By then, however, the appeal of the Johnstones’ attritional palaver had been eclipsed. A quieter, tenser incident had occurred, one whose ramifications were unpredictable and intriguing. Again, here was a demonstration of the opportunities for reinvention afforded by the now distant war’s chaotic aftermath. Was anyone who he claimed to be? We all knew that the war had changed global power’s bias and Britain’s social shape – we could read of such shifts every day. The democratisation of affluence was a commonplace. There was another level of mutation. Personal, buried, secret.
Early one evening on the way back from the liquid coffin of Wastwater my father spotted a roadside pub and suggested we have a drink. There was a small gravelled car park. I followed him down several flights of steps between rockeries and loud flowerbeds. He ducked through the door between bottleglass bow windows. The room was lugubrious. The only light was behind the bar. A biscuit-coloured man stood there. His thin baby hair and bovine face and crumpled clothes were chromatically indistinguishable.
He barely looked up from the newspaper spread on the bar to greet us with a bored: ‘Evshning.’
At about this point everything goes slo-mo.
He looked up again and announced: ‘The boy’ll havsh to shtop outshide.’
His voice, although a farrago of sibilants and whistles, was flat. It was a voice that resented itself and the callous pity it provoked. It was a voice like no other.
My father started. Not, it was immediately apparent, because of the man’s casual officiousness. He bristled with the incredulity of recognition – but recognition of what? In a gesture of contained rage that I had never seen before he tightened his lips over his teeth. He was absorbed in memorious dredging. He peered at the landlord then walked to the bar.
‘Well, in that case we’ll push off … We’ve met before, haven’t we? Kufi wuk say at cot daykanahi.fn1 Corlett, isn’t it?’ He was amiably accusatory.
The landlord had not troubled to register him till that moment. For a grossly stretched second his face locked in mortal puzzlement, an abattoir animal that cannot believe the indignity of getting a bolt to its head. He twitched as though about to sneeze. A subcutaneous tic danced beneath his left eye. He masticated air. He shook his head.
‘What? No no. Namesh Lishter. Bob Lishter. No yer mush be mishtakin me for shomeone elsh.’
‘Really?’ My father did not hide his disbelief.
‘Fraid sho.’
‘Then Major Keith Corlett of Paiforce’ – this was undisguisedly mocking – ‘has a double.’
The landlord opened his palms, shrugged: ‘’Appensh.’ He nodded in agreement with himself.
My father glared at him, turned on his heel, clasped my shoulder. As we left he glanced up at the white-lettered notice above the door according to which the licensee’s name was Robert Erskine Lister. He was staring at us, his face frozen in a rictus of fearful antagonism.
‘Lishter! Lishter!’ My father sat in the car guying the man’s speech impediment. He had an acute ear, not that it was required in this case. I enjoyed hearing him mock the unfortunate.
A finned Austin, baby blue and cream, entered the car park. A small boy with iridescent black hair got out of the car followed by his mother, a strikingly elegant Indian or chi-chi woman wearing pedal pushers. She glanced at us and smiled whitely. From the car’s boot she lifted several cardboard boxes marked with Smiths Crisps’ logo.fn2 They obscured her path. She walked blindly down the potentially slapstick steps with assured grace. This must be Mrs Lister. Or Mrs Corlett.
‘He knew bloody well that I’d rumbled him. Lishter … A shlimey piece of work.’
War foments war. The Japanese army in Indochina surrendered on 19 August 1945 to the Viet Minh, which had been armed and funded by the USA. In the new world order there was to be room for only one colonial power. So the USA continued to support Ho Chi Minh after he had declared himself President since it wanted an end to French rule: it did not distinguish between the Vichy appointees who had been ousted and massacred by the Japanese and the Free French. Some Japanese troops joined Ho Chi Minh’s guerrillas. Confusion reigned. An awkward alliance of a British Indian division under the clumsy Major-General Douglas Gracey and a French expeditionary force was despatched to wrest control of Saigon. So began the war that would end in the American evacuation twenty-eight years later.
In Iraq a number of officers and men of Paiforce awaiting demobilisation were astonished and infuriated to find themselves seconded to Gracey’s division. Major Keith Corlett, a pen-pushing quartermaster stationed in Basra, was not among them.
But twenty-two soldiers whom he had invented were. For two and a half years he had peculated the wages of between thirty and fifty non-existent soldiers. Further, he had received money for payments to similarly non-existent civilian contractors. The plan he had devised for covering up his embezzlement was not nullified by the peremptoriness of the order that these troops should immediately embark for Bombay en route to Saigon. It was merely enacted earlier than anticipated.
Major Keith Corlett disappeared.
His absence was not noticed for some days. Even then it was a week after he was last seen that MPs investigated his bungalow. His clothes, his personal effects, his papers, his identity card and passport were all there. He was a heavy drinker, a member of several card schools, a polyglot whose impediment was said to vanish when he spoke Urdu or Bengali – prewar he had worked in Calcutta. It was initially mooted that a) he had met with an accident when rough shooting, which he typically did alone; b) he had been murdered in the Hanna Sheikh market area where he frequented a brothel; c) he had collapsed with alcohol poisoning; d) he had been killed over a gambling debt. When twenty-two soldiers failed to report to the vessel that was to take them to Gracey’s HQ at Bombay it was assumed that they had deserted. Over a month passed before the extravagant truth began to emerge. By then Corlett was far away, and he was Lister, as he had long prepared to be.
My father had known him only casually. He had recognised him by his voice. This fluke encounter had shocked him as much as it had Lister, who must now have been living in fear of exposure. If, that is, he was Corlett and my father had not been mistaken, a possibility which nagged at him. He was worried too about what he ought to do. He was steadfast in his conviction that if Lister were Corlett he should face trial. This was a matter of an officer’s duty, a gentleman’s duty. He rightly discounted the notion that to inform the authorities of Corlett’s whereabouts would make him a grass. But what authorities? Paiforce was long disbanded. In whose jurisdiction should Corlett be tried? Barrow-in-Furness’s rozzers would improbably be interested in a martial fraud and, possibly, an identity theft perpetrated fifteen years previously in a distant country that had undergone a revolution and was now hostile to Britain. Did the Judge Advocate’s department have the competence and legitimacy to instigate proceedings? And what proof could he offer? What was the process? How was it put into motion? He repeatedly discussed it with my mother, who became exasperated with his near-obsession. She believed he’d be wasting his time. He corresponded with Mike Morton, now a tobacco planter in Southern Rhodesia who had known Corlett as well as anyone had and who in future years would refer to Harold Wilson as ‘that damned Communist, he’s sold us down the river’. He talked to a couple of local India hands, Stewart Vartan, an actor who lived at Orcheston on Salisbury Plain, and Dan Goodman. They all agreed with my mother though were more polite.
They all agreed too that Jack Watts, who in 1945 had been as astonished as everyone else at Corlett’s activities, was the man. Would have been the man. Old Jack would have known the form. But this former major in Paiforce and the Cheshires, Roman Catholic bachelor, Mancunian textile magnate, nephew, though only fourteen years her junior, of Agatha Christie, clubman (White’s, Pratt’s, Carlton), Conservative MP for Moss Side (Commons catchphrase: ‘monstrous injustice’), proponent of corporal punishment, of slum clearance and of controlled immigration, had died at his house i
n Chester Street SW1 the previous month. He had suffered a pulmonary embolism after breaking an ankle. Although he had spent ten days in hospital, deep-vein thrombosis had not been detected. Certain of Watts’s friends, my father included, believed that there was more to it than met the eye. Having made a hardly contentious link between Manchester’s housing shortage and Commonwealth immigration he had received a number of threats which he took seriously. It is difficult to see how the circumstances of his death might be construed as foul play but that did not inhibit my father from insisting that the Westminster coroner’s verdict of accidental death was flawed, a cover-up.fn3
Given that English law allowed no statute of limitations my father had all the time in the world to decide what to do about Corlett / Lister. In later years he would occasionally refer to it. He had done nothing to resolve the matter when he died in 1981.
MAJOR McCOLL
The inhumanity of majors to children took many forms. Major McColl breathed booze. His clothes had been steeped in tobacco tars. He appeared to own one jacket, gooseshit-green and hairy. It presumably concealed a flask. He was a former gunnery instructor at the Royal Artillery School, Larkhill, an ugly neo-Georgian camp between Stonehenge and Woodhenge. Full-grown squaddies and bolshie national servicemen cannot have provided so attractive a target as a ten-year-old boy. It took him about three weeks to identify me as his preferred quarry. He pushed my head into a stationery cupboard and beat me with a stick till my bottom bled. He did this often. A rubber had fallen from my cramped desk during maths. He accused me of having dropped it. I had not. He knew I had not. He accused me of talking when I was conscientiously mute. The pretexts for his punishments were risibly flimsy. A smudged exercise book. Looking out of the window. Copying someone else’s homework. My hopeless innumeracy. My bottom was bruised. I inspected it in my mother’s three-mirrored dressing table when my parents were out. The flesh was broken, blistered, striped; the weals were cutely ruffed with dead skin frills. By that age I was, of course, self-conscious about my body. So my parents would not see the injuries by chance. And I was too ashamed to show them. Too embarrassed. We had to take our punishment like men, like the men who meted it out. I wanted McColl to die even though I was guiltily worried about what would become of his wreck of a wife and his ghostly nervy daughter who shivered even in summer like a diseased ewe. But he didn’t die. So much for the power of prayer. By now though he’ll have obliged. Fleshy lips dissolved, wirewool hair powder in a cask, cirrhotic liver scarred and shrunken.
Long-term damage? No. An antipathy to military personnel (which evidently has countless other causes) and to the strenuously characterful bow-ties he more usually wore, can hardly be considered damage. Rather, a valuable lesson. I have enjoyed a lifelong mistrust of bow-ties which I cannot but regard as the badge of the sadistic bastard and the fraud. They will have done better than he, they’ll have been in and out of Oxfam, have kept coming round, frayed, gracing the necks of further generations of embittered passed-over majors and their heirs.
MAJOR MEADES
An officer who has achieved field rank, major and above, is entitled to retain it as a mode of address after he is decommissioned. My father eagerly did so. He was indignant about those who styled themselves captain, though turned a blind eye to his friend Captain Jack Powell who had been thus promoted in September 1918 at the age of nineteen. And a deaf ear to Jack’s wearisome ‘rolled on the thighs of a dusky Cuban maiden doncha know’, unerringly uttered with every cigar.
What was a proud token of service in the 1950s and early 60s seemed unconvincingly self-aggrandising thereafter, as though the bearer of the title was living on dusty laurels. It did not embarrass him. It embarrassed me. Nonetheless mockery of his style angered me.
MARDEN, CYRIL
Old Fielden, who had introduced gas light to Salisbury many decades previously, died in 1959. Watersmeet House was split into flats. The long-neglected riverside gardens where he used to sit sucking a pipe on a rocking chair outside a summer house were sold as four building plots. My parents bought the westernmost – half an acre of brambles and woodbine. The Fieldens were Quaker textile magnates, radicals, and, in the way of great Quaker families, philanthropists. Their fiefdom was Todmorden, on the Yorkshire/Lancashire border high on the Pennines. That small town’s public buildings, churches, chapels and almshouses were Fielden gifts. Beside Watersmeet House there was a handsome barn, a treasure trove of late Victorian prints, Stevengraphs, oleographs and several hundred monochrome postcards of Todmorden, the great town hall (by John Gibson, among the finest architects of the classical survival), factories, flights of locks, mills, Bacup, the Bridestones, high chimneys, pennyfarthings, brass bands, the moors, fanciful bridges, Broad Clough, the Fieldens’ castellated houses, Hebden Bridge, cobbled streets, spires. I spent weeks poring over these unwanted mementoes of a distant life. I dared not take any. Then one day the barn was demolished to provide a further building plot. Its contents were thrown on to bonfires by Old Fielden’s unsentimental son Edward, a jobbing builder. Jobbing builder suggests that he got jobs. His reputation – as low as Griffin-The-Humber-Hawk’s – was such that he didn’t get jobs. The four houses built in the gardens between 1960 and ’62 were his work because he made it a condition of purchase of the land. He was inept, borderline bent, charmingly plausible, full of excuses. Among his employees was a slobbering evangelical who foisted leaflets and sacred spittle on anyone who came near him.
Access to the houses was created by extending and metalling a previously unnamed lane that led past a corrugated-iron village hall to one of Salisbury’s few essays in art deco. Art deco was not yet current. My mother’s rather scornful epithet was jazz modern. Windows: Crittall or ‘Daily Mail’. Roof: green pantiles. It was owned by a septuagenarian hotelier named Cyril Marden, who was, coincidentally, in the process of building, in his garden adjacent to my parents’ plot, a block of two maisonettes. He and his unflappable wife Pam would move into the upstairs one, let the other and sell the art deco house. Progress was hesitant. Pyramids of sand sprouted grass. Trenches turned into reservoirs. Brickies came and went. It became apparent that this was due to Cyril’s blithe disregard of the payment schedule agreed with the builder (not Edward Fielden; Cyril, being one, could recognise one). His pathological unwillingness to pay bills was frequently compounded by an equal inability to pay them: his parsimony was both habitual and necessary. Had he been of a more genial disposition he might perhaps have been accorded the wearisome status of ‘a character’. But genial was not the word for Cyril. A man less suited to what was not yet called the hospitality industry is unimaginable. He was misanthropic, misogynistic, grudge-bearing, treacherous, paranoid, laughably mean, ignorant, jealous, resentful, permanently irate, too stupid to be cunning, rude. His qualities were manifest in his face, a sour scowling knot of knolls and crevices wrapped around a reeking cigar. It was made further alarming by a pair of feminine cat’s-eye glasses whose sweeping frame was styled with the baroque bombast of a mid-Fifties Cadillac. He never smiled. I liked him.
The Crown Hotel was easily missed even though there was an entrance in the High Street and another round the corner in Crane Street. It belonged, at best, to the lowest division of the city’s hotels, a long way behind Laundry Maidment’s Red Lion, The White Hart, managed by Mr Ianetta who, to my father’s consternation, changed his name to Ian, the beaming Austrian’s Rose and Crown, The King’s Arms (lobster thermidor) and The Clovelly, an unlicensed guesthouse near the station. The Crown’s only competitor in sheer insalubrity was the misleadingly named Claridge’s in Castle Street, but at least that pit had a bar-billiards table. The Crown was sordid. It looked more like a decrepit office building than a hostelry. White paint flaked from its exterior. The windows were matt with epic grime and curtained with filthy nylon net. The consequently lugubrious interior was a maze of sitting rooms and lounges furnished with bursting sofas and greasy armchairs. The carpets suffered mange. There was an ambient reek, a combinatio
n of noxious sources: brimming ashtrays and driptrays, the kitchen, electrocuted rats rotting behind wainscots, the seldom maintained lavatories. It was doubtless to The Crown’s advantage that the delightful Old George Inn across the street had been demolished by Hammersons, vandal property speculators and comprehensive redevelopers, in order to build a rotten shopping ‘precinct’, precursor of many an ill mall.
Cyril drove to The Crown every morning in his maroon and cream Vauxhall Velox, subsequently replaced by an automatic, primitively clutchless, green Ford Corsair which I would sometimes chauffeur him in when he had overdone breakfast. He never paid me, never thanked me. I’d have been disappointed had he done so. It would have detracted from his guileless mystique. He passed most of the day sitting on a stool at his hotel’s oddly well-frequented bar, drinking old maids’ sickly liqueurs (Tia Maria, Kahlua, Advocaat), baiting the startlingly seedy barman who was also a waiter in the dining room. This culinary morgue was proof that the English attitude to food was founded in masochistic stoicism rather than the disease called pleasure. The walls were a riot of insipidity, all smeared beiges and fawns. The swirly carpet contained the well-trodden gristle of immemorial meals. The food included imperfectly defrosted, fishmeal-fed fowl from the cash and carry at West Harnham and bottom-of-the-range tinned veg from the Amesbury NAAFI. It was typical of Cyril that, with no legitimate connection to the services, he should have got his hands on a NAAFI card.
Christmas Day 1964. Lunch at The Crown as Cyril and Pam’s guests. Why? Whatever can my parents have been thinking of? My parents were hard up, but this? The hotel was smellier than usual because grossly overheated. Nonetheless I sat beside an ill-fitting window and suffered Boxing Day neuralgia as a result. Cyril remained ignorant of the food’s aggressive nastiness. Or knew it too well. He ate nothing. He drank copiously and chain-smoked. His wine-stained tutu-pink party hat rested on his spectacle frames, a bandage on a severe head wound. The fellow guests were Cyril and Pam’s harassed son Brian and his fractious, beehived wife Vicky; dundrearied Mr Slegg wore a vermilion ceremonial sash and roared; mute Mrs Slegg in a hat on which she placed her paper hat; a jolie laide apprentice hairdresser and her mother Mrs, a venomous bundle of prejudices and asperity, who was clearly suspicious of my intentions towards the invitingly dirty-looking Miggy. Happily, by the time the Christmas pudding had been set light to, Mrs, as keen an enthusiast as Cyril for sweet liqueurs, was comatose. Miggy and I made our getaway, to a fuggy drawing room that smelled of old people and was crammed with bulbous prewar furniture. I stroked her thigh whilst pretending to be captivated by the gossip from Charles of Mayfair, Jean-Noel of Bond Street and Wanda (provenance undisclosed). These were Salisbury’s top salons: a punning name was not yet mandatory. Soon they would be joined by Hans of Bond Street and Vienna, noted for his mittel-European courtesy. She aspired to work at Wanda. She wasn’t sure I should be doing that because she had an official boyfriend Greg. Greg was going to get his own sports car in the spring. I silently wished him ill. I persisted. In time Miggy appeared to forget about Greg. The bloated armchair we were sprawled over wasn’t made for heavy petting, a disapprobatory Sixties euphemism for mutual masturbation. Half undressed we stumbled in furious haste to a lumpy sofa. Consummation beckoned. To facilitate that end Miggy pushed a greasy bolster to the floor. She screamed. Where the bolster had been there was a seething tide of maggots covering one of the sofa’s thick cushions. The sight of teeming white larvae turned out to be potently anaphrodisiac. Miggy hurriedly rolled down her skirt from above her waist. I suffered an alarmingly swift detumescence, which was just as well, for her scream had been heard. I had only just pulled my trousers on when the door opened. Mrs stood there, she too was seething. She observed the maggots with distaste and me with greater distaste. She dragged her daughter from the room, scowling at me with mighty malevolence. Unseen by her mother Miggy shrugged her puff-cheeked regret. They left.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 20