as possible . In the meantime I marvelled at the thought of all those little wires running through my body carrying every sort of command. Most of my wires, barring the odd sparky fluke, were connected properly and working well. I didn’t need to think of myself as completely ill. It was only part of me that was ill. I was partly well.
One day I would have a house of my own, a cheerful house much more colourful and full of life than the one I was stuck in now. I would have a house built entirely to suit my needs. I talked about it with Mum. She warned me that planning a house was a lot of work, and I was grateful for her ideas, but I made a secret alteration to her suggestions. When it really happened I wasn’t going to hire an electrician . I knew someone who would do it so much better. All the wiring was going to be done by Dr Duckett.
Dad was away a lot. It wasn’t a priority for the forces to give young fathers time at home. They weren’t feather-bedded. Sometimes he would send postcards, usually of æroplanes, but one he sent me was of a restaurant somewhere abroad. On the back he’d written:
Ate here last night. Funny sort of place. None of the plates matched, none of the cups belonged with their saucers. Saw a beautiful green praying mantis trying to escape by the window, tho’. Right up your street. Love Dad.
He knew I liked everything that crept and crawled.
‘Love’ wasn’t part of Dad’s normal vocabulary, but he seemed to be able to write it down, though he did have to be abroad for the trick to work. As if the very word was in a foreign language, the custom of another country. A body of water had to intervene between us before the risk could be taken, the words ‘love’ and ‘Dad’ brought into startling proximity.
Dad wasn’t away all the time, and my nose was sensitised, even through several closed doors, to the strongly medicated smell of his beloved Wright’s Coal Tar Soap. In the flesh he could sometimes show a muted tenderness. I remember him sitting in my room once, resplendent in his uniform, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Mum asked me, ‘What do you want? Is there anything you want?’ I couldn’t say anything. Five times she asked me, and I wouldn’t speak. I just shook my head. Finally she knelt by the bed and leaned over so that her ear was near my mouth. I could smell her hair. Even so, a whisper was too loud for what I wanted and I wanted to put my hand over my mouth when I made the whisper. ‘I’d like to sit on Daddy’s lap.’ And very gently she picked me up and carried me over to my daddy and lowered me onto his lap. Gingerly he put his arms around me. I stayed there for a minute or two. I could feel a faint bunching in the muscles of his thighs, first one and then the other, as if he was suppressing an impulse to rock me. To dandle his first-born. It was absolute Heaven, to rock on the big warm muscles I didn’t yet know were called quadriceps.
The waiting-room pounce
He was away the first Christmas I was ill, and Mum had a guest, a young Canadian airman. Jim Shaeffer. He had hairy wrists, and he brought presents of an extreme generosity.
I don’t know how to account for Jim Shaeffer’s presence at that Christmas. I assume he was a contact of Dad’s, and there may have been charity involved in the invitation. But was it Mum who was showing charity, by taking a stranger in for the festival, or Jim Shaeffer, persuaded to offer the stricken mother a shoulder to cry on? If it was Jim, he made a good job of it.
I resisted him to some extent, partly because he called Mum ‘Ma’am’ not ‘Mrs Cromer’. It was too close to my own name for her – it seemed to place us in competition. I was sensitised to male presence anyway, in Dad’s absences. If anyone was going to be tall, if anyone was going to make a glass vibrate with the low register of his voice, it was supposed to be Dad.
Mum brought a couple of upright chairs into my room, and she and
One day I would have a house of my own, a cheerful house much more colourful and full of life than the one I was stuck in now. I would have a house built entirely to suit my needs. I talked about it with Mum. She warned me that planning a house was a lot of work, and I was grateful for her ideas, but I made a secret alteration to her suggestions. When it really happened I wasn’t going to hire an electrician . I knew someone who would do it so much better. All the wiring was going to be done by Dr Duckett.
Dad was away a lot. It wasn’t a priority for the forces to give young fathers time at home. They weren’t feather-bedded. Sometimes he would send postcards, usually of æroplanes, but one he sent me was of a restaurant somewhere abroad. On the back he’d written:
Ate here last night. Funny sort of place. None of the plates matched, none of the cups belonged with their saucers. Saw a beautiful green praying mantis trying to escape by the window, tho’. Right up your street. Love Dad.
He knew I liked everything that crept and crawled.
‘Love’ wasn’t part of Dad’s normal vocabulary, but he seemed to be able to write it down, though he did have to be abroad for the trick to work. As if the very word was in a foreign language, the custom of another country. A body of water had to intervene between us before the risk could be taken, the words ‘love’ and ‘Dad’ brought into startling proximity.
Dad wasn’t away all the time, and my nose was sensitised, even through several closed doors, to the strongly medicated smell of his beloved Wright’s Coal Tar Soap. In the flesh he could sometimes show a muted tenderness. I remember him sitting in my room once, resplendent in his uniform, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Mum asked me, ‘What do you want? Is there anything you want?’ I couldn’t say anything. Five times she asked me, and I wouldn’t speak. I just shook my head. Finally she knelt by the bed and leaned over so that her ear was near my mouth. I could smell her hair. Even so, a whisper was too loud for what I wanted and I wanted to put my hand over my mouth when I made the whisper. ‘I’d like to sit on Daddy’s lap.’ And very gently she picked me up and carried me over to my daddy and lowered me onto his lap. Gingerly he put his arms around me. I stayed there for a minute or two. I could feel a faint bunching in the muscles of his thighs, first one and then the other, as if he was suppressing an impulse to rock me. To dandle his first-born. It was absolute Heaven, to rock on the big warm muscles I didn’t yet know were called quadriceps.
The waiting-room pounce
He was away the first Christmas I was ill, and Mum had a guest, a young Canadian airman. Jim Shaeffer. He had hairy wrists, and he brought presents of an extreme generosity.
I don’t know how to account for Jim Shaeffer’s presence at that Christmas. I assume he was a contact of Dad’s, and there may have been charity involved in the invitation. But was it Mum who was showing charity, by taking a stranger in for the festival, or Jim Shaeffer, persuaded to offer the stricken mother a shoulder to cry on? If it was Jim, he made a good job of it.
I resisted him to some extent, partly because he called Mum ‘Ma’am’ not ‘Mrs Cromer’. It was too close to my own name for her – it seemed to place us in competition. I was sensitised to male presence anyway, in Dad’s absences. If anyone was going to be tall, if anyone was going to make a glass vibrate with the low register of his voice, it was supposed to be Dad.
Mum brought a couple of upright chairs into my room, and she and
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