Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I don’t count the great beast in Revelation, with the seven heads and ten horns, which just sounds as if the maths has gone wrong. The angel in Great Ormond Street was definitely one of the winged horde. With twain (s)he covered her face, with twain (s)he covered her feet, and with twain — just the prehensile tips of the wings — (s)he turned the pages of the repertories.

Normally I have a good memory for doctors and their ways. Which ones make real eye-contact, and which prefer to do their business at one remove. The ones for whom medicine is a harsh crusade, the ones for whom it is a losing battle. But of this doctor, the arch-homœopath, I remember nothing, not even gender, angels being beyond such things. It’s the glorious therapeutic system I remember instead, and the way it treated me.

Homœopathy sums itself up in a single Latin phrase, which exists in two versions. Similia similibus curantur — like cures like. Similia similibus curentur — let like cure like. I prefer the second version. It’s the verb form that gets me. It’s a jussive form, though whether ‘the jussive’ is a mood or a voice or a tense I couldn’t say. It’s the same form that exists in ‘Let there be light’, or Fiat lux , the one moment in the Bible that seems to me beyond argument, the Jewish version of the sruti -note. That all-powerful urging from the heart of the matter.

At the back of my mind, in all my dealings with homœopathy, lay the feeling that if orthodox medicine wasn’t all that there was, then the same might be true in other departments of life. Perhaps I’m not exaggerating when I look back and remember reasoning that if homœopathy could work as a system of therapy — if not for everybody, perhaps — then perhaps homosexuality was workable also. Alternative or complementary. Not wrong but right in a different way. Similes similibus amentur .

When my amazement subsided, I found that the angel was asking me the most novel question of all. ‘Why did you think you became ill?’ That was all that was said, and yet it was revolutionary. In my fifteen years and more of Still’s Disease, no medical person had voiced the idea that the disease had happened to a person, who might have made sense of it in his own fashion. With the emphasis on the past. Not ‘Why do you think you became ill?’ but ‘Why did you think —?’ What was the explanation that one-time person gave himself? I hadn’t thought about it for years — it had never been a worked-out thought — but I had an answer ready, as if in fact I had been waiting all this time. I answered, ‘I thought it was because I had eaten a dirty red Spangle in the garden, when Mummy told me not to.’ I thought I had become ill because of a sweet I’d found in the garden and recklessly eaten, in defiance of all Mum’s instructions about hygiene, what was nice and what was nasty.

The angel simply wrote it down with the answers to the other questions. In homœopathic terms it wasn’t pivotal, merely part of the material for diagnosis. But I felt as if an ancient cyst in my memory, a little recalcitrant bubble of crystallised toxins, something that had been part of my material being all this time, had suddenly liquefied, bobbed to the surface and silently burst. Once I’d called it to mind, it vaporised, but without being asked that question I would have carried around the husk of guilt and shame indefinitely. Now it had no more personal application than the sort of children’s rhyme Audrey brought home from the school playground. Chew, chew, chewing gum, Brought me to my grave, Mother told me not to chew, And still I disobeyed …

After my visit to Great Ormond Street, I was even more of a devotee of Hahnemann and his view of life. The remedy I was given, a Johnsized glass tube containing pillules of Silicea 30, had been lovingly chosen after the most individuated assessment of my medicalised life. It was a transcendent masterpiece of diagnosis, but it didn’t make the slightest impression on my dandruff. Efficacy wasn’t necessarily one of the virtues of the system I loved, and scurf would be with me for a few years yet.

Jets of disciplinary flame

Mum’s packing on my behalf before I went to India had been tender as well as anguished. Before I left for Cambridge it had a definite air of last rites. She handled my unimpressive possessions as if she was clearing a dead person’s room, while the corpse looked meekly on.

It was herself she was mourning, of course. If life for her had become synonymous with looking after me, then my leaving home could only be a sort of death.

Her attempts at making the best of things were almost more up-setting. ‘I dare say you’ll make lots of new friends who will invite you to their homes … but perhaps you’ll spare us a couple of days at Christmas.’ My dreams were indeed on that level — I would be swept into a social whirlpool and would forget family entirely, pursuing more congenial illusions. It was only when I heard Mum echoing my inmost thoughts that I realised how unlikely it all was.

On the afternoon I arrived as a student, we drove in convoy. I was at the wheel of the Mini, and Mum and Dad followed in their own car with my things. Sometimes they let me put two or three cars between us before they caught up with me.

I felt I could hear Mum and Dad wrangling in the æther, as if I was tuned in to some hellish family radio station impossible to turn off. The name of the programme would have been Family Un-Favourites . ‘Shouldn’t you catch up with him, Dennis?’ ‘For heaven’s sake, m’dear! John knows his way around, you know. He’s not going to get lost — he came here for his interview.’ ‘That was ages ago. Not everyone’s as good with directions as you think you are …’

It turned out that the college nurse was watching out for my arrival, perched in the Porter’s Lodge. She was a part of the welcoming committee. Not a welcome part, as far as I was concerned, but Mum greeted her warmly, as if a weight had been lifted off her heart.

I sulked, though the passive emotional states aren’t particularly effective coming from those who are assumed to be passive by decree of fate anyway. My sulk became intense without becoming any more noticeable. Was I not a standard member of the student body? And was this standard treatment? Would she be watching over us all in the same attentive manner, tucking us in and giving us our doses of cod liver oil?

It was obvious that I didn’t need nursing. After all, if I had needed nursing then Downing College would have chosen someone else — someone who didn’t — to have the honour of being their first disabled undergraduate. They didn’t want to make work for themselves, after all.

I can’t help feeling that there’s something only semi-respectable about nurses who don’t work in actual hospitals or surgeries. A college nurse is like a ship’s surgeon or a vet attached to a circus — the position simply reeks of dark history, of secret drinking or worse. I don’t know what medical arrangements exist in a flea circus, but perhaps the same type of character is drawn to that environment too, entomologist down on his luck, whiff of formaldehyde on the clothes if not the breath.

Assuming I didn’t have such a prejudice already, then this must have been the moment I acquired it. This particular college nurse wouldn’t have lasted a minute under the command of Sister Heel or any other of the dragons whose nostrils I had seen shoot out jets of disciplinary flame. Not only did this person wear a cardigan, she had dropped cigarette ash on it while she waited, puffing away in the Lodge with the porters. The starch had gone out of her, or never been properly absorbed, as it must be, from the fibres of the uniform right down into the nervous system.