Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I wasn’t looking forward to the meeting. When I saw Miss Drummond in the corridor she seemed tense and looked dreadful. She had never looked exactly well, even at the beginning of term, but now she looked positively ill. There was no colour in her face at all.

‘John,’ she said with false warmth, ‘why on earth didn’t you tell me more clearly about your objections? I would have been happy to explain at greater length if only you had given me the chance. Now you’ve gone and upset an old lady for no reason at all. You shouldn’t be sneaky, John, not go around three corners. If there’s anything you have to say you should just come out with it.’

The principal behaved in a friendly manner towards me. It took me a little while to realise he wasn’t greatly exercised by the dispute in front of him as a disciplinary matter. He was closer to being an amused spectator than a hanging judge. I started to consider the possibility of giving him something to see.

I said I did have one question, and the principal said, ‘Go on, then, John. Ask away.’

‘Would it be an act of mercy if I broke Miss Drummond’s neck, providing I had been kind enough to break all her fingers and toes slowly first, and as long as thousands of people were watching? Would that be exquisite ?’

Miss Drummond drew in her breath as if she had been slapped. It had been a bit of a mistake for her to have characterised Mrs Adcock as a frail victim. After that she could hardly denounce me as the cat’s-paw and mouthpiece of a vegetarian terrorist, which would have been far more accurate. It was something of a put-up job. I had more or less been coached by Mrs A, though I hadn’t been sure I’d be able to go through with it until the moment I opened my mouth. Now there was nothing very much Miss Drummond could do to regain the initiative. The principal said, ‘We won’t keep you, Miss Drummond. I know you have a class to teach.’ Whether he was letting her off the hook or twisting the knife in the wound I really couldn’t say.

He seemed quite pleased with the way the meeting had gone. ‘I did enjoy that, I must say, John,’ he said, when we were alone. Possibly Miss Drummond’s Francoist inclinations made her less than popular in the staffroom. ‘It’s certainly made a change from my paperwork, I can tell you. I wish the College could run to a debating team. You could be our secret weapon — though perhaps as a matter of tactics it isn’t necessary to go for the jugular right away. Still, if this had been a bull-fight rather than a battle of wills, the crowd would have been in a tremendous lather and I would be awarding you Miss Drummond’s ears and tail at this very moment.’ This was a rather ugly way of putting it, I thought.

I’m not sure if it was quite such a brainwave to have locked horns with a teacher and to have humiliated her in front of her boss. I was going to have to turn up to her class for the rest of the year.

Conversely, she was always going to have to turn up to teach me. After our meeting in the principal’s office she always looked to me as if she had a barbed ceremonial dart (¿a banderilla ?) broken off in her shoulder bone, crusted over but throbbing with stale pain every time her heart beat. And all thanks to me. As if it had been all my idea to turn further education into a blood sport.

I had to learn a new skill as a student, the skill of learning from someone who disliked me and withheld all possibility of rapport. In those lessons I was no more than an academic barge being loaded with heavy pallets of knowledge by a dockside crane which answered in other contexts to the name of Dawn. I have to say, though, that even at her most distant Miss Drummond was a lot more polite than Klaus Eckstein at his most ingratiating. Teachers have different styles, and a casual visitor to her classroom might easily have thought that I was one of the favoured pupils, just as it would have been possible to conclude at Burnham (over hundreds of German lessons) that Eckstein considered me a hateful idiot.

Death the needful

Miss Drummond was absolutely in the wrong. I had no doubts about that. But over the course of the year I began to feel a pang of my own, not confined to the shoulder, the ache of pity which she refused to those baffled animals who bled their lives away on the public sand. Perhaps it was even guilt. Miss Drummond wouldn’t stay in the pigeon-hole I assigned her, of spokesman for sadism, shamed and justly routed. She began to take on some aspects of the sacrificial victim, and if that was true then I necessarily departed from my own pigeon-hole, my idea of myself. Everyone considered me innocuous, including me, but here I seemed to have done damage. Could vegetarians really draw blood?

Mrs Adcock was very sure we had done the right thing. I wondered if there wasn’t some word we could come up with, using our combined lexicographical power, to mean someone who does harm by doing the right thing, a word more nuanced than meddler .

The year I was studying Spanish and German at High Wycombe Technical College was also the year that Gipsy began to die. When she was a puppy filled to the bubbling brim with energy I was on the very edge of life, ready to be nudged into the next one by illness and pain. Now I was much stronger, leading something relatively close to a normal existence, and she could hardly get up from her basket. If her job was to give me a transfusion of vitality then she had done it outstandingly well, but now she was paying the price for her generosity. Her legs began to pack up.

She would bark sorrowfully in the night to be let out. In the garden, or so Mum told me, she would expel with difficulty disobliging and desiccated turds. What Mum actually said was, ‘Her poo is all dry, poor love.’

Gipsy was mortified to be old and helpless. The door was left open at night anyway, except in extreme conditions, but on those stiff legs Gipsy had great difficulty making it to the garden. It went against every fibre of her fur when the next stage came, and Mum had to pick her up and carry her outside to do her unsatisfactory business. A not-large woman carrying a not-small dog. Gipsy had been bought to look after me and to keep Mum sane. She had done both things. She had been a health professional all her life — no wonder she was a bad patient, or at least a very sad one. She hated seeing dependency from the other side.

On the day of my Spanish oral, I finally said to Mum, ‘It’s time to give Mr Ticehurst a call. He needs to do the needful for Gipsy.’ Death the needful. Vets didn’t usually do home visits, even then, but Mr Ticehurst was always happy to come. It was common knowledge that he was having an affair with Isobel Dell — knowledge not confined to that hotbed of secrets, the sewing circle. Her husband was a pilot for BOAC, which meant he was away a lot. So Mr Ticehurst was very willing to turn out on any pretext. He appreciated any legitimate excuse to be in the area, the handy alibi of a house call.

In a large veterinary practice there is a designated lethalist, and perhaps there are as many children who dream of being lethalists as ones who dream of being regular vets. Mr Ticehurst’s practice wasn’t a large one, and he did the needful for Gipsy. Then he took her body away with him in a carrier bag, and Mum wept. I don’t know why I didn’t, except that I had such a strong joyful sense of the good job Gipsy had done. There’s an assumption that the last incarnation has to be human, that it isn’t possible to have your last rebirth ‘lower down’ in the animal kingdom. I don’t see why that should be set in stone. There should certainly be some exceptional mechanism, just as in sporting events it’s possible in certain circumstances to skip a round. Gipsy deserved a bye, a walk-over.