I saw that those five little staccato words, those (he was right) entirely unforgettable words, remained on the board, and a wave of fear swept over me. Not entirely selfish fear — I didn’t want Eckstein to be compromised in any way, though why was I worried? His unpopularity was already exemplary. He had nothing to fear.
‘Sir —,’ I piped up, ‘shouldn’t we clean the blackboard?’
‘As I understand the situation, young Mr Cromer, you cannot do so, and I myself … cannot be bothered. No one will understand what those words mean,’ he added airily, ‘and if they do … well, who cares? I am here to provide instruction, am I not? Let them learn …’
He didn’t abandon me quite as brusquely as I feared. He pushed the Tan-Sad roughly to the stairwell, wheezing as he did so, but then summoned up enough breath to produce an enormous whistle which summoned some of the boys with which those premises were so richly supplied.
Orthographical paraçites
Perhaps Eckstein gambled on Spanish attracting me as a language of secrets and obscenities. Presumably the octopus featured in the unforgettable curse because with its eight arms it could quite easily explore a lady and a man at the same time, and still have fingers left over for the eating of its lunch. Eckstein instilled in me the idea that Spanish was a language of adult intimacies. German as I first experienced it was a motherly language, full of lullabies, endearments and diminutives, while Spanish was more of a lover from the start, a fount of forbidden knowledge. German was a familiar hand on the cradle. Spanish was an unknown tongue in my ear.
From then on, at the end of a lesson, Mr Eckstein might mention some virtue or peculiarity of the Spanish language, contrasting it as if casually with German. He thought German and English were both impoverished compared with Spanish in the matter of punctuation, specifically the punctuation of exclamations and questions. In English we would think it very odd if someone only bothered to indicate the end of quoted speech, and not the beginning. ¿So why not apply the same principle to questions? ¡And exclamations! ¿Why not prepare the reader for what is coming? ¡It’s silly not to!
Or he might remark that Spanish, unlike German, had two verbs meaning ‘to be’. They weren’t interchangeable. Estar and ser. One referred to the merely accidental and contingent, while the other dealt with permanent, existential characteristics. He said that there was a lot more German philosophy than Spanish, but perhaps that was because the Spanish needed less, so much being embodied in their language. When he made these remarks in passing on the relative merits of languages, he didn’t address them to me. He never even looked at me, but I realised it was my interest he was fishing for.
He knew what he was doing with these sidelong comments. Ever since I had fallen out with Miss Collins, the tutor of my bed rest years, over the sacred symbol æ, disputed 27th letter of the alphabet, strange forms and symbols had been my chosen playground. If I had been less prudish I would have seen at once that the punctuation of the five-word curse he had chalked on the blackboard was as thrilling as its meaning. Eckstein was drawing my attention to two symbols that were right up my street. ¡If they’d been any further up my street they’d be sticking their tongues and so on!
I vowed from then on to import these useful symbols into my own essays and letters, in any subject, for every teacher. ¿Wasn’t it logical, as Eckstein said? ¿Why should English remain at its historical disadvantage, when help was at hand? Any page of my writing crawled with orthographical paraçites. I didn’t much mind that my attempts to Iberiçise English punctuation were invariably crossed out and çingled out for reproach. That’s always how the world treats pioneers.
It took me ages to chasten these flourishes and exorcise the cedillas from my cs. I loved making those expressive little hooks, dainty curls like stray typographic eyelashes. I wanted to study them under laboratory conditions, magnifying them to see if each cedilla had a little cedilla of its own, and so on down into unthinkable realms of subordination … in my mind’s eye, my mind’s microscope, the inside curve of each cedilla had the dull gleam of something whetted and oiled, like the edge of an infinitesimal sickle.
Little cs have lesser cs upon their tails to bite ’em / Lesser cs have lesser cs, and so ad infinitum! Unless it might happen that electron microscopy revealed at supreme magnification some final clinger-on, some depender without dependants, the loneliest and most necessary of his kind, his perfect uselessness underwriting a sense of purpose for all the rest.
Eckstein was scrupulous, within the limits of his abrasiveness, to let me down lightly. He explained that although the word cedilla is Spanish and means ‘little z’, the mark itself does not feature in the modern language, or not in the Castilian master-dialect which was the only one possible to study in schools. I was disappointed but my fondness for the little diacritic held firm. Curaçao was still my favourite drink, of all the ones I had never tasted.
What Eckstein alleged about the absorptive powers of teenaged memory certainly seemed to be true of mine. It seemed to be actively hungry rather than passively registering, and I trained it to do tricks. I threw random scraps to its surplus capacity. I would memorise shopping lists and reel them off to an amazed (or mildly diverted, or not quite bored) audience. Once Dad thought he’d caught me out, until I explained that it was more of a challenge to retain last week’s shopping list rather than this one’s. I made him dig the old list out of the kitchen drawer and check every item, rather than take my word for it.
Duly mashed
I performed just as willingly with numbers. The trick was to forge associative links — to impose a grammar on numbers, building on their resemblances to creatures or objects. So 2 was represented by a swan, 6 by an elephant’s trunk, 1 by a magic wand, and to establish 261 firmly in your memory all you had to do was think of a swan eating an elephant that is waving a wand.
Possibly Mum and Dad thought these hobbies were morbid signs of some sort. They wanted me to make some friends outside school, which in my special case meant ‘outside the school buildings’, to have things to do in the evenings. And so did I, but their idea was that I should go to a meeting of the Young Conservatives, described by Dad as ‘a nice bunch of youngsters’. The Bourne End meeting place of this cult wasn’t far away, by the level crossing, within wheelchair range so that I wouldn’t need to be delivered like a child to a birthday party.
I agreed, to keep them happy. This was a very abstract display of independence (of ‘independence’ prescribed by someone else!). I didn’t want to go where I was going — I was going there because I could. But I did always love going over the level crossing in the Wrigley, bumping outrageously over the uneven sleepers, almost willing myself to come a cropper. If I’d got stuck and been duly mashed I dare say Mum would never have forgiven herself and the Young Conservatives.
It turned out that their lair was well defended. The only access was by way of a metal spiral staircase. I wasn’t having that. I wasn’t going to ask someone to carry me up such a frightening structure for the sake of company I didn’t want. I went to the Red Lion instead, and drank there till closing time. I can’t say I had a whale of a time, but at least I was in a place I had chosen for myself, and someone put ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ on the jukebox. A nice young man in a floral shirt came over to see if I was all right, saying if there was anything I wanted I should just give a shout. I began to wonder if I hadn’t stumbled on a ‘queer pub’ just round the corner from home, hitting the jackpot with my first pull on the handle. What luck! I wouldn’t have to go to the extreme lengths favoured by Boyde Ashlar (I had no idea how to find a Turkish Baths, let alone get myself through its turnstile). This nice young man was positively chatting me up. He twinkled at me. Nothing was too much trouble. Then I realised that this lad had found the easiest possible way of impressing a girlfriend with his essential niceness on a first date, bouncing a twinkle at me for her benefit. If I’d been a kitten stuck up a tree outside the pub I’d have served his turn just as well. After that I had no qualms about letting him refill my glass. Pathos has a price, and it was the least he could do. This stranded kitten doesn’t come cheap.