Luckily my excrescent epiphyses didn’t hurt. I thought they did, but I was wrong. One of Ansell’s deputies explained that since the knee joint was fully fused and had no moving parts, there could be no pain. In those days it was up to the doctor to decide whether the patient was in pain or not. Personally I thought my epiphyses hurt quite a lot, they weren’t just eyesores they were bloody sore, but I was outvoted and told otherwise. I had a certain amount of experience of pain by this time, but apparently I could still be fooled like any novice.
The doctor who pooh-poohed my idea that the lumps hurt didn’t deny that there were pain sensors in the area of the knee, and also working nerves, he just maintained that there was no movement to set them off. Personally I think that he was defining movement rather narrowly. The end of the tibia was moving all right, in the slow frenzy of growth, blindly pushing against a socket that couldn’t accommodate it. Possibly I mean the fibula. But either way — bone grinding against bone. Whatever the explanation, I disliked what I fancied I felt, like the ‘faith-healer of Deal’ in the limerick. I disliked it more than ever before.
Over time the pain diminished and the excrescences themselves seemed to shrink. Logically this should have prepared me for the idea that my epiphyses had settled down and that my body had done all the growing of which it was capable. I should have been relieved, but I experienced it as a surprise and a worry when Ansell told me that the waiting was over at last. Now it was time to operate.
I wasn’t exactly overjoyed. I didn’t look forward to going under the knife. Mum was the impatient one. She had been saying for years, ‘I can’t think why they haven’t done the operations yet. Why don’t they do them now? They should get a move on!’
I wasn’t in a hurry. When I was told it was time for those operations I burst out with, ‘But you said it wouldn’t happen until I was sixteen!’ I sounded like a betrayed child, the very thing I wanted so badly not to be taken for. Ansell told me as gently as she could that my body was ready and I should be too. I should be pleased — she said that. There was nothing to be gained by any further delay.
In fact Mum and I were both behaving out of character. We were like clumsy actors with some amateur troupe who simultaneously drop their scripts at a read-through, and pick up each other’s without noticing. I was always the one who wanted independence and normality at any cost, and now I was dreading a decisive move in that direction. Mum was convinced that I would never be able to manage on my own, but here she was showing impatience about something that would help (fingers crossed) to bring that about.
For a long moment we spoke each other’s lines without finding it strange. The tone of the family drama was remarkably unchanged by the actors going off the rails for a little while, and we soon got back in character.
We made so much of our differences, of course, because we had so much in common. Often the difference was only one of emphasis. For instance, Mum’s greatest fear was that she would die, and then there would be no one to look after me. My greatest fear was almost the same. I was afraid that Mum would make me helpless without her, and then die. Almost the same thing, you see, but not quite.
Loving care and domination
My whole grammar-school scheme played into Mum’s hands, in a certain sense. Our minds were set on different phases of the future. Grammar school pointed me away from the disabled world, it addressed me firmly to a wider set of possibilities, yes, all of that, except that in the short term (a short term to be measured in years) it didn’t. I had made the subtle transition from in-patient to boarder in a disabled school, but now on my triumphant progress towards the main stream of life I would pass through a period of being a day-boy, someone who returned after school hours to the loving care and domination of his mother.
So from Mum’s point of view the independence I had promised myself was a cloud with a silver lining — and the silver lining preceded the cloud. There must have seemed every chance that the cloud would simply drift away in its own sweet time, leaving the two of us curled up in its lining.
You might think that having a young daughter would give Mum all the maternal focus she needed. Mum had thought so herself, before the young daughter actually arrived and showed what she was made of. Audrey was no picnic. She was very watchful as a baby, but once she had seen everything she needed to know she started to throw her weight around.
When Audrey chose the womb, as according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead we all do (with the benefit of an unobstructed view free of time and space), she must have seen her chance to continue the family tradition of conflict between the generations, as shown by Mum’s hopeless struggle against Granny. The day Audrey had her first tantrum she showed that she was already a force fully formed. This was a hurricane that would never simply blow itself out. Local seismographs must have scribbled on slowly moving paper the initial tremors of the Bourne End Fault.
Her behaviour, though, was never quite predictable. Like any sensible volcano, she learned the virtue of long dormant periods, emitting just the odd sulphurous puff to make the villagers in the lava path look up and tremble.
My volatility was necessarily more limited. Mum’s thinking started to go in reverse. She began to hedge her bets. Whatever my shortcomings as a son, my huge advantage in Mum’s eyes was that I would — surely? — never leave her. She wrote me back into her future, when Audrey started showing how spectacularly unfitted she was to the rôle of the dutiful daughter. My job was to be the bitter consolation of a disappointed life. But only if I let it happen.
Mum hadn’t either opposed or strongly supported my bid to escape from Vulcan, but there was no doubt she would be the beneficiary. She would minister to my needs and fall back, unless I was very vigilant, into her old rôle of interpreting me to the world. She would try to be self-effacing and I would try to be grateful. For a couple of years it wouldn’t be too bad — but what happened afterwards? No one had suggested any plausible future for me at the end of my education. We were not much further forward than in those days of the 1950s when we looked, she and I, at the uniforms of various careers with a photograph of my smiling face pasted at the back and showing through portholes cut in the illustrations. Since then Dad had suggested I might be an actor, perhaps playing an old lady marooned in a chair who nevertheless bossed everybody about (an immobile Granny, essentially).
Mr Turpin at CRX had suggested I might become a clerk, though it was never clear how someone whose handwriting was the weakest point of his whole academic performance would ever make a go of that. Since then there had been silence about my future. Miss Willis, the Principal of Vulcan, had wanted me to do my A-levels under her ægis, but that was really so that she could point to me as evidence of what the school could do, a sort of high-water mark which would galvanise supporters of the school into paroxysms of funding, not because the academic achievement would usher me into a world of fulfilling work. Or unfulfilling work, come to that.
Mum was the last person to visualise me finding a real place in the world, one that would challenge her monopoly on suffering. She could let events take their course, and rely on their leaving me stranded, with no other options. So I must think of myself as a lodger only. If I let the waters of home close over my head I would never be heard from again. No door would close behind me with any finality, but no new door would open ever.