Anyway, it didn’t work. Either romance fizzled out early or the powder was damp from the beginning. Granny had listed the subjects in which Roy took particular interest, and Mum had passed them on to Muzzie. Caroline had lightly read up on them, being careful not to show undue independence of mind, but even so Roy was not to be taken out of himself. As Caroline reported to her mother, who passed the news on to Mum, ‘It was all jolly hard work, and Roy was strange. He was always polite and courteous to me, but his attention always seemed to be on … another man.’ Mum left the insinuating three dots intact when she passed this information on to me. I think it must have been a marginally censored version which reached Granny. I can’t see Mum retaining that punctuational innuendo.
I was slow to connect Granny’s reappearance with the fact that Dad had resigned from the Air Force. Wing Commander Cromer came back down to earth, with something of a bump. It was no small thing, as he discovered, to be looking for a job at forty-plus. He held onto his rank, of course, but it was a rather different thing to be a Wing-Co at an altitude of zero feet. There was no reason given for this drastic change of life. I doubt if I even asked. The reasons grown-ups gave for things never made sense to me anyway. Mum didn’t say in so many words that she put pressure on him. All she said was that a family needed a father. He couldn’t expect to go on a foreign posting and then walk in whenever he felt like it for a hero’s welcome.
Granny’s antennæ registered the shift in the family’s finances, and the new relationships it made possible. Mum and Dad would find it much harder to say ‘no’ to any offers she might care to make. They might even be made to beg. I swear she could smell an overdraft the way ogres in fairy tales smell an Englishman’s blood.
Mum and Dad were faced with the problem of what school to send Peter to now. One possibility was Sidcot School in Winscombe, North Somerset. We all went along along in the car for Peter’s interview. From the first breath I found the atmosphere of this school wonderfully comforting — it was an old Quaker foundation, though at the time I wouldn’t have understood anything by that. I was very happy for Peter if it meant he could have a new start in such welcoming surroundings, though I felt all the more isolated in my own schooling.
The headmaster of Sidcot, Mr Brayshaw, was both absent-minded and very much on the ball, a combination rather common among school-teachers. I thought he was beautiful. He gave Peter a sincere welcome. Peter was shy and I suppose traumatised, so he hung back. Mum was nervous and horribly humble, while Dad was almost truculent. You could almost hear him thinking, ‘Don’t think your authority impresses me, I’ve got some of my own if it comes to that. I’ll hear you out but that’s all. Just don’t expect me to kow-tow.’ In Dad’s book kow-towing was worse than being a sneak and a copy-cat and a bad sport all put together.
When Mr Brayshaw set eyes on me, he included me in the conversation quite naturally. He was wonderfully warm. He was like the dream uncle I’d always wanted, and more. In this lifetime I’ve suffered from a severe shortage of uncles. Roy was a dud uncle, really.
As he gave us the tour Mr Brayshaw kept saying madly positive things like, ‘Now there’s not really much of a step here,’ and, ‘This next classroom may be difficult, but I am sure we can find a way if we just put our minds to it … You know, we really only go in there in the winter. Most of the time the class just comes outside and sits under that tree over there, so that would be fine for John … I’m sure something can be arranged before winter comes …’
With much rambling and pottering he mapped out his vision of Sidcot School with John in it. The greatest problem as he saw it was the inaccessibility of the dancing class, but it was clear that if I had my heart set on learning to dance it would be made to happen somehow.
Mum was in a panic and going ‘ahem’ like mad, making the humble artificial double cough that meant she needed to be asked to speak, but Mr Brayshaw hadn’t risen to the rank of headmaster without knowing how to ignore a parent. He conducted the whole interview as if I was the only candidate to be considered, as if that had been the morning’s only task and theme.
When we wound up back in the headmaster’s study, Mr Brayshaw asked if we had any questions, just as if Mum hadn’t been trying to butt in for the last half-hour.
‘But Mr Brayshaw,’ she cried. ‘It’s John’s brother Peter who is applying to come to Sidcot, not John himself!’
‘Yes, I’m well aware of that, Mrs Cromer,’ he replied, ‘but I thought it would be rather nice for Peter if he could have his older brother with him, don’t you? It’s perfectly practical. He’s not on any dangerous medication, I take it? So it’s not a matter of medical supervision, just washing and dressing. Not a great deal of effort, I should have thought. Doesn’t seem much of an obstacle, as obstacles go.’
The twinkle in his eye made me jump up and down from my seated position, exploiting the residual flexibility of my spine. I waved my arms about and shouted out of turn, ‘Oh Mum, wouldn’t it be wonderful? Mr Brayshaw wants me to be with Peter! Please, please, oh please say yes!!’ Please let me escape from Judy Brisby and from the Board of Education. Please let me sit under a tree surrounded by love and understanding, where the harvest called learning will be brought on by steady sunshine. This was more like it. This was the old tune of No Such Word As Can’t played thickly on Sparky’s Magic Piano, not picked out with one finger. I was being offered something I would never have dared to ask for myself.
To Mr Brayshaw Dad said, ‘Well, we’ll have to think about that.’ But the moment we were in the car, he told me, ‘It’s not on. It’s a lovely dream, chicken, but it’s not on.’
‘But you said you’d think about it!’
‘I’ve thought about it. It’s just not on, and that’s that!’ How I hated those words. I was no longer a child, I wouldn’t thrash and scream and say, ‘You lied, I’ll never trust you again.’ I sat and thought about what could be learned from this unprecedented afternoon.
I looked at Mum and Dad in the car, bickering routinely over the map. For the first time in any of our lives we had encountered something genuinely unusual — disability being treated as unimportant, neither here nor there. And what was Mum and Dad’s reaction? Social embarrassment. Revelation had been greeted with fidgeting and changing of the subject. I vowed that the next time a path opened up in front of me, I would put the Everest & Jennings into the higher of its two gears and head straight for the gap. Then woe betide any toe which got in my way.
For a moment I had been grazed by happiness. Even so, I was happy that Peter had escaped his Colditz Castle and would be treated tenderly in a new school. I myself had learned something about ‘reality’. When the building-blocks of the world, those things we consider facts, seem to be most firmly chamfered and grouted one against another, then — exactly then — is when the wall will shiver and turn to liquid. I just had to be aware that when every obstacle had disappeared from view, Mum and Dad would invent new ones. With the path cleared in front of them and brilliantly lit, they would stay exactly where they were, pretending it hadn’t happened and there was nothing they could do about it, except to put the car in reverse and drive glumly home.
That I had been accepted as a pupil of a normal school to which I hadn’t even applied was a miracle. It was a full miracle, despite the fact that it hadn’t happened. Mum and Dad wouldn’t let it happen, and miracles don’t insist. That isn’t the etiquette.