Dad just grunted, but soon his eye fell on something more interesting. There were some fascinating items on the list, in among the common grasses and fairground prizes. There were plenty of Drosera species which we didn’t have, and soon we were making a shopping list of our own. Dad decided that we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of some interesting specimens just because the man was potty. Major Howell had converted me instantly, but it took Dad a little longer to come round. He came to mock and stayed to fill in an order form. Soon the Cromers, father and son, were regular customers.
The introductory paragraph of the list explained how the system operated. All seeds in the list were equal, and as far as Major Howell was concerned one item could never be more (or less) equal than any other item — even if one was the size of a cannonball and the other a sprinkling of dusty spores. So you could choose whichever seed you wanted. As far as I remember these were the rules:
Seeds shall be ordered in units. A UNIT shall be six packets of seed plus a GRATIS specimen. A customer who orders two units shall be entitled to a third GRATIS unit, as well as the GRATIS specimens included in the units themselves.
If you have seed which is not in the list, you may exchange it for any item in the list when ordering one or more units. Major Howell does not give cash for seeds.
A packet of seeds (which might contain many seeds, or a few, or just one, depending on size and rarity) cost 5d, so that each unit cost 3/-. It was all splendidly idealistic but also terribly practical. Dad and I ordered two units from the list. I tried to scribble ‘Cocos nucifera’ on the form while he wasn’t looking, but furtiveness is not my forte and he found me out. He wouldn’t wear it. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘I hope you realise that the old boy has to pay postage costs. In his eyes all seeds may be equal, but I doubt if the GPO will see it that way. Coconuts are heavy items. It will be expensive and inconvenient for him. And I know exactly why you’re trying this on. You enjoy creating maximum inconvenience with everything you do. That’s you all over, John! But not this time.’ I don’t think my psychology was really so complicated. I hadn’t wanted Cocos nucifera in the first place until I was told I couldn’t have it. Then it became a project and the thing I wanted above all others. It’s a mental mechanism which has served me well, all in all — it got me walking, didn’t it?
When I looked wounded, Dad suggested that we add an extra packet of Drosera seed to our order. Trying to get around the rules paid the usual dividends.
I can’t say Dad was entirely wrong about me. I was always experimenting, taking things to their limit. Wherever I was I would try to turn my surroundings into a laboratory, whether I was making soapsuds from nowhere in CRX, performing mantras in toilets or creating mouth-vacuums in school-issue Bic Biro pens in Vulcan so that the ink got everywhere. There are only so many ways I can play, and this is one of the best. And to be even fairer than fair, to be fair to myself now that I’ve been fair to Dad, I think that he was a little blind in rejecting Cocos nucifera out of hand. It wasn’t long before we learned that botanic samples of the seed are very different from the cultivars in the supermarkets.
Over that tantalising ledge
The seeds arrived. They nearly all germinated. The Drosera did particularly well, and soon we had the beginnings of an impressive collection. We were encouraged to order a packet of Drosophyllum Lusitanicum, the Portuguese Sundew, the uncoöperative Holy Grail of our carnivorous plant-rearing. Good seed added to Dad’s refined gardening technique produced astounding results, and Major Howell’s name began to smell like a rose.
If there was a slow submarine detonation in progress underneath the whole established culture, then the ripples had lapped against my wheelchair and I too was restless. In terms of doing things for myself my best bet, perhaps my only chance, was independent motion, even if that meant also losing Broyan. I would have to learn to drive. The Wrigley was all very well for getting me to the railway station and the concert venue, and for menacing pop stars, but I needed a bigger engine if I was to reach escape velocity.
This is a standard teenage urge, but in my case it couldn’t be fulfilled in a series of gradual stages. My fellows faced a smooth ramp of choices — driving lessons, borrowing the family car, finally getting their own. I, though, would have needed stilts to reach the pedals of the family car. I would have to do the whole thing in a single mighty flying leap, and I would need my own vehicle from the word go.
Or the word stop. Mum, being a non-driver herself, was likely to be discouraging. Dad was unpredictable, but certainly couldn’t afford to buy me a car. I would have to organise an embassy to Granny.
The whole family seemed to be a complex mechanism for frustrating desires — like the machines at fairgrounds which Peter had always liked so much, aligning the mechanical grab directly over a desired trinket, so that it couldn’t miss, and then pressing a button, and watching as it did. Or glass cases full of pennies stacked so thickly on ledges that a payout was inevitable. Trustingly Peter would send penny after penny down the chute to trigger the avalanche that never came. And now, despite my poor coördination, it was my turn to work the family machine, to send the grab down towards the elusive prize of a car, or push the necessary funds over that tantalising ledge. If there was no jackpot there could be no driving licence, and my life would never broaden out from the straits I was in.
I thought of making my eighteenth birthday the occasion for an extraordinary appeal to Granny — except that she didn’t really recognise the pressure of the calendar. It was actually better to steer clear of landmarks such as birthdays and Christmas, and to give her a stronger sense of her own arbitrary grace. The scratching of the pen in her chequebook made a red-letter day all by itself.
Birthdays had always seemed a bit hollow to me also, if only because mine was always overshadowed by Christmas. Then the last days of 1967 showed me a further deterioration of the festival. Mum was determined to mark the occasion, not with a present but with an attempt to pass on a legacy: her own ancient injuries.
On my big day Mum sat me down and told me something she’d been told in a similarly formal manner. By ‘sat me down’ I mean formally commandeered the wheelchair and manœuvred me into the sitting room. It’s to her credit that she let the birthday unfold a little way before she took centre stage and made her announcement. She could have pinned me down in the bed at first light and passed on the trauma tidings — trauma for her, no more than casual interest for me. I chose the womb, and the womb has its own attachments, which aren’t mine.
Before she said anything she offered me a drink. That was standard practice for birthdays — it was family custom, enlightened or corrupt as you choose to look at it, to allow us, when we had passed a minimum age, a drink and a smoke on birthdays. One drink and one cigarette. And not just your own birthday, but any birthday in the family, so Peter too would be given his own ration, invited to splice the mainbrace. This, though, was different.
Live coal burning her tongue
Mum took ages to get going. How hard is it to say ‘Happy Birthday, John’? Not hard. There was miles of ‘I don’t know quite how to say this’ and ‘I’ve never found it an easy thing to talk about’ before she started to come out with anything significant at all.
‘Your grandfather Ivo, my father’ — and already there was a sort of gulp invading those phrases — ‘went out to East Africa in the 1920s to make his fortune coffee farming. That was where the money was to be made.’ This much I knew. Families have histories. People seem to enjoy being ruled by them. Grandpa’s people weren’t rich, he had married above himself in that way, and this was his chance to equalise things. ‘Then while he was away, your grandmother my mother’ — these tags of kinship received a much harsher intonation — ‘had a … love affair with one of the local squires. A great love affair.’ I think Mum had left space for a mocking laugh for this point in her speech, but it didn’t quite come off. The bitterness in her voice was too stark to be laughed away.