Here the story reached out and held hands with the poem about the girl who dwindled to nothing. The idea of simply evaporating from life was exquisitely beautiful. Its tingle gripped me from head to toe. We were both of us melting in sympathy with the fated life cycle of H2O. As Snowflake’s life ended the Sun said to her, ‘You have done well, little Snowflake. Come home to me now.’ We felt the hairs on the back of our necks standing on end, the very shiver of divinity. Without any idea of what was going on, we were visited by four of the eight physical signs of the presence of God. Horripilation (specifically nirvikalpa samadhi, the horripilation that precedes enlightenment), trembling, tears, faltering of the voice. The other signs of divine presence being perspiration, changing of body colour, inability to move (even the limbs), holy devastation. I really appreciate having a technical vocabulary for religious states. It’s one of the great advantages that Hinduism has. When you think about it, there are sodding great holes in the Christian descriptions. Even Paul Gallico, if he had witnessed the glory-babble of Pentecost or St Teresa hovering in the chapel on jump-jets of grace, would have struggled to put it across without a precise vocabulary to hand.
I pestered Mum to get other books by Paul Gallico from the library, and she came back with The Snow Goose. I hated it, perhaps because it was about war. It was also full of dialect, oddly written out, along the lines of ‘We was roustin’ on the beach between Dunkirk an’ Lapanny, like a lot o’ bloomin’ pigeons on Victoria Hembankment, waitin’ for Jerry to pot us. ’E potted us good too. ’E was be’ind us an’ flankin’ us an’ above us. ’E give us shrapnel and ’e give us H.E., an’ ’e peppers us from the bloomin’ hatmosphere with Jittersmiths.’ Mum couldn’t seem to extract the desired accent from this orgy of apostrophes, and we both felt that it wasn’t proper writing somehow.
We went back to Snowflake any number of times, and it always affected us the same way. Mum and I had a strange taste of that sublime state in which the ego melts, to return as a shadow if it returns at all. On the basis of that one little book, Paul Gallico is a great magus and swami, and that’s flat. The image of death as a merging resonates so deeply. People understand that the drop merges with the ocean, but they sometimes forget that the ocean also merges with the drop.
Mum would sometimes leave Snowflake or another book with me when she’d finished reading. I would take it under the bedclothes, understanding that this was a more precious hostage even than Peter’s toy soldier. A boy who was only allowed to move his head and his hands wouldn’t long resist the lure of print.
My favourite book at that time didn’t have words at all. It was a book of What I Want to Be When I Grow Up. It had pictures of various professional uniforms and styles of dress, each with a cut-out circle where the head should be. Mum had mounted a picture of my face at the back of the book, so that I could see myself looking proudly up through a porthole cut in all the pages of rôles and careers. She must have done that before I was ill. I was always excited by the obvious uniforms, soldier sailor policeman, but I was more deeply drawn to the curative, investigative or spiritual professions: doctor, scientist, priest.
Engine of hope
It was in those days that I started talking to God, making prayers. Even the most selfish prayer is a little engine of hope. I prayed for small improvements rather than drastic transformations. At a time when I could only squirm from one side of the bed to the other, I’d pray that some day I’d be able to inch from one side of the room to the other. That would be enough for me. No sense in being greedy.
When Mum wasn’t reading to me, she would look at the fire. I could understand her fascination when the gas was lit, with my own pyrolatry so incandescent. I liked the way the honeycombed panels behind the grille glowed orange and pink as they grew hot, and held those wonderful colours, yearningly, nostalgically, for a long moment after the flame was extinguished. Perhaps I had a memory-inkling that nirvana in Sanskrit means the state of having been extinguished or snuffed — otherwise it’s a mystery that I should have been happy to see the fire I loved so much die down. Nirvana isn’t ‘extinction’ with all its ominous overtones, more an extinguishment (an indispensable word I’ve just made up) welcomed by the flame. But Mum would sit there for what seemed like hours on a warm evening, with her knitting on her knee unthought-of, looking at the fire when the honeycombed panels were pale and dead.
One of the games I played, Itches and Scratches, needed another player — Mum. It was fun, though the itch could often get out of hand. Any itch I had was likely to be in a part of the body I couldn’t reach, and I would have to ask Mum to scratch it. Having the itch scratched was sheer Heaven, but it wouldn’t be long before another itch broke out, and then Mum would have to scratch that one also. After three or four such itches, I seemed to be itching all over and would be wondering whether the game was so much fun after all.
Sometimes the game took on a new twist. It would happen that when I had an itch and Mum came to scratch it, the itch wasn’t affected in the slightest. Then Mum said, ‘Shall we try scratching bits of your body which don’t itch at all? Somewhere quite different.’ I could do a certain amount of scratching myself, and I discovered that if there was an itch somewhere on my right leg near the foot, then scratching part of my left arm completely cured it. The same trick only worked less well on the other side because I found it harder to scratch my right arm. What’s more, the phantom itch, when treated by remote control in this way, was much less likely to break out again.
I pestered Mum to tell me how this piece of body magic worked. She said she didn’t really know, but I could ask Dr Duckett next time he called. Dr Duckett was the local doctor, portly and fierce of eyebrow. He smelled of the little cigars he smoked, pungent little things. Weren’t they called Wills Whiffs? They were certainly whiffy. Once I heard Dad say, ‘Why can’t he smoke cigarettes, like a normal doctor?’, not meaning a joke.
Dr Duckett was a very good explainer. He thought for a moment after I asked him about the itches and then said, ‘John, you know how sometimes a light bulb has two switches, on different sides of the room?’
‘Oh yes!’ I had always been fascinated by such things.
‘If you turn on a switch near the door, the ceiling light comes on. Yet you could turn off the same light’ (well, I couldn’t, couldn’t have reached even if I was allowed out of bed, but I had seen it done) ‘by using a different switch right over on the other side of the room. Well, itching is to do with nerves, and in a way nerves are the body’s “wiring”. The wiring of the body is a much more complicated business than the wiring of a house, but sometimes you can put your finger on an itch-switch in a place you wouldn’t expect.’
Dr Duckett gave me so much to think about. No wonder I loved him. I decided that I’d try to understand house wiring as soon as possible. In the meantime I marvelled at the thought of all those little wires running through my body carrying every sort of command. Most of my wires, barring the odd sparky fluke, were connected properly and working well. I didn’t need to think of myself as completely ill. It was only part of me that was ill. I was partly well.
One day I would have a house of my own, a cheerful house much more colourful and full of life than the one I was stuck in now. I would have a house built entirely to suit my needs. I talked about it with Mum. She warned me that planning a house was a lot of work, and I was grateful for her ideas, but I made a secret alteration to her suggestions. When it really happened I wasn’t going to hire an electrician. I knew someone who would do it so much better. All the wiring was going to be done by Dr Duckett.