Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

‘A bull chased me across the last field, that’s what happened. Can we get a move on?’ Dad never normally let a little thing like a bull worry him. He’d pushed me past any number of bulls in the past. ‘I thought you said it was only people who didn’t know what they were doing who got chased by bulls?’

‘Never mind what I said, John. Move off. Chop chop. Time’s getting on. We’ve got somewhere to go.’

I thought that was a bit rich after leaving me twiddling my thumbs for so long. I was the driver, wasn’t I? He was only hitching a lift, and it would have served him right if I had gone on without him. I said, ‘I’m just taking one last look at this lovely spot.’

‘I must insist that you start driving.’

‘Granny always said that I shouldn’t waste the privilege of the view. Otherwise I’ll get bored and crash.’

‘Crash later if you must but drive now .’ Sullenly I obeyed him. ‘Your grandmother, John,’ he went on, ‘is a surly old witch who has never said a sensible thing or done a useful one.’

‘Apart perhaps from buying the car you’re riding in.’

That stopped him short, but only for a moment, and then he added, ‘Oh, she’ll make you pay, never fear. Don’t you know that?’ I knew that. Afterwards he calmed down a bit, though the earlier sunny mood was in no hurry to re-form.

My bright red charabanc

We were given a good welcome at Keele. It seemed a pretty little campus. It looked to me rather an artificial environment, which didn’t put me off, rather the opposite. I quite fancied the idea of being a student of the University of Toytown. It was like a more modern version of the village in The Prisoner , a television programme which had many devotees at Burnham Grammar, enigmatic spy drama set in a seaside resort, with splendid neo-Edwardian charabancs to carry everyone around. I found myself imitating the ritual leave-taking from the series by saying ‘Be Seeing You’ rather meaningfully at the end of my interview, instead of the conventional Goodbye.

The interview wasn’t easy, though, and I found myself getting flustered. My German pronunciation faltered. It wasn’t what it should have been. It rather let me down.

The canteen offered not one but two vegetarian options. I was told that if I was accepted I would be allowed to drive the Mini on the pedestrian walkways. All of this added to the seductiveness of the place — my bright red charabanc would have right of way.

There was a Victorian mansion which was part of the complex, with an enormous holly hedge which Dad and I admired. It must have been hundreds of feet wide, thirty foot high and almost as thick.

As we were leaving in the morning, Dad pointed out a disabled student, a girl in a motorised wheelchair. I could recognise the dawdling progress of an Everest & Jennings from some way off. I thought her presence was a good sign, but Dad was discouraging. ‘While she’s there,’ he said, ‘you don’t have a chance. Not a chance in hell — that’s just the way these things work.’ I pointed out that if she was a second-year she would have graduated by the time I arrived, but Dad wasn’t convinced.

I asked Dad if he wanted to do any more botanical sight-seeing on the way home, but he said he’d had enough of nature for the time being. We made do with coffee and sandwiches at a pub.

Muriel Foot was at Trees when we got there, to keep Mum company. Muriel had been worried, and though she hadn’t spent the night she had stayed late that evening and returned early in the morning.

The day before, she had found Mum painting over the inside of a window with whitewash, and it had taken some time before Mum gave any sort of explanation. In fact she was putting into practice one of the procedures recommended in the event of nuclear war. The whitewash was intended to reflect the visible wave-lengths of an explosion, but Mum wasn’t thinking in terms of a bomb. She was trying to protect us all against the catastrophic flash from Stoppard’s brain.

Muriel tried to think of something else to suggest, to take her mind off things. Mum was willing to be distracted, but only up to a certain point. They sat down to draft letters to the local paper instead, warning people of the danger in which they all lived.

Muriel told Dad she thought Mum was having a nervous breakdown, but Dad didn’t give that idea house room. ‘That’s not how Laura’s breakdowns go. If she has the energy to whitewash a window it means she’s holding her own.’ Which wasn’t exactly reassuring to Muriel, or indeed to me. It was news (to both of us, I imagine) that Mum had had breakdowns in the past.

Dad shooed Muriel away. She went without verbal protest — everyone knew better in those days than to come between husband and wife — though the set of her shoulders told a different story. Then Dad threw the draft letters in the bin, poured the whitewash away and made a start on cleaning the affected window. Then he went into the garden to see how things were getting along there in his absence. He paid no direct attention to Mum, but that wasn’t the way their marriage worked (to the extent that it did). He had a steadying effect unconnected to any communicative current, and being ignored by him at close range was almost enough to bring her back to herself. To love, honour and obey — all those actions were promised at the wedding and, I’m sure, sincerely meant at the time. But they were hardly the operative verbs of the marriage. Almost-hearing, not-quite-looking-through, leaving-the-room-without-actually-moving — nothing was said in church about any of those.

As part of my application to Cambridge I had to write an essay on any subject under the sun. Free choice, that terrifying obligation. I decided I wanted to write something which proved my mind and my character went in more than one direction, both outward and inward, so I described the various stages a flame passes through before it starves to death. Thanks to my candle-making with Mum I had a good grasp of what went on in a flame. I made it as exact and technical as I could, describing the adventures of the flame as a scientific event, a nuanced narrative of physics and chemistry, but then I changed gear and wrote, ‘I am now exactly that tiny blue tongue of combustion on a cushion of gases. You, dear examiner, can snuff me out once and for all. Or you can prolong the wick of my mind’s life so that I burn yellow and burn bright.’ Good manipulative pyræsthetics, though it was sentimental of me to use the image of a candle flame in such a way. In Hindu mysticism it is used to represent an opposite truth, the inconstancy of personality.

Even before the interview I got the impression that Cambridge University wasn’t keen on disability, not in its heart of hearts. I decided that the only way I was going to persuade them otherwise was by being very full of the old can-do. Cambridge might agree to have me as long as I made out that I hardly needed the wheelchair. Only hanging on to it for sentimental reasons, like Evelyn Waugh’s silly Sebastian taking his teddy bear with him to Oxford.

Dad didn’t offer to go with me this time, and anyway I thought it would be a good idea to tackle a substantial trip solo. I did ask him to draw me a map, though, one more time. ‘If you’re going to fly solo you must learn to navigate,’ he told me. ‘It’s all a matter of practice.’ Out of the nest pronto, my lad. Don’t expect any favours. Flap those stubby wings.

Old Tin-Legs has a lot to answer for

My interviewer was called Mr A. T. Grove. He met me outside the Porter’s Lodge, shook my hand and then said neutrally, ‘Shall we go for a little walk?’ Yes, let’s! All the way to this pebble here.

It was exactly as I feared. My body would have to pass muster before my mind was even considered. ‘Certainly,’ I said, hoping he didn’t mean more than a few steps. ‘It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?’ The surface under my shoes, however, was anything but lovely. It was gravel. There is no less coöperative material to have underneath you when you’re ambulating feebly with a crutch and a cane. It’s a hellish surface for me, given the small square-inchage of my feet, and my very limited bracing skills with the hand-held implements. Rudimentary implements held in deficient hands.