Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

One evening I came home late with a slightly rowdy party. We had made a ritual journey across the modest urban lawn of Parker’s Piece to pay our respects to Reality Checkpoint — no more than an elaborate Victorian lamp-post, really, ornamented with a motif of dolphins, but universally known by the phrase painted on its plinth. By common consent Reality Checkpoint offered reassurance to those who got lost while voyaging strange seas of thought alone and artificially bewildered by drugs. It was a pilot light to rekindle the snuffed spirits of those trapped between dimensions.

Then nothing would content the group but to play games with the traffic lights, or rather with the mechanism that made them change. There was some sort of sensor buried under a heavyweight rubber strip, which counted the cars passing over it and triggered the lights to change when a predetermined number had been reached. This seemed to the group an astoundingly sophisticated piece of technology and also (here I parted company from the general mood) something that cried out for a bit of tampering.

A lot of good my dissidence did me. The idea was to bounce the wheelchair back and forth on the decision-making flange, persuading it that cars were massing in large numbers and that the lights must therefore change. There was no logic to the use of the wheelchair, since weight was the issue and John plus wheelchair was lighter than any one of my companions, but then the logic of the group was purely alcoholic. The evening had been alcohological for some time, and I looked up at the events unfolding around me with a sour sobriety.

Returning to college had an edge of melancholy and resentment for me. My passengers didn’t necessarily share this mood, and would get up to pranks and high jinks. All very amusing, until someone fell over my foot.

Someone. Mentioning no names. You know who you are — don’t you, Stephen Morris?

All right, it wasn’t quite as innocent as all that. My pals were busy uprooting the stanchion, and though I hadn’t exactly put them up to it I was silently cheering them on. The stanchion was quite feebly rooted in concrete, like an ailing tooth, and it came out quite suddenly, which was when Stephen stumbled backwards and fell over my foot.

I had been all in favour of vandalism until I was vandalised myself. Still, I had a couple of weeks of significantly easier access to my room until the repairs were done. By then my foot had stopped hurting quite so much, and the world and I were back at our usual loggerheads.

Even so the Mini brought more joy than anything else. There were many trips in that little car which resembled rehearsals for world record attempts in the human compression category. Only the observers from the Guinness Book of Records were missing. We were always fitting one more person in. And then one more.

If the Mini was 120 inches long, 55 wide and 53 high (though obviously you have to discount the distance between the ground and the bottom of the car), then you subtract the measurements of the boot and the engine and you get … my maths isn’t what it was, but I’d estimate the interior volume as being between 127 and 134 cubic feet. Call it 130. Not a lot when, like most of my passengers, you’re built like a Greek god, except for your English inability to look people in the eye, or anywhere near it.

There might be as many as four outsized knees jammed up against my back in the driver’s seat, so close that I could feel the freckles on them. If ever I did take the Mini for a drive on my own, it seemed to ride unnaturally high on its axles. When the suspension didn’t bump it felt as if there was something wrong.

All this driving placed a lot of strain on my shoulder, which could freeze even in the warmest weather. Three-point turns were my nightmare — despite Dad’s best drilling, they tended to have five or seven points. So one summer evening my passengers sweetly relieved me of the need to perform them.

There were four of them, strapping boys who had been playing cricket on Parker’s Piece before I drove us all to Midsummer Common for a pint in a pub they liked. They wore their hair at a timidly daring length, creeping down over the collar, enough to needle their parents when they visited Cambridge for the ritual of Sunday lunch at the Blue Boar — roast flesh carved from the trolley, and is it so hard to find a proper tie? — but far too short to impress their contemporaries.

The pub was popular, and parking spaces were very limited. ‘Just stop here,’ said one of the party, and they all got out, innocently slamming the doors with a force driven from the shoulder and suited to flinging a ball or wielding a bat. If the windows had been closed I imagine my eardrums would have burst. There’s an anvil in the ear, you know, and those doors banged like hammers.

After a little chat in murmurs the lads took up positions round the car and simply picked it up, taking advantage of those open windows to get a good grip.

They lifted the Mini as if it weighed nothing at all. It wasn’t a heavyweight among cars, admittedly, and now it was transfigured and airborne, levitated into the balmy Cambridge evening by eight beefy arms. I’m a leg man myself, a leg man to my fingertips, but I have to say that I enjoyed watching the arms I could see from the driving seat, the tanned ones and the pale with freckles. I could see white shirts with rolled-up sleeves, and summer sweat staining the armpits. There are days when the world seems entirely peopled with giants, but this was an evening when I felt I could meet anyone’s eye and hold anyone’s gaze.

Truthful bitterness of hops

After they had parked the car and I had struggled out of it they picked me up in a compact version of the same formation and conveyed me in state to the outside seating area of the pub. It was like riding in some human sedan chair.

Local people had grazing rights on the Common, and while we sipped our drinks we could hear horses tearing up mouthfuls of grass, that placid ripping. I like the way horses’ eyes are set in their heads, on a soft edge in a long skull. That’s a particularly pleasing touch.

These young men were cider drinkers, leaving me with my half of bitter to claim maturity of taste. Their green palates preferred apple sweetness to the truthful bitterness of hops. I spent most of the evening perched on one broad knee or other. I would have one sturdy arm wrapped round me while the other hand took care of the precious pint of cider. Dandled by the group I listened to the conversation with abstract rapture.

Young people at university at that time behaved as if they spent their days in the underground youth culture of resistance and revolution, surfacing only rarely to deal with The Man (by attending a lecture or supervision). Every now and then they might have to have lunch with those aliens their parents. Asked what they were going to do with their lives, students would give rambling answers in which the words ‘kibbutz’, ‘start a band’ and ‘underground newspaper’ stood out.

Lads like these cider drinkers, sons of doctors and solicitors in county towns, mumbled less convincingly than most. Their hearts weren’t in it. The turmoil of youth and social upheaval would pass like the measles, leaving most of them unchanged, without even a scar. What’s that folksy saying? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree (unless it’s wrenched tenderly off the branch to make cider). This was a period when the apple was determined to turn into an orange or a pomegranate. I loved this attitude all the more because I couldn’t share it. This banana doesn’t change his spots.

Even among themselves these young men stuck devotedly to the generational clichés. Asked why he had turned up late to play cricket, one of them said, ‘I couldn’t get my act together.’ ‘And what act was that, pray?’ I wondered to myself dreamily. ‘Billy Smart’s Circus? The Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Is it too much to expect that you be punctual, since you’re installed in a body that anticipates your every wish?’ I’ve always been slightly cracked on the subject of timekeeping. I admit it.