Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

While I was teetering over the sill I experienced a biblical twinge. The whole scene was full of New Testament echoes. Was it when one meeting was so crowded that Christ had to enter by this unorthodox route? Or did a sick man’s family resort to extreme measures to get their kinsman to the top of the queue? Either way, I was a bit shaken by the parallel, once I’d detected it. If your initials are J and C, it’s just the sort of thing you need to be on your guard against.

Inside, there was an atmosphere of celebration. People smoked dope and played guitars in the academic holy of holies, where students were admitted only for rites of passage, matriculation and graduation. But there was also an earnest side to the occupation. I remember a board being put up with a list of teach-ins and debates, from ‘By Any Means Necessary — How to Make a Molotov Cocktail Without Blowing Yourself Up’ to ‘Sister Power — The Lessons of Radical Feminism’. A crèche was signposted, though there wasn’t a child in sight.

There was also a tremendous sense of anticlimax and loss of purpose. We had made our point, hadn’t we? Whatever it was. Couldn’t we go now? No, we had to stay put indefinitely, or the whole event would fizzle.

Perhaps I was a mascot, but I was also a nuisance, bleating for veggie food when there were other priorities. I said I couldn’t be expected to live on chips indefinitely. The idea seemed to be that it was a privilege to make sacrifices for the Revolution, and mine was eating Wimpys. I wished I had a book with me, and wondered if I could come up with a medical excuse for leaving in the morning. I could say there was medicine in my room which I needed to take (but what if someone offered to fetch it?).

Early the next morning the proctors arrived and drove us from the building. We hadn’t done much to barricade doors that had been left open in the first place, and were dazed by sleep and cheap wine. It was a textbook bit of tactics — wait until the enemy is off his guard, and then scour him from the city you have pretended to cede to him. I do seriously wonder if the Vice-Chancellor at the time wasn’t in fact a military historian, seizing the chance to demonstrate the eternal relevance of his speciality.

I was asleep on the floor in the library, with someone’s coat as a mattress, when the cry went up of ‘It’s the pigs!’ Someone blearily picked me up and ran with me. Neither of us had time to put on our shoes. It didn’t matter that I was barefoot. It mattered rather a lot that he was wearing only socks, since he slipped on the staircase and dropped me.

This time there was no human providential mattress to break my fall, as at Burnham, no stoutly built Marion Wilding to absorb the impact as at Vulcan. I gave up the effort of constructing the illusion of time and space. I dropped my knitting needles, and the skein of consciousness bounced softly across a cold hard floor, unwinding as it went.

The next time I was up to the chore of creating my surroundings, I was in Addenbrookes Hospital with an unfamiliar man, formally dressed, sitting on a chair by my bed.

I don’t remember the fall itself, nothing from the moment of being routed out of the library and heading towards the stairs. If I try to force my memory all I get is an academic version of the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin , with the shiny shoes of faceless proctors replacing the implacable boots of the Tsar’s soldiers, the wheelchair standing in for the baby-carriage as it bounces helplessly down. Of course it didn’t happen that way — I wasn’t in the wheelchair, and there was no massacre on the Senate House steps. There was no massacre on the Odessa Steps either, for that matter, but there is now. That’s just the way Maya works.

My heart was on its last legs

The slightly daunting man by my bed introduced himself by saying, ‘I’m one of your nasty proctors.’ Which made me feel a little queasy and a little guilty too. My voice sounded very tinny when I answered, as protocol demanded, ‘And I’m one of your revolting students.’ Was he a guard or an interrogator-in-waiting? Perhaps my tutor had told him to hold me fast until he came in wrath.

My next concern was for the wheelchair and what had happened to it, but there it was beside my bed. This was a lesson in itself: the wheelchair had followed me to my new address like a faithful pet. My shoes too had made their own way. It all went to prove one of Ramana Maharshi’s favourite teachings, that self-enquiry is the only priority. Everything else takes care of itself.

They wanted to keep me in Addenbrookes for a night or two, under observation, but I didn’t see the fun in that. They did an ECG, which I consented to — for all the good it would do them. An ECG is all very fine, but it’s a standard procedure designed to measure a standard organ. What else could it be? But my heart is not standard. My heart is my own. Under my first diagnosis, of rheumatic fever, there was worry that my heart would be permanently damaged by the infection I was supposed to have.

Under my second diagnosis that worry was made moot. As my joints began to follow new laws during the ill-advised period of bedrest, the chest cavity was squeezed and skewed, and the heart followed suit. My heart has adjusted to new conditions, but it’s anyone’s guess how well it has maintained its functions. My diaphragm, the heart’s body habitus, is irregularly shaped, which makes the echoes hard to interpret. I have yet to meet a specialist who could decide from my ECG readings whether my heart was on its last legs or likely to beat its little drum another billion times. We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we? Household items seem to know when their guarantees run out. Perhaps I’ll feel the existential twinge which in a washingmachine immediately precedes the outpour of dirty water onto the kitchen floor.

I couldn’t wait to get out of Addenbrookes, mainly because my digestion demanded it. The wheelchair had followed me to hospital, not so the loo chair, and I badly needed to defæcate. Nurses are all very well, some of them even know their business, but I’d rather do my business in my own way.

The disturbances were serious enough for the university to commission a report into them. It commented with displeasure on dis order ‘during which a student was injured’. That’s me. If you can’t make the headlines, at least make the footnotes. It’s my only real presence in the official record between the rites of passage of matriculation and graduation, and I’m being used as a stick to beat my radical generation. No mention of the fact that it was the university’s own crackdown which caused the incident. We were snoozing happily in the library before then, safe and sound. Even without the report, though, my telephone would have been back in its original category, as far as Graëme Beamish was concerned. A lost cause. And Cambridge is not the natural home of lost causes — Oxford claims that distinction.

During the Easter holidays, in consultation with Peter, I decided it was time to try the substance which had fascinated me for so long, mescaline, which was on offer in a local pub. It would be silly to have my heart conk out with my curiosity still unsatisfied.

We had done a lot of research, one way or another. Peter wasn’t much of a reader, but I had read bits of The Doors of Perception to him, and he had spent the previous summer hitch-hiking round California and asking a lot of questions. He volunteered to be my psychedelic chaperone, and I could think of no one better for the job. I felt entirely safe with Peter, and it made sense for him to see the effects of the drug at close hand before he slipped into the unknown himself.

We decided to avoid Easter week itself. Even if you think you’re not a believer, that story is so strong that it’s bound to percolate into your opened mind, even if you avoid, say, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. You’d better not be playing on the railway when the express comes through, or your consciousness will be flattened like the pennies we used to leave on the tracks.