It’s true that there was an irritating element to the Tonys’ togetherness, an unstated refrain of What would have become of me, if I hadn’t found you? We were all aware of it, but our objections were probably not political.
They were houseproud, they made quiche. Quite apart from the fact that men didn’t cook back then, quiche at the time was far from being a cliché, it was something of a showpiece of kitchen skills. Larks’ tongues in aspic would hardly have caused more wonderment. People at meetings stuffed themselves, but still I think the Tonys’ kitchen skills counted against them. Equal rights for sexual minorities and the search for a perfect savoury custard flan were seen, back then, as incompatible goals in life.
Eventually I summoned up the courage to tell the Tonys that their quiche smelled rather good, and was there any chance of their making a vegetarian one every now and then? After that my attendance became devoted. I didn’t want to risk missing one of their meat-free evenings, but didn’t quite have the nerve to phone up in advance to check.
I resolved not to join in the ritual slander of our hosts. The gossipy members tended to be young and flighty, often making little experiments in effeminacy. Ken himself was always talking about revolutionary androgyny, but the idea seemed very theoretical as it emerged from his thick neck. The flibbertigibbets of the group had their own idiosyncratic ideas about defying the patriarchy. Their revolutionary programme involved shop-lifting make-up from Josh Tosh. If there were other aspects I never heard about them.
I’m not a gossip and I don’t enjoy tittle-tattle. It’s not a moral position so much as a physical fact. Having an inflexible neck cuts me off from that whole aspect of the world. Gossip is only a pleasure if you’ve got supple vertebrae. I don’t find it easy to follow the social mechanics of a group. I can’t turn my head to deliver an aside, or catch the fleeting expressions on people’s faces when they think they’re not being observed. Peripheral vision isn’t enough unless you can keep it moving, pouncing on all the giveaway nuances at the edge of events.
An appropriate punishment for gossips might be blinkers or some sort of neck-brace arrangement, inhibiting the flow of information, though the effect might be paranoiac delusions. Certainly if I try to imagine what goes on around me, socially, in any sort of detail, I inevitably imagine people whispering against me. It’s a direct consequence of lack of mobility, and there’s not a lot to be done about it.
If people were considerate enough to arrange themselves in front of me like a group photograph, tallest in the back row or else crouching in the front, looking only at me, not exchanging signals among themselves in any sidelong manner, then I dare say I’d enjoy parties as much as everyone else does. It doesn’t seem a lot to ask. Perhaps we could arrange things on a rota basis — social life the majority way for fifty-five minutes an hour, then everyone adopting their positions at a given signal to arrange things to suit me. I could blow a little whistle. In the meantime, the simplest way for me to be part of a conversation is to rule it.
The sacred fluids are kept in trust
Sometimes there were guest speakers at CHAPs meetings. One was an anthropology graduate who gave a presentation about the very warlike Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea. According to this noble tribe, semen should never be wasted. Even such rituals as rubbing it into one’s hands or capturing it in an old Redoxon bottle would be unacceptable by their standards. These ways of cleaning up would qualify as dirty in their own right.
The student who told us about the Sambia wore a scarf so long that it fell below his knees, despite being coiled twice around his neck. The ends were bedraggled from being trodden on, by his own feet and those of others. He hunched his shoulders and held his elbows back while he spoke, as if he was longing to drive his hands into the pockets his jumper lacked. He was clean-shaven, except for little patches of whiskers high up on his cheekbones. He looked like a woodland creature from an early draft of The Wind in the Willows.
He started off by explaining that among the Sambia the transfer of semen to ladies’ vaginas was extremely limited and hedged about with taboos. The main sexual practice, crucial for the initiation of young males, was fellatio.
When Christians arrived, they were unenthusiastic about this tradition. They regarded the older members of the tribe as beyond help, but succeeded in building a chapel and enticing quite a number of young boys away from the Sambia and into their own curious practices. This process continued to the point where the existence of the tribe itself was in danger.
Our little radical Rat or Mole had our attention by now. He ended by quoting the defiant words of the headman of the Sambia:
‘These Christians are taking away our culture by building a chapel and converting our males.
‘It is a sin for my semen to be wasted. Women can only be approached at prescribed times and in the correct manner.
‘We will never defy our culture and waste our sperm. When the missionaries take our young men away, what are we to do? The only thing we can do after that is make a hole in the ground and go and fuck that when we need to have release. Tell me, is that all they will leave for us?
‘I tell you, these Christians make out they are so god-like. Accordingly to them we are only primitive savages who cannot be saved, but shall I tell you something?
‘One of our boys went over to these Christians and consequently never learned our initiations and our ways. Do you know what? A year or two after he had defected, a girl in that compound was raped … That is unthinkable amongst our peoples. All our women are loved and cherished here. They do not even know what rape is. No atrocity like that happens here. If it were ever committed, the punishment would be death. What is so “civilised” about those people?
‘In our tribe we fully know and understand the way we are made by the gods. If that boy had been here, he would have been initiated into drinking the semen of his elders. When he reached puberty and started to make his own sperm, he would have a younger boy to drink his semen for him, and when the younger boy grew older he would have another boy to service him, and so on. Thus the sacred fluids are kept in trust among our peoples … To this degree we respect the gods and all our wonderful life.’
Despite his diffidence, our guest speaker held us spellbound. Even the ping of the timer on the Tonys’ electric oven, arriving in the middle of the lecture, had no power to break our concentration.
I dare say that like most of the life-changing texts of the 1960s and ’70s — Desiderata (‘Go softly’, and so forth) or the ‘Cree Indian proverb’ (‘Only when the last tree has died and / The last river has been poisoned and / The last fish has been caught, / Will we realise that / We cannot eat money’) — this plea was more or less made up. It doesn’t even matter. The text changes your life not by virtue of being true but because you are ready for the transformation it announces.
In Hall, as the academic year wound down, I heard people talking about their plans for the summer. One person was going to work in a pub in Argyll, another had found work repairing slate roofs on a farm in Cornwall. And what were my plans? Not quite in that class, though ambitious enough in their way. I would be spending the long vacation in the bosom of my family, trying not to choke on the bullying nipple of Mum’s need to look after me despite all protests.
Dancing with eyes averted
There was a rather hectic atmosphere as May Week approached. I had already noticed that students made a point of breaking up their love affairs near the end of a term. A little wave of tears would break over the undergraduate population just before Christmas and Easter, and then the heartbroken would go home to mope with their families, casting a pall on the celebrations. May Week, though (which lasted more than a week and took place in June), was high jilting season, particularly for third-years, many of whom seemed determined to wipe the emotional slate clean before they moved on into the ‘world’ and the next stage of their lives.