I really upset myself. I was fretting as well as wasting away. Mum had to work hard to reassure me. She said soothingly, ‘They didn’t kill any snakes, JJ.’ She’d started calling me JJ. It began about then. ‘When they have to get bigger, snakes just crawl out of their old skin and leave it behind.’ I cheered up mightily, relieved that there was no blood-guilt on my Christmas present. I sucked the sweet lie right up, no better than a clarinet. No one was telling me the truth about important things at this point. Everything from Christmas to my gramophone was wrapped in a nasty secret.
It’s entirely in character that I don’t remember Peter at all from that Christmas. Years later I asked him if he remembered Jim Shaeffer, the nice Canadian airman who came for Christmas, but the name didn’t ring a bell with him. He remembered me being given the gramophone and the watch, though, when all he got out of it was a handful of sweets. Even so, he wasn’t a neglected child in any real sense, except by me. Mum smacked him a fair amount, but smacking isn’t exactly neglect.
Perhaps it was Dad’s choice to be away that hectic Christmas, but I doubt if he had any say in the matter. He was often away for as long as a month at a time, and the armed forces didn’t go in much for compassionate leave in those days. Even if they had, I imagine Dad would have preferred not to ask for it. It would have been more in character for him not to ask for special treatment. That was very much a virtue to his generation’s way of looking at things.
With the help of herbalist hindsight, potent tincture, it’s pretty plain that Dad was a Cerato, which is one of the original Twelve Healers of 1933 and a fundamental character type. His buried keynote was indecisiveness. Surprising in a military man, or perhaps not. Where better to hide an inability to choose than in a chain of command? In the forces decisions are handed down, and servicemen are routinely relieved of the burden of initiative.
It’s mysterious that this fundamentally lukewarm soul should attach itself to a long line of strong believers — preachers and pastors — whose only previous aberration was a fairly distinguished Victorian architect, his piety well up to par.
When Dad was a young man his own father kept quizzing him about whether he had yet been visited by Jesus the Christ, as if this was positively a stage of adolescence, the spiritual equivalent of starting to shave. Dad had to admit that no such visitation had been granted him.
Of course they aren’t all sheep in the armed forces. There are occasional mavericks, and one of them was his friend Kit Draper, the one he’d wanted to middle-name me after. Hence Draper’s nickname: the Mad Major. Yet even Dad’s worship of this senior airman (who had seen action in the First War as well as the Second) didn’t break the pattern. Has tendency to imitate is also part of the herbalist picture. Dad admired the Mad Major for daring to break the rules, but didn’t even get as far as imitating him. He just muttered, ‘Good old Kit. He showed them.’ Kit Draper did his rebelling for him, at a safe remove.
Promiscuous sympathy
In daily life Dad hated to be asked to make choices, and the more trivial the alternatives with which he was presented the less he was able to choose between them. The rolling incompatibility that was my parents’ marriage can be described in many ways, but one of them is herbalistic. They were a Heather and a Cerato bound together, one sapping the other’s vitality by demanding sympathy, the other sapping right back by needing to be told what to do. The whole situation was made worse by the fact that he had no sympathy to give her, and so she sought it promiscuously elsewhere. He, of course, as a man of his time, would happily take advice from a male acquaintance, however slight, but never from his wife.
Tempting to say that if someone had been there to administer the relevant tinctures, those four drops in water four times a day, they could both have been brought into the positive ranges of their characters, so that Mum could sympathise with the uncertainty that Dad tried so hard to hide, and he in turn could tap into the large-scale emotions which she could bestow as well as demand. But I chose the womb as it was and must accept the life it led to, without getting out my portable dispensary of herbalist hindsight to tamper with the givens.
I myself seem to be a Vine, another secondary character type, as infallibly sketched by Dr Bach, when he came to round up the stragglers after the Twelve: they think that it would be for the benefit of others if they could be persuaded to do things as they themselves do, or as they are certain is right … Even in illness they will direct their attendants … may be of great value in emergency. The layman’s term, I suppose, would be bossy-boots.
I had been patient for a long time, but now I was beginning to chafe against the restrictions of my bed-bound life. Mum had to step up her efforts at diversion without excitement.
Abstraction of wrestling
When children are very young, their parents find styles of rough play that won’t cause any harm. If one adult hand is pushing against the chest of a delighted toddler, the other arm is poised behind his back, ready to catch him when he falls. The joy of play is intensified by a tiny infiltration of pretend-fear, pretend-risk. Mum had a harder task when it came to rough-housing with me. She had to carry the risk-monitoring approach much further. My level of agitation had to be carefully measured. She would climb carefully onto the bed so that she could support herself on her elbows and knees, poised above me. Then she would blow on my face, shake her head so that her cheeks wobbled, make menacing noises in her throat, roar like a lion, and raise each hand from the bed alternately, to waggle her fingers thrillingly in front of my face.
The whole performance was a wonderful treat. I think we both forgot that this was an abstraction of wrestling, taken to such a stylised extreme that no physical contact was involved. It was closer to an art form like Noh drama than to actual rough-housing. Then one day while she was crouched over me like a tenderly devouring spider, her weight shifted on the bed, and that was enough to make my back click. The pain came shuddering and stabbing into the facet joints of the spine. The immobility of bed rest was encouraging my ligaments to weaken, so that tremors of the facet joints could happen more or less at any time. Mum climbed off the bed in slow motion, trying not to make things any worse, and weeping bitterly at the failure of our mime of normal fun. Even this charade of roughness was too close to the real thing. From then on we had to find other forms of game, less risky than horse-play even at its tamest.
Mum racked her brains to devise new pastimes for me. One huge treat was a candle set on a saucer. She gave me a knitting needle, which I used to heat up and poke into the wax. She kept the flame of my pyrolatry from flickering out in those dark times. Peter and I were even allowed, under close supervision, to hold scraps of food in the flame to toast them. It need only be a modest square of bread, toasted in the flame and then dipped in tomato sauce. We became adept little chefs, and produced quite a range of toy snacks. We wanted to feed Mum and Dad with our one-candlepower barbecue. It was our turn, after so long being looked after, to play host.
One day Mum said she had a surprise for me. When I asked what it was, she said I’d just have to wait and see. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a surprise, now would it? She went out and I heard murmuring in the hall. She came back in. ‘Shall I tell you what it is? Perhaps I better had.’
‘No you mustn’t. You said it was a surprise!’
‘I know I did.’ But she was having second thoughts, remembering the risks of over-excitement. What if it was all too much for me? So she whispered, to take some of the shock out of the scene she had engineered, ‘It’s a surprise donkey.’ At last she called out, ‘We’re ready.’