An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  Major J. W. Meades of Paiforce (Persia and Iraq Force) commanded No. 3 Petrol Depot outside Basra. Shortly before he was demobbed in February 1946 he had his cook make up a variety of spice mixes. Each mix was then packed into a dozen or so cans the size of a domestic bully beef can. The cans, about eighty altogether, were rendered airtight with solder and numbered. He had also had engineers at this vast depot in southern Iraq weld a hefty iron boat which he used when shooting wild duck on Hammar Lake. The cans of spice, the boat and its unreliable Evinrude outboard motor were brought back to England on an oil tanker captained by Alex Henney, a distant cousin whom I never met. I imagined him to be dashing and moustachioed. He was not to be confused with another distant cousin Alec Rich, an important electrical goods retailer in Coventry whom I also never met. He, surely, was bald with grocer’s stripes.

  The outboard, whose use was anyway proscribed by the Dean & Chapter, self-appointed ruler of Salisbury’s rivers, lay for years in the flaking stalls of Pritchett’s old brick abattoir along with worn harnesses, splintered spokes, holed churns, torn sacks, worn shackles, wonky hives. A different section of the small building housed Pritchett’s spruce apiarist kit: a sort of frogman’s suit, smokers like oil cans, nets, massive gauntlets. This is where the boat was kept until my parents moved in 1962 to the new house beside the river 200 yards downstream of it: the one move they made in their entire marriage. The boat long outlived its matt silver outboard. It lasted till the mid-Seventies when the rusting hull could no longer support the thick layers of British racing green paint.

  The spices had given out a few years earlier: there had been no diminution of their potency nor of my father’s enthusiasm for a twice weekly ‘curry’. That is the word he used. The dish it described had nothing in common with English curry, an aberration of the post-war years confected, apparently, by boiling raw curry powder in condensed milk, pouring this sauce on to leftover meat or fowl which was then reheated. Accompanied by bananas, dried fruits, chutney, coconut. I suffered this at the table of friends’ parents: I never commented on the ‘sham’ but would, in a conspiracy of smugness, laughingly grass them up to my parents who had taught me that this was the applicable word.

  His curry was different, too, from the aggressively chilli’d assaults of Indian restaurants, so rare in smalltown England till the mid-Sixties that my father would travel to London specifically to punish his jejunum. On one of the occasions that I accompanied him we discovered that the restaurant we sought had moved from a row of single-storey shops erected on a bomb site at the southern end of Tottenham Court Road to Mitcham. No alternative was admissible. We set off by underground, overground and foot to that distant southern suburb where, miraculously, the customerless restaurant, beside the remnants of a village green, was still open for lunch. My father spoke his still serviceable Urdu to the uncomprehending Bengali staff who, far from being flattered, were bewildered, even offended. We were served a lunch of stinging stew the colour of Cardinal Red tile polish.

  His taste for such buccal infernos was at odds with the curry he cooked himself. This was subtle, delicate, fairly dry, and often incorporating rice in the manner of a pulao or pilau or pilaf – the countless names signify that the method is common to countless kitchens. Yet the flavours of his dishes were, it seemed, sui generis, anything but common. After the soldered tins had yielded their last he would buy spices wherever he could find them, and later I’d buy them for him in Euston. But even with an arsenal of the full Rajah range he could not recreate the evanescent fragrance of Iraq ’46. In 1987, six years after my father died and three years after I had seen him on Lewes railway station, I ate at an Afghan restaurant in a Putney backstreet. The flavours astonished me. They were familiar. They were those of my childhood. They took me back as surely as particular registers of chalky royal blue and metallic carmine, the scent of maltings, Pears’s rendition of ‘The Foggy Foggy Dew’. Decades dissolved. The Paiforce cook who had prepared the spice mixes must have been Afghan. Had my father not known?

  His own curries became increasingly coarse, ever closer to those of the Taj Mahals, Shah Jahans, Agra Palaces and New Bangalores which proliferated in the later Sixties. Nonetheless, he persisted in inflicting them on anyone who happened to be around. Perhaps his palate had become blunted, perhaps he deluded himself. He was touchy about anything he had made himself and enjoyed the rigorously uncritical support of my mother and my dutiful silence. So the curries had to be consumed.

  So did the wines.

  He had long harboured the desire to make wine, and even whilst the new house was being built he constructed a crude press, skimmed a couple of instructional books and planted vines. The grape was a species of Seyval hybrid, chosen because it was one of the rare red varieties that were adjudged to flourish in the English climate. It flourished all too well. The crop was stubbornly abundant in even the most miserable summers. The vines were resistant to downpours, frost, hail, everything. The wine they yielded was notably nasty: an odour of slum drains presaged a mouthful of soiled tissues in a thin acidic suspension. It was of course no more undrinkable than many of the cheap wines commercially available in the 1960s, wines he would not have dreamed of buying, which he mocked as having been ‘brewed from banana skins in the cellars of Ipswich’, an epithet which may have been his but was equally likely filched from Cyril Ray or Pamela Vandyke Price. New parenthood blunts discrimination: the child is the world’s first-ever child and a marvel. Such blind joy dissipates with nappies, howling, sleeplessness. And so it did with Chateau Riverain, eventually. He ceased to delude himself of its qualities. But he continued to tend the vines, watching the fruits ripen, picking them. He took pleasure in the process of production and continued to vinify the loutish grapes, to another end. With his friend Joe Gubbins, a GP and a JP, he built a rudimentary still which transformed the wine into a crude, dizzyingly strong spirit, a cudgelling anaesthetic fit for the most exigent derelict and doubtless liable to maim. This moonshining malarkey went on for several years until Joe’s possibly unconnected death.

  Without, of course, having looked into it, they were, so far as they knew, within the law provided that they did not sell the stuff. Still, they were cautious about whom they gave unwelcome presents to. The next-door neighbour but one, John Silver, a meek, nervy, middle-ranking Porton scientist, was perhaps more cautious than most. He was seen surreptitiously tipping a glass that had been forced on him into a flowerbed. His meekness may have derived from his ancient mother’s habit of calling John’s younger brother ‘my lovely son’ whilst John was merely ‘my son’.

  My father was more cavalier in his earlier illegal pursuits. When I was small he continued his prewar practice of carrying a Lee-Enfield .22 in the car. He’d shoot anything loitering in roadside fields.fn1 Outside the New Forest there were few deer in those days. Hares were sometimes abundant near the ruins of Vanity and at Soming, though they were seldom to be seen near roads. Partridges and wood pigeons were more common than pheasants, which were not yet intensively reared. Up on the desolate downs where the shadows of clouds threatened the very existence of day there were rabbits keen for the pot. He would rarely get out of the car. He would take the rifle from the back seat, load a single bullet and fire. The crack of the gun was thrilling. There was no drama in death, death lacked death throes, the quarry flopped over with anticlimactic finality. I did fear that he’d kill Sugary Bun, but the first Posty got there before him.

  Myxomatosis and the police put an end to the rifle in the car. The rozzers – an inspector and a silently invasive rookie – made an annual visit to ask him to renounce his gun licence. He would offer them a drink. They understood (comedy moment, man to man) that Sir wasn’t the type to be holding up sub-post offices! No! But what if it was to fall into the wrong hands, what then, Sir, eh? He was smilingly unpersuaded, the conversation moved on. He jocularly bid them farewell: ‘Look forward to seeing you next year.’ Once they had gone – one at a time through that narrow front door and bet
ween the trunks supporting the porch – he would castigate their attempted infringement of his liberty, deride their ignorance of sport, fulminate against whatever pompous half-wit or cocky smart-alec happened to be Home Secretary. His irritation was exacerbated by his embarrassment at having being reproved, no matter how mildly, whilst I was in the house, very likely listening at the door. He considered it a sabotage of his paternal mystique – not that he’d have put it thus. He had an instinctive resistance to being told what to do and an empirical distaste for authority. He was hypersensitive to rank, to social class, to the gradations of hierarchy. He wished to believe in the status quo, in the literality of aristocracy – government by the best.

  So the inescapable fact that the pursuit of power and the exercise of authority were undertaken by anyone but the best – by fanatics, blackguards, fraudsters, preachers, cranks, liars, bullies, clowns, believers, know-alls, know-nothings, seditious lawyers in loincloths, any lawyer – seemed to him a perpetual betrayal and everlasting truth. Before his posting to the command of No. 155 Petrol Depot near Kirkuk he had spent the year 1942 at Meerut in what was then United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). He had arrived in time to witness the outbreak of unrest that followed Gandhi’s and Congress’s demand for independence and the aggravation of sectarian, religious and racial fissures which Jinnah, Gandhi, Bose and the Princes – ideologically disparate, united in self-interest – enthusiastically exploited rather than bridged. The British suppression of civil disobedience and riots was selective along religious lines. Hindus were targeted. The Muslim minority was spared, its loyalty was bought so that it might provide necessary, willing, non-mutinous cannon fodder.

  He was thirty-three, old to be learning about politicians’ duplicity and the gulf between their interests and those of the masses. But he did learn. He would subsequently rail against Mountbatten for his inability to foresee the predictable consequences of clumsily hurried partition. He equally resented Mountbatten’s most vigorous and astute critic, the by now dotard Churchill. He was convinced that Churchill’s government had, early in 1945, maliciously betrayed him. It forbade a handful of Paiforce officers – him among them – to accept the Order of the Patriotic War, First Class, in recognition of their having supplied the Red Army with petrol and aviation fuel through the Persian Corridor. He was chuffed by the honour, miffed not to receive it. What he most rued was the loss of its attendant perks. These included free travel for life for him and his family throughout the USSR and its satellites, a pension in roubles, a vodka allowance.

  That Churchill might have been otherwise occupied and not personally involved in this vindictive decision he dismissed as ridiculous. He voted Labour. The new government would surely be more sympathetic. He wrote to Manny Shinwell, one of Attlee’s several Secretaries of State for War, a Red Clydesider, faded now to pink maybe but still a fellow traveller, a friend of the USSR, our ally. No reply. He wrote to John Morrison, since 1942 Tory MP for Salisbury. Many months later the future First Baron Margadale’s letter arrived. He had looked into it with all the resources available to him but there was, regrettably, nothing that he could do. The decision was irreversible.

  It was all too clear that Morrison had succumbed, he had adopted the evasive habits of the political class of which he was now a member.

  Which was a disappointment, for was not Morrison sound? After all, he was a keen sportsman, he wore a bristling moustache, he had held the rank of major in the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, the regiment into which my father had been commissioned. This presumption of fellowship on my father’s part was a sentimental delusion. The accidental parities of wartime had swiftly evaporated.

  Morrison went back to being a multimillionaire landowner.

  And my father went back to being a sales rep in a rented house.

  Its floors were uneven, its heating was inadequate, its hot water limited. His wife was suffering breast abscesses, his newborn baby’s nappies froze on the washing line, his company car wouldn’t respond to the starting handle in the coldest winter of the century. His job depended on that car. Had it been discovered that, in contravention of Crawford’s stipulation, he did not have a proper garage, with doors and a lock, but just a sort of lean-to shelter which incorporated next-door’s garden gate, he was blithely certain that Douglas, whom he improbably addressed thus (Brigadier Sir Douglas Crawford – another good chap, another brother officer), would have been indulgent towards him and countermanded the transport pool’s pen-pushing tyrants.

  This rockily founded optimism might be considered an expression of vanity, a symptom of unworldly innocence, an ill-judged or non-judged estimate of other men’s beneficence – despite everything he had seen and lived through he believed in the essential decency of mankind. He believed that the man within the MP Morrison or the MD Crawford might overcome the position the man held. For, having no ambition to hold an office (or lacking the wherewithal to achieve it), he could not grasp the congruence of man and office. He failed to see that the uniform or the title is the man, but only so long as the man retains the office, the role. He styled himself Major till he died, thirty-five years of increasing embarrassment for his son, to whom it was nothing more than an honorific, a faded laurel. It wasn’t as though it would have been less embarrassing had he been of higher rank – he was a brevet Lieutenant Colonel immediately before demobilisation but could not style himself thus.

  It’s improbable that anyone would actually have noticed had he promoted himself: 1945–c. 1960 was the Golden Age of the Bogus Major. Even after that a military rank enjoyed a prestige in Civvy Street that did not entirely diminish till the 1980s, when the generation that had fought in the war was no longer dominant. Captains (army), majors, wingcos, commanders, colonels, captains (navy), brigs, gens … they littered the post-war stage, hanging on, proudly, to the titular tokens of their service and, desperately, to a time when their achievement had matched their self-estimate, when status was unambiguous shoulder display. These once conscripted men defined themselves by the rank they had attained rather than by their post-war positions. They peppered their life with martial mores, RAF slang, jacktarishness.

  Short-fused Squadron Leader Don Fairs married the widow of a lost member of his flight called Mitchell, took over his paint and grout shop, propped up bars, wore a handlebar moustache and addressed his daughter as Sprogs. Lieutenant Guy Jessop RN tackled his daily stride down Castle Road and Castle Street to the auctioneers Woolley and Wallis as though it were a route march. He said a wardroom grace before meals, he enlivened parties with his melodramatic Death of Nelson wearing a tricorn fashioned from newspaper: his affable fellow rugby player and daredevil tobogganist Tim Trethewey took the role of Hardy. Had Guy Jessopfn2 been a lieutenant in the army he would not have been allowed that courtesy title: insufficiently senior. Jack Powell had been a captain since the age of nineteen in 1918; to his chagrin he spent the second show desk-polishing. My father’s lexicon included, conventionally enough, prang, homework, popsy, officer’s groundsheet, gopwo, browned off. His curries, any curries, were links to a provisional, concentrated, heightened life – to a nabob’s array of batmen and to hunting boar the size of donkeys certainly, but more to a time when he was part of a venture of the greatest moment, responsible for the lives of a fractiously cosmopolitan body of men, responsible too for the capability of distant armies.

  His habitual breakfast was that which he had drunk outside his bungalow in the pipelined desert: raw egg whisked with milk. Armed Russian convoys, having driven for 1,500 miles from the Volga and the Don to the Tigris, would rest at No. 3 Petrol Depot before returning north in their now filled tankers. The commander of one convoy, offered this breakfast, tasted it and called a subordinate who fetched several bottles of vodka from a tanker lorry’s cabin. He had assumed that he was being offered egg and milk to prepare his stomach for a protracted drinking session and if that preparation began at 06.30 – well, what do you expect from these crazy English? In common with most Englishmen of h
is generation, my father had never consumed this spirit (which was not generally available in the UK till the 1960s). That was his first and last experience of it, so he claimed.

  Whether his antipathy to vodka was due to a morning’s mutual misunderstanding that resulted in a day’s brain-clubbing overindulgence or of the spirit’s lack of flavour is moot. He would still wonder, thirty years later, whether it was an antipathy he would have overcome had his free passage through the USSR been lubricated by free vodka. He thought he probably would have. Towards the end of his life he would pour a shot of brandy into his breakfast and greet me with an approximate rendition of what he reckoned was a Soviet toast, boootmoo.

  The Russia I had been denied was a red, cyclopean locomotive as high as a house. Steam boluses gusted from it. I would look out on snowbound wooden cabins and people like wizened Sioux who caught salmon with their hands, shared wigwams with reindeers, rode dog-sledges, wore lacrosse rackets on their feet, drank fermented mare’s milk. These happy zoophiles were the personae of children’s encyclopaedias and of the midget autodidact’s ethnographic and mammarial primer, the National Geographic. The red locomotive lived in a gaudy colour photograph in a book of railway exotica. On the opposite page was a monochrome drawing of the Maharajah of Gwalior’s jewelled model train which chugged around a banqueting table loaded with decanters, sweetmeats, cigars. It was surely the most exciting thing in all India, in my India. I could not understand why my father had not been to visit it: Gwalior is only 200 miles from Jaipur, where he was briefly posted. Nor could I understand why the Russia that he regretted not seeing was so different from mine. And whyever did he long to go somewhere so horrible? What fascinated him about the USSR was what terrified me so much that I hid beneath the bedclothes – losing myself, getting disoriented in a dark maze, longing for uterine solace.