Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

When I took a closer look at the carpet, I saw that every possible insult that could be offered to a floor covering had already been visited on it and been (more or less) wiped, hoovered and scrubbed away, darkening the overall tone of the textile.

I was a little embarrassed about being cleaned for. It was partly that I didn’t want a servant — if I was condemned to having a servant I wanted one who would be more useful to me. I tried to show Mrs Beddoes that most forms of clearing up merely made things inaccessible to me. As far as I was concerned, tidying up was only hiding with a whiff of self-righteousness. Books, for instance, needed to stay on the front section of the desk if they were to remain within my reach. She nodded uncertainly, and after that she mostly left my things where I wanted them.

What I really needed, if I had to have help of some sort, was help with washing. Dressing I could manage, and laundry wasn’t too much of a problem — there was a service which collected and made deliveries. Bathing was much harder work than washing clothes. I would have been delighted if there had been a similar service operating — to send this body off for laundering and get it back neatly folded and smelling fresh.

The toilet arrangements were satisfactory — in fact, since (naturally enough) the other students tended to avoid the cubicle with my commode parked in it, it was very much the cleanest of the three, the best of a bad bunch.

Bathing was a different matter. In the bathroom of A staircase, Kenny Court, I had to run a bath and transfer myself from the wheelchair to a hoist supported by a rail on the ceiling. It was reasonably manageable. I would lay two ‘canvas’ (actually synthetic) straps crosswise on the seat of the wheelchair before sitting down on it. Each strap had a ring on the end, which had to be slipped over the hoist’s hook. These technical descriptions are hopeless! Better to imagine the picture on the front of a standard christening card. Now substitute me for the baby in the sling of cloth, and an engine attached to the ceiling (dangling a hook) for the stork.

I would rise in my cradle into the cold air of the bathroom, negotiate myself into the right position and lower myself into the water, pulling on the appropriate strings to turn the motor on and off. Green for Go and red for Stop. Even when I was in the water I had to stay in the harness of the hoist. I would conjure some suds from the soap onto a flannel, then perch the flannel on the end of my stick and poke at the outlying parts of this body, but I was relying more on the power of hot water to magic away dirt than anything else. The bare bones of this routine were familiar from life at Trees, where the bathroom ceiling was also fitted with a rail, but I was used to having help or at least company.

I’m not usually much of a wallower in baths. Experiences at the hands of a sadistic physiotherapist employed at CRX had more or less broken any link for me between bodies of water and peace of mind, though I’d felt safe enough in the pool at Burnham, surrounded by my fellows. My ‘shamming’ in the bath at Trees was never very prolonged, even though I was surrounded by family. It was a sort of trance state, all the same, so much so that I wonder if a spore of language, the word shaman , hadn’t been what originally drifted into Dad’s mind. Despite his own best efforts, Dad was rather good at inklings. He preferred not to tune into other people’s awareness, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself.

In the tub on A staircase, Kenny Court, though, I would lie there till the water grew cold. Not wallowing so much as postponing the inevitable. I knew it was going to be such an almighty effort to heave my bones out of the soapy broth and get out again.

Lowered back into the wheelchair, I had only to detach the straps from the hook and I was free, though the overall expenditure of effort had been enormous. The whole business of taking a bath single-handed was like manning some assembly line, whose only end product was myself, wet and often shivering, but with some claim to being clean.

Help getting bathed would have changed my undergraduate life more than any other single factor, but I didn’t know anyone well enough to ask and I had set myself against making friendships based on need. The most I dared do was ask a passer-by or staircase-mate to close the quarter-light window in the bathroom to keep the heat in.

A large towel is unmanageable, a small one isn’t up to the job. Towelling was rather a frustrating process altogether, and it made sense to wait for the laws of nature to finish the job. Given time, drying is something which happens on its own.

There was no point in waiting in the bathroom when my room was so much warmer, so I would set off home in the wheelchair, discreetly draped in a towel. Remembering my school science lessons I said to myself, ‘This is no more than an observation of the phenomenon of the loss of latent heat of evaporation,’ and my body had indeed lost a lot of heat by the time I was back in my room, thanks to the movement of air (and my own trundling) in the bathroom and corridor. If I was colder then, logically, I was also drier.

Elves with hairdryers

Being back in the warm was a great luxury. It was tropical! It wasn’t long before I was almost dry. Of course my shoulders lost heat more quickly than my bottom, and my bottom was still damp when the rest of me was dry. Ideally, if my body had allowed the position, I would have lain face down on the bed while National Health elves with hairdryers played warm currents of air across my backside. As it was, I would ease myself up onto the carpet, whose traction enabled me to raise my bum from the seat of the chair, and then retrieve the still-damp straps from underneath me. Sometimes I would have to take them back into the bathroom personally, but usually I could ‘volunteer’ a student to take them back to the bathroom and hang them up for me ready for next time.

That sort of ‘volunteering’ can only be an emergency measure — language itself rebels against intransitive verbs being turned inside out like that, like umbrellas in a hurricane, and the social fabric is damaged by people’s helpfulness being forced instead of being allowed to open out like a blossom in its own sweet time. But as far as I was concerned, in my Cambridge period, that was just too bad. Jump to it! I haven’t got all year.

I didn’t do much home-making in my new premises, but I did pamper myself with a couple of indulgences that had been forbidden at home. First I bought joss-sticks and lit them, an act banned at home. Dad explained, ‘The thing about joss-sticks, incense, all that sort of stuff, is … you see, they can disguise all sorts of other smells …’ And I had said, ‘I know. Isn’t it marvellous?’ I missed the point, I failed to twig. Dad wasn’t referring to the standard male fug of a shared bedroom but to the smell of cannabis. Mary Jane, goblin weed, eater of souls. No doubt cannabis made people do many strange things in those years, but one of the strangest was to make parents sniff around their children like police dogs at airports.

At Trees I had wanted a red lightbulb in my room, to make it more like a shrine, but this suggestion also created alarm. Mum and Dad didn’t seem to be attuned to the effect I wanted to create, that receptive spiritual aura. The disapproving term Mum used was ‘boudoir’, while Dad’s phrase was ‘knocking-shop’. So I simply draped a piece of red cloth over an existing bulb, and gave their opposition a united front. Fire risk. Concern for safety masked something more mysterious, a moral disapproval of coloured light. In my best surly-hippy manner I muttered, ‘You’d tax the ruddy rainbow if you could find its home address. You’re a disgrace to the Age of Aquarius.’ Not that I believed any of that guff.