Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I needed to be lifted in and out of the Tan-Sad, like a baby with its pram, a demotion I felt keenly. I wanted a deepened style of relationship here in the mainstream, based on more than wheelchairs passing in the night. So much for being in the swim of a normal education. Already I felt to be swimming like a stone.

Sea of boys

And yet in general terms the mad scheme worked. I never came to serious harm, though the experience of being carried could be terrifying. I got a few knocks from such accidents and I’m sure I dealt out plenty more, but the sea of boys always broke my fall. Ashford was right. They didn’t all go tumbling in their turn. Enough hands reached instinctively for banisters to stabilise the toppling tower. Massed pupils acted as a wildly laughing safety-net whenever the Tan-Sad broke loose from its bearers. For everyone but me it was fun and a break from routine, something that schoolchildren crave more than anything. Since then, whenever I see pop concerts on television where the singers dive ecstatically into the audience it reminds me of my schooldays, although it was never by choice that I surfed the crowd in my trundling chariot.

I had been pushed around in the Tan-Sad for years as a child, feeling both conspicuous and invisible, but the new routine made a difference. I was much more self-conscious, of course, as a teenager who was only on those premises because of his fixed desire to be independent. There was another element in play, though. Partly it was the number of people helping, but mainly of course the change of level, the element of laborious lifting, which added something almost ceremonial to my progress from floor to floor. Sometimes when I arrived safely on a landing, and my helpers set me down, there would be a little ripple of applause from the other pupils, as if I had done something remarkable, and though this was nonsense still it made people look at me differently. Naturally the cheers were louder when I was almost dropped, but there was a stubborn feeling of carnival even without a near-disaster.

At the end of each schoolday the Tan-Sad was left in the hall of the school. I would be reunited with it the next morning before assembly, without much rejoicing.

Assembly took place in the big hall. There was a hymn, accompanied on the piano by a plump little lady with a fixed smile, though the minority of pupils who made any noise at all conspired to slow the music right down, stripping it of the slightest claim to forward motion. Roll-call, which was held in the classroom, had a strange element of apartheid. The school was co-educational but not exactly equal in its treatment of the sexes.

The rule was that boys would be called by their surnames, and girls by their first names. The intonations were different too, gruff and challenging for the boys, tender and sweet for the girls. So it would be brusque, denunciatory ‘Adams!’ for Peter Adams and murmured tentative ‘Julie?’ for Julie Chandler. A name like ‘Valerie’ became filigree on the lips of some of the teachers. Valerie was well on her way to becoming a mythological figure. Positively a dryad of Slough.

Even at this late stage of normal education, it seemed that girls were made of sugar and spice (and all things nice), boys of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. This piece of symbolic theatre was repeated at the beginning of every school day, with girls being cooed over as if they were unique and fragrant blooms, boys marked down as bleak little blobs, no improvement on the fathers whose names they were made to answer to.

Mothering at a lower voltage

Girls were nicer than boys, then. It was official, and perhaps it was even true. Certainly the girls of the school were franker and warmer in their approaches to me — but I was never willingly going to be mothered again. And as far as I could see, sistering was just mothering at a lower voltage. I knew from my years at CRX how easy it was to become an honorary girl, and it wasn’t going to happen again. Once in an incarnation was plenty.

Little chatty groups of girls came over to cultivate me. No one quite dared to come alone — but the boys were much less enterprising. Boys were very happy to push or carry the Tan-Sad, and perhaps they had some limited opportunities to spy on me, but I noticed that every now and then a boy would be despatched to ask the girls for information, to find out what I had said and what I might turn out to be like.

There were disordered refinements to the hateful system of rollcall. If two girls had the same Christian name, then one of them would be set apart with a diminutive, so that there might be one Jane and one Janie. If two boys had the same last name, their first initials would be used to distinguish them, but it would be snarled rather than neutrally spoken. The same lips which shaped ‘Valerie’ so tenderly that you could almost feel the floaty fabric of her dress spat out the initials as though they were bitter pips. The discrimination of tone became extreme when two boys made the blunder of having the same last name and the same initial as well. So it was ‘Savage, Paul! ’ and ‘Savage, Patrick! ’ spoken with a sort of rage, barely suppressed. How dare twins share an initial on top of everything else! It was asking for trouble.

On my first day I was upset at hearing my surname barked out so baldly. The rasping double consonant at the beginning of Cromer suddenly seemed tailor-made for parade-ground abuse.

Ideally I would have reformed the system, but it was more practical to gain exemption from it. I vowed I would become John in the school universally, first in class and then at roll-call. This was a strictly limited blurring of the boundaries: I wanted my name read out at roll-call in the female style, but my interest wasn’t in androgyny, only special treatment.

I exploited the physical characteristics of the Tan-Sad, and the way it shaped my encounters with others. If I spoke softly, people had to lean over it to hear me, and then the charm could flow at full pressure. I learned how to sweep even teachers off their feet with the water cannon of intimacy. By the third week every teacher except Mr Jardine was calling me John, and I became John to him by the start of the next term. Only the horrendous Mr Waller stood firm in the face of sentimental pressure. Mr Waller was immune to every strain of personality magic I could come up with. He once logged a formal complaint against me for wearing a coloured shirt. I was the only pupil whose shirts had to be specially made, but I was allowed no compensating fun. It’s not as if adhering to the letter of the uniform code would help me blend in.

Of course there was something ridiculous about my quest for Christian-name status at roll-call. For years I had been fighting to be treated as a normal boy, but the moment there was any danger of it happening I threw myself into a campaign for exceptional status.

The day I was called ‘John’ at roll-call at last, I couldn’t stop smiling. I would never be filigree Valerie, but I was no longer denounced as Cromer. I was worming my way into the heart of the place.

Burnham Grammar School gave me what I wanted in the way of education. I don’t necessarily mean that it was an educational hothouse, although I have no complaints. The hothouse doesn’t suit every plant. The great thing was that Burnham really was a school — a school and only a school. It wasn’t anything else in disguise. That was what I wanted. After so much time spent at schools that were really hospitals, or converted tennis courts, or folly-castles, it felt thrilling and holy to be going to a school that was only a school. A school disguised as a school! Glorious double-bluff. To be absorbing knowledge in a building designed, however unambitiously, for that purpose and no other.