Those late summer late afternoons at the pool were an early rehearsal for the perpetual party of my teens. I got to know most of the people who lazed away long hours there. And if I didn’t get to know them I found out who they were to assuage my snooping curiosity. I made sure they knew me: I was a turn, a fast and flashy swimmer, the fastest and flashiest in the school, a virtuoso of freestyle and beyond that of butterfly, the least functional, the most dandiacal, most boastful, most monstrous of strokes. Not the one you choose to swim to the bank when you come head to head with a pike. I abandoned competitive swimming in favour of teenage dissipation after I was beaten by the glistening man-mountain Brian Jenkin of Swindon Dolphin in a race of 100 yards (3 lengths), by 33.3 yards (one length); I was just making my last turn when he finished.
They, the people of those poolside summers, were: blonde Maggie, Liz, Flatfoot, whining Dunc, Jenny, the two American Lindas – the lithe one and the other one – the other one’s mother and her plaid rug, the Wallis family from Brigmerston who squeezed into an Aston Martin DB3, dashing gent-farmer father (though he carried the germ of the fat gene), glamorous mother in a turquoise and black one-piece, three perfect children (did they remain thus? Ah, they were human beings). They were Ham, Richard, Brian and the flashy racing bike he fondled as though it were a sexual organ, the Sessions twins Aubrey and Arnold and their sister Ann, David Hayden, the future scientist and writer Martin Woodhouse, the shooting-brake Wolstans, the Whitaker-Bovill girl, proudly keen to display the bruise on her bottom where, she claimed, it had been pinched in Rome.
And then there were the Shemilts. They would arrive en masse in the late afternoon. Philip Shemilt was supple and outdoorsy. What remained of his hair was dark, his skin was tanned and smooth. I don’t remember how I knew that he lived on the northern side of the Close with his wife and several small daughters. I don’t remember how I knew that he was a surgeon, inevitably a distinguished surgeon. I never spoke to any of them. They didn’t invite social contact. The parents would take turns to teach the girls to swim. The family’s closeness, trust and integrity were patent. At ease in their collective reticence, they were serenely oblivious to the splashing, high-spirited world beyond their towels and togs.
One evening my father asked me who had been at the pool. I mentioned the Shemilts. ‘Shemilts?’
My father was not conscripted in 1939. As a representative of William Crawford & Son he worked in food distribution so was, to his shame, exempted. A nation at war needed its biscuits. He volunteered for the Auxiliary Fire Service. In that capacity he witnessed the destruction of Southampton in November and December 1940. He sought and obtained a waiver of his exemption, joined the Wiltshire Regiment, applied for a commission, was admitted to 165 OCTU Dunbar where he was bullied by a Sergeant-Major Mackmurdo and lost a front tooth. A fellow rookie scaling a cliff above him dropped a rifle whose butt struck his mouth. He was condemned to a lifetime of Steradent. He continued to a further OCTU at Oadby in suburban Leicester, a town for which he quickly developed a visceral loathing. In January 1942 he was seconded to the Indian Army and sailed from Liverpool to Karachi. Here is a photo of my parents, my paternal grandmother and my father’s siblings. My father is in uniform. They are gathered to wish him farewell before he sails to India. My mother’s smile is forced, as though the Virgin Witch Kitty had just inflicted on her one of the understated, unanswerable humiliations she specialised in. No doubt something snide about being widowed young.
His first posting was to Jhelum, south-east of Rawalpindi, where he worked in a department controlling convoys. He was subsequently at Kakul in North West Frontier Province, Jaipur in Rajasthan and at Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. The India he photographed was thick with local colour: dust roads, extravagant mosques and temples, camels, scrawny cattle, pack ponies, marshalling yards, collapsed bridges and forded rivers, wizened oldsters, bivouacs, distant mountains.
A year later he was seconded again, to the newly established Paiforce. He embarked at Bombay, disembarked at the ad hoc port of Umm Qasr. After a brief period at Kirkuk his three years in Iraq were spent near Basra. His photographs record brief furloughs in Damascus and Babylon (the lion walls, the processional way), duck shoots at Hammar Lake, his pet gazelle, bazaars, dhows, hockey matches, Nissen huts and a touchingly seedy tourist attraction called The Original Garden Of Eden. The richness and variety of India is mostly absent. The desert landscape is relentlessly grim. There was indigenous hostility to contend with. The Arab world was broadly sympathetic to the Axis powers. (The Nazis’ successors are not the lost causists of the BNP, NPD and Vlaams Belang but the totalitarian Islamist post-Khomeini terror states.)
Long after the Anglo-Iraqi war of May 1941 desultory acts of sabotage continued: trains derailed, pipelines severed, British-owned plant and buildings subjected to arson attacks. Maintenance of security at the petrol depot he commanded was a persistent problem: the troops under his command, mostly Hindu, were met with hostility.
A naïve programme of appeasement (or sycophancy) towards Bedouin chiefs was decreed in the hope that they might control their tribes. This appeared to my father to derive from the military (and political) establishment’s unreflective trust of Arabs, a trust founded in an endemic romanticism, a swooning admiration for horsemen and falconers and warriors. Chivalry and nobility were detected where there was only vengeful primitivism. The entire sentimental Arabist package, the tradition of the fawning British buggerocracy – Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence, St John Philby, Glubb Pasha, Wilfred Thesiger and countless other harmful eccentrics – had become la pensée unique of the army’s higher strata. It was also (not that its adherents acknowledged it) effete, homoerotic, misogynistic, irrational, anti-urban, Luddite and gullible.
Still, my father would surely have been less contemptuous of it had that same top brass, composed entirely of career soldiers, bothered to dissemble its distaste for the necessary evil of ‘unprofessional’ conscripts and volunteers who were left in no doubt that they were second-class soldiers no matter what rank they attained.
This divisiveness seems likely to have had a bearing on the outcome of the 1945 general election. It unquestionably had a decisive influence on my father’s prejudices, for this strain of Arabism, like all strains of Arabism, was invariably complemented by a ‘social’ anti-Semitism, a coded anti-Semitism that slyly invited collusion, an anti-Semitism that was disguised in those years as a concern for the Middle East’s stability in the light of Zionist colonisation. This snide malediction was all the more indecent given that the anti-Semitism of the Muslim majority was far from ‘social’. It was physically malevolent: theft, looting, violence, murder. This excited a martial blind eye.
Not all the causes of philo-Semitism are honourable. My father initially favoured the Zionist cause not because of its probity, not because of its necessity, not because of the immane crimes committed against Jewry, but because he felt personally slighted by a military establishment whose approval he sought but which, even in the middle of a world war, had ample time for hierarchical gradations and nuanced ostracism. Having failed to detect anti-Semitism in Freiburg in 1938 he now sided with the excluded because he knew that sycophancy towards that establishment would merely incur its further despisal. His temperamental inclination was towards the optimism and physical bravery of the aspirant Israelis. The self-pity and mendacity of the Arabs he had to deal with infuriated him. He would be dismayed by Clement Attlee’s government which – even as pogroms and expulsions were being effected throughout the Middle East and the Maghreb – supported the Arab League’s attempt to destroy Israel in 1947–8. (The Arab armies included Bosnian Muslim veterans of the Handzar SS brigades.)
His philo-Semitism took some unusual forms. Years after the man was dead, my father would rail against Attlee’s foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, whom he considered anti-Semitic, cruel and ignorant: he was right on all counts. He reproached himself for having voted Labour in 1945.
Israeli women soldiers armed with
Uzis impressed and excited him: he hoped that some had been employed in Eichmann’s capture. None was. He seemed to admire Jewish virtuosi – Rubinstein, Landowska, Menuhin, Kreisler – because they were Jewish. He bought me a record by Esther and Abi Ofarim. Late one night, after what was not yet called the watershed, he woke me and insisted that I watch a documentary about the liberation of Belsen. The first film about the camps to be transmitted on British television. Was this part of the Sidney Bernstein work that was not shown in its entirety till thirty years later lest Germans be offended? How could the mounds of starved corpses belong to the decade I had been born in? How could the craters and the plague pits filled with the living dead? And the pitiful clowns in pyjamas, the bone faces, the bullnecked woman guards? This horror came surely from some distant age of apocalyptic wrath when god had sullied the earth in his cleansing fury.
This was the sight that had tipped Jerry Savage over the edge. I gaped numbly. Here was the war that we had previously been protected from by War Picture Library, Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd, the war which god’s usurper had won, the racial war – for which the war we knew might merely have been a cover. The Shemilts were to be accorded the greatest courtesy and respect. My father made this plain to me.
His dictate was redundant, I was too timid a child to treat anyone otherwise. Till I was thirteen or fourteen I behaved as I was bidden; in my father’s tiresomely repeated formulation, ‘with all due decorum’. So the Shemilts got the full treatment. The parents may have thought that I was a bit touched, the little girls were perhaps frightened. I grinned rictal greetings at them, mouthed a genial ‘afternoon’, nodded in sympathy. I lurked in hope of an opportunity to save one of the girls from drowning but, annoyingly, none occurred. I concocted a plan to offer to carry home some of the bags they struggled to heave but was too shy to go through with it. I wanted to help, I wanted to signal to them that I had the most profound sympathy for what they and their people had suffered. How many people in their family had perished? Was their tightness as a defensive unit founded in loss? Was the parents’ evident protectiveness due to terrible crimes committed against their kin? Did they fear contamination by the carefree milieu that established itself around the swimming pool? Did they discern the germ of licentiousness? Or were they, on the contrary, besieged by the Close’s Anglican piety? There was a lot of it about, a surfeit. Why did they choose to live there, in a house dominated by one of Christendom’s supreme monuments? Where did they worship?
Maybe a forty- or fifty-mile round trip was nothing for the devout. There was a synagogue in Southampton, in the old town. There were several synagogues in Bournemouth. There were even kosher hotels in Bournemouth, sites of exotic noodles and mysterious rites behind pines. Their dining rooms were, needless to say, not frequented by my mother’s Aunt Nesta and her formerly Jewish subsequently Anglican husband Joe Janda who lived in the town. Nor, it transpired, were they frequented by the Shemilts.
The next summer beside the pool, sometime no doubt between the Kalin Twins’ ‘When’ and Ricky Nelson’s ‘Poor Little Fool’, the (absent) Shemilts’ standoffishness was mentioned. I confidently ascribed it to their being the inheritors of centuries of pogroms and persecution. My audience included a vague acquaintance of my mother, Daniel Pettiward, an illustrator, actor, librettist, ‘humorist’ (contributed to Punch) and problem dresser with a taste for lace-up shirts as ruddy as an inner tube. He lived in the Close’s northernmost house, darted hither and scurried thither, and was altogether too sensitive to be an artist. He gaped at me with incredulity. His neighbours the Shemilts were not Jews. God forbid! What did I mean by impugning them! The family name, he splutteringly insisted, was a good old English name, a staunch English yeoman name common in parts of the English Midlands. (The Potteries, specifically.)
I never told my father.
SONGS: JOHNNY REMEMBER ME
The afternoon of Saturday 26 August 1961. The Exeter bypass was at a standstill. Leo Lush was at the wheel of his Rover 3-litre. Beryl sat beside him. They grudgingly tuned into the Light Programme. I was in the back between Chris and Angela.
‘When the mist’s a-rising and the rain’s a-falling and the wind’s a-blowing cold across the moor …’ Few pop songs send a shiver down my spine as this one of ghostly lost love does. Maybe it’s the B-feature eeriness; to teenage ears it supplied the plangent angst we long for at that age, and it located hammy melancholia in that week’s Dartmoor dusks. More likely it’s because I’ve spent a lifetime failing to dissociate the song from the news report which followed it. It detailed a murder, rape and assault in Bedfordshire, at Deadman’s Hill. The crimes had been committed on the night of 22–23 August yet this bulletin announced it as though it had not previously been made public. Had there been a police embargo? The horrible events were, anyway, previously unknown to everyone in the car.
I have never heard that song without recalling them and the lay-by and Valerie Storie and the delusional Alphon and the psychopathic Hanratty and the industry of pious indignation that burgeoned around the presumption of his innocence, an innocence which is still insisted upon by dotard DNA-deniers whose faith survives all known fact. As faith does: that’s the problem with faith.
Thirty-five years after he had recorded ‘Johnny Remember Me’ I was introduced to John Leyton in the bar of Meridiana, a pretty South Kensington restaurant which he then owned. A minute’s small talk. Then I said: ‘Do y’know – whenever I hear “Johnny Remember Me” I think of James Hanratty.’ He looked at me with speechless astonishment, clearly thought I was mad, or insulting, or both. Before I could elaborate he fled down some stairs. Thus I was denied the opportunity to ask him whether he reckoned that Joe Meek had ever fucked Joe Orton. The two died violently within months of each other in 1967. For many years previously they had been the Holloway and Islington’s top cottagers. It seems inconceivable that they had not conjoined somewhere between Nag’s Head and Angel. Had it been with anonymity or with knowledge of who the other was?
SONGS: SINGING THE BLUES
Peggy Worrin drove a left-hand-drive Studebaker, drove it with her left hand, her cigarette hand, whilst she turned to talk to us in the back. Its kinship with Ice-Cream Rigiani’s sleek gleaming Loewy Studebaker was that of marque alone. Hers was of the mid-1940s at latest, bulbous, lumbering, putty-colour, cold – one of its windows failed to shut wholly, a sheet of celluloid was taped over the gap to little effect. It slewed through Bulford Camp’s slushscape of muddy thawing puddled roads, half-built garrison houses, future utility and sewer trenches, tarpaulins still fretted with snow, stacks of bricks and tiles, pipes, scaffolding, icicles detumescing in windowless apertures.
David Worrin and I were friends because our parents were friends. Even though David’s younger brother was called Jonathan it amused both sets of parents to allude to the friendship between our biblical namesakes. That David was a shepherd who killed Goliath of Gath with a sling, beheaded him, then murdered two hundred of his fellow Philistines and cut off their foreskins to prove to Jonathan’s treacherous father Saul that he would make a worthy son-in-law: an unusual form of proof.
He became a king. In old age, after a lifetime’s regal gangsterism, slaughter, warfare, pillage, deception and remorse, David turned, as biblical characters and light entertainers will, to paedophilia and warmed himself with virgins. Jonathan, the passive partner, worshipped David.
Had I known any of this I’d have resented being flippantly cast as an idolater, as the one who looks up. But I knew none of it because my mother had assured me that the old testament was risible tosh. And so it is. So, of course, are all ‘holy’ books. But risible tosh can be persuasive. If god can allow his only son to die on the abattoir hill of Golgotha then he surely sanctions crucifixion: thus Cary Grant’s illegitimate half-brother Eric Leach, better known as Foreskin Eric, was merely doing god’s will when he nailed Joseph de Haviland (né Ramirez), an unemployed Hungarian illusionist from Ramsgate, to a cross on Hampstead Heath in 1968.
If god can be a genocidal warrior why, then, cannot man who is made in god’s image be a genocidal warrior too? To a certain cast of mind god’s acts legitimise gulags and gas ovens.
I was thinking more about hot chocolate and buttered crumpets than mass death when we got to the Worrins’ house, newly built to the same design as every other house in the newly metalled road which would be separated from the pavements by strips of lawn, just now strips of earth pitted with little puddles which grass seed floated on. The army camps on the southern and eastern edges of Salisbury Plain were uniformly neat and ordered, embodiments of routine. Even when unfinished their plans were appealingly legible. There was nothing out of place, nothing which didn’t fit: the church, the fire station, the parade of shops, the messes, the barracks, the houses graded by size according to the rank of soldier who occupied them.
There was an obviousness which appealed to the infantile taste for easy comprehension: no nuance, no ambiguity. The camps conformed to the illustrations of towns in pedagogic children’s books in a way that few civilian towns did. They might have been composed of Minibrix buildings inflated to life size. I was unable to see in the ubiquitous neo-Georgianism the aesthetic blight which, according to my mother, was the inevitable mark of armed forces’ settlements. It was evident that one camp was more or less indistinguishable from the next. I did not understand that this was deliberate, that these places were essays in determinism, in conditioning the will of the individual by site and example. The road names honoured top brass: Shrapnel, Alanbrooke, Templer, Godley, Haig. Soldiers, wartime friends of my father, posted with their families to Bulford, Tidworth, Durrington and Larkhill, often knew no civvies other than my parents whose society offered some respite from military insularity; the camps were places apart.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 30