His habitats were a) the Works, b) the Bull, c) the House.
The Works was a group of utilitarian, single-storey, light-industrial 1950s buildings to the north of the village. These insipid structures looked as though they had been intended for some purpose other than tuning cars and had been seized upon by Daniel and Bunty as they began to prosper (which he, certainly, had never yearned for let alone expected).
The Bull, still there, was frequented by elderly pub bores: ‘Have ye heard mih shtory bowt …’ The taxidermised pike in a glass box was more entertaining. Under age, I was tolerated because I was Daniel’s guest. He was the place’s most important, richest client. I’d guess that by the time he sat beside me on a hefty settle and laid the rather delicate hand that wasn’t holding a Gauloise on my cock he was a millionaire. I can see my father in his Gannex holding a couple of glasses as though in frozen porterage, a gesture to show that he is en route to another part of the room, a gesture that is blithely unrecognised by the anecdotard bending his ear at the bar. I can hear myself explaining to Daniel, with a calmness that surprised me, that were I to be taken queer he’d be my first port of call. He agreed that was a good idea. Later that evening as we drove home I recounted this to my father. He merely laughed: ‘That’s Daniel all over.’ His implication (I guess) was that at the age of sixteen I was old enough to look after myself, to make my own choices in such matters.
The House was a narrow, low, perpetually sombre cottage on a steep slope. Its upper storey was level with the road that passed within a few yards. It had been built two hundred years before for foresters, bad-diet folk, hence diminutive. The scale was not appropriate for lurching, fully formed boozers. Other people’s homes are as much a mystery as other people’s marriages.
Daniel and Bunty’s partnership withstood quarter of a century of excess. Excessive lucubration, excessive drinking, excessive infidelity (him), excessive antisocial behaviour (her). What it could not bear was excessive wealth. Their financial fortune changed with alacrity. The cottage industry turned into an industry. The passionate inquiry, inspired improvisation, make-do-and-mend spirit of post-war amateurishness were sacrificed to a professional production line. The years of research had provided them with a golden goose that they dared not destroy even though it was destroying them with boredom and plenty. Daniel did not wish to be an executive. With the swollen tide of royalties that he now received from BMC for the design of components which were incorporated as standard in Mini engines he bought several miles of fishing on the Taw at Chumleigh, a house and a variety of decrepit adjacent properties. He would hole up there for weeks on end. Bunty would join him then return reluctantly to Downton to run the business in which he had lost all interest.
Chumleigh is only a couple of miles downstream from Eggesford. My father was delighted that Daniel now owned water there, further delighted that he should be issued an invitation to stay and to fish whenever he wished: which, of course, this being England, didn’t quite mean that. Nonetheless my father gratefully accepted when Daniel suggested specific dates. He drove to Devon for a couple of weekends. The appeal of these exercises in riverbank sodality, initially undertaken with enthusiasm, soon palled. My father found reasons to decline Daniel’s subsequent invitations. He observed, not altogether frivolously and with some regret, that the less Daniel was with Bunty the more he seemed to adopt Bunty’s characteristics. There is a price to pay for free fishing, this one was too high.
Daniel, the new Bunty, drifted away from the old Bunty. He hardly noticed. He sleepwalked towards oblivion. He became friendly with the elderly Henry Williamson. He took up with a woman who ran a riverside pub. Fishing began to get in the way of drinking. He was a few months short of his fiftieth birthday when he suffered a fatal stroke. Two years later, having meticulously wound up the business, Bunty killed herself with an overdose.
SCUTT, ERIC
‘Seventeen times did goalkeeper Eric Scutt stoop to pick the ball out of the back of West Harnham Reserves’ net.’ My mother asked me what I was laughing at. I read out the exquisite first line of the Salisbury Journal match report. (West Harnham Reserves’ opponents had been St Osmond’s.) ‘Eric Scutt. Oh god … I used to teach him.’ She rolled her eyes.
‘Seventeen times did Eric Scutt stoop’ became a catchphrase. It signalled preposterous failure.
Other catchphrases:
Not in front of the renchild.
Rally Rally Rally.
Lance says urrgh.
No sooner asked than granted.
Act with all due decorum.
The Ladzz.
Das Ladzz (when Germany was playing).
SEARLE, MR
Mr Searle was the Close Constable. Old, amiably avuncular manner, healthy appetite, consequently bulging dark blue uniform.
Work habitat: a tightfit wooden sentry box beside Choristers’ Green: he was usually outside it, presumably because he couldn’t squeeze himself inside it. His job was to prevent unseemly behaviour. (How does it go? – ‘The buttered buttocks of the bishop’s bumboy.’ There wasn’t enough of that malarkey.)
He monitored comings and goings and discouraged motorists from using the Close as a short cut – it was the quickest route from the city to Harnham. Harnham Gate (aka De Vaux Gate), St Ann’s Gate and the High Street Gate were open till nine or ten o’clock at night. How residents drove in and out after that hour is to this day a mystery. Pedestrian access was through doorways in the gates which may or may not have remained perpetually unlocked. The Bishop’s Gate on Exeter Street was always locked and never washed; it gave on to the grounds of the Cathedral School (formerly the Bishop’s Palace) rather than on to a public road. It was known to us as Cavy’s Gate after Mr Cavanagh. He had been a pupil at the school in the 1880s and had graduated in the 1890s, whereupon he had returned to teach Latin at the school. He lived with his similarly ancient wife in the house that stretched over the gate. Mr Searle’s domestic habitat was a house beside Harnham Gate, the only gate that has no quarters above it. Its hefty machicolations are martial – it is a work of fortified exclusion rather than an invitation to observance like the others.
There are three houses conjoined to this gate. Another of them would subsequently be occupied by the lank-haired choral singer Michael Foster who taught me history in my last year at prep school. He had just come down from Cambridge. From the Pye factory, according to my father. In what was presumably a clumsy effort at blokeish ingratiation he called me, to my evident irritation, Gerty. His example was not followed. So he imposed the same crass sobriquet on a slow farmer’s boy called Sladen who was less able than I to cope with jocular bullying. His future wife Sarah had been the school’s matron; she was the neurotic sister of the cathedral organist, teacher, musicologist and naturist Christopher Dearnley who, when assistant organist to Douglas Guest, had been responsible for bringing both her and Douglas Blythe to Salisbury. The Close was socially and familially tight-knit. The Church of England was not yet a property empire run by alumni of The School of Rachman. The Close was a village with rules. All of the houses were then still owned by the Dean and Chapter. The majority were inhabited by clergy and officers of the cathedral (organists, adult choristers, the Clerk to the Dean and Chapter etc.). Others were let as grace and favour dwellings to observant communicants: Mrs Martin-Jones, a doctor’s widow and her two daughters; Mrs Pettiward and her artistic son Daniel, by Salisbury standards something of an exotic; Douglas Pitcairn and his wife Leonora who wrote romantic fiction and books on child care; Margaret Diment, the spinster daughter of a long-dead canon. Others of her ilk lived in the College of Matrons, an almshouse ascribed (not without cause) to Christopher Wren.
Miss Philips (aka Ma Pee) owed her position at the Cathedral School to the fact that she was the headmaster’s sister. Given that she didn’t share Laurence Griffiths’s surname she had presumably once been Mrs Philips. Of Mr Philips we knew nothing. Her morning duties included inspecting boarders’ stools before allowing them t
o flush the lavatory. When she wasn’t poking around in foetid puddles of Izal and Bronco she was in charge of the kitchen.
My fellow pupils, the future MP for Salisbury Robert Key and the future progrock guitarist Mike Wedgwood, were sons of, respectively, the suffragan Bishop of Sherborne and the Cathedral’s succentor. The latter got a cottage beside Choristers’ Green. The suffragan bishop got a finer billet, the Walton Canonry: red brick, early c18, homelier than its stately neighbour Myles Place where Harry and Marjorie Jacobs lived. When Marjorie died, two centuries of occupation by that family ended and the Dean and Chapter sold it.
The heterodoxy of the bishops John Robinson (Woolwich) and, later, David Jenkins (Durham); churches in the round; the New English Bible; vicars with guitars strumming ‘Kumbaya’. Due, however, to their coarse mediation and the vague odour of ‘controversy’ the atypical, as so often, was granted a disproportionate currency. The majority of Anglican clergy, certainly of Salisbury Cathedral’s clergy, were not susceptible to dilute modernism. The Close was a bastion of unchallenged dogma, ritual, philistinism, unquestioning belief. The manipulator of millions of minds Joseph Goebbels wrote: ‘It is almost immaterial what we believe in so long as we believe in something.’ Time and again, those with this promiscuous capacity for credulousness are shown to be those with the equal capacity to promote and sanction atrocities. We repeatedly witness the migration of believers – ‘spiritual persons’ – from one cult to the next; a religion is merely a heavily armed cult. Believing in something all too evidently means believing in anything. Why should Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims – especially Muslims – be treated with anything other than the contemptuous toleration that is visited on flat-earthers and ufologists? Believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden and you are deemed fit for the bin, for the Old Manor. Believe in parthenogenesis and ascension and you are deemed fit to govern the country, run the BBC, command UK Landforces etc. The notion that these people might be mentally ill is quite overlooked: quis custodiet and all that. David Hume was right: ‘Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are anything but sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies in human shape.’
The Close’s inhabitants – lay and sacred alike – were those monkies in human shape. They were not blessed with doubt. They were obedient and loyal; both qualities which, like sincerity, are in themselves of no merit. Obedient to who? Loyal to what? It is from the ranks of the obedient and loyal that come our most accomplished state torturers, most deluded freedom fighters, most narcissistic bombers. These were evidently not occupations pursued in the bridge-playing, sensible-shoe-wearing, drop-scone-eating Close. But a chiding sanctimony sprouted like henbane. The clergy were pro-god and anti-life. My parents’ lack of observance was noted with priggish severity. And the omission was no doubt exacerbated by my mother’s teaching in a C of E school, a C of E school that overflowed from its humble Gothic premises (beside All Saints, East Harnham where I had been baptised) into a wooden makeshift classroom in a field next to the South Canonry, home of the Bishop.
For my parents, baptism and confirmation did not signify an intention that I should become any more of a communicant or joiner than they were. These rituals were merely social. There was no particular hypocrisy attached to this stance. It was the norm, the done thing. I loathed, still loathe, still despise, the liturgical boredom, the sheer balls that was spoken, the crass panto that was enacted, the degrading notion of worship of a hackneyed human construct. Kneeling for no one, blathering in prayer. Self-abasement is the terrible vanity of the unknowing.
I hated the desiccated smell of the cathedral, the ponderous responses, the dirges, the perpetual dusk, the organ, now joyless, now fatuously pompous. Because I had no faith I had no occasion to suffer a crisis of faith. Thus a nugatory adolescent rite was denied me. I vaguely regret that I will never understand the torment of losing faith any more than I will ever understand having faith. To do so demands an imaginative leap that I am incapable of. Where does it go when it is lost? Does it infect others? Does faith slip away, does this comfort blanket of the soul self-slough? If you attempt to shed it, does faith threaten that multi-suckered flukes will lay eggs in your soft tissue? If you question it, does faith respond with bolts of molten wrath? My ignorance was a deprivation akin to, say, not having been given a teddy bear when I was little. At the age of fourteen I complained to my mother of the grave psychological damage caused by that ursine absence. In the same spirit of comic exaggeration she bought me one, to teach me how little succour is to be had from such things. Faith, then, is no more than a soft toy, a cuddly companion in make-believe, an imaginary friend that is a false friend. Faith demands a gene, a credulous gene, that was not passed to me. My parents gave me little to rebel against: thus a further adolescent rite was denied me.
The Close continued to be defined by piety, the aggression of unworldliness and the faith of spinsters till the last quarter of the last century when it underwent a demographic shift.
Myles Place was sold to Sir Arthur Bryant, a popular historian and enthusiastic Hitlerite.
Leslie Thomas, a popular novelist and the bloke’s bloke, bought the Walton Canonry.
Arundells became the home of and, after his death, an insipid shrine to the former cottager Sir Edward Heath who, taking advantage of a loophole and a thick estate agent, managed to secure the freehold of a house of which the Dean and Chapter had intended to sell only a twenty-one-year lease. Unlike Bryant, Heath was not taken by Nazism. He had attended the 1937 Nuremberg Rally and was unimpressed: but then, he hadn’t been the centre of attention. He was less fastidious about Mao’s China, his ‘consultancy’ with that tyranny made him a fortune. Sadly the money bought him neither love nor even friends. He was to be found playing darts with squaddies in Salisbury pubs or eating enormous restaurant meals with his mute bodyguards. (He vainly assumed that he was worth assassinating.)
The North Canonry was bought by a man who had made a pile in container shipping and who, when he died, left over £10 million.
An important wholesaler of deep-frying equipment was granted permission to build a house in the grounds of Leadenhall, a regrettable excrescence in officers’-mess-Georgian. The Close turned into a gated community of the very rich. Which is what, mutatis mutandis, it had been half a millennium earlier when tithes and the gelt from simony, indulgences and chantries allowed the clergy to live high on the hog, bloated as bankers.
The choristers in capes and caps processed as they always had through the autumn dusk thick with spores and damp air from the river.
SONGS: DIANA
August 1957. The school swimming pool was free to pupils’ families throughout the summer holidays. Others paid a small fee. There were numerous Americans, the families of USAF pilots, marine liaison officers, soldiers and spooks who were able to buy the future at a PX. One of them had a battery-powered record player – tinny but enticing nonetheless. It played 45 rpm discs, still an exciting novelty in England. Among them were ‘That’ll Be The Day’ by The Crickets (the name Buddy Holly was yet unknown) and the fifteen-year-old Paul Anka’s ‘Diana’, which I instantly recognised to be my song: Diana was Diana Cullumbine. I begged my mother to buy it for me. She reluctantly got me the Embassy 78 rpm cover version by David Ross,fn1 from Woolworths. Embassy was its own record label; Winfield was the clothes brand. Embassy records: 4/6d. Columbia 45s: 6/8d. The pastiche might be indistinguishable from the original but that wasn’t the point. The song of my lost love across the sea was cheapened in this fake version, simply because it was a fake. I would not have given Diana a pinchbeck ring instead of gold. My love itself was compromised. I felt cheated, affronted, ashamed. My mother, too, was affronted – by my ingratitude. So I convinced myself it sounded better on the tinny portable than on my parents’ radiogram, a sort of double coffin which had once all but electrocuted my mother. She rece
ived a shock from a wire which she picked up whilst cleaning behind it. The improperly earthed current raced through her body and tightened her hand so that she was stuck to it, unable to articulate the muscles. She was wrenched away by her wartime lodger Mary Sutcliffe, who had just come into the house from the garden. A few seconds later Mary would not have heard her scream. She would have died. She suffered no injuries save bruising to her hand.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 29