The magazine was called Freeze Peach. I don’t think the editors wanted to produce a magazine and then devised a suitably clever name. More likely that they thought Freeze Peach too good a name not to have a magazine attached to it. The originators of Woman’s Own, their eyes less clouded by Maya, avoided this mistake. Freeze Peach stumbled on as far as a third issue, then died in a ditch. I take no responsibility for that, though my contribution probably didn’t help. If the magazine had kept going a little longer, I would have tried to lumber it with another opus (in the same vein of manipulative pluck) entitled ‘Not Waving but Downing’. One more case of the title coming first, the actual artefact being an optional afterthought. I was getting on the magazine’s wave-length, by writing a poem that was entirely parasitic on its title.
My taste was more adventurous in poetry than in prose. If I had been asked then what was the most important book published in the twentieth century, I would have answered ‘Ficcíones’, in unison with every other self-respecting Cambridge undergraduate of the period — and Borges’s Spanish is indeed crisp and fine. But the books I read more than any others were Roald Dahl’s collections of admirably sick short stories. Books have always been awkward objects to me without exception, but I managed to tuck my copies of Kiss Kiss and Someone Like You out of sight behind more impressive-looking volumes, just like everyone else.
Theoretically the person to consult in my perplexity was my tutor Graëme, but that was obviously not going to do any good with the way things stood between us, and I wasn’t going to grovel. Humble pie is no dish for vegetarians (historically, numble pie). The filling is deer guts, if you really want to know. I didn’t consult Graëme, just told him what I had decided. He gave a mannered little sigh and said that it was a matter of statistical fact that English students were more prone to nervous breakdowns than those who read Modern Languages. He hoped that my change of academic direction didn’t qualify as a cry for help in its own right.
I didn’t anticipate that the change of subjects would be too jarring. I was better integrated into the life of the college than I was with my department, though that wasn’t saying much. Still, the Mini had become almost the Downing taxi. I was often being asked to ferry people around, and I enjoyed doing it.
The risky parts of air travel are take-off and landing. The dangerous moments when conveying bone china by hot-air balloon are loading and unloading. Why should wheelchair-based car trips be any different? I was vulnerable while my helpers were conveying me from room to car, and much more so on the return journey, at the end of the day above all, when alcohol had a bit part in the drama, and sometimes the leading rôle.
It vexed me that Downing was a castle of learning strongly fortified against its own residents. Returning from an evening out, early enough for the back gate to be open, I was faced with a barrier, a vertical stanchion blocking access for cars. Dons with parking privileges were issued with keys which let them unlock it and hinge it down out of the way, this lone fat prison bar blocking the Mini’s liberty. I shared their parking privileges but not their right to a key, without which parking privileges didn’t amount to much.
Until I was vandalised myself
I asked for a key at the Porter’s Lodge and was told that I should apply through my tutor. Did I imagine the look of wry amusement which ricocheted around the room, bouncing off the notice boards and arrays of pigeonholes? They might have had the manners to wait until I had gone, my tail between my legs, and then they could have murmured quite audibly, ‘And a fat lot of good that will do you, as everyone knows!’ The nicest of the porters said that a key wouldn’t make all that much difference anyway, since I couldn’t manhandle the post myself — which made me wonder why I had ever thought him the nicest. If I had a key then my passengers would do the physical work for me, and the social bubble would be preserved that much longer. When I had to go by way of the Porter’s Lodge people tended to mooch off, and then I would have to recruit someone to return the key anyway.
One evening I came home late with a slightly rowdy party. We had made a ritual journey across the modest urban lawn of Parker’s Piece to pay our respects to Reality Checkpoint — no more than an elaborate Victorian lamp-post, really, ornamented with a motif of dolphins, but universally known by the phrase painted on its plinth. By common consent Reality Checkpoint offered reassurance to those who got lost while voyaging strange seas of thought alone and artificially bewildered by drugs. It was a pilot light to rekindle the snuffed spirits of those trapped between dimensions.
Then nothing would content the group but to play games with the traffic lights, or rather with the mechanism that made them change. There was some sort of sensor buried under a heavyweight rubber strip, which counted the cars passing over it and triggered the lights to change when a predetermined number had been reached. This seemed to the group an astoundingly sophisticated piece of technology and also (here I parted company from the general mood) something that cried out for a bit of tampering.
A lot of good my dissidence did me. The idea was to bounce the wheelchair back and forth on the decision-making flange, persuading it that cars were massing in large numbers and that the lights must therefore change. There was no logic to the use of the wheelchair, since weight was the issue and John plus wheelchair was lighter than any one of my companions, but then the logic of the group was purely alcoholic. The evening had been alcohological for some time, and I looked up at the events unfolding around me with a sour sobriety.
Returning to college had an edge of melancholy and resentment for me. My passengers didn’t necessarily share this mood, and would get up to pranks and high jinks. All very amusing, until someone fell over my foot.
Someone. Mentioning no names. You know who you are — don’t you, Stephen Morris?
All right, it wasn’t quite as innocent as all that. My pals were busy uprooting the stanchion, and though I hadn’t exactly put them up to it I was silently cheering them on. The stanchion was quite feebly rooted in concrete, like an ailing tooth, and it came out quite suddenly, which was when Stephen stumbled backwards and fell over my foot.
I had been all in favour of vandalism until I was vandalised myself. Still, I had a couple of weeks of significantly easier access to my room until the repairs were done. By then my foot had stopped hurting quite so much, and the world and I were back at our usual loggerheads.
Even so the Mini brought more joy than anything else. There were many trips in that little car which resembled rehearsals for world record attempts in the human compression category. Only the observers from the Guinness Book of Records were missing. We were always fitting one more person in. And then one more.
If the Mini was 120 inches long, 55 wide and 53 high (though obviously you have to discount the distance between the ground and the bottom of the car), then you subtract the measurements of the boot and the engine and you get … my maths isn’t what it was, but I’d estimate the interior volume as being between 127 and 134 cubic feet. Call it 130. Not a lot when, like most of my passengers, you’re built like a Greek god, except for your English inability to look people in the eye, or anywhere near it.
There might be as many as four outsized knees jammed up against my back in the driver’s seat, so close that I could feel the freckles on them. If ever I did take the Mini for a drive on my own, it seemed to ride unnaturally high on its axles. When the suspension didn’t bump it felt as if there was something wrong.