An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  LAKER

  The off-spinner Jim Laker took nine Australian wickets in the first innings of the fourth test at Old Trafford in 1956. He took all ten in the second innings, the last of them that of the wicketkeeper Len Maddocks, on the late afternoon of the fifth day, Tuesday 31 July.

  I learnt of this feat from the six o’clock news on the car radio. We had parked beside a precipitous road on the edge of a golden Snowdonia. Beyond a drystone wall, far below ranks of pines climbing to the light, a river flashed and bellowed in the rocky gorge. My father stared longingly at it. This was one of the days when he had made a sacrifice and had forgone fishing so that I might see something of north Wales. He was smoking a pipe. He indulged me by agreeing that Laker’s was a jolly good show.fn1 His interest in cricket was confined to players’ tics, to peripheral incidents. He relished Ian Meckiff’s nickname, ‘Chucker’. Hubert Doggart swallowed a bee whilst fielding for Sussex against Hampshire at Bournemouth; it did him no harm – he became headmaster of King’s School, Bruton. Laker’s fellow spinner Tony Lock often took to the field with his cuffs and collar buttoned: he was likened to an inmate of the Old Manor. A third spinner, the South African Hugh Tayfield who had toured England the previous year, caught his attention because of the pedal ritual he performed before bowling: he called him Tapfoot. I knew however that to his fellow players he was Toey; that was the correct nickname, the official nickname. Tapfoot! Colin Cowdrey was mocked for his huge arse; David Sheppard for his churchiness (he was an evangelical clergyman, eventually Bishop of Liverpool); Dennis Compton for wearing dripping on his head (he famously advertised Brylcreem and took his gleaming paymaster onto the field with him).

  Three days previously we had driven from Salisbury. I derived mild excitement from a signwriter’s self-advertising premises at Stratton St Margaret. He advertised his considerable craft by impasting his Edwardian house and workshop with samples of countless fonts, colophons, logotypes, clichés. At Shrewsbury there was a great church built of stone stained by lilacs. We had stopped where the road ran beside a canal, the Llangollen or the Shropshire Union. There were silver birches and a black and white lift-bridge, hand-operated; its benign low-gear winding mechanism allowed tender muscles to hang it in the air at forty-five degrees above the water. Such bridges, rare in Britain, are common in the Netherlands: they are the source of Rietveld’s angular, coccyx-trashing furniture. Years later I half-heartedly searched for and failed to find this one. I doubt that I shall ever see it again.

  We were staying at The Black Boy in Caernarvon. The ill-wrought inn sign showed a toothy blackamoor, Uncle Tom’s nephew who had run away to sea.

  We were staying at The Black Buoy in Caernarvon. The ill-wrought inn sign’s verso showed a black blob supposedly floating on a blue background (the sea) pocked by white curlicues (waves). The inn still has two names: The Black Boy and, for those who don’t or won’t speak English, Tafarn Y Bachgen Du. The children who lived across the road, with whom I played on the green beside the town walls and the Northgate, had been instructed that English was not a means of increasingly universal communication but the weapon of an occupying power. Hence when I asked them the word for boy they told me it was mochyn, not bachgen. Mochyn means pig. It was not till three years later that this deception was revealed to me during another and better holiday at Lampeter where the delightful Mr Conti made the best ice cream I had yet tasted. Whilst my father fished my mother read green Penguins and encouraged me to read them too. That was the summer I put Enid Blyton behind me. We walked around the castle, preferring the view of it from the west to the martial actuality of ramparts and portcullises. A fellow guest at the hotel, Major Bismuth-Kerr, a hail-fellow-well-met handshaker, frequently joined us, uninvited. He tried to persuade my mother to send me to the school where he taught, St David’s, Congresbury near Weston-super-Mare. She declined glacially. But he was not deterred. He later made the same suggestion to my father, insisting that it would make a man of me in a way that the musically inclined Cathedral School never would.

  Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwlllantysiliogogogoch has the longest place name in Europe. I insisted that we take a bus there. The elegant Menai Bridge and the sinister Britannia Bridge, whose tubular structure was supported on neoclassical pylons, were captivating. Not so the bearer of the longest place name, a village which lived off, doubtless still lives off, its very name. I did not of course admit my disappointment. But it was obvious. My mother was not sympathetic. She disdained anything that smacked of folksiness. That included extravagant place names, the Welsh language, gewgaws and bondieuserie, national costume – particularly kilts worn by expats, regional accents, arty-crafty tat. At Bangor we had tea and rock cakes: never was a foodstuff more aptly named. I put a halfpenny on the track of the North Wales coastal line in the hope that the train hauled by a panting locomotive would so squash it that it would pass as a penny. After the train had passed I couldn’t find the coin. Most days it drizzled. The hotel was dark and cramped. My tiny room’s dormer window was grimy. Breakfasts were enlivened by a family comprising a ruddy, pompous, tattersall-checked fellow; the apple of his eye – a gleaming ‘cyclops’ Rover 75; his harassed, nervously exhausted wife; their gurgling, spittle-foaming baby girl. The parents repeatedly tried to feed her spoonsful of egg, crying with increasing petulance: ‘Eggy Baba! Eggy Baba! Eggy Baba!’ And the baby repeatedly and enthusiastically repelled them so that her highchair was encrusted with yolk, the floor with toast and albumen. For some years after my father would exclaim ‘Eggy Baba’ when food fell from a fork or drink was spilled at table. This rather foxed guests.

  Fishing the afon Gwyrfai and the afon Seiont had been disappointing. No sewin. In six days he had taken three brown trout (which the hotel had overcooked in Duckham’s). There might have been intermittent drizzle but there had been no rain for weeks. The water was low, ad hoc stepping stones had appeared across rivers. So at breakfast on Sunday 5 August whilst watching Eggy Baba’s spirited resistance my father announced an unexpected treat.

  We would go to the summit of Snowdon on the mountain railway. Bright day!

  It proved to be more of a treat than I could ever have imagined. My mother, cautious, insisted that we bring waterproofs: the mountains, you know. We men scoffed. The day was fine, warm, cloudless, mistless. The heights above Llanberis Pass were sharp silhouettes. Scree and slate sparkled. Sheep basked among boulders hurled in battle by angry giants (long ago). Moss turned to velvet. There was a traffic jam, mostly black prewar cars, still commonplace in 1956. I sat in the back fearing my father’s impatience: he would turn round and I would never reach the summit of the highest mountain in Wales (3,560 feet – I had that figure by heart, nine times taller than Salisbury Cathedral). Atypically, he managed to restrict himself to drumming on the steering wheel. Nor did he complain when after finding a space in the car park we were obliged to join the end of a long queue for train tickets. However, after a few minutes he marched briskly to the front of the queue counting the number of hopefuls ahead of us. He spoke to a peaked cap. ‘We’re going to walk.’ We would come back by train. My mother sighed. We were not dressed for mountain walking. No one on that bleak mountain was dressed for mountain walking. This was due to a combination of national indigence and national fear of pretension. You walked up mountains in whatever you happened to be wearing that day, no matter how unsuitable; high heels, hats, drainpipes, threadbare blazers whose wire crests were frayed and tarnished, swirly skirts, cheap cotton blouses, flannels, Sunday best suits, pedal pushers, biker’s stiff tarpaulins, drape jackets, coiled coifs, oiled quiffs, collarless shirts, (relatively) gaudy holiday shirts whose collars stretched over jacket lapels in an access of informality and seaside fun, garments from war and National Service: combat jackets, blanco’d belts, once spooned boots, pullovers with pips, with stripes, with ARP badges, customised berets, perished Sam Brownes, crudely dyed battledress.

  Britain was a raggedly martial nation, making do, improvising unco
mplaining. The many who had not been able to get on the train trudged up and up without grumbling, for it was a glorious day. The path followed the narrow-gauge railway, crossing and recrossing the track. It was less than a yard wide, satisfactorily miniature, polished. There were points and passing loops, viaducts and halts, water tanks. My father would stride ahead then exhort us to catch up: ‘Rally rally rally!’ We looked down on still black lakes and hefty white water churning in straits. Pitted cliffs rose to the blueblue sky. Beside the path stood all manner of cairns: slender as a stylite’s pillar; coarse rubble piles; pyramidal garden ornaments; demolition sites; diagrammatic anthropoids; squads of antagonistic zoomorphs; vertical drystone walls.

  And then there came darkness. A violently roistering gang of clouds, blueblack as bruises and unmistakably trouble-seeking, lurched from beyond the jagged horizon. These bloated impostors of night switched off the light. The first gouts of fat rain fell. Then there were the water cannons. Crackling runes of lightning. Malevolent cymbals. There was no lapse between them. We were in the storm’s core. The path was suddenly deserted. Where had all the walkers gone? To shelter evidently. But where on these barren slopes might shelter be sought? We were not going to find out. Within seconds we had been soaked through. We couldn’t have been any wetter. There was nothing to lose. My father was loving it. So on we went at his behest, now striding, trudging, now paddling, now wading. The path became a torrent, visibility was blighted, scree was shifting, stone and water were belligerently allied. The mountain storm’s epic grandeur was however mitigated and mocked by low comic pratfalls and undignified stumbles: sound by Wagner, vision by Charlie Drake. I didn’t care that I grazed my shins and bruised my hands, it was such fun. Fun of an unprecedented kind.

  At the summit where the railway evidently terminates there perched a café, a cafeteria even, a mid-Thirties structure which might have dignified an important provincial bus station.fn2 The windows were densely condensed. Refugees from the storm abandoned reticence. They shared tables chatting excitedly to each other, to strangers whose accent was not theirs – Toxteth spoke to Llandudno, Prenton to Fylde, Tarporley to Bacup. We were the only southerners. Tea-crusted sugar cellars were passed about with generous abandon. They drank in the excitement. I fell for a boy of fifteen or sixteen. Instant crush.

  His lank dark hair was parted on the left. A bang fell over his right eye. His cheekbones were just so, his eyes dark and lively, his face frail and starved of light. He carried the germ of young death. He smiled at my mother. I have never forgotten him. His hearing aid was sage-green, coiled wire stretched from it to a transmitter in his windcheater which was the same colour. (Maybe time has dyed it.) I longed for a prosthesis: two years later I would be prescribed spectacles, precisely not the prosthesis I sought. I longed for a squawking, screeching ear-snail or metal callipers (leg preferably, but arm would do) or a correctional neckbrace or an ostentatiously built-up shoe just as I longed for the comradely embrace of this teenager whose disability rendered him vulnerable and romantic. He was more clearly outlined than his companions, more vital despite his etiolation, because of his etiolation. His redmop friend was certainly no catch. The other members of the group were morose, formless, forgettable. They didn’t carry a duffel bag. I relished the few minutes I spent in proximity to this boy. My preoccupation was such that I was only faintly aware of my parents’ conversation. Did he notice my fixated gaze? It took me some time to realise that the café had got crowded. The passengers of a just-arrived train jostled each other as they sought tables and places in the tea queue. ‘Standing room only!’ A couple belied that jovial complaint and pulled their chairs to our table. We silently greeted them, nods and reassuring all-in-this-together smiles. The parts of the panes immediately adjacent to the horizontal and vertical metal bars were clear: condensation is centripetal. My view in the other direction had been obstructed by the milling trippers. When I looked for him again my boy had gone. I stood, scanned the café – too late. The newcomers beside us spoke in incomprehensibly accented stage whispers. They wore motorcycle kit. Unpliable heavily oiled jackets, waterproof leggings. She carried her helmet. He wore his, hadn’t bothered to take it off. A pair of goggles was pushed up above the peak like a starlet’s shades. Surely this couple must be too hot. They were as much in love as I was, as I had just been. Their love, however, was acknowledged, spoken, reciprocated and impervious to the increasingly clammy atmosphere. Wet breath and reeking urn steam were suspended in the air. Their gaze was tender. They held hands, self-consciously, clumsily, fondly. The lights blinked as the storm flung its electric warriors at the walls. She pretended to wince in fear. He rolled his eyes conspiratorially.

  A Walian voice distorted to bronchial gruffness by a hitherto unremarked public address system portentously announced the indefinite postponement of the next train to Llanberis Pass. The café hushed. The announcement was repeated with added throat clearance. The café was bemused. How long is indefinite? My father immediately and predictably invited us to agree that walking down would be no chore after that ascent. The return is always quicker. I rued being denied the train ride and was not convinced by his observation that the train is available every day whilst an adventure like this is rarely granted us. But we don’t come here every day … We shook our drenched macs and put them on over our drenched summer clothes, nodded farewell to our amorous neighbours – she moued ‘ooh’ at our daring, he gave a bashful thumbs-up – then pushed our way, arms up, from the café into the lugubrious monochrome of obstinately unabated storm.

  The downward path was no easier than the upward. We slid, slipped, stumbled, paddled through the dusky day that might still be day, that might now be dusk: climate amends time, an arctic hour is not an equatorial hour. How long had we been trudging when, not far below us, a descending train overtook us, silenced by the stinging gusts? What was happening? The storm was by now even more ferocious, was even less fit for rack and pinion kit. And above that, the carriages were unlit.

  John Mattinson was thirty-four years old. His wife Mary was ten years his junior. They came from the Leeds suburb of Wortley. They had left the café at the summit about half an hour after we had. They walked only a few yards. He stood on a cairn. He spotted across the Irish Sea a climatic change that we, by then further down the mountain, were innocent of. He said to Mary: ‘Just look at that sunshine over there. Trust us to come to the wrong spot.’ Those were his last words. Lightning entered through the goggles perched on his helmet. His death and the portage of his body on the unlit train through the worst storm anyone in north Wales could recall were reported on the front page of the Daily Mirror, a paper I had never previously seen. My mother was strict, mock-incredulous, far from sympathetic: ‘Well if you will stand on a cairn in a thunderstorm …’

  MAJOR, BOGUS

  October 1986. Warrick Knock employs Bright Clive as his gofer and driver, strictly cash. All I previously knew of Bright Clive was that he was ‘an old mucker’ (his word) of the tearaway Johnny Dudley, one of whose lesser misdemeanours was to have attempted to shoot the ingénue Tessa Wyatt’s caged budgerigar: having missed with six shots he jacked it in and the bird lived. Giving a job to Bright Clive is charitable: he is only recently out after six months in Ford Open. His offence was to put forgeries of antique arms through a ‘prestigious’ London auction house. As Warrick says: ‘Could have happened to any of us.’ The swords themselves, made and aged by a bladesmith in Fulda, were convincing. Their provenances – Bright Clive’s department – were littered with elementary disparities which contributed to his reputation as The Balliol Dunce. (Had someone taken the entrance exam for him? Had his finals papers got mixed up with another undergraduate’s?)

  Whatever he learnt at Oxford, it wasn’t caution. Ignoring his employer’s pleas he is bombing down a road between Cheltenham and Cirencester (the Ciren of my infancy). He runs over a pheasant. He brakes so hurriedly that the vehicle skids. He jumps out, runs back to scrape the multicoloured squash o
f blood, bone, beak, claw and feathers from the road and hurls it in the back.

  ‘Supper, delish!’ he booms fruitily and, without pausing for breath, asks me: ‘D’you like post-war thrillers? Black and white. Spivs. Private hotels. John Mills, Nigel Patrick, Eric Portman, those chaps … Golden age of the bogus major. D’you know,’ he’s confidential and wistful now, ‘I wish I’d been born a generation earlier … then I could have been a bogus major.’

  He cannot disguise his regret at never having had the opportunity to achieve this touchingly rare ambition.

  MAJOR BRAITHWAITE

  At the age of four, during a picnic at Pritchett’s Point, at the confluence of the Avon and the Nadder where, on the south bank, my parents would build their house ten years later, I pushed Richard Braithwaite into the river whence he had to be rescued by my fully clothed father. The Braithwaites – he was still in the army – were living during that particular south Wiltshire posting in a Britford Lane bungalow subsequently rented by Uncle Ken and Auntie Jessica Southwell. To my embarrassment, and his too no doubt, Major Braithwaite, now cast on to Civvy Street, joined the hopelessly unqualified staff of the Cathedral School in my second year there, 1955–6. He was my first French teacher, and quite the worst. So inept indeed that I spoke better French than he did. He was soon found out by the parents. He was replaced by Barry Still, who actually spoke the language. That faint praise is graceless. This was a man whom I admired even though I often feared him. He mocked my confusion of ‘frais’ with ‘fraise’ which caused me to translate ‘un petit matin frais’ as early morning strawberry – this ought to have been praised in a school where David Gascoyne had been a pupil.