An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  When I returned to the dining room my mother smiled in mock reproach and touched her chin to indicate that I should wipe Miggy’s labia-pink lipstick from mine. I picked up a napkin. My father was locked in conversation with Vicky’s deep cleavage. Brian was clutching a bottle of Cointreau and blowing smoke rings. Mr Slegg was chortling at some joke – doubtless his own, doubtless at my expense, doubtless smutty – which Cyril apparently failed to understand. Pam, the only sober member of the party, told me, without severity: ‘You should take care.’ Which presumably meant I should have been to the Durex dispenser in the gents before meeting the maggots.

  Cyril depended on Pam whilst treating her with contemptuous indifference. She kept the books and mollified the staff. The hotel was held together by her skilful drudgery and by subventions from Cyril’s elder brother and his nephew whose company’s name he spoke with a proprietorial boastfulness that was delusional: Wheelock Marden was a potent Hong whose businesses included shipping, containers (then in their infancy) and property. George Marden and his son John were massively successful tai-pans. George had bailed out his brother year after year. Loan after loan had remained unrepaid. According to Pam, John considered that he and his father were more or less blackmailed by Cyril, who was all too aware that a Marden bankruptcy, even on the other side of the world, would stain the family’s reputation in Kowloon and New Territories, and across the South China Sea to the Philippines and Australia. Nor was Cyril too proud to beg with menaces from his own son, nailbiting Brian, a manufacturer of packaging equipment in suburban Bournemouth.

  Pam Marden was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the autumn of 1966. A shaken Brian Marden was telling my parents the prognosis when I got back from Wellworthy’s piston ring factory where I worked as a chamfer machine operator. The next evening I went to see Pam. Her impending death affected her less than did the fate of the children of Aberfan who had died that morning under a sliding slag heap. ‘At least I’ve had my life.’

  Cyril, however, was deeply affected. Pam’s cancer was a form of treachery towards him; at the very least it was offensively inconsiderate. He was incapable of looking after himself, too idle to look after her. He continued to spend all day in the bar at The Crown. Pam was confined to her bed. A series of nurses was hired. Some left because they weren’t paid, others because of Cyril’s malicious rudeness. Eventually Bill and Eleanor Adams, the tenants downstairs, found themselves taking charge of Pam’s care. Brian and Vicky came at the weekends. When Vicky was around during the week she’d spend the afternoon in bed with my father rather than tending to her mother-in-law.

  Nosing around in Cyril’s squalid office at The Crown she found a pile of some two dozen recent envelopes addressed to him, handwritten rather than typed. Not the usual invoices, summons and demands. The letters had been replaced in the envelopes. She read them with incredulity. They were replies to a classified advertisement for a wife placed by a ‘recently widowed gentleman, respected hotelier with international business interests and property owner of standing’.

  Cyril was unabashed when Vicky confronted him. He told her that he had already interviewed two of the respondents but considered neither of them suitably qualified; that is to say they were not wealthy or not susceptible to being enslaved. The ideal, obviously, was a well-heeled widow who was accustomed to being downtrodden. Pam was taken into Odstock Hospital. The day she died Cyril was lunching with an applicant in The Rose and Crown. Wisely, he didn’t risk his own hotel. The jolly Austrian manager got used to Mr Marden’s successive lady friends whose eagerness caused them to travel considerable distances to meet him. They came from Kingston-upon-Thames, from Reigate, from Daventry, from Tiverton. One was so wide a special obesity chair had to be found for her. A second, alert to widowers’ ways – and by now he really was a widower – shrilly accused him of being a gold-digger. At which point Cyril confirmed the accuracy of that estimate by announcing that he had forgotten his wallet and storming out of the dining room.

  When Marjorie read Cyril’s ad she was revisiting the country of her birth for the first time in over thirty-five years: she had migrated to Australia from Derby in 1930 after her fiancé broke off their engagement the week they were to be married. Three years later in Adelaide she had met and married a mechanical engineer. Post-war they established a small business to manufacture the knitting machines which he designed and patented. Their only child, a son, was killed when a scrum collapsed in a university rugby game. When her husband died she sold the thriving, much-expanded concern. The cottage industry in a workshop was now an exporter with a purpose-built factory.

  Marjorie didn’t have the makings of a mug. She had presumably been an astute businesswoman. But loss and loneliness weighed on her, rendered her vulnerable. She blamed herself for her misfortunes. Her reunion with her socially immobile sister’s family and proletarian cousins had not been happy. They resented her affluence, her worldly success, her immunity from wartime privations, her accent, her expensively tailored clothes. She told my mother, whom she would perforce befriend, that she had not been looking for a husband. She had been reading the classifieds as an entertainment; she was taken by their boastful desperation. It was the mention in Cyril’s ad of ‘a property commanding John Constable’s world-famous view of Salisbury’s historic cathedral’ that sparked her curiosity. Although she had never visited the city, framed prints of certain paintings by Constable had, in her exile, represented an ideal of the England she had left behind. There was a sort of piquancy in the contrast with the Adelaide suburb called Salisbury, a roughneck, meat-pie sort of place, a world away from Glenside where she had latterly lived.

  Constable painted more than a dozen world-famous views of the cathedral. They are his own. His duty was to his inventions rather than to topographical fidelity. Thus Cyril’s claim had, for once, been not entirely mendacious, nor had his boast to Marjorie that Wheelock Marden was ‘the family firm’. He was, after all, of that family and massively in hock to it. They married three months after meeting. For Cyril it was like hitting the jackpot. For Marjorie it was the beginning of a sentence in hell. Not that she realised it immediately. On the contrary, she was enchanted by the rivers, the meadows between the rivers, the spire beyond the rivers. Whilst she sat contentedly on the balcony or ambled about the cathedral and close clutching a guidebook, Cyril set about devising ways of redistributing her wealth.

  Initially he requested ‘loans’ to help him through problems at the hotel. He claimed that these were caused by governmental mismanagement of sterling. The sums requested soon increased in size. When Marjorie began to demur he resorted to self-pitying tears: he would lose his hotel, they would lose their home. He locked her in the spare room, hardly larger than a cupboard, till she agreed to sign cheques to him. She would sit with my mother and howl. Her face was puffy from tears and blows. Cyril might be old and scrawny but he didn’t allow those qualifications to inhibit his taste for domestics with a purpose. In little more than a year Cyril peculated and menacingly obtained over £25,000. This was a sum far in excess of the handouts he received from his brother and nephew. He swindled to satisfy his avarice, his craving for hoarding. The hotel was not refurbished; he did not replace his now rusting slum of a car; he continued to wear the same shiny threadbare suit day in day out. A year after their marriage Cyril was admitted to hospital suffering pleurisy. Marjorie seized her chance and returned to Australia, partially fleeced but entirely relieved. For several years she sent my mother letters. Sometimes they included a photo of a brightly coloured flower. She was happy. Then they stopped.

  Cyril had been surprised by her defection. He couldn’t believe it. It took him some time to understand what had happened. When his confusion abated he realised that what he had feared at the time of Pam’s terminal illness had come to revisit him. He was alone with no one to bully and abuse, no one to skiv for him, no one to pick him up whenever he collapsed, an ampersand of bony malnutrition. Vicky volunteered to spend part of the week wi
th him. Thus she was able to renew her affair with my father. I was by now so seldom in Salisbury that I knew nothing of it. One time I was there she said of Cyril: ‘If he ate anything he’d be incontinent. He’d be in nappies. But he only drinks so he just pisses himself.’ He was not so drunk that he didn’t realise what his daughter-in-law was up to. He grassed her up to Brian who, with his usual force, confronted my unsuspecting mother rather than my father. Could she please please possibly get my father to desist? I arrived late one weekend morning as Brian, clumsy and tearful, and Vicky, a haughtily unrepentant culprit, exited from my parents’ front door. Vicky ignored me. Brian smiled desperately, sort of kneeled.

  My father and mother watched them go. He was all sheepish bluster. She was furious. No one said anything. He disappeared to tie some fishing flies. She mixed a jug of gimlet. Perplexed but no doubt recognising what was going on, I went down to the river’s edge and laughed at the boiling stream. I was not privy to what had passed but it soon became clear that Cyril had been removed so that Vicky would have no cause to trouserloiter. He went to live with them in the northern sprawl of Bournemouth. They swiftly tired of his presence. So began Cyril’s vagabondage. That conurbation’s numberless sunset homes were unable to cope with his ever-increasing delinquency. Time and again he was asked to leave. He died in the brown hall of an establishment in Branksome Park whilst he was waiting for Vicky to drive him to the next place, which he would now never terrorise.

  MARKET PLACE

  What a spectacle! What a din!

  Fearful calves penned between wooden hurdles. Sheep spinning this way and that, sensing something was amiss. Insouciant pigs, happy and snuffling. The market superintendent whose face was a synthesis of farm animals – please note the cavernous nostrils and their stalactites of bristle. Hay, straw, shit in several coalescing forms. Gullible kine snorting and mooing and peering winsomely. A sense of the chaos to come when one of the condemned breaks its bounds.

  Till the mid-Fifties the centre of the Market Place was devoted on Tuesdays to livestock.

  Prewar trucks, slatted-sided lorries, demobbed Jeeps and the oxidised bronze statue of him apart, the scene could not have changed much in the century since Henry Fawcett – political economist, radical reformer, Postmaster General – last saw it before he was blinded by his father whilst shooting partridge on Harnham Hill. There were still horses tethered outside the pubs along Ox Row. There were still smallholders’ dog carts parked by the Guildhall.

  Along the northern side of the square, beside Blue Boar Row, where Fawcett was born, stood two rows of stalls and vans. Boiled sweets, suspiciously coloured cakes, jams, canned goods from the Commonwealth, dirty veg, fruit, meat, wet fish and fish and chips. The hygienic probity and the quality of the goods were variable. The air was thick with the stench of the subterranean public lavatories, their disinfectant and unidentified frying agents. But here was Johnson’s cockle stall. Threepence a plate. A drop of malt vinegar, a shake of white pepper. This was a kind of bliss, amplified by being forbidden. The First German Girl, Christine, who initially took me there, warned me not to tell my parents. The Second German Girl, Lotte, was too conscientious to succumb to my demands and had no appetite for such things. She left to marry Mark Young, a Communist electrician who renounced the party for a career as an ETU official and eventually became General Secretary of BALPA. Her short-lived replacement Lynn arrived bearing a gift for my father: a moleskin waistcoat made not of that cotton fabric but of the fur of moles trapped by her father, a professional mole catcher on Lambourn gallops. As well as fur the garment was composed of drops of dried blood, bone shards and desiccated ligament. Much of Lynn’s day was taken up listening to Frankie Laine’s ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin’’ (‘The Ballad of High Noon’) whilst putting on make-up to entice squaddies, one of whom soon impregnated her. She blithely revealed to my horrified mother my fondness for cockles and was duly forbidden to take me there. So too was her successor, The Third German Girl, Ruth, who did as she was told. However, because she had not been told not to give a six-year-old boy half a pound of melted butter for breakfast she did so, granting my request without demur, assuming no doubt that this was a commonplace English dish: a not unreasonable assumption given that I used to eat tubes of supposedly fruit-flavoured Punch and Judy toothpaste. Her more usual repertoire included stuffed cabbage braised in stock, silverside with dumplings, potatoes fried with cubes of bacon.

  She had an insatiably sweet tooth. She assuaged it with Tyrozets, cough-sweets packaged in translucent marmalade-coloured cylinders, and frequent visits to the half-timbered Cadena Café on Blue Boar Row where the éclairs and doughnuts were cheaper than The Bay Tree’s or The House of Steps’s. This chain of cafés had artistic pretensions. In certain branches a trio was said to play at teatime. Here there was no music but a mural which acknowledged local sensibilities: the cathedral spire rose behind chalky downs. The style was whimsical, Festival of Britain, akin to Barbara Jones’s. The foreground represented agriculture as far from pastoral, as a mechanised industry: combine harvesters and tractors driven by dungareed workers, rectilinear cowsheds, Dutch barns. There were glowing sheaths of corn among pylons. This picture of neatness bore no relation to the Market Place’s muddy disorder, lowing cacophony and heavily accented bonhomie. It might have been a fellow traveller’s happy dream of a collective farm on the road to Amesbury.

  The spectacle of the Market Place took many forms. Muir Martin and Higgins: chemists of contrast! Mr Higgins’s shop was a relic of long long ago when tiled floors were coloured by the sun’s rays refracted through gigantic vials on shelves in the window, when banks of drawers contained the ingredients of remedies that would be mixed and pounded and fired and pressed into pellets by a pharmacist who had trained to do something other than sell nappies and shampoo. Each drawer was marked with gold lettering in a signwriter’s hand from the days of gaiety girls and Skindles. And Mr Higgins himself lived in St Marie’s Grange, a house at Alderbury considered to be the last word in ugliness. No matter that it was the work of the young Pugin, who had built it for himself on a site which looked upstream to the cathedral and downstream to Longford Castle. No one knew who Pugin was. Half a century after the Queen and Empress had died Victorian architecture’s reputation was at its very nadir. To claim an interest in it was regarded as mad or pretentious or both: there were exceptions such as the neo-Romanesque church at Wilton, the classical survival villas of Clifton and Cheltenham, but as for the Gothic! The Dean and Chapter’s typically oafish, typically vandalistic removal of George Gilbert Scott’s and Francis Skidmore’s reredos and rood screen from the cathedral excited hardly a murmur. This prodigy of the metalworker’s craft, installed during Scott’s restoration, had lasted less than a century. It was bought by Bert Shergold, a blacksmith who presumably used pieces of it in the patio doors, garden gates and distinctive barbecues for which he claimed to be noted. (The Shergolds were one of the tribes of south Wiltshire – others were the Gullivers, the Moodys, the Chalkes, the Dredges.)

  Cecil Kent was a pharmacist. Rae Kent was a character. He was shy, she wasn’t. She had moved to Salisbury with her south Walian parents and accent when her father had bought Muir Martin. Cecil had been employed as an assistant. He married into the business. When his father-in-law retired he took it over. He in turn employed an assistant who was known as Living Wage. The attraction of the shop to me resided in the large bowls of shampoo sachets manufactured by a company called French: they were like jewels, taut, distended, sexy. The attraction of the Kents themselves was her effusive generosity and his bemused geniality: they gave countless parties where he was a wallflower and she got badered. Life and soul was their Gannex-clad friend Mac, who had never had time to get married because he was so busy building up one of the most important chains of dry cleaners in Hampshire and Dorset. His dog was incontinent. The Kents moved house often, on two occasions to houses I knew through their previous owners. This troubled me.