I learned to use words like ‘shit’ and ‘bum’ instead of tuppenny and BTM. There’s something to be said for the direct approach, after all. And of course tuppenny is only rhyming slang, isn’t it? ‘Tuppenny bit’ equals ‘shit’. I wonder if Mum and Dad even realised the vulgar roots of their genteel expression. Although it does add up in a way, the idea of spending-a-penny doubled.
Even after ‘lavatory’ had gone down the pan, Wendy found other ammunition. She never ran short. If for instance you have developed the charming notion, as a child beginning to speak, that the holes in your nose are called ‘snorts’ rather than nostrils, and if your parents have indulged your delightfulness by adopting the word themselves on the rare occasions when nostrils must be talked of, and if you then experience a drastic shift of company, forgetting that home words must stay in the home, then you will very quickly learn your mistake. Wendy snorted with derisive laughter, till the snot almost ran out of her nose-holes.
Régime of terror
With the meagre materials to hand Wendy ran quite a little régime of terror. She was sly in extracting secrets she might use to her advantage. She was convinced that I had a middle name, despite my denials, and that it would be a goldmine of mockable ore when I was finally made to reveal it. She tricked me by claiming to have an embarrassing middle name herself — mine could hardly be worse than Buttercup, could it?
I felt almost sorry for her, in my folly, and I gave up my secret. I tried to give it some historical context by referring knowingly to the bouncing bomb, but I needn’t have bothered. ‘Wallis’ became ‘Wally’, and that was what she called me from then on. Wally Snorts. Wally did not then mean ‘idiot’ as it does now, but still I flinched every time. I tried calling her ‘Buttercup’, though my heart wasn’t in it, and she simply said, ‘Did I say Buttercup? My mistake. My middle name is Jane. It’s a rotten sort of name, isn’t it?’
Somehow she heard about my meeting with the matron of the whole hospital, the empress in purple. She told me I was a poshie and a sissy and that I was ‘sucking up to Matron’, when I would never have thought of such a thing. It was an impossibility. It would have been like sucking up to God. After that she sometimes called me Little Lord Fauntleroy and sometimes Archie Andrews after a ventriloquist’s dummy very popular on radio at the time.
That tells you all you need to know about the 1950s, really, that millions of listeners would tune in to a programme in which a man they couldn’t see pretended to make his voice emerge from a dummy that was likewise invisible. Julie Andrews played the dummy’s girlfriend, Beryl Reid his catty friend Monica. In the heyday of Educating Archie there was a whole little industry making souvenir mugs, ties, soap, confectionery and scarves. When clothes were still rationed,
Archie had been given an allowance of 50 coupons a year to acknowledge the contribution he made to national morale. Archie and his manipulator, Peter Brough, even performed privately for the late King and the princesses. After the show they asked him to take Archie’s head off so that they could see how it worked. Later the King remarked that there had only been one beheading in his whole reign, and his daughters had insisted on watching the whole thing.
When the show made the logical transition to a visual medium, to television, it wasn’t nearly so successful. People preferred the imaginary illusion to the real one. And they say the British have no taste for mysticism!
The Archie Andrews nick-name was particularly galling because I thought of myself as one of nature’s ventriloquists rather than one of her dummies. I had pined for the teach-yourself-voice-throwing book advertised in the Ellisdons catalogue, but finally been stern with myself. It didn’t fit my requirement that everything I sent off actually did something, preferably something spectacular, when it arrived.
Normal blue ink
When Mum wrote to me, she had a particular way of writing the address. She would use normal blue ink to write ‘Ward 1’ on the envelope, and then instead of ‘Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital’, she would write ‘Canadian + Memorial Hospital’. But she’d change to red ink for the ‘+’. A red cross instead of ‘Red Cross’. That was her special way of writing the hospital’s name. She made it into a sort of game between us.
There was no guarantee that so wayward a variation of the address would be accepted by Her Majesty’s postal service. It could easily have been returned. The Post Office were sticklers to a man, in those days before postcodes, after which stickling became more idiosyncratic, but they colluded with her little flight of fancy.
I learned to say ‘C.R.C.M.H.’, even to think it that way, always with capitals and the right pronunciation. C full stop R full stop C full stop M full stop H full stop. Then one day I was wheeled to an office in the hospital, where a clerk needed to fill in a form on my behalf. He asked me about my previous addresses, and then where I lived now.
Proud of knowing the right answer, I said ‘C.R.C.M.H.,’ complete with all stops. I looked up at the man, waiting for my pat on the back. Well done John! You’ve shown you’re not hopelessly volatile but are able to listen gravely. Instead he said, ‘That’s rather a mouthful, don’t you think, John? I’ll let you in on a little secret. Up here we just write “CRX”. Much easier, isn’t it?’ ‘Affirmative,’ I said, using Dad’s forces form of words, which Mum found so exasperating (‘Why can’t you just say “Yes”?’).
To tell the truth I was rather crestfallen to be corrected after so much brain-washing, but the clerk made it up to me by saying, ‘Keep quiet about it, though — don’t go telling the other kids on the ward.’
It wasn’t altogether clear whether CRX, as I allowed myself to call it in my mind, was in Buckinghamshire or Berkshire. I badgered people to be definite. I didn’t enjoy living with uncertainty in those days, and it didn’t seem too much to hope that there was a definite answer in this case. But there wasn’t. Letters could be sent to me either on ‘Ward 1, Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Taplow, Bucks’ or ‘Ward 1, Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Taplow nr Maidenhead, Berks’. Post could be sorted in either place. In effect I spent several years of my life in a place with an indeterminate location. My first feeling was that I had a right to a definite answer, one way or the other, but then I came to enjoy the fact that things weren’t so simple.
I liked the idea that I could go on holiday without moving. When I started writing a letter, I could ask myself, ‘Where do I want to be today?’ before I wrote the return address. The ‘Bucks’ form usually seemed clearer and more direct than the ‘Berks’ one, but my mood could change. Depending on which form of the address I used (always assuming my correspondent respected it), the letter of reply would pass through one sorting office or another. Action at a distance, always an attractive idea. The letter would pass under the eyes and hands of a different set of Post Office employees. One lot might process it more quickly than the other, but even if they didn’t I would know the letter had come a different way. There was an extra edge of pleasure in the wait for the postman. Even at my most megalomaniac I had to concede that it was the same postman making the delivery, whichever route I had decreed for the letter to use.