Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

We had been misinformed, before the interview. We had been reassured about the presence of a lift by people in a position to know. I suppose Dad, instead of making the call himself, might have got his secretary to do it (now that he had one) and hadn’t briefed her properly. I can see that happening. Take a letter Miss Smith. Oh, and find a school for my son. Yes, Mr Cromer, right away, sir.

So when we turned up for the interview the School Secretary was first flustered and then frosty. What business did we have accusing the school of having lifts? Who had made these false claims of suitability? Burnham Grammar School was strongly resistant to the needs of the disabled, and gave every sign of being proud of it.

Mum looked frantically at Dad, who fished a piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘Miss Cornelia Norris from County Hall, High Wycombe, that’s who,’ he said. Surely information supplied by someone called Cornelia Norris could be trusted? — otherwise the whole world was going smash.

To squash the educational dreams

Mum backed him up. ‘Miss Norris said there were lifts!’ Between them Mum and Dad chanted this formula three or four times. In their own way they had grasped the basic principle of the mantra. Repetition bringing its own meaning.

The secretary wasn’t spiritually susceptible to this approach. ‘Miss Norris, whoever she may be, doesn’t know what she’s talking about. There are no lifts on these premises. And never have been.’ As if this might in fact be a standard procedure, removing lifts at short notice so as to squash the educational dreams of the disabled. She stalked off into her office, where we could hear her complaining loudly about parents and education officers, and how fed up she was with the whole bang lot of them.

I had already seen the steep and terrifying stairs, and I let defeat slide into my heart. The little flame that had been burning there since that miraculous interview at Sidcot School, when I had been accepted with open arms by an institution to which I hadn’t even applied, finally snuffed it. In the case of Sidcot, only Mum and Dad had stood between me and a radiant education, but now they were on my side and still things were hopeless. I felt suddenly tired and said, ‘Can we go now? Let’s not bother to wait around. Complete waste of time.’ I felt rather bitter about it. Dad looked unsure of himself, perhaps because it wasn’t in his nature to leave a meeting without being properly dismissed. No shuffling off, no sneaking away. Then before we had a chance to beat a retreat the secretary came out again, with a rather poisonous smile, and said, ‘Mr Ashford will see you now’.

Mr Ashford was much more friendly, but also a little dismayed at what we’d been told by Miss Cornelia Norris. He was tall and lean, and he had a distant look in his eyes, something which reminded me of the co-principal of Vulcan School, Alan Raeburn. Perhaps it’s a common ophthalmic feature of teachers, produced by a mixture of concentration and vagueness, and the constant repetition required by the rôle.

All tint seemed to be fading from Mr Ashford’s face, more or less as we watched. His hair was greying and his eyes were grey already. ‘It’s a puzzle, certainly. However … one thing we do have is plenty of boys.’ He said it again, seemingly pleased. ‘No shortage of boys.’ I thought this was a rather tactless thing to say — if the school had plenty of boys, why would they want another one, let alone a boy who was lost without a lift?

He meant something different from that. He meant that boys in bulk would stand in for the missing mechanism. The school had plenty of boys, and the boys would carry me up and down stairs. Two at the back of the wheelchair, two at the front. If by some misfortune the boys carrying me lost their grip then other boys, below me on the stairs, would perform an equally valuable service by breaking my fall, whether they saw me coming or not. Some girls might end up acting as shock absorbers too, since the school was co-educational.

‘Do you see?’ asked Mr Ashford, with a prim small smile. ‘The more that fall over lower down on the stairs, the greater will be the cushioning effect. They won’t all fall over and tumble down, will they? It’s elementary physics, and common sense.’

It was lunacy. It was the antipodes of common sense. Each of us individually may have had doubts about the wisdom of the proposed system — me, Mum, Dad and perhaps even Mr Ashford — but as a collective we voted for it unanimously. Legally the arrangement must have been very precarious. If anything went wrong, if I was dropped and damaged, then there wouldn’t be enough lawyers in the world to break the school’s fall. Nothing similar would be contemplated for a moment now.

Lawsuit virus

The craze for litigation, though, had not yet hit these islands. In those days hardly anyone went to law no matter what injury was done them. People trapped under fallen masonry apologised for being a nuisance, signing away their rights with whichever hand was the less damaged. Perhaps the lawsuit virus was actually carried by that other invader, the American grey squirrel. Too late to eradicate it now.

Though I had doubts about the viability of the method of porterage and mass human-cushioning proposed by Mr Ashford, it wasn’t that I was sentimental about lifts. I can’t say I ever cared for them much as gadgets. In every lift I’ve ever tried to enter there’s been a cheery chappy who says with a grin, ‘Room inside for a littl’un,’ when there patently isn’t. Perhaps it’s always the same man. I may be a littl’un, but when you factor in the wheelchair and (let’s hope) the someone to push it, it’s more of a littl’untourage. And then I’m perfectly placed, in terms of level, to catch the farts that seem to be forced out of people by the movement of the lift. Is it to do with the change of air pressure, or perhaps a side-effect of claustrophobia?

The full address of Burnham Grammar School was Hogfair Lane, Burnham, Slough. The street name referred to some ancient livestock market, I dare say, but it seemed appropriate enough. We were both taking on something unknown, the school and I, both buying a pig in a poke. On my first day at the school I turned up in the wheelchair. With my McKee pins working smoothly I could now sit down in a wheelchair reasonably convincingly. What I couldn’t do, as it turned out, was stay in place while the chair was carried up or down stairs. I perched stably enough for life on the flat but not for the amateurish toting of my peers.

That first day was nightmarish. They couldn’t keep the wheelchair level, and if it tipped I would be tipped out, and then the boys and girls who broke my fall would break me in the process. Seat belts hadn’t been thought of for wheelchairs back then — they had hardly been thought of for cars. After the first frightening day I had to regress from the Wrigley to a more primitive style of vehicle, back into the prehistoric phase of my life on four wheels. The Tan-Sad invalid carriage from long ago was dusted off — quite literally. I remember Mum disinterring it from the shed and flapping her duster at it in dismay.

One step forward and one step back. Not much of a dance, but that seemed to be what my karma had choreographed for me. I was now independent, in the sense that I was receiving a mainstream education for the first time in my whole life. In other ways I needed more help than I had for quite some time.

I had struggled over the mountains of Vulcan to find myself stuck on a plateau. The Tan-Sad symbolised this predicament — and no one wants to spend his schooldays travelling between classes in a symbol. The Tan-Sad’s wheels were fixed, so it couldn’t turn corners. It was less steerable than a supermarket trolley, though its wheels didn’t squeak. Its great advantage was that it had a broad footplate and so wouldn’t tip me out — but it was very unwieldy, and far too heavy to be punted along by a crutch or a cane like a wheelchair. I would always need to be pushed on school premises. No more self-locomotion. No more privacy, or to put it more positively, no more solitude.