Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Sustained hedon bombardment

Dad, of course, retreated to the greenhouse in protest at the din, but gave the game away by leaving the door open a few inches. The elementary particles of sensation had always seemed to stream right through Dad, or to bounce off him. His pain threshold was high, his pleasure threshold higher still. Perhaps this was only the side of him we saw, but we saw a lot of it. It took mighty waves of positively charged experience to provoke the smallest interior ripple of enjoyment. He preferred to go through life without being obliged to provide emotional commentary.

There must be a benefit, for the species if not for the individual, in the refusal of joy. A hedon is the unit of pleasure, just as a dolor is the unit of pain. The hedon isn’t recognised by any authority, not even one as marginal as a Swedish university research project. Still, it’s logically necessary, even if I just this minute made it up.

Hedon radiation was agitating every molecule of the shed, hedons were pulsing and throbbing like fireflies, tickling the soft palate of anyone within range like inhaled lemonade. Strong California sunshine trapped in grooves of black plastic was converted back into the visible spectrum by the travelling prism, tip down, of the stylus on the family record player. Our English summer was given substance by the American one on the record.

Even Dad couldn’t hold out against the Beach Boys for ever. Sustained hedon bombardment day after day, relentless, was bound to find the chink in the shed, and Dad’s armour. It took its toll. Dad’s resistance was high but he wasn’t quite hedon-proof, much (for some reason) as he might want that.

One day he was watering the garden while Mum was playing the song indoors at the usual volume, and I could see for myself how those good vibrations infiltrated the arm that held the hose. Whenever that peculiar passage came round when an unearthly electronic instrument goes OOOWEEEYOOO OOOWEEEE like an ecstatic banshee, Dad would move the hose in luxurious loops and spirals. Random beds and plantings in the garden got the benefit of a more generous, carefree sprinkling, the moisture subtly ionised by Dad’s grudging pleasure in the song.

There came a day when I caught him whistling bits of the tune. Dad’s was a generation of whistlers. They whistled when they were cheerful and also when they weren’t. They whistled their way into the War, and those who came back were still whistling, when it ended, with a fair approximation of nonchalance.

In later life they whistled as they washed the car, as they tidied the tools in the shed, and on their way to the funerals of their contemporaries, though it was always considered poor form to reproduce much in the way of a tune. And now Dad, despite himself, was whistling a song he wanted to hate. I looked enquiringly at him, hoping he would admit to liking and enjoying something that we all loved, but he didn’t respond. It would be too much of a loss of face to come clean and admit that not all songs with guitars in them were infantile rubbish. That would mean, somehow, that we had won, if he ever admitted he was just as much seduced by this luminous summer anthem as anyone else.

Intolerable coffee please

There was a similar pattern of behaviour on the rare occasions we went to a restaurant for any sort of celebration meal. Dad would start to rally his troops immediately after pudding, and I would ask, ‘Can we have some coffee, please Dad?’

‘No point, John,’ he would say. ‘We’ll have it at home where they know how to make it. Everyone knows the coffee here is intolerable.’

‘Have you tasted it yourself?’

‘I expect so.’ Dad didn’t enjoy telling actual lies, untruths without any blurring at their edges. He didn’t have much of a gift for equivocation, come to that. He was a little better at changing the subject, but I was too fast for him.

‘Try to remember. Have you had the coffee here?’

He looked at the corner of the room. ‘Possibly not.’

‘Then how do you know it’s so bad?’

‘Experience and common sense.’

‘It isn’t experience if you haven’t experienced it, and it can’t be common sense if it’s not sensible.’

‘It seems I must order some intolerable coffee in order to pander to the prejudices of my son.’

‘Yes please, Dad.’

‘Waiter! I’d like a cup of your’ — the next word was mumbled — ‘intolerable coffee, please.’

‘Yes, sir. Right away.’

When it arrived he took a small sip. ‘What’s it like, Dad?’

‘Worst coffee I ever tasted.’

‘Are you going to leave it, then?’

‘Certainly not. Senseless waste. Now put a cork in it, John. Can’t a man have a little peace in which to try not to taste his intolerable cup of coffee?’

When he had finished the cup he made a final pronouncement: ‘Positively the worst cup of coffee I ever drank or even heard of. Do you want some?’

‘Yes please, Dad.’ Of course it was delicious. But he’d already given the game away by the way he relaxed as the coffee got to work on him. His look was almost dreamy.

He wasn’t trying to be difficult. No one enjoys seeing a fixed idea go up in smoke, an axiom torpedoed. I think it gave him physical pain to change his mind.

Dad got his little bit of revenge for ‘Good Vibrations’ by commandeering the record player himself, and putting on his own favourite song again and again. Not anything by Eartha Kitt, in fact (perhaps he was more fascinated by the singer than the songs) but a song from a film — ‘Moon River’ from Breakfast at Tiffany’s . The song wasn’t a single but a track on an album (of Andy Williams singing songs from films), so Dad had to keep returning the needle to the right place on the record by hand, instead of letting it find its own way to the beginning of the song again, as Peter did when he left the repeat lever in the up position. ‘Moon River’ is a nice enough song, and I was quite likely to find myself humming its tune, but it never saturated the garden the way ‘Good Vibrations’ did. It didn’t have the power to charge Mum’s dowsing hand as she picked her herbs, or to make Peter’s chest-expanding exercises keep time with its beat (it didn’t really have one). After a while Dad would tire of re-positioning the needle, and we would hear other classic hits from the Henry Mancini songbook, and when the whole side of the record finished (with ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’) the time was ripe for the Beach Boys to storm the turntable all over again.

I knew there was a link between ‘Moon River’ and Audrey Hepburn, she being the star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s . My little sister had been named after that demure goddess, and perhaps the idea had been to align her with certain feminine qualities, with neatness and self-control. If so it hadn’t taken.

There was a line in ‘Moon River’ which struck me as being as mysterious as anything in ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. The song starts talking about two drifters setting off to see the world. Apparently they’re after the same rainbow’s end, / Waitin’ ’round the bend / My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me …

What on earth was a ‘huckleberry friend’? I knew that a gooseberry was someone who stopped two people from being together, but as for huckleberry I was stumped. Dad didn’t know either, though he seemed irritated to admit it. Either that or he didn’t want me to know what a huckleberry friend was. Perhaps he was afraid I’d ask where his was, if I knew, or want one of my own.

There was one little thing I had kept from Marion Wilding during our final confrontation at Vulcan, that parting of the ways over incompatible visions of my future. On that occasion I presented Burnham Grammar School as the answer to a disabled boy’s prayers, a modern building throughly suited to his needs. In fact it wasn’t ideal for a pupil in a wheelchair. Far from ideal. Vulcan had been built as a castle-shaped folly, and was turned into a school for disabled boys in the teeth of its architectural allegiances. Only a tiny lift could be installed, and the inconvenience of this was felt every single day, until the new buildings allowed the dorms to move to the ground floor. Burnham Grammar School wasn’t a folly, but it wasn’t a sensible construction on my terms. Modern, yes, but lacking a lift of any sort, big or small.