The gallery of Government House’s squash court in Romer Road off Wavell Road. Both roads named after GOCs of Southern Command whose residence it was in the decade between the Longford Estate selling it and the outbreak of war in 1939 when it became a mess. For the first time I watched the only ball game (table tennis excepted) that I’d be any good at: and I wasn’t that good at either. The windowless brick shed was clammy and cold. The walls streaked with black rubber. An archive of ancient sweat as rank as market cattle. The ball’s scorched reek. The ball’s repertoire of screams, squeaks, dulls thuds, the ailing yelp when it struck the tin. Squash seemed sordid. But I wanted to play because this was what men did. They panted, they grunted, they cursed. They joshed: chulaka, jammy bugger, well played sir! My father lost. I was hardly proud that Glynn beat a man who was exactly twice his age, for that would have been disloyal, even traitorous. But I was mysteriously excited. For this was a triumph of a young man. I would be a young man in the unimaginably far future and I would no longer have to take the rent folded inside the rentbook next door but one to Glynn’s stepmother Mrs Edwards to whom no Christian name was attached in either the second or the third person. Always thus: Mrs Edwards.
Such a form was common enough in the nominative regulations and vocative rules that the 1950s inherited from a far distant century, and which were to be mastered like declensions from yet further distant.
Thus:
Mrs Sadd. Often in the construction Mrs Sadd and her Bedlington. She dressed exclusively in suits as pallid as her beige-ish rinsed hair, as her massively powdered face, as her lamb-like terrier whose feebly sloping lower back lent it the unresolved silhouette of a Jowett Jupiter or Westland Healey. Did my parents know her Christian name? What had become of Mr Sadd? Had such a person existed?
Miss Spottiswoode, who lived in The Friary, and Mrs Manning played bridge with my mother. They were, like Mrs Sadd, a generation older than my parents. Perhaps it was that gulf that occasioned the form of address. But the Viennese Mrs Lambert was Lammi: her son had risen enviably high in Hilton Hotels, further proof that to succeed you had to leave Salisbury. And Mrs Hill, another bridge player, was so old she was ancient yet she was always Babs. When I was eleven she gave me a fresh Fontana edition of a book called The Rare Adventure by her monocled nephew Sir Bernard Fergusson, Baron Ballantrae, Chindit, Arabist, black-ops specialist in Palestine, Black Watch Brigadier, Governor General of New Zealand et al. I haven’t quite got round to it yet. Nor have I got round to Born Free, a gift from a bossy Scot called Belle who was Mrs Hiddlestone to me and a cousin of George Adamson, guardian of the celebrity lioness.
My parents referred to Bowns the toothy farmer and dairyman as Hawk Bowns and to his headscarfed, down-in-the-mouth, lightly moustachioed, bicycle-pushing, milkbottle-carrying wife as Rene (pron. Reen) – no surname required. For all I knew they addressed them as Hawk and Rene. I didn’t address him with anything other than a nod in reply to his grunts, which he punctuated with lavish expectorations that landed at my feet.
One autumnal dusk in 2003 I was walking with a couple of friends down Cow Lane near Pritchett’s old brick abattoir when an elderly woman and a man whom I took to be her son appeared from the orchard and told us, courteously enough, that we were on private property. I explained that I was revisiting a site of my childhood. We got talking. Mrs Meades! Oh yes. She had taught one of her other children, his sister. Her best friend had been Rene Bowns, now departed. I said that of course I remembered Rene and Hawk.
‘Who?’
‘Hawk. Rene’s husband. Hawk.’
‘Eh? Who? No. No, Rene’s husband was Bill.’
It was then, half a century late, that it dawned on me that Hawk was my father’s covert name for him, a sobriquet which honoured the shining orbs of sputum and paraboloid trails of mucus that Mr Bowns launched from the crevices of his respiratory tract. I managed to keep a straight face. We walked with them across the wooden bridge towards Harnham Road. It occurred to me too that maybe this single-track, unmade lane was Cow Lane to no one save my father. I realised that I never heard anyone else refer to it thus.
Barbara Marks was Miss Marks to me, Barbara to my parents. She was the only one of my mother’s fellow teachers with whom that degree of intimacy was broached, though they hardly met out of school. Her sister Betty who worked at the pungently leather-scented Tills, the saddlers, was Miss Marks to me and to my parents.
The other teachers were Miss Ellaby, the terrifying headmistress on a sit-up-and-beg who was succeeded by Mr Wood, known to be Arthur but not so addressed; to my mother’s amusement he was referred to in the third person by certain pupils as Sir and she was unable to persuade them of their solecism.
Mrs Webber-Taylor was married to Inspector Webber-Taylor (notable for the exemplary cleanliness of his shoes: I lived in dread of meeting him and never did).
Mrs Ponting’s husband was Jim, not Mr Ponting; this for reasons possibly connected to his being perpetually homesick for the north-east which marked him as a queer fish to be pitied.
Tom and Mildred Nicholas were known as The Must-We? He was a short-tempered martinet. She was his embittered victim. They had recently moved from Salisbury to a gaunt house in a forested Carmarthenshire valley. It had been built for an early nineteenth-century ironmaster the ruins of whose forge stood nearby. My father was not entirely oblivious to the couple’s aggressive dreariness but their property was bordered by a fast-flowing river (giggling, gurgling), a tributary of the Towy notable for sewin. And they had invited him to fish whilst we were en route to Padre’s cottage on the Teifi. An invitation which he had neglected to inform my mother of. It was not until we had reached the Brecon Beacons that he mentioned that we were going to drop in on them, as though it were some sort of treat. My mother was incredulous. ‘Must we?’ She repeated this question with increasing irritation. ‘Must we?’
The Pigdens rented Ken James’s house. They had the ill manners to take his phone number when their tenancy ended. He was a smugly ambitious young bank manager whose looks were appropriately porcine. The Pigbins.
Major-General (retd) Arthur Austin of the Royal Army Dental Corps was Gen to my father and the Friday night regulars over their ale at the White Jam Tart. In all other company he was Arthur. Smoking killed him having first stained his teeth mahogany. His wife was jocularly referred to as Mrs Gen but answered to Gladys. Poor Gladys. The spinach incident put me off that vegetable till adulthood: a pressure cooker exploded; boiling green leaves clung to her face; plastic surgery (which showed, how it showed). Their younger daughter was Bunty and their ad-man son-in-law Smoothie Derek, Smoothie being omitted when he was present, smoothly mixing drinks, smoothly smoking du Maurier, smoothly drawling.
The formidable founder, owner and headmistress of the Swan School was never anything other than Miss Swanton. Her long-term companion whom she had married in secret was, however, never anything other than Teddy Bear, a hearty stout moustachioed retired Gunners colonel almost as tweedy, almost as masculine, almost as baritone as she was. It is improbable that these two delightful people had a sexual relationship. But one never knows.
The Reverend Ronald Leigh-Jones, widower, had no sexual relationship with his timid spinsterish second wife. He was a rambunctious Welshman who often fished with my father. I first met him when I was eight. I returned home late one Saturday afternoon to find him naked, clutching a whisky bottle in front of the sitting-room fire with skeins of soaked longjohns, socks, vests, pullovers steaming on the floor and the fireguard. He had married Lesley for her small inheritance. He neglected to consummate the union. He spent her money on hard liquor, his vicious Jack Russell terrier, field sports, maintenance of an Austin A35 and what turned out to be an insalubrious crumbling cottage with an earth closet near Lampeter. It was not a question of his being indifferent to sex. By his first marriage (to a woman whom he drove mad and had had sectioned) he was father to a son and a daughter whose lubricious escapades delighted him. He was a devoted read
er of the News of the World, which he called ‘Crime and Cunt on Sunday’: he would bring this newspaper, far more sordid then than in later years, into services he was conducting as a locum and read it during the boring bits. On one occasion he left a service to buy a copy from a nearby newsagent. Except by Lesley, he was addressed as Padre.
This was a boon to me, for I was spared the formal Missis Gamboge, Squadron Leader Mauve which was my generation’s duty. Mister with no surname suffixed was uncouth, just not done, hideously non-U (that frivolously snobbish burden that the wretched Nancy Mitford constructed for the fearful middle class). Captain or Colonel with no surname was just about acceptable if spoken by an officer of superior rank in a strop. The sheer irregularity of the declensions was trying. There were more exceptions to the rules than there were adherents. Of course had I had the nerve … but I didn’t, didn’t dare call Major Worrin Tigger as my parents did, didn’t even dare refer to him as Tigger or to his Studebaker-driving wife as Peggy, didn’t dare address my parents as anything other than Mummy and Daddy: Mummy was still Mummy when I was middle-aged and she was struggling to utter her last dry rasping imprecations with her memory so shot I could have called her anything but didn’t.
Too timid, too, to echo the nicknames that were as much a part of their private patois as the doting Bobie they called each other. As well as Alan Arse Smell, Smoothie Derek and the Pigbins there were Laundry Maidment, The Flemish Mare, Bloodyman Brayshaw, Young Lochinvar, Prig Prior, Eggy Baba, Dafydd ap, The Drug Peddler, Little N and Little N, King Duddo, Malcolm Sargent, Offupthathill, Popeye, The Commie, Keep Death Off The Road, Chrissypegs, Fave o’clork, Byron.
Television afforded endless opportunities: Ronnie Barker was Len Gill because of a supposed resemblance to an army land agent of that name; Brian Jones became Mrs Wormold, a character in the sitcom Hugh and I played by Patricia Hayes, who did indeed share his maxillary armature; football was The Ladzz; a moustached, Ulster-accented weather-forecaster Thonduray Wuthuh. It was embarrassment as much as timidity that dissuaded me from adopting these sobriquets: they belonged to their world of two, a world in which I was an intruder.
The titled allowed me the electric thrill of speaking a Christian name (albeit prefixed) whilst face to face with a grown-up. But there weren’t enough of them, and their grand houses. Only Sir Westrow Hulse, Bt. and Sir Reginald Kennedy-Cox.
Hulse was of the seventh generation of his family to reside at Breamore House (Elizabethan, big, mechanical) in the Avon valley ten miles south of Salisbury. He was much married, warm, genial, generous. His land agent, Dennis Stanford, gave me what he assured me was a valuable pre-revolutionary American postal stamp. It turned out to be worthless. Innocently, I assumed this to be a mistake on Stanford’s part.
Kennedy-Cox was a self-important dilettante and stage-door johnnie. He described himself as a playwright. George Devine, on the money, described him as ‘weird’ and ‘a rich old queer’. Nonetheless Devine accepted his financial support when setting up the English Stage Company. Kennedy-Cox had been knighted for having established, with Harold Davidson (the future vicar of Stiffkey and circus performer who died without honours), the Docklands Settlement – one of several early c20 public school ‘missions’ to the East End, which gave men of his class an opportunity to mix with rough boy boxers who didn’t wipe their arse for lack of Izal and Bronco: I was not to his taste. He lived in the Close at Arundells (Georgian, dull) and died there in 1967. Eighteen years later the house was bought by a still weirder rich old queer, Sir Edward Heath. The characterisation of this Herculean grudge-bearer as ill-mannered is imprecise. He was rather, gauche, quite without manners, as though ignorant of their very existence. A visitor, waiting to see Heath and abandoned by the major-domo who had admitted him, went in search of a toilet. The one he found was ‘like an abattoir’. Its walls and floor were streaked with rivers of blood, not yet dry.
EELS
In early spring I’d sit at dusk on a willow stump where the rivers join. The floated meadows between them taper to form what my father and no one else called Pritchett’s Point, an ever-mutating collision of mud, ducks’ nests, branches, several gauges and colours of polythene, whole swollen drowned calf, reeds, sacking, broken chair legs, fleece, treadless tyres, soggy rope, catkins, brightly bobbing plastic, grass cuttings, bones, would-be trees. This inventory should make meliorists of us all: when Constable painted here, at the very spot where I sat, the dark green waters of the Avon and the Nadder were thick with pulp and rags from paper mills and with human faeces. That’s what the past smelled of.
My purpose in sitting here was to witness serpentine armies of silvery eels slither across the twilit meadows.
Unlike those south of Salisbury at Britford and further downstream near the octagonal and quasi-carceral Matrimony Farm, most of Harnham’s floated meadows were by now in desuetude. Their carriers, spillways and tail drains were blocked with silt. They had been maintained and their waterflow had been controlled by the drowners who operated rudimentary hatches. When I was very young I had a very old neighbour, a veteran of both the First World War and the Boer War. He lived opposite The Rose and Crown, next to Sid the Butcher’s shop and rejoiced in the name of Mr Thick. He spoke in the broadest Wiltshire accent, never wore a collar, collected tobacco in his dense moustache. He was among the last of the drowners. He had succumbed to the trade disease of arthritis which had withered his arms and contorted his bullish body. He spent much of the day leaning against his garden gate, gripping the wicket with twisted fingers, waiting for an audience. He captivated me with stories of his watery omnipotence: I believed that he was some kind of weather. He created floods. He delighted me with the information that in foreign parts – that is, a few valleys away – meadows were known as meads and drowners as meadmen. He said serpentine armies of silvery eels slithered across the meadows in twilight.
Sitting on a stump shivering as day after day gloamed into night after night it became apparent that he had once seen something exceptional which, in time, he persuaded himself was commonplace. Or, more likely, he had so wholly succumbed to eel lore that he believed he had witnessed these amphibian migrations which were (and remain) unvalidated. I wanted to believe him. I was fascinated by aquatic peculiarities – the Severn bore and the Garonne mascaret, leaping salmon, Tarn Beck’s trout traps, Seathwaite Tarn’s sinister blackness, the sluggish hell of Denver Sluice, pikes’ omnivorous viciousness. I had come face to jaw with a pike at just this confluence. It had immediately disappeared into waterweed, more scared of me than I was of it. Nonetheless I got out of the water smartish, I knew what these prognathous beasts were capable of. A couple of years previously whilst eviscerating one, my father had found a baby coot in its stomach. The abundant tall stories about pike had a basis in actuality. This particular one about eels didn’t. When my parents moved 400 yards from 55 Harnham Road to 4 Watersmeet Road Mr Thick was long dead. I was now fifteen. Yet I still felt inchoately ashamed that my younger self had been taken in, irritated that Mr Thick, whom I regarded as a friend, should have misled me. Had he?fn1
My father was contemptuous of folkwisdom, the bluff of those too idle to observe nature. The notion that a swan could break a man’s arm was nothing more than evidence of indolent credulousness. Eels taking to land were figments of stale imagination. His interest in eels was, of course, as quarry, as a challenge. Living beside a river meant that he could fish every day. It also allowed him a place to set an eel trap, to fish by proxy.
There was, in the 1960s, no diminution in eel stocks or, indeed in the stocks of any of the species which inhabited the rivers of the Avon and Stour basins. Nonetheless licences to trap eels were seldom granted. So he didn’t bother to apply for one. Scratch a fisherman and you’ll find a poacher. The trap that he built comprised three small bicycle wheels that he welded to an axle about 1.5 metres long. Fine chicken wire was wrapped around them to form a cylinder. At one end of this cylinder was an ever-narrowing funnel which a hungry eel coul
d just squeeze through. At the other end was a removable shelf which would be baited with bones, carcasses, entrails, anything. Once through the funnel the eels could not escape out due to the sharpness of the wire around the aperture: this might be called the pike’s teeth principle.
In late March, early April I had to haul this home-made eel trap from the river at the bottom of the garden. I slid into the cold, cold water and clumsily looped two ropes, of which my father held the ends, beneath the cage. Shivering, I got back on to the bank and took one of the ropes. Heave! We hauled the trap on to the lawn. The glistening snakes squirmed in their wire prison. I ran to the house tripping over the towels I had wrapped around me.
My father grilled them on an improvised barbecue. My mother poached them in a court-bouillon which I have never been able to replicate. It is true: there is always something you forget to ask. I’d meant to get the recipe from her. Too late now, too late.
EGG BEATEN IN MILK
‘The Persian Gulf is the asshole of the world and Basra is eighty miles up it.’ That was Harry Hopkins, F. D. Roosevelt’s adviser on diplomacy.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 10