An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  In the autumn of 1936 he moved to Strathbrook Road, Streatham Common, London SW where he had digs with a family called Ridley. He went to Madame Tussaud’s to see the newly installed display of Reg Hinks’s effigy together with the actual gas oven from Englishcombe Lane. With his contemporary Norman Ridley he watched the Crystal Palace burn on 30 November. He didn’t like London. Maybe he didn’t realise that Streatham going on Norbury was not London. He was impressed by how much an acquaintance who worked for the Daily Mirror was paid.

  Soon after, he was back in Wiltshire, in digs in Salisbury, in Wilton Road. He disgraced himself by eating all the walnuts decorating a cake his landlady had made.

  He met the woman who would become my mother.

  They spoke of each other as though they had hardly existed before they met, as though they were the ghosts of the beings they would become. They left behind them almost vanished worlds which I learnt of obliquely in repeated anecdotes:

  When a Czechoslovakian orchestra visiting University College Southampton played that country’s protracted national anthem, the audience, believing the piece to have ended, sat down and applauded only to discover that it was barely halfway through.

  In the So’ton suburb of Shirley my mother instructed her class of eight-year-olds to draw a flower seller, which they did. One of them however misunderstood the brief. She drew a cellar full of sacks of flour with rats running over them. This child knew her stuff: she was an over-candid member of the Lowman family which owned bakeries and tea shops.

  She taught for a year at Ashurst on the edge of the New Forest. Living with her parents in Portswood she no doubt took the train from St Denys station precipitously perched above muddy hulks in the Itchen. Ashurst was only just developing the arterial roadscape it possesses today. Much of it was still shacks and bothies. In winter a little girl came to school sewn into untreated rabbit furs beneath her clothes. Another was wrapped in newspapers. I used these bucolic quirks in a short story. My mother’s only reaction was: ‘You left out that business about the couple who claimed the child had caught syphilis from a towel.’

  I kicked myself. I had forgotten it.

  At weekends in autumn she and her family would gather penny buns (ceps) at Emery Down in the Forest: in the last days of her life, short-term memory shot, she would recall: ‘The Forest floor was a carpet of penny buns, a carpet of them.’ At weekends in summer they would go to a beach hut at Naish’s Farm where Chewton Bunny debouched into the sea. She spent family holidays on the Channel Islands from where they would go on to Brittany. This was unusual for a petit bourgeois family in the 1920s. Pop, my grandfather, her father, worked in the accounts department of the Southern Railway at its pompier High Victorian offices in Canute Road near the docks. The company ran ferries to St Helier and would later run them to St Malo and Le Havre. His family was allocated free passages and cut-rate passages. And because he travelled to these ports on business he had friends in them with whom his family would stay. I, in turn, would benefit from (the now nationalised) Southern Region’s largesse towards its employees and often travel on the Falaise to and from St Malo.

  My grandmother, née Agnes Baird, had numerous relatives around Falkirk and Bridge of Allan: her parents had both grown up nearby in St Ninian’s, not yet a suburb of Stirling. My mother spent a miserable school holiday with some uncouth, bullying, perpetually truanting cousins called Taylor near Dunblane. She and her sister had to sleep in button beds – alcoves beside the stove, an arrangement close to that used in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan where children slept on palettes suspended above stoves. The two sisters walked up to the Wallace Monument of which their great-grandfather had been the first keeper. They hated the food. They refused to go back the next Easter.

  That, they hoped, was the last they’d ever see of the Taylors. And it was – for over fifty years, until the late 1970s when an Australian backpacker arrived at my parents’ house and announced he was the son of one of those cousins who had emigrated in the 1930s. How, it was wondered, had he got the address? The youth was as callow and boorish as his father had been. After ten days of being waited on he showed no sign of pursuing his grand tour. He was only persuaded to leave when some imminent house guests were invented. My father opened an ancient wound by jocularly holding my mother responsible: the Taylors were, after all, part of ‘her’ family. She was indignant at this reminder of a buried animus, which would soon be thoroughly exhumed when, within a few months of each other, Uncle Eric and Uncle Hank, who had never met each other, died.

  My father predictably spent the day fishing rather than attend Eric’s funeral. In revenge, my mother refused to go to Hank’s.

  QUALIFICATIONS

  I was provided with three godparents. Uncle Hank was a DIY pantheist. ‘Auntie’ Nancy Short was agnostic. ‘Uncle’ Norman Short was atheist. He was not militant because he had no cause to be. There was nothing to rail against. Religion was not a question in the milieu he frequented. He was originally a Cambridge mathematician, a scholarship boy from working-class Spalding who retained vestiges of a flatlands accent, a collision of East Anglian twang and Dukeries vowels, these veneered with RP. Post-graduation he turned to aeronautical science. He married his childhood sweetheart. He was recruited by the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment at Martlesham and moved with it to Boscombe Down in the first month of the war. He remained there all his working life save when seconded to USAF testing facilities in California and Colorado. He was the very opposite of my father, who referred to him as ‘Little N’, obstinately unable to figure how or why their lives should be intertwined. It was through their wives, fellow teachers who had met during the war at Highbury Avenue School. They met as adjuncts of their wives. Thus they endured a thirty-five-year acquaintanceship which pretended to friendship. In my father’s eyes Norman was a bloodless, introspective, fastidious, unworldly, antisocial, snivelling hay-fever sufferer. (Norman and Nancy never came to my parents’ parties. Either they weren’t invited or if they were they declined out of shyness.)

  Norman ate the rind of hard cheese, grew vegetables and flew with test pilots, beyond the speed of sound, roller-coasting above the numberless greens and greys, buffs and blues, corkscrewing through the empyrean, his empyrean. He was a cold warrior boffin-god with his graphs, charts, diagrams, headphones, allinonecatsuit as shiny as a light entertainer’s, a life-support helmet, corrugated pipes, breathing apparatus, valves, wrapround goggles. With feet on land he cut a comical figure. He was, indeed, short, closer to five feet than six, squat, severely myopic, restrained and so calm he might have been under almost permanent sedation. Almost. Major calamities were met with mute stoicism whilst the frailest of causes might prompt a fit of petulance, which may have been a kind of displacement: his first child, a sweet-natured daughter, was severely disabled, whether through a botched delivery or a genetic flaw was unresolved. His son feared the latter and determined not to have children.

  Nancy held up her many siblings and, implicitly, herself as paragons of striving and upward mobility. Their father was a cobbler, their mother a cottage hospital cook. They worked hard, passed exams, went to college, achieved, gained qualifications. Ruth Misselbrook was a lesbian primary school teacher with an entourage of desiccated elderly queens whom I wouldn’t have blown even had I been not as other men (apart, evidently, from the others who are not as other men), Peggy Misselbrook was a lesbian grammar school headmistress, Anthony Misselbrook was a heterosexual senior civil servant in Customs and Excise (one son), Sidney Misselbrook was so senior a heterosexual civil servant in the Inland Revenue that he received a knighthood (one son), Jack Misselbrook was a homosexual civil servant who killed himself by slitting his wrist. There may have been others. They were all good bridge players; Anthony, the best of them, represented Scotland. They were not wholly indifferent to literature, art, music etc. But anything beyond detective fiction, Medici Society prints and saccharine light orchestral music was reckoned to be pretentious and corrosive.
Norman and Nancy owned three prints: a horse at plough followed by gulls, downs in the background; a windmill, more downs (chalk is aptly the medium in which to represent them). And one painting, realised with precision: a tile-hung arts and crafts house above a raised pavement. This was said to be a scene in Wheathampstead. On my only visit to that village I failed to locate the site. A further enthusiasm was Compton Acres, a risibly kitsch park at Poole built by a margarine baron and filled with coy ‘classical’ sculptures. Sir Sidney, a sometime hockey international and minor counties cricketer, was proud that among his fellow commuters from Meopham was the thriller-writing solicitor Michael Gilbert who composed his work on the train. His son, Sidney Tim, a couple of years my senior, once failed to impress me by demonstrating how to leave a tip in a restaurant: the coins were to be pushed by the palm of the hand rather than the fingers under the rim of a plate or saucer. The gesture should be indiscernible.

  The Shorts and the Misselbrooks were preoccupied with mores’ minutiae, for if they got them right they were entitled, qualified, to sit in judgment on those who failed in one regard or another. So any mention of the socially ambitious local horizontal Estelle Tedd would prompt Nancy to hiss: ‘Marriage breaker … she’s got more than a few divorces on her conscience. Or would have if she had a conscience.’ As well as the adulterous and the sexually promiscuous, she berated exam failures and idlers and those who had fancy ideas above their station. She assumed that the road accident at High Wycombe in which Ken James’s first wife and their unborn child died in 1939 was bound to have been his fault: we all know what sort of chancer – thus driver – he is. (The inquest was shown irrefutable evidence that a spoked wheel’s wingnut had suffered metal fatigue.) She denounced Ian Priest as irresponsibly selfish; had he given up playing rugby Kay would not now be a widow with two small sons to bring up on a teacher’s salary after he was fatally injured in an inter-services match. The Dowson boyfn1 is in trouble again, stealing from his father’s firm …

  My father thought it necessary to instruct me in the difference between a moralist and a moraliser. He said that when he calls someone a loose-wallah or a chulaka or a pansy, he is describing them, not condemning them. He harboured a faint fear that my mother might be infected by Nancy’s schoolmarmish fishwifery and that she might take up with Nancy’s friends, among them a miserable woman, also a teacher, whom he referred to as ‘Keep Death Off The Road’, an allusion to the widow in weeds shown in a road safety poster of the Attlee years. He need not have worried. My mother was not much given to judgment. She used the term ‘a superior type’, but not without irony; she would describe her denser pupils as ‘dull and backward’, but not without fondness. The Shorts’ semi-detached bookless house was excessively overheated. It was furnished with swollen prewar armchairs. The fireplaces were all fudge-coloured tiles. A table by the front door held a telephone and an American plastic address book equipped with an arrow-shaped slide that took one swiftly to whatever letter was required. The house smelled pleasantly enough of Nancy’s cooking. That was the best thing about her cooking. It tasted lardy, bland, greasy, underseasoned: the putty colour of a chicken roast at too low a temperature was unappealing. The worst of it was that it was all served with reckless generosity that stretched beyond the table. Norman and Nancy liked to help. I didn’t want to be helped with my near-innumeracy so that I might qualify to read physics at Hull like Derek Gibby, son of one of Norman’s Boscombe Down carshare group. I didn’t want to be taken on holiday to a dismal bungalow in the North Sea resort of Mundesley, a week of killing boredom, chilly beach and gala pie which was spectacularly relieved by a drive to their native Spalding across the fens where black-sailed vessels soared thrillingly on black waterways high above the black earth. The world went widdershins.

  RICHMOND, DANIEL & BUNTY

  In the early autumn of 1956 my father was offered a promotion by William Crawford and Sons. The job was akin to Chas Perry’s in Southampton. My father would oversee the company’s reps in the East Midlands and East Anglia. He would be based in Northampton. Early one Sunday we drove to what was to be our new hometown. I was impressed by a taut flag in the brisk breeze in the ironstone village of Rockingham. I was further impressed by being able to buy a half-pint of dilute orange juice in a milkbottle from a milkman on his rounds: this was not, it turns out, peculiar to Northampton but I had not met it before. And though we didn’t go there I knew that Fotheringhay was close. The name sent, still sends, a shiver down my spine. I looked forward to moving. Why my father had even bothered to drive to Northampton was puzzling. He must have known that he would never live there. There was no river. The mighty Nene didn’t count. It wasn’t a chalkstream, there was no game fishing. He wasn’t going to sit on a bank with a Thermos waiting for inedible mud-flavoured bottom feeders that would be thrown back. The considerably higher salary, over £2,000 p.a. according to my eavesdropping, was no compensation for the sporting bereavement. He believed himself to be defined by his eternal battle with Salmo salar. Not that he could really afford the ever-mounting fees demanded by the fisheries he favoured.

  The Breamore estate owns extensive riparian rights on the Avon upstream of Fordingbridge. Down on its luck in the second half of the Fifties, it decided to investigate the idea of exploiting the river as a commercial fishery in the manner of Somerley and Royalty, further south. My father had acquired a minor local reputation as a sort of virtuoso, a consistently successful salmon fisherman on the Avon over the previous decade. He was nevertheless astonished to be contacted out of the blue by Breamore’s owner Sir Westrow Hulse, Bt, with whom he had a passing acquaintance. Westrow made him a splendid offer: would he be prepared to fish the river for free for three or four years, in all seasons, to determine whether the proposed scheme was feasible and if so what were the piscatorial characteristics of the water, where are the pools where salmon might lie, what attention should be paid to the management of the sluices, how it might be organised as beats and so on. Given that salmon fishing is a rich man’s sport and that my father was far from rich and forever attempting to sponge a day here or there, this was a gift. And Westrow, whose fortunes were such that he could barely afford to heat his sprawling Elizabethan house, was getting what would now be called expert consultancy for nothing. Deal done.

  This would prove to be as much a social as a sporting adventure. Westrow had been apprised of my father’s prowess by Daniel Richmond, whom he had originally asked to survey the river. Daniel Richmond was too busy. His name meant nothing to my father. In that case, said Westrow, you must meet him. Thus through my father I came to discover the allure of a singular man with a semi-ziggurat hairdo.

  Daniel (never ‘Dan’) was charming, intemperate, alcoholic, witty, promiscuously bisexual, snobbish, generous, chain-smoking, outrageously rude, usually laughing. For over a decade and a half my father and he would enjoy a friendship marinated in fishing, cars, champagne and black velvet. ‘I’m just a gwease munkih,’ Daniel would sibilantly murmur, not for a moment expecting anyone to believe him. He was, in fact, a brilliant and inventive engineer. An engineer on the verge of (automotive) fame and considerable fortune. His company Downton Engineering tuned the BMC Mini Coopers which, driven by Timo Mäkinen and Paddy Hopkirk, became the most successful rally cars of the age and won the Monte Carlo three times. They were tested to screeching point on the long straight roads across the Forest: stray ponies tested the brakes. I couldn’t, still can’t, tell a manifold from a rocker arm. How cars worked bored me. Daniel didn’t bore me, nor did his diffident astonishment at his achievement. He was an obsessive tinkerer and maker who succeeded in raising the performance of Alec Issigonis’s creation to an unprecedented pitch. Issigonis and Alex Moulton, who designed the folding bicycle and the Mini’s suspension, were friends of Daniel’s. So too were Jem Marsh who designed and built the Marcos and such once-scandalous figures as his fellow gentleman-engineer Jeremy Fry, Edward Montagu of Beaulieu and the profligate landowner and occasional writer Mich
ael Pitt-Rivers (who despite his marriage to Sonia Brownell was homo rather than bisexual). Daniel’s milieu was that of upper bohemian oddballs,fn1 black sheep, remittance men, bolters, bankrupts – the sort of people who lived in the villages of Rockbourne and Whitsbury, had indiscreet affairs, gambled recklessly, suffered nembutal and/or seconal addiction and hanged themselves.

  Bunty, his terrifying and saturnine wife, was not actually his wife. She had apparently bolted from her husband, a man named Whitaker, after a couple of years’ wartime marriage and had not divorced. She was older than Daniel. Together they bought a garage that was little more than a decent-sized shed, a carriage house. It was an extension of Daniel’s hobby of motor sport – saloon car races, hill climbs (Shelsley Walsh, Snettisham), time trials etc. They hoped to scratch a living repairing and refitting the grand cars of the aristocracy which had been in wraps for the duration. It wasn’t the most ambitious of enterprises. They were novices in engineering and business. Bunty’s modest private income was hardly a guarantee of security.

  Daniel had a gift for friendship, Bunty had a gift for antagonism. He could get away with anything. She couldn’t. It can be a fine line; in this instance it wasn’t. Her accent was posher than the Queen’s. She was bossy, occasionally menacing, impressively touchy and never let anyone forget that she was Somerset Maugham’s niece. Which, in fact, she wasn’t – her father’s sister was married to Maugham’s brother. Near-miss. Besides, what kudos did she expect to gain from announcing herself as Maugham’s niece in a village such as Downton, a bucolic place whose industries were tanning (Richardson), seeds (the well-named Hickman) and brickfields (the stations and halts of the fantastically slow Salisbury and Dorset Junction Railway were ruddily built of them). Her precise cousinage was improbably challenged, for why should such a connection be fabricated? She was hypersensitively suspicious of the most meagre courtesy shown her. ‘Why don’t you say what you’re fucking thinking?’ was her habitual response to any utterance which she reckoned (rightly, wrongly) euphemistic or, signally, which failed to insult her as she believed she deserved to be insulted. She abhorred niceness, she despised wanting to be liked: ‘Je m’en fous du qu’en dira-t-on.’ She gave no other indication of familiarity with idiomatic French. With crashing understatement my mother once remarked: ‘Bunty can be really quite difficult.’ The rawness, hurtfulness, vindictiveness, palaeolithic crudeness of her demeanour were much more than difficult. This was clinical. Her appearance was a problem. She had clearly once been good-looking – handsome rather than beautiful; but, in the cant of the era, ‘she had let herself go’. And how. Her hair was a greasy chaos with a pronounced widow’s peak. There was liverish baggage beneath her eyes. She had a puffy indoors complexion, her arms were fubsy with quasi-dropsical flaps that were not yet called buffalo wings. Years later I would see her near-replicated in Ian Nairn. Her frumpy shapeless dresses might have been expressions of self-contempt. Yet she drove a Ferrari (Enzo Ferrari himself owned a Downton-tuned Mini) whilst Daniel drove anything that was around, mostly Minis but also an astonishingly ungainly Morris or maybe Austin Maxi which could accommodate salmon rods. It was lumbering proof that Issigonis had peaked with the Mini. And it presaged the decline of British car manufacture. Since they were unsaleable maybe Daniel had been given his.