Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Hoff also favoured tinned ham risotto, not necessarily a dish which Italians would recognise or claim credit for. This too he ate from the tin, unheated, gaining access with a small opener, no more than a blade with a flange, which he worked round the edge of the tin with a vigorous rocking motion. Under the jagged lid, when at last he lifted it, were yellowed grains of rice and reddish cubes of ham. Among them nestled amber pearls of fat.

All these tins, heavy with karma even when empty, went into my waste-paper basket. Mrs Beddoes would frown as she retrieved them, though she must have known without needing to ask that these were not relics of binges on my part.

Girlfriends weren’t exempt from Hoff’s mathematical calculations, though in that department of economic affairs I think the unit was the pound-orgasm rather than the penny-calorie. A girl who gave him the full penile thrill for less than fifteen shillings (though no doubt he was learning to say ‘seventy-five new pence’ like everyone else) would stay on his books.

Not necessary to celebrate Hitler’s birthday

So when Jean Beddoes expressed worry about Hoff I thought that perhaps a conquest of his had left some incriminating item in his room — panties in the bed, perhaps, at the least. Perhaps a number of pairs. Then she said, ‘I think Mr Hoffman must be a fascist. A proper fascist.’

This was a startling thing for a bedmaker to say in 1971. It wasn’t a startling thing for an undergraduate to say, of course. By this time the word was an entirely unspecific term of disapproval — it wasn’t necessary to wear jackboots in the street or celebrate Hitler’s birthday to earn the label. Jumping the meal queue in Hall was quite enough.

Mrs Beddoes, though, must mean something different. ‘What makes you think so?’ I asked. Miserably she produced something from her pinny pocket. It was an item of clothing — I’d got that right. Not panties, though, or anything else belonging to a girl. It was a bundled pair of socks. I turned them over awkwardly in my hands, completely baffled. Mrs Beddoes reached over to unroll them and exposed the shocking truth. The socks — black, nylon — were neatly labelled with blue Cash’s name-tapes, and the name they carried was BENITO MUSSOLINI.

‘It isn’t just his socks,’ she whispered. ‘ That name is on everything he wears.’

Mrs Beddoes didn’t actually think that Hoff was wearing a dead dictator’s nylon socks, but she certainly thought the name-tapes represented a homage to sinister politics. I tried to talk her round.

I explained that it wasn’t any more ominous that he had the Duce’s name on all his things than that he had it in his socks. It only meant that the minimum order for Cash’s name-tapes was a hundred, and that he was a dab hand with a sewing-machine, no doubt smirking as he stitched smugly away.

I managed to persuade Mrs Beddoes that it was just the sort of silly thing Hoff would do, a stupid prank that only a clever person would dream up. I think I did her a favour by persuading her that this wasn’t a matter for the college authorities. Any investigation would show Hoff up as an idiot, nothing worse, but it would make her known as an oppressive snoop, and the word ‘fascist’ would settle on her for good.

I tackled Hoff directly about the name-tapes, the next time he sat near me in Hall. He seemed delighted to have caused so much confusion and distress, but also made out that he was making a serious philosophical point. If labels served the purpose of distinguishing one person’s property from anyone else’s, then Mussolini name-tapes would do the job just as well on A staircase as Hoffman ones.

He boasted of other footling projects. He had posed as Joseph Stalin to procure library tickets and opened a Post Office account in the name of Karl Marx. His long-term goal was to persuade a bank to set up an account for himself as Mussolini, without changing his name by Deed Poll or Statutory Declaration, which he regarded as an inadmissible short cut.

Hoff was above such fetishes (and extravagances) as Christmas presents, but others were more sentimental. I was clearly making an impact on Downing, to judge by the fact of receiving as presents not one but two copies of Christy Brown’s Down All The Days , an autobiographical novel by an Irish spastic whose condition (doubly athetoid) was particularly severe. I suppose one could have been for Christmas, the other for the birthday which trailed along behind Jesus’s.

I don’t think they were telling me to count my blessings, exactly, though Brown’s disability certainly put mine in the shade — this was cerebral palsy beyond anything I saw at Vulcan.

I tried to like the book, at least I think I did. I didn’t care for the style, though, which was all rather clottedly poetic, as if the poor man was afflicted by an inflamed blarney duct on top of his other troubles. My reservations about the book must have made me seem churlish and hard to please. It was as if I’d been served the vegetarian option in a restaurant, and had sent it back just to be difficult. Bad John, wicked John. So ungrateful, after all the trouble people have gone to. A wicked part of me speculated that if they’d met Christy Brown in person, rather than through a book, they wouldn’t have been able to understand a word he tried to say. And perhaps that was the way they preferred it.

I didn’t need to wait till spring to get started on another Voodoo Lily. Providentially the bulbs were available at the seed merchants. The bulbs were as eager as I was. They were even attractively priced, perhaps because they were so ready for planting they were jumping the gun. The protuberance on one had already started to seek the light. I bought that one in preference to any other, knowing there wouldn’t be so long to wait. Next time Whiffy Barry wouldn’t miss his inflorescent cousin. He promised to come at a moment’s notice.

When the day of the second Voodoo Lily’s flowering arrived I sent Whiffy Barry a message to come at once. Mrs Beddoes took a keen interest in what was going on, and was very willing to run the errand for me. Like any victim of a practical joke, she couldn’t wait to see it played on someone else, not realising that Barry as a botanist was well prepared for what had caused her so much dismay.

She returned to tell me that Mr Barry would be along soon. ‘Today of all days,’ she said, ‘he’s taking a bath.’ She hoovered the room, then settled down in the Parker-Knoll with a cup of tea. She was enjoying herself. It wasn’t every day she could eavesdrop on a miniature botanical congress, convened to inspect the plant which had played such a mean trick on her.

I took another look at the star of the show. Sauromatum ’s purple-and-brown-spotted hood reared up like a cobra behind the glistening spadix. The smell was entirely disgusting, but there was a deep spiritual message latent here. If I had described the smell to Bhagavan as disgusting, he would certainly have replied, ‘Disgusting for whom?’ Then I would have had to enter the deepest sanctum of awareness, embarking on the vichara (Self-Enquiry). The answer was that it was disgusting for me. And who am I?

His date with Voodoo Lily

It wasn’t disgusting if you were a fly, that was for certain. I pretended to be a fly and tried to tell myself that the smell was beautiful, but still I felt sick. I asked Mrs Beddoes to open the windows to their widest, which she did rather unwillingly — there had been no such concession when she was the one being tested — but the smell was still overpowering. It took a lot of determination to stay in the room.

Then there was a knock at the door and Barry came in. Mrs Beddoes was so much at home by now that she gave a happy little yawn and a wave of the hand. Barry had done more than just take a bath. He had smartened himself up considerably for his date with Voodoo Lily. He was wearing tight (and crisply ironed) black flannel trousers and a white shirt. He had the instruments of dissection in one hand and a clipboard in the other.