It was at this point, surfeited with Kissingers and Johnsons and Ho Chi Minhs, that I accused Jayjay of name-dropping. He promptly excused himself, left the room, and after only a brief delay returned with a faded autograph book which he tossed into my lap. Typical of its period, which was the thirties, it was a four-by-three-inch booklet with Autographs stamped at a slant in gold script on the cover. Alternating pale pink, blue and green pages were covered with signatures, short messages with exclamation marks and hasty sketches.
– We all had one of those at school. I don’t know why. It seemed important. Find the picture of a biplane. –
I leafed through until I came to a neat pencil sketch of a First World War aircraft falling out of the sun on an unsuspecting Hun, guns blazing. It was signed, but not dated, ‘W. E. Johns, with best wishes’. I take it all back, I said.
– I never claimed I knew him. He was my boyhood hero. He visited the school one day. I suppose he was talking about his experiences in France, inspirational stuff for boys with the idea of drumming up recruits for the RAF. It would have been about 1933 or 1934: it’s a pity he didn’t date it. Like plenty of others who’d fought in the war Johns was watching Hitler’s rise to power and Germany’s re-arming with dismay. He used to bombard the Air Ministry with warning letters. Like Baden-Powell, the gist of his message was ‘Be prepared’. –
There was something touching in seeing Johns’s little drawing and signature in Jayjay’s book. I myself would have killed for it when I was twelve, Biggles having been a hero of my own back in my pre-teens in the early fifties. By then, of course, Hitler’s Luftwaffe had long since made the fatal error of coming up against this legendary British pilot and had been obliged to retire in disarray, its hands raised en masse. I had been a Biggles fan at the age of twelve, but hardly at fifteen and still less past the age of fifty. Biographers are vulgarians at heart, of course, always sniffing around casual asides and reminiscences for the significant, for the childhood enthusiasm that can be press-ganged into foreshadowing the adult character trait and thus explain things. (This over-valuing of explanation, of dreary old cause and effect, is immensely tedious but made necessary by the narrative convention into which most readers, as well as subjects, expect a biography to fit.) So I, too, had gone away to sniff at Johns’s life, provoked by Jayjay’s hoarded autograph book and enthusiasm in order to discover something about this portly old pilot that might justify the nostalgia of a septuagenarian. At the time, I failed.
– I really admired Johns. At school that day I definitely wanted to become him. He was large and assured and a great raconteur. He made us boys think there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do provided we had the nerve. –
At the time the ex-pilot signed Jayjay’s autograph book he was the editor of a flying magazine, a scholarly columnist in gardening magazines and a regular contributor to the Boy’s Own Paper, as well as a churner-out of innumerable stories and novels, adult as well as juvenile. He lived in a whirl of energy on the move from one journal’s office to another, dashing off passionate editorials, lightning stories and flaming letters to Whitehall about the Nazi menace and the unprepared state of Britain’s Air Force. The authorities found him dangerously radical because Popular Flying had a large and lively circulation and his editorials were widely read. All this threw some moderately interesting light on an author about whose life I myself had hardly speculated while reading him. Still, I couldn’t quite see why Jayjay had been so taken. Then he added a titbit which I filed away in case it had a bearing on this old man on the sofa opposite who was leafing through his school autograph book with an unreadable half-smile.
– Did you know Johns had a secret love? Soon after he returned from the First World War his marriage collapsed and he began a lifelong affair with a lady named Doris. Because his wife was a vicar’s daughter he hadn’t quite liked to talk about an official separation and by the time he was a famous children’s writer in the thirties and forties his publishers absolutely refused to allow him to divorce and marry Doris. They said that the creator of Biggles, that paragon of British virtue, couldn’t possibly acknowledge in public that he was divorced. So Johns was obliged to go on living in sin. When he died in 1968 he and Doris had been cohabiting, technically unmarried, for over forty years.
– How could anyone fail to be taken by the idea of this peculiar man? Here is Biggles, a hero whose daredevil flying and brilliant tactics made him an ace in the skies over France. Yet his creator’s own flying must have brought aid and comfort to the Kaiser, while the morality of the times obliged him to live a lie. That’s the good thing about writing, isn’t it? On paper you can always go back and do things properly. Is that what I’m doing, do you think? –
*
I am not at all sure yet what to think but am beginning to brace myself to hear the career of a man of action rather than of one who has indulged in a lifetime of Proustian reflectiveness in heavily curtained rooms. Who would mention a boyhood hero in such detail unless he thought the matter relevant? Have I made a silly mistake in taking on this literary chore? And at what point will I realise that I’m merely compounding the mistake?
*
In those early days of listening to Jayjay’s diffuse reminiscences I was, like any other biographer feeling his way, still unsure about what was strictly germane and what digression. In general I use a tape-recorder sparingly. I am not fond of the machine. It encourages an interviewer not to listen but to drift off in daydreams of his own, knowing it can all be replayed later. So it can, at the cost of a further tranche of time, but the tensions and nuances are generally lost for ever. Still, a tape-machine is an essential backup for the political stuff I occasionally write. I am not about to leave myself unprotected from the casual displeasure of ex-dictators and assorted monsters who cannot believe their words in print were those they actually spoke. But Jayjay’s memoirs are a different matter. He is not going to have me mugged or arrested in some steamy Asian capital. With him I can simply respect the laws of libel as well as those that govern truthfulness. When interviewing real people like him I prefer to rely on speedwritten notes, which have the advantage of retaining the spontaneity of one’s immediate judgements as to what is relevant and what merely padding. Perhaps because sheer chance arranged that I was working on ex-dictators and Jayjay simultaneously, I used both a tape-recorder and speedwritten notes haphazardly with him for many months. This was to make for curious and sometimes unsettling variations in his narrative voice but I’m not displeased with the effect since it does preserve the flavour of the man’s own ambiguity, as though in his confessions he were for ever skirting around a secret.
Indeed, the impression I had from the start was that despite his having been keen enough to ‘tell his story’ he was by no means certain what that story was until he began to speak. Far from dictating a version that was already clear in his head he would start our morning sessions as unsure as I where his reminiscences might lead. I quickly passed beyond any suspicion that he was making things up as he went along. From first to last I thought Jayjay truthful, whatever that means. But there was always the sense of a person who contained assorted versions of himself, and entirely different flavours of that person could be obtained depending on what one chose to put in or leave out. On successive Tuscan mornings I would drive to Il Ghibli along the appalling track from my house on the hillside, down through patches of early sunlight slanting between the tangled branches of scrub oaks, curiously excited and half apprehensive as though in the course of the next few hours I might learn something dangerous about myself.
Eventually I did, of course. But that was not for over a year, by which time another spring’s Red Admirals were rising before the nose of my truck with their characteristic floating flight. These scraps of life, vivid scarlet-on-inky-velvet as they balanced on the air, mixed themselves in with what I heard and became associated with the whole experience of that period. Now when I think of Jayjay the butterflies cross over his name and face.
4
He takes me out on the terrace and says this is all a dream, this being a cold, overcast Tuscan morning in early March. Offstage are the insistent, repetitive sounds of a tractor ploughing narrow fields of olives, at each short turn borne on the wind as clankings and revvings. In the valley grey smoke careers upwards from several brisk bonfires of olive prunings. Another agricultural year getting under way. Immemorial as you could wish, he remarks, as seen in two thousand years’ of art from tomb paintings onwards, though minus the tractors, of course. Really happening really now, but a dream for all that.
What is not a dream, then?
– Nothing. Oh, Eltham, maybe. Unlike the present, seventy-five years ago doesn’t feel like a dream. It’s with me awake, asleep, just as with anyone my age. M. R. James’s ghost story ‘A View from a Hill’ had a pair of binoculars filled with liquid distilled from a corpse and through this refractive ichor one could see the past. I think our eyeballs still contain the very fluid through which we saw the world seventy years ago. Aqueous humour? Vitreous? It is not to be found by dissection. No matter where I look I see only a thin illusion of the present. Only when we reach an age do we realise how long it is since we experienced the uncontaminated present. Somebody once tried to sell me a Zennish subspecies of Buddhism and the only thing I remember now is his insistence on the importance of living in the absolute present, whatever that might be. According to this fellow, who I only let through the door because I was intrigued by the colour of his great woolly socks, the unenlightened are constantly held back by the past, which is irrelevant and illusory. But how else does one learn anything except through memory? How else grow into the person one is? I’m afraid I remain as doggedly unenlightened as that day I gave the chap sixpence for the bus fare to return to his presumably nonexistent home. After all, it’s not that I so love the past I can’t bring myself to leave it. It simply gave me all the bearings by which I know I’m me. What I like is not Eltham but the depth Eltham now gives an otherwise superficial life. Things acquire their own patina. The most the present can do is stick to me briefly like clingfilm until the static wears off. It’s irritating and I can see through it. –
I suppose he is calling the shots so I will indulge him his fanciful images and wait patiently, even though it is cold out here on the terrace. Luckily he is caffèdipendente, like me, and hates to be separated for too long from his espresso machine.
– If you went back there now you would find whole streets of houses remarkably unchanged. What has changed is their use. Even quite small semi-detached houses have been subdivided and sold off piecemeal or let to students, immigrants, transients. Or else a pair of houses has been knocked together and turned into a des. res. for the upwardly mobile, the front gardens paved over for parking space. In the twenties and thirties the air was more one of stability and permanence. Another difference is that it used to be quieter and more spacious. The streets were twice as wide, not simply because I was small then but because almost no-one owned a car. Nowadays in London cars are parked on both sides of residential roads which effectively narrows them by ten or twelve feet. The mere fact of their presence shows the householders’ mobility, their unrootedness. In those days we could play in the street, always provided our parents didn’t forbid it as being what they called dirty or common. We boys used to go whizzing around in soapboxes on wheels: completely home-made, of course, like everything else. The best ones were steerable and used the wheels off old prams. Most of them lacked rubber tyres. I can still hear the sound the rims made going over the cracks between paving stones. You could be out there all morning and hardly see a motor vehicle. There were a lot of horse-drawn carts about still. Delivery services. Milkmen. Sweeps. Rag-and-bone men. Ah, rag-and-bone men. I must have M. R. James’s liquid in my ears, too, because that’s another sound I can hear. The streets being so empty and quiet they had much more echo to them. Sometimes at night here in Tuscany I can hear the rag-and-bone man who came through our streets in Eltham. He must have died at least half a century ago but I can hear him as clearly as if he were drawn up outside. ‘Ra’n boon‚’ he went. ‘Ra’n boon.’ You could hear him streets away, that echoing boon the most melancholy cry imaginable, him and his horse clip-clopping slowly away, fainter and fainter into silence. I think he lived with the Gypsies over Blackfen way. Even my nose has been M. R. Jamesed because I can smell his horse, that comforting scent of hot oats and ammonia. We would run out to scratch its face and look in the nosebag and marvel at how well polished the man kept all the tack, especially the blinkers. Glossy black rectangles. Well of course that’s why they said we mustn’t play in the street because it was dirty. It wasn’t oil they meant but horse shit. Heaps of steaming nuggets until the sweeper came along with his handcart and broom, or else we would collect it ourselves for the garden.
– Oh the garden. That was it, you see. Still Kent as much as London SE9. Only thirty years earlier it had been copses and fields and orchards. Just up the road Eltham Park was still pretty much unreconstructed countryside with a few municipal tokens. A drinking fountain. A shelter. Some railings. Things like that. The park-keeper’s house. That park-keeper was fearsome to us. He’d probably only been demobbed and out of uniform ten years and might well have flown with W. E. Johns in the Royal Flying Corps, but he seemed ancient. He went about in leather gaiters like a nineteenth-century gamekeeper and often patrolled on horseback. We boys lived in mortal dread of him. We’d go up to Shepherdleas Wood for conkers. At the right season you could find mushrooms there: horse mushrooms and parasols, mainly. If you wanted blewits the place to go was Shooters Hill. But whatever we went to the park for, we used never to come back without sticks for kindling. There was a grate in every room. The cleaning-out and laying, the black-leading, the hauling and emptying. Imagine the labour of it. Plus the front doorstep to be scrubbed daily and whitened. And the letterbox, knocker and bell-push polished with Bluebell or Brasso. There was real pride in suburban home ownership. Who nowadays would polish the flap of their letterbox? By the end of the thirties the legend on our flap saying ‘Letters’ had been rubbed away until it was barely legible, like the inscription on a medieval brass.
– Coal fires with gas pokers to light them. Cooking was by gas, of course. If you wanted hot water in the bathroom you lit the geyser, which came on when you opened the hot tap. As the gas ignited it made a great wumph! and rattled the windows. Off the kitchen was the scullery, a step down from lino to red quarry tiles. My mother did the laundry there. She had a mangle through which she wound the sheets. They came out hard and curved in a solid mass: ‘mangled’, I suppose. Outside lavatory, freezing cold, with a cast-iron cistern.
– Now I think about it, coal was everything. Before each front doorstep was the round iron cover of the coal hole. The coalman called regularly, a big dray with two Suffolk Punches pulling it because the load was heavy and came uphill from the depot at Well Hall. When I was about ten or twelve the firm bought an Albion lorry instead with a sunburst on its radiator. Coal’s another thing I can still smell. Hundredweight sacks, often with rope handles. They gave off this wonderful tarry reek, as did the lorry and the coalmen. You could smell them from the end of the street. The men were black with dust. They wore leather jerkins and filthy caps with the stuffing coming out. Their eyes and teeth were very white in the middle of all the dirt and their arms were sinewy from all the hauling, although I now realise the men were often thin and quite probably undernourished. I remember big blue veins amid the filth on the insides of their arms. They would flip the lid off the coal hole and come up the path bent under these great weights. Then in one movement they would stoop and jerk the sack over their heads so it fell mouth downwards over the hole. That’s partly why they wore caps, although all working men wore caps in those days. You could hear the coal crashing down the chute into the cellar. Twenty trips to the ton. Then they would sweep up around the hole, drop the lid back into p
lace and hand over a grimy delivery note. Tradesmen always carried a pencil behind one ear. You wouldn’t open the cellar door for an hour or two until the dust had settled. What with coal deliveries and ash pans and the sweep, soot and coal dust were everywhere. Hence all the cleaning and polishing.
– Since coal was everything in those days London smelt quite different. So did the entire urban landscape of Britain, come to that. Motor traffic was growing all the time, of course, and petrol and oil smelt cruder then. I suppose everything came from lower down the fractionating column, less refined. Coal, gas, creosote, tar. Even the green Southern Railways’ electric trains smelt of phenol, I imagine because their various condensers and resistors and transformers were coated with phenolic resins for insulation. When hot they gave off this clean, medicinal smell. I associated it with doctors’ surgeries, probably because carbolic was still being used as an antiseptic. Tar fractions were in the air everywhere, which of course was exactly the problem and the reason for those famous Dickensian fogs which persisted in London until the Clean Air Act began to take effect in the late fifties. When I said my father never missed a day’s work it wasn’t strictly true. I was thinking of illness but I’d overlooked the fogs. I don’t know if you remember how bad they could be? So thick and yellow you couldn’t see from one lamp-post to the next? People could get hopelessly lost within twenty yards of their own front gates. A big fog might last for a week, a fortnight, even longer. When it was like that the trains often couldn’t run at all because the signals weren’t visible. My father would stay at home and fret, but only after he had tried every means of getting to the office short of walking up to the City. Occasionally he had to sleep at the office because he couldn’t get home.
Loving Monsters Page 4