Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

The exam was scheduled for a Tuesday. On the Saturday night I opened the book for one last despairing bout of revision, and the language looked quite different. It was lucid. It coöperated. Dead language or no dead language, it had come alive. It had only been lying doggo, and it wanted to play after all. The Key Cards shone with meaning in Broyan’s taxi on the day of the exam, as if someone had turned on a spotlight on the other side of a keyhole while I crouched to spy on the principal parts of verbs.

In a strange way it was modern teaching methods that had held me back. Previous languages I had learned by rote and repetition, at least in the early stages, whereas Latin at Burnham was taught by stages, through progressive understanding. It’s a splendid notion, but I wonder if it suits the brain, really. It’s a question of neurology. To learn and understand at the same time is a perverse undertaking, like that silly thing people are always trying to do — what is it, to pat your head and stroke your tummy in a circle at the same time? It’s something like that.

I know I’ve always managed better when I’ve learned mechanically and understood after the event. Fewer simultaneous mental processes are required. That seems to be the key. It’s best if new shapes are allowed to sink into the brain-mush undisturbed. Then they’ll pop up somewhere else, in another lobe perhaps, bathed in understanding. Whatever the exact mechanics of my late burst of comprehension, I who had given such ample grounds for doubt earned a 2 Grade and the school’s usual response to surprises of this kind, a little flattering sheaf of book tokens.

The witching hour was 4.20

One more thing I hadn’t really considered before I started at Burnham Grammar was that a day school only functions in the day. Another sad lapse of common sense, another bit of clever-person’s stupidity. The whole point of attending a mainstream school was to be absorbed into a wider world, but that wasn’t really on the cards. The problem was Broyan. The magic coach which carried me to the academic ball every morning also came to fetch me, and its summons was imperious. The witching hour was 4.20 rather than midnight, but that was a technicality. Yes, Broyan would wait, but why should he? True, Broyan was employed on a contract basis and there was no meter running except the one in my head (I was very aware that the local education authority wasn’t made of money). I could have sent him away but then my predicament, as a young man in an invalid carriage with no way home, would be at least as awkward as Cinderella’s.

I was effectively debarred from teenage society by my exclusion from loitering. Teenage society and loitering are two words for the same thing. Without hanging around there can be no hanging together. I did my best to loiter in free periods, but you can’t get into the swing of loitering when you’re on the clock. In fact I was debarred from taking part not only by the practical difficulties but by my own exhaustion. I just wanted to ride back in Broyan’s taxi to Trees, where the cry of ‘The ruddy crutch!’ could almost sound like ‘Welcome Home’.

Unable to build relationships with my fellows at the end of the school day, I couldn’t really hope to fill up my schedule at weekends, except with homework. So normally I would badger Dad into taking me to the library on a Saturday. That’s where I did my loitering instead, while Dad ran errands. I can’t imagine what they were, Dad’s errands — shopping wasn’t on the agenda for a husband and father of that vintage, except when it came to special errands to select things that women couldn’t possibly know about, such as wine.

Dad wouldn’t stay when he took me to the library, not being on good terms with Mrs Pavey, whom he described as ‘doolally’, saying he couldn’t understand how she kept her job. It was true that she had her little ways, but none of the patrons minded that. We all have our little ways.

Certifiably insane remedy

Mrs Pavey was a martyr to migraines. Sometimes the pain was so bad that coming to work was out of the question, but more often she struggled in. She always wore a silk scarf — it was part of how she dressed for work — but when the torture inside her head got too much for her, she would blindfold herself with the scarf and lie down behind the counter. Regular users came to know the signs, and would process their own returns and borrowings, tucking the slips into the cardboard pockets and stamping the issue page, taking care not to make too much noise with the stamping machine. I suppose newcomers to the library must have found it strange that the person in charge was lying concealed behind the issue desk, moaning faintly at the slightest sound, but this was really only a tableau expanding on the sign on the desk: Silence Is Requested.

Mrs Pavey treated her migraine with a standard remedy of the day. It was an incredibly exotic, certifiably insane remedy, but in those lax days it was readily available. It was called Cafergot Q. A chocolate-flavoured, caffeine-enhanced chewable ergotamine. They looked like sweets, and Mrs Pavey gobbled them down as if that’s what they were. When she went to Bourne End surgery for a repeat prescription, our rather flinty GP Flanny (Dr Flanagan) couldn’t believe how much she’d got through. Two months’ worth in ten days. She didn’t make a fuss, since after all in those days a chocolate-flavoured, caffeine-enhanced chewable ergotamine was all part of the pharmacological sweetshop, no more than a quirky flavour of Spangles, latently hallucinogenic. She simply said, ‘It’s a wonder your fingers haven’t fallen off.’

Mrs Pavey was a sweet woman, melancholy-seeming even when her brain wasn’t held in its vice of pain. Her skin was oddly creamy and her blue eyes had a lot of grey in them. She lived with her elderly mother, and I never heard a Mr Pavey spoken of.

Sometimes after she had done a particularly inspired bit of truffle-hunting on my behalf, running down some esoteric oddity in the stacks, I would pay her a visit in the library to express my thanks. She would shy away from my gratitude, dismissing it almost, as if she was only doing her job. Which was true, but if everyone did it at that level then ‘job’ would be a holy word.

One Saturday in the library I came across a book on shorthand, and immediately decided I must master it. I loved the way shorthand looked. It seemed to be an entirely alien language, yet it was still English under the surface of squiggles. When I started to study it seriously I was disappointed to learn that the shapes of related consonants — p and b , say — were the same, the only difference being thickness of line. Perversely I wanted every sound to be represented by a different shape, which would have turned Pitman into mere hieroglyphics and made huge demands on the memory.

I could never make the pens work anyway.

Campy spoofing

I transferred my allegiances from Pitman to Gregg, a rival system which did at least use differences of size, if not shape. I got hold of a magazine from the library which promised to teach you eighty new short forms a week. I enjoyed the element of esoteric knowledge, writing words that not one in a thousand people would be able to reconstitute — I suppose it was Yod Hé Vau Hé all over again. I didn’t really see shorthand as a means of communication, more a cipher with considerable ornamental merits. There was nothing ‘short’ about it. Everything took a lot longer than if I’d used the uncryptic full-length forms.

It was always against the odds that I could hide an actual object, so my interest was drawn to metaphysical hiding, in other words to secrets. It mattered relatively little that they were secrets everyone knew already, under the heavy disguise of shorthand, or had no interest in, like the arcana (major, minor and downright silly) of the Tarot.