Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

It was never hard to rekindle my relationship with Mrs Adcock. Our rapport was never a thing of blazing glory, but there was some steady combustion going on. It was a sort of smouldering friendship. It might seem to go out altogether for months or even years, but it never needed much encouragement to break out again. Just a little fuel would make it burn brightly. I still tried to make a note of new words to pass on, even if we were neither of us as easy to impress as we had once been. When I read Gardening for Adventure in hospital it gave me a bright bouquet of verbal novelties to present to her, or to relay in notes delivered by Peter. Mrs Adcock was perfectly familiar with abortifacient , but clean bowled by emmenagogue (used to describe anything which promotes the menstrual flow). Peter never stayed longer than the minimum, and always turned down coffee and tea. I worried sometimes about his lack of adventurousness, which seemed partly a sort of brotherly inhibition. My rôle was to chafe against the limits of my world. He seemed to atone for his wider opportunities by not taking advantage of them.

When I started visiting Mrs Adcock again in 1968, while studying at High Wycombe Technical College, she hardly seemed any older. She had all her own teeth, she had all her own wits. By this time her vegetarianism had taken a new crusading turn. She was campaigning against factory farming, and got me to take out my own membership in the society she had joined.

The astral blood spurted green

She had stopped drinking milk, since she couldn’t be sure of the well-being of the cows involved, so that the milky Nescaff she served was now based on Coffee Mate. I took a discreet look at the ingredients on the label, and wondered how long she could get by on dried glucose solids and powdered hydrogenated fats. Milk had been the core of her diet. She only picked at other things.

There was hardly a vitamin or ghost of protein in her body, but there was nothing wrong with her drive and sense of purpose. In fact she had far more of a plan to change the world than either Mum or Flanny. She was expanding her range of activities and her areas of operation. So much for the low energy levels of herbivores. Not content with opposing the cruelties of the domestic food industry she had foreign barbarism in her sights. She was revolted by bull-fighting in Spain, which she wanted banned. If the Spanish had such a taste for blood, let them jab skewers in each other, and then talk about the dark glory of the sport.

I don’t think bull-fighting had many defenders in Britain at the time, but by bad luck one of them was my Spanish teacher at the college, Dawn Drummond. She had lived in Spain and explained that we had it all wrong about bull-fighting. For a Spaniard going to a bull-fight was no more exotic than going to the bingo in Britain, though a great deal more profound and poetic. She had attended many corridas . It was a mistake to think bull-fighting was based on cruelty. In fact it was an exquisite moment when the matador came in for the kill.

I did my best to represent the bull’s point of view in class but had made no headway. Dad had been chased across a field by a bull, but it didn’t make him wish the animal any harm. The matadors had no such grievance.

Miss Drummond said the matador used a special knife for the job, very sharp but surprisingly small. She even told us the Spanish word for it, but my mind refused to store it. Mentally I withheld my assent from the technical vocabulary of ritual killing. She said that the bull was completely exhausted by this stage, and frankly, after all the jabs he’d received from the picadors, finishing him off so cleanly was an act of mercy.

She held an imaginary knife in her hand and plunged it into the bull’s imaginary heart, from which the astral blood spurted green. A macabre glow lit up her face with momentary incandescence, right in front of the eyes of the class. I felt I had seen an appalling transformation, which turned Miss Drummond into a blood sister of Miss Mitchell-Hedges gloating over her crystal skull at Vulcan School, draining the psychic energy from the pupils to feed on.

It’s only fair to say that there were other elements in Miss Drummond’s portrait of Spanish culture. There was flamenco, which I dismissed from a position of total ignorance. I couldn’t accord much respect to a style of movement which seemed to me to resemble bad-tempered tap-dancing, a ritual re-enactment, in frothy dress and high heels, of the stamping my sister did when she didn’t get her way. A choreographed tantrum. Then there was gazpacho , whose praises Miss Drummond constantly trumpeted, with digressions on recipe variations permissible and impermissible.

I was the closest the Cromer family had to an adventurous palate (if you bear in mind that eating meat is not an adventure). Mum greatly disliked the taste of olive oil, which I relished. I could even enjoy, or certainly tolerate, garlic, so gazpacho should have been well within my experimental range.

I don’t know whether the barrier was physiological or mental. It’s true that my body’s temperature equilibrium is easily upset. After a few minutes in the hot part of the new conservatory I would overheat and take some time to recover. I felt sure that drinking cold soup would sabotage my metabolism from within — yet I was the same John Cromer who liked to leave the bedroom door open on the coldest days.

I couldn’t face the idea of ingesting the icy liquid. On a hot day I didn’t want a chilled drink, though of course ice cream is in a different category. Ice cream rewrites the rules. And I take tiny bites, tiny sips, tiny slurps as it melts.

In any case I rejected the idea that Spanish culture boiled down to this — soup, stamping and savagery. What about St John of the Cross, Cervantes and Lorca? I was particularly attuned to St John of the Cross and the notion of La Noche Oscura del Alma . In Hindu thought, there is a dark night of the soul as wide as the cosmos which lasts a hundred thousand years. There’s a special word for it.

I could find excuses for Lorca’s bloodlust, but none for Miss Drummond. She never actually praised Franco in class, but said darkly that we shouldn’t believe what we read in the papers. You had to live in a country to know what you were talking about.

But wasn’t it on Franco’s orders that Lorca was killed? I wasn’t the only one in class to be horrified by Miss Drummond’s enthusiasm for the bull-fight, but when there were muffled protests she told us we were making judgements in ignorance. Anyone who had the courage to attend a bull-fight with an open mind would certainly be converted.

Miss Drummond’s ears and tail

When I reported all this to Mrs Adcock, she immediately pulled out her own fighting equipment. A pen and a piece of paper. An envelope and a stamp. The pen in its own way was also a specialised weapon, with a deadly edge.

‘I’m going to write to the principal of your college about this,’ she said. She took down the relevant names. With anyone else I might have thought I was being humoured, but I knew Mrs Adcock would make good on her promises. In fact I wasn’t sure whether I wanted this hoo-hah to happen. I had been more or less tortured at CRX and at Vulcan school without mounting any sort of protest. Was I really going to take Miss Drummond to court for her perverted interest in the shedding of ruminant blood? It made more sense to keep my head down and concentrate on my A-level. Unfortunately the slogan ‘anything for a quiet life’ practically guarantees rebirth after rebirth, with no remission from the cycle, so I had to stick to my guns.

About a week later Mum answered the telephone. It was the principal of the college. When I next came in, would I be kind enough to report to him? He would make sure that Miss Drummond was there also.