Another forces neighbour: a soldier and his wife. Sandy and Jane Robertson were Scottish, newly married. He was newly promoted. They rented No. 57. I pretended to myself that Jane was my big sister. I wanted to pretend to myself that she was my mother but could not countenance such treacherous disloyalty. But there was a sister vacancy: there always would be, I was resigned from very early on to my parents’ unwillingness to make me a sister. (I didn’t want to be supplied with a brother.) Jane was young with an excitingly carefree habit of skipping along the pavement whilst I clutched her hand, running to keep up as I knew I must. She took me on shopping expeditions to Sid the Butcher, Hands’s corner shop and over the bridges to Mr Batten’s where prewar jars of boiled sweets were opaque with prewar dust and the ham was good. It felt important undertaking chores for her, holding a box of clothes pegs whilst she struggled with swollen sheets and dancing shirts, putting tins of cling peaches and fruit salad in the store cupboard, carrying plates from the draining board to the dining room where everything was just so and a dresser displayed wedding presents: lustreware pots, toby jugs, a cow creamer, a docile lion with Edinburgh’s coat of arms on its back. Sandy was a handsome Scot, palest ginger, whence, I assumed, came his name – I didn’t mention it so no one corrected me. His accent, like Jane’s, bore the faintest trace of what I did not yet know as Morningside. He was a young major, a black-sweater’d ‘tankie’ (a rare breed in Salisbury) seconded to Southern Command at Fugglestone, an unwanted sedentary posting, desk-polishing. He compensated for it at lunchtimes by taking his big black labrador Postman for gusty walks on the downs towards Snake Hill and the descent to the Avon valley. The rest of the day the dog lay with uncharacteristic tranquillity at his master’s feet. So many army officers took their dog to work that the Nissen huts at this camp must have been like a kennels. Sandy and my father would rough shoot at weekends on the Gradidge family’s farms at Wellow and Whiteparish. Pheasant, partridge, wood pigeon, the odd hare and rabbits, still plentiful in those last years before myxomatosis was introduced to southern England. Postman bounded willingly across fields and through streams. He fetched as a retriever should. My father’s admiration for this threateningly boisterous dog increased by the week. He was further trained to flush out birds. And, what is more, he displayed a terrier-like aptitude for seeking out warrens. There was no end to his abilities. My father resolved to get a gun dog of his own, not least because the Robertsons and Postman would soon be on the move again. He pored over advertisements in The Field and Shooting Times. He wrote letters to breeders. It was decided, by my mother, that if he must have a gun dog then a cocker spaniel would be more domestically manageable than a lolloping enthusiastic energetic uncontainable labrador like Postman. Too enthusiastic. Too energetic. Too uncontainable. And too playful. My mother was in the kitchen chopping or podding. Through the high horizontal slit of the window she noticed that Postman was once again in the garden which the remains of a wicket fence hardly separated from the Robertsons’. She wondered where he’d found the rag doll he was playing with, vigorously, and got back to peeling or seeding. Clock time gets a kicking at this point. The gulf between seeing and understanding is the foundation of the double-take. She understood in a microsecond that lasted a minute what the rag doll was. She ran outside. It was too late. Postman, in terrier mode, had forced open Sugary Bun’s makeshift cage. According to my mother he had merely been playful. Too playful. Sugary Bun suffered shaken bunny syndrome. The savage dog had broken the rabbit’s neck for fun. He had meant no harm. My mother’s attempts at mollification didn’t stop me howling. My father buried the rabbit. I hugged Kalu who was imperiously indifferent. Jane hugged me and wiped my tears. She scolded Postman whilst maintaining that he had simply been too exuberant. She said Postman was sorry. I didn’t believe her. Postman wagged his tail: that was a fine way to say sorry. He showed no sign of remorse. Sandy clutched my shoulder man to man. Postman wagged his tail. It didn’t matter that he meant no harm. He had done harm. He had killed my second-favourite pet, formerly my very favourite pet. I reconsidered: Sugary Bun’s loss made him my very favourite once again, for a while. A week or so after Sugary Bun’s murder I was being helpful. This, I believed, was one of my strengths. Ingratiation through action. Jane was drying plates and cutlery. I was helpfully carrying them to the dining-room table where, in a moment, she would sort them and put them in the dresser drawers beneath the trophies of her proud marriage. How did it happen? How did it slip through my fingers? Among their wedding presents was an eighteenth-century cruet. (Cruet was a word banned by my parents on grounds of tweeness. But Jane and Sandy had no such inhibitions.) The receptacles were poison-blue glass. They fitted into frilly, squat-legged silver stands, circular for pepper and salt, crib-shaped for mustard. It was the mustard receptacle that I dropped on the kitchen’s stone floor. Dropped? Or let drop? The latter was Jane’s verdict. She looked at me in fury. I learnt that extreme ire is expressed in a near-whisper. The damage was not just to a mustard pot which was now a former mustard pot – shards and splinters and nuggety lumps. The damage was to her and Sandy and their sacred bond. Tears and anger. I was shooed out of the house.
The presumption that I had taken revenge for Sugary Bun was not discounted by my parents. But they seemed unconcerned. It was just one of those things. They negligently failed to dissemble their indifference from Jane and Sandy. Such a fuss over a piece of glass! My father got browned off with Sandy’s pompous Edinbourgeois righteousness and with Jane’s fractious self-pity. He had immediately offered to replace the vessel only to be told it was irreplaceable. There was something approaching a row, thick with cruet. I didn’t witness it, I didn’t hear it through the chalky cob walls. But I realised nonetheless that my parents had defended my maladroitness and – should it have been the case – my motive. In the couple of months that remained before they moved to their next posting the Robertsons were nothing less than civil. We exchanged polite greetings. But I was no longer included in Jane’s adventurous shopping trips. An important friendship had been damaged.
They left a couple of days after Christmas 1952. I bravely patted Postman. A few weeks later my father announced that he had found a dog and that we would soon be going to collect it. A dog of our own! My excitement was boundless. On a frosty Sunday morning my father and I took the familiar road through Wilton, past the theatrically castellated lodge to Compton Park, the Fovant badges, the Blinking Owl, the turning to Guy’s Marsh, the mesmerisingly straight glinting Sherborne Causeway (fifteen miles from Sherborne itself), East Stour then, at last, Henstridge. My father, as often, followed directions written on paper clipped to a board. At the end of a track we arrived at a drab house. The breeder who greeted us was a strapping pyramid of a woman snugly bandaged in multiple layers of cardigan and checked car rugs. She wore fur-lined bootees with a zip up the instep. We drank tea in her overheated malodorous kitchen whilst she complimented my father on his fine choice of dog and slipped his cheque beneath a mantelpiece clock. She and my father walked across a muddy yard constellated with shit coils to a barking growling yapping former farm building. I waited beside the door onto the yard. The smell was repulsive. There was a large woven willow basket filled with gypsy clothes pegs resting in mire. They reappeared with a dog, the dog, our dog, my dog. A cocker spaniel puppy, a blue roan. But he was black and grey. That ‘blue’ was a matter of constant exasperation. Why was this species so called? No one could explain it to my satisfaction. As usual no one knew, as usual no one would admit his ignorance. My dog sat on the floor in front of me, beneath the glove compartment. He had large mournful eyes. He was a puzzled dog. His removal from the only home he had ever known at the age of four months prompted a morose resignation. He could not have been less like Postman. When we got home he was shown his brand-new basket and his aluminium water bowl. My mother had prepared a welcoming meal of dog biscuits and boiled meat. This was put before him in a second, enamel bowl. Something happened. Gloomy passivity was shed. Suddenly the
dog came to life, to greedy gluttonous life. He was happy. My mother wondered whether he had been insufficiently fed at Henstridge. In any case it soon became apparent that his sole interest was food. The dog was so lazy he wouldn’t even fetch a stick. His routine was sleep, eat, sleep, eat. He consented to walkies provided that we processed at snail’s pace. After six frustrating months of attempting to train this ‘natural gun dog’ my father reconciled himself to failure. It served him right for, in the hope that he might share the murderous labrador’s sporting spirit, he had chosen to name him Postman.
Did he not realise how much that hurt? He became Posty, my mother’s responsibility, and Kalu’s whipping dog in perpetuity. But Posty was very easily pleased. Provided he was lavishly fed he showed a constant fortitude in the face of feline oppression, a stoic born of torpor.
KNEE LIGAMENTS
Whilst his father would stay there for six years, coming back for infrequent holidays, Roger and his mother Pat returned from Brazil after only a few months. He brought me a marquetry box containing a deck of cards. It shows Copacabana and the Sugar Loaf, places he had not actually seen. They had hardly left São Paulo where he was frightened by black people, brown people, tan people and the language they spoke. I was selfishly relieved that he had been unable to settle there. We picked up where we had left off, with extra gusto. Our cowboy and Indian games now acquired a violent edge. We would execute lead (and, later, plastic) models by sawing off their heads. This was no doubt the sado-sexual behaviour of future serial killers; happily we had other vocations. I developed a fondness for hiding under Pat’s skirt, inspecting her stocking tops. She indulged me like an amiably unruly pet. Her mother Mrs Dear thought this was a hoot.
Mrs Dear inadvertently taught me the word ‘bugger’. She cooked lights for Tiggy the cat. Her favourite film was The Charge of the Light Brigade, which she had taken Roger and me to see at a friend’s who had a telly. She enjoyed talking football with Sid the Butcher from whom she bought those lights. The day before the 1955 Cup Final – Tony Blair’s second birthday – she popped across the road to check if she could invite herself to watch it on our recently acquired telly, so much handier than going across town to Ridgeway Road where the friend lived. I had never heard of the Cup Final, would improbably have watched it had she not been so keen. So it was that I saw my first entire football match. Newcastle United, wearing black shorts and black and white striped shirts, were more visible than Manchester City whose baby blue shirts were rendered pale grey by the primitive monochrome reception. I was hooked from the very start: Jackie Milburn – subject of one of The Christian Bomber’s lesser, earlier, but most revelatory lies – scored in the first minute. Jimmy Meadows tore his knee ligaments twenty minutes later. He never played again. The terror on his face as he was carried off was pitiful. I feared that he was going to be put down. Mrs Dear was gleeful that Manchester City would have to play the match with ten men. They duly lost. She had had a bet with Sid the Butcher and would pocket £1 on Monday.
Whilst my parents filled in their pools coupons at random Mrs Dear and Sid the Butcher were assiduous scholars of form rather than connoisseurs of chance. Bradford Park Avenue, Port Vale, Crewe Alexandra, Scunthorpe and Lindsey United, Stenhousemuir, Airdrieonians, Albion Rovers – there was nothing they didn’t know about Saturday afternoon’s litany of paired names which I now began to understand were more than names, they represented sporting endeavour as well as a dream of untold riches (£75,000) and escape.
‘I’ll be up that ’ill,’ said Mrs Bacon when she left on Friday afternoons, ‘I can feel it’s going to be my week.’ There was no one I would have preferred to receive a two-metre-long cheque from a saucy light entertainer at a gaudy London hotel. Mrs Bacon was a cheery optimist. She chose her numbers from combinations of family birthdays. Her ideal was a newly built bungalow, a dream bungalow, up that hill which rose steeply to the south of Harnham.
This was where I’d go on evening walks with my father and Posty. As we approached the bottom of the long flight of worn steps that led up to Bouverie Avenue he’d often warn me about men who interfere with children. The implication was that such men were liable to be the tramps who slept in the abandoned subterranean munitions stores at the end of the nearby sunken lane rather than nice schoolmasters. Those foggy autumn nights were full of fungal spores, rotting vegetation, cabbages and bonfires extinguished by rain.
In Bouverie Avenue (formerly owned by the Earls of Radnor whose family name that is) there were early bungalows in a vaguely colonial style with wide verandahs. Bouverie Avenue South was tonier. Gen and Mrs Gen, the ecclesiastical architect Robert Potter and Dr Bailes Barker lived there. The last’s sumptuous 1920s house had a service wing and an arch to a courtyard with a games room above it.
Close by was Harnham Heights, precursor of a ‘gated’ community, hidden down beech-shaded lanes where the elderly and fastidious French bachelor J.-P. ‘Froggy’ Hellmann inhabited one of Salisbury’s few moderne houses: he might have been the model for Jules Supervielle’s Colonel Bigua, a man of two nations but at home in neither.
Harnwood Road was, Mrs Bacon reckoned, the apogee of smartness and class. Its earliest houses were large prewar pseudo-vernacular works which might have been designed for Wentworth or Virginia Water: double garages, extensive gardens and, importantly, a hatch between kitchen and dining room. The very largest was bought with what my father considered illicit war spoils. Its resented owner had a company that rewound military batteries. He was certainly uncouth (tomato ketchup on everything, guitar, wife with a moustache), but hardly criminal, and it was probably essential work. The majority of the houses were smaller and post-war. Rather, post-November 1954 when building licences were removed. My parents owned a building plot there. But they procrastinated. Their heart wasn’t in it – there was no river. Besides money was, as ever, short. My father constructed scale model houses to my mother’s awkward Neaum-derived designs in compensation for the lack of the real thing, their very own and golden house. When Roger’s father returned from Brazil in 1960 they built a house there. Mrs Bacon was impressed by the forged metal sign announcing its name, Bom Clima (jocularly, Bum Cleaner; joyously, some people called Bottom built a house on an adjoining plot). She cased the houses noting their foibles, yearning to escape her life of Johnson’s Hardgloss Glo-Coat, elbow grease, drudgery, Cardinal Red. She tutted and tutted about an art teacher’s house called Topsy Turvey whose bedrooms were downstairs, whose living room and kitchen were on the first floor. That wasn’t right. But it was! From the living room and adjacent studio you could gaze across the conjoining valleys at the cathedral and Old Sarum. Nor was it right to install, as my parents did, a bidet in a bathroom. This device, which Mrs Bacon pronounced biddy, with repulsed distaste, spoke of sexual abominations.
Alas, it never was Mrs Bacon’s week. Wealth eluded her. She lived on in Old Street with her daughter Pammy who had a secretarial job at Woodrow’s the ironmongers and had once found a live slug in a school salad. Mr Bacon had been an engine driver in a celluloid-peaked cap. His work clothes shone with coal dust. No doubt it permeated his cancerous lungs too.
She was a generous woman who cut brown bread so thinly that its fibres had to be bonded by slabs of butter. This accompanied tea which was hot water and milk. She used such prodigious quantities of polish that a floor’s surface was as hazardous as a skid-pan. When I went a-over-t and put my elbow through a door’s glass panel she warned me about my recklessness.
My father sang ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’: the little boy was surely me and Old Street was the lane he lived down. It was all puddles, cinders, rivulets, gravel. The back gate, squeezed between our coalshed and next-door’s, gave onto it. Each of the four semi-detached pebbledash and red-brick houses on the steep bank to the south had its own flight of steps: here lived the Dredge family (a name more common in Wiltshire than elsewhere), the Newells, the red-headed Norrises and some of the Shipsey catering clan. Mr Latham, the Government House gardener,
Mrs Latham, who was permanently attached to a decaying wicker basket, and their two daughters Jean and Barbara lived in a small detached house which had once fulfilled some non-domestic military purpose. Smith the Carpenter’s children used the western end of Old Street in lieu of a garden. The other end, where Mrs Bacon lived, was round a 90-degree bend. Some of the fifteen or so houses were borderline slums. This was the pye dog’s domain (my father’s expression; according to Hobson-Jobson it signifies pariah). Whenever I cycled past, the hideous shrieking creature hurled itself from a toxic rookery alley to try to bite my ankles. It wriggled at banshee speed. I shielded my eyes from that alley and the other alleys: their cracked flags exuded leucous venom.
I never knew where to look in Old Street. I hated lingering there. It was a place to hurry through. But because my mother refused to let me bring my bike through the house to the front door I was obliged to broach it even though its dimensions increased with my fear, and its properties grew ever more extreme. The Lovely Queenie’s rouge glowed like embers, her powder was flour, her seamed-stockinged calves swelled to thigh thickness, her fat feet bid to escape her GI-pleasing shoes, the dead animal hiding her neck paunch came to life as the pye dog. Mr Thick the drowner’s moustache was big as a yard brush. Mrs Bevan’s gamboge teeth turned marmalade. Mr Bevan’s simian paws dangled beside his shins. His Welsh accent got Welsher. The Bevans were figures from a late Victorian bucolic painting by, say, La Thangue. Like Mr Thick, who had fought in the second Boer War, they had been born around 1880: they were trapped in the dress of their youth and were condemned with the face of their generation (it is not just hairdos which are giveaways of age). The prospect of octogenarian hoodies is one I shall thankfully be spared. Peasants always look old – fatigue, bad diet and so on. My father gave them most of the pike he caught: he considered this fish unfit for human consumption.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 15