Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

It’s funny that it should have been so hard, after all the to-ing and fro-ing, to take Yes for an answer. I’d won, and I demanded a recount. The doors had opened, and somehow I kept banging on them with my stick and my puny fists.

Of course there was a catch. To satisfy Cambridge I only had to get two Es in my A-levels, English and German, but if I was going to read Modern Languages (which was the whole idea), then I had to take another modern language at A-level. It couldn’t be a subject that was already part of my course of study. In other words, it couldn’t be French.

This was actually something of a relief, since I’d always disliked the language, or at least the chasm between what was written and what was said. Every ending in French seemed to sound like eh , but the spellings proliferated wildly. That had always been one of German’s trump cards, the precision of its notation.

My extra language would have to be Spanish, which I’d barely started to learn. The strategy of early application had been a success, though, and I had time in hand, if I could only muster the patience. Eckstein had already got me started. I was well on my way with Nos ponemos en camino. We put ourselves on the path . We were picking up speed. There were three books in the series, and I sailed through the first two. Admittedly the third gave me a bit of trouble.

I would skip the O-level and study for my Spanish A-level at High Wycombe Technical College, brushing up my German at the same time, and I would arrive in Cambridge at last in September 1970.

First, though, there was some more tinkering to be done on this body. It was as if I had got used to a perverse sort of pattern — leave a school, treat yourself to some surgery. This time it was a matter of sorting out my right leg, which pointed forward so alarmingly at the knee. The procedure wasn’t medically necessary, but the leg was certainly unsightly as things stood.

Mr Arden would operate, as before. ‘I don’t need to explain everything to you, John,’ he said, ‘after what you’ve been through already. You know the drill.’ Indeed I knew the drill. The circular saw I also knew. ‘But how straight do you want it?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to make it too straight, after all.’ He did a little sketch of what he proposed, to be sure of getting my approval.

The proposed operation was paradoxical. I was like a Zen koan written in surgical steel: shortening the leg we make it longer . Mr Arden would be shortening my leg, in the sense that a wedge of bone would be removed, but lengthening it for practical purposes. My foot would meet the ground, once he had done his work, and the finished limb would be longer because more straight. The effect, if he overdid it, would be to make the other leg, the left, shorter in relative terms. My ability to reach the pedals with both feet might be impaired. He wanted me to know what would be involved, even after I had given the go-ahead on the basis of his nifty little drawing. ‘You do know, don’t you,’ he said, ‘that you’ll have to learn to drive all over again when your leg has healed? Not from scratch, exactly, but near enough. It’ll take you a good while to adjust.’ I told myself that it couldn’t be as bad as the rehabilitation from hips.

I was promised clear benefits from the operation, in terms of my posture and physical ability to manage, but really this was cosmetic surgery. If Patrick Savage had never referred to the unearthly angle of my knee and his need for a protractor to measure it, I wouldn’t have tampered with it. I had wanted to be his dear love, I hadn’t wanted to be his geometry homework. But of course by this time he and I hadn’t spoken for months. We were no longer even at the same institution. It was too late to make any difference, and I couldn’t mend the past.

Perhaps I was hoping to get off on the right foot with a future, more available Patrick Savage. To make the best of my prospects, with someone who had lacked company in the womb and might elect to become my twin. Any streamlining that could be done on this uncoöperative body was a good idea — that’s the sort of thinking that passes for rational. But yes, perhaps there was an element of scape-goating, singling out my knee for punishment when it was the whole organism which had failed to find favour.

I took Arthur Osborne’s precious book with me into the hospital, but I had also put in a request for another one from Mrs Pavey at the library. Not a Hindu volume — a life of Mary Baker Eddy. Ever since I had heard of Christian Science, even before I made the connection with Nancy Astor and CRX, I felt violently attracted and repulsed. Here at last was a school of religious thought which didn’t regard pain as meaningful. Just what I thought myself, and part of what drew me so strongly to Hinduism. The drawback was correspondingly massive: if illness was Error, then I had been in the wrong continuously since I was three. It was time to decide whether Christian Science was a sort of Western Hinduism or a mean trick.

Hagioscope, squint or leper window

There was a Christian Science Reading Room in Maidenhead, and I had even thought of driving over there to talk to someone. The trouble was, of course — supposing that I was convinced of Mary Baker Eddy’s truth — that I couldn’t imagine the next step. How can the body repent? Would my joints listen when I recanted the fantasy and folly of Still’s Disease?

It stood to reason, in any case, that Christian Science Reading Rooms would be up huge flights of stairs unserved by lifts, to discourage the unbelieving, the wallowers in imperfection. The most that could be hoped for, logically, was some sort of ramp, up which the wilful outcasts could trundle in their wheelchairs, to gaze with the corruptness of envy through a hagioscope (or squint, or leper window, in descending linguistic registers) at the jovial elect of Maidenhead.

I had left the choice of a book on Mary Baker Eddy up to Mrs Pavey. She must have taken a lot of trouble over her selection. A library is a sort of public garden, and librarians themselves are gardeners, but their interventions are anything but neutral. In every garden there are delicate plants that do well, and sturdy ones which succumb to a mysterious blight.

The book which was transmitted in Mum’s bicycle basket was called Mrs. Eddy , by Edwin Franden Dakin, but that was roughly where its conventionality ended. There was a suggestive subtitle: The Biography of a Virginal Mind .

The book was American, published in 1929. I knew Mrs Pavey would have good reason for supplying me with a book that was less than up to date.

It was dedicated to the author’s mother, in gratitude for the diligence she had shown in ‘exploring with painstaking care the obscure haunts of data’. That was a phrase like a toffee to be lingeringly chewed: the obscure haunts of data. There was also a Publishers’ Note which I found extremely interesting, which described the appearance of the text in a popular edition as marking ‘the failure of an organized Minority to accomplish the suppression of opinions not to its liking’.

The idea of the tyrannous Minority was new to me — any tyranny I had experienced was of another kind. The Note explained that there had been a campaign to suppress the book in America, and pressure brought to bear on bookshops (though ‘in all but a few cities the book could always be bought somewhere’), until a counter-campaign in defence of free speech was mounted.

So this was obviously not a life of Mary Baker Eddy which was welcomed by the organisation she founded. Why not? Mr Dakin explained it like this: ‘There undoubtedly prevails a certain notion that all those who dare to talk intimately of God should conform in character to a conventional pattern, much as the design for sacred faces on church windows must all have an orthodox stare.’ Something about Mrs Eddy’s particular outlook didn’t suit stained-glass prose. A hunger perhaps. Her life in this version was an adventure, ‘a gorgeous adventure’.