Uncle Hank, né Harry in Evesham, 1907, also wore Aertex, hairy tweed and khaki drill trousers. He smelt of tobacco and of a sandalwood cologne and of coal-tar soap. He never married. Uncle Hank had been engaged before the war to a woman called Vera, who eventually married someone else.
Uncle Hank lived in digs. He lived in digs while at Birmingham University and he lived in digs when he went to work in that city’s town clerk’s office upon graduating. In 1934 he moved to Burton-on-Trent as deputy town clerk. In 1957 he was promoted and was appointed town clerk, which position he held till he retired in 1972. All those years in Burton he lived in digs with two spinster sisters. There was a hectic week in 1949 when they moved from one suburb of Burton to another, and he moved with them. They addressed each other as mister and miss. At weekends and for holidays he drove to Evesham. Evesham was always home for him. He’d never escaped from his mother – my grandmother. Nor from his sister – my maiden, literally maiden – Aunt Kitty, the Virgin Witch. And when he retired he of course returned to that house to live with Auntie Kitty. It is a life out of Larkin – the carefully delineated confines, the eschewal of the exotic, the Midlands topographies, the walk through the foggy streets back to the digs. But we know now that Larkin’s life was not quite Larkinesque. Both my mother, who was only too happy to entertain such ideas, and the woman with whom I lived throughout the Seventies used to wonder at the precise nature of the sibling relationship between Uncle Hank and Auntie Kitty. Whatever it was, they, like Uncle Wangle, were both childless. Uncle Os, who owned the pub surrounded by orchards and who became the owner of a string of hotels, once said of the three of them that ‘they lived life in fear of life’.
Uncle Hank had a molar extracted when it was poisoned by a strand of pipe tobacco that was caught between it and the gum. That might suggest a cavalier attitude to personal hygiene, but Uncle Hank was a keen washer even in the days when the house had no bathroom, and a tin tub was filled in the kitchen. He was a wet shaver, a cold showerer. When he was eleven he swallowed a watch-chain and never knowingly passed it. It was presumably still there, lurking in his duodenum, when his corpse entered the fire at Cheltenham crematorium on a fine brisk day in February 1978. Auntie Kitty cried more than sisters are wont to cry.
Evesham is where two landscapes conjoin in collision rather than elision, the Cotswolds and the Vale. The Cotswolds and their satellite Bredon Hill are all oolitic limestone. Their buildings are geologically determined, now golden, now silver, now grey – but despite chromatic variation they are essentially homogeneous. All quarried stone. All out of the immediately proximate ground, supra-local. From Stow on the Wold, the road to Evesham descends the Cotswold escarpment through Broadway, the show village of all England, the perfect place – immemorial cottages, weathered stone mottled with lichen, greenswards ancient as time itself. The landscape of drystone walls and limestone cottages is of course atypical of England – but it is so persistently photographed, so persistently held to represent some sort of ideal, that it becomes familiar, a norm.
This mendacious fantasy, this dream of olde Englande ends, harshly and suddenly, at the point where a bridge of the old Cheltenham–Birmingham railway crosses the Evesham road. Beyond the bridge a sort of normality was resumed: 1930s houses in their abundant forms lined the road. There was better to come. An entirely different country, geologically apart too. It might have been designed to offend the sensibility which responds favourably to the homogeneous good taste of Cotswolds.
The Vale of Evesham is a vital, scrappy delight, an accretion of intimate details, dense with incident. It is an unofficial landscape that is, so to speak, habitually swept beneath the carpet. Best place for it, too, was Uncle Hank’s conviction. Badsey, Willersey, Wickhamford, Childswickham: village upon village of fruitholdings, smallholdings, blinding greenhouses, rich earth, wheelbarrows, hurdles, wickets, glinting cloches, orchards, narrow paths between beanpoles, rusty rolls of wire, stacks of pallets, wooden warehouses, rotavators, crates, raised beds, palings, fences made of doors, unscared crows perched on scarecrows, punnets, hoes, corrugated iron, rudimentary dwellings in vegetable plots, shacks, sheds and roadside stalls selling pears and asparagus according to season, a landscape bright with the red industrial brick houses of market gardeners and with the caravans of itinerant pickers. Ordered lines of cabbages and kale stretched to the horizon. The light falling on furrows made them iridescent. It was an open-air factory. Polythene, stretched across fields, shone like an inland sea. It was a bodgerscape, knotted with twine, secured by Birmingham screwdrivers, roughly improvised. Everything was reused, a vehicle chassis here, a mattress there, damp burlap and mould-bloomed tarpaulin, prams, a jerry can. Uncle Hank’s despisal of it was prompted by its crudeness, by what he considered the ugliness of the structures. Many of the market gardeners were Italians. They had no sentimental bond with the land. They had rendered the Vale of Evesham an industrial site. The earth was, for them, merely a resource. It was unholy, commercial, material. If you grow greengages or cauliflowers for a living you are very likely disinclined to seek spiritual succour from the earth – unless you have been instructed in such practices by an animistic townie. Uncle Hank wanted everywhere to be like the Malverns or Bredon Hill, places that were sacred to him, places of which he had taken solipsistic possession, places that spoke to him, places that were repositories of mysteries, places that had been invested with the most morbid magic by Housman, who came from the Birmingham satellite town of Bromsgrove. Uncle Hank’s conception of these places was a sort of religiose affliction.
Piety demands that we respect other people’s faith, but what is there to respect in the delusion that a transcendental bond exists between people and place? Awe in the face of geological phenomena or overwhelming natural beauty is one thing. It is quite another to grant landscape powers other than affective ones. It is aberrant to conceive of the inanimate as though it possesses feelings or thoughts or human capabilities. It is daft enough to attribute these qualities to animals, but to hills and dales …
In Evesham, the exotic was represented by a singular trophy which captivated me when I was tiny, a Gothic arch formed by a whale’s jawbone, brought back to the town by some long-dead lad who’d signed up as a whaler in the 1870s. Uncle Hank never went whaling. So far as I know he never left England in his seventy-one years. To have done so might have cracked the shell built of layers of habit which protected him from, say, the Brummie blue-collars who used to picnic in the park where the whale’s jawbone stands, who used to ride in the pedalos on the Avon. He enjoyed eavesdropping on them and mimicking their twanging inanities, a task he prosecuted with unmistakable despisal for the subjects of these parodic monologues. He had no fondness for them whatsoever. City dwellers were targets; townies were targets (he excused himself); towns themselves were targets, especially towns that had been built after the advent of canals and railways and which were not thus reliant on local materials for their buildings, e.g., Burton-on-Trent. Under his stewardship Burton destroyed itself. The mega-brewers, whom Uncle Hank sucked up to and who plied him with cases of limited-edition beers each Christmas, were men whose all too English mores he admired. They were given carte blanche to demolish the great brick warehouses that defined Burton, the brewery of the Empire. The oast houses, the maltings, the cooperages – they all went. They were expendable (and Victorian). Cities are temporary things. Only the country, the specially sanctioned parts of the country, are eternal.
Uncle Hank’s and Uncle Wangle’s bucolicism may have been a state of mind – they were not, after all, farriers or farmers or hedgers – but they certainly practised the sort of thrift associable with the rural indigent. Uncle Wangle, who much preferred to be called Reg, owed his name to a supposedly charming childhood capacity to persuade people to give him things. Uncle Scrounger would not have had the same ring to it but would better have summoned his oblivious, unembarrassed tendency to ‘borrow’ and never to return. He was happy to abandon his vegetarianism if s
omeone else had bought the meat. Uncle Hank was even more costive. My father, who earned less than him and had a family to support, was serially swindled by him over family wills – small sums certainly, but that’s not the point – and over what turned out to be an interest-free loan for the Aston Martin. Uncle Hank persistently tried to touch my parents on behalf of Auntie Kitty, who had never worked. And when Uncle Wangle, who was over six feet tall, died, Uncle Hank, who was barely five foot eight, had all of Wangle’s meagre wardrobe shortened to fit him so that had my father, also six foot, been inclined to claim a share in it, it would have been no use.
Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle never met Uncle Eric. They belonged to the country. Or so they deluded themselves. And they never made much effort to dissemble their contemptuous bemusement that their brother, my father, should have married a city girl. They wouldn’t have thought much of Uncle Eric. I was apprised from an early age of their footling snobbery, of the hierarchy of places they believed in, of their explicit conviction that an affinity with England’s grebe and pheasant was aesthetically and – more importantly – morally superior to a fondness, a weakness, for the fleshpots of the city.
Some fleshpot, Southampton: the Port Said of the Solent.
A poor whore has only to sit in a window in Derby Road, and a major police operation will be launched. All the coppers who’ve been on Cottage Patrol squeeze out from beneath the rafters to race a mile east from the Common. Their route takes them past Great Aunt Doll’s chaotic bungalow where there were peals of dirty laughter and sweet sherry and sweet Marsala, and a room heated to eighty degrees and fish and chips for a dozen in an enamel bowl, and gossip and ribbing and silly stories, and gaspers, and will someone let the dog out else he’s going to wee on the couch, and Jonathan you better go with him if you want a widdle ’cos Eric’s been and done a big one and you won’t be able to get in the karzy there for half an hour – ooh the whiff! And there was chortling wheezing and the feeling that you might be alive.
COMANCHE
The lithe back of the brave in the foreground; the petroleum sheen of his black hair; the headband; the unoxidised tomahawk (Made In Birmingham); the wigwam; the Winchester ’73; the smoke signals like freak cloud formations; the heliographic bottle shard …
All these could be staged through a compact between my brain and the back garden – more or less, give or take. What couldn’t be staged were: depth of field; Monument Valley; canyons’ cliffs; Technicolor’s peculiarities; squaws.
At the age of seven it occurred to me that there was a squaw-shaped void in my life. This coincided with my leaving Holmwood School. My parents had been asked to remove me: they pleaded on my behalf, to no avail. They were inured to my misbehaviour: Mrs Douglas Guest, wife of the cathedral organist, and Mrs Morgan, a vicar’s wife, were among those who sent me home from their daughters’ parties for infractions of pass-the-parcel’s rules or spitting out disgusting food. The school too had had enough of my unwitting disruptiveness. I hadn’t meant to projectile-vomit melted butter in class: I had requested half a pound for breakfast and The Third German Girl had obliged me. I hadn’t meant to yelp every time I was pinched by Janet Wheelwright who lived in a house with its own squash court. I hadn’t meant to step in dog shit and trail it through the school. But I had. I was castigated too for my persistent lateness, and my reveries. It was at Holmwood that I first suffered the intermittent hallucinations which have visited me all my life.fn1 Then, like my dreams, they often involved loutishly aggressive sheep. I was sitting on a bench outside the windowless room where we hung our coats. A flock ascended the staircase towards me. I gasped with delight. This was a secret world which, instinctively, I knew not to tell my parents about. Rather, then, like masturbation, but without RSI.
Because I was too young yet to enter the Cathedral School I was sent for two terms to the Swan School, founded in 1931 by the redoubtable Miss Swanton whom I feared and adored. I craved her approbation. She was a burly gust of tweed out of Margaret Rutherford by Nancy Spain. The school occupied a timber-framed house of c. 1500 which would be destroyed in 1970 when Rackham, the vandal employed as City Engineer, built an inner relief with a spur on stilts that led nowhere and was inevitably known as the ski jump. I had to wear a uniform: navy blue blazer with white swan on the breast pocket, navy blue and grey quartered cap with a second white swan. This was a novelty which I enjoyed. My parents didn’t. All that expense for just two terms; hence, no doubt, their pleading with Mrs Mears at Holmwood.
The beginning of Easter term 1954 was exciting. I got to walk to and from the Swan School with Roger, who had attended it since he was four. He introduced me to parts of Salisbury’s mediaeval grid that I didn’t know, intersecting streets which allowed us to take a variety of routes, to explore alleys and courtyards safe in each other’s company. But after a few weeks he left for Brazil, where his father had been seconded by the Royal Mail to assist in the planning of São Paulo’s telephone network.
I was alone among unknown antagonists who were bigger and rougher and maler than Janet Wheelwright. Many had three years’ start on me during which they had formed gangs and alliances. This first experience of a single-sex environment was a shock. Janet Wheelwright apart, I missed the girls: Liz, Elizabeth, Jenny, Sue, Clare, the two further Janets, Penny, even the haughty Caroline, who seldom deigned to speak to me and who was chauffeured in a tudorbethan lodge on wheels by her mother, a headscarf rumoured to know the Queen. No girls meant no calm solicitude, no sweet fragrance of talc and cleanliness, but, rather, the soilpipe smell of almost a hundred shrieking, blubbing, blundering, chucking, grubby, boisterous, energetic, savage, merciless small boys.
And there was another smell, a far worse smell. One of the permutations of route that Roger and I could follow through the grid took us up Trinity Street. It’s no doubt fitting that a city whose major industries were god and war should have in its centre a dozen almshouses for Christ’s brides, old soldiers, pious widows of the fallen etc. Trinity Hospital was crumbly red brick and worn stone quoins. It has been grotesquely restored when it should have been allowed to perish like the generations within it. A Wrennish chapel stands on one side of a courtyard which we investigated unnoticed. It was too ordered to appeal to us. Nonetheless some time later I did creep in again, alone this time, daring myself to trespass. A parchment woman was upright and immobile on a chair by the chapel’s door. She was unconscionably old, older than my paternal grandmother, older even than my father’s nanny Mrs Hopkins, who could remember reading the news of General Custer’s death at the battle of the Little Bighorn during the smallpox summer of 1876, older than anyone I had ever seen. She appeared not to notice me. And as I left, silently, a man shuffled out of his set towards her. He was, incredibly, as old as she was. These people must belong to the third sex, which I had thitherto believed was the domain of gypsies. They were all matt, all dried up. They bore the complexion of split cement sacks, which caused me to shiver. Trinity Hospital was heaven’s (or hell’s) antechamber where the pallid waited for judgment. In late winter they emitted no odour. You could not smell them. You could not smell their mortal fear. You could not smell their food. Initially the reek was faint and fleeting. By the time my nostrils had got a message to my brain it had disappeared, an olfactory vanishing act. Such instances of evanescence did not last. As the weather grew warmer so did the odour increase. Even though there were days when I detected nothing it was becoming ever more assertive, more frequent, more protracted. It was putrid, clammy, vegetal and carnal. It prompted disgust, then dread, then confused compassion. This was the smell of old people as they relinquished life. This was the stink of death, as rank as that of the long-hung pheasants Padre inflicted on my parents. That route past Trinity Hospital was far from the only choice. I could have taken St Ann Street and Love Lane, or Payne’s Hill where the German spy who worked at a tannery had lived, or grey Rampart Road’s raised pavement, or Dolphin Street and Culver Street. But these were the ways I did not go, for I w
as drawn to putrefaction, I took shameful pleasure in whatever disgusted me. Were the old living corpses who began to rot before they died? Did maggots seethe beneath their skin? Did they flap helplessly to repel the rodents that gnawed their limbs? The rats in the nearby Friary slums were said to be as large as cats.
Mine was not a case of nostalgie de la boue. That would imply a yearning to return to brute sordor. I had never left it. It had merely been shepherded into abeyance by the everyday presence of girls who even in prepuberty insouciantly inflict couth on the rough puppies that will grow into the dogs called men. My mother had wanted a girl. And I wanted a sister among whose contemporaries I would find a squaw. Boys with sisters had girls on tap. It was easy for them. Everyone knew that.
My gregarious parents had a quick turnaround in new acquaintances. Not because a mutual animus was struck, though that did inevitably sometimes occur. It was, rather, due to the transitory nature of Salisbury’s population. Service postings were often less than two years. People came and went. Their children came and went throughout my schooldays. At the Swan School there were menacing charts on the wall with our names listed down the left. Along the line from each name, performance in class and obedience were marked by shiny triangular stickers. Blue and green indicated achievement and good manners, shit-brown and Satan-black were the signs of academic failure and moral impoverishment. At the end of my first term I had an averagely polychrome horizontal mix. Now that Roger had gone I considered my best friend to be a boy called Richard Hallmark, whose chestnut hair was beautiful. We never spoke. But he didn’t hit me. In all likelihood he did not wish to add to the log of his offences. He had acquired nothing but browns and blacks. He was the only boy in the school to have done so. Advised by Miss Swanton that he was a disgrace he burst into tears. I wanted to comfort him. When we resumed for the summer term he wasn’t there. Perhaps he felt himself unworthy of the school. Perhaps he had been asked to go elsewhere. Some weeks later I learned that he had moved. His father had been posted from CDE Porton Down to Cornwall. A far-off wild sea county which I knew of as the home of my father’s late uncle, the Revd John Tarpley, vicar of Roche, and of his daughter Molly, who had enjoyed the privilege of sitting – inapt word – for no less a coyly erotic painter than Russell Flint. A far-off wild sea county where production of Sarin and VX had begun at CDE Nancekuke.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 7