Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  But Elwyn was mainly transfixed by woodwork; sawing and glueing at the kitchen table, to the despair of my mother, never changing out of his ‘good’ clothes and carrying sawdust through the house. The boys got the railway platform. My sister got the doll’s house (not quite as good as the one he made earlier for my cousins in Gloucester, which had an opening front, stair rods on the stairs and an array of clunking great electric switches hidden in the lean—to round the back); Helen’s was a flat-fronted, four-storey cupboard with a dormer roof, but it was painted a sticky white with a poisonous green creeper up the front, spotted with cabbage roses; a Kees Van Dongen, Post-Impressionist influence for a change.

  Later came a full-sized puppet theatre and puppets, animal hutches, shelves, cupboards, record boxes, garden fittings, walls, garages and an entire boat. Meanwhile in Midhurst he moved on to a tree-house in an oak tree up at the back of the clearing. It had Tyrolean peep-holes, and a real pitched roof. Having got that far, he set to work on a section of the woods themselves. He got into brick-laying (more Churchill?) and built himself a giant barbecue which could have doubled as a field kitchen for a battalion (mind you, I suppose there were an awful lot of Australians around the sanatorium). Others might have settled for an old oil-drum, but we got a pit. He laid foundations and constructed a sort of Vulcan furnace. An old wash-pot was inserted into a brick surround which climbed up to a towering, oblong chimney. It vied with the kitchens of Hampton Court.

  In 1988 the hurricane had come at the south-facing slopes of Easebourne Hill like Thor with a strimmer. The entire pine forest behind the house was mown flat. It had quickly been replanted, but nearer to the Lodge than before. The new wood had grown up in thick, serried lines. It was already about twenty feet high when I plunged into it in 2005. I was back in a metaphor. My widely spaced, wooded, open playground had been smothered with an overplanting of reality. I stepped over a chicken-wire fence and found myself in a beige, dead world. There was no path at all. It had been obliterated. Within minutes I lost every sense of direction. Instead of finding the things I wanted in memory-bank wood — the pet cemetery, the tree-house, the barbecue — all I got was a thick, claustrophobic maze. I quickly got lost. I began absurdly to panic. I literally couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

  When I suddenly burst through back to the edge of the garden right in front of the house, almost by accident, I kicked into a brick. It might have been a brick from the barbecue, covered in a thick green moss. I noticed there were others around. I felt like a detective in a Polish film, searching for evidence of some past atrocity. It was damp and cold. What did it signify anyway? What had I expected to find? Bones?

  Did we ever use the barbecue much anyway? Elwyn certainly built himself a picnic area to surround it, using massive half logs, dipped in a preservative that never quite dried. The accompanying benches were anchored to the ground, just a stretch too far away from the splintery tables. He was very proud of it. We were too. He must have ordered a patent glass cutter from a magazine, because I remember the trees were hung with half-bottles in wire cradles, holding candles. Everybody was called around to drink gin and tonics, eat the burned sausages (how could they be anything but incinerated in the improvised blast furnace) and swat the midges, until my father announced, as he habitually did, ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m off to bed now.

  What a dad! Except of course he was always a little remote, busy at something, perpetually screwing or sanding, glueing or painting, and when he wasn’t, he was down the hill at the hospital, where we seldom went.

  We went everywhere else. Perhaps because my father was so diligently occupied, and my mother so understanding, we were released into the wild as no parent would dare do today There were strict times we had to be back: for lunch, supper and bed. We must have gone to school, but I only remember my time in Midhurst as a pre-lapsarian paradise of feral gangs.

  The Lodge sat on a little promontory above a drive that led a few hundred yards down the hill to the main hospital, hidden from view by the woods. The trees crept up on the other side of the white road too, fronted by a few mountain ashes and the occasional giant chestnut.

  Behind the house was a little fenced garden; beyond that a stretch of grass, traversed by a path; and beyond that more of the enclosing trees. They were tall Douglas pines with red, scaly trunks. We thought they were useless, because, although they had branches, the branches started twelve feet above our heads and they were impossible to climb. Miles up there somewhere, they formed a canopy of dark green fir, which groaned in high winds.

  The floor of the wood was thick with pine needles, soft underfoot, even and clean and slightly bouncy. ‘The buxom, rosy-faced and high spirited patients’ were discouraged from drinking and given the gardens to till. They also went for walks, which were ‘measured’ so that just the right amount of exertion could be prescribed. The walk past the back of the house was one of these. This was where we buried the family pets: in the middle of it. The hamster went into a shoe-box coffin with a wooden cross made of twigs. There was Winston, an angora rabbit. (My father claimed my mother shaved it for its fur and it died of the cold.) We liked our graveyard so much that we took to searching for other corpses and carried dead birds and squirrels to be buried in state, and once, triumphantly, an adder squashed down the road next to the fuchsia bushes. Thus the passing-away of a loved one became bearable to the infant psyche. Or rather we became all too keen for our pets to hurry up and die, and took to examining the tortoise with the blue cross on its back, the guinea pigs and Bella the dog for signs of imminent mortality. (Wasn’t there a donkey too? Now that would have been a funeral.) We liked our ceremonies and the jewels and cotton wool in the caskets, but best of all we liked revisiting the plots for a touch of disinterment. We dug up a woodpecker over and over again to scare ourselves with the shiny white maggots, until my mother caught us at it and chased us off.

  We’d have run on down the path, now eradicated. One second and you were in the woods, thirty seconds and you were gone. The undergrowth was surprisingly dense, good for camps and ambushes, but scratchy to push through in shorts.

  Just along the way, heading west, the path crossed a ride cut through from the back of the main hospital building, lined with massive rhododendrons. There was some unwritten rule that we were never to be seen by the hospital staff, and most particularly the patients. It would give them some sort of fit, apparently So when we decided to climb the giant larches, we had to scoot across to get to them.

  A family gang, as opposed to a school gang, involves a variety of ages, including an unwanted baby figure, who has to be held by the hand, one of the boys from the Benicky family, several girls and an older brother who goads the younger brother (me) into life-threatening situations.

  ‘We could get to that branch.’

  ‘I can’t reach.’

  ‘You’re not scared are you?’

  The lower branches were prone to snap off, but they were frequent, rather too frequent, in fact, because we had to take risks to wiggle between them. Nobody had ever climbed this tree before. That was obvious. We kicked off clouds of green dust from the tops of the branches. It was so thick we were not really able to see anything, except if we looked down, the upturned faces of the girls, now too small to register as anything but a smudge of concern. But I distinctly recall, when we finally got right to the top, that this was the highest tree we had ever climbed, high enough to see right over the top of the hospital, beyond the cricket field on the other side, down to the valley of the Rother. In truth, it was rather higher than we wanted to be. It began swaying. And after the moment of triumph, a wash of panic came sluicing up. The whole superstructure suddenly seemed fragile. So I gripped tighter to the only bit that really seemed substantial, the trunk itself.

  ‘Put your foot down.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  Then everybody started panicking. The branches seemed an enormous distance apart. It was impossible to stretch down to the next fo
othold without releasing the iron hug on the trunk. And that was the only thing that stopped me falling.

  ‘I’m stuck.’

  ‘You’re not stuck.’

  Not that he knew. He started crying before I did. He was the one who was going to start shouting at me, because he was the one who would have to tell my father that he left me at the top of a hundred-foot larch tree.

  ‘Let go of my foot!’

  ‘Let me put it down. You’ll be all right if you can get your foot on to this branch.’

  After about five minutes, I was. But the way down was horrific. The scratches from the twigs began to really hurt. There was inevitably a horrible skip on a green-covered branch, which wrenched an arm socket and crashed me on to my crotch, so it brought tears stinging.

  ‘Don’t start crying.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  Then on the ground you actually could start crying.

  ‘He made me do it,’ was a useless excuse. ‘If he told you to put your hand in the fire would you do it?’ This didn’t require an answer except to shake the head and stare resolutely at the ground, but the honest answer was probably ‘yes’, especially if he had got away with it without hurting himself.

  We once went to some house further up the hill, and I was sent off with the son, a brand new acquaintance (while the adults drank gin and tonics). He took me through the farmyard and stood me in front of a long barn with a row of upper windows, yards long. It was a dappled-sunshine day He leaned down, picked up a stone, said, ‘This is fun,’ and threw it straight through a pane of glass. It was fun actually. They were big panes and collapsed with an exemplary destructive implosion, so we worked our way along the building, taking it in turns to demolish the lot. As we reached the end I glanced up to see my pal’s father stomping round the corner of the barn. There is a sort of level at which you can understand, even excuse, the fury of your own parents (blood counts for a lot) but there is an unspoken rule amongst the badly behaved that dads don’t bawl out other people’s children. Your own parents, hot with embarrassment and shame, can usually be counted upon to redouble any hand-me-down annoyance. But here was my friend’s father in the throes of a full screaming fit at me. Me! It must have been bad. I was left quaking for the rest of the afternoon, though I noted that the scion of the house got over it fairly briskly.

  Is it only because these traumas are lodged like burrs in my hairy subconscious that it felt like our lives were one scurrilous outrage after another? We ate all the peas in the vegetable garden at Jimmy Summers’ house. When I was three, I chopped the heads off every tulip in our front garden. I went on the run in Chichester. I broke my arm attacking a swan. When I was six I reached up and pulled down a poster stuck on a tree in Bosham, just for the thrill of it. I had seen it done in a film. It was what cowboys did to ‘wanted’ posters. Nobody ever found out.

  We must have been good sometimes. After all, the fury of all adults, and my father in particular, was something to be avoided if possible. A good spanking was hardly as common as in the Dandy, but I remember once being offered the choice between missing television and having a smack. My father laughed when I chose the beating.

  Forty years later, in the end, I found the path again. I walked up the road, skirting round the new plantation, and turned south. A few yards through some overgrown rhododendrons and there was the unmistakable view of the back of the hospital. So the little track leading west must be the path, the path where I learned to whistle. It was nothing. The larches had gone. Twenty yards through what was now overgrown scrub and I was standing on ‘the cliff’.

  The hospital was built to be a sustainable community, which in the 1960s meant a self-contained community. There was an incinerator block with a tall chimney and a hooter that sounded at twelve for lunch. Round the back and down a set of steps were the kitchens. My father used to take me there to meet ‘chef’, who liked to escort me into his cold room and feed me scraps of over-cooked pork or cold chipolata sausages. I have grown up with a dread of hospitals and especially the greasily polished kitchen departments. This was the real morgue: the heavy door that threatened to seal you in the gloomy, yellowy-grey room with its metallic shelves and hanging carcasses. I didn’t like the noisy clatter of battered baking trays, the pale, fleshy hands of the largely Italian staff who grabbed my hamster cheeks and pinched them hard —to get a reaction presumably — out of a sudden welling of affection probably — but all alien and noisy and utterly unappetizing.

  There had been fields of Brussels sprouts and pig sties too, which must have been part of the total operation, I suppose. My brother William was old enough to be taken down to see a litter of piglets born. I only remember the morning after and being led down to where they lay, like us with our father in bed, in the smelly straw under a hot lamp. The pig shit and dirty, low-ceilinged hovels were more appealing than the hospital.

  And there was a hay barn. This was on ‘the cliff’ which overlooked the offices of the sanatorium. The cliff was ours.

  It was here we discovered something smelly in a milk bottle and took it in turns to go and look at it. I think it was probably a premature pig, at least I hope it was. But up there in the undergrowth, where we were in charge, we could keep an eye on the comings and goings and take our own time over exploring things, including boys and girls things.

  Though I left this place before I was seven, I had already taken part in some complex games of Doctors and Nurses in the elder bushes behind the hay barn — unusual scenarios of a melodramatic nature that needed one of the little girls to injure herself, requiring ‘doctors’ to examine her bare areas beneath her dark—blue knickers, sometimes using a twig or leaves. I forget the names of the girls, or who initiated the games, but they fired up the pangs of curiosity and added significantly to the layer-cake of guilt. And the girls were much keener on the play-acting than we were. It was almost as if the chance to satisfy curiosity was the price we exacted for taking part in the silly play-acting games in the first place.

  We much preferred to be inside the barn. It was totally forbidden, but never seemed to be visited by anyone. It was piled full of straw-bales. At the risk of white ridges in the fleshy parts of the fingers, these could be lugged around in the half-light by the two strands of thin baling twine to make first a tunnel and then, after hours of work, secret inner caves. We had hardly settled triumphantly in one room of bristly benches before somebody would start yanking at another bale.

  Later, when the recriminations came, it was pointed out that the entire heap could have collapsed at any moment, smothering us, in a tragic disaster from which our mothers in particular would never have recovered. We had not, apparently, been thinking about them at all. That was true. We had worked our way through the straw building blocks until we came up against the planked wall of the barn. The sunlight struck through the slats and a knot gave us a spy hole through which we could see the woods, and the path snaking away through the pines. For once, there was actually someone coming along it.

  We spied on an old man (probably in his forties) pushing a bicycle. It was laden with panniers. There was a large basket filled with parcels at the front and a wooden box fixed to the rear. He propped his bike up against a tree and walked off down the hill towards the sanatorium offices. He had sideburns. Like a cowboy.

  I blame television. He was inadvertently acting out the scene of the man who thinks he’s on his own in a clearing in The Last of the Mohicans. Virtually every day we sat in front of the black-and-white television in the brown, shiny bakelite box with an armoury of ‘Lone-Star’ cap-revolvers and Winchester repeater rifles close by on the sofa, in order to shoot down the ‘baddies’. On long journeys, we would attempt to drive our young and exasperated mothers out of their minds by humming the six notes from the theme from The Alamo under our breath, until the mummies suddenly boiled over, brought the car to a halt and turned on us with undisguised fury.

  The man was a bicycling grocer. We were Apache. So we raided his pack. We s
neaked out of the barn and were probably just going to have a quick look, but the basket was packed with sausages. This was too much. They were beautifully pink and squishy We had to hang them in strings like Christmas decorations all over the nearby trees. What else could we do? Well, we had to stick pine needles in them first, obviously, to make them prickly I know this because, as I write this, I can suddenly recall sticking the thin, bifurcated spikes of pine needles into pink, yielding sausage meat somewhere, and when else would I have done that? I can still remember the pungent whiff from the packets of tea in the panniers, oblong boxes with pale blue markings. Inside there were grease-proof paper bags. We tore them open. It was ordained. We had to scatter the useless stuff all over the pine needles then and trample them about a bit. We stuck all the cigarettes in the trees. We didn’t steal anything. We simply vandalized the lot. Then we went back in the barn and waited. The excitement of the exercise was the opportunity to appear from nowhere, wreak havoc and then slip away to watch the result. It was a real adventure raid, not a pretend. That’s what made it good.

  I don’t even remember whether he railed, jumped up and down or looked mystified; probably the lot. But it was easily worked out, by a process of elimination, who did it. Apart from the kids who once set a dog on me, there was no one else it could have been.

  Weeks later, we overheard a scrap of comment (while they were drinking gin and tonics and giggling about it). When my mother offered to buy the stuff, the man pretended that we had destroyed far more than we actually had. Not only that, but after she paid for it, he wanted to keep it. ‘Probably going to sell it,’ my mother said, and the other mothers snorted. So, he was untrustworthy, and we were on the right side, and that was all right. But we still knew it was better to say nothing.