Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

It had been at the back of my mind, when I went to the Cheshire Home for my respite break, that this was a sort of trial run or probationary visit. I might be expected to live at Gerrards Cross sometime in the future. I think I can honestly say that I took no particular pains to make myself unacceptable. It was without ulterior motive that I blotted my copy-book, though the resulting disgrace certainly came in handy. My bad behaviour was disinterested and long overdue. I squeezed a lot of adolescence into a short span of days.

In terms of respite the Home gave me what I needed. If I had ended up living there I would have lost my vitality bit by bit, or else been frozen in a posture of rebellion against my surroundings, which is only another way (admittedly more seductive) of becoming institutionalised.

The pans of the scales seemed to be evenly balanced between the two authorities, so I decided I must hurl my trusty typewriter down onto the Cambridge side. I charged the ribbon of the Smith-Corona with its most irresistible ink and wrote a letter to my MP, appealing for help with my housing ‘difficulties’. To prevail over Cambridge I had to appeal to High Wycombe, since that was where I was a constituent, but I couldn’t be choosy about what tiny leverage I had. The MP for High Wycombe, Sir John Hall, wrote back in charming and eloquent terms, though I don’t know whether he actually did anything. If he did, it amounted to foisting me definitively on Cambridge. Wearily they accepted responsibility for me, and wearily I accepted their acceptance. Then all I had to do was wait to hear the details of my new home.

It seemed to take a long time. Downing told me that it would be all right for me to stay on a bit after the end of term, which took the pressure off a little and made the waiting easier.

After I had taken my final exams, my Cambridge GP gave me a referral to be looked after. I was booked in for ten days at the Mary Marlborough Rehabilitation Lodge, part of the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre at Headington. This wasn’t really about rehabilitation, though, it was about playing for time, though I picked up some useful kitchen skills.

I had taken some Gerard Manley Hopkins with me to read. Poetry in general has the advantage of portability, but this was a poor choice. Not because it was too remote from my experience, but too close.

I am soft sift

In an hourglass — at the wall

Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,

And it crowds and it combs to the fall …

The same rhythmic trick, dragging then racing, Faustus’s nightmares. Not at all reassuring to my thoughts of that season.

Mary Marlborough gave me a refresher course in the forked nature of institutions, in case I had forgotten. The establishment harboured contradictory attitudes towards its own goals. Independence was the be-all and end-all of the place, and yet a Plan B was provided at all times. You were encouraged to make a meal for yourself — but when you signed up to do it you also had to order a meal from the kitchens, in case yours was a disaster. A slightly insulting precaution. We weren’t painting the Forth Bridge. This wasn’t the Normandy landings. This was a lentil bake.

I was confident in my own modest culinary skills and shocked by the proposed waste of food, so I wouldn’t choose from the menu. Then the staff would get quite shirty and end up ordering meals over my head, since that was the approved procedure. A very strange attitude in a place with Rehabilitation in the name. They wanted me to fend for myself and were rather put out when I did. They protected me from the possible consequences of my actions (lentil bake burned to buggery), though how this would fit me for independent living wasn’t clear. Safety-nets are fine, but no one wants to be tripping over them the whole time. Is it going too far to suggest that staff felt rejected when their help wasn’t needed, and were quite pleased by dehabilitation and back-sliding?

The people at Mary Marlborough kept me housed and fed. They offered me a selection of gadgets for use in the kitchen, mainly picker-uppers which my hands were too small and stiff to work. The only handy tool was a little bill-hook, which I use to this day. The most valuable lesson I learned was from a Pakistani occupational therapist called Mariam, who taught me how to skin tomatoes by scalding them. So I showed a modest profit on my stay in Headington.

Mariam was fun. She was lovely. She would always say, ‘I’m just going to sneak to the fridge’ or ‘sneak to the bathroom’, making the most wholesome activities seem unauthorised, loaded with the promise of transgression.

A ghost in hibernation

After my stint at Mary Marlborough, though, I really did feel I was sneaking back to Downing, where everyone else was getting ready to leave and I was getting ready to overstay my welcome. There was nowhere else for me to go. It wasn’t as if I could go home to Mum and Dad, after everything that had happened. Of course I was glad that I had closed off that option. If further education was a dead end then ‘home’ was certainly another.

The examiners worked against the clock to mark our exams promptly, as if it mattered. On the day that results were posted up outside the Senate House the academic air was so tense it crackled. I stayed where I was in my room. Nothing on those lists could make a difference to me. A few times friends came to knock on my door, but I didn’t answer. Eventually someone pushed a note under the door to tell me where I stood. I was in no hurry to go over and read it. The future could wait, particularly as I didn’t have one.

At last I punted the wheelchair over and read the note where it lay. I had landed one of the coveted, and strictly limited, First Class degrees — the counter-cultural ones, technically known as Thirds. I had collected the whole set, and completed my downward progress from that First in spoken German. I had found my level. Still, going to Cambridge hadn’t been about scholastic achievement. It had been about … I couldn’t remember.

If the note had been pushed under the door face downwards, or folded over, I really don’t know when I would have bothered to read it. My hunger for abstract knowledge seemed to have been stalled for the time being. I had no burning need to know. The ceremony of graduation, the supposed consummation of my undergraduate career, seemed so stunningly futile as to cast a favourable light backwards on the rigmarole of matriculation.

I left the note, my badge of honour, where it lay. Mrs Beddoes picked it up, glanced at it, and put it on the desk. She at least sincerely didn’t care.

We parted with real emotion, she and I, when the time came. We had been ‘John’ and ‘Jean’ for ages by then. I’d taught her to make coffee the way I liked it, and she’d even started to like it that way too. I’d say we were like an old married couple, but that seems a rather slighting comparison. I’d say she loved me like a mother, though the same objection applies.

She said she would come in to college as usual during my overstay, to make sure I was all right, but I told her not to be silly. If she hadn’t earned a holiday, who had?

She brought me a leaving present and helped me unwrap it. It was horrible, but it showed she had come a long way. It was a Harlequin Beetle in a little case, Acrocinus longimanus if memory serves, framed like a painting, something which she had found in the market. It was a great credit to her that she could see that this arthropod, at least, was beautiful — was a Nice Thing. It had a wonderful colour scheme — the camouflage pattern really did look consciously designed, as if someone like Braque had had a hand in it. I oohed and aahed like anything, and I think I convinced her I really liked it.