Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Desmodium gyrans , the Indian Telegraph plant, had leaves which moved round and round whenever the temperature rose above 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The movement was very rapid in plant terms, easily visible. The hotter it got the faster they moved. They twirled and twirled until they dropped off, presumably from the equivalent (in the vegetable kingdom) of metal fatigue.

I learned the finer points of parasitism. There are plants which have photosynthetic leaves, like mistletoe, so that they don’t get all their nourishment from the host plant — hemiparasites — and there are holoparasites like the dodder we saw on the marshland by Abbotsbrook, with no ability to fend for themselves. There are even endoparasites, plants which live entirely inside the stems of the host, only manifesting themselves as a tiny bud opening into a diminutive flower. Rather like a pimple on your face suddenly turning into a carnation, a buttonhole worn rather too high up. I winced when I thought of that. My complexion was not at its best in those years. When no one was looking I’d sometimes try to burst my pimples with the point of a pencil. It’s not a technique I can really recommend, though it’s remarkably addictive.

Mr Menage also wrote about Sauromatum guttatum , otherwise known as Monarch of the East, and resolved an old dispute. Sauromatum was an old friend, though a bittersweet one who had produced a certain amount of conflict. I’d been given one of these bulbs when I was living in CRX, way back when Ward Two was still Ward One. Mr Mole was a porter who thought himself a gardening expert. He told me that it ate insects but I didn’t believe him. I knew and loved the carnivores, and this wasn’t on the list.

The great thing about Sauromatum guttatum is that it’s a powerful osmophore — that’s the scientific way of saying that it stinks to high heaven. What more could a boy want from a plant? Sauromatum was an Ellisdons Stink Bomb come to life. Look after it, keep it warm and it will flower. I waited for the big day, the day of pungent flowering. The girls on the ward duly cringed and coughed and said they needed clothes-pegs for their noses. I enjoyed watching them scream and giggle as they came closer to the source of the stink, then reeled away. The inflorescence only lasts a day or so. Then Sauromatum was put back on the windowsill and I forgot all about it. A day or two later Mr Mole took the shrivelled flower and casually prised it open. Inside there were two or three dead flies.

They proved nothing. Absolutely nothing! I hated Mr Mole for saying ‘Didn’t I tell you so?’, for imagining he’d proved his point and had won our duel of botanical expertise. Everyone thought I was in the wrong. It was almost physically painful to know that I was right. Mr Mole was hopelessly unscientific and just jumped to conclusions. When it came to Sauromata , he knew sod-all. He had no feeling for them, or he would have asked himself why a plant that — according to his theory — ate flies didn’t bother to digest them. It was agony to be dismissed by someone who knew less than I did.

Now, in the same hospital, I finally got the lowdown on Sauromatum guttatum. There it was plainly in Menage’s book: the plant attracted flies as pollinating agents, not as food. I felt vindicated but also mortified. There had never been any doubt in my mind that Sauromatum guttatum wasn’t a carnivorous plant. Now I had the evidence — and no one to show it to. I asked after Mr Mole with pretended fondness, but he’d been gone for years, no one knew where. I’m sorry to say that if I’d had a time machine at my disposal at that moment, and only one return trip to make in it, I would probably have used it to turn up with a gardening book from the future, just for the satisfaction of proving Mr Mole wrong in front of witnesses. Of course on the return journey I would have found myself in an unrecognisable 1966, where with the refutation of Mole’s Fallacy all ignorance had withered away.

Sometimes Mum brought Peter along to visit me at CRX. Most teenagers sharing a bedroom with their older brother would see some advantage to having it to themselves, but Peter seemed not to think that way. He had never acquired the knack of consulting his own interests ahead of mine. He seemed to yawn all the time, partly with the exhaustion of healthy growth — he too was negotiating adolescence, in a way much more obvious than mine — but also because of his new schedule of early mornings.

We both wanted to grow up and find our own way in the world, but his path was clear. There was nothing to stop him from reaching escape velocity — he was practically on the launch pad already. During the holidays he was doing a paper round! He was earning already. Prepare for blast-off!

We both shared the enthusiasm of the time for outer space and exploration, though we had cried when Laika the dog, first creature in space, died in orbit, trapped in a metal box with none of the smells that she loved. I must have been seven at the time, and Peter five or six. We couldn’t understand why no one else was upset — but then we hadn’t realised that there had never been a plan to bring her back. Death was part of her mission, as it is of ours.

A thwarting engine

Fired by my reading, I wanted Dad to put up a greenhouse next to the house, so that I could raise specimens of Drosophyllum lusitanicum in there. The Portuguese Sundew. One of the few carnivores that likes dry conditions, temperamental, a real challenge. Dad wanted a greenhouse too, but Mum wasn’t too keen. Could I mould them both to my sovereign will? It didn’t seem likely, since they never seemed to agree about anything. Deadlock was inevitable unless I used subtle strategy.

Dad wasn’t easy to handle, even when you and he wanted the same thing. He was less a person in any conventional sense than a sort of thwarting engine. He was strongly counter-suggestible. If there was something anyone wanted, then his reflex was to rule it out, and he found it much easier to come up with reasons against than to wonder why he was so opposed to it in the first place.

It was a curious piece of psychological wiring. If you made any sort of claim on him, he would smack you down. But if you built a wall against him, as Peter and I were busy doing, then a helpless fondness would show through the chinks of it.

For weeks the McKee pin installed at such expense of pain seemed to be a dud. My left hip had no more than a little grudging movement, like a hinge so rusty that nobody can get at it with the oil can. Then I suppose the endless physiotherapy, although painful as well as boring, built the muscle up sufficiently for me to notice the difference. My new mechanical hip changed its tune, starting to make murmurs of competence. It responded, after a fashion, to instructions. It fell into line. I began to be able to sit approximately, not as most of the world sits but to half-sit at a jaunty sideways angle. Sitting with a bit of leaning built into it. This was a welcome change.

Walking was also mildly transformed. I needed a stick to help my balance, but as long as I had that I could get about fairly smartly. Still at a snail’s pace, but a limber, youthful snail, impatient to find what was round the corner.

To beguile the tedium of healing the Platonic Librarian of Bourne End worked hard on my behalf. She cast her net widely. Mum had been filling Mrs Pavey in about my foibles and fascinations. She must have mentioned my interest in the occult and mystical, and so various books came along that were attuned to those vibrations. I remember Psychic Self-Defence by Dion Fortune, which made me want to join some sort of esoteric Order. But how to find one, and how to know it was the right one? Through Mum I ordered a monthly journal called Prediction from the stationer’s in Bourne End and pored over the cryptic small advertisements. Of course the occult wave-lengths are jammed with trash. I needed the equivalent of Mum’s indispensable consumer guide to pick and choose among the hundreds on offer, a sort of Which Cult? The desire to retreat from the world was fierce in me, perhaps because the world seemed to care so little whether I was in it or not. It was the same they’ll-miss-me-when-I’m-gone motivation as lay behind my ‘suicide attempt’ at school.