Dad got his little bit of revenge for ‘Good Vibrations’ by commandeering the record player himself, and putting on his own favourite song again and again. Not anything by Eartha Kitt, in fact (perhaps he was more fascinated by the singer than the songs) but a song from a film — ‘Moon River’ from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The song wasn’t a single but a track on an album (of Andy Williams singing songs from films), so Dad had to keep returning the needle to the right place on the record by hand, instead of letting it find its own way to the beginning of the song again, as Peter did when he left the repeat lever in the up position. ‘Moon River’ is a nice enough song, and I was quite likely to find myself humming its tune, but it never saturated the garden the way ‘Good Vibrations’ did. It didn’t have the power to charge Mum’s dowsing hand as she picked her herbs, or to make Peter’s chest-expanding exercises keep time with its beat (it didn’t really have one). After a while Dad would tire of re-positioning the needle, and we would hear other classic hits from the Henry Mancini songbook, and when the whole side of the record finished (with ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’) the time was ripe for the Beach Boys to storm the turntable all over again.
I knew there was a link between ‘Moon River’ and Audrey Hepburn, she being the star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My little sister had been named after that demure goddess, and perhaps the idea had been to align her with certain feminine qualities, with neatness and self-control. If so it hadn’t taken.
There was a line in ‘Moon River’ which struck me as being as mysterious as anything in ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. The song starts talking about two drifters setting off to see the world. Apparently they’re after the same rainbow’s end, / Waitin’ ’round the bend / My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me …
What on earth was a ‘huckleberry friend’? I knew that a gooseberry was someone who stopped two people from being together, but as for huckleberry I was stumped. Dad didn’t know either, though he seemed irritated to admit it. Either that or he didn’t want me to know what a huckleberry friend was. Perhaps he was afraid I’d ask where his was, if I knew, or want one of my own.
2 Swimming Like a Stone
There was one little thing I had kept from Marion Wilding during our final confrontation at Vulcan, that parting of the ways over incompatible visions of my future. On that occasion I presented Burnham Grammar School as the answer to a disabled boy’s prayers, a modern building throughly suited to his needs. In fact it wasn’t ideal for a pupil in a wheelchair. Far from ideal. Vulcan had been built as a castle-shaped folly, and was turned into a school for disabled boys in the teeth of its architectural allegiances. Only a tiny lift could be installed, and the inconvenience of this was felt every single day, until the new buildings allowed the dorms to move to the ground floor. Burnham Grammar School wasn’t a folly, but it wasn’t a sensible construction on my terms. Modern, yes, but lacking a lift of any sort, big or small.
We had been misinformed, before the interview. We had been reassured about the presence of a lift by people in a position to know. I suppose Dad, instead of making the call himself, might have got his secretary to do it (now that he had one) and hadn’t briefed her properly. I can see that happening. Take a letter Miss Smith. Oh, and find a school for my son. Yes, Mr Cromer, right away, sir.
So when we turned up for the interview the School Secretary was first flustered and then frosty. What business did we have accusing the school of having lifts? Who had made these false claims of suitability? Burnham Grammar School was strongly resistant to the needs of the disabled, and gave every sign of being proud of it.
Mum looked frantically at Dad, who fished a piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘Miss Cornelia Norris from County Hall, High Wycombe, that’s who,’ he said. Surely information supplied by someone called Cornelia Norris could be trusted? — otherwise the whole world was going smash.
To squash the educational dreams
Mum backed him up. ‘Miss Norris said there were lifts!’ Between them Mum and Dad chanted this formula three or four times. In their own way they had grasped the basic principle of the mantra. Repetition bringing its own meaning.
The secretary wasn’t spiritually susceptible to this approach. ‘Miss Norris, whoever she may be, doesn’t know what she’s talking about. There are no lifts on these premises. And never have been.’ As if this might in fact be a standard procedure, removing lifts at short notice so as to squash the educational dreams of the disabled. She stalked off into her office, where we could hear her complaining loudly about parents and education officers, and how fed up she was with the whole bang lot of them.
I had already seen the steep and terrifying stairs, and I let defeat slide into my heart. The little flame that had been burning there since that miraculous interview at Sidcot School, when I had been accepted with open arms by an institution to which I hadn’t even applied, finally snuffed it. In the case of Sidcot, only Mum and Dad had stood between me and a radiant education, but now they were on my side and still things were hopeless. I felt suddenly tired and said, ‘Can we go now? Let’s not bother to wait around. Complete waste of time.’ I felt rather bitter about it. Dad looked unsure of himself, perhaps because it wasn’t in his nature to leave a meeting without being properly dismissed. No shuffling off, no sneaking away. Then before we had a chance to beat a retreat the secretary came out again, with a rather poisonous smile, and said, ‘Mr Ashford will see you now’.
Mr Ashford was much more friendly, but also a little dismayed at what we’d been told by Miss Cornelia Norris. He was tall and lean, and he had a distant look in his eyes, something which reminded me of the co-principal of Vulcan School, Alan Raeburn. Perhaps it’s a common ophthalmic feature of teachers, produced by a mixture of concentration and vagueness, and the constant repetition required by the rôle.
All tint seemed to be fading from Mr Ashford’s face, more or less as we watched. His hair was greying and his eyes were grey already. ‘It’s a puzzle, certainly. However … one thing we do have is plenty of boys.’ He said it again, seemingly pleased. ‘No shortage of boys.’ I thought this was a rather tactless thing to say — if the school had plenty of boys, why would they want another one, let alone a boy who was lost without a lift?
He meant something different from that. He meant that boys in bulk would stand in for the missing mechanism. The school had plenty of boys, and the boys would carry me up and down stairs. Two at the back of the wheelchair, two at the front. If by some misfortune the boys carrying me lost their grip then other boys, below me on the stairs, would perform an equally valuable service by breaking my fall, whether they saw me coming or not. Some girls might end up acting as shock absorbers too, since the school was co-educational.
‘Do you see?’ asked Mr Ashford, with a prim small smile. ‘The more that fall over lower down on the stairs, the greater will be the cushioning effect. They won’t all fall over and tumble down, will they? It’s elementary physics, and common sense.’
It was lunacy. It was the antipodes of common sense. Each of us individually may have had doubts about the wisdom of the proposed system — me, Mum, Dad and perhaps even Mr Ashford — but as a collective we voted for it unanimously. Legally the arrangement must have been very precarious. If anything went wrong, if I was dropped and damaged, then there wouldn’t be enough lawyers in the world to break the school’s fall. Nothing similar would be contemplated for a moment now.