Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

The millipede had a name, but somehow I’ve forgotten it, and The Nasty Thing is all that remains.

Over the railings outside the back entrance of my staircase was a building on the Downing Site labelled Department of Parapsychology, which I thought was a wonderful omen and a testimony to the open-mindedness of the university — until I realised I had been misreading Parasitology . Also an honourable discipline, of course.

When I arrived with Mum and Dad on that first day I had been issued with a key to the door of A6, something that presented practical problems from the start. Where was I to keep it, for one thing? Pockets and I don’t get on, never have and never will. Something in a pocket is as far out of my reach as a jar on a high shelf.

I asked my bedmaker for help. By now she had a name. She hadn’t volunteered it, but I had extracted it like an expert dentist while her attention was elsewhere.

I had it all planned. I let her surprise me at my typewriter, tapping cheerfully away. I called out, ‘I love typing, don’t you? Ten tiny tendrils tapping in tempo! I’m just writing to my mother about you, only — so embarrassing! — your name has slipped my mind. I swear, I’d forget my hips if they weren’t screwed on!’

She gave a little gasp and then it came out. She was Mrs Beddoes. The reluctant stump was held safe in my pliers. And it hadn’t hurt a bit. ‘Beddoes by name and bedder by nature,’ she said. Mrs Beddoes the bedder, next card along from Mr Carve the Butcher in the Happy Families pack.

Her fear of me was still great and it was important to be delicate in my approaches. If I could I would tempt her into making the first move, as if I was coaxing a squirrel down from its branch.

I spoke soothingly, knowing that tone of voice was more important than my choice of words. ‘I wish,’ I said, ‘I could find some way of keeping track of my room key. Perhaps a piece of string would do the trick.’ This was the equivalent of the peanut on the back of my hand, tempting the flighty creature to come close.

Mrs Beddoes frowned and produced a length of string from the pocket of her pinny. Then she came up to me of her own accord, close enough to attach it to my trousers. Her hand held the string, but in another way it was me who reeled her in.

Town full of scrappy facial hair

First we tied one end to the key and the other to a belt-loop. I could retrieve the key reasonably easily by pulling on the string, but I couldn’t always tuck it away again, so the whole arrangement was a bit of a business. Eventually I realised that it was simpler to have the key on its string round my neck, even if it sometimes got tangled up with my clothes. By then Mrs Beddoes was almost tame, though still a long way from eating out of my hand. Progress enough for one day.

She had gone on bringing me cups of tea, and I had gone on not drinking them. Finally she broached the subject. ‘Aren’t you going to have your tea, Mr Cromer?’ she asked. ‘I should have asked how you take it — perhaps you need sugar? If it’s cold I can make you another. It’s no trouble.’

Here we were at the heart of the matter, the charity case refusing to be patronised. ‘Now see here, Mrs Beddoes, why do you bring me tea?’

‘I thought you could do with a cuppa.’

‘But you don’t bring tea to anyone else, do you?’

‘Well, no.’

‘Perhaps you feel sorry for me.’

‘Not really, Mr Cromer. It’s the others I feel sorry for.’

That stopped me in my tracks. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, you’re the only one who is ever awake. The only one who doesn’t groan when I knock on the door. And after all, they’re missing the best part of the day, aren’t they?’

After that the scales fell from my eyes, and I started taking Mrs Beddoes’ cups of tea at face value, as a real privilege and quite a contribution to what was (as she said), or became, the best part of the day.

A door to close behind me and a key to lock it with. These were things I had never had until I was an undergraduate. They seemed fairytale privileges. Space and privacy were not things that had gone together in my history. My most intense previous experience of control over my surroundings was possession of the ornamental Chinese box given me by Ben Nevin at Vulcan. A precious enclosure, but not large enough to accommodate so much as a pack of playing cards or, more importantly, a full tube of depilatory cream.

Now I had room for whole vats of Immac, if I had wanted, and could have kept them safe from pilferers. The Immac, incidentally, had done its work, and more than its work. I was making no efforts to suppress the sprouting of my beard, but it was chemically damaged and never grew quite right. There were irregular patches where nothing much happened. Unfortunately they were more on one side than the other, perhaps because I laid the stuff on thick where I could reach most easily. I didn’t try to shave what I had, all the same. I had enough on my plate without razor chores. My growth, however substandard, didn’t draw attention to itself in a whole university town full of scrappy facial hair.

Possession of a key transformed my status. It conferred so many privileges: the knowledge that no one could enter the room in my absence (except, theoretically, the Head Porter, who had a master key). Control of any admission while I was in. Privacy and security, necessary elements of the much-touted ‘peace of mind’.

All this amounted to a huge step forward. My key practically defined me as an adult — far more than my beard did. Children, invalids, prisoners, the mad. None of these gets the key to his room. Thanks to the smiling authorities of Downing College, Cambridge, I was gathered in from my life on the margins. I was not only mature and well but free to roam, and certified sane into the bargain. I was in control of my own life. I was my own doorkeeper. I had the key to freedom.

It took me a couple of weeks to realise that I didn’t like it. That is, I enjoyed not having inferior status, but I didn’t like locking my door, or even closing it. I hadn’t come to a university to shut myself away. It was at home that I sometimes wanted to do that. It was at Trees, Bourne End, that a key to the bedroom would have come in very handy from time to time. At Trees I could have become a recluse very happily between meals, ignoring Mum’s anxious knocks, thinking my own thoughts and steadily filling a whole array of urine bottles like a penniless little Howard Hughes, while my beard grew long on the one side only.

The other door to the room at Trees, the one which gave wheelchair access to the great outdoors, would always be left open wide, unless there was a blizzard or Mum tried to sneak up and spy on me from that vantage point. Even when automatic doors à la Starship Enterprise , with their soothing whoosh, become standard, I’ll be sentimental about the peerless charm of an open door. An open door offers me my only real chance of catching someone by surprise. Leaving the door open being also my best way to arrange to be surprised myself.

In any case for me the difference between a closed door and a locked one isn’t as great as all that. It’s almost a technicality. I went through a brief phase of leaving my door unlocked, though I tried to remember to take the key with me when I went out, in case Mrs Beddoes or some other authorised person innocently locked the door on my behalf. Then one day I came back to find a stranger dozing in the Parker-Knoll. It was the junkie who regularly fixed up in the lavatories. He didn’t make trouble, just shambled off on command like a dog in disgrace, but after that I took security more seriously.

Every possible insult

Back in Bourne End the floor of the room I shared with Peter was bare lino. In A6 Kenny I did at last have carpet. The college authorities were less worried about the problem of my tracking mud across internal spaces than Mum — perhaps it came under the heading, from their point of view, of fair wear and tear. For Mum, wear and tear could never be fair, since everything was part of a conspiracy to make her look slovenly in her mother’s eyes. Wear and tear was always unfair.