I don’t have a nostalgic bone in my body, and I wouldn’t willingly go back to any day gone by. Adhesion to the past is as bad as wanting to sew yourself into your old clothes. I can’t help it if my times of waiting for books to be ferried down the steps are among the brighter spots in an overcast time.
Of course the real difficulty in the library lay in locating the books in the catalogues, writing down the relevant class-marks and placing my order. I made another attempt to sell Beamish on the idea that a telephone in Kenny A6 was the final element required to make the whole system workable. The staff of the Library wouldn’t mind my ordering books by phone. They might even look things up in the catalogue for me.
The Beamish wasn’t having it. ‘I’m beginning to see, John,’ he told me, ‘that you have quite a talent for sweet talk. It’s a fact that the Library and indeed the whole university is full of pussycats who could easily be talked into anything by someone with your wheedling skills. But at the moment our splendid Bursar is under the impression that disabled students are rather expensive to run, something of an extravagance in administrative terms. If I tell him you now need a phone in your room, he’ll be absolutely sure of it. So don’t over-play your hand. Put that honeyed tongue away.’
He seemed to have a very precise idea of his rôle: to make my life possible but not easy. ‘As I may have mentioned,’ he went on, ‘it was only quite recently that the colleges began installing telephones for their Fellows. I’m not sure it counts as progress. It makes it much harder to get work done when the phone keeps ringing. Forgive me if I am repeating myself. A repetitious demand deserves a repetitious answer.’
The lowest vesicle of the lingam
This was a bit much to swallow, the physicist as Luddite, and I’d only just explained that having a phone would actually help me with my work. Still, I had to knuckle under. Technically, under Regulation 8(a) of the University Statutes, it was my Tutor who was held hostage when books were entrusted to me by the Library. He was responsible for any penalties incurred, as if he had borrowed them himself.
So I had to put up with a rather unsatisfactory system, relying on other people to chase up the catalogue, dropping off notes with my requirements or taking my turn on the long-suffering phone in the Porter’s Lodge. All too often a porter would come down the steps to me at the agreed time, in response to my horn signal, with fewer books than I had hoped, or even none, saying cheerfully, ‘I’m afraid we’ve run into some problems, sir!’ And of course there was no possibility of appeal, to see where the system had failed.
Still, I now had at my disposal one of the great libraries in the country, stuffed with treasures Mrs Pavey could only dream of. I was determined to exploit it, and I wasn’t going to wait for an academic emergency which might never arise. I was determined to dredge up a wriggling rarity from the depths of the lingam, from its lowest possible vesicle.
It was Mrs Pavey who gave me the idea, when she was looking into different systems of shorthand at my request. I had acquired a competence in Pitman, but then become disillusioned with it because it was so angular. On the rebound I fell into the arms of Gregg, with which I was very happy for a while before I had to admit that it was simply too curvy. I gave up for a while, without altogether abandoning the hope that out there somewhere there was a baby bear of a shorthand system, neither too curvy nor too angular but just right. And I had never forgotten Mrs Pavey saying, ‘I did come across a reference to a book based on another system, John, but it’s impossibly rare. Still, it might be just what you’re looking for — it’s called Brachystography. Not just shorthand, which would be brachygraphy, but the shortest shorthand of all. From the Greek brachistos, shortest.’ And I had almost-nodded, as if I had been born knowing Greek.
So that was my choice. J. A. A. Percebois’s Brachystography, from 1898. At first the omens were good. The book had been located, in a sub-basement. There was a label on it saying NOT TO BE LENT OUT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Just the sort of prize I was after. There was a waiting period, while the case was referred indefinitely upwards for judgement, and then finally I received a note saying the book was ready for collection.
It was all terribly disappointing. The moment the glassy-eyed cœlacanth was in my fishing-net I realised I’d have had more fun with a goldfish in a plastic bag from the fair.
I shouldn’t have been expecting a little book, just because it was about a system of extreme abbreviation, and anyway my love of such things should have been exhausted a long time ago, when I was in CRX and Mum gave me the World’s Smallest Bible and a tiny Webster’s Dictionary. More to the point, Percebois’s system was about as sensible a way of representing the sounds of words as pictures of birds’ feet. No wonder it hadn’t caught on! I was reduced to my least favourite position, of agreeing with what everyone has always thought. That’s guaranteed to put my teeth on edge.
My status as Downing’s first disabled student wasn’t clear-cut. It turned out that there was another already, a blind student called Kevin who was reading Law. I would see him around the college, laden with textbooks in Braille. He was very popular, both in his own right and because he had somehow landed a job writing record reviews for the Melody Maker. LPs arrived for him by every post, and he was generous in passing them on. I wondered darkly whether he had a phone in his room. He seemed very favoured — and of course he hadn’t needed to have a rail fitted in the college bathroom he used. He represented a modest institutional investment. Unlike some people. Mentioning no names.
The college had assigned me a room that was accessible, give or take, to someone with my poor mobility, but had overlooked the need to make a similar arrangement for my pigeon-hole, where mail would be distributed. The alphabetical run was maintained, with the result that Cromer, J.’s pigeon-hole was set at a height which Cromer, J. would never be able to reach. I considered protesting, in the hope of being granted a more convenient slot roughly two feet off the floor, but I was learning to ration my appeals for special treatment. Wheedling was apt to blow up in my face, and the honeyed tongue was beginning to receive caustic answers.
It would have been futile in any case, since I couldn’t get into the Porter’s Lodge unaided. When I needed to use their phone, I took the porters on a trip back in time, to the etymological roots of their calling. If they had been able to vote on the phone-in-John’s-room question, they would have been solidly behind me, for the sake of equal rights and their backs. As for mail, they delivered it direct to my room.
The UL staff would only convey books to the bottom of the steps outside the front entrance, or a few paces further, to the door of the Mini. The personnel at Heffers, the university’s foremost bookshop, would come much closer to home. They matched the efforts of the college porters. In an attempt to fight off the challenge of rival businesses such as Bowes & Bowes and (who knows?) even W. H. Smith, Heffers would deliver books to undergraduates at no charge. What an enlightened gimmick! The books came to my door.
If I had only had a phone in my room the whole book-buying transaction could have been accomplished without labour on my part, and I would have become an early example of the stay-at-home shopper. Even allowing for bookshop visits to place my order, it was a lot better than nothing.
I’m happier with hardbacks than soft covers, which isn’t snobbery but pure practicality. With a paperback the only way you can avoid breaking the spine is to cradle it with your outstretched fingers. My fingers won’t reach that far, so it’s a matter of either balancing the book on the backs of my hands or going ahead and breaking the book’s back, flattening it against the table-top. There’s no room for sentiment when it comes to something as important as reading. Tender-hearted book-lovers wince when they see me in action, and I don’t care.