Again my parents were unenthusiastic, for another uniform had to be bought: a green pullover with an integral collar, a green peaked cap, a khaki neckerchief, a woggle. Beyond that they were discouraging because the Cubs and Scouts were organisations. Further they were quasi-spiritual organisations that inculcated pernicious guff.
There was too an element of anti-urbanistic bias. The Scouting movement was intended to teach country lore, woodcraft and fieldcraft to town children who would otherwise be deprived of these important disciplines which I, as a country child, should acquire for myself, as Bevis and Stalky and my father had done, untutored and untainted by greeny-up mysticism. I was preposterously encouraged to think of myself as a country child even though I lived in what was plainly a suburb: I might as well have been encouraged to think of myself as a girl.
A stringy, toothy, kink-haired myope instructed us that we should address her as Akela. She wore a faded green warehouse coat cinched with a belt plaited from fraying canvas which repulsed me. We sat in a circle round an invisible camp fire in the Cathedral School’s ‘gym’, the freezing Nissen hut where Alan R. Snell had the previous winter awarded the boxing bout to his son rather than to me and to which collective imagination could not summon warmth. We swore an oath and chanted. Akela was a believer in the Cub code. And in the manner of believers she wore humility as a weapon. Our life would be blighted if we deviated from the code. It would be an affront to her if we deviated.
Bob-a-Job week in the Easter holiday was the supposed highlight of the Cub year. Small boys in uniform pestered their neighbours to pay them to run errands, wash cars, undertake domestic tasks and gardening chores. The money so raised went to the Cub pack. I set off from home knocking on doors. Most houses were unoccupied. Those that were had no jobs to offer, or already had a fellow Cub working keenly. It was late morning before I found an employer.
Peggy Sanger was mother of one of the many Janets I had gone to school with. Her first husband had been shot down. Her second husband was one of his fellow RAF officers. (My mother confusingly referred to her by her first married name, Lampard.)
She suggested I walk to Upper Street, a few minutes away, on the periphery of West Harnham and try Mrs Fairs. Her first husband too had been shot down. Her second husband was one of his fellow RAF officers. I was loath to importune her, for she made little secret of her dislike of me.
The cause was my having precociously corrected her usage a year or so previously when watching an episode of Range Rider with Pauline aka Sprogs. Mrs Fairs referred to the outlaws (distinguished no doubt by their giveaway stubble) as ‘the naughty men’. I sensed a twee euphemism, an avoidance of the truth that patronised me because it was trying to protect me (and Sprogs who, being used to it, maybe didn’t notice). ‘They are not the naughty men,’ I told her, ‘they are the bad men.’ Whenever I had seen her subsequently she had let it be known to whoever was present that I was too clever by half, a cardinal sin in provincial England, in provincial anywhere. Now she took her revenge. She asked me to fetch some potatoes. From Hands, the corner shop half an hour’s walk away, past my home. Surely I could go to Queensberry Stores, a mere five minutes distant? No. Her account was with Hands. She would call to let the shop know I was coming. When I arrived Hands was about to close for lunch. She had ordered such a quantity of potatoes that I could barely lift them. And the sack they were in was covered in fine dust which made me shiver. I said that I’d return when the shop reopened, sloped home and confessed my plight to my parents, who detected a comic aspect which I had failed to discern.
An hour later my father drove me and the potatoes to Upper Street. Mrs Fairs complained that I had taken too long. She observed that getting a lift in a car was cheating. She grudgingly signed my Bob-a-Job card and gave me a shilling. It was evident that the world of work was arduous and cruel. I quietly took off my uniform, went to play Cowboys and Indians with Roger who was not a Cub and forgot about Bob-a-Job week.
Soon we would hand in our job cards together with the money we had earned. I ruefully sacrificed my two shillings pocket money and added it to the one I had earned. Like a proto-Juppé I invented a couple of fictitious jobs and signed my card with indecipherable monograms. Everybody else had earned at least ten shillings. Akela chided me for my performance, inviting the derision of the pack. That was that – so I thought.
The following week’s meeting began with Akela’s announcement that she had something very grave to report. A member of the pack had broken the Cub’s code. This was one of the most serious breaches of trust that she had ever known. She had rumbled me. She told the pack that Jonathan Meades had committed the unforgivable crime of falsifying his Bob-a-Job card. I pleaded that I had done so to my financial disadvantage. The old witch did not offer to repay me the money which I was too ashamed to ask for. I was no longer a Cub and was never to be a Scout. Somewhere no doubt in a file at Baden Powell House are the details of my crime. That was the first of many sackings. Next up: Dunn’s Seeds, then Passmore’s petrol station on the Southampton Road.
It was not out of charitable compassion that I went to a League of Pity Christmas party in a grand room at Church House (the Salisbury Diocesan offices), so becoming a member of yet another organisation and the bearer of an enamel badge representing a bluebird blue as ceanothus. The League of Pity was the junior branch of the NSPCC. It encouraged children from supposedly privileged homes to practise a dilute version of noblesse oblige, a bourgeois duty of bountiful care for children from poor homes or no homes at all: waifs, strays, mudlarks, coal gatherers, décolleté ragamuffins of the sort that Alice Liddell dressed up as before she became Mrs Reginald Hargreaves, visits to whose grave at Lyndhurst were, I realised, intended as treats.
This time the group was composed of my new friends at the Cathedral School where I had just started. Again, avoidance of ostracism was my motive. The gradations of social class were daunting as ever. The Harnham Road children, my out-of-school friends, wore hand-me-downs, black plimsolls, haircream. They were grazed, runny-nosed, Wiltshire-accented, out at all hours, i.e. past my prescribed bedtime. Were they the very children whom the League of Pity enjoined me to pity? Or were they merely borderline pitiable? And if so was I borderline pitiable too, pitying when I should have been pitied? I might not have a Wiltshire accent and, siblingless, I had no hand-me-downs. But my parents’ domestic circumstances were actually more straitened than the Harnham Road average and they were a world away from those of the families of my schoolfriends, owner-occupiers of interbellum houses with that essential of middle-class middle-brow mid-century domestic desirability – a hatch between kitchen and dining room. They had parquet floors where we had stone or splintering boards. Their floors were even. Their houses weren’t porous. Their roofs didn’t leak, the part of our roof that wasn’t thatched was rusted corrugated iron. We had warped wooden sashes on the ground floor and draughty casements upstairs. They had French windows, wrap-round, horizontal-barred Crittall windows, even portholes and often leaded lights. They had post-war gramophones and cookers, smart cars, central heating, front halls, downstairs ‘cloakrooms’, eau de nil bathrooms with shaver sockets, breakfast rooms, long gardens, motor mowers, space.
My mother took me to stay at Erpingham Road, Bournemouth, with her strikingly made-up friend Phyllis Treadgold, the irascible Denis Treadgold and their indulged son Gale (‘Gala’ in my earliest infancy). His enviable electric train set had an entire room devoted to it. In the distance, beyond sandy pinewoods, rolling stock clanking in and out of Branksome station provided a naturalistic soundtrack.
When we returned home I tried to enthuse my father about the impossibly large house’s multiple levels, the winding stone steps which led to its exciting underground garage – underground! As usual I was instructed that such houses were recently built so had no character. Further, because Gale’s train set was a plastic Triang, it was not the echt thing, not a metal Hornby 00. This was no consolation: I’d have settled for inferior plast
ic. When eventually I was given a trainset it was a Hornby, bought secondhand from an overheated semi in Hythe on a grey Sunday. The mains transformer was dodgy and many of the rails were bent. Further, by the time I was twelve I didn’t want such a toy: when I was twenty-one Wangle gave me that shunting engine.
As an assiduous eavesdropper I surmised that the Treadgolds were materially ambitious, brash, flashy: bookie’s checks and tart shoes – whatever these were – Jaguars, the price of everything, the value of nothing. But were not some of the poor Harnham Road families equally brash and flashy? Look at Derek Brooks’s swaggering suits, shoes, Windsor knots, cutaway collars, rings, haircuts.
There were too many markers to figure out:
Wealth, accent, house, manners, school, mode of transport, vocabulary, clothes, job, former rank, domestic servants, address, recreations, resident grandparents etc.
So many tiny signals to be painfully learnt.
Why was game fishing superior to coarse fishing, bridge to canasta, rugby to soccer, napkin to serviette, wood to plastic, opera to musicals, pipes to cigarettes?
Why was Jim Laing’s Ayrshire accent not remarked upon whilst Hetherington the Dentist’s Morningside bray was relentlessly guyed? ‘Goodbay. Ay’ll see you at fave o’clork next Wensdeh.’ His fillings, extractions and anaesthesia were rather less refained: indeed he administered the last so approximately that I coma’d on long after one treatment, dreaming that my father was skinning a pike in his surgery.
Why did Mr Kraft, who reminded me of Hitler (tiny moustache, high-pitched voice) and who was rumoured to be of the processed cheese dynasty’s Swiss branch, not drive the primped Standard 8 that stood outside his house instead of wheezingly pushing a bicycle weighed down with Skivertex bags full of root veg?
Why did Mr Reid, a man in his fifties who lived with his mother in a prodigious manor house, dress like a tramp yet talk to himself and to walls in a duke’s accent?
What class did they belong to? For a child of a taxonomical bent such oddballs were frustrating. How could I know my rung on the ladder of society if I could not determine its entire scale?
In an era when it was de rigueur to do so, I didn’t know my place.
(Years later I would have to teach myself not to know my place.)
For the moment the macaronic complexity of the social organism I inhabited was an obstacle that impaired my sense of myself. I yearned for omniscience so that I might know myself, I yearned to know every word so that I might express myself. I did not share the common fear of having been adopted, no doubt because of a bereavement of imaginative self-pity and because my preoccupations were approximately demographic rather than psychological.
However, early one evening when I was nine, in the garden of the next-door house which my parents were keeping an eye on whilst it was untenanted and Mrs Edwards was absent, I told them that I realised I was a burden, that my existence was a blight on their life, that I knew I wasn’t wanted, that I was willing to be given away. I didn’t cry. Was there a stork strong enough to bear me to new parents?
They stood in front of the lugubrious cliff of cotoneaster that separated the two gardens and made light of it, telling me, ‘Oh do come on darling!’ Telling me not to be so silly, laughing it off. Here was their characteristic burial of emotional swarf, their refusal to consider that I had, for a moment at least, been in earnest. Their presumption that I was exhibiting deflected symptoms of a different malaise, problems at school, say, was groundless. I was not, as my father suggested, ‘a bit browned off’. I was, rather, troubled by a guilty suspicion that I had gatecrashed their marriage. He would use variations of this formula all his life. ‘Down in the mouth … off colour … not rubbing along too well.’
This habit of stoical meiosis was normal in a generation which denied itself deep immersion in feeling, had not learned to wallow in empathy, understood an outpouring to be the discharge of cloacal rather than lachrymal sewage. The lexicon of demonstrative care had yet to be coined; the people’s absurd princess had yet to be born; the mistakenly unaborted Blair had yet to perfect the catch of tremulous sincerity in his voice.
Two world wars, economic depressions, genocidal dictators, material privations, the omnipresence of death … enduring such stuff is not propitious for the embrace of affective ostentation, for the desire to get in touch with our inner entitlements (in the manner of the unappealing Mrs Blair), for the infantile need to share our pain, for the comfy validation of our self-pity, for the slovenly luxury of annihilating our restraint, for the quashing of our shame.
The generations which suffered, which had fought for their country’s existence and its people’s life, would have been disinclined to abide by petty laws of governmentally sanctioned niceness and to indulge the suicide-bombing community’s human rights. Our self-respect diminishes with the ever-growing number of special-pleading causes, minorities and religions we are enjoined to ‘respect’. A French diplomat: ‘You had a marvellous country till you buggered it up.’ The tyranny of minorities has caused the atomisation of England and the consequent destruction of a coherent society.
The damage is repairable – by state terror or mob rule. But since the state’s treasonable clerks are the very cause of the embuggerance we can be sure that it will do nothing. And a mob needs a leader to bring its hatred to the boil, foment its venom, drive it on. It needs the Duke of Edinburgh. Much as he might wish it he won’t be around.
KALU
‘Bleeding in the brain.’ My mother was on the phone. It sounded alarming. I overheard her repeat the phrase. Every day one or other of my parents would push through the gap between the hurdles and the cotoneaster hedge to look in on Mrs Perkins, the genial, stately, impressively amnesiac next-door neighbour who had lived at 53 Harnham Road all her long widowhood. She had the elegant bearing of a standard poodle. Her hair was a white cloud, her skin was powdered white in the fashion of her distant youth, her formal suits were pale.
It was my father who found her unconscious on the bathroom floor. Stroke. That was the state that my mother was tersely describing. I imagined that the bathroom floor was sticky crimson from brain blood. Who would clear it up? It wasn’t till Squadron Leader and Mrs Johnson moved in to her house that I realised that Mrs Perkins wouldn’t be coming back. Was Mrs Perkins still bleeding? Was there still cacophony in her head? Was she dead? I dared not ask: death was taboo. Where were her belongings, her furniture, her beeswaxed table whose mildly undulating surface was so satisfying to the touch? Had she gone to heaven? If she had gone to heaven how did my mother visit her? Where did she visit her?
When I was four heaven possessed a refulgent literality. Maxfield Parrish had devised the mise en scène. Much of it was moss-green and mottled, azurine and dappled. It was always the golden hour. Heaven was horizontally lit by the lowest of low-key lights. There were mackerel clouds and outstretched shadows. The unmitigated sublimity was reward for a life well led. It was deserted. Were the dead invisible? Could they see? With her bleeding in the brain would Mrs Perkins be able to see it? Would curtains of blood blind her? Would she be able to smell the heavenly perfume, to taste the manna, milk and honey? Were all faculties restored once heaven was ascended to? Even had I asked these questions no one would have been willing to respond to them. Did no one know the answers? Or would telling me them cause them to forfeit their place in heaven? I was coming to recognise adults’ secrets, their unwillingness to share what they knew with a mere child. I was beginning to cotton on to adults’ dissemblance of their ignorance, their desperation not to be found out, not to lose face, their barely suppressed petulance when corrected by a dwarf know-all who was insouciant of the offence he gave and of his supposed precocity. My habit of politely pointing out factual inaccuracies hardly amounted to an assault on the amour propre of the middle-aged but it was frequently taken thus. Similarly, my questioning certain usages: I was my father’s son. After fishing, in which I had no interest, the minutiae of usage was the subject he most oft
en addressed at meals. My mother, though a schoolmarm to my contemporaries, didn’t share his proscriptive bent. She was inured to the syntactical and grammatical accidents that befell the dull and backward, even enjoyed them. After little more than a year’s tenure Squadron Leader and Mrs Johnson were posted to Cyprus, leaving us their cat Blacky. We got new neighbours at 53. Another RAF family. Squadron Leader and Mrs Ritson-Hoyle. Everything was too much for her. She was always at the end of her tether. She was blinding effing (though whispering) proof that there is nothing genteel about a double-barrelled name or the officer class. Her mucous-moustached son was an animal five or so years my senior. My mother gleefully reported this exchange between them. Whining son: ‘But I dund it Mum. I dund it.’ Mrs Ritson-Hoyle (sotto): ‘Not I dund it. I done it.’ I noticed that my mother no longer visited Mrs Perkins. Nothing was said. There was never a good time to ask about death. The dead, as I would learn that the French have it, disappear. They incite forgetfulness. Even though their name liveth for evermore. It is only the name though. If that, if that. Blacky was renamed Kalu (black or blacky in both Urdu and Ceylonese). My father had had a mongrel dog so named in Iraq. This cat was the most delightful creature. I loved him more even than I loved Sugary Bun, my dove-grey dandy of a rabbit who lived in a cage my father had bodged from a tea chest. My mother had feared that Kalu might attack Sugary Bun. In fact the cat ignored the rabbit. He had other plans. He created a sort of ledge or nest in the springy cotoneaster hedge from which he’d pounce, with a languid flop and boxing paws, on his unsuspecting prey beneath. Hardly a day passed without Kalu bringing a dead or maimed bird into the kitchen. They bled through their feathers as Mrs Perkins had through her brain. They shivered in their throes. Kalu stands over them with hunter’s pride. In a moment he will resume his position in the hedge. The garden’s little flowerbeds became an avian cemetery. My father was persuaded that all phosphates succour plants. Sentimentally impressed by any form of hunting, he buried the sparrows and tits and finches and thrushes just as he buried pike which hunted down the trout that were, rightly, his quarry. Here was nature’s merciless cycle. Kalu was taken to Dalton the vet to be neutered in a canvas grip. Thereafter the sound of a zip sent him scuttling to safety. It was the only thing that alarmed this fearless predator.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 14