Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

It took me ages to chasten these flourishes and exorcise the cedillas from my c s. I loved making those expressive little hooks, dainty curls like stray typographic eyelashes. I wanted to study them under laboratory conditions, magnifying them to see if each cedilla had a little cedilla of its own, and so on down into unthinkable realms of subordination … in my mind’s eye, my mind’s microscope, the inside curve of each cedilla had the dull gleam of something whetted and oiled, like the edge of an infinitesimal sickle.

Little c s have lesser c s upon their tails to bite ’em / Lesser c s have lesser c s, and so ad infinitum ! Unless it might happen that electron microscopy revealed at supreme magnification some final clinger-on, some depender without dependants, the loneliest and most necessary of his kind, his perfect uselessness underwriting a sense of purpose for all the rest.

Eckstein was scrupulous, within the limits of his abrasiveness, to let me down lightly. He explained that although the word cedilla is Spanish and means ‘little z’, the mark itself does not feature in the modern language, or not in the Castilian master-dialect which was the only one possible to study in schools. I was disappointed but my fondness for the little diacritic held firm. Curaçao was still my favourite drink, of all the ones I had never tasted.

What Eckstein alleged about the absorptive powers of teenaged memory certainly seemed to be true of mine. It seemed to be actively hungry rather than passively registering, and I trained it to do tricks. I threw random scraps to its surplus capacity. I would memorise shopping lists and reel them off to an amazed (or mildly diverted, or not quite bored) audience. Once Dad thought he’d caught me out, until I explained that it was more of a challenge to retain last week’s shopping list rather than this one’s. I made him dig the old list out of the kitchen drawer and check every item, rather than take my word for it.

Duly mashed

I performed just as willingly with numbers. The trick was to forge associative links — to impose a grammar on numbers, building on their resemblances to creatures or objects. So 2 was represented by a swan, 6 by an elephant’s trunk, 1 by a magic wand, and to establish 261 firmly in your memory all you had to do was think of a swan eating an elephant that is waving a wand.

Possibly Mum and Dad thought these hobbies were morbid signs of some sort. They wanted me to make some friends outside school, which in my special case meant ‘outside the school buildings’, to have things to do in the evenings. And so did I, but their idea was that I should go to a meeting of the Young Conservatives, described by Dad as ‘a nice bunch of youngsters’. The Bourne End meeting place of this cult wasn’t far away, by the level crossing, within wheelchair range so that I wouldn’t need to be delivered like a child to a birthday party.

I agreed, to keep them happy. This was a very abstract display of independence (of ‘independence’ prescribed by someone else!). I didn’t want to go where I was going — I was going there because I could. But I did always love going over the level crossing in the Wrigley, bumping outrageously over the uneven sleepers, almost willing myself to come a cropper. If I’d got stuck and been duly mashed I dare say Mum would never have forgiven herself and the Young Conservatives.

It turned out that their lair was well defended. The only access was by way of a metal spiral staircase. I wasn’t having that. I wasn’t going to ask someone to carry me up such a frightening structure for the sake of company I didn’t want. I went to the Red Lion instead, and drank there till closing time. I can’t say I had a whale of a time, but at least I was in a place I had chosen for myself, and someone put ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ on the jukebox. A nice young man in a floral shirt came over to see if I was all right, saying if there was anything I wanted I should just give a shout. I began to wonder if I hadn’t stumbled on a ‘queer pub’ just round the corner from home, hitting the jackpot with my first pull on the handle. What luck! I wouldn’t have to go to the extreme lengths favoured by Boyde Ashlar (I had no idea how to find a Turkish Baths, let alone get myself through its turnstile). This nice young man was positively chatting me up. He twinkled at me. Nothing was too much trouble. Then I realised that this lad had found the easiest possible way of impressing a girlfriend with his essential niceness on a first date, bouncing a twinkle at me for her benefit. If I’d been a kitten stuck up a tree outside the pub I’d have served his turn just as well. After that I had no qualms about letting him refill my glass. Pathos has a price, and it was the least he could do. This stranded kitten doesn’t come cheap.

Mum and Dad had left the door of Trees open for me as usual. The system was that the door of the bedroom I shared with Peter (when he was in residence), which gave access to the outside world, stayed open except when we all left the house. It stayed open even in cold weather, though on days of actual snow it might be closed when a few satisfying flurries had been admitted. The gain in convenience — the easy flow of unescorted wheelchairs in and out — easily outweighed any inconvenience of temperature. If I couldn’t circulate freely myself then I could at least give the air that privilege. It was better than a consolation prize, a pleasurable sensation in its own right.

When I came in that night I was exhilarated out of all proportion to the actual pleasures of my night out. I had mounted an expedition solo, across the tracks and back, over an unknown threshold, and I had come back safe. Peter came in just after me, from his pub job at the Spade Oak Hotel. I sang at the top of my voice while he helped prepare me for bed. I sang ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, inevitably, with particular repetition of the bit about calling out for another drink and the waiter bringing a tray.

Next morning Mum came in beaming to ask about my big evening out. My late-night song recital seemed to indicate a social breakthrough. She wanted all the details of my evening of Tory glory. It was only when I told her I hadn’t gone to the Young Conservatives after all that the atmosphere became suffused with toxins. Mum went quite white. It was one thing for me to engage in alcoholic carousal with Young Conservatives, quite another to do anything of the sort at the Red Lion. That was beyond the pale, and my singing of a cryptic Procol Harum ballad suddenly changed from a natural burst of exuberance to a sinister display of drunkenness, though I missed the same number of notes either way. The song might just as well have been ‘The Red Flag’ for all the legitimate entertainment it provided. Mum’s face, at first just ghastly, turned a darker shade of puce, and then she stalked off.

She didn’t speak to me for four days. She thought I’d been drinking, and as she didn’t ask me outright I didn’t volunteer any information. I’d stuck to soft drinks, naturally, being under age. Arguments about my behaviour raged through the house without my needing to participate, which was often the way. Once I heard the phrase ‘ — showed a little initiative —’ in Dad’s voice between two door-slammings. That must have been him standing up for me, welcome proof that he could come through with the goods in my defence when he was really up against it.

Dad was a much happier organism altogether, working in the personnel department of BOAC, than he had been as a sub-standard salesman for Centrum Intercoms, his first job after leaving the services. BOAC gave him back some of the sense of himself he had enjoyed in the RAF. He was a bit of a hermit crab, I suppose, when it came to the world of work. He needed the right sort of job — one with a proper chain of command — to give him a shape and a home. Otherwise he felt defenceless, skulking between shells.