Cecil owned a succession of oddball cars which I would get to ride in. My only experience of travelling in a rumble seat was in his Triumph Roadster. Years later he had a Facel Vega which he drove with thrilling recklessness. The Kents’ three children – older than me by at least a decade – led admirably independent lives. As soon as he had finished an apprenticeship Martin left England to work as a marine engineer in the eastern Mediterranean. Sandra the youngest married a literally lowbrowed marine who died in a road accident. Pat’s acceptance by Guildford Art School’s photography department, the first in the country, was regarded with awe, reported in the Salisbury Journal: tertiary education was not a commonplace. Then, whoops, she eloped with a beard called Jimmy. Fellow students indicated that they had gone to Paris. Poor Cecil, who had never been out of England and spoke no French, obtained a temporary passport so that he might track them down. Improbably, he succeeded. A neighbour belonged to the same regiment as a member of the British military attaché’s staff. This fellow had good contacts in the French intelligence agencies. A moonlighting DSTfn1 officer had no trouble in finding the indigent young lovers and, misunderstanding why they were being sought, treated Jimmy to some good old-fashioned coppering. The marriage didn’t last. Their photographic portrait business floundered. As they grew out of being off-the-peg beatniksfn2 they grew out of each other. They divorced. Rae, following an agony aunt’s advice, sent Pat on a cruise in search of a new rich husband. She found a suitable man forty years her senior, older than her parents.
The broadest frontage on Blue Boar Row was that of the ill-named Style and Gerrish, a startlingly tatty department store where in his grotto Father Christmas, too pissed to grope, merely burped Empire sherry fumes at Roger and me; where, at the age of three, I panicked and screamed when I found myself separated from my mother in a dark forest of legs on the move (thinner trunks than today’s); where I bought a Tootal Silver Blade horizontally striped tie (navy, cerise); where a plate-glass window was broken during a fight between a dozen girls from rival schools and two were hospitalised. Leaving the store one day when I was thirteen I saw a youth of nineteen or twenty with the malnourished, high-cheekboned face of Jet Harris. He wore ice-blue jeans and grey winklepickers. Grey! I had never previously seen grey winklepickers. I wanted a pair even though I knew the smartest feet were now in chisel toes, I wanted those jeans, I wanted his tight bumfreezer, I wanted to be him. Or if not him one of the proto-Mods with Roman haircuts and short iridescent bronze macs who loitered in Sutton’s record shop with its advanced, perforated-hardboard listening booths. It had moved a hundred yards from straitened premises in a dark courtyard where there still stood the skewed outside staircase of a late mediaeval pub. Now it occupied a tile-hung building’s roomy ground floor which granted the bearded owner sufficient space to embarrass his young clientele with fits of finger-clicking, dig-the-sounds hepcattery. The Spanish girls (or town prozzies) pointed and mugged silent laughter at him. Whether or not they were Spanish is moot: all that is sure is that they were barely anglophone. One had a baby. They were both swarthy. They wore dauntingly tight skirts, thick mascara, moustache-size false lashes, scuffed stilettos. Their vigorously sprayed and backcombed beehives were skyscraping mantillas reminiscent of the patissier’s craft. They prompted rehearsal of what I did not then know to be a commonplace urban myth, prompted as much by the nominal association as the vertiginous construction itself. Insects or nits or spiders, maybe beetles or bees, were said to have nested in the cavernous inner recesses of their hairdos and were already boring into the skull. One summer the Spanish girls were always around. Then they vanished. Their brains pocked and holed no doubt.
Pinder’s was an ironmongers which sold tacks and nails by weight and wrapped them in shiny brown paper cones. Opposite on the north-east corner of the market square stood a hamfisted lump of tudorbethan gigantism which may have fooled someone but didn’t fool me: I knew very well that it wasn’t of the sixteenth century, and I was a child. It housed the tartan-carpeted Caledonian Club whose walls were antlerscapes, whose members were, according to my father, pompous, self-righteous bores. (One of them, a sometime ‘gaiety girl’, had the temerity to telephone my mother to tell her to tell me to get my hair cut.) His despisal of kilts was disproportionate to the visual offence they caused him. I didn’t realise that his contempt was not so much levelled at the garment as at the bogusness of ‘traditional’ garb and sectarian affectation.
By mid-Georgian standards the Guildhall is wild. I was beguiled and repulsed by its primitive rustication, which broke through the smooth ashlared stone like petrified suppuration. It recalled the strawberry-mark borne by the Old Mill’s owner. Beside it was Whaley’s outfitters. School uniforms, Cash’s name tapes sewn in the font of your choice, Lee Cooper jeans, eau de nil jeans, check jeans, snake belts (though none of them compared with my Dan Dare belt whose elastic was printed with space ships and ray guns, whose buckle incorporated the pilot’s helmeted head – a masterpiece of moulded plastic).
The Saturday market pitch outside Whaley’s was occupied by Billy Hector, a Bournemouth knocker. His job was to read death notices, to discover the address of the departed and at a suitable interval after the funeral – as much as two or three days – to knock on the bereaved’s door and attempt to buy the departed’s unwanted possessions, the ones that are cluttering up everywhere and that, just getting in the way, inconvenient like Missus and watch out for some of them dealers from elsewhere, Southampton, Totton – bad lot. He was a charming, heavy-eyebrowed, gregarious loose-wallah, whose market stall was laden with the junk that he was obliged to take along with the occasional treasures he uncovered. Those went straight to auctions conducted by supposedly respectable houses. The junk comprised hideous gewgaws, book club books, airport novels, dead men’s cracked shoes and shiny suits. Greater Bournemouth, with its tens of thousands of slobbering geriatrics and nonagenarian kerb crawlers, was a fecund source of death’s gifts. My father witnessed Billy greeting an evidently regular customer, telling her that he had just the salad tongs she had been looking for. The customer beamed as he proudly brandished a pair of delivery forceps. Sold.
The adjacent greasy spoons, caffs and pubs were unappealing. I ate Stoby’s chips on a single occasion. Of the city’s five fish and chip shops, one for every seven thousand inhabitants, it was the least enticing. My loyalty was divided: Yorkshire Fisheries’ chips were the best but Bedwyn Street had an incomparably showy fryer, a smalltown James Dean with a vivacious blond quiff, with a pack of cigarettes folded into his T-shirt’s sleeve, with a muscular shovelling action. He was fearless in the face of flying fat. The tiny outfit smelled good and the chips were crisp. Whereas Stoby’s were pale and flaccid and the stale smell had powerful outreach.
The smell of Scats was more like it, mysteriously sperm-like, though in infancy that was not revealed to me. The seed of grass smells like the seed of man. This seed merchant was at the western end of the Market Place. There were bulbous sacks stacked high. A staircase corkscrewed to unseen offices above. The light was dim. The air was brown. Every shade of brown was represented in that shop. From baby’s first try to spraint – scat does mean shit. (It also means whisky and heroin.) For many years I obstinately confused Scats with Spratt’s, manufacturers of birdseed and brownish dog biscuits. Spratt’s advertised their products with an ingenious logotype. The seven letters of the name were eased by the designer Maxfield Bush into the profile of a canary or, more commonly, a Scottie dog. This was achieved without the laborious contortions that habitually characterise such devices. Why, I wondered, did Scats not display Spratt’s’ logo? I didn’t lose any sleep over it. I set out to emulate Mr Bush. I learned from John Bennett, editor of the Salisbury Journal, that this sort of visual pun was called a calligram. My efforts at devising them were at least better than my shamefully maladroit attempts to build model aircraft or carpenter anything other than a wristwatch stand in the impenetrably accented Mr Usher’s woodwork class. My limitat
ions were apparent to me even though I lied to myself as I did to the world. It alarmed me that my brain’s response to three-dimensional demands and spatial riddles should be to close down, to take industrial inaction; that was something to keep to myself. Calligraphy and its derivatives appeared to be as rigorously one-dimensional as cartography, thus as exciting, as alluring: here were forms that I might actually master. Such exercises might culminate in something other than frustration at my wretched incapacity.
Chronology was baffling. Salisbury teemed with evident ancientness. Elsewhere there were things that had been made in another time, in the recent past, which confusingly appeared to belong to tomorrow. I didn’t know that these were emblems of a puzzle called modernism. The past they came from seemed more modern than the present. It was as though the future had already been and gone, before the war. Everything was happening in the wrong order. Gresley’s A4 Pacifics, pastel colours, the flat-roofed houses besides the unmade roads at Sandbanks, green pantiles, blue pantiles, wrap-round windows, the lonely High Post Hotel, Poole Twintone pottery – they were all evidently products of an aberrational parenthesis outside time. By the 1950s however, time was under control, normality had reasserted itself: the new police headquarters on Wilton Road was neo-Georgian and pompous; the first stage of Southampton’s reconstruction was neo-Georgian and meek.
In the course of that parenthesis the alphabet’s letters had been cleaned, sharpened, pared down, shorn of redundant excrescences. Now, once again, letters’ modesty was preserved – as it had been long ago in advertisements for meat extracts and vaudeville – by flourishes, tails, curlicues, tendrils. An austere sans serif font was associable with the austerity of war and rationing. The reaction against it was swift. All of a sudden it was the typographical equivalent of going out in public with no clothes on: not done, worse than not done.
My efforts to create calligrams, my efforts to design display letters were connected to and hampered by my efforts to achieve an individualistic handwriting which was mine alone, which would, when I perfected it, be a facet of my identity. Indeed when I perfected it my identity would be partially revealed to me. My efforts were also informed by my antipathy to a slab serif or egyptian font which, used in its seemingly invariable italic form, had become ubiquitous with astonishing alacrity. Britain suffered a rash of Stymie. It was timidly invasive, apologetically maculating. Even though it was a prewar composition it did not, aptly, find favour in Britain till the middle Fifties. Like much of the design which came to characterise that decade it gave offence for the very reason that it sought not to give offence. It was cowed by such self-abasement that it couldn’t even stand up straight, rather it stooped under the weight of its fawning forelock. Italics were doubtless reckoned casual, modest. High modernism had been formal, rhetorical, ostentatious. The first wave of post-war modernism was a dilute, matey, cosy, folksy reaction to what had preceded it. It felt tentatively pre-modern. That chronological conundrum again.
Stymie was the preferred font of welfarist exhortation, yet it was unauthoritative because so implicitly provisional, so liable to collapse. It was the literal expression of the coercive carrot. Come on! This is good for you. Eat your greens. Swim your lengths, that’s the way. Please tie your barrel knot. Run on the spot. Tie your granny knot. Press, press, fling – that’s a good chap! Join in! Youth clubs which no youth wished to frequent, public lavatories, telephone exchanges, post offices, community centres, health centres, swimming baths, council flats, fire stations, dole offices, civic centres. Stymie was the state’s means of reassuring us that the state’s largesse provided all our needs, for which boastful do-goodery we must be grateful. It was to be avoided. Nonetheless when I drew letters, the strokes of my heavy crayon or pencil never quit the paper without leaving on it the unwelcome promise of a serif to come, the germ of an unwelcome growth. My hand’s insubordinate lack of discipline was frustrating.
Till the age of seven handwriting was a matter of isolated letters on, or almost on, exercise books’ lines, wobbly pylons and dead trees on a horizon. The margins of those exercise books are decoratively defaced by drawings of Norman helmets which extend over the nose like an exaggerated widow’s peak. Joined-up writing was foisted on us by Miss Piercey, a needling spinster whose classroom was off the undercroft where we ate disgusting lunches (fish spirited away in pockets) and Sun-Pat peanut butter at teatime. Learning copperplate was learning by rote. Times tables, county towns, Marlborough’s battles, French verbs and vocab, the kings and queens of England, verse by de la Mare, Lear and Stevenson: learning these through repetitive recitation was a task I undertook with boundless enthusiasm. Housman: ‘Let a man acquire knowledge not for this or that external and incidental good which may chance to result from it, but for itself; not because it is useful or ornamental, but because it is knowledge, and therefore good for man to acquire.’ Copperplate was not knowledge. It was a set of inflexible rules, a rubric enforced by a disciple of chastity, a property that the Virgin Witch Kitty’s example caused me to recognise, if not to articulate to myself, and to mistrust. We wrote with regularly sharpened pencils then progressed to dip pens which were good for us, like prayers or gym. They tore pages, they constellated them with blobs and spots, with drunken diaereses and macrons on the lam, with dolt’s Morse. Miss Piercey was swift to slap our wrists. Because I wished her ill I was incapable of appreciating that a grudging submission to her copperplate tyranny might have bent my hand to my will and so allowed me to achieve something other than the inchoate, illegible skein of wisps and curls which passed for my writing after I moved on from Miss Piercey’s class and, unchallenged, declared calligraphic independence.
My imaginary friend, my only imaginary friend, Andrew Parker, with whom I would share record-breaking batting partnerships, was a scion of the family that had founded the fountain pen company. I chose him because he was going to be a ready source of desirable, streamlined, hooded nib Parker 51s. I might write illegibly but I wanted to write illegibly in style, with the modern pen par excellence: modern once again meant something created before I was born. I had overlooked the Parker Pen Company’s being an American manufacturer. It was a blow to discover that awkward truth: Andrew Parker was, then, an improbable cricketer who breached my rule of an imaginary friend’s credibility. Further, in my parallel domestic life, the Parker 51 I yearned for was considered a laughably expensive pen for a child, let alone a child whose lifelong aptitude for losing things had revealed itself early. Instead I was, as usual, fobbed off with a Woolworths imitation. Which became a series of imitations as, in turn, I lost them. The pens – no manufacturer or even country of origin was vouchsafed – had a hooded nib which could be unscrewed, an inconsistent ink flow and a slightly plumper barrel than the Parker: choose from metallic crimson or petroleum blue. They might not have had the status of Conway Stewarts, Osmiroids or even Platignums, but they weren’t old hat. Their streamlining allowed them to move across the page with a speed unthinkable in an open-nibbed model. I was very proud of my nameless pens, just as I was of my wallet – plastic and British racing green. (I coveted Poth’s non-U green plastic clip-on tie with a non-U Windsor knot.) My father owned, though never used, a hopelessly outmoded Parker Duofold of the 1920s, mottled plastic that mimicked marble or blue cheese and with a clip like an oboe’s stretched key. He wrote with pencils or Bics which he bought in bulk in St Malo (where there were formica tables, zinc bars, tergal clothes and sans serif letters so pared down that they didn’t even extend to the point where a parasitical serif might append itself: you cannot be too careful). He teased me that were I to be as modern as I wished I too should use a Bic or a Biro. He knew of course that such instruments were strictly forbidden at school on the spurious grounds that they caused children to write with enfeebled hands. Newness was a crime. Rejection of any form of technological advance was Salisbury’s norm, derived maybe from the excessive temporal power wielded by the Dean and Chapter: presumably the land on which the Wilton Carpet Factory
stood was not subject to that pernicious body’s jurisdiction, for in 1957, during the summer of the concert at Wilton House, a weaving ‘shed’ with a hyperbolic paraboloid roof was erected there to the designs of Robert Townsend. With the exception of that architect’s own house in the benighted garrison village of Durrington, it was the only building in south Wiltshire that declined to look backwards.
As my ineptitude as a cricketer became ever more evident Andrew Parker slipped out of my life. I seldom played the game, training more or less daily to improve my swimming, determined to excel at something. It was not as though I particularly enjoyed swimming length after length and being tested by Mr Cooper’s omnipresent stopwatch. But swimming fast – freestyle and butterfly – was the only talent I possessed. It defined me as much as my hairdo and my handwriting; the former in a state of flux, the latter yet unresolved. Not playing cricket did not quash my interest in certain aspects of the game. Watching it bored me. Rather, watching players who were better than I was – that is, everyone – bored me. And I was too close to the game to appreciate its lexicon’s dash. But scoring was the practice of an engrossing code: I bought books of scorepads and staged games determined by dice in which I amassed centuries or, in modest mood, was dismissed in the high eighties. My appetite for such publications as the Picture Post Book of the Tests was undiminished: ‘Benaud in the gully takes “the catch of the century” to dismiss Cowdrey for 23’. (Lord’s, 1956). I supported no team or country: tribalism wasn’t the point. Australia’s tour of South Africa in 1957–8 prompted no more or less involvement than Pakistan’s of the West Indies the same winter. Lists of cricketers’ names – P. B. H. May, P. E. Richardson, E. R. Dexter, and the initialless ‘players’, the Untermenschen from up north, Trueman, Tyson, Wardle, Washbrook – fascinated me. Were Australians such as Norm O’Neill and Graeme Hole, South Africans such as Jackie McGlew and Peter Heine, gentlemen or players? Among the many annuals I bought or browsed was the Playfair. Oh the exoticism of names: there were cricketers called Contractor and Engineer. Must be Parsi my father said – as were such surnames as Barrister, Banker and Cookwala: one of his Paiforce subalterns had been Lieutenant Doctor.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 22