Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I must have slept. I woke up in the early morning chilled to the bone. I gave the lever of the chair one last try and it yielded. The drawbridge swung smoothly down and I was free. It was as if I had been applying pressure in the wrong direction. I suppose that’s possible.

The first thing I did was to turn the stereo off. Then I had hell’s own job cleaning myself up. Finally I wriggled under the Dream-Cloud to get warm.

And that was pretty much the beginning and end of my student experience of C. sativa . It was also the beginning and the end of my Van Morrison phase. I had listened to Side One of Astral Weeks (‘In The Beginning’) non-stop between about 8.30 and 5.15 the next morning. I never got as far as Side Two (‘Afterwards’). ‘In the beginning’ was more than enough. In the beginning just about finished me.

When Mrs Beddoes came I groaned, and she cleaned round me with theatrical tact. She asked if I needed the doctor and I made stoical noises. When I woke up again it was after eleven.

Like every other undergraduate I had formally been assigned a doctor, in my case one at a medical practice in Trinity Street. I can’t say I was impressed. He didn’t know anything about Still’s Disease, and by now I suppose I was used to doctors who had the good manners to pretend they knew more than me.

Slowly rolling goosebumps

I was used to Flanny’s little ways by now, and whatever her other shortcomings she was a good sport when it came to prescribing drugs. So I let her do the donkey-work of writing my scripts. There was no point spending the time it would take me to break in a new medical professional just for term-times, when I had Flanny so well trained.

During the summer holidays of 1971, though, Flanny took a holiday of her own, so I saw another doctor in the same practice, Dr Bailey. The summer break was the ‘long vac’ in Cambridge parlance, and certainly I anticipated a long vacuum which medication might help to fill. I thought this new chap might not be so biddable, so I decided to play safe.

What I wanted was a prescription for Mandrax, a widely prescribed drug of the period, much maligned since then. I still give it high marks. To me it’s pretty much the Jesus Christ of prescription drugs (meaning no offence, or not much). Mild and loving, but reviled and rejected, and all for trying to help.

The name, granted, isn’t well chosen. Whoever came up with it must have had mandrake in mind, which isn’t reassuring, and then finished off with a Bond-villain flourish (isn’t Drax the baddie in Moonraker ?). Give a drug a bad name.

It’s not actually one of the barbiturates, though it shares some of their properties. The great thing about Mandrax is that you can take an awful lot of it with very little in the way of side-effects. Naturally the question of ‘side’ effects is wholly subjective. What’s at the side depends on your angle of vision. Some people lead decidely off-centre lives, and a side-effect can be right up their alley.

Above a certain dosage I might get a sort of nomadic paræsthesia, with tingles and patches of numbness lazily playing over my body. To tell the truth I rather enjoyed that. It was like having slowly rolling goosebumps, and goosebumps are only a mild case of horripilation, which is one of the signs testifying to the presence of God. Mandrax offered no more than a simulation, but I enjoyed the experience anyway, this synthetic merry-go-round of skin sensation, a slow swirling where my body met the world. Emotionally it detached me from a world that was only posing as real. Since the body is no more than a screen, it makes sense to project onto it something you enjoy.

But don’t just shuffle down to the local fleapit without checking what’s on! It shocked me that young people would smoke, sniff or inject anything they could get their hands on, taking untested substances into their bodies with total abandon. I found the general drug culture of the time very alienating because it was so different from my own. Didn’t they have any standards, any finesse? Even in terms of transgression I preferred the drama of the subverted prescription to the flat illegality of hashish. And I always liked the reliability of standard strengths and dosages. None of the uncertainty you get with your street muck.

When I was preparing for my appointment with Dr Bailey I decided I would take no chances. I didn’t write down Mandrax as such on my list of requirements. I didn’t even use its generic name of Methaqualone. This was a time for heavier disguise. By now I knew my way around the Monthly Index of Medical Specialities , the MIMS , pretty well. It’s pretty much a GP’s Bible. I’d seen it on Flanny’s shelves, and noticed how well-thumbed it always was, though of course it’s not for sale to the general public. Gamekeepers do like to keep ahead of poachers, don’t they? But it’s better sport if both groups are well-informed.

A nurse at Addenbrookes had given me an old copy, and sometimes I’d scrounge one from my GP when I needed to check dosages. There could be no better way of keeping tabs on the profession with which this body has linked my destiny, and I didn’t need to be madly up to date. The rate of change wasn’t so very frantic then, and I could keep pace with the professionals without too much trouble.

Ever since CRX, where Ansell had laid aside her tenderness to reel off technical terms to her colleagues, I had coveted the medical manner. Knowledge isn’t power, whatever people say. Knowledge is power’s poor relation, at best. It’s the consolation, if not the booby prize. Still, it was all I could aim at. I might never become a doctor, but I could reasonably hope to sound like one. I could mimic the preoccupied expression, the technical drone.

I knew from my studies of MIMS that Boots the Chemist had its own private version of the drug, in two fractionally different formulations called Melsedin and Melsed, so I plumped for one of those instead.

Melsedin and Melsed. They haunted me, that pair of near-identicals. I knew from experience that it was perfectly possible to be in love with just one of a pair of twins, feeling no more than warm indifference to the other — and people seemed to have strong preferences as between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, though to the outsider’s eye and palate it’s all just treacly carbonated water. Melsed or Melsedin? I tossed a coin.

It seemed to me, as I looked at my little slip of paper, that the Mandrax, even wearing its carnival mask as Melsedin, looked a little suspect, so I added Dexedrine in first place on the list. Dexedrine I cared less about but still enjoyed. I had moved on since the days of involuntary binges on amphetamine-tinged hundreds and thousands. I could say no, and I could do without perfectly easily. I was confident in my willpower. I was struggling to do without sugar at the time, no easy thing for vegetarians, who tend to have a weakness for sweet things.

Torpid heat-bumps

Dr Bailey might baulk at either the Dexedrine or the disguised Mandrax, but he was unlikely to withhold them both. Finally, as a gesture towards clean living, I put down ‘Redoxon 1000 mg’ — a gram of effervescent Vitamin C, a good all-round tonic for the system. Now there were two guilty faces in the line-up of medication, one undisguised and the other masquerading, along with a radiant innocent included to raise the general tone of the group.

In person Dr Bailey seemed more like a handler of animals than a human doctor. He was very burly, ripe for the wrestling of steers. He can’t literally have worn a butcher’s apron, though that’s how I picture him. There was an oar hung up on the wall in his surgery, trophy of a university past. When he learned I was at Cambridge he asked which college, and then ‘How’s their rowing?’ He seemed shocked that I had no idea. As far as he was concerned, there was no excuse for not knowing about torpid heat-bumps, times and regattas. All that nonsense — he did go on.