Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

The restaurant was hardly one which Granny would have recognised as such, what with the chipped plates and the unmatched cutlery. But there was one little waiter, from the Philippines I think, who was vaguely reminiscent of the waiter at the Compleat Angler, so expert at buttering up a woman who prided herself on immunity to flattery.

This Filipino would sometimes ask an undergraduate for a phone number as well as his address on the back of a cheque. This was in the days before cheque guarantee cards, when no pledge more formal than an address was required. He certainly took the name of the establishment at face value. The god of boyish desire threw arrow after arrow into his heart, till it must have had the pitted texture of a pub dartboard.

I was the only one who seemed to notice the glaring inappropriateness of the extra request. This waiter only asked the pretty ones for this detail, and was perhaps shrewd enough to ask only parties whom wine had fuddled. Not shrewd enough, though, to realise that the numbers he was given were never more intimate than those of the public phones on some privileged staircases, which took incoming calls. The best he could hope for was pot luck. Perhaps the right person would pick up the phone and hear the plaintive murmur of ‘Here is Eros boy. You are nice James?’

Some of the letters which the porters kindly delivered to A6 were government circulars to do with decimal currency, which would be introduced in February of 1971. These circulars with their jaunty tone nevertheless managed to suggest that decimal currency was an impossibly difficult challenge for young, old and everyone in between. I determined to master it. Time is an illusion, absolutely right — but that’s no excuse for being stuck in the past.

By the time my Heffers bill for the term arrived I was well ahead of the game. Laboriously I converted all the sums from pounds shillings and pence into New Pennies, and wrote out a cheque accordingly. There’s a thin line between being cheeky-charming and getting people’s backs up, and I don’t always know which side I’m on. Heffers returned the cheque, with a wry covering letter saying they were impressed by my preparedness for change, not to mention my computational skills, but would I mind replacing the old cheque drawn on the new system with a new one drawn on the old?

The tides of history were rising over Britannia’s knees on the big old dirty copper penny, but she hadn’t been swept away just yet. I can’t help feeling it would have been more fun if Heffers had given me credit as a pioneer of the new world of sensibly divisible money, by holding on to the cheque for a couple of months, till it ripened into legal validity.

When I went home for the Christmas vacation I didn’t know what sort of welcome I would get from the family. By the family I mean Mum. The others were dependable in their ways. Peter would be quietly happy, Audrey would blow hot and cold, and Dad would greet me absently, as if he was pretty sure he knew me but couldn’t remember the context.

I even considered staying in Cambridge over the vacation, though Hall would close down and I would have to cater for myself. I would also need my Tutor’s permission, which pretty much ruled it out. Graëme Beamish had obviously made a resolution, well ahead of the New Year, to refuse any further requests from the occupant of A6 Kenny. I made a resolution not to put his resolution to the test.

In the event Mum was warm and gracious, very much on best behaviour. It seemed that at last she accepted me having a home elsewhere. I wouldn’t keep coming home if she made it an ordeal when I did. It made a difference that she was having great trouble with Audrey.

Audrey was hardly more than ten, but her wilfulness was phenomenal. She would never back down. Sometimes I think she was frightened by her own anger. She wasn’t alone in that.

The present I remember most fondly from my twenty-first birthday (it did for Christmas as well) was a purse containing twenty-one fifty-pence pieces. The coins were legal tender already, as ten shillingses, though I felt honour-bound to wait until decimalisation dawned to spend them. This was from my other grandmother, Dad’s mother. We hardly ever saw her. By this time she was retired, living in a part of Edinburgh called Hunters Tryst, which I loved even before I learned that it was pronounced to rhyme with ‘Christ’. She was a rather childlike creature who had spent most of her life running her own little gift shop, specialising in glass animals. She was always feeling sorry for people and giving them ridiculous discounts. Not much of a businesswoman. Eventually the shop burned down, and we learned that it had never been insured. She seemed remarkably calm about it, saying that she had had fun out of it for years and years without doing anyone any harm, and that was the main thing, wasn’t it?

Freshly minted heptagons

Perhaps no one can watch everything they care about going up in flames without feeling a certain lifting of the spirits. Few of us get the chance to find out, and so we pay lip-service to the notion of catastrophe.

She said she would have liked to send me the full twenty-one pounds, but her funds wouldn’t stretch so far. I was very pleased with my stack of coins. Peter too was impressed by my new purse bursting with freshly minted heptagons, and asked who had given it to me. ‘Granny,’ I said, and then, seeing his incredulous expression, ‘The other one. Nice Granny.’ There was no implied criticism of the one who came first in our minds, the ur-Granny, who wouldn’t have thought much of an unconditional gift. For her, presents came into the same category as kites, balloons and aprons, having strings attached by definition.

Dad’s mum loved animals even when they weren’t made of glass. As a child I asked her, where do the animals go? Go after death. And she said, ‘I’m sure there’s a little corner of heaven God keeps for animals.’ A paddock in paradise — why not? It’s what Nice Granny would have provided herself.

The only limit on her niceness was that she didn’t love her children. Nature and strangers but not her own children. A worm in a jar was ‘a perfect lamb’ (as she had said once), but her own children were perfect nuisances. When children got to be about eight years old they began to be bearable to her — they were allowed to say goodbye to her then, gently clasping the tip of her outstretched finger.

Luckily there was Midge to bring them up, a local girl who had joined Nice Granny’s household when she was twelve and never left. When Nice Granny was getting old Midge said she wanted the house, and Nice Granny said, Then you’d better have it.

Understandably Dad had no more than a pained fondness for his mother, and a deep though resentful bond with Midge. If it turned out that his mother hadn’t put anything in the will about Midge getting the house, he would certainly have seen her right.

I spent a lot of time getting my thanks about my birthday down on paper, which was probably wasted effort. There’s nothing that introduces a false note into a thank-you letter more reliably than actual gratitude. It’s a container that can accommodate almost anything more easily than what it was specifically designed to hold. A sincere thank-you letter is a live chick pecking its way out of a dyed egg on an Easter table-decoration, and giving everyone a turn.

Returning to Cambridge after Christmas didn’t exactly feel like a home-coming, but there were fewer possibilities for explosion and upset on Kenny A staircase than in Bourne End. It was too peaceful to feel like home. I almost felt I was getting to know the ropes.

Jean Beddoes had started to confide in me — not about private matters, though I could have compiled a fair-sized dossier on her husband’s health from what she let slip on the subject, and I picked up a certain amount of information about her money worries. It was more when she felt out of her depth as a bedmaker that she would come to me for advice. One day, for instance, she told me that she didn’t know what to do about a student on my staircase. Should she report him to the college authorities, or was it none of her business? She couldn’t make up her mind.