Stuffed marrow was as disgusting as the Scrambled Egg Boats had been delightful. It wasn’t the tomato innards that I minded but the mince part of the stuffing. That I wouldn’t eat. Fasting was a doddle when you knew in advance it was going to be marrow for lunch, and could prepare yourself. The treat was balanced by the going without. I didn’t consciously thwart Mum’s plans to feed me up, but something in my forming character applauded the symmetry of this arrangement.
At some stage Mum realised that there were such things as indoor fireworks. It would have been poor tactics to lay on a display inside the house, necessarily very muted, on the same night that everyone else was letting off rockets galore just outside. Indoor fireworks are to outdoor what tiddlywinks is to the pole vault. Mum waited for my birthday instead.
One advantage of the indoor fireworks was that I was actually allowed to light them, with a long spill. They were brought in on a tray and laid on the bed. I particularly liked the ones that looked like pills on square pieces of cardboard, but produced a writhing snake when touched with the taper. A serpent made of some grey and fæcal ash would rush from the ignited pellet, and I watched in raptures while it writhed in coils of silent agony. The smell of indoor fireworks is harshly beautiful. I hated for it to dissipate and would plead with Mum not to open the windows. She grumbled that she didn’t want to be smelling that stink on her curtains in a week’s time, but still she agreed to wait for a few minutes, chafing, after the show was over.
Perhaps that was the day when I solemnly announced, ‘This is a very special birthday. Today I am the same age as all the fingers on one hand.’
I had yet to understand the spiritual significance of a birthday. The spiritual significance of a birthday is nil. She who fills a cradle fills a grave. I had yet to read the verse which describes celebrating a birthday as a sort of necrophilia:
Of all days
On one’s birthday
One should mourn one’s fall [into entanglement].
To celebrate it as a festival
Is like adorning and glorifying a corpse …
The left hand which I held up to demonstrate the special significance of that birthday was becoming strange to me. The wrist was twisting of its own accord, and the fingers were losing the knack of staying parallel. Dr Duckett the GP recommended that I wear splints at night to minimise the distortion of the joints.
Collie Boy
Now that my age corresponded to the number of digits on a hand, however well or badly shaped, it was time to think of my education. Not a school, of course, but schooling none the less. A teacher coming to the house several times a week. An elderly school-teacher earning a little money in her retirement. Miss Collins.
There must have been a lot of work behind the scenes to arrange it, but Mum only gave me the news a little bit before Miss Collins arrived for the first time, so that my excitement wouldn’t become dangerously magnified by a long wait. I had time to ask, ‘Is she a governess?’ Granny had had a governess, who had marked her nose with a piece of chalk if she got her sums wrong. She hated that, and so would I. Granny’s governess would tie her thumbs behind her knees if she fidgeted. Would Miss Collins be allowed to do that?
Once I was reassured that Miss Collins wasn’t a governess, I was mad keen for lessons to begin. Someone was coming to the house with only one object in mind: to teach me everything she knew. I couldn’t wait. There was never a pupil so willing.
After the first lesson, though, I asked Mum, ‘Is Miss Collins a lady or a man?’ I was genuinely puzzled. My tutor was at a rather mannish stage of later life. She had whiskers of a rudimentary sort. Mum laughed rather uneasily and said Miss Collins was definitely a lady, but she could see why I needed to ask. After that we gave Miss Collins a nick-name which we used with much guilty pleasure. To us she became the Collie Boy.
This wasn’t the first time I had been puzzled by the marks of gender. For a long time I worried about the status of nurses, who seemed to be in some strange way intermediate. Finally I asked Mum, ‘Are nurses ladies?’
‘Whatever do you mean, JJ?’
‘Are nurses ladies or are they men?’ I wasn’t thinking in terms of male nurses, not yet knowing that such things existed.
‘They’re ladies, of course! Why would you think anything else?’
‘Well, nurses have ears and ladies don’t.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
What I was talking about, really, was that nurses were the only female persons I had seen who wore their hair pinned neatly back, so that I could see their ears. I had always thought the hair-do was all part of the lady. Normal ladies wore their hair permed and shaped, so that they had waves of glossy hair where their ears would have been if they had had them.
‘Men have ears, but I’ve never seen a lady’s except a nurse’s so are nurses ladies?’
‘Everyone has ears. I have ears, you know I do.’
‘Will you show me?’
‘Of course I will, silly. There’s one, see? And there’s the other.’ So the nurse question was settled, just as the Miss Collins question would be. It turned out that nurses and Miss Collins were all really ladies.
Not long after that Mum told me the facts of life. She was remarkably direct about it. She warned me that people would try to tell me about babies and everything, ‘and they’ll get it wrong’. So she told me. This sudden surge of frankness represented an underside of her character, the medical professional in a hurry to dispel ignorance. Other children were kept in the dark, even when they were obsessed with knowing where babies come from, and here I was being overwhelmed with knowledge well ahead of schedule, and without having to ask a single question.
She used family words for the parts involved, saying ‘taily’ rather than penis, but otherwise she was fairly frank. I was outraged. I thought she must be making it all up. ‘But you told me it was all to do with storks and blackberry bushes!’
‘No, John, I never did. I said that some people say it’s to do with storks and blackberry bushes. That’s what some people pretend to believe, but now I’m telling you the truth.’
She might at least have come up with a better story.
‘But that’s rude. Why do mummies and daddies have to be rude to make a baby?’
‘Well when they do it, it’s nice. So if it’s nice, it’s not rude.’
‘Nice? Nice? What’s nice about putting your taily in a hole between a lady’s legs? I bet it hurts!’
‘No, it doesn’t. The lady likes it.’
‘I DIDN’T MEAN THE LADY. I meant, I bet it hurts the man!’ My concern was all for him, in this desperate transaction. ‘The poor man! He must love the baby terribly to do that with his taily.’
‘Oh no, the man likes it!’
‘How do you know? You’re not a man!’
‘No, but I told you — Daddy says it’s nice.’
This was where her lying was blatant and I became incredulous with anger. ‘Daddy would never say it was nice to stick his taily in a hole between a lady’s legs.’
‘He says it’s nice.’
‘Bring him here. I have to hear him say it.’ I was almost in tears. ‘He won’t say it, he can’t say it because it’s not true. You’re fibbing!’
‘I’m telling the truth. And one day you will find out for yourself …’
‘Do you mean that one day I’m going to take my taily and stick it in a hole between a lady’s legs?’