The Fowler Family Business

by Jonathan Meades

  ‘Uncle Curly, Uncle Curly,’ Lennie cried. She wanted to be lifted through the air too.

  Mr Fowler looked on fondly, proudly. ‘You’d have made such a funeral director Curly – you got a way with people. You’re a people person.’

  ‘What’s a people person?’ asked Lennie.

  ‘I’m more a car person,’ said Curly.

  ‘People drive cars,’ Mr Fowler pointed out.

  ‘I got two cars,’ said Ben, holding up three electric model hearses.

  ‘You’ve got three,’ said Curly. ‘And what have I got?’

  ‘You got a real Sitran.’

  ‘Citro-ën,’ corrected Curly, fussily. His CX GTI Turbo was parked outside. His DS21 was in his garage at home, less than a mile away.

  ‘Two Citroëns, he’s got. And they’re both black. They use them as hearses in France,’ claimed Mr Fowler.

  ‘Ambulances,’ said Curly.

  ‘Close enough,’ grinned Mr Fowler.

  ‘Nee-nor, nee-nor, nee-nor, nee-nor,’ repeated Ben the Ambulance.

  Naomi poked her head through the serving hatch and told him to be quiet, to come and wash his hands before lunch.

  The Sunday Express in the corner armchair was lowered and Henry asked, ‘We ready then, I’m extra peckish.’

  ‘Is Daddy going to eat all the crackling?’ asked Ben.

  ‘’Slamb. No crackling on lamb. Come on!’ insisted Naomi.

  ‘Why no crackling on lamb?’

  ‘Cause there isn’t,’ Henry told him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘Because … because. Because God gave lambs wool instead of crackling.’

  ‘Can’t eat wool – urgh.’

  Mrs Fowler sieved flour into the roasting pan and scraped it with a wooden spoon. The noise made Curly shiver. He clenched his teeth and fists. Naomi drained the carrots: ‘Butter them would you Curl.’

  His knife bounced off the frozen half pound. He emitted an exasperated petulant tush. He flapped the fumous kitchen air with the knife. He inspected it. ‘Hasn’t seen a steel in years,’ he told Naomi, reproachfully.

  ‘Ooh dear,’ she said with parodic emphasis.

  Curly looked hurt. ‘It is, paradoxically, blunt knives which are dangerous. It’s like keeping your body in trim. If you’re fit you’re not so likely to get injured. Tools need to be kept in trim too.’

  ‘Well sharpen it then,’ she said brusquely, sensitive to her failure to recover her figure after the birth of the children within a year of each other.

  For four and a half years since Lennie was born she had dieted, subscribed to fads and partworks, adhered to the principle that if one calorie-free rusk is good for you then two calorie-free rusks must be better. But it hadn’t made any difference to her tennis, and her golf had definitely improved – her handicap was down to seventeen, which was partly ascribable to the improved coaching of the new club pro Denny Groebe and partly, as her tactless partner Jill Tann too often joked, to her having ‘more meat to put into the drive’.

  ‘These,’ said Curly, holding up an electric knife sharpener he’d found at the back of a drawer, ‘do more harm than good – they hack at the blade, they leave it sort of serrated.’

  ‘Curly!’

  In the afternoon the children and their grandparents got into Curly’s bouncy CX, and Henry and Naomi followed in the Jaguar. They were off to Crystal Palace Park which despite the fire at the end of November 1936 which had consumed the great glass pavilion Mr Fowler regarded as the heart of ‘his’ London, a site Henry accepted with filial faith. He was keeping Curly’s car in view and taking bets with himself on how long it would be before his father gave his eyewitness account of that fire when Naomi, hitherto unusually mute, asked: ‘D’you think Curly’s all right?’

  He was tempted to answer ‘Of course he’s all right, he’s my best mate’ but Naomi’s tone militated against a pat response.

  He asked: ‘What do you mean all right?’

  ‘Well, you know, he’s always over every Sunday …’

  ‘The wine he brings is usually worth more than the entire meal.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. He’s really generous, we all know that. It’s … it’s just, you know, the way he never brings anyone with him. He’s thirty – and I mean, look at his birthday, pathetic.’

  ‘You said you enjoyed it.’

  ‘Yeah, course I did, lovely food and all that, delicious – but you know, ask him what he’s got planned for his birthday and it’s I’d like to take you both to Chez Nico.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well – why don’t we meet his other friends? If he’s got any. I mean does he have a girlfriend or anything?’

  ‘There was Moira.’

  ‘Three years ago that was Henry, at least.’

  ‘And thingy, ahmm, the French one, Natasha.’

  ‘Natalie. Henry – that was when he was living there.’

  ‘I don’t know – it’s not the kind of thing I like to talk about with him.’

  ‘Do you think he’s queer and that’s why we never meet his friends?’

  ‘Curly?’ Henry’s incredulity was such that he turned towards Naomi and narrowly avoided a cyclist who yelled an imprecation, waved a sinewy arm.

  ‘God, look what you made me do.’

  ‘I merely suggested that perhaps he is not as other men – apart that is from other men who go for other men.’

  ‘What are you saying – he’s a danger to the children?’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody melodramatic. And do look where you’re going.’

  ‘It’s these humps in the road.’

  ‘Well you know who put those there.’

  ‘If you’d paid a blind bit of attention you’d know that Curly is totally 100-per-cent against traffic calming. His whole thing is to make it go faster …’

  ‘So more kids get run over.’

  ‘So congestion is – what’s the word, alleviated. And if you want to know how I know he’s not a homo it’s because of your precious chum Freddie Glade.’

  (Freddie Glade, b. 21.1.42. Aquarian – but on the cusp, luv. Garden designer, ‘exterior decorator’, artist in flowers, the creative florist’s creative florist. Naomi’s occasional tennis partner. Colourful dresser. The front hedge outside the Crittall-windowed house he had inherited from his parents by Sydenham Wells Park was topiarised into the shape of a poodle.)

  ‘What about Freddie?’ Naomi’s tone was cold, urgent, suspicious.

  ‘D’you know what Curly calls him? The cottage gardener.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well he wouldn’t call him that if he was one too – would he?’

  Naomi cocked her head quizzically: ‘Uh?’

  Some seconds passed before Naomi, a woman and thus antipathetic towards slang which she regarded as a male-generated pollutant of pure language, remembered what a cottage was.

  ‘Oh that’s horrible, that’s so unfair – just bloody smug. Offensive.’

  ‘Only the truth isn’t it?’

  ‘It dirties everything doesn’t it, that sort of talk. Like mucky schoolboys. Anyway just ‘cause Curly calls him that doesn’t prove anything. Haven’t you heard of pots and kettles?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Henry sighed, ‘takes one to know one.’

  ‘Quite!’

  ‘As a matter of fact Curly only calls him that because there was a time when every time Curly went to the club Freddie would make a pass at him, want to get in the shower with him, all that. Real pain he was.’

  ‘Hmmhh. He could be exaggerating. I’m sure Freddie’s not that bad.’

  ‘How would you know? Or are you going to tell me he’s a rampant hetero now? Freddie the lady-killer. The Don Juan of Sydenham Hill. They called him the Dulwich Casanova. Women! Can you resist this man? Thrill to his lithp. Quake as he flaps his writht. See him minth.’

  ‘You’re being really cheap.’

  ‘You are being
really ridiculous … I mean, Curly was only saying the other day that he wants to have kids of his own.’

  Naomi laughed pityingly. ‘And queers don’t?’

  They were still bickering when Henry turned into the Thicket Road car park. Lennie was high above Curly on his shoulders.

  ‘Grandpa says you been dilly-dallying.’ Ben looked at his grandfather to make sure he had got the word right.

  They walked up the worn, grassless slope past the noxious blasts from the cafeteria’s humming extractor, past the crates of soft-drinks empties and the brimming refuse bins. ‘A hearty meniscus on mine if you please,’ said Mr Fowler, as always, when his eyes came level with the surface of the boating lake. It was a wonder that the water didn’t spill over, it was that high, lapping at the edge where refugees from domesticity sat on their X-folders surrounded by six packs, vacuum flasks, seething bait in jars, telescopic keepnets, alarm clocks, rods on rests. A flotilla of tethered brown boats bobbed on the wind-chopped water. Tiro arms jerked oars from their rowlocks, causing them to dig deep in the dark water, fishermen looked up from their intense absorption in newspaper reports of the disgusting sex acts performed on footballers by unwitting dancers in hotel rooms and screamed at the boat hirers not to disturb the fish.

  ‘You never want to swim in there,’ Mr Fowler told Ben, ‘on account of the Weil’s Disease, from rats. I’ve seen a few taken with that.’

  ‘Can’t swim,’ said Ben, ‘yet.’

  ‘Course you can’t. I was forgetting. You get to forgetting when you get old.’

  ‘And you get to remembering,’ said Naөmi putting an arm round him and kissing his cheek.

  ‘Oh yes – what memories.’

  ‘He’s off,’ said Henry to his mother. He’d bet himself that Mr Fowler would start before they reached the Irish elks.

  ‘You’re so, oh I don’t know,’ said Curly with Lennie’s hands over his eyes, ‘exacting.’

  ‘Kettle pot black,’ Henry was quick off the mark. Curly grinned. Henry heard the echo.

  Henry took his mother’s arm.

  Mr Fowler began: ‘It was a fellow called Frizzel and you know I’d never have remembered his name otherwise but we put him to rest and then because Grandma was out that evening I went and had a drink with – oh, blimeycrikes whatever were he called …’

  ‘Ridley – from Strathleven Avenue,’ said Mrs Fowler who’d reminded him so many times before.

  ‘Ridley. Thassit. Ridley. Goshowcaniforget?’

  ‘There’re the Irish elks.’ Henry pointed to the multiplicity of tines and bezels proud of the araucaria, high above the boating lake.

  ‘Rishells!’ proclaimed Lennie, her chin on Curly’s crown.

  ‘Rissoles,’ repeated Curly, then: ‘Irish elks – they lived on the Isle of Man.’

  ‘I didn’t go there,’ said Lennie.

  ‘And you don’t want to go. They beat people with sticks called birches.’

  ‘When they’re naughty,’ confirmed Lennie.

  ‘No. No – just because they don’t like them.’

  Naomi smiled a little smile to herself and tried to catch Henry’s eye.

  ‘So then this Ridley chap …’

  ‘He died in the war,’ said Mrs Fowler, ‘the Japs got him. His sister married one of those Pook boys.’

  ‘That’s right Mother. We went to the new road-house they called it, on the corner of Beulah Hill and Spa Hill – opposite the lodges there. They’d hardly finished building it. Brand new. Very snazzy. Well we hadn’t been in there more than about ten minutes when we hear all these fire engines … They had ’em coming from Streatham and Norbury and Croydon. Then some chap come in the bar and say the Crystal Palace is in flames. That was one way of putting it. I never seen anything like it. The whole sky. Like Vesuvius erupting – all orange and yellow, colours you’d never have thought of, pink and blue and green. Armageddon it was and, ooh, what’s the other one, what’s the other one?’

  ‘Apocalypse,’ said Mrs Fowler.

  ‘That’s the one. Oh yes. If I hadn’t known it was the Crystal Palace I’d have said it was the Day of Judgement come.’

  They passed the children’s zoo with its sad menagerie of guinea fowl, Aleppo cockerels, fancy ewes, lop-eared rabbits, hamsters. Ben began to run. Mr Fowler and Naomi hurried to keep pace with him.

  ‘Careful of the bridge, Ben!’ shouted Naomi.

  Ben stopped on the middle of the bridge.

  ‘Monsters,’ he yelled triumphantly.

  Monsters. At the core of the heart of Mr Fowler’s London and Henry’s London and, now, evidently, Ben’s London were the monsters. Triceratops, megalosaurus, megatherium, ichthyosaurus, pterodactyls, palaeotherium – three generations of the Fowler family were bound together by their excitement at the full-scale painted metal models of these antediluvian beasts whó stood on hillocks and swam in ponds. It was an hallucination of prehistory, a secret known only by deepest South Londoners. Ben willed them to be real. He wanted the jaws to snap, the teeth to rend, the leathery reptile skin to ripple in predatory anticipation.

  ‘It’s here where we watched it from,’ continued Mr Fowler. ‘All the roads up the hill was blocked. Ghouls! If there hadn’t been so many of them they might have saved it but the fire engines couldn’t get through. So we got in old Ridley’s car, it was a Singer he had, and went all the way round, down Sylvan Hill and Hamlet Road and that … Like the Titanic it was, like the Titanic. Right down here – how far away was we? – half a mile at least, we could hear the metal groaning, terrible sound it made.’

  ‘It was like the monsters coming to life wasn’t it Grandpa?’

  ‘That’s just what it was like.’

  ‘And tell us about the fire lighting up the monsters’ teeth Grandpa.’

  ‘They shone in the light they did. All the colours of the rainbow. And they looked like they was ready to pounce. And the flames they played on the monsters’ skin so they looked like they was moving.’

  Ben squirmed with fairy-tale delight. Mr Fowler jumped, rather daintily, towards him, hands clawing playfully. The little boy ran from his grandfather who hobbled after him: ‘The monsters need feeding, the monsters are hungry, fee fi fo fum.’ Ben hid behind his mother.

  ‘Where is he? Where’s that tasty little morsel?’ Ben squeaked and shuddered as Mr Fowler picked him up and pretended to bite like an ogre, growling, grimacing, crossing his eyes.

  ‘Grandpa’s king of the monsters,’ Ben told Henry. ‘We all used to be like the monsters didn’t we.’

  ‘You must ask Uncle Curly about that,’ replied Mr Fowler. ‘He’s a varsity man. So far as I’m concerned I’m not descended from any reptile – but I expect Curly’ll tell us different.’

  ‘Whahat?’ laughed Curly.

  ‘How many letters is it you got after your name?’ asked Mrs Fowler.

  ‘I’m a civil engineer, I don’t know anything about evolution.’

  ‘Weren’t we like the monsters then?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ shrugged Curly, ‘but so long ago that no one can remember.’

  ‘Want to get down,’ Lennie demanded.

  ‘There.’ Curly stooped. ‘The thing is, Ben, you’re like your dad, and your dad’s like his dad, your grandpa, and your grandpa is like his dad, your great-grandpa. You’re your dad’s descendant – that’s what it’s called.’

  ‘But Daddy’s tall and Grandpa’s short.’

  Mr Fowler stood beside Henry: the six-inch disparity in their height was obvious.

  ‘Yes,’ said Curly, ‘but that’s because of Grandma.’

  ‘She’s short too – aren’t you Grandma.’

  ‘Oh you’re too clever for me Benjy,’ Mrs Fowler admonished him. Clever was not a word of approbation in her lexicon. He was right. She was short.

  ‘I’m not Benjy.’ He stomped along the path beside the pond, clasped the low railing and gazed in defiant wonder at the gleaming khaki paint on the crazed surface of the iguanodon’s tail.
r />   Naomi shook her head. ‘He’s got a real thing about being Ben. It’s a macho thing – he thinks Benjy is wet. And Benny.’

  ‘I remember Henry’s six-guns,’ smiled Mrs Flowler. ‘Every day he came home from school he’d put on his holster.’

  When they walked on round the pond Curly, straggling back, observed how Henry towered above his parents and gently laughed to himself when the phrase genetic caprice came to him.

  Chapter Six

  Henry Fowler prided himself on his sense of continuity, on his appreciation of the generations’ cycles. He anticipated the first day of Ben’s apprenticeship with prospective longing and with nostalgia for the lad he had been and for the trade itself in those days when every lichened headstone was sun-dappled and stroked by summer breezes. No sooner, he often reflected to Curly, have we ceased to be someone’s child than we become someone’s parent. We take our parents’ places and play their old roles. We repeat their mistakes – it’s in our genes to do so. We learn about their imperfections – not that it lessens our love for them. Some of the stories that Henry’s heard about his father as a young man. Blimey O’Reilly! And Mr Fowler didn’t deny them, didn’t shout down his friends and colleagues who told them in his presence. Indeed he was rather chuffed to be represented as a bit of a daredevil, as a bit of a joker, letting down tyres, peeing in beer glasses, putting on funny voices over the phone (Jews and Arabs a speciality). He made Henry think of himself as a sober sides in comparison. Nonetheless Henry modelled his paternal mores on his father’s.

  Henry’s adult topographies did not diverge from those he had known as a child. His first marital home had been little more than a mile from his parents’. And when they moved, at Naomi’s insistence, the summer after Lennie was born they were still only ten minutes’ drive away. That took a bit of getting used to though.

  It was the view that was the problem for Henry. The megalopolis was spread beneath him. From the house on Ringmore Rise he could look right across the London Basin. It was – and everyone agreed – awesome, magnificent. People’d kill for a view like this, he thought.

  That’s the Sally Army college on Champion Park – you know, by KCH. Oh and isn’t the Barbican tiny. Look at the Nat West Tower – are they ever going to finish the top? Hampstead. Highgate. Holloway. It’s like being in an aeroplane. Those vapour trails! That sunset! Sunsets like that are almost edible – they’re cassata. The terracotta tower of Imperial College signalled Curly’s whereabouts on Thursday afternoons, which was when he lectured. You could sit here all day and just watch the weather. Far far away, far beyond the lucent scum of particulates and emissions which flop across the city, rises Harrow Weald, the woody horizon at the extremity of this scene. Harrow Weald, where they had had their wedding reception. In memory of that day Henry Fowler calls it the Golan Heights.