Lawsuit virus
The craze for litigation, though, had not yet hit these islands. In those days hardly anyone went to law no matter what injury was done them. People trapped under fallen masonry apologised for being a nuisance, signing away their rights with whichever hand was the less damaged. Perhaps the lawsuit virus was actually carried by that other invader, the American grey squirrel. Too late to eradicate it now.
Though I had doubts about the viability of the method of porterage and mass human-cushioning proposed by Mr Ashford, it wasn’t that I was sentimental about lifts. I can’t say I ever cared for them much as gadgets. In every lift I’ve ever tried to enter there’s been a cheery chappy who says with a grin, ‘Room inside for a littl’un,’ when there patently isn’t. Perhaps it’s always the same man. I may be a littl’un, but when you factor in the wheelchair and (let’s hope) the someone to push it, it’s more of a littl’untourage. And then I’m perfectly placed, in terms of level, to catch the farts that seem to be forced out of people by the movement of the lift. Is it to do with the change of air pressure, or perhaps a side-effect of claustrophobia?
The full address of Burnham Grammar School was Hogfair Lane, Burnham, Slough. The street name referred to some ancient livestock market, I dare say, but it seemed appropriate enough. We were both taking on something unknown, the school and I, both buying a pig in a poke. On my first day at the school I turned up in the wheelchair. With my McKee pins working smoothly I could now sit down in a wheelchair reasonably convincingly. What I couldn’t do, as it turned out, was stay in place while the chair was carried up or down stairs. I perched stably enough for life on the flat but not for the amateurish toting of my peers.
That first day was nightmarish. They couldn’t keep the wheelchair level, and if it tipped I would be tipped out, and then the boys and girls who broke my fall would break me in the process. Seat belts hadn’t been thought of for wheelchairs back then — they had hardly been thought of for cars. After the first frightening day I had to regress from the Wrigley to a more primitive style of vehicle, back into the prehistoric phase of my life on four wheels. The Tan-Sad invalid carriage from long ago was dusted off — quite literally. I remember Mum disinterring it from the shed and flapping her duster at it in dismay.
One step forward and one step back. Not much of a dance, but that seemed to be what my karma had choreographed for me. I was now independent, in the sense that I was receiving a mainstream education for the first time in my whole life. In other ways I needed more help than I had for quite some time.
I had struggled over the mountains of Vulcan to find myself stuck on a plateau. The Tan-Sad symbolised this predicament — and no one wants to spend his schooldays travelling between classes in a symbol. The Tan-Sad’s wheels were fixed, so it couldn’t turn corners. It was less steerable than a supermarket trolley, though its wheels didn’t squeak. Its great advantage was that it had a broad footplate and so wouldn’t tip me out — but it was very unwieldy, and far too heavy to be punted along by a crutch or a cane like a wheelchair. I would always need to be pushed on school premises. No more self-locomotion. No more privacy, or to put it more positively, no more solitude.
I needed to be lifted in and out of the Tan-Sad, like a baby with its pram, a demotion I felt keenly. I wanted a deepened style of relationship here in the mainstream, based on more than wheelchairs passing in the night. So much for being in the swim of a normal education. Already I felt to be swimming like a stone.
Sea of boys
And yet in general terms the mad scheme worked. I never came to serious harm, though the experience of being carried could be terrifying. I got a few knocks from such accidents and I’m sure I dealt out plenty more, but the sea of boys always broke my fall. Ashford was right. They didn’t all go tumbling in their turn. Enough hands reached instinctively for banisters to stabilise the toppling tower. Massed pupils acted as a wildly laughing safety-net whenever the Tan-Sad broke loose from its bearers. For everyone but me it was fun and a break from routine, something that schoolchildren crave more than anything. Since then, whenever I see pop concerts on television where the singers dive ecstatically into the audience it reminds me of my schooldays, although it was never by choice that I surfed the crowd in my trundling chariot.
I had been pushed around in the Tan-Sad for years as a child, feeling both conspicuous and invisible, but the new routine made a difference. I was much more self-conscious, of course, as a teenager who was only on those premises because of his fixed desire to be independent. There was another element in play, though. Partly it was the number of people helping, but mainly of course the change of level, the element of laborious lifting, which added something almost ceremonial to my progress from floor to floor. Sometimes when I arrived safely on a landing, and my helpers set me down, there would be a little ripple of applause from the other pupils, as if I had done something remarkable, and though this was nonsense still it made people look at me differently. Naturally the cheers were louder when I was almost dropped, but there was a stubborn feeling of carnival even without a near-disaster.
At the end of each schoolday the Tan-Sad was left in the hall of the school. I would be reunited with it the next morning before assembly, without much rejoicing.
Assembly took place in the big hall. There was a hymn, accompanied on the piano by a plump little lady with a fixed smile, though the minority of pupils who made any noise at all conspired to slow the music right down, stripping it of the slightest claim to forward motion. Roll-call, which was held in the classroom, had a strange element of apartheid. The school was co-educational but not exactly equal in its treatment of the sexes.
The rule was that boys would be called by their surnames, and girls by their first names. The intonations were different too, gruff and challenging for the boys, tender and sweet for the girls. So it would be brusque, denunciatory ‘Adams!’ for Peter Adams and murmured tentative ‘Julie?’ for Julie Chandler. A name like ‘Valerie’ became filigree on the lips of some of the teachers. Valerie was well on her way to becoming a mythological figure. Positively a dryad of Slough.
Even at this late stage of normal education, it seemed that girls were made of sugar and spice (and all things nice), boys of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. This piece of symbolic theatre was repeated at the beginning of every school day, with girls being cooed over as if they were unique and fragrant blooms, boys marked down as bleak little blobs, no improvement on the fathers whose names they were made to answer to.
Mothering at a lower voltage
Girls were nicer than boys, then. It was official, and perhaps it was even true. Certainly the girls of the school were franker and warmer in their approaches to me — but I was never willingly going to be mothered again. And as far as I could see, sistering was just mothering at a lower voltage. I knew from my years at CRX how easy it was to become an honorary girl, and it wasn’t going to happen again. Once in an incarnation was plenty.
Little chatty groups of girls came over to cultivate me. No one quite dared to come alone — but the boys were much less enterprising. Boys were very happy to push or carry the Tan-Sad, and perhaps they had some limited opportunities to spy on me, but I noticed that every now and then a boy would be despatched to ask the girls for information, to find out what I had said and what I might turn out to be like.
There were disordered refinements to the hateful system of rollcall. If two girls had the same Christian name, then one of them would be set apart with a diminutive, so that there might be one Jane and one Janie. If two boys had the same last name, their first initials would be used to distinguish them, but it would be snarled rather than neutrally spoken. The same lips which shaped ‘Valerie’ so tenderly that you could almost feel the floaty fabric of her dress spat out the initials as though they were bitter pips. The discrimination of tone became extreme when two boys made the blunder of having the same last name and the same initial as well. So it was ‘Savage, Paul!’ and ‘Savage, Patrick!’ spoken with a sort of rage, barely suppressed. How dare twins share an initial on top of everything else! It was asking for trouble.