Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

In time, though, it became a compulsion, and my party trick become more like a brush with mental illness. I found it a real effort to leave stops unvoiced, even when answering a teacher’s question during a lesson. The return of the repressed isn’t a process that is easy to put into reverse. It isn’t a straightforward job to put the lid back on Pandora’s Box of punctuation, and that little tic took a long time to die down. It helped if I asked Barbara to sit far away from me in class. Then the hysteria had a chance to die down, though our friendship stalled, rather, with what looked like rejection on my part. Sometimes I would get panicky when she spoke to me, for fear that I would erupt again, a displaced Pentecostalist bearing witness to his molten God not in tongues but spoken signs.

A proper cage of rules

When autumn came the family’s wine-making activities tailed off, since fermentation became too slow for good results. I looked around for a new project to maintain our momentum, and suggested that Dad occupy his time by growing mushrooms in the greenhouse. ‘It’ll give a bit of heat to the plants,’ I said, ‘And the insulating effect will lower our fuel bills.’

Dad might reasonably have answered, ‘When did you give a fig for our heating bills, John, with your taste for leaving doors open in all weathers?’ Instead he buckled down to become a mushroom farmer.

It was a funny old psychology that he had. He liked to know what he was supposed to do, which was easily managed when he was at work. Inside a proper cage of rules he could be very unyielding — so that my phoning him at work was a tremendous liberty that must be stamped on and prevented from recurring. But at home he had less sense of running on rails, and at the weekends he was almost grateful to have me organise his time. He tried to get me interested in what interested him, but at this stage I was fairly resistant and it’s fair to say that the flow of hobbies was more the other way.

Soon I was giving orders, watching him mixing horse dung, straw and organic composting powder, testing the temperature with a hotbed thermometer. We bought the spawn by mail order from a local farm which advertised in Exchange & Mart and even undertook to buy the crop back from us when it was ready. We couldn’t lose.

There was great excitement when we saw bits of the peat casing begin to heave with fungal nodes. Everyone went to look in admiration at the little pearls as they grew steadily bigger. We patted ourselves on the back. All that hard work was worth it.

Finally it was time to pick some of our crop and taste them. ‘Would you care for some mushrooms, m’dear?’ Dad asked, doing a jovial pastiche of what he imagined was Peter’s manner at work. ‘They’re from Chef’s own garden.’

‘Yes please, Dennis,’ said Mum, and then ‘I don’t think this is a good one, though, dear. Can I try again?’ They were none of them good. We couldn’t lose — yet somehow we managed it. Something rather ghastly was eating them before we had a chance. Our fungi had funguses of their own.

I scolded Dad for cutting corners with his fungiculture — he had turned the mass too little, he hadn’t been particular enough about the temperature of the hotbed, which was crucial. This can’t have been much fun for him. Mum joined in with me in what must have been a horrendous alliance. To be hen-pecked and chick-pecked simultaneously, what a fate.

I was already firmly established as the family’s telephone wheedler, and I got on the phone to the farm. ‘I’m afraid there’s something gone wrong with our crop — do you want to come and inspect it?’ Suppressed panic leaked down the line. The response was very clear: Don’t for God’s sake bring them here!

Dad said he didn’t see the harm in us paying a visit. Privately I thought we would be as welcome as Blind Pew at the Admiral Benbow, primed to pass on the Black Spot to poor Billy Bones, but I also thought it might be fun to make them sit up and take notice. We took a few of our stricken mushrooms with us, though we left them politely in the car. We were relying quite a bit on the ‘knock’ effect of the wheelchair. The chair always knocked people back, and then they tended to lose track of their normal behaviour patterns.

Knock knock! Who’s there? Abel. Abel who? Able-bodied dismay. I asked the farmer if there was any medicine we could administer to our defective mushrooms.

‘Um … There’s powder I could give you.’

‘Will that work?’

‘No. I’m not hopeful. Best to dispose of them carefully and start again from scratch.’

All the same, they gave us a huge tray of mushrooms to compensate for the failure of our crop. This was a very welcome knock-on effect of our visit. We were many pounds of mushrooms to the good, though the truth was that we none of us cared all that much for mushrooms. It was the activity that was important, the uniting fever of a hobby, and the mushrooms, like the wine we made, were a sort of side-effect, almost a nuisance which we would have done without if we’d been able.

When both of us enjoyed the product as well as the process, though, we made quite a team. I privately claimed credit for having made the conservatory happen, but I have to give Dad his due in matters of siting and temperature control. He knew what he was doing. The dry, desert half of the conservatory was for Mum, of course, but also cacti (mainly grown from seed) and Drosophyllum s to boot, though the first few batches didn’t seem too happy. It’s a temperamental plant, though, everyone knows that. The dry bit of the conservatory had a door into the garden for when it grew too hot, even for Mum.

The damp greenhousy part, which was kept shadier, had no external door. There was plenty of sun both morning and evening, with shade being provided by the trees, carefully pruned to allow a rich flow of air under their branches and over the greenhouse top. Just the sort of conditions your Cymbidium orchid is partial to. Moving patches of sunlight generated a really nice tropical fug, ideal for drosera, sarracenias and (even if it was just the once) an Australian byblis which Dad raised from seed.

It all worked beautifully, even if Drosophyllum wasn’t persuaded yet. I would have liked to convey my appreciation to Dad, but compliments were never really part of our currency, in either direction.

An anarchist commune for seeds

Even after the mushroom débâcle I hadn’t altogether lost my touch with Dad. It made sense to go on pressurising him for things, just to keep in practice for when it was really important. In one of his Telegraph s, probably a Sunday one, I saw an advertisement for an eiderdown called the Margaret Erskine Dream-Cloud. There was a splendid picture illustrating the virtues of the product. It showed a girl ensconced under her eiderdown, warm as toast, radiantly smiling, despite the ice blocks surrounding her, which seemed to crimp the crust-edges of a strawberry-apple-girl pie.

I wanted a Dream-Cloud immediately. It was the perfect solution to my odd combination of needs, my love of fresh air in all seasons and weather coupled with this body’s intolerance of cold. There were various levels of insulating excellence, with goose down at the top. That’s what I wanted, goose down and nothing less, and I wore Dad down, though he did some bargaining of his own. It was finally agreed that the Dream-Cloud represented two birthdays and one Christmas. Dad said, ‘You’d just better promise that you’ll make it last.’ That was just like him, to save face by taking a hard line — even after he had caved in.

I read and re-read Gardening for Adventure , from its first page to the last, and the ones after that. I’ve always had a particular fondness for indexes, bibliographies and postscripts — everything that publishers call ‘back matter’. Gardening for Adventure had something I myself had lacked for some years now, an Appendix, which listed suppliers of plants. Number 17 on the list of 35 was Major V. F. Howell, of Firethorn, Oxshot Way, Cobham, Surrey. There were other suppliers relatively near, but I have to admit I was attracted by the idea of ordering plants from a Major.