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Nursery world

I was a text-book healthy baby, a magazine-cover specimen of infant. I don’t exaggerate. The magazine for which I was the cover star was The Nursery World, Vol. 41, No. 1,290 — the issue for August 31st 1950, when I was eight months old. I was the sort of bonny baby who provokes knitting frenzy in susceptible persons. The publishers have detected this matinée-jacket-provoking aura of mine, and have linked my image to a commercial slogan: Wise knitters aim for … Target Cherub baby wool!

They knew full well what bait they were dangling in front of the knitting public. They knew what a marketing tool they had in me. I’m adorable. I’m enough by myself to start a craze for bootees and tiny cardigans, pale blue with matching pearlised buttons.

I wasn’t always so groomed and wholesome. I remember playing in the garden, as a baby, as a toddler, and loving to eat dirt. It’s one of my strongest early memories. When Mum caught me doing it, she would scold and even shout. It was the first thing that I learned was wrong. Not that I stopped doing it. I liked the taste too much. Eating dirt was the first thing that I learned to do when Mum’s back was turned. It was the secret vice which turned the withdrawal of her attention into an opportunity rather than a bereavement.

Mum hated dirt, though she also hated cleaning. The garden with its necessary dirt was unattractive to her. Dad took charge of all outside chores, until (much later) she discovered the joy of herbs, and a way of planting them which let her keep her shoes clean. Of course she kept a pair of old shoes to wear in the garden, but even those she hated to get dirty.

Inside or outside the house, creating order was a burden to her. Dirt was her enemy, cleanliness not altogether her friend. There was something brusque and aggrieved about her housework. Every flick of the duster, every pass with the broom, every guilty glance at the cleaning lady (when we could afford one at last), was part of a life-long dialogue with her mother, with Granny, whose attitude to domestic hygiene was passionate and entirely single-minded.

In Hindu cosmology it’s said of Krishna that he too ate dirt as a toddler. A playmate told on him to his mother. But when Krishna’s mother went to scold him and demanded that he open his mouth, he did — and then she saw that all the stars and the planets were held there in safety also. That was her revelation of her boy’s Godhead, when she saw the cosmos whirling in his little mouth, a mouth that still had its baby teeth. If Krishna’s mum had been mine, of course, he’d have been sent to bed without supper just the same.

There’s a theory that children, when they put the wrong things in their mouths, are incorporating necessary impurities, building up their defences for later encounters. Mum took a more social view — eating dirt was common. When I put nasty things in my mouth I was showing her up, even when there was no one around to witness my vulgar behaviour.

Once I found a red Spangle in the garden. It was caked with dirt, but I wiped it roughly clean and ate it. It was delicious. Afterwards I didn’t feel so good. When the taste wore off, there was nothing left in my mouth but fear, telling me that I’d done something terribly bad and wrong.

The mouth, being at that age the cave of all pleasure and knowing, refuses admission to nothing. Another time my imaginary friend Peterkin and I ate some little black-and-yellow caterpillars we found in the garden, not for the flavour but to feel them wriggling in our tummies. Peterkin said that nobody could see him but me, but that was just him being silly. I only pretended to eat my caterpillars, but Peterkin didn’t notice and wanted to show he was as brave as me, so he swallowed his down. He said he could feel them moving for a long time afterwards. It wasn’t half as much fun as I’d said, but I knew he’d do the next thing I told him to do just the same.

Vomit of truth

Near Christmas, I saw some holly bushes in full berry. I had Peterkin with me, and I told him they were the tastiest of all berries. ‘And now, Peterkin,’ I announced, ‘we’re going to eat tasty holly berries like the ones in the carols.’ Even after the berries had been heaved up on the kitchen floor I tried to talk my way out of trouble with Mum. I wasn’t ready to come clean even when my guts had made a full confession. ‘I only ate one,’ I said, ‘but Peterkin had lots and lots.’ There was no chance of my getting away with it, since Mum could see the undigested berries shining in what I had thrown up. My vomit was more truthful than my story.

After that I ignored Peterkin, pretending I couldn’t see or hear him. I made him cry. He didn’t like being reminded he was imaginary.

Of course Peterkin wasn’t really my imaginary friend, he was my little brother Peter. Peter on his birth certificate, Peterkin to the family (I think the diminutive comes from Treasure Island). I was told I should love him. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want a brother at all, I wanted a friend who could run and maybe fly. Instead there was this dull bundle who spent most of his time on the floor even after he had learned to stand. Perhaps it was my job to teach him to fly. I helped him up onto a chair in the kitchen and told him he could do it, but he had to wait until I had counted to ten before he took off. Then I went into the garden, still counting. There was no sense in being too near the scene of the spell if the magic didn’t work after all.

When Dad came in from his work, he would turn his hand into a flat blade and use it to deliver a soft chop to his forehead. He did this to Mum, he did it to me, sometimes he even did it to Peterkin. It was called a salute, and other people’s daddies didn’t do that. My daddy flied for the King. My daddy was a Squadron Leader. Mum made a smile with her lips while I saluted back.

We were allowed to roam pretty freely. I said to Peterkin, ‘I know exactly how to get on the runway where Daddy keeps his plane. I’ll take you there if you like.’ Then there they were, all the flying men. From the start I liked uniforms always. The men stamped together and saluted. ‘That’s all for us, you see,’ I explained. ‘This man is coming to see us. He wants to know if we liked it.’

Of course when he came closer I saw that it was Dad, and all he wanted to know was what the hell we thought we were up to. He was jolly cross.

To feel myself being washed away

It was Mum’s choice to call me John, but Dad was delegated to choose my middle name, as a consolation prize. Originally I was going to be John Draper Cromer, after one of Dad’s Air Force heroes, Kit Draper, but Mum dug her heels in. She hadn’t met him, but she certainly didn’t like what she had heard about him. Yes, he’d served in the War — yes, all right, both wars — but he wasn’t what you could call a war hero, was he? He kept wrecking planes. He was a show-off and a liability, if not worse — some said he had been lucky not to be tried as a traitor and a spy. Dad said that was all nonsense and drivel, but she insisted on his second choice instead, and so I became John Wallis Cromer. After Barnes Wallis, of the Dam Busters and the bouncing bomb.

Somewhere in Dad’s papers I expect there’s a list of possible names for his first-born, written in small caps:

JOHN DRAPER CROMER.

JOHN BARNES CROMER.

JOHN TRENCHARD CROMER.

JOHN BADER CROMER.

JOHN CHESHIRE CROMER.

JOHN GIBSON CROMER.

As if he imagined them looking well on a war memorial, if it came to that. Of course the War still cast its shadow, over him and over everyone. There was rationing still. ‘Cheshire’ would have been for Leonard Cheshire, war hero and witness of the bombing of Nagasaki, ‘Gibson’ for Guy Gibson, who led the raid on the Ruhr when the bouncing bombs were dropped.

The earliest pattern of sound I can remember is Mum saying ‘Dou-asíss — Dou-asÍSS!’ I didn’t know what it meant at first, but she always made that sound in the same set of circumstances.