Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘It wasn’t an adolescent who did it,’ I said. ‘It was actually the manager himself, trying to turn his own clock back. One night years ago he drove up in his BMW at two a.m. and sprayed the word. Then, finding he just felt tired and silly instead of young, he let himself into the back of the Co-op and hanged himself in the staff lavatory. Fica is his epitaph, and we shall never know whether it was a mere expletive or an invocation. Now I’d better go and do my shopping. I gather they have a special offer on the Elixir of Life this week. I trust you’ve bought a bottle?’

  ‘Certainly I have,’ said Jayjay. ‘Only for some obscure marketing reason they’ve disguised it to look like Gordon’s gin.’ He nodded to a bottle visible in a basket on the back seat of his car. ‘Anyway, James, I do hope you make up your mind soon. It really might just cheat my own clock if I were to re-live little bits of the past.’

  ‘If ever I did agree, I ought to warn you that I would stop if you began to bore me.’

  ‘So I would expect. Just as I would sack you if I saw you weren’t up to it.’

  *

  All this certainly added a gram or two to the balance in favour of working with him; but what with one thing and another, including the work I already had in hand, I came to no conclusion. Thus did the weeks go by, leaving me in apparent indecision. But it turned out to be only apparent.

  3

  Raymond Jerningham Jebb was born at 58 Beechill Road, Eltham on July 3rd 1918. Since most of his next eighteen years were spent in or around the London postal district of SE9 he qualifies as a genuine child of the suburbs. What is more, far from presenting the remainder of his life as a flight from the restricting horrors of petit-bourgeois gentility, he often spoke of the place, as well as of the inter-war period, with a degree of nostalgia. A biographer labels this Exhibit A.

  He was, he said, the only child of Harold Jerningham Jebb and Olive Sargent, about whose ancestry he was not very forthcoming. I don’t think he was particularly interested. Piecing it together, it appeared Harold’s own father was originally from Shropshire (there are some Jerningham graves in Ludlow) and had been brought when still a child to Herne Hill where his family had bought a poultry farm beside the Effra. Jayjay spoke of geese, a lucrative trade especially in the Christmas season. Harold was born there on the precise day in May 1885 that John Ruskin, a few hundred yards further up the hill, finished the dedicatory preface to Praeterita. Despite the spread of the railways that Ruskin so deplored this area of Kent was still remarkably countrified, for all that it would soon qualify as south London. Jayjay’s father remembered being driven in his own father’s donkey-cart through the lanes of Dulwich, Peckham and Lewisham and often beyond Bromley as far afield as Widmore, in those days a remote Kentish village. These were delivery rounds, and the boy Harold would scramble out at each of the high-street poulterers, lugging geese that weighed almost as much as he did, their beaks and feet tied with a loop of bass and their wings pinioned. Harold had also recalled the new streets even then being laid out across fields of buttercups. The heaps of London bricks waited on each plot, the blond skeletons of roofs stretched their bright pine trusses in perspectives a hundred yards long waiting for the tilers with pads of sacking on their knees to cover them up. This was the work of men like Cameron Corbett, who built estates over large parts of Eltham and Hither Green and became the first Lord Rowallan on the strength of it.

  Somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century the goose farm beside the Effra was bought and it, too, quickly disappeared beneath brick and asphalt just as the river itself was destined to vanish. Harold’s father did well out of the sale of his land and thereafter the family moved briefly to Tulse Hill before fetching up near Well Hall station at the foot of Eltham’s modest hill. Well Hall itself was an eighteenth-century house built on the remains of a Tudor manor and here at the age of fifteen Harold became an all-purpose knives, boots and jobbing boy. If Jayjay were to be believed he also became the clandestine lover of Well Hall’s tenant, Edith Nesbit. E. Nesbit had moved to the Hall in 1899 and stayed until 1922, a good deal longer than Harold’s association with her household. He had certainly left her employ, and supposedly also her bed, well before 1906 when she published the book that made her famous, The Railway Children. By then Jayjay’s father had become apprenticed as a ship’s broker and settled into the career that was to sustain him and his family for the rest of his working life. Why that line of business, particularly? Maybe he was responding to a force of nature that in one way or another still influenced the life of every Londoner of the time. The buttercups, orchards and paddocks of Herne Hill and the rest of suburbia might be fast disappearing, but the River Thames was at the full flood of its vitality. From Eltham’s eminence there were views northwards (fog permitting) towards Woolwich and Greenwich. The Royal Dockyard was not three miles away. Just across the river lay Silvertown and the great commercial hub of the docklands. The port and its shipping were London’s heart as well as the Empire’s.

  When his son was born in 1918 Harold was already thirty-three and had been married seven months. The Great War put normal life into abeyance where it had not stopped it altogether. Harold was lucky. His knowledge of ships, their cargoes and insurance had earned him a desk in a crowded Admiralty office instead of a posting to France. It was while he was there that he met Olive, who was working in the Censorship. AWSCD* was the department whose job was similar to that of the civilian censorship: checking the letters of RN personnel for inadvertent breaches of security as well as for signs of a more intentional espionage.

  – I will tell you about my mother (said Jayjay early on) in the hopes that I shan’t have to refer to her again. When they met it seems she was by no means a beauty though apparently very jolly. By the time I can remember her she was anything but jolly, having lost a favourite brother in the last week of the war and then falling victim to a terminal attack of religion. This was a particularly crippling strain where any sense of irony was concerned: Methodist or Wesleyan or Congregationalist, I forget which. Really, I’ve blotted it out completely and it would take a hypnotist to recover the memory. Somewhere I must know the answer perfectly well. The house was full of tracts and she was always going to church meetings. You never met such dreary people as her friends. They had in common a worthy dowdiness, or possibly a dowdy worthiness. Not unkind to me as a child, certainly, but the sort who would practically faint with horror if ever someone offered them a glass of sherry.

  – At the time when my father and Olive met in the Admiralty, though, she was still allegedly good fun and quite bouncy. She was also fearsomely bright. I later heard this from a couple of people who had known her in the Censorship and they said my mother had the best brain of anyone they had ever met, male or female. That must mean something. In those days women weren’t as a rule given the credit for having the intelligence to come in out of the rain, not unless a gallant gentleman with an umbrella assisted them. So what happened to her in those ten years or so after the war? I really don’t know. I’m afraid she went considerably batty. Marriage to my father, I suppose. Plus her health was not up to much. But she went on being bright in a strictly formal sense even as Jesus rotted away the rest of her intellect. I remember she carried all our household accounts in her head. I never once saw her use pencil and paper to add up bills. She also whizzed through the crossword in my father’s Daily Telegraph. Anyway, let’s not dwell on my mother. She really had nothing to do with my life other than in a limited biological sense. –

  At these words (Exhibit B) the biographer sits back and taps his teeth with the end of his pen, sensing that it will be useless to challenge head-on a statement that cannot possibly be true. The tone of voice in which it is delivered, one of throwaway finality, suggests clearly that any further probing will be met with truculence. To catch this monkey one will need to go very softly indeed, behind Jayjay’s back if necessary. Since when was it assumed that anyone wanting their life written will necessarily tell the whole truth? Or even
any of it?

  – One can hardly have grown up this century without having absorbed some of that Freudian over-determination – he said on another occasion. – You know, when things people don’t want to talk about take on heavy significance. But why mightn’t it be that the most important things in a person’s life sometimes really are the ones that seem the most significant? Now in my father’s case there was a side of him that I think did have a lasting effect on me, whereas I could never say that about my mother. Except, of course, that I’m a devout atheist and stupid with figures. I’ll get to my father’s influence shortly.

  – There’s no doubt that, seen through our neighbours’ eyes, my father would have appeared completely conventional, quite unexceptional. The Pooter par excellence, the nine-to-five man incarnate. Every morning, rain or shine, off to work in the City. Dark suit, bowler hat, overcoat, brolly and briefcase. A short walk to Well Hall: left into Balcaskie Road, down to Glenlea, left again and you’re practically at the station. Up to Charing Cross on the eight-seventeen. Strap-hang the District or Circle line to Monument, another short walk up Leadenhall Street. He worked in the new Lloyds building. New then, I mean; I think they built it on the site of the old East India House in the late twenties. Once there he must have been just one of a vast army of underwriters sitting at desks all day, probably in their shirtsleeves and wearing cuff protectors. Over the years he became quite senior, but essentially he remained an underwriter. Then in the evening the reverse journey back to Eltham. A picture of regularity. Much later, of course, that sort of working life became the butt of endless jokes about wage-slavery and unimaginative, drab existence. Still, I would bet that nowadays an awful lot of men would cheerfully put up with it if given the chance. People like routine, you know. They need it. At the end of a long life I am convinced that security is number three on the human list of basic essentials, right up there after food and shelter. That’s where politicians go so wrong talking about people needing to adjust to not having a job for life, to working with six-month or one-year contracts, to moving house all the time. It goes against human instinct. We need our continuities, we ache for places. So I think many people would rejoice if told that, all else being equal, they would still be doing the same work in ten, even twenty years, gradually moving up the ladder of seniority, bringing home a little more money and taking slightly longer holidays.

  – So if I describe my father as an archetypal nine-to-five man I’m certainly not mocking him. The twenties and thirties were hardly a stable period, what with post-war prostration and the mass unemployment of those who came back. Then the Wall Street crash, the Slump, the hunger marches. To be in a skilled and essential line of business like my father’s was a godsend for a man with family responsibilities. As long as there was trade there were merchant vessels; and as long as there were valuable cargoes shuttling about the world on the high seas my father would be in employment. Not true of goose farmers, after all. –

  Maybe it was partly this aspect of his father, that of the hard-working small burgher with aspirations, to which Jayjay was referring as having had consequences for himself. Harold Jebb’s own schooling, such as it was, had stopped when he was fourteen, a year before he allegedly entered night school at Well Hall under the tutelage of that ardent socialist, E. Nesbit. Harold’s eventual redemption through his apprenticeship at Lloyds evidently left him determined his son should have a better chance. Accordingly the shipping broker stretched his modest though reliable income in order to send his only son to Eltham College.

  Eltham College was, and still is, an independent school with a reputation for solid academic standards. It was founded in the 1840s for the sons of missionaries who were usually sent home for their secondary schooling from India and Africa and China. Typically, such children boarded or were farmed out to relatives or church families in the locality, living out of steamer trunks in spare bedrooms, exiled from their parents by thousands of miles of ocean. English literature of the period is full of the cries of children who grew up articulate enough to describe the desolation these banishments could entail. Kipling and Saki were both examples of the type. This was no direct part of Jayjay’s own experience, of course. By his own account his suburbia was benign and supportive. Yet from time to time a certain melancholy would tiptoe in behind his descriptions of childhood Eltham and just stand there, like a summoned employee respectfully waiting for his boss to get off the telephone before he can speak. Later, having myself become familiar with the area in the course of my researches, I can say that anybody might visit one of those semi-detached houses in streets named after Scottish glens, all of them built to much the same pattern as Jayjay’s birthplace in Beechill Road, and sense how it might have been for a child uprooted from his family overseas. Each landing halfway up the stairs has a sash window and, unless it has been modernised, each window has ornamental borders of stained glass. The exact patterns and colours may vary in detail from house to house, from street to street, depending on the whims and supplies of the original builders. It is possible to stand on the landing halfway up the staircase and, at the head-height of a child, look through a panel of coloured glass and completely transform the world outside. By slightly moving one’s head the back garden plunges through acrid green to desert ochre, from ultramarine to hellish red. It is the Saki trick, turning a suburban garden into an exotic world, somewhere else, anywhere else: a cool, undersea land of mysterious longing or a vengeful inferno as the doomed planet falls into the sun. To visit these houses is still now and then to be fleetingly possessed by the clamorous ghosts of children who once stood, chin on forearm at the narrow sill, staring out for hours, temporarily transforming their world by means of tinted glass, mesmerised by unformed thoughts which, as soon as they turned away, slipped from their minds even as the mist of their breath vanished from the pane.

  When Jayjay first went to Eltham College in 1930 he just failed to overlap with a boy seven years his senior who was to become a writer and an artist: Mervyn Peake. The future inventor of Gormenghast was born in China and sent back to Eltham to school and a suburban adolescence. It seems plausible that this experience crystallised into Gormenghast itself: less an extravagant gothick castle than a metaphor for a world fossilised by the conventional, the elderly and the stiflingly dull. Perhaps it is too easy to see how Peake’s internal image of Gormenghast might have been built up stone by stone in Eltham on medieval foundations laid in China, the Castle’s bleak flagged corridors and loveless characters proliferating in his exile’s mind. Yet the wrench of being sent half across the world was real enough; and one begins to glimpse how the stolid, conventional community in south London Jayjay so often described must actually have been stranded through with nervelike threads leading straight to the roughest corners of the world and nurturing powerful, even violent fantasies. Kent’s lost Arcady might lie shallowly beneath tarmac and crazy paving, which was how Jayjay presented it, but a potential for subversiveness had always undermined this early commuterland. Great angers, despairs and yearnings were confided to awful wallpapers in small bedrooms dotted about an outwardly placid and respectable community. The same everywhere, no doubt. One must always suspect the placid.

  Eltham College’s records show that Mervyn Peake left in 1929, the year before Jayjay entered. As to Jayjay’s own career there, the school’s annals do little but note that he left at the end of the summer term of 1936. He himself was not at first forthcoming about his schooldays, although he did cite going on the Eltham College Travel Club’s trip to Andorra in 1934 which he remembered as being led by a Mr McIver. I very easily found McIver’s name in the Staff lists and for some reason this corroborative detail gave me a confidence in Jayjay’s account that the mere dates of his entry and departure somehow had not. Why? What was there to distrust? He even looked out a little booklet done in faded violet ink on a duplicating machine that commemorated the trip. It was almost as though he wished to reassure me of the authenticity of his past self, which it did until I
began wondering why he should ever have kept such a trivial relic.

  In fact he often turned out to be surprisingly good at producing obscure pieces of documentation. I remember a lengthy session one morning during which he reminisced fairly uninterestingly about some Vietnam peace talks of the nineteen-sixties and various conversations he had had with President Thieu of South Vietnam, General Ky, Henry Kissinger and the US Ambassador of the time. Towards the end Jayjay remarked that Ky had been little more than an airborne cowboy and fancied himself as a jock in a fighter plane’s cockpit when he flew with the Tiger Squadron out of Bien Hoa. A proper warrior like Biggles, on the other hand, would doubtless have settled the Vietnam war in a week, given only his three trusty henchmen and some stout British biplanes. – You remember Biggles? W. E. Johns’s heroic air ace? Have I mentioned that I met him? Johns, I mean. –