicating idea. I could go round with a little book, noting down who had helped me and who hadn’t. Mr Turpin at CRX had said I could be a clerk, which I hadn’t fancied — but it would be a different matter if I was attached to the Recording Angel’s office.

My karma banks at Coutts

Most thinking about disability that I knew at that point, and even mine, circled warily round the idea of punishment. Miss Reid had started it all by going on about wheat and chaff and tares and Hell, even if she had relented when she saw how miserable she made me. And still, what she was really saying was that I would scrape into Heaven if my life on earth was enough like hell. What sort of merciful God would arrange things like that? The whole thing was a big mess.

Mum and Dad had confronted this question in a conversation once, when I wasn’t quite out of earshot. Either that, or my memory has decided to have a part of my thinking played out in the voices of the people I knew best.

‘I’m sure you know, m’dear, that many people think of handicap as a sort of punishment …’

‘He’s only a little boy, he hasn’t done anything!’

‘Don’t jump down my throat, m’dear! I’m only saying what some religious people think, I didn’t say I agreed with them. It’s not an attractive idea, it may be a lot of nonsense, but that’s how some people think.’

‘But, Dennis, he’s done nothing. So perhaps it’s our fault? We’re the ones being punished?’

‘It’s not so bad, m’dear. And I don’t know what you’d do without him …’ Dad gets marks in my book for blocking Mum’s move to take on all the guilt of the world.

Disability as punishment for actions in a previous life — there’s no point in pretending there isn’t a side of the mind that responds to these punitive simplicities. I can’t seem to muster the proper outrage at such suggestions.

Since then, though, I’ve discovered a different application of the concept of karma. By this interpretation, disability at birth or in early life is a highly specific condition. It relates to an earlier life in which one displayed mystical powers. The physical difficulties are only the residue of a sage or mage over-taxing his spiritual strength in that previous life. Not really a punishment — more of an overdraft, and on a rather swish account at that. My karma banks at Coutts, don’t you know. Lovely people — they’re very understanding. And even in this day and age the statements are written by hand! I find this idea terribly attractive, but if I claim to be open-minded, and I do, then I can’t dismiss the harsher doctrine either.