An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  Uncle Edgar, bearded boho restaurateur / potter / antiques dealer / debt welsher whose raggedy truant children, at least a decade and a half my senior, I envied for their licence to call my parents by their Christian name without prefix. Wife: Auntie Grace.

  Uncle Os lived far away beyond the Severn; he owned a pub surrounded by orchards and hopyards. Wife: Auntie Margot.

  Uncle Jerry, soldier, had been among the first British infantry officers into Belsen. He drank. He killed himself with sleepers and Scotch when I was eleven, thirteen haunted years after he had witnessed the unimaginable: he suffered the guilt of not having had to endure it. No wife, no widow, no auntie.

  Uncle Eric might not have been blood, might not have been officer class – he had no rank to attach to his name in Civvy Street in the days when such a device was supposed to prompt respect. He did have a metal leg, the replacement of the original lost when the Cunliffe Owen Swaythling factory (which manufactured components of the Supermarine Spitfire) was bombed in the Southampton Blitz of November 1940. This loss caused him to postpone his marriage by more than a year. He owned a garage called Gibson’s Motors, a subscription to Glass’s Guide to Secondhand Car Prices, an entire set of Giles annuals, a season ticket to watch Third Division South Southampton at the Dell where the sheer numbers excited me and the ancient cantilevered stands frightened me – I had read in Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly that such a stand had once collapsed at Stoke or Bradford or somewhere. I regarded my presence in Southampton’s as a death-defying, as an exhilarating rite to be suffered in the progress towards teenage, which had just been invented and which was associable with crowds, groups, mobs and the crush of cities. I was necessarily familiar with the crush, for Uncle Eric was slow, gimping up the stairs to our seats whence he’d bark barrack-room calumnies: shirker, NBG, fairy.

  Until I was six or seven Uncle Eric, his wife my Auntie Mary, my only cousin Wendy and their corgi dog Jinx lived with my maternal grandparents in Shakespeare Avenue, Portswood. This was the house my mother had grown up in. There were two storeys at the front, four at the back: this part of Southampton swoops precipitously. It was, thus, a house of steep stairs, unsuited to Jinx’s tiny legs. The placid, massively overfed dog developed a stentorian wheeze, adapting himself to a family of chronic hawkers and career coughers. My grandmother could really cough. She smoked three packets of Kensitas per day. Kensitas was not merely a brand of fag, it was an efficacious expectorant. Uncle Eric, no mean smoker himself but a Player’s man, used to confide to me in no one else’s hearing that she needed them for the coupons. Seventy-five coupons brought a Turkish Face Towel from Robinson & Cleaver, 150 a Lady’s Morocco Purse. The coupons carried the warning: ‘If you do smoke cigarettes leave a long stub. Remove from mouth between puffs …’ My grandmother had clearly not got as far as that last bit.

  It was a house of brute tables, heavily incised wood, samplers, lardy antimacassars and fussy beading, ornately framed birds (a Redwing Blackbird and a Jay) which my great grandfather John Baird bought in New York, where he had briefly emigrated as a young man in the early 1880s: he returned to Scotland in the middle of that decade to marry his sweetheart Agnes McInnes. The walls were hung with prints and photographs of Bridge of Allan, Stirling, stags and the Wallace Monument, of which my grandmother’s grandfather had been the first keeper, a post no doubt coveted by the central belt’s entire janitocracy.

  John Baird and Agnes McInnes were both born in 1861 in the Stirling suburb of St Ninian’s. He was a steamship engineer. His bettering himself took him through a world of horse trams, coal gas, hurdy-gurdies and temperance halls, from grimy port to reeking port. As well as New York he worked in Glasgow, Hull, Liverpool (my grandmother, also Agnes, was born in Bootle in 1888).

  When Agnes Baird junior was in early infancy he moved his family to Southampton where he would prosper and live the rest of his life. Agnes Baird junior married Edwin Percy Felix Hogg (b. So’ton 1885). His Scottish forebears had moved south, initially to Niton on the Isle of Wight in the 1840s. They were tenant farmers, market gardeners and lighthouse keepers. Edwin Percy Felix’s father, also Edwin, was a carpenter. Despite the pressure of Scotland weighing on her, my mother (b. So’ton 1912) never considered herself anything other than English.

  There was always a catheter attached to my grandfather after my grandmother died of lung cancer. He lived on for five years, Pop did, treating me to frites and ice cream on trips to St Malo where he had old friends from his lifetime with Southern Railways, which ran the cross-Channel ferries, old friends who had stashes of wine from before the fall of France, in cellars that had been concreted to hide them from the Germans – or so it was claimed. They all knew the words of ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’, a place I confused with Timbuktu.

  We got cheap fares and trophy wines. Pop gave me prewar Sauternes from a tooth mug in a room we shared in the Hôtel du Louvre in St Malo, just six weeks into his widowhood, the day after he’d bought me the Swiss Army knife I still have. The wine was a colour I got to know well, the colour of the contents of the catheter bag that I’d pour away in the morning. Some days he’d take a bus to Dol de Bretagne, where he had a lady friend of long standing. Some nights he’d miss the bus back. By day he would accompany me on walks around the rebuilt ramparts and at low tide to l’Ile du Grand Bé, where lies the unmarked tomb of Chateaubriand whom he encouraged me to read, thus introducing me to the first of the two Breton fantasists who have marked my life.

  He sold the house in Shakespeare Avenue and moved a mile away to Uncle Eric’s and Auntie Mary’s new house, one of two that my mother designed. That’s two too many. Pop moved with a modicum of souvenirs. What happened to the furniture? Did it end up outside a totter’s premises in Bevois Valley? What happened to the souvenir biscuit tins and the souvenir biscuit tin catalogues? It occurred to me many years later that these were items that my father had given his future parents-in-law to butter them up, to let them consent to a life with their elder daughter who would bear me after she’d given up wearing the coat of aborted lambs’ fleeces captured in a Southern Evening Echo photo a few days before they met in collision on the ice rink. When the house in Shakespeare Avenue was taken from me so was the thrilling walk from the alley behind it by way of roads named Thackeray and Tennyson all the way to the front door. This was a treeless labyrinth, all industrial brick and terracotta of 1910–11. My grandparents were its first tenants. I suspect that a Baird held a shotgun to a Hogg head. My mother was born eight months after they married. They eventually bought the house with a windfall between the wars. But they never changed the way it looked. It was for ever 1911. I lived little more than twenty miles away but in a different world. Salisbury is a church city, an army city. In Southampton there were the red and black funnels of great liners, there were predatory cranes, there were vast hangars on the Itchen where boats were built and where flying boats put down in furrows of silver spume. The river was crossed by the ‘floating bridge’, a chain ferry which landed you in Woolston, where there were streets with names like Vespasian and more houses. Southampton was a city of relentless houses. Yellow brick, red brick. Faced in stucco with bulbous bays in a coarse pastiche of Brighton. There were houses with gables, houses with diapering, houses with overblown capitals and crudely cast mouldings. There were houses where Lascars lodged – that epithet which signified Indian and Malayan seamen was still current. There were the houses where Ken Russell and Benny Hill had grown up. They might have been twins sired by Donald McGill. There wasn’t a house in Southampton that didn’t rock with bawdy laughter. Fat bottoms, bloated bosoms, big jobs, the barmaid’s knickers, all the nice girls love a candle, all the nice girls love a wick. I didn’t know whether to block her passage or toss meself off … The city lacked decorum. Its police lacked decorum. At a public lavatory on the Common, officers, curled in foetal discomfort, spied from the eaves on sailors perpetuating sailors’ mores. Every house I knew had about it the whiff of the public house, of a partic
ular public house, one whose guv’nor was Archie Rice, whose punters’ tipple was navy gin. There was indeed a pub by the old town walls that was licensed to distil its own. The Juniper Berry, of course. Uncle Eric kept a boat moored on the Netley shore. It was a Royal Navy cast-off, a sometime lifeboat. Uses of: drinking bottled beer and gin on Sundays, and navigating under the influence. Apart from Spanish holidays which prompted postcards saying ‘The beach is lovely. Eric can take off his leg and slide down into the water’ and rare visits to relatives in his native Manchester, Eric seldom ventured further than his boat. He didn’t see much point in the country though he was happy enough provided he didn’t have to get out of the car. Like all my mother’s family he belonged to the city, the smoke, the bevelled-glass gin palace rather than the mellow country inn.

  Uncle Wangle, né Reginald, Evesham, 1913, lived, when I first remember him, in a flat overlooking the sea at Southbourne, where Bournemouth straggles towards Hengistbury Head. He was determinedly hypochondriacal: migraine, neuralgia, lumbago, cold, heartburn, grogginess, tummy ache. His wife Auntie Ann was frail, freckled, valetudinarian. She was to be pitied because she was an orphan rather than because she was married to Uncle Wangle. Her maiden name was Pope. That is all I know of her life pre-Wangle. It surely cannot have been as hermetic, frugal and loopy as that which she led during the twenty or so years of her marriage (she was a war bride). Wangle had enjoyed failed careers as a mechanical engineer, a policeman, a conscientious objector, an ambulance driver. Now he wrote technical manuals for the De Havilland Aircraft Company and swam in the sea every day of the year. But mere immersion and a view were evidently not enough for him – or indeed for frail freckled valetudinarian Auntie Ann, whose health, he decided, would improve were she subjected to a more fulsome marine contact. So they bought a caravan which they named ‘Bredon’ and parked it a couple of miles east at Sandhills beside Mudeford Quay. There were pines, dunes, shifting lagoons, crumbling cliffs and other caravans. Theirs was no ordinary lot. The caravan was parked on the very shore. Waves broke over it, they battered the sheet-metal walls of the pioneering home, they caused tympanic mayhem, they promised natural disaster, their potency was amplified so a squall seemed like a gale, a gale like a typhoon. An agency of the local authority threatened action to remove the caravan from the shore before Auntie Ann’s health had had a chance to improve. The congress with the elements would be continued a couple of miles inland in a regrettably less exposed position. The caravan site at Walkford Woods was close by a railway line. The brown and cream Bournemouth Belle raced past hauled by the Southern Region’s green Merchant Navy-class locomotives (designed by Oliver Bulleid, second only to Nigel Gresley in the Steam Pantheon).

  I was forced to spend part of every summer holiday with them and the shared Elsan and the neighbour’s girl Shirley whose favourite record was The Stargazers’ ‘Close The Door They’re Coming In The Window’, which I believed had something to do with a plague of locusts. It terrified me. I prissily told Shirley that my favourite record was Handel’s Water Music. Uncle Wangle’s favourite record was anything depressing by a dead Scandinavian or anything gloomy by a dead Finn. When Auntie Ann’s health once again failed to improve they moved a further couple of miles to Hinton Admiral where they bought the lodge of a decrepit, unoccupied William IV house whose grounds were being covered in bungalows. The sitting room was octagonal. Its floor was marked with Ls of white sticky tape which indicated precisely where to position a chair for maximum auditory efficacy when listening to the new hi-fi which played Grieg, Grieg, Grieg and occasionally Sibelius. Cruder music, the music which excited me, was not welcome. My taste for Elvis Presley was again incredulously mocked. I bought ‘All Shook Up’ and got bollocked for it. I put on a pullover one chill September evening and was told how soft I was – the implication was that I was a mummy’s boy who had inherited his mummy’s sissy city ways. When I admitted to having gone in to Christchurch to see a film called Light Up the Sky, a feeble ack-ack comedy with Benny Hill and Tommy Steele, Uncle Wangle rolled his eyes. He abhorred the cinema, never owned a television, listened only to the Home Service and the Third Programme, read the Listener and the Manchester Guardian (it arrived a day late, by post. The organist, composer and English teacher Richard Lloyd also subscribed to it by post: with sober fury he passed round our class the edition which reported the Sharpeville massacre). Wangle didn’t eat meat; rather, he didn’t buy meat. He was a practised scrounger. He ate Grape-Nuts, a cereal as dentally unforgiving as pebbledash. Auntie Ann made equally challenging nutroasts. Bread and sugar were brown. Pipe and tobacco were brown. Clothes were brown or brownish. Auntie Ann wore oatmeal hopsack and had a diarrhoea-colour pea jacket for best: she was oblivious to style. Uncle Wangle wore Aertex the whole year through, a hairy tweed jacket, a knitted tie, khaki drill trousers, sandals or canvas sailing shoes called bumpers. It goes without saying that the house was virtually unheated, that his Morris Minor was a convertible (it was called ‘Janet’), that Auntie Ann wore no make-up, that he was dismissive of the grandest house in the locality, the ruinous Highcliffe Castle, which he reckoned bogus and ugly – this would, of course, have been the reaction of most of his coevals to Victorian mediaevalism. It was not its retrospection that he deplored but the theatricality of its expression, and the pomp.

  The stratum of old England he sentimentally connected with was that of down-to-earth yeomanry rather than nobility: stout not flash, worthy not chivalric. Uncle Wangle’s and Uncle Hank’s idealisation of a certain England contained some dilute element of blood and soil. This hodgepodge of pernicious anthropomorphic sentimentality which dignified itself as a doctrine was not, incidentally, a Nazi creation. It was merely hijacked by that regime’s ideologues. The identification of a particular people with a particular place and a particular past was a parochial goal whose paradox was that in the years when Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle (and my father) grew up it was a pan-European commonplace proselytized by Barrès, Maurras, Hamsun etc. Walther Darré’s programme was merely an extreme manifestation of that commonplace. In England it went no further than the primitivist chapter of the Arts and Crafts, the Boy Scouts, the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, the Kibbo Kift, the English Mistery (get that ‘i’), the English Array, Social Credit, Distributism, H. J. Massingham, Henry Williamson, Rolf Gardiner, John Hargrave, Jorian Jenks, Captain Pitt-Rivers and a few other eco-fascist fruitcakes, some of whom were detained under Regulation 18B. It was peripheral. And so too was England’s proud host of land colonies, repetitive essays in failed communality and spiritual root crops (which also failed). Not that Uncle Wangle ever went back to the land. He was merely a fellow traveller of bucolicism who discerned moral worth in camping. He revelled in discomfort. He was a man who loved a Primus stove and who insisted in defiance of all evidence to the contrary that a half-raw potato half-baked in the embers of a campfire was a peerless treat.

  When I was thirteen I put my foot down. I told my parents that I was no longer willing to be farmed out to Uncle Wangle and Auntie Ann during holidays. I’d had enough of being sent to kennels. Two years later Auntie Ann’s health was declining. On the second day of a holiday in Devon she had been hospitalised in Bideford where she would remain for a month. Uncle Wangle visited her twice a week, driving through the night. According to my father her frailty was more conspicuous than ever. Her freckled skin was papery, yellow. She appeared severely jaundiced. But it wasn’t her liver that was the problem. It was her heart. When she at last returned from Bideford she had open-heart surgery, a procedure that was then in its infancy. The operation was performed at the Royal South Hants Hospital in Southampton. It was apparently successful. When she was discharged she spent her days dozing. Her face was drawn and she was junky-thin. But she was in good spirits. As soon as he judged her fit Uncle Wangle took her away to convalesce. They went camping in the Cairngorms. They were accompanied by their arty and – it follows – entirely artless friends Heather and Bertie. A photo, taken by Heather, shows he
r and Bertie’s Series III MG Magnette, Uncle Wangle’s new half-timbered Morris Traveller, two tents, a boulder-strewn stream, a mountainside, Uncle Wangle beside an upturned plastic bucket, Bertie on a folding chair, Auntie Ann on a second folding chair shrouded in blankets and car rugs, wearing a bobble hat. Soon after they returned home she suffered complications resulting from pneumonia. She died on 25 July 1963. Uncle Wangle wrote in his diary ‘Black Thursday’.

  Despite my protests three years previously my parents, on the point of departing for Germany for the first time since 1938, insisted that I go to stay with him. Keep him company! Cheer him up! I failed. After a couple of days, worn down by his litany of complaints (car tyres, drains, workmen, weather, anything) and his deferred self-justification, oblique exculpation and sly self-pity, I packed my grip and went to crash with some friends who had rented a caravan at Sandhills, only a few yards from where in better times he had parked ‘Bredon’ on the shore. One night he turned up on the pretext of checking I was OK. There were girls from another van with us (one of them subsequently married a bigamous car dealer in Swindon). There was pop music. There were bottles of beer, cigarettes. I had never seen an adult look so woundedly bewildered. Outside his own milieu, which was halved by Auntie Ann’s death, he was at a loss.

  He was the loneliest man in the world. His wife was dead. Heather and Bertie had returned to Canada. In his widowhood he was virtually friendless. He absented himself from work. He drove aimlessly round rural England and Wales, sleeping alone in a tent made for two, bathing in brooks. He occasionally sailed with our near-namesake Brian Mead, editor of the Christchurch Times, but this was an exclusively marine acquaintanceship. His obstinacy and pride and self-delusion were such that he very likely never admitted to himself that it was his determination to adhere to his code of faith (or whatever it was) that had ruptured his world. When he died five years later, at the age of fifty-five, it was not so much from a broken heart as from an unconquerable isolation, from incomprehension of another world, one that her death had forced him to frequent if not quite inhabit. He was displaced. He was also temporally adrift: for my twenty-first birthday, a few months before he died, he gave me a model railway engine, a Hornby .00 shunter. It wasn’t a joke either.