Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

When Mr Johnson showed us round, Mum put up some token resistance. She said, ‘If it’s only men doing the work — and young ones at that, from the look of the ones I’ve seen — then surfaces won’t get properly wiped and hoovered and dusted, will they? And the pee bottles won’t be emptied promptly, which means they’ll start to smell …’

Mr Johnson needed only one word for his answer. ‘Exactly’, he said. That was just the atmosphere he was aiming at. In a way it was surprising that Mum didn’t drag me out of there right away, but she actually quite approved. If I was to be looked after by anyone else, then she would prefer it to be someone entirely her opposite. She would certainly prefer to entrust me to a sloppy man than a rival stickler of a woman. Perhaps she was hoping I’d see the merits of good housekeeping from exposure to neglect. I might come to love her on the rebound.

It’s true that everything was amazingly slapdash, close to hazardous in some ways. Pee bottles sat around till they got good and pongy. The male staff just slobbed about in jeans, smoking cigarettes and drinking cups of tea. They would sit on your bed for a chat, which was still unheard-of in hospitals. I thought it was cosy. I thought it was heaven. Of course we were all young. It wouldn’t have suited older, more settled people.

The rule about ‘nae wummen’ didn’t apply to girlfriends of the inmates or indeed the staff. There was a plentiful female presence, who were forgiven for washing up the odd plate as long as they did their fair share of the smoking and chatting. Naturally the wummen had to be ‘oot’ by nine o’clock in the evening, and after that it was boys and men together.

My first morning at the Home set the tone. A member of staff (he’d already told us to call him Mike) came in, clapped his hands loudly and called out, ‘Right, you rabble, wake up! OK, first interrogation of the day: Who’s been a good boy and who hasn’t?’

Silence. What could he mean? ‘What are these bits of white stuff in your bottles, eh? Been blowing your noses in the night?’

People didn’t suggest such things! Surely?

‘Pleading the fifth amendment, eh? Bunch of wankers! And I mean that most sincerely. You won’t escape me so easily.’

He picked up my piss bottle and peered inside. ‘Mmmm … not enough evidence. Try harder next time, John! Come clean! For the moment I have to say the verdict is Not Guilty. Not innocent, mind! What Mr Johnson would call, “ Not Prrroven ”.’

He moved over to the next bed and picked up my neighbour’s bottle. ‘Aha! Just as I suspected. Lots of little white floating thingies — we have a dedicated self-abuser here!’ He bent his ear over the bottle, as if listening to the whispering spermatozoa. ‘What’s that you say, boys? You didn’t jump? You were pushed? How disgraceful. We shall have to see what Mr J has to say about all this (relax, he won’t mind). Oh, and don’t worry if any of you ever have trouble giving yourself a good tossing-off. Don’t be shy — what do you think we’re here for? Not everyone has a girlfriend, you know. We’re here to help in any way we can.’

The size of a pet’s gravestone

Not quite the prevailing atmosphere at Trees in Bourne End. Mum had underestimated the threat to her way of doing things presented by Mr Johnson’s home. It was a revelation that men without women could create such a welcoming atmosphere, and the element of rough good humour was just what I had been missing.

There was one resident called Jack who particularly befriended me. He was in the Merchant Navy, and hated it. He was recovering, very slowly, from dysentery. He could walk a few tottery steps, but then he needed to rest. He was weak, although the signals he sent were strong. He had worked for the Palm Line, owned by Unilever, transporting palm oil from Nigeria.

I couldn’t decide whether the oil they loaded for the return journey, to be processed into margarine, soap and candles, sounded disgusting or delicious. Jack explained that it was bright orange and almost solid. The local people dressed their food with it, though it had no particular taste and the sweetish smell wasn’t appealing.

The crew weren’t well paid, but they didn’t need to be. Barter was the prevailing system, and they had the goods to exchange. A Unilever product such as Lifebuoy soap, returning to Africa after its grand tour, had gained enormously in economic buoyancy. A bar of Lifebuoy soap for a sack of pawpaws, a sack of lobsters or a woman. Admittedly these weren’t the sort of soap bars we bought in shops, being the size of a pet’s gravestone. ‘The only trouble is,’ he said, ‘that I get sick of pawpaws long before I finish the sack and lobster doesn’t agree with me in the first place. Women don’t either.’ I didn’t quite know what to say, and missed the moment.

Another time he asked me if I had noticed that the staff of the home were all nutty, or queer, or both. ‘Of course I’m broadminded,’ he said. ‘Travel does that for you, it broadens the mind. But then my mind was pretty broad before I left home.’

There was no privacy for the residents, but Jack was great pals with Mike. He told me that Mike had agreed to lend us his room when we were both a little stronger, just so we could light some joss-sticks and listen to music in peace. This was a very generous offer of Mike’s. Perhaps a bar of Lifebuoy changed hands. Then in the end by the time I was strong enough to think this tender little scheme was practical, Jack was still too weak. And after that I had to leave Bognor and go back to Bourne End.

Before I left, a number of people from the Home autographed my cast. There was a lot of mischievous laughter while they worked. I inhaled the delicious stink of the felt-tip they were using, but everyone had chosen to make marks where I couldn’t read them. I worried that I was innocently carrying back into Mum’s zone of power any amount of incriminating commentary.

In a way I needn’t have worried. Mum inspected the cast and made a non-committal noise, a genteel grunt. She didn’t read them out, so I had to wait for Peter to come home and put me out of my suspense. Jack had written DON’T DO ANYTHING I WOULDN’T DO! Mike had added IF YOU CAN’T BE GOOD AT LEAST BE CAREFUL! Mr Johnson’s contribution was DON’T TAKE ANY WOODEN NICKELS, SON! There was nothing overtly objectionable about these slogans. Their mischief-making was indirect. But Mum must have realised my hair had been ruffled by a permissive breeze.

Back under her roof, I decided that ‘the Home’ was much homier than home proper. My descriptions made where I had been sound so warm and welcoming to Peter that he made me promise, if I ever went back there, to take him too.

I wrote a short story about my little crush on Jack, changing the genders (well, one of them anyway). It pretty much wrote itself and showed me that writing stories was a lot easier than writing plays. I called it ‘And Melanie Was Pleased’ and sent it to Woman’s Own . I might be unfulfilled, but perhaps I could make unfulfilment pay. They rejected it prontissimo, and I can’t say I blame them. I didn’t believe my own happy ending, and if I didn’t believe it how could I expect belief from anyone else?

I left Edith Piaf in the dust

After the cast had served its purpose I had to learn to walk, for the fifth time. I shouldn’t exaggerate the difficulty of the rehabilitation — there was no new moving part to be coaxed into function. All the same my balance was quite different, and the muscles were required to work in a new way. Re-learning to drive was more arduous than re-learning to walk. My leg was now shorter but straighter, and I was taller by an inch and a half. I had opened up a decisive lead over Edith Piaf. These days I left her in the dust — but the leg that hadn’t been tampered with was now lagging behind the other, and for driving purposes I needed it built up to compensate. Even after the new shoes arrived, I was never as comfortable in the car as I had been before the surgery.