An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  Did he live at the Fox and Hounds? People, especially bachelor majors, lived in hotels in those years. Or did he own it? His manner was proprietorial. Every year we went to Eggesford he was there. The elderly genial dome-headed Major Veale was frequently there too. But he lacked Major Ferguson’s magical omnipresence. Even when Major Ferguson was not in sight the tractor would be. The cowman (an agricultural labourer, thus nameless) rode it like an adult on a child’s bicycle. It was of course a Ferguson, in that marque’s invariable pale grey. Eventually I would have a plastic model of one, unhappily of a larger scale than the Dinky lorry that my mother bought me in the general stores at Chulmleigh – a grinning S-type Bedford, tan and French navy. The latter colour prompts my brain to vault over the accretions of the decades. It is one of several colours of the Fifties that are sure mnemonic triggers. (There was a water butt in Bohemia, North Yorkshire, in 1991.)

  The Exeter–Barnstaple railway, today named the Tarka Line after the celebrity otter, follows the route of the Taw, now on this side, now on the west. Beside Eggesford station, a couple of hundred yards from the hotel, was a level crossing whose mechanisms and polished rails flush to the road tarmac were fascinating even though they were not novel to me.

  The rail maintenance gangers’ handcar (a hydraulic pump trolley) was, however, unlike anything I had ever seen. I had yet to witness silent cinema where these vehicles were a staple. It was an apparatus to marvel at. And it was of course Major Ferguson who pulled rank with the linesmen, cajoling them to show me how to operate it, pushing the handle up and down to propel it, pushing so that on its return it lifted my feet off its dark base fashioned from sleepers. Whilst the gang ate lunch (sandwiches from tiffin boxes) I rode it back and forth on jolting metal wheels along a stretch of line on top of an embankment. This became daily routine. Christine would accompany me from the hotel to the railway line. We passed big-tongued, fly-eyed cows and their calves. The ‘red’ earth didn’t absorb the surface water. Our path was a series of retreats across tufted islets. But where the path passed beneath the embankment there was no avoiding the deep mud. As I played on the track Christine would attempt to sweet-talk the reticent linesman while ostentatiously scraping mud from her legs. They had no time for Germans or flirts.

  It was worth the long walk up the dark sunken lane under a cat’s cradle of coppiced boughs. We emerged into sun beside the shining ruins of the Earl of Portsmouth’s Eggesford House – multi-chimneyed, multi-crenellated, fractured, haphazard, jagged, melancholy, exhilarating. An intact neo-Tudor mansion would not have been remotely so affecting. The abundant rabbits had crewcut the grass so it was as springy as Dunlopillo. I rolled blissfully on it as I did on Major Veale’s velvet lawn when we visited him at Romsey.

  What my parents called ‘the lawn’ at home was a pat of mud with grass seeds forlornly scattered about it. It wasn’t a lawn but a grown-up’s lie, just like ‘red’ earth.

  MAJOR HOWELLS

  Bachelor history master – apter than teacher, which would be an exaggeration of his pedagogic capacity. Cathedral chorister, baritone. Brown Bedford-cord jacket, regimental tie. Black hair and moustache, pale skin – a combination which I learnt to identify as Welsh. Slight limp due to an injury he had sustained during the war. He had, presumably unintentionally, discharged a revolver into his right foot. He would sit beside the school swimming pool in a pair of blue woollen trunks and invite us to inspect the site of the lost toe. This seemed normal behaviour. So we scrutinised a stub which, because it lacked a nail, appeared blind and aggressive, a Beardsley foetus. Until 1959 he was accepted as the school’s de facto deputy head, a position which he had assumed for himself. But late in the summer term of that year Barry Still was, to general surprise, appointed to that previously non-existent post. Why was Major Howells passed over? Had Still’s elevation merely been the means devised by the newly arrived and already intriguing Dean Haworth to ensure that Howells would leave? If so, it misfired. Howells did indeed leave, in a bate, to sulk in St David’s for evermore. However, a few weeks later Mr Griffiths died and Still, faute de mieux, was hurriedly appointed headmaster. It took the meddling shit Haworth two years to find a reason to dismiss him.

  MAJOR JOHNSTONE AND MAJOR CORLETT

  In 1936 Ted and Dorothea (Dot, Dotty) Craven paid £45 for a ruinous bothy at Seathwaite in the high Duddon valley in Furness. Over the next few years they rebuilt it themselves during their long holidays – he was head of classics at Westminster, she taught at a nearby primary school. At the outbreak of war Westminster was evacuated to three sites in and around Bromyard. Ted joined the Royal Navy and became a submariner. Dorothea took up a post in Salisbury at Highbury Avenue School, an industrial-modern building which looked across the Avon valley to Old Sarum and whose neighbour, Nestlé’s factory (pron. Nessels), was known, to my father at least, as The Mosque due to its minaret-like chimney. Among her fellow teachers were Nancy Short and my mother, with whom she formed a friendship and soon went to lodge. They would cycle to the school along the Town Path, the causeway across the water meadows where the morning mists are white wigwams. In the Easter holidays of 1942 they made the first of half a dozen trips together to Furness, some 300 miles north. Travel by train was restricted, slow, uncomfortable, unreliable. It involved numerous changes and protracted waits. After they arrived at Foxfield station beside Duddon Sands they had to walk ten miles to Seathwaite unless they could hitch a lift – which was unlikely, for the very absence of vehicles was what made the Duddon valley so plentiful and so attractive in those years of stringent rations. The gradients of the roads at either end of the valley were such that lorries could not enter it to collect the abundance produced there. The people of the valley lived off the fat of the land: partridge, pigeon, pheasant, deer, duck, chicken, egg, lamb, beef, pork, milk, butter, buttermilk, cheese, mushrooms, honey, fruit, vegetables, even flowers. There were brown trout and sea trout in the Duddon and in Tarn Beck, where a rudimentary (and illegal) fish trap had been constructed among whitewater rocks. My mother, Dorothea, Mary Sutcliffe (also a lodger) and a mutating band of other young women ate as much as they could. They camped in Dorothea’s still primitive bothy and its garden.

  The last time my daughters saw their grandmother they presented her with a photograph I had taken of them beside the deep, green, strangely still pool immediately downstream of Birks Bridge. In her terminal dementia the name wouldn’t come, her face contorted in agonised frustration although she could recognise the place. ‘Birks Bridge, Grandma.’ It was here that she had been photographed bathing with Dorothea and Mary many summers ago: they looked healthy, glowing, athletic, like companionable Land Girls.

  Tarn Beck generated the electricity which lit the Newfield Inn: pub, hotel, restaurant, post office, village shop, farm. Jack and Mary Longmire who owned it brewed beer which they flavoured with damsons. My mother called it ‘a piece of heaven in a time of hell’. Seathwaite, Birks Bridge, Harter Fell, Birker Fell, Cockley Beck, Troutal, Wallowbarrow, Walna Scar, Under Crag, Long House Gill: when I was tiny she would recite to me the names of these places she loved, places I had been to but had yet to see. When my father returned from Iraq in the spring of 1946 Ted and Dorothea lent my parents the bothy. That was where I was conceived. The 0.2 mm intra-uterine version of me saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. It did not even yet own an amniotic sac. By the time my parents-in-waiting attended the City of Salisbury’s Welcome Home to Members of the Forces and the Merchant Navy at the Guildhall on Monday 13 May 1946 it was almost a centimetre long. It shared my mother’s soup, roast turkey, stuffing, sausage, baked and boiled potatoes, green peas, Christmas pudding, crème (sic), trifle, ices, rolls. Not yet able to hear, it missed The Spotlights, produced and compèred by Dick Clark: ‘A Show Built for the Forces by arrangement with the War Office Central Pool of Artists and Major Harwood of Southern Command’.

  It was not till 1954 that I saw the place where my pre-life had begun, where the prospective creature of wartime’s
epistolatory longing called Jonathan had at last been fertilised. We drove through the night following a route that Norman Short, a member, had ordered bespoke from the AA (Automobile Association). The railway viaduct across the Severn at Worcester; Kidderminster, where Peter Collins’s father’s garage was – the promised visit would never occur; Bridgnorth’s sleeping low town and the silhouette of its high town which one day I’d reach by funicular – I still haven’t; Tarporley; doucely half-timbered Wigan; Chorley; treeless streets of back-to-backs in Preston’s first light; red-brick encrusted with black smuts; millscapes, chimneys stretching to the sky; Garstang; Carnforth, yet to be globally celebrated as the birthplace of Cecil Parkinson; Newby Bridge, the signpost to Grange-over-Sands.

  The Morris Eight grumbled up the hills after Broughton, spluttering and wheezing. And, then, there, spread before us was my mother’s heaven which was my heaven too. I had never seen a landscape of such grandeur, such drama. There were haphazard boulders in boggy fields, tufts of tussock grass, drystone walls, layered slate walls, dazzlingly green fields, packhorse bridges, spring upon spring, sheep, whitewashed houses, white water leaping down mountainsides, bright lichens, rushing rivers. Matching places to the names I had learnt from my mother was sheerly joyful. She pointed them out with girlish delight, with a relief at finding it all as it had been before the presage of parenthood, still the land of plenty. (Although fifteen years of food rationing had officially ended two weeks previously the actuality in Salisbury, as in most other places, would not change for a couple of years.) At Seathwaite the end of rationing was an irrelevance.

  The childless Longmires doted on me. I rode in Jack’s tractor’s trailer, tried eagerly to help with harvests, gaped in awe at his huge hands which were leather tools. Mary was happy to have me skiv for her in the Newfield Inn’s wonderfully scented kitchen. She cured green bacon; in its fat she fried eggs, kidneys, pluck, brown trout till the skin was crisp. She boiled (i.e. simmered) beef, carrots, potatoes, soups. She steamed dumplings and rich steak and kidney puddings. She baked bread, chicken pies and batter puddings (this was proudly Lancastrian Furness). She moulded great forms of tart white Lancashire cheese and rounds of yellow butter. There were crocks of cream for trifles, fools, fruit tarts, treacle tarts. The wood-fuelled Aga she worked at was an immense vessel. She swallowed draughts of strong tea, smoked an occasional Park Drive and tutted over the News of the World’s stories of sexual intercourse and molestation. Now and then she hugged me. The best food I’d tasted away from home was served in a charming corrugated-iron dining room, a prefabricated structure presumably intended as a colonial mission hall. As a special treat I was allowed to wait on certain indulgent tables, but not that of Sir Ian —, a grocer-striped Latin-reading Whitehall mandarin who seldom condescended to speak to fellow guests and was thus known as Silent Knight.

  Late one lowering afternoon whilst my father set off to fish, my mother and I went for tea at Dorothea and Ted’s bothy (no longer really a bothy but a snug cottage). After cake, Ted clapped his hands and suggested that I be shown the tarn. Tarn was an unfamiliar word, not part of my mother’s Duddon litany. Maybe it was an abandoned chapel. Or a charcoal burner’s oven. A shepherd’s shelter? It was perhaps the proper name of a distinctive rock, something along those lines. It was a fair climb from the former bothy. Pewter skies above white houses. Velvet green turf. Stern grey karst. The higher we walked the darker and more thrilling grew the lumbering clouds. They obstructed the sun’s shafts, they became indistinguishable from the peaks ahead. The stony path was rough, bumpy, steep, blistering.

  Then at last there was relief from the hard going. The incline decreased. But, in front of me, at eye level, was an immense lake of the utmost blackness, polished as jet. I was shocked, scared. To have walked uphill for a mile and a half, then to come upon an expanse of water that defied gravity …

  Expanses of water are meant to be in valleys, not high above us in the fells, which were also black but matt, unreflective. This was a site of unmitigated horror. The water might burst through the old dam at any moment. My mother and the Cravens sat down to contemplate it. I turned away, looked back to safety, to distant wooded crags where there were still bolts of sun, of hope. But this terrible place had done its work, it had glued itself to my retina. It was inerasable and would indeed contaminate my dreams for years to come. This was the first occasion when, due to the weight of water above me, I suffered a sensation akin to vertigo. It was only in sunshine and in the care of a level-headed daughter that I dared return to it forty years later.

  A further vertiginous alarm would shortly occur. A big day out was in store, a treat, a trip to Eskdale where we would ride on the narrow-gauge railway to Ravenglass. My father drove upstream beside Tarn Beck and the Duddon to Cockley Beck where he took the turning to Hardknott Pass, mighty Hardknott, the steepest road in Britain, he informed us. My mother had mentioned this a few minutes previously. As though in confirmation the Morris Eight shrieked its mechanical distress. As it crept forward it was overtaken by walkers and scraggy ewes. I assumed that in a battle between machine and nature, machine would win. I was mistaken. Alarmingly, the car began to roll backwards down the snaking road, to roll backwards increasingly quickly. The crest that filled the windscreen receded, the brackened fells moved the wrong way, roadside rocks hurtled slowly upwards. Even more alarmingly my father struggled to prevent the freefalling vehicle leaving the metalled surface. Twisting to gape through the tiny back window he succeeded in keeping it on the road, just. But at some cost to his amour propre. His embarrassment seemed, absurdly, to verge on shame. A cheerfully sympathetic family trudging up the slope offered well-meant Lancastrian-accented commiserations. He looked at them as though they had mocked him: he failed to take into account that north of the irony curtain ‘hard luck mate’ is liable to mean just that. He was silent as we headed back.

  Dimp was packaged in a shallow cylindrical tin of the 1930s – eau de nil, vertically emphatic sans serif off-white letters. It took its name from dimethyl phthalate. It repelled head lice, pubic lice, ticks, chiggers and midges. My father daubed his forehead and face with it before he fished at night, every night. The Duddon midges knew their way into the apiarist’s jungly net helmet he wore. This device was a construction of non-porous manmade fibres, a head sauna which caused the smeared Dimp to melt and trickle into his eyes which itched then stung then burnt then closed. Abandoning his rod and kit he staggered across hardly familiar fields, tripping and stumbling till he reached the deserted valley road and grasping the wall that ran beside it directed himself to the hotel.

  He believed he was going blind.

  A Broughton-in-Furness GP resented having been called out, offered little cheer, told him that he had brought it upon himself, suggested he should hold his eyes under water for as long as possible and said it was just a question of wait and see. My father clung to this inappropriate expression and would cite it as symptomatic of medical ignorance and tactlessness. He lay in the darkness of his hotel bedroom with a wet towel over his eyes. Periodically my mother would guide his face into a stoneware basin. Unable to read, he listened to the idiot relation, a wizened valve-radio tuned, mostly, approximately, to the Home Service and, when my mother remembered, to the Light Programme for the delightful Al Read, admired even though he was northern (catchphrase: ‘Right Monkey’) and Ted Ray’s Ray’s A Laugh (as direly unfunny as the title – he too had a catchphrase: I have forgotten it).

  When, after a couple of days there was no improvement, Jack Longmire drove him to the hospital in Ulverston. He returned with his eyes heavily bandaged. It wasn’t like blind man’s buff: in a book at home was a reproduction of Sargent’s great First World War tableau Gassed. A single file of soldiers moves its way forward between trenches and the bodies of those even less fortunate than they are. They hold the shoulder of the comrade in front of them to guide them. Many were dressed in the very bandages my father now wore. They would never see again. Would he? I didn’t lik
e to ask. The possibility must have occurred to him, for he was unusually silent. This was an injury which, atypically, he didn’t laugh off. The prospect loomed of a noble childhood as a human guide dog of exceptional loyalty and selflessness: I would sacrifice my life to lead him wheresoever he wished to wander, to the riverbank, to the pub. But, before such piety could be observed, we had to get him back to Salisbury. He evidently could not drive in such a state. My mother, no matter what state she was in, could hardly drive. She held a licence from before the inauguration of the compulsory driving test in 1935. Had a licence been conditional on passing a test she would not have had one. When I was three, seatbelts did not exist. Had they existed I would not have been propelled into the dashboard by my mother braking hard for no reason, I would not have had the opportunity to discover the balmy solace of cool moss picked from the Forest roadside and applied to a forehead’s bulging shiner.

  There was no option. Humiliatingly, my father had to obtain permission for her to drive his company car. A telegram was despatched to Chas Perry, the chirpy Southampton supremacist and saloon bar chortler who oversaw Crawford’s reps south of the Thames. Like much of that city’s populace (Aunt Doll, Uncle Eric, Benny Hill, Ken Russell) he was a creation of Donald McGill. He doubtless replied: ‘Permission is granted to the Major’s good lady.’ I can hear him saying it. He spoke in an all but vanished So’ton accent, a pile-up of Cockney cackle and Hampshire farmyard which declined to elide; successive words seemed not to have been introduced to each other. It was like listening to an amnesiac mimic.