Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

When I wasn’t actually in the firing line, there was some fun to be had from noticing the nuances of the examination. Some people only looked at the bottoms of people with nice faces. Others only looked at the faces of people with nice bottoms.

I don’t remember making any new acquaintances at the Stable Bar, except when one man came over to me and said he worked in the University Library. He was good enough to tell me that I had a nickname at the UL. Toad of Toad Hall ( Poop! poop! ). Not the worst nickname in the world and yes, I dare say I could seem a little imperious when I sounded the car horn, to signal that the books I had ordered should be toted down to me.

While the leaves were still on the trees I began to be preöccupied with the ritual midwinter festival. Over the years I had borne various grudges against Christmas. First because it came round so slowly. Then that it crowded out my birthday by being so close to it. Next that it was too commercial. Then that it was too Christian. Now I felt that it came round too quickly. The Christ Child seemed to be bearing down on me at the wheel of his holly-trimmed steamroller, and this was the first year that he would find me out in the open, with nowhere to hide.

If I had been able to send a message about what I wanted for Christmas using Granny’s special system of chimney semaphore, a slip of paper burnt in the fireplace to give Santa his cue, mine would have been along the lines of Yule! Yule! Steer well clear! Come again another year!

Peter had found a job at a hotel near Bristol, an old coaching inn. He had accommodation there and gamely offered to play host, but I couldn’t quite see that as a practical proposition. So what were my options, realistically? Well, now that I no longer had a home, there was always a Home. A referral from my GP would be child’s play. No exaggeration would be necessary. It was a perfectly routine request. Still, I was in no hurry to meet the Ghost of Christmas Future, the many Ghosts of Christmases to come. What sort of person ends up in a Home at the time of year when even the most abject orphans are taken in? I wasn’t in any hurry to find out.

I decided that I would put myself about, socially, and accept the first offer I got, no questions asked. Call it Russian roulette, only played with Christmas crackers rather than the customary revolver. The trouble being that if ever I pull a cracker and win, it’s because someone is being kind and would like me to have a tie-pin.

Socially the hot spot of the moment was something called King’s Bop, that is, a disco in the cellar of a modern building in King’s College. Downing could offer no comparable attraction. King’s was ever a trendy hotbed. Girls had been sighted there, rare girls, girls never seen elsewhere. A different species from those who manifested themselves in common room and lecture hall, shop and street.

I had already experienced the event. Part of its fashionability lay in its unpredictable disc-jockey and part in its exclusiveness, since there were people at the door who were supposed to make sure that only students of King’s were admitted.

The policing of King’s Bop was hardly rigorous — someone at the door would politely ask for your locker number — but surely no one would question the right of the chap in the wheelchair to attend?

This was a reasonable hypothesis. It reached me, though, not as an abstract proposition or social experiment but in the form of an ambush after Hall one Wednesday evening. A little party wanted to make an attempt on King’s Bop, using the wheelchair’s magical powers as a pass-key, or else an enchanted textile, not so much a cloak of invisibility as a small trundling marquee.

I was a good sport about it. I would have screamed bloody murder if I had known I would be carried downstairs by people I hardly knew, but the trauma was well under way before I had any idea. The word ‘cellar’ had not been part of the approach that was made to me.

At the door we were waved through with smiles of embarrassment. The hypothesis was confirmed. The wheelchair belonged everywhere as well as nowhere.

The noise was extreme and made conversation difficult. There’s a limit to how far I can stretch to bring my ear close to someone’s mouth, and if all the bending is done by others then they must feel they’re part of something more like limbo dancing than chat. As for whether there were any rare girls in attendance, I really couldn’t say.

Indoor magnetism

I wasn’t expected to buy drinks since I had made the whole expedition possible, which I took as no more than my due. The beer was from kegs and served in plastic glasses, either to save washing-up or from fear of rowdiness. A glass without a handle or a stem is pretty much useless to me, and I was reduced (if I really wanted to wet my whistle) to having people hold up to my mouth the nasty beer in its nasty plastic glass.

The Mini was always an asset, but it turned out that the wheelchair had an indoor magnetism of its own. It stimulated and intoxified. People too awkward or shy to dance by themselves would grab hold of the wheelchair and push it about in rhythm, swinging me around with sickening force.

There were also people who would prise me out of the wheelchair and hug me to themselves while they danced. It seemed to be their feeling that the main deprivation in a life of restricted mobility was the experience of centrifugal force in raw form. My value to these dance partners may partly have been the low risk of treading on my toes. There was no factor working to reduce the speed and recklessness of our whirling.

I learned to spot the type. When I saw someone approach me with a particular look of glazed joy, I would start reeling off excuses, saying ‘I’m afraid I’ve got a cold,’ or even ‘I’ve eaten a bad mushroom and I’m going to be sick,’ though no threat of mucus, virus, even vomit in the pipeline had a reliably deterrent effect.

After that visit I had refused to consider a return, but now I had an agenda of my own. I volunteered, and though there was obviously something fishy about my change of heart no one worried too much. My fear of Christmas outweighed, just about, my fear of being dropped downstairs in a slapdash re-enactment of the Senate House occupation.

Almost the moment we arrived I was caught up in a piece of musical torture. The disc-jockey put on something which wasn’t even a single but an album track, and it wasn’t a recent release, but it had a stubborn popularity in student circles as a stereo showpiece. People used the song to make sure that their speakers were wired the right way round. It was a track called ‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ from the Steve Miller Band’s album No.5 . The song had outlasted the album, which had been controversial when new (in 1969, I think), not because of any musical content but something written in small print inside the gatefold for the sharp-eyed to discover. It was dedicated to President Richard Nixon, a betrayal of hippy ideals only partly excused by the infantile phrasing. We luv you cuz you need it .

‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ starts with a sombre atmosphere rather than a tune as such. Then an electric guitar makes its entrance. The sound is supercharged with reverberation and echo. It’s also strongly directional. This golden noise is flung from left to right of the stereo picture. It’s an acoustic projectile which finds the target and hangs there for a moment, pulsing. Then the pattern repeats with the polarity reversed, the note catapulting back from the right to the left. Two more convulsions of the guitar and the song itself gets under way, murkier and less dramatic, less memorable in every respect.

In those days records were supposed to contain subliminal messages, Satanic commands played backwards — God is dead, Paul is dead, Kill the piggies till the piggies are dead . Thousands of undergraduate hours were spent dragging gramophone needles backwards through the final grooves of ‘A Day In The Life’, to yield everything from ‘We’ll fuck you like supermen’ to ‘The gardener was hellish unmathematical’.