Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Physiotherapy was unrelenting. Eventually they broke it to me that the right hip, despite having the more mobility of the two preoperationally, would never have the final mobility of the left. I managed to act surprised. Gosh, that’s a pity. Nobody remembered that I had predicted this outcome, and I never knew how I knew.

Before the pins I tottered, afterwards I came closer to hobbling. Those aren’t technical terms but approximations. My walking also was an approximation. The later motion was sturdier and less precarious. It could cover more ground — but it looked worse. A crutch and a cane advertised the deficiences of what doesn’t altogether qualify, even now, as a gait. Strangers have never found my progress reassuring. They look on in alarm.

Equals futility

No one helped me understand the disappointment of the second operation. Perhaps they didn’t understand themselves, just shrugging it off as one of those things, but I worked to get to the bottom of it myself. There was a gain of movement in both axes, from side to side and also backwards and forwards, but this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The problem was that I couldn’t control the lateral component. However much work we did, the physiotherapists and I, there wasn’t enough muscle to support me reliably. All the calculations were correct, but the sum didn’t work out as it should have, and I did indeed become bendy in the middle, in very much the way I had feared. The basic arithmetic was off. The sum didn’t go ‘one successful hip operation plus another successful hip operation equals fully ambulant and permanently cheery chappy, praising the National Health Service with every newly bouncy step’. It went mobility minus stability equals futility . I was worse off than I had been before the second operation.

There was no second honeymoon after the second intervention in my bones, since it marked an estrangement, a widening of the asymmetry in my bodily competence. To guarantee my balance I now needed to use my new crutch (with a sort of padded gutter on which to rest my arm) as well as a stick. The right side, the second one to be operated on, was much the weaker, which was quite convenient, since the right arm was the one with enough flexibility to fit comfortably into the gutter of the crutch.

Medical science had over-corrected matters and created new problems. The intermediate stage between operations, with one hip newly flexible, the other still rigid, had actually offered the best compromise and the closest approximation to normal human walking. Dimly I had sensed this at the time, but hadn’t been able to overrule the authorities around me. Instead I had agreed to a painful setback disguised as a technical improvement.

I managed never to say ‘I told you so’ to Ansell or anyone else about the relative failure of the second operation. I’m capable of suppressing my baser self on special occasions, though there’s something about my expression which makes people assume I’m constipated when I do, and I had taken enough Senokot on the children’s wards of CRX to last me several lifetimes.

I didn’t point out that I had been right, and no one ever apologised or repeated the offer of re-doing the operation so as to leave my leg fixed in the position of my choice. I wouldn’t have taken up such an offer anyway. I’d learned that there was a tariff to be paid even on a free offer, and I accepted that no amount of tinkering would make my legs keep in step. The whole pattern of my progress (if progress was what I was making) seemed to be one step forward and one step back, which would never be more painfully clear than it was now. One hip forward. And one hip back.

I was still sinking deep roots into Gardening for Adventure — Mrs Pavey would only ask Mum for a book back if someone requested it. Despite Menage’s enthusiasm I couldn’t get excited about orchids at this time of my life, perhaps because Dad was such an enthusiast.

Hobbies were a sort of battleground for us. I loved the challenge of imposing one of my interests on Dad (he being far the most hobby-minded of the tribe), having it supersede one of his own. He in his turn tried to interest me in his obsessions, but I was oddly resistant, so that the net flow of hobbies was in the other direction.

Dad found orchids full of fascination and charm. I went on finding them rather boring — just a load of leaves coming out of bulb-things in pots which sometimes offered you flowers. Perhaps I was working up to a phase of resistance to Dad, and practising on a small scale by rejecting his interests.

If Dad had really wanted to sell me on orchids, he would have told me that they are like ideas. Or perhaps ideas are like orchids. They’re born from almost nothing, in sterile conditions — the faintest contamination prevents them from germinating. Then, once started, they depend on getting exactly the right balance of nutrients. They need moisture, but almost more than that they need a breeze. They flourish in the crannies of other plants, not dependent but simply sheltered, in the crook of a tree, say. From a million spores only a few plants will establish themselves — but then they can assume an astounding range of sizes and shapes, from the barely visible ( Platystele jungermannioides , its flowers barely a hundredth of an inch across) to the towering ( Sobralia altissima , which can grow nearly thirty feet tall).

I had one particular idea in my head, of all the mental spores, cradled and moistened, scrupulously blown on, which refused to die altogether. After the first hip operation (or rather, between the botched first attempt and the agonising second) Dad had tried to cheer me up, telling me that once my hips had been fixed I would be able to do many more normal things. ‘You could travel,’ he said. ‘Why not? You could even fly, if I said the word,’ Dad said.

‘Really?’ I was roughly as surprised as Wendy Darling must have been when Peter Pan first held her hand and took to the air.

It turned out that BOAC let the family members of employees fly at greatly reduced prices. ‘How do you feel about Paris?’ Dad asked me.

I didn’t feel much about Paris, either way, but I let the idea take root inside me. After that I would remind Dad from time to time of the promise he had made. He hadn’t come close to anything as binding as an actual promise, of course, but it did no harm to let him think he had. I jogged his memory from time to time after that, and though he never committed himself in definite terms he seemed to concede that an undertaking had been made to me.

Far more interesting to me than any possible orchid was the succulent known as the Mescal Button, Lophophora williamsii . According to Menage, it was sacred to a tribe of Indians in America (the Kiowas of the Rio Grande) who took it as part of their religious rites. I read that slices of Mescal Button were used to replace the bread and wine in church services in Mexico ‘as late as 1918’, though that didn’t seem very recent to me.

The communicants would get coloured visions and coloured emotions and then see the colours of their God. This was really starting to be fun. Mr Menage explained that the phenomenon was caused by a substance in the cactus called mescaline. Researchers who had eaten mescal were unable to describe sensations which lay so far outside ordinary experience. One side-effect was that the drug sometimes ‘fixes the limbs in strange, grotesque positions where they remain for a considerable time’. That didn’t scare me. I felt sure I was immune. The words ‘Mescal’ and ‘Mescaline’ acquired a shimmering aura for me, and I decided that some mescaline tablets would greatly accelerate my convalescence. I wondered if CRX had any tucked away.

Tendrils and serifs