An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  My grandmother’s late Victorian terraced house was in Bengeworth – Evesham east of the Avon. It had no bathroom. There was a tin bath in the kitchen, an outside lavatory, two rooms and kitchen downstairs, three rooms upstairs. Her musty, multiply curtained bedroom was at the front. Every surface was covered with fabric. Formless garments on hangers, doilies and samplers, cushions and crochetwork, a complicated abundance of bedclothes, shawls everywhere. The Virgin Witch Kitty’s bedroom was in the middle. She had never left home. Uncle Hank’s was at the back. He had hardly left home. He returned every weekend of his life from his digs in Burton-on-Trent. He would continue to do so after his mother died in 1962. Only then was the back bedroom converted into a frugal unheated lino’d bathroom smelling of coal-tar soap. My grandmother knitted in winter and gardened in summer in an old person’s garden full of old person’s herbs and flowers: sunflowers, honeysuckle, hollyhocks, phlox, foxgloves, lovage, thyme, sage. The garden was long and narrow. The rectangular beds were evenly spaced, partially bordered by metal edgers whose lacy patterns were coarsened by decades of paint. Between the beds were the stems of an arterial cinder path that stretched to the garden’s end where a high gate in a high hedge opened onto a lane. Here sheds and garages were dwarfed by a green, corrugated-iron, potato warehouse. Its hangar-like scale was boorish, its windowlessness sinister. At that far end of the garden Auntie Kitty grew runner beans and tomatoes. She turned the tomatoes into vinegary chutney and vinegary ketchup. Dozens of seldom sampled jars and bottles were stored in a walk-in cupboard under the stairs. It was my favourite place in this house of tense misery and ancient odours.

  Can they have lived, day upon day, in such emotional straits? With such bereavement of pleasure? With such smug incuriosity about the world beyond Port Street?

  Possibly that misery only descended on the house with our arrival. Possibly our intrusion into their hermetic world exacerbated the collective despond.

  Possibly the awkwardness of their greetings and the familial gaucheness were compounded by my father and, especially, my mother on her infrequent visits. She was not a blood relation so she contended with the insurmountable handicap of not being a Meades, save by marriage. Further, her pursuits were urban and indoors. Worse, she had stolen my father, led him far from bosom and hearth. And he had gone all too willingly, he had chosen her over them.

  The place where Uncle Wangle lived might be more distant than Salisbury but this house was still his home and Poor Frail Auntie Ann’s too, for she was an orphan and had nowhere else to call home, no one else to call family. Poor Pale Auntie Ann was accepted because she wore no make-up, because she was meek, because she willingly succumbed to the mother-fixated neurosis of Auntie Kitty, Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle, because she did not question the delusional familial myth that Auntie Kitty had made a ‘sacrifice’ to stay at home and look after Mum who (my mother suggested) was quite capable of looking after herself. My mother would add that Auntie Kitty was ugly, idle and spiteful, a sponger who had even invented a sickness to avoid any kind of work during the war. She would not say any of this in front of my father, who showed an unreciprocated, groundless loyalty towards these miserable people whose blood he shared and whom he had escaped from.

  And he would escape from them again, within minutes.

  Those Sundays we would arrive at Northwick Road at about 11.30. The kitchen and dining-room windows would already be opaque with lunch condensation. Uncle Hank would have gone to a pub. We would stand around awkwardly. I would be offered the choice of staying with Auntie Kitty and Grandma or coming to look for Uncle Hank. I opted for the latter. My mother, if present, would come too, in defiance of the code of the Meades. I’m not going to skivvy for that parasite she’d say out of my father’s hearing. By 11.45 we were on Uncle Hank’s trail. This was far preferable to hanging around Northwick Road. Soon I’d be comforted by those essential staples of period colour, a bottle of fizzy pop and crisps with damp salt in a blue paper twist, sitting in the car outside a pub.

  The Crown on the Avon’s right bank near the abbey gardens: a hotel of car parks, drainpipes, yards, dustbins and little future.

  The Fleece at Bretforton whose landlady Lola was a character, an appellation I assumed to be a synonym for throaty old bag smothered in panto rouge. Had she not drawn chalk circles around the hearth, witches would have come down the chimney. They were evidently easily deterred. Besides, Auntie Kitty wouldn’t have fitted into the flue.

  The Lizzie at Elmley (never Elmley Castle) where the landlord’s nephew Tony, a cruise-liner steward, came to recuperate from a tropical fever and was still there half a century later, his name over the door now.

  The Bridge Inn at Offenham. There was no bridge. There was a rope ferry across the river (the ropes were frayed). It had a scrappy ‘beer garden’ with cold uncomfortable chairs. This was meant to be a treat for me, to sit there with Hank, my father and my complaining mother (if applicable). It wasn’t a treat. The car was preferable. The very notion of a ‘beer garden’ was to be mistrusted. Worcestershire wasn’t, still isn’t, Bavaria, even if the people are as ugly. ‘Worst-looking women in England’ was my father’s view.

  The Fish and Anchor upstream of Offenham. It was peculiarly isolated, the place was desolate, excitingly gaunt. A ford crossed the river above a weir. A lock was hidden behind an islet of willows. The dusty road ran along the riverbank towards a bare hillside. When I was very small I believed that beyond the hill was the end of the world. Later I would learn that beyond the hill was another hill, a higher hill where, two years before I was born, a hedge-layer had been murdered. His throat was slit with his billhook, a cross was carved in his chest, his body was pinned to the ground with a pitchfork. Such signs suggest that he was believed to have been a witch.fn2

  One summer Sunday midday Uncle Hank wasn’t at a pub. He was, said Auntie Kitty, at Owlett’s End.

  With the Hodges!

  Auntie Kitty imparted this intelligence to my father with a heavy emphasis and a … what? I noted a change. Knowing smirk. He either didn’t notice or chose to ignore it. The name Hodges appeared not to mean anything to him. He was no doubt as accustomed as I was to Kitty’s hobgoblin tics. I had never heard of Owlett’s End. Owlett’s End! The name was entrancing. Like the Owlhoot Trail. It turned out to be less than quarter of a mile away. We could have walked but, as usual, my father strode across the street, got into the car and drove. Over Port Street, past Beach’s jam factory in Church Street where all that remained of the church was a porch. Then, after stopping and starting and peering and reversing, we turned past a five-bar gate hanging from a rotting post into a drive. It led beside a portmanteau-ish house of limestone and wings, add-ons and brick, to a yard flanked by former stables, outhouses, sheds, swaying chestnuts in bloom, dapple. We parked behind Uncle Hank’s Aston Martin. A burly man who might have been an officer-class chicken farmer – apple-cheeked, tattersall-checked, cavalry-twilled – was showing him a Morgan sports car. His high voice hardly accorded with his man’s-man garb. A boy and a girl in their early teens stood beside their father’s new acquisition as though it lent them kudos, which it did, to my regret. The man’s greeting to my father was distracted, as though he was trying to place him. I feigned an interest in the car even though it looked out of date, almost prewar, stylistically retardataire as though it was contemporary with the Aston Martin: the same detached mudguards and unincorporated headlights, an entire lack of streamlining. But, undeniably, it was not a Morris Traveller. The teenagers ignored me. Their father squeaked about torque, rpm, nought to sixty. Between the yard and the house was a thick, blowsy garden of palpitating shrubs and heavy-breathing boughs. We had been there only a few minutes when a dark blonde, superhealthy, suntanned woman appeared from it with a tray bearing glasses of beer and lemonade. For a long moment, negotiating the uneven path, she failed to notice my father and me. When she did see that her family and Uncle Hank had someone with them she uttered a surprised vowel. She was about to
put down the tray on top of a butt when she started and looked again at my father. Her handsome face glissando’d from recognition to astonishment to suppressed fury. This occurred so swiftly that the others, by now gaping at a carburettor or cylinder head, saw nothing of this transformation which was beyond mere mood: she mutated from one person into another. Her husband, immersed in ownership, offhandedly introduced my father, whose name he had forgotten, as Harry’s brother and appended me as his nephew. It was not till he spoke his wife’s name, Laura, that my father was stirred from his dissembled Morgan envy and realised that they had at least met before. She announced that she would get drinks for us too. She made it sound like a threat. When she returned she remained silent and still, undemonstratively furious. Why? That my father should have possessed the insolence to come to her house? To so dare? If her restrained anger was evident to my father he didn’t show it. He did not allow himself to be fazed by such matters.

  Had I mentioned it – which, of course, I didn’t – he’d have irately brushed it aside. An undertaker of the emotions, he’d have shrugged it off by suggesting that she was a bit down in the mouth. I didn’t mention it because I was afraid of his wrath. And because I was puzzled. I didn’t understand anything beyond what I had seen and sensed. What did this woman have against him? Whatever could he have done, or not done, to prompt such a dislike? A dislike moreover that she wished not to reveal. It was her secret. It was his secret. Was I really too young at the age of ten to surmise the obvious? To guess, as I did some time later, that they had been lovers, that my father had mistreated her in some way many years ago when she was not yet Hodges, when she still bore her maiden name. Her surprise: why should she have made the connection between this acquaintance of her husband and my father. He, reciprocally, had no idea whom she had married, whose name she had taken (as was de rigueur in those days). He had left Evesham twenty-five years previously and was hardly assiduous about keeping up with old friends, their gossip and news. Again, there was no reason for Uncle Hank to have known about a distant, youthful liaison of his secretive brother.

  What were the sentimental and sexual lives of my parents before they met (and, perhaps, after, given their four-year wartime separation)?

  A woman who – dark eyes, chaotic hair, negligent dress apart – so resembles my mother that they might have been taken for each other appears with my father in various photos that I found only after both he and my mother were dead.

  This, I assume, is Tina, also dead no doubt: there’s no one left to ask.

  ‘Daddy was engaged to a girl called Tina … She’d have been your mother.’

  I knew enough at the age of seven to retort to my mother: ‘I wouldn’t have existed.’

  That worried me. Not my mother’s comforting, misguided, silliness but my non-existence.

  So I was grateful to Tina for having wearied of fishing trips. Here she is with two plump trout taken at Paxford near Chipping Camden in the summer of 1935. Maybe she wearied of him, or he of her once he had met her better-turned-out ringer. I was grateful for the combination of circumstances that brought my parents together and for having been given the opportunity of life – this egg, this seed – rather than the ignorance of nothingness which a union with Tina would not have inflicted on the uncreature that could not be called me. What luck to have avoided such nullity, such abysmally close nullity. It was fearful contemplation of this nullity’s abysmal proximity that made me see early on that religion is merely a desperate form of pattern-making which attempts (and fails) to deny that each individual’s very being owes everything to chance, that the lap of the gods is a euphemism for the conjoined groins of human animals.

  My father never mentioned Tina. My mother, only that one time. She was hardly more forthcoming about her former boyfriends.

  After her death I found some photos of her with a moustached, crinkle-haired fellow (Southsea 1932 etc.). I described him to my aunt, her sister Mary. ‘That’ll have been Stuart,’ she said.

  Sometime after, I discovered more photographs of the same man, now wearing academic robes; on the back of several of them he was named as John.

  My mother once mentioned (parenthetically, forgetfully) that when she was a probationary teacher at Basingstoke in the early Thirties and he was a policeman, she had known John Arlott ‘quite well’. That might have meant anything. It probably meant no more than her having ‘gone to a couple of dances’ with the young Hugh Casson, whom she had met through his father, University College Southampton’s rowing coach.

  She didn’t row.

  She played violin in the college orchestra.

  She watched in horror as the front wheel of her friend Gwen Newman’s bicycle got caught in a tram track near Bevois Valley on the way to school. The tram, braking hard but unable to stop, bore down on Gwen Newman. She scrambled desperately to get out of its path. Just! Her bicycle was crushed. This incident was often recalled as a cautionary tale, although when I was at my grandparents’ house in Southampton I had no bicycle and in Salisbury where I did have a bicycle there were no trams. Its achievement was to intensify my dislike of Bevois Valley where the pavements were piled with dead people’s furniture and mangey fur coats, where the collarless totters stank of tobacco and drink, where lorries hurtled and clanked, where the day was dense with gyring smuts and tracks still gleamed in the macadam, lethal souvenirs of the trams they had once guided.

  Gwen Newman was my mother’s only schoolfriend whose name I knew. And it was heard exclusively in this context. Poor Gwen was the near-victim of an accident that was reported in the Southern Evening Echo. That was it. That was her one role. What did she do with the rest of her life? Had she excelled at lacrosse? Was she brunette? Did she marry? Was she happy, was she a housewife, did she serve in the war – if so, how? Did she leave Southampton? Did she have a pet as sweet as the fox terrier Rags?

  The marriage that my future parents contracted beside the Itchen at St Mary’s, South Stoneham on 20 May 1939 was of course a union. It was also a tabula rasa achieved with a Kärcher, a compact to shut out those friends who were his and those who were hers, rather than those who were theirs. This may even have been deliberately plotted, a quid pro quo where the quid and the quo are indistinguishable. It may have been an unspoken treaty. They were strangers to each other’s milieu. For different reasons they were not at ease with the other’s family.

  These are propitious conditions for an enduring marriage so exclusive that its child will inevitably sense that it is an intruder.

  The premarital world that was erased that day.

  My father went to Prince Henry’s Grammar School. He often walked to school across ‘Echo Bridge’ which carries the railway over the Avon to Evesham station. He roamed on Bredon Hill with Jumbo Evans and Os Edwards: years later he would tell me stories about the imperious Lord Rabbit whose luxury warren was in a quarry there. My mother was insistent that he ought to write them, send them to a publisher.

  He and his friend Eric Rae who lived at Rous Lench would, when Rae’s parents had gone to bed, push their car from its garage, along a long drive and when out of hearing of the house crank it and glide, high above the hedges, through the silent sleeping Vale to Ab Lench, Atch Lench, Pinvin, Peopleton, Iron Cross, White Ladies Aston. He ate hedgehog baked in clay with gypsy fruit-pickers. He worked for a wool merchant. He got a job with William Crawford and was posted to Bath.

  The next-door house in Englishcombe Lane was occupied by James Pullen, an octogenarian widower suffering dementia, his middle-aged daughter Connie, her six-year-old daughter Beryl from her former marriage, and her second, younger, husband Reg Hinks who, according to my father, was ‘a classic small-town Lothario, smarmy, bit of a pissartist’.fn3 He called himself an electrical engineer rather than an electrical goods salesman – a marginal self-elevation that would improbably be called into question. He had given up work upon marrying. No matter what the weather, he would often push Pullen in a bath chair out into the back garden. The old m
an would sometimes remain there till after dusk. He screamed and swore and jabbered incontinently. He shivered. His face was knotted in pain. He sat through hailstorms. Anxious neighbours gossiped that it was going to be the death of him. They were repeatedly assured that exposure to climatic vagaries is what he wanted: remember Gramps isn’t quite all there in the head, Hinks told them. And besides, he’s physically fit – apart from all the falls which caused him multiple contusions. On 1 December 1933 Pullen died. It was apparently a gas oven suicide: something he had repeatedly threatened. Connie was absent when Hinks discovered the body. A post-mortem, however, revealed that Pullen had been hit on the back of the head. Reg Hinks was charged with murder, found guilty and sentenced to death. In the condemned cell he received more than 3,000 letters of sympathy, many of them proposals of marriage. Too late. ‘The only English murderer I came across – so far as I know,’ said my father, who had occasionally nodded to him in the street and had observed him in a pub.

  By the time Reg Hinks was hanged at Horfield Prison, Bristol, on 4 May 1934, my father had moved to Devizes. He shot at hares on the downs at Bromham with Joe Davies, a policeman whose family owned The Bear Hotel. He fished in the chalk streams to the east and south of Salisbury Plain. This was when he first got to know the city of Salisbury where he would live most of his life.