Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Mr Ashford disregarded my dietary eccentricity and simply said, ‘Then I expect you’ll be taught by Mr Eckstein. Quite a character. You’ll either like him or you won’t.’ These formulas reliably indicate unpopularity.

Volatilised mucus

Klaus Eckstein was a portly man, with whiskers sprouting in all directions. He had no small talk. In my first lesson with him one boy tried to lay an ambush by saying, ‘My father says the only good German is a dead German.’ There was still a lot of this sentiment around, but I was a little shocked to have it spelled out in this way. Eckstein simply snarled back, ‘Tell your father he is wrong! Even the dead ones stink.’ A horrible, wonderful thing to say, and I was shocked all over again. I didn’t understand that there were people who could be described as German, refugees and survivors, whose feelings for their homeland were not sentimental.

Eckstein wore a garment that I’d never seen before, and rarely enough since — a suède waistcoat. He took snuff, tapping the yellowish powder onto a mysterious hollow which appeared at the base of his thumb when he contorted it in a particular way. Then he sharply sniffed up the soft clod of powder. Eckstein kept a hanky handy for the inevitable sneezes, but even so his waistcoat became encrusted with grains and stains. Suède seemed to be a material perfectly chosen to welcome into its nap a mist of volatilised mucus suspending particles of ground tobacco. The flecked waistcoat and his snuff habit gave him a spicy smell, like gingerbread gone wrong. Perhaps Eckstein thought his snuffbox and waistcoat made him seem like an English gentleman rather than a startling exotic — but what would an English gentleman have been doing on the staff of Burnham Grammar? Such a person would have been no less exotic than Eckstein himself.

Eckstein made a point of being stern and abrasive and rude, but I wasn’t going to let a little thing like that deter me from getting into his good books. After his lesson one day, I apologised for how poor my German was, how deficient my general education. This sort of performance I knew to be foolproof: build yourself up and the world will rush to tear you down, but if you tear yourself down the rush is all the other way, to make repairs. Except that Eckstein had not signed up to this convention. He glared and said, ‘Indeed. Your German is appalling, as are most things about you. You’ll never be much good at it unless you can get yourself to Germany somehow and stay there for a year, a season at the least. A horrible country in many ways, but the only place that foolish English boys can be stripped of their bleat of an accent.’

I tried to take this in my stride, telling myself that the compliments when they came would be sweeter for the wait. Buttering people up had always been my bread and butter, and I wasn’t going to be cured of the habit just because I’d been fed a mouthful of dry crumbs. ‘I’ll try my hardest, sir. And sir? Since Ecke is the German word for corner and Stein is the German for stone, perhaps you, Mr Eckstein, will be the cornerstone of my German education?’ I had been practising this little aria of flattery for days.

He gave a grunt. ‘Not unless you dig down into the rubble of what you think you know, and lay some proper foundations. Your accent is execrable .’ I knew it could hardly be so bad, since the native tones of Gisela Schmidt, star physiotherapist of CRX, throbbed behind every syllable, but I had to salute the mileage Eckstein got from the packed consonants of his chosen adjective. ‘You’ll never be any good unless you can get yourself to Germany and stay there until it all sinks in.’ He didn’t acknowledge with his tone that there could be any excuse but laziness for my not heading immediately to Germany, and getting stuck in to the sort of Deutsches Leben they don’t tell you about in Deutsches Leben or any other book, German Life away from the page.

Eckstein belonged to a strange category of teacher, those who can frogmarch pupils to excellence without ever sullying their mouths with a single word of praise. One of his tricks was to say to a pupil, ‘With all due respect,’ adding with no change of tone: ‘which is none.’ Following up a standard piece of wheedling good manners with some bad manners all his own. He was extremely unpopular. I loved him from the first.

One bit of regression connected with living at home was my lack of bathroom discipline. I can’t fault the National Health Service, which provided me with some equipment at about this time, by paying for a wheeled commode made to my measure. I even remember the name of the man who made it, a Mr Heard. After the trouble he went to, it’s only right to commemorate him. It was such a pleasure to have something that really was tailored to my requirements — even NHS hips seemed to be off the peg. I wish Mr Heard had made those! But I was happy enough with my trolley upholstered in maroon leatherette.

As a newly acknowledged normal schoolboy, I came into my birthright of laziness. Schoolboys aren’t the most hygiene-minded of creatures. Along with the commode I was the proud possessor of a National Health bum-wiper, an elegant accessory in sculptural terms, a curve of perspex which looked vaguely like a snorkel. I was shown how to use it, but it was a bit of a business and I was happy enough with things as they were.

Mum and Dad, reluctant wipers, weren’t so happy. This was an area where they were united for once in wanting me to grow up, though normally Mum fought to hold on to her privileges. Meanwhile I dragged my heels. Re-learning something is very different from learning it the first time. There’s no glamour, is there? I knew I could do it, I’d done it well enough before I was ill, so there wasn’t a lot of incentive. I’d get round to it sooner or later. In terms of potty-training I was in a state of arrested development, in no great hurry to manage things on my own. This was a time when my personality was made up of plates of artificial maturity and babyishness which were always shearing unstably past each other. This too made me a normal schoolboy.

Advertising homunculus

It was the swimming teacher at Burnham, Mr Marshall, who opened my eyes. He didn’t scold, he couldn’t have been nicer, but I got the message loud and clear. There was no actual provision for disabled swimming, no extra help assigned. Somebody was going to be neglected, either me or the rest of the class, and for once it was going to be the others. Mr Marshall devoted almost all of his time to me, giving everyone else the dregs of his attention. I’m surprised nobody decided to drown out of pique.

My swimming lesson was really hydrotherapy rather than actual instruction, gentle supported movement in water. It would have taken all the buoyancy aids on hand to counteract the heaviness of my bones (I would have looked like a little Michelin Man, the advertising homunculus composed of tyres) if Mr Marshall had withdrawn his helping hand.

He even dressed and undressed me, and that’s how they came to light, the shameful stains that go by the jaunty name of skid-marks. Skid-marks, yes, if you must — but I hadn’t been the one at the wheel. So much for Mum’s high standards. So much for once-a-nurse-always-a-nurse.

I was struck by a thunderbolt of shame, there in the changing-room. I was about to explain that I didn’t wipe myself, but I stopped myself in time. There’s only so much of an alibi you can claim when your bum is the guilty party. Admitting that someone else did the dirty work at home would make me seem even less of a grown-up than doing the job, badly, myself.

So belatedly I got to grips with the instrument provided by a grateful Government. It wasn’t a picnic — the bum-wiper was a bit of a bugger to use. There was a slit in the perspex into which I was supposed to tuck a length of toilet paper. Then in theory I would pass the snorkel back between my legs, where my arms don’t reach, and dab away hopefully at my mucky bottom. With a little paper-folding (though origami was never really my sport) it was even possible to make several wipes with a single length of bog roll. I should make clear that by ‘single length’ I don’t mean a single rectangle between perforations. I’m not a magician! I needed six — four at a pinch.