Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

It’s only now that I realise that there is a simpler explanation for absence than either a preference for other styles of charitable act or else her Otel commitments. Ridiculously simple, once the Granular mystique has worn away and you’ve given the thought permission to occur. Granny hated hospitals, and so she stayed away.

What do people hate about hospitals? The smell. The lighting. Bad tea in the canteen. The fact that death comes calling.

So when people say they ‘hate’ hospitals, it only means they fear them. Normally Granny embraced hatred with a certain amount of affection, and left the fearing to other people. But during the year-plus of my operations and rehabilitations, it was fear which drove her in any direction but mine, far more reliably than her neighbour’s car.

Despite everything I remember the sense of a warm breeze moving through the house, which was partly summer, of course, but also corresponded to a break in the family weather, a climate in which lightning hardly ever flashed but clouds were slow to clear. Tensions never seemed to come to a proper rolling boil, but it was rare for them to stop simmering altogether for the duration of a radiant interlude. It was our nature as a family to seethe rather than explode, and even when we did explode there was no actual violence and very little damage to property. Admittedly Audrey showed signs of being a wild card, who would not play by the established rules that were good or bad enough for everyone else.

Dad had a new job with BOAC, I had a new hip and a crutch whose misadventures seemed to tickle everybody, Peter had a paper round and Audrey hadn’t yet devised a hiding place beyond Mum’s power to find.

I felt proprietorial about the conservatory-greenhouse (although of course I couldn’t say so) and I liked to be parked by it. I was already planning what Dad should grow there, apart from the Drosophyllum lusitanicum in whose interest the whole long-distance hypnosis experiment had been conducted.

Love in the key of exasperation

My next project would be to persuade Dad to experiment, in the new greenhouse, with another of Menage’s tips, Musa ensete — the Abyssinian banana. If we sowed it in spring next year it would reach nearly four foot by early autumn, needing to be transplanted first into a seven-inch and then a twelve-inch pot. By the end of the second year it would be pressing outwards against the panes of the conservatory, and Menage’s advice was to get rid of it and start again from scratch. It would be interesting to see whether Dad could be so casual about the fate of the cuckoo in his greenhouse — a plant which would have by then more or less the status of a family member. Then we’d see how good a job he made of rejecting the claims of a vegetable child.

Mum fussed over me endlessly, which I tried whole-heartedly to hate. What do fully-fledged chicks feel when the mother bird regurgitates food down their throats, long after they’ve learned to feed themselves? Love, I expect, love in the key of exasperation.

She was good at the job. She was more than competent. She wasn’t like some of the professionals I had experienced over the years, who had secretly hated the job, or parts of it, and had passed that hatred on. With Mum it was just the reverse. She liked it too much. It would fit her personality and her character ( Heather ) in the Bach herbal system, for there to be one child who never outgrew the need for her. Then she would never need to outgrow her own need. Audrey wasn’t the answer to her prayers after all, was in fact showing signs of being a right little madam, while Peter (with that paper round and pub work in prospect) was almost out of her orbit already.

I wanted Mum’s life to have meaning — of course I did — as long as its meaning wasn’t that she had a tragically stricken son who couldn’t manage without her. Unfortunately that was the meaning she had her heart set on.

She was always on my side, but whose side was I on? Not hers. I couldn’t afford to be. She was a helper who was also an obstacle. Mum wasn’t the alternative to an ‘institution’, she was an institution in her own right, a one-woman hospice-hermitage yawning to receive me.

Bare observation

I spent a lot of time viewing Mum through the wrong end of a mental telescope, practising the Buddhist vision — bare observation , indifferent to the agreed meanings of things — taught by the Satipatthana Sutta . What was Mum? Mum was a fathom-long carcass (closer to the fathom mark, in fact, than I would ever be), fat, tears, grease, saliva, etc. More to the point, Mum was the champion of the Relaxator, the Bernina — the sewing-machine — and Sqezy (I was troubled and thrilled by the manufacturer’s licence to drop the mandatory u after q ), booster of the Kenwood, the Rayburn, Kia-Ora, Yeast-Vite and Nescaff, compulsive denigrator of Kit-e-Kat and Kit-Kat. The layman’s term for this spiritual enterprise is ‘hardening the heart’.

When his family spilled out into the garden which was his exclusive province for much of the year, Dad tended to retreat into the shed. Mum’s main reason for being in the garden was to pick herbs. She had white paving stones laid in the back plot just outside the kitchen door, in the form of a chess board. Her herbs grew in the black squares, and she could walk on the white squares when she wanted to pick them.

The first thing she did on a picking expedition was to shake her right hand, as if she was holding an invisible thermometer and trying to get the mercury back down to its bulb. When I asked her what she was doing, she explained it was to make her hand go floppy. ‘I want to be guided by influences far from the brain,’ she would say with a faraway look in her eyes. Her loosened arm would then rise smoothly up and get its bearings. Within a second or two it had jerked decisively towards the appropriate accents to be added to lunch.

Clearly this was herbalist dowsing, yet Mum was horrified when she found out that Peter and I had been playing with ouija boards. I couldn’t see the difference — except that regimented herbs don’t talk back. But when it was me calling on influences far from the brain, that was somehow sinister and appalling.

In our ouija sessions Peter and I had been having snatches of conversation with two ancestors, Great-Grandpa who designed the Cambridge Divinity School and Newnham College (not to mention bits of Girton) and Mum’s Uncle Ted who suicided himself at Jesus College, Cambridge. The ouija board seemed to have a strong Cambridge bias. If it was controlled (Mum’s theory) by a minor devil, then it was one that sported a light-blue scarf.

The ouija board was a homely device, nothing more than a glass upside-down on a piece of Dad’s shirt-cardboard marked with the letters of the alphabet. It wasn’t practical for me to put my hand on top of the glass, so Peter was flying solo. I suppose he might have been cheating, but the messages which came through weren’t in his style. Great-Uncle Ted kept saying I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE QUICK, round and round again, and then the astral switchboard seemed to lose interest, saying BLAH BLAH BLAH instead. ‘Are you tired?’ I asked, and the answer came back, SURE AM, BOSS. After that, no movement at all, however long we tried. Peter seemed disappointed, but I thought this was a good result. A pair of teenaged boys at a loose end had bored the Spirit World out of its tiny mind. Something to be proud of.

We were fairly bored too, on our side of the spectral divide, with Great-Uncle Ted and Great-Grandpa endlessly repeating the same things. Even knowing the ouija board was prohibited couldn’t make it interesting indefinitely. There’s some forbidden fruit that tastes of nothing much.