At various times of life there have been words which have had a sharper significance for me than they did for the world at large. The first word of this sort was obviously ‘Granny’, not in my family a cloud of lavender-scented sweetness but the inventor of her own style of conversational judo throw, using her opponents’ strength against them and leaving them panting on the mat.
The second such word was librarian. A librarian for me is a sort of lay magus, broker of knowledge and fascination, and all thanks to Mrs Pavey, the head librarian in Bourne End. She was a melancholy-seeming woman plagued by migraines, but remarkably conscientious. She didn’t see her job as passive, a matter of meeting requests merely. She anticipated needs. I think she saw herself as a sort of matchmaker, arranging encounters between books and readers whose affinities weren’t obvious. Love at first sight can look after itself. Love at second sight requires careful planning.
So Mrs Pavey would search out books on subjects which Mum told her might interest me, to beguile those long months of rehabilitation, but she was also quite capable of sending something along unprompted. You could never predict what might turn up in Mum’s bicycle basket, in the slightly sticky plastic covers that library books wore in those days.
In Hinduism there’s a technical term for someone who has been well on the Path in a previous life and then stumbled. A brahmarashtra. The point being that such people are surrounded by helpfulness on their next go-round — just as everyone will be particularly patient with a learner driver who has failed the test a few times.
Isn’t this exactly my profile? I’ve never felt hampered by an avarana, a veil of ignorance. I’ve been beetling after enlightenment from the word go. By ‘my profile’ I mean increased difficulties but a prodigal scattering of hints and clues, inklings galore, signposts as far as the eye can see.
Come and get me, Copper!
Mrs Pavey got hold of The Tibetan Book of the Dead at my insistence, though I must admit I found it a rather penitential read. There was just one wonderful idea in it, which I immediately made my own — that we choose the womb in the privileged instant between lives. The idea seemed very familiar. That jewel of insight was like the ear-ring which turns up at last in the dust-bag of the vacuum-cleaner. It gave me a sense of relief and restitution rather than new discovery.
A real bull’s-eye of Mrs Pavey’s was Gardening for Adventure by R. H. Menage. Mum made a good pitch for the book. ‘It’s got a section on sundews,’ she said, ‘Venus Flytraps, pitcher-plants and butterworts. Mrs Pavey and I felt it would be right up your street. And it would give you and Dad something to talk about, and things to do when you come home …’ By saying this Mum was recognising a profound truth about the man she had married, that he was always happier and more amenable if there was a project of some sort on hand. Marriage did not fit his definition of a project.
Dad had always been a true botanist, with a disinterested fascination for the workings of nature. He did all the gardening proper, but he regarded the garden as a laboratory as much as a showpiece. Mum’s attitude to the plant kingdom was different. She was a kitchen alchemist with no real interest beyond her herb garden.
Usually when people told me I was going to like something, I decided on principle to hate it to bits. This time, though, Mum and Mrs Pavey had got my number. If anything though, the phrase ‘right up your street’ understated things. Gardening for Adventure was so far up my street it had its tongue through my letterbox.
Inactive in bed between my linen sheets, their chaste rustling an audible mark of caste privilege, I was like some winter bulb, dimly thriving, from which little overt growth could be expected. No wonder my mind was attuned to the vegetable kingdom. I was almost part of it.
The introduction to Gardening for Adventure got things off to a flying start. It ended, ‘By growing the plants described in this book I think you will find that gardening can be an adventure — even if the realisation only comes in a police cell after you have been arrested for the possession of opium or Indian hemp.’
I couldn’t see what could possibly be so wrong about growing this plant, particularly when the author had explained so carefully how he tended his. On the other hand, I found the idea of sitting in a police cell strangely attractive. When I had been on Ward Two of CRX I had been terrified of moving up to Ward Three, and now I was there I found it wasn’t so bad. I was sure I could handle police custody and even prison if it came to that. I was used to institutions — hospitals and schools — and was sure I could turn it all into a game until I had collected the whole set.
There was even a picture of Cannabis sativa on the front cover of the book. Combined with the assertion on the back cover that all the illustrations in the book were taken by the author of plants he had grown himself, this seemed splendidly defiant — a gentlemanly way of drawling COME AND GET ME, COPPER!
Mr Menage certainly showed more knowledge of the plant than was common at the time. The leaves can be made into cigarettes known to the underworld as ‘reefers’ and hashish is prepared from the exuded resin. Other names given to the plant are bhang which consists of selected dried leaves and twigs, and ganjah (or gunjah) which is the flowering tops.
About opium he was similarly open-minded (‘Many experts state that opium smoking is in fact little more harmful than tobacco smoking — in spite of publicity given to the contrary’). His description of the methods of preparing it for smoking could almost be mistaken for instructions (‘It is then placed in the orifice of a special pipe which is puffed four or five times’). Specifying the number of puffs suggested a knowledge more than academic. OVER HERE, FLATFOOT! CRIMINAL MASTERMIND STICKING OUT HIS TONGUE!
I was excited by the possibility of invisible transgression in the allotment, civil disobedience in the rockery. I longed for a criminal record more than anything, while knowing that disability squelched any real possibility of going to the bad.
It was an annoying logic, but I couldn’t see any way out of it: I needed to be good in order to deserve to be looked after, but however good I was I would never be as good as the people who looked after me, since they were being ‘selfless’ and giving up part of their lives to make mine possible. I wanted to be ‘selfless’ myself, but perhaps I already meant something different by that word.
I was still indefatigably asking the question ‘Who am I?’, but not getting very far at this stage. I didn’t know whether I should feel special or not special at all, part of the broad sweep of humanity or only an afterthought, a slip of the creator’s tongue.
‘Handicap’ was the polite word then, not ‘disability’. I had ‘a handicap’, and so did our neighbour Arthur Foot, but that was only to do with golf. I knew that the word meant a different thing used in that way, but the co-incidence was still rather tempting. It set off new thoughts Arthur had a handicap because he was so good at golf, and a way had to be found for him to play with other people and not beat them every time. Otherwise everyone would soon become bored. And perhaps I was handicapped for the same general reason, to give other people a chance. I could manage to feel worthless fairly often, but the more desirable state of humility seemed to be beyond me.