The moment she mentioned her parents, Rebecca’s voice started to betray the Celtic lilt for ever associated with Dylan Thomas. Perhaps it was true that she had avoided all dairy products from birth, but she hadn’t altogether been able to steer clear of Under Milk Wood.
I had to ask Rebecca to attract a waitress’s attention so that I could order my fifth columnist’s lunch, my feast of indirect animal suffering. The waitress was trying so hard to treat me like everyone else, not staring or anything, that I could have set fire to my hair and she wouldn’t have looked my way, telling herself it was all part of my unfortunate condition. ‘Plain omelette, chips and salad, please,’ I said, my voice a chastened whisper. I was still abusing the chicken, but cow and calf had a provisional reprieve.
Part of me, the part that loved rigour and clarity, found this new doctrine of eating very appealing. What a shock it would give Mum and Flanny if I returned to Bourne End saying No to a whole new range of foods! What consternation in the kitchen and the surgery. At the same time I had to acknowledge that as a vegan child in the bed-rest years, refusing to embark on Mum’s scrambled-egg boats, I would simply have faded away, my precious Christmas-present watch dangling loosely from my shrivelled wrist.
Perhaps I would stay where I was in the pecking order of eating after all, dismissed by one camp as a faddist and by the other as a gutless fellow-traveller of slaughter.
When my omelette arrived, Rebecca graciously consented to share my salad. She even helped herself to a few chips, after sniffing one to assure herself that it hadn’t been fried in an animal fat. Her nose could infallibly settle that question. After the main course she produced something she described as a carob bar from her pocket, some innocent treat which she understandably didn’t offer to share. I asked her the Latin name, which she didn’t know. That was a relief (it’s Ceratonia siliqua, for the record). I was feeling oddly competitive.
I had expected to discuss Rebecca’s symptoms over the lunch table. Did the red patches on her face itch or perhaps throb? Were they hot or cold, even numb? Did the sensations vary with the time of day? Each answer would narrow down the possible diagnosis until a remedy was found, as in a classic detective story — except that there would be no need to finger a culprit or even name the crime. I wouldn’t have to use the (admittedly pretty) word ‘Rosacea’.
M. L. Tyler in Homœopathic Drug Pictures uses a lovely quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson to explain the method: ‘I only saw the things you did / But always you yourself you hid.’ Seeing the symptoms is plenty, as long as you see them clearly enough, and learn to make the crucial distinctions between apparent similarities. Colonel Mustard in the Library is given the relevant pillule, dusted off and helped to his feet. It’s not a dramatic story, granted, but something much more worthwhile, a happy ending. All friends again.
Rebecca addressed herself to the carob bar as if she was eating a shaft of sweetened sunlight. Was she more self-righteous than me? Not necessarily. Was she making a better job of it? Definitely.
Petticoats over their working clothes
I went on the offensive in a slightly indirect way. ‘Rebecca isn’t a very Welsh name, is it?’ She seemed very pleased with the question. ‘If you mean it sounds Jewish, then perhaps you’re referring to the theory that the Welsh are the lost twelfth tribe of Israel.’
Are they, by Jove!
I couldn’t begin to explain why I was so preöccupied with her ethnic identity. If it turned out that she put on a pointy hat between lectures and used her spinning-wheel to make the strings for harps why should I care?
‘In any case I’m not sure you know what you’re talking about. Rebecca and her daughters are important figures in Welsh history. They rioted against the English oppressor in the 1840s. They burned down toll-houses and terrorised the gate-keepers.’
‘And what did the men do while the women ran wild?’
She looked at me rather pityingly. ‘It was the men doing the rioting.’
‘But I thought you said …’
‘“Rebecca and her daughters” were men. They wore bonnets and petticoats over their working clothes. They took their name from Genesis — something about “possessing the gates of those which hate them”. Farmers taking cattle to a nearby market town might have to pay six tolls. It was a group identity. They were all “Rebecca”. Have you seen Spartacus?’
‘No.’
‘Never mind, then.’
‘And did the brutal Establishment crack down as it always does?’
‘Not really. A commission was set up which was more sympathetic to local people and established County Roads Boards instead.’
‘Power to the people,’ I said hopefully, but I think Rebecca had realised that my political consciousness didn’t run either broad or deep.
Her carob bar was more or less Rebecca’s lunch, while if I was still hungry I could always order (for instance) an ice cream — even if it was little better in the moral scheme of things than a candied pig’s trotter, or a bunch of South African grapes visibly dripping with the blood of the oppressed.
Rebecca’s exposition of dietary virtue had distracted us from the main thrust of our Saturday, but in the afternoon we got back into our stride. In fact we made so much of a splash at Joshua Taylor, Cambridge’s poshest department store (universally known as Josh Tosh), that we came rather unstuck. By now our approach had become very slick. Perhaps our lunchtime conversation had put Rebecca back in touch with the preaching intonations of her forebears (though there must be a few Welsh folk without the pulpit in their veins). Meanwhile I had acquired the knack of helplessness — and it’s definitely a knack, whatever anyone tells you. It was only in the afternoon that I got the hang of it. It felt like filling my nappies on principle, long after I’d mastered potty-training. I just looked around as if I’d never seen a door before, as if I’d been protected from the harsh truths of the entrance-way.
Meanwhile Rebecca’s journalistic credentials had escalated from Broadsheet by way of Varsity to the Cambridge Evening News. As she helped me ostentatiously into the trendy-young-man section of the shop, which had a dandyish name all its own — ‘The Peacock’, the shop’s bold response to the vibrant and trendsetting ‘Way In’ men’s department of Harrods — we caused consternation. I don’t think it was because there was nothing in the shop I could conceivably wear, bar a few scarves. Perhaps word had gone round the retailers of Cambridge city centre that a man in a wheelchair and a reporter were asking embarrassing questions.
We didn’t look like what we were, ill-assorted acquaintances enjoying an odd sort of day out under the umbrella of idealistic agitation. We looked like the advance party of a journalistic exposé, preparing the ground for the camera crew. We caused alarm, but it wasn’t too late. We could still be bought off.
A swarm of smart and rather flustered young men surged towards us. This was customer service at the highest pitch of professionalism and nervousness. By the time we left the premises, barely two minutes later, I was clutching in my hand a Joshua Taylor credit note for twenty pounds.
We had set out to make people more aware of the difficulties faced by people in wheelchairs, and ended up doing rather well out of it ourselves. Accidentally we became a protection racket. Up to the very moment the credit note was pressed into my hands, I had no idea we were in the extortion business, and nor (I’m sure) did Rebecca.