Mum and Dad had left the door of Trees open for me as usual. The system was that the door of the bedroom I shared with Peter (when he was in residence), which gave access to the outside world, stayed open except when we all left the house. It stayed open even in cold weather, though on days of actual snow it might be closed when a few satisfying flurries had been admitted. The gain in convenience — the easy flow of unescorted wheelchairs in and out — easily outweighed any inconvenience of temperature. If I couldn’t circulate freely myself then I could at least give the air that privilege. It was better than a consolation prize, a pleasurable sensation in its own right.
When I came in that night I was exhilarated out of all proportion to the actual pleasures of my night out. I had mounted an expedition solo, across the tracks and back, over an unknown threshold, and I had come back safe. Peter came in just after me, from his pub job at the Spade Oak Hotel. I sang at the top of my voice while he helped prepare me for bed. I sang ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, inevitably, with particular repetition of the bit about calling out for another drink and the waiter bringing a tray.
Next morning Mum came in beaming to ask about my big evening out. My late-night song recital seemed to indicate a social breakthrough. She wanted all the details of my evening of Tory glory. It was only when I told her I hadn’t gone to the Young Conservatives after all that the atmosphere became suffused with toxins. Mum went quite white. It was one thing for me to engage in alcoholic carousal with Young Conservatives, quite another to do anything of the sort at the Red Lion. That was beyond the pale, and my singing of a cryptic Procol Harum ballad suddenly changed from a natural burst of exuberance to a sinister display of drunkenness, though I missed the same number of notes either way. The song might just as well have been ‘The Red Flag’ for all the legitimate entertainment it provided. Mum’s face, at first just ghastly, turned a darker shade of puce, and then she stalked off.
She didn’t speak to me for four days. She thought I’d been drinking, and as she didn’t ask me outright I didn’t volunteer any information. I’d stuck to soft drinks, naturally, being under age. Arguments about my behaviour raged through the house without my needing to participate, which was often the way. Once I heard the phrase ‘ — showed a little initiative —’ in Dad’s voice between two door-slammings. That must have been him standing up for me, welcome proof that he could come through with the goods in my defence when he was really up against it.
Dad was a much happier organism altogether, working in the personnel department of BOAC, than he had been as a sub-standard salesman for Centrum Intercoms, his first job after leaving the services. BOAC gave him back some of the sense of himself he had enjoyed in the RAF. He was a bit of a hermit crab, I suppose, when it came to the world of work. He needed the right sort of job — one with a proper chain of command — to give him a shape and a home. Otherwise he felt defenceless, skulking between shells.
During the school holidays I wanted to make a trip to London, to see where he worked. Joy Payne, best of neighbours, a joy to all and a bringer of pain only to herself, volunteered to drive me. So I phoned him up to ask for directions. Normally Dad enjoyed giving this sort of help. I had once seen him with my own eyes writing page after page of directions, with his fountain pen, for the benefit of some passing stranger. How much keener would he be when he was guiding his own son! I was sure a visit from me would increase his standing in the office.
I spoke to his secretary, who was lovely. We had a good long chat, but when Dad finally came on the line he was very short with me. I had used up all my charm on the secretary, and had no reserves left for someone who sounded much more like a stranger than she did. If I had been a salesman I could have got Dad’s secretary to sign up for anything, but from the man himself I got the bum’s rush.
Dad was cheerful again by the time he got home. ‘I’ve told my secretary not to put you through again under any circumstances. She’ll get fired if she lets it happen again. She should have known better, and now she does. So don’t bother trying to repeat today’s little trick.’
I was stung. How was it a trick to phone your father? I tried to argue my way out of this unexpected disgrace. ‘What if there’s an emergency?’
‘Such as?’
I didn’t have an answer ready. ‘Well … what if Mum dropped dead?’
‘Then what on earth would be the point of phoning me about something like that? Show some sense — phone the undertaker instead. I’ll find out soon enough when I get home.’
This wasn’t a very tactful conversation to be having with Mum in the room, perhaps. Her smile was a rather blighted thing. It wasn’t Dad who introduced the subject of death — I have to put my hand up to that. He certainly capitalised on it.
Sentient luggage
I wonder if Dad did actually have the power to fire his secretary for her insubordination in putting through an unauthorised call from a civilian. There was probably a more complex procedure to be gone through, the equivalent of a court-martial — a court-bureaucratic.
At weekends, obviously, Broyan wasn’t at my disposal. If I wanted an outing I had to make my own arrangements. That was where the rail system came in. I was never quite so gone on rail travel as Mum, but I can’t deny that it served me well. There was a system, or rather there wasn’t a system — which turned out to work much better than any formal set of arrangements could have done. I would simply turn up at Bourne End station and be loaded, Wrigley and all, into the goods van. I was treated as sentient luggage. It was glorious.
I would be asked where I was going, of course, but only so that I could be retrieved and off-loaded at the proper time. No mention was ever made of tickets or fares. This can’t have been an official dispensation, I don’t think — otherwise, surely, the goods van would have been piled high with wheelchairs and their occupants. And there would have been paperwork. It was just a blind eye being turned, a perk extended, without comment, to me personally. Unless a background murmur of marvellous-how-the-little-fellow-seems-to-manage counts as comment.
The sheer novelty of a wheelchair-bound person having an appetite for unaccompanied travel worked in my favour, I’m sure. Still, British Rail and its employees have access to this mystical truth, if no other: the body is always and everywhere luggage.
On one trip, a very neatly-turned-out guard came to have a chat. He was chummy as well as smartly dressed but I felt deeply uncomfortable about my ambiguous status and blurted out, ‘Shouldn’t you be making me buy a ticket?’