Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Emotionally I closed myself off. I didn’t actively seek out situations in which I might be hurt. Why would I do such a thing? Why would I give away chances to hurt me as if they were tickets in a raffle?

There were certainly people I knew in those years who could be trusted. Alan Linton was one, who kept in touch after he left Cambridge at the end of my first year. Yet even then I responded to his letters in a rather tepid way, writing just often enough to go through the motions. Eventually he wrote saying he had the feeling that he was keeping our friendship going single-handed. He went on to say that it was quite all right if I had lost interest, such things happened, friendship had its rhythms and its seasons, but I wrote back saying no, no, it was always good to hear from him, which was great hypocrisy on my part. I let Alan dangle. I did nothing to extend the life of our friendship but wouldn’t take the active responsibility of ending it. I let him strangle himself on his own goodwill. I didn’t even have the good manners to behave badly, and I may have left him with a feeling of guilt rather than the proper annoyance. A few years ago I saw his name listed in Yellow Pages as a homœopath based in Saffron Walden. The alternative medicine he had resisted so fiercely when he first encountered it ended by wooing him away from his first, his conventional love. And perhaps the part I played in his life wasn’t entirely ignoble, thanks to those early exchanges, conversations in which I was largely showing off.

Underlying crackle of dialectic

Hoff the Downing Casanova came to see me from time to time while he was living out of college, though we were never as intimate as when we lived on the same staircase. At some stage his cottage-loaf-made-of-wire hairstyle had been replaced by something modestly trendy, allowed to grow out without savage brushing but kept reasonably short, in a sort of home counties Afro.

For Hoff exclusively I would make coffee by the filter method, using Kenya Peaberry beans that had been ground before my eyes at the King Street coffee shop. Luckily in those glory days all my other visitors stuck to their preference, turning up their noses at the suspect brew I made in a glass vessel by a laborious technical process, boiling the kettle (filled with fresh-drawn water, of course) and then waiting two minutes for the temperature to be right. For this diehard group the filter method perverted the true taste of coffee, the powdered or granular joys of Nescafé. As far as these purists were concerned, unless it had been prepared for the jar using high-pressure industrial sprays, properly dehydrated or freeze-dried at the very moment that the flavour reached its peak, it hardly counted as coffee at all. My small-scale operation, with its plastic funnel and paper filter struck them as insultingly amateurish. Who was I to set myself up against Messrs Nestlé?

Considering the expense of Kenya Peaberry, this was handy. Of course it’s when life seems to be collaborating merrily with you, supporting all your little schemes, that you have to watch out. Luckily the sensation is very fleeting.

Once, very disconcertingly, Hoff said he wished I was a girl. Or rather he wished he had met a girl he got on with as easily as he did with me. My mind in a body he fancied — but then why would we be discussing his several protocols? ‘Girls are fantastic, girls are wonderful,’ he told me, ‘they shoot their stars across the sky and then they fizzle out. I’d never get tired of you, John.’

A mad thing to say, but touching too. And to a limited extent I could agree. My chats with Hoff were the closest I got in my Cambridge years to the university experience as promised and advertised. There was a nice Socratic feel to our conversations, an underlying crackle of dialectic, even if the subject was the sexual availability of young women. Getting into their knickers, to be perfectly frank.

Things might have worked less well if I had found Hoff the slightest bit attractive, but I didn’t. I wasn’t put off by the name-tapes on his socks or even the way he called ten thousand unborn cod, compressed into a tin, by the name of ‘lunch’. That wave-length simply wasn’t there.

On his last visit, at the very end of term, he brought me a present. It was an extremely thoughtful gift, positively disorienting in its attunement to my needs. I’m not used to people reading my mind, but if they can do it on special occasions, why not on a regular basis?

It was a simple enough piece of electrical equipment, an array of plug sockets, five of them side by side, on a short extension lead. It meant I could have all my devices on at the same time — record player, Anglepoise, electric typewriter, even my prematurely senile lava lamp — without the labour of juggling with an adaptor (itself a luxury) which would only accommodate two plugs at a time.

I don’t frequent electrical stores any more than I do shoe shops, but I was pretty sure that this wasn’t an item on sale to the public. It was a rather fancy piece of technology in those days. I went into raptures of entirely sincere appreciation, and managed not to mention two little details.

One was the timing. Hoff was passing on this highly desirable gadget only when he himself had no further use for it. He was leaving it with me rather than take it with him when he went down.

The other was the provenance. There was a strip of Dymotape stuck on the white plastic of the array’s body.

Dymotape, sublime Dymotape! Dymotape was a lettering system which printed raised characters on a long roll of self-adhesive tape. It came as a sort of ray-gun (or so it seemed to minds formed in the ’50s), with a wheel mounted on the top with which you selected the next letter, rather than ANNIHILATE or ANTI-GRAVITY, before squeezing the trigger to advance your message by a single space. The clever thing about it was that the plastic tape turned white under pressure, so that the raised letters stood out blanched and clear against the coloured ground. A final extra-strength squeeze on the trigger caused a blade to clip off the strip, while also nicking the underside so that it was easy to peel off the protective layer and expose the adhesive. I knew the pleasures of the machine only by watching, since it was no better suited to my handling than any other ray-gun (a ray-gun made to fit my grip would actually look alien), but even at second hand they were considerable.

The strip of Dymotape said PROPERTY OF THE CAVENDISH LABORATORY. By this time I knew Hoff well enough to be sure this name-tape was no joke, though Mrs Beddoes would never have suspected that this was stolen property, now that the riddle of the dictator’s socks had been cleared up. There’s no one so gullible as someone who’s been fooled once already, as long as you don’t pull the same trick twice.

University security was rudimentary in those days, and libraries suffered a steady leakage of their treasures. I imagine Hoff had crossed paths at some stage with a shopping-trolley filled with oscilloscopes, and had spotted and snaffled this humble device so well adapted to his needs (and in due course to mine).

Metaphysical oilskins

Stealing things was always described in those days as ‘liberating’ them, as long as the thieves were young and subscribed to a revolutionary agenda of some sort, but for once the word applied. Not having to struggle with plugs was indeed a little liberation.

It was entirely in character that Hoff should offer me a present only after getting plenty of use out of it himself, and also that he shouldn’t remove the incriminating tape in order to convince me that money had been laid out on my behalf. Yet even when any generosity had been so scrupulously scrubbed from the gesture, a residue remained. By Hoff’s sacred code of miserliness, passing on the socket-array at all was a sort of mad spending-spree, a morbid splurge of emotional extravagance all the more unsettling because its economic basis couldn’t be mathematically established. Consequently my thanks were heartfelt.