Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

She took him back, but sensibly kept him on a short rein. No student girlfriend could have had him so completely under her thumb. Helen, who was crisp, organised and already in work, seemed very grown-up.

When Helen first saw me she said, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Making yoghurt,’ I said, to which she replied with the greatest cheerfulness, ‘How revolting!’ We got on well from the start, though she had no plans to share the limited time she had with Pete. She pressed him to give up smoking (so that he could contribute to her travelling expenses, as was only right), which tended to prevent him from coming to my room after meals. Helen had no interest in plants, so it was handy that I had learned to dispense with Pete’s services as botanical escort at weekends.

He wasn’t entirely at ease with the company after meals at A6 anyway. He had acquired a nickname he disliked, and in a way it was his own fault. Like many people studying a language he was struck by the limited sounds of Russian (while of course forcing his tongue to master intricacies unknown in English). One day he happened to mention that there was no H in Rooshian, so that his own name, Hughes, would be pronounced Gooks . What he said wasn’t exactly ‘Gooks’, but that was what people decided they heard, and he was Peter Gooks after that, or just ‘Gooks’. I tried to set up a counter-tradition by calling him Pyotr or Petrushka instead, but no one ever used those fond forms but me.

Sites of sordid suffering

I’ve always been a slow eater, and always will be, but the improvement in what we ate in Hall made Alan Linton also linger over his food. Mealtimes became companionable, now that we could bask in the envious glances of our flesh-eating fellows, who would chew their corrupt rations in grim haste. Our plates were not sites of sordid suffering, and our forks were not burdened with karma.

The slow pace of eating suited rambling chat, but I was running out of subjects. I had qualms by now about turning my summer in India into a party piece. In any case it often fell flat. In practice, telling people about my sojourn as guest of the mountain only prompted questions about Indian restaurants. Which was better, the Sylhet or the Curry Centre on Castle Hill? I had no idea. I had spotted a restaurant called the Curry Queen on Mill Road, and had decided it would be my first port of call, but I hadn’t got round to it yet.

In those days even educated people knew only a tiny handful of words in any Indian language, and one of them was always Sutra. Another was Karma. I spent a lot of time explaining that the Kama in Kama Sutra was not the same thing as the Karma the hippies held so dear. To make the distinction clear I would roll the r in Karma exaggeratedly, until my whole brain shook in its moorings from the force of the alveolar trill.

In early days there was another obvious subject of conversation. For the amusement of my fellow-students in Hall I would imitate Mrs Beddoes, giving her an exaggeratedly strangulated voice which swooped from would-be posh to common in a single sentence. I don’t know how this fool’s route to popularity ranked, when set beside the folly of buying rounds indiscriminately in the college bar. Rather lower, I suspect.

I was repeating past successes in the rôle of raconteur, from the times I had beguiled the dorm at Vulcan with a thousand variations on themes of sexual passion and home cooking. Bit by bit I worked Mrs Beddoes up into a character, exaggerating her very mild mispronunciations and odd patterns of stress. ‘Oh Mr Crow- maire , if you really think my duties extend to tidying up after your friends you’re very much mis- taiken . Alf (that’s my husband) always tells me I do too much for others, but then Mr Crow- maire you are a child of God as good as any. Better than most.

‘All well and good, Jean, says Alf-that’s-my-husband, but if I’ve told you once I’ve told you times without number, your endless service to others may well se- coor your place in the blue hereafter, but what about the here and now, eh?

‘By which he generally means his tea.’

Such routines were much in demand, and if I didn’t announce a performance with a single stylised sniff the cry would go up of, ‘Come on John, entertain us. Do the bedder, she’s priceless.’ It was reassuring to have a routine that reliably brought approval.

It was only gradually that I became uncomfortable. Wasn’t I traducing the person who had shown me most friendliness, an intimacy without demands? (A cup of tea freely offered is a small miracle of consideration.) I determined to stop.

I wasn’t brave or self-righteous enough to lecture my faithful audience on the misrepresentation we were conspiring to perpetrate, to announce Mrs Beddoes in so many words as the salt of the earth without which there would be no savour. My conscience pushed me in the opposite direction from the one I had taken historically, not towards wilder flights but a greater fidelity. I added in more and more of the humble details — the caravan outside Beccles, the deaf sister in Waterbeach. Eventually people stopped asking me to ‘do’ Mrs Beddoes, and neighbours in Hall who had missed the performance for a while would receive frantic signals not to egg me on.

Ribs in the head

All in all there has been quite a lot of eye-rolling in my immediate vicinity down the years, just outside my line of sight, or just within it when people have underestimated my peripheral vision. Most of the useful information I have gathered has reached me out of the tail of my eye.

With Alan I found myself talking about homœopathy. As a medical student, he was biased against therapies not based on the Western tradition, but he wasn’t entirely opposed to new ideas. His mind was neither open nor shut, but ajar. I argued that homœopathy was a Western tradition in itself.

I emphasised that homœopathy individuates, taking each person as a separate unit, while conventional science generalises and expects the same results to hold for everyone. Alan was intrigued by the unimportance in homœopathy of theory without result, its sheer practicality as a set of techniques.

As always when homœopathy was the subject in those years, I was at least partly thinking about something else. Similes similibus amentur , if you like. I had heard of something called the Gay Liberation Front, which sounded angry rather than loving, and in any case hadn’t yet forced itself on my attention in the university or the town.

I asked Alan if he knew the story of the 1854 cholera epidemic in London. ‘Bloody hell, John,’ he said. ‘I am a medical student, you know. I know a little bit about the history of diseases and a few things about the human body. This is my third year of study, so I even know that the ribs aren’t located in the head.’ I rather enjoyed being on the receiving end of some sarcasm. It gingered me up. Normally people get rather mealy-mouthed in my vicinity. ‘So if you’re referring to the discovery of the water-borne transmission of cholera, and how the doughty John Snow saved lives in Soho by taking the handle off the Broad Street pump, then yes, I know the story of the 1854 cholera epidemic.’

He had taken the bait. ‘Then you know about the report on the epidemic prepared for Parliament by the Board of Health.’

‘What about it?’

‘The exclusion from it of the data from the Homœopathic Hospital in Golden Square, which was in the middle of the outbreak.’ After my visit to Great Ormond Street I had discovered that it wasn’t the original London base of homœopathy.

He went rather quiet. ‘I’m a little vague about that. Remind me.’

‘The Homœopathic Hospital gave the information as requested — names and addresses of patients, symptoms, remedies and results. The whole hospital had been given over to victims of the epidemic. Out of 61 cases of cholera, 10 died — a mortality of 16.4 %. At the Middlesex Hospital nearby, 123 died out of 231. A mortality of over 50 %. Under protest the Board of Health released these figures, which had been kept out of the original tally.’