Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

In fact I was enjoying myself too much to make trouble. As I was passed from lap to lap over the course of the evening, I tried to see if there was even one of these young groins that didn’t stir when sat upon at the proper angle. In every lap there was a hydraulic response ignored by its owner. Young flesh salutes a change of pressure. It’s a purely barometric pleasure.

Meanwhile I enjoyed their stoical conventionality, their casual social weight. These were men as reliable as the rhythms of a hymn, sung by a congregation with most of its mind on Sunday lunch. Was there also something left over from public-school loneliness, the residue of tears after lights-out? I like stolidity and stolid men, the slow processing of emotions. It’s a great luxury not to respond right away. The redhead of the group must have been told three times a week since he went to kindergarten that his colouring gave him an ungovernable temper, and he was still stupendously phlegmatic.

At the end of the evening I was carried back to the car in the same processional fashion as I had been delivered to the pub. I loved being so high above the ground yet feeling so safe. Even if one of my bearers stumbled the others would keep their footing. When I was at school at Vulcan, one of the boys had tried to run away to be a truck driver’s mate — perhaps this was really what he wanted, not just rough company and the dream of sounding the horn, but the elevation of the cab.

The Mini certainly had a comical aspect to eyes enlightened by drink, hemmed in so snugly by its neighbours. It looked like something dropped from the sky, or else thrust up by stage machinery. After I had been slid tenderly into the driving seat, my four porters picked up the car again, disengaging it from its narrow space and then serenely rotating it in the middle of the road, to save me the trouble of making the turn myself. The evening was still light, and there was no real need to turn the headlights on, but I did it for the sense of occasion.

Why is this memory so radiant, verging on the radioactive? It wasn’t just the beauty of the young men which powered my joy. Of course mammals spend a lot of their energy trying either to generate heat or to lose it, and there’s something peculiarly inviting to happiness about those moments when we are at one with our surroundings without having to work to make it so. Our bodies can turn off the fans and radiators for a while. We stop squandering energy to maintain the status quo. Summer night a case in point, bringing the human body close to the bliss of the reptile, organism which submits without a struggle to the conditions in which it finds itself.

Those tiny spasms

There were more specific inducements to happiness. The smell of earlier sweat, relatively fresh but dried in, voluptuously blended with grass smells, released and combined with new secretions as the young men exerted themselves in an improvised sport calling for a different sort of teamwork. The slightly laboured breathing of healthy young people, within earshot of each other, trying to pretend to be that little bit fitter than they were. The sound of cricket boots on road metal, long paces, regular gait, the crunch of the little nails on their soles, ominous, military, but also like little boys wearing Dad’s shoes and wanting to sound just like him, striding with a manliness maintained by conscious effort. There’s so much poignancy in the state of trying to be a man, nothing remotely comparable about being one.

The boy nearest to me outside the driver’s window, the stolid redhead, was suffering from singultus . In Latin a sob, in English no more than a hiccup. He had the hiccups, and those tiny spasms translated into a strangely seductive rhythmic lurch of the whole vehicle. The involuntary movement hiccups gave his arm had a knock-on effect on his neighbour, the lad outside the passenger window. Their positions made eye contact hard to avoid, and then other factors entered in, cider and laughter. The cider caused the hiccups, it amplified and distorted the laughter, and soon the whole body of the car was faintly vibrating with the hilarity of those who carried it. The infinitesimal rocking that comes from being slightly out of step in a concerted task was subjected to an interference pattern of hiccups and laughter. Waves rippled back and forth, disrupting themselves and each other, complex functions on a graph of exhilaration.

I was whispering ‘Mush!’ to a team of very English huskies, on eight strong laughing arms, eight cider-drunk hiccupping legs, as if I would never need to deal with life on the flat, and yet I didn’t really want to linger. I enjoyed a brief swirl of people in carbonated moments, as long as the bubbles were guaranteed to burst. I liked to be held and then passed on.

I was still dictating terms to Maya, and she always agreed to them, but she does that, doesn’t she? She gets you caught in her trap by letting you design it yourself. She gives you a free hand. She plays along.

Mum and Dad were only mildly disturbed by my proposed change of subject. Of course I didn’t present it as any sort of defeat. I could tell them perfectly sincerely that Cambridge had enjoyed a glorious history in English studies for much of the twentieth century, and Downing had been near the centre of all that. It was Downing, after all, that had given F. R. Leavis a professorship. Leavis, the heretic guru of English letters, who had founded and edited a massively influential magazine. That magazine had been called Scrutiny — the Cambridge word above all others. The unscrutinised life was not worth living and the unscrutinised text had no place on a serious person’s shelves. Vast and merrily crackling was the critical bonfire of the deficient.

At that time Leavis was in retirement but could still be glimpsed occasionally. I didn’t mention that the one time I had seen Leavis he was walking briskly down Senate House Passage on a chilly day with fanatical vigour and remoteness, wearing a sports jacket and an open-necked shirt. He picked up his feet like an aggrieved heron, and I was sure he would spear me if I got in his way, wheelchair or no wheelchair. Anyone less life-enhancing would be hard to imagine, but naturally I didn’t pass that impression on to Mum and Dad. I simply said I would be in safe hands, experiencing the full flow of a great tradition. Of course, Leavis had eventually severed his links with Downing in the usual austere huff, scattering excommunications in all directions like black and baleful confetti, but again, there seemed no need to relay such a minor detail.

My proposed academic trajectory — from Modern Languages Part I to English Part II — felt disjointed, a wrong turn in a life that couldn’t afford one. It seemed absurd that I could travel single-handed across the world (though I don’t wish to slight the many strong arms and lifting hands which helped me on my way) to pay my respects to my guru in India, but not pursue my studies as I wished at an educational institution that recognised me as worthy to attend. It was absurd but there seemed to be no way round it. Trudge on, pilgrim.

The exams for Part I, when they came, felt anything but momentous. I sat the papers in a sort of academic quarantine (the same drill as for my A-levels) with an invigilator for my own exclusive use. I was segregated from my fellow examinees because of the clacking disturbance of the typewriter and also because of my privilege of extra time — bags of it. I was allowed 50 per cent more time than my fellows because of the physical inconvenience of the process, though I never used anything like that much. I’d call out ‘I’ve finished’ as soon as I properly could.

It seemed only fair that I should have a bit more time, but all the same I chafed against the extravagant allowance. It seemed so imprecisely worked out, as if the authorities were really saying, ‘Give the little chap an easy ride — he doesn’t get many of those.’ I would have preferred a more precise system, with observers making the calculations on a case-by-case basis, so that I would be allowed, say, 3 hours and 13 minutes, and not a second more . I didn’t want favours — I wanted a time-and-motion-study man to follow me around for a week, and then to stand sternly over me during the exam with a stopwatch. I mean, are we taking this seriously, or are we just amusing ourselves?