Adam Mars-Jones: Cedilla

When I left Vulcan, that self-proclaimed ‘boarding school for the education and rehabilitation of severely disabled but intelligent boys’, a phase of my mundane education was over. I was now an Old Vulcanian, though not in any hurry to attend reunions — if any were even held.

I had been much changed during my years on those premises. Perhaps you could say I had been Vulcanised, vulcanisation being a process for treating rubber by adding sulphur or other substances in the presence of heat and pressure. Vulcanisation enhances rubber’s strength, resistance and elasticity. The description can be made to fit. I (or actually only ‘I’) had been strengthened and weakened in a complex simultaneous process, fortified and adulterated.

Then gradually the whole world became Vulcanised, in a different sense. A few years later the Star Trek series started to be broadcast and became extremely popular. English fans were told that no work was done at NASA on a Friday evening, because staff were required to watch Star Trek . They too had to learn what the future would be like.

Some of us loved the graceful shape of the Starship Enterprise itself, others coveted the weaponry, those stunning phasers, or the ability to beam down onto planets directly, descending like gods in a cascade of molecules. Others loved the comely communications officer Lieutenant Uhura (of the United States of Africa). No one had any respect for the theme tune — a swoony number which would have gone better with Come Dancing — or the nasty nylon trousers worn stupidly short.

I personally was spellbound by the automatic doors on the Starship Enterprise , which opened and closed with a distinctive squawking swish.

It was obvious to me that there would be automatic doors in the future, superseding every other sort of mechanism. There would be no more awkward pushing and pulling, no more knobs out of reach. The technology was elementary, surely? No real challenge for a boffin. I wasn’t holding my breath for matter transporters or warp drives, but I was confident that there would soon be automatic doors everywhere, swishing open to admit me to privileged spaces, swishing closed behind me to seal off the outside world. I was eager for that future to begin, and I’m a patient person. I have to be, and I’m still waiting.

One element of the Star Trek saga threw a light backwards on my past as a severely disabled but intelligent schoolboy. This was the enigmatic character of Mr Spock, impassive and elfin, who came from a planet with the same name as my old school, Vulcan. Technically in fact he was only half-Vulcan, but nevertheless he made us familiar with a number of practices from his home planet, techniques of combat and communication: the Vulcan Death Grip and the Vulcan Mind Meld.

I went along with the general enjoyment of the programme, but I experienced an extra layer of response. To me the phrase ‘Vulcan Death Grip’ could only conjure up Judy Brisby holding me by the ankles over the stairwell of the school after I had refused a meal of slimy fish, even when she tried to cram the hated pilchards down my throat. The manœuvre as performed by Mr Spock and his kind, though, was a nerve pinch rather than the nerve punches which were Judy Brisby’s speciality. It produced unconsciousness without involving pain, a set of priorities for which Judy Brisby would have had no use.

‘Vulcan Mind Meld’, on the other hand, seemed a perfect way of describing the ecstatic episode in the Music Room, when Luke Squires and I played the melancholy waltz called Plaisir d’Amour and were mysteriously played upon in our turn by a poorly tuned upright piano transformed into a blaring Wurlitzer of synæsthetic sensation.

Hip hurdles

In my final interview with Miss Marion Willis, sole Principal of Vulcan, I had made out that Burnham Grammar School was waiting with open arms to shield me from the cold winds of special education, holding out a blanket and a steaming mug of cocoa, to make sure that I was never again exposed to the piercing blasts of winter, as I had experienced them in a frozen turret bathroom of Farley Castle, a folly imperfectly turned into a school.

In fact we weren’t quite ready for our encounter, the school and I. There were two hurdles that I had to clear before I could take my rightful place in the state educational system. A perverse way of putting it, perhaps, the clearing of hurdles, since those hurdles were my hips.

Even after I had started being a pupil of Vulcan School I would return every few months to the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow (known to initiates as CRX) for the eminent Dr Ansell to give me the once-over. The measuring process no longer included nude photography, as it had done when I had lived in the hospital, and the object in view was explicitly spelled out. She was waiting for me to stop growing. To the untrained eye I hardly seemed to be growing at all, but I was doing it on the sly, and Ansell was patiently waiting for that furtive impulse to spend itself at last.

Usually Ansell spoke to me as grown-up to grown-up, but sometimes she forgot and talked to someone else as if I wasn’t there. Even in the days when I was living at the hospital, I had hated the way Ansell would start off in her friendly vein, encouraging me to develop an understanding of my physical situation and a relationship with the medical experts, and then turn to a colleague and say something entirely different, something that was clearly designed to exclude me from understanding. It seemed so rude. On my return visits from Vulcan for monitoring she fell into the same bad habit. So she might say to me, ‘John, we’re examining your legs in such a lot of detail because when you’ve stopped growing we can do something about those hips of yours. I’m sure you’d like to sit down properly after all this time!’ But then she’d turn to a junior doctor and say something about epiphysis.

Epiphysis . I hated that word, hated and feared it though I learned to say it correctly in my head. Four short syllables, with the stress on the second.

It was being kept in the dark that felt so horrible. There was obviously a reason for it, and I knew what it had to be: I had an extra illness that they weren’t telling me about. I didn’t just have Still’s Disease, I had epiphysis as well, and considering how foul Still’s was, epiphysis must be much worse, or else they’d tell me about it, wouldn’t they?

It took me a long time to realise that Ansell wasn’t saying anything very different to her junior than what she was saying to me. She was just changing from plain English to technical language. An epiphysis is the growing end of a long bone. Once I understood that, I calmed down and even rather enjoyed the word. There’s nothing like a technical vocabulary for conferring the illusion of control. I could see that there were parallels in other parts of the natural world, the growing tips of plants, for instance. It’s one of my great regrets that I’ve never climbed to the top of a coconut tree, to witness the glory of that vegetable epiphysis. Still, who’s to say it’s too late? Perhaps a fork-lift truck could be commandeered.

Slow frenzy of growth

In my early teens my epiphyses played me merry hell. My legs developed excrescences. Nasty ugly lumps. It began to look as if I had a knob stuck on the outer edge of each leg, to the side of where a working knee ought to be. I thought them very unsightly. I felt they let me down, though I don’t have great expectations of this body.

I was almost fond of ‘epiphysis’ by this time, the word though not the thing, but the same trick didn’t work for ‘excrescence’. By derivation the words aren’t so very different — they both mean something that grows out of something else. Their overtones don’t overlap, though. Nice ethereal epiphysis — nasty brutish grotty excrescence.