An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  AYLESWADE ROAD

  John Morton’s microbiological research was into the viability and infection rates of airborne microorganisms and radioactive spores. Many of his trials were necessarily conducted at sea in the approved gung-ho manner of the day. Like many other middle-aged Porton Down scientists of the Fifties facing an impoverished future he joined what would, in the next decade, become known as the brain drain to the United States, land of plenty, land of handsomely rewarded weapons technologists, land of modernity, streamlining, dams, freeways, cars with fins, cars with gurning radiator grilles, square watches, observation cars, air conditioning, Kodaslide Highlux projectors, teen camps (Adirondack Woodcraft, Western Caravan and Ranch, Gay Valley). But also, puzzlingly, land of the Wild West. How could that be?

  He prospered, eventually took American citizenship. His wife Peggy didn’t. After their divorce she returned to England with their son and their pretty twins, dizygotic girls who were readily distinguishable and who I was convinced were not real twins but impostors, perpetrators of an incomprehensible deception.

  The Goddard twins, monozygotic boys, were real twins. I couldn’t tell which was which. Identification was exacerbated by their usually being dressed in identical clothes. They relished the confusion they caused. Further, they were so confusingly akin to Freddie and Ferdie Fox in Rupert Bear that I cannot now picture one set without the other. They lived within a few yards of Beaton’s Garage in Ayleswade Road. The Beaton brothers, only a year apart in age, might have been twins. A few minutes’ walk away in one of the Royal Artillery houses there lived, temporarily, Aubrey, Arnold and Ann Sessions. Biscuit-skinned twins? Triplets? Mere siblings?

  Ayleswade Road was a street of, mostly, banal Edwardian terraces which concealed multiple births, interchangeable identities and puzzling doubles. It must have been its intricate genealogies which caused a momentous thought to occur to me. I was standing outside The Swan, raised on a bank across the road from the Goddards’ house and Beaton’s Garage. The people coming out of Hands’s shop with their uniform wicker baskets, the people getting off the 55 bus and hurrying home for lunch, the group of people heading for The Rose and Crown – all these people and all the other people I couldn’t see all across the world over were men or women, girls or boys. Why? Why were people restricted to membership of one sex or the other? Perhaps they weren’t. There must, I decided, be a third sex. And that third sex was gypsies, swarthy, leather-faced clothes-peg folk with horses, wild dogs and plentiful scrap metal who were mistrusted precisely because being of the third sex they were given to different behaviour.

  For many years after I learnt that gypsies were, according to taste, self-pitying, special-pleading minor criminals or persecuted rovers clinging to an ancient, threatened way of life, I’d still gape at The Swan’s gravel car park and allow the notion of the third sex to capture me.

  BARNETT, MISS

  The far-distant end of Britford Lane where the rutted, puddled, cindered road ended. From there on the route to the watery village of Britford was a narrow footpath bordered by a thorny hedge and, on its other side, a barbed wire fence. Beyond the field that way, unseen, signalled by a suspended mist strip, ran Navigation Straight. A gilded copperplate signboard on legs in its garden announced that Britford Lane’s penultimate building, a pebbledash chalet-bungalow, was a school, a sort of dame school, my first school. The single classroom occupied most of the ground floor. Its ceiling was impressively high; all ceilings were impressively high in comparison with my home’s. I had never seen such a bright room, I had never seen such light before. The end onto the back garden was entirely glazed. Late in the morning it admitted stout rods of sunlight dense with churning motes which vanished when I went to stroke them. Where did they go? To the garden where stooped the vestiges of an orchard, withered plum trees that no longer bore fruit? To the lane behind where wooden sheds and ad hoc garages teetered and rotted? On the third day of term we were instructed to paint these barren trees with our watercolours. I made some sploshes on a sheet of paper then drank the muddy water from the jar in which we cleaned our brushes. It tasted interesting. I drank more. A fellow pupil grassed me up to Miss Barnett, a spinster in pince-nez which caught the sun. They heliographed a virgin’s hatred of life. She marched to my desk and hissed. She told me that I was not just stupid to have drunk the water, she said that I would die, that I deserved to die. But that I was not to die at school. Her assistant teacher, a young woman in plaid, drove me home in her van so that I might die in my own bed. The alarmed German Girl ran up the road to my mother’s classroom to fetch her. I waited anxiously. I hoped to see my mother before I died. Until the moment when I had to retire to my deathbed I waited for her on the dining-room window seat. The assistant teacher paced between the van and the front door, smoking. I wondered how to check for symptoms. How would I know when I was dead? Was transport to heaven immediate? What form did it take? If handsomely liveried tourist coaches were used I prayed that the vehicle would not be a wheezy Bedford which might fail to climb the slopes but a sleek Guy with a cast-metal Red Indian’s head above the radiator: I prided myself on being able to distinguish lorries by the sound of their engine. I could tell a handsome Foden (those crazy radiator grilles!) from a Dennis (locally tested, in skeletal form, no cab, no bonnet, all working parts revealed as though the driver was driving an exploded drawing). I craned my neck for a sight of my mother. Had I been a good son? Then my mother was hugging me, telling me I wasn’t going to die, wiping the tears I had thitherto been too numb to shed, getting The German Girl to make me cocoa. She comforted me so long that my fear abated. Then she went outside, out of my hearing, to talk to the assistant teacher. I had never seen her gesture before, never seen her shake her head that way. She was berating the young woman whose expression was increasingly sheepish. Whatever was said was presumably mild beside what was said to Miss Barnett herself later that day. That was the end of that school. I did not enquire whether I was expelled or withdrawn.

  BLUE SPOT

  When my father carried me high on his shoulders grasping my ankles in his giant’s hands I would caress a circular blemish on the top of his head, a birthmark made visible by baldness. (He had already lost most of his hair by the time he married at the age of thirty.) This fascinating spot, the circumference of a cigarette, was approximately the colour of the penicillium mould in blue cheese. Prying in some long-lost book I had been frightened by a Medusa’s head in what I could not then identify as the brothelish style of Rops or Moreau, whose paintings, like all others, I accepted with a dogged literality. My father called Gorgonzola ‘gorgon’, thus conflating in my mind the worms that were rumoured to seethe through the all too living lactate with a Gorgon’s venomously vermicular hairdo. It was this homophone which made me shun the stuff. Besides, I preferred the saltier, less rich Danish Blue, which my father took a dim view of because it didn’t taste of cow. At Christmas there would appear a stoneware crock of Stilton festering in grocer’s port, a sludge as repulsively pungent as an adult’s stool. Mercifully this cheese which, macerated or not, I have never appreciated, was in those days a seasonal ‘treat’ and so unglimpsed and unsmelled throughout the rest of the year. That was not the case with Cheddar, always called ‘mousetrap’. Salisbury’s best grocery, the coffee-and-bacon-scented Robert Stokes, stocked wheels of farm Cheddar, a rarity, for the majority of prewar producers now sold their milk to factory-dairies such as Cow & Gate in Wincanton or Horlicks in Ilminster which processed it into lumps of generic cheese-style product. That was the future: industrial food, rational food, soon to be plastic-wrapped food. It was a future which my parents scornfully opposed whilst I succumbed, shamefully, to Primula, Dairylea triangles, citric Philadelphia, Huntley and Palmers cheese footballs which tickled mucous membrane, Roka cheese crispies in their recyclable blue and yellow tin (pencils, dividers, erasers etc.). I knew I shouldn’t enjoy such foods: I was so advised often enough. I longed to leave childhood taste behind me but it wouldn’t leav
e me. Even at the age of seventeen I would be excited by Golden Wonder cheese and onion crisps, the first flavoured crisps manufactured, the first flavoured crisps I ate, in that sweetest of all summers, 1964.

  At least this litany of vintage lactic colour did not include Kraft cheese slices, tan leatherette rectangles whose textural bounce and astonishing flavour were tours de force of chemical engineering. However, they did not appeal to me. Nor does it include Cracker Barrel ‘Cheddar’ – oblong, granular, fudge-like, a stinging palatal assault which my father would probably have dismissed had it not been advertised on telly by James Robertson Justice, who like Jimmy Edwards and Stinker Murdoch, was generally (and maybe erroneously) accepted to be a jolly good chap rather than a mere actor; bluff, beery, down to earth. He was occasionally to be seen in Salisbury hauling his big-boned beardie bulk from a gull-wing Mercedes.

  The Cracker Barrel commercials were directed by Lindsay Anderson. Another cause, then, of his gnawing self-despisal.

  BOBIE

  Long O. My parents’ affectionate nickname for each other. Only used vocatively. Derivation unknown. Its infantilism embarrassed me. It belonged, like much else, to an era, close but quite ungraspable, when they had yet to make me, when they had been a world of two, unintruded upon, carefree and yet to be separated for almost half a decade: I was no doubt the glue designed to reunite them, to transport them back to the Thirties, to the coming enormity whose germ was there to be ignored by all, to collective amnesia about a future bereft of treasure hunts and roadhouses.

  Not yet Bobie and Bobie, they meet in Southampton, at the Banister Park ice rink, in 1937. My future father falls at my future mother’s feet. He is a tyro skater, she is practised. She literally picks him up. Is it a deliberate fall? What the morons of the football industry now term simulation? Probably. He was, though, a clumsy dancer and an awkward swimmer. The likelihood of his being able to remain upright on skates was slight. Still, the matter of predetermination was never discussed. Maybe romance’s integrity was better served by ascribing it to chance. And maybe they were loath to admit to each other, let alone to me, that they frequented somewhere so proletarian as a glacial meat market. Between that encounter and their marriage three months before the outbreak of war their life was one of heedless enjoyment recorded in crinkle-bordered monochrome.

  Here is a sailing holiday on the Broads aboard Perfect Lady with Ken and Jessica Southwell: Ken wears a short-sleeved Aertex shirt with a lace-up front. Post-war they would be addressed as Uncle Ken and Auntie Jessica though I knew they weren’t. They came and went according to Ken’s RAF postings. He lost his temper, often; subcutaneous ropes swelled in his forehead. He had also lost control of his hair which refused to be tamed by brilliantine and rose in Mayan strip lynchets. They found me a tiresome child. I found them frightening adults. I was occasionally foisted on them at wherever they were currently calling home – a bookless cottage at Boscombe, a bookless bungalow along Britford Lane with an adder in the pond, subsequently rented by the Braithwaites. The last time I saw the Southwells was near Barnstaple in the summer of 1964. Now they found me more than tiresome, an insolent, sneering teenage know-all with, as Jessica said, a tongue in his head. They were inordinately proud that their lame daughter was engaged to be married to a member of the family descended from Henry Curry, founder of the fridge and digital goods retailers. This was their social triumph. Their son had joined the Merchant Navy, that may have been a social triumph too. Ken was by then employed as a golf club secretary, which is how choleric passed-over officers nostalgic for mess life often ended up: a house came with the job. Through its picture window, there across blanched fields, shimmered the distant sea. It was no solace to Ken. The country was going to the dogs. And if that man Wilson gets in … That man Wilson did get in.

  Here is my father fishing, always fishing: casting a fly in a chalkstream, displaying his catch, up to his wadered thighs in white water, crouching on rocks beneath contorted pines, seated on a dead trunk adjusting a reel with a jeweller’s screwdriver, netting a trout from a rowing boat’s stern with the rod parabola’d by the struggling fish. He often wears a Norfolk jacket with two buttoning breast pockets and a belt. The material is Donegal tweed. The photographer was my mother. There are fewer snaps of her, a towny acclimatising to willowy, watery places with the eagerness of new love. Here she’s standing beside the ford through the Blackwater at West Wellow. My father made lifelong friends of the Gradidge family. He fished their stream, a feeder of the Test, and he shot on their three farms. At the party in the village hall for Mr and Mrs Walter Gradidge’s golden wedding anniversary Mrs Gradidge indicated my girlfriend and asked my mother: ‘Where did Jonathan find her then? I wish Clifford could find himself one … he could buy her a Jag straight off.’ Clifford, then pushing fifty, did find one not long after, a multiple divorcée from Bournemouth who got a Jag straight off and who cost the family one of their farms when she offloaded her latest husband after only three years.

  Here are my parents in a country pub’s garden with friends. Young men looked older then. They wanted to look older. Hence the ubiquitous moustache and the absence of a specifically youthful form of dress. But the faces are older too. Diet? Physical endeavour? It is certainly the case that today the only young men who look older than their years are professional sportsmen who sell their bodies for sums that other prostitutes can only envy. That sleek-haired (and moustachioed) fellow raising his glass to the camera is Wagstaff. He is familiar from their wedding photos. The war was a divider on another scale too. When he returned from service he had two prosthetic legs but seldom moved from a wheelchair. Although his wife had been one of my mother’s bridesmaids they soon lost contact. I never met him. Was he called Ray? Or was that her name?

  BUCKHORN WESTON

  We travelled to a rugby match by stopping train. I loved that journey. Trying to calculate the very point where, above the deep cutting after Wilton South station, the Lush family’s house was. The Nadder valley’s reduced palette – grey woodsmoke, black skeletal trees, brown hillocks, hints of hidden combes. After Semley the landscape changed, shed all intimacy. Big fields; heavy west country plough; Buckhorn Weston, up a slope to the north of the track. (When I returned home that evening I pored over the map till I’d identified its name.) It appeared to be a village of stone houses the memory of whose prettiness I all but destroyed for a time thirty-five years later when I was meant to be doing something else but noticed a signpost and negligently diverted to it. I found a group of galvanised byres and garaged tractors. I cursed myself for having gone back. Never go back. Truism or true? But I had never gone in the first place. I willed the early memory to re-establish its primacy. Gradually it did so, and my Buckhorn Weston today is that of over half a century ago: a snapshot through a third-class window. A modest mnemonic triumph, the victory of the distant past over the recent. We steamed through Templecombe, close to Posty’s birthplace. Milborne Port is not a port, can never have been a port. There’s no river. It was a cloth town and glove town. Some cottages have almost entirely glazed upper storeys to admit light so that weavers might see to weave. (Not enough, they still went blind.) We walked from Sherborne station past the Victorian–Jacobean Digby Hotel, an impressively grand establishment for a small town, then entered the Middle Ages, all ironstone cloisters and pointed arches. It was only by proximity that Sherborne Preparatory School was attached to the public school which, given the former’s moral squalor, would have doubtless preferred to detach itself: for the moment it turned a blind eye. The premises were barrack-like, of no merit. The school’s distinction derived from its being the fiefdom of the Lindsay family whose motto was Dieu et Mon Droit du Seigneur. The ownership and, with it, the headmastership passed from one churchy generation to the next. The then headmaster’s son, Robin Lindsay, was, in the century’s late fifties, in his early thirties. He cannot have believed his luck in being born into such a dynasty, into such a milieu, into such a plenty of prepubescent flesh: a car
nivore’s paradise, temptation was just a wet towel’s flick away. He was evidently sated by the sight of ‘his’ naked boys in the showers, fed up with the sameness of his diet. Christopherson, Webster, Sheriff, Barry, Rose … even had they been masked he would have been capable of identifying them by their genitalia, which were on the very point of making the big leap. Visiting school teams offered variety. As a special feast for himself he organised an annual seven-a-side tournament for sixteen schools. Post-match he processed slowly beside the communal showers and cast the expert, appreciative eye of the true professional over the fresh flesh: a beauty contest of unwitting participants staged in water that was now freezing, now scalding. In 2006 a notice inside the door of Sherborne Abbey announced that ‘Choirboys are available for £10’. Tradition in action.

  CLOSE THE DOOR THEY’RE COMING IN THE WINDOW

  My uncles were Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle. There was also Uncle Eric but Uncle Eric wasn’t blood, merely marriage. And then there were uncles who were not even uncles by that familial fluke, whose title was honorific in accordance with the lower-middle-class practice of the Fifties, uncles whom I’d never have considered addressing without that title. Uncle Ken, Auntie Jessica. Uncle Norman, Boscombe Down boffin, was my godfather. He was an atheist. Wife: Auntie Nancy.

  Uncle Cecil, pharmacist. Wife: Auntie Rae.

  Uncle Edgar, dislikable optician. Wife: Auntie Cath.