With the Wrigley, though, I was only a prince of the pavement, minor royalty at best. To crown my independence I would need to learn to drive a car.
We say ‘clicking your fingers’, but the Elizabethans thought of it differently — there’s a bit in Sejanus about statues of Jove clicking their marble thumbs. Ben Jonson — A-level set book. Obviously you need them both, the middle finger (is it?) and the thumb. Perhaps this mystical percussion was the first fruit of the opposable thumb. Perhaps we came down from the trees communicating by clicking our fingers at each other. Click click: your turn to do the hunter-gathering today. Click click: I did it yesterday. Click click: Say that one more time and I’m going back to my mother.
After she had been so helpful at the concert I could hardly avoid becoming friends with Barbara Broier, despite my prejudice against girls. She was a lovely person.
Barbara told me that she had a pet squirrel. ‘What’s his name?’ I asked, ‘Cyril?’ ‘No,’ she said, looking at me as if I was mad, ‘he’s called Fred.’ She had found him injured on the road and had nursed him back to health. I became very matey with her and was finally invited to meet her Polish father.
She lived in Cookham. Barbara was brainy, polite and well spoken, and it followed that her father was gruff and rather alarming. Barbara was not pretty. Those who have put themselves out to be helpful to me have not in general been pretty. When a pretty person has been helpful it has made a deep impression on me, of which I am rather ashamed.
In general terms I feel sorry for pretty people — they’re hemmed in by the possibility of losing face, which holds a disproportionate fear for them since they experience it so rarely. As for which is the consolation prize, good looks or independence of mind, I really couldn’t say.
Before I was allowed to meet Fred I had to have a chat with Barbara’s Dad. He was in a sense the gatekeeper of the squirrel. He had difficulties with the ‘r’ sound, which I’m sure exists in Polish, so it must have been some sort of impediment. His r’s all came out as aspirated g’s. He told me a story about a ghoom in Slough — if you ghented the ghoom for the night, that was the end of you. Your throat was slit with a ghazor while you slept. Your body fell down a trap-door and was turned into a sausage or even a ghissole. It was the Sweeney Todd legend, essentially, with some variation in the meat products and the scene shifted to our neck of the woods, though I didn’t know the original story at the time.
Barbara had said that her dad liked people who stood up to him, and I did my level best. I said that if people didn’t insist on eating meat in the first place such murders couldn’t be covered up so easily. Just try passing off human flesh in a cheese omelette or an egg salad and see how far you get. Barbara’s dad gave a little bark of a laugh at that, and from then on he took a shine to me in quite a big way.
Offer to visitors we don’t much like
I liked Fred the squirrel very much, when I was finally shown him, and wanted to touch. Apparently, though, he was likely to bite or scratch, so that aspect of the visit fizzled out. Before I left, though, Mr Broier offered me a glass of tea wine. I’d never heard of wine being made of anything but grapes and was intrigued. It turned out he made it himself. The process involved spreading yeast on a piece of toast and floating it on top of a mixture of tea, lemon and sugar in a bucket, till it fizzed and slowly fell to pieces. More than anything I wanted to see that.
When I got home, even while Dad was driving me home, I started to preach the gospel of home-made wines. I had Mum running to the library to get books, and recruited Dad to make trips to Boots the Chemists for demijohns and airlocks (they had to be glass, not plastic). I put Campden tablets on the shopping list, along with fruit and raisins. Soon we had flagons bubbling away in airing cupboards, for the initial rapid fermentation. Then we transferred them, in the absence of a cellar, to cooler areas on the east side of the house for slow maturing.
I became too impatient to wait for Mrs Pavey to order more advanced books through the library, and started sending off for them myself. I learned that sugar, being a disaccharide, was alien to the human digestive system, so we should convert it (or semi-convert it) to a monosaccharide. I lectured the household in general and Dad in particular about the unhealthiness of sugar. I wasn’t happy about the long-term effects of the first batch we made without converting the sugar, about six gallons of it. We decided that it should be labelled ‘disaccharide, suspect, o.t.v.w.d.m.l.’ The letters stood for ‘offer to visitors we don’t much like’.
I made experiments. I took sugar in large quantities, added lemon juice and a little water and boiled it at the correct temperature, testing attentively with a jam-maker’s sugar thermometer, until everything turned a pale golden colour. All these verbs of action — ‘made’, ‘took’, ‘added’, ‘boiled’ and so on — represent acts of delegation. I was learning that Dad could be smoothly enrolled into a practical project. He was only uncoöperative when dealing with people directly, without working towards something definite.
I warned him that the cooking process would continue for quite a while after turning off the gas, but he thought he knew best and overcooked the syrup, ending up with a great pan of molasses which he stoically ate on his cereal and drank in his coffee until it was finally all gone and he could look forward to breakfast-time again.
Finally we got it right, decanted the syrup into bottles and used it as our stock. The new semi-inverted sugar refracted light ninety degrees the other way. The first batch of wine made with it seemed miraculous. The syrup dissolved sweetly into the must, fermentation was smooth and very fragrant. The esters floated off the oranges and fruits, and we were all in joy. From that point onwards we really got going, gaining in confidence and also in ambition. We made wine from rose petals, from clover, from nettles, from lettuce, from potatoes, from rhubarb.
We were perfectionists who would never dream of using pectin to clear a cloudy wine (it bonds to the starch and sinks out in the lees). Without pectin it was virtually impossible to clear potato or rice wine, but the trick could be managed with parsnip, if you had the knack. I seemed to have the knack.
My memory of family life is of a constant thwarting, yet when I came up with such a project Mum and Dad would help me to carry it out. Perhaps I really did have some sort of hypnotic ascendancy over them in those years. I wish I’d known — I’d have worked them harder. Half of what I have done in life has come from hypnotising other people. The other half from hypnotising myself.
With Dad in particular I got on better when we had something in hand, something to generate the slow rhythms of companionship. The books had all said ‘If you can bear the wait (the hardest part of wine making!) let it mature for two or three years.’ For us that was easy. Making wine was the point, not drinking it. We had so much wine by now that we had to store the surplus flagons in the conservatory-greenhouse-sun lounge, where it roiled in slow motion with the dull excitement of fermentation.
Barbara Broier tried to keep me in the swim with school gossip and school crazes, all the things which tended to pass me by. People wouldn’t go to the trouble of filling me in. I can’t say I missed it. There’s something about leaning over a Tan-Sad (or any other disability conveyance) which is mildly shaming to both parties.
There were riddles which passed round the school like verbal measles. Barbara wanted to be sure I developed immunity like everyone else. So she would say, ‘This is a good one, John. Antony and Cleopatra were lying on the floor surrounded by broken glass and water. How did they die? Let me know if you’d like a clue.’