Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum was in St Ann Street, the southernmost street of the grid. It had been founded in the mid-c19 to house the predominantly mediaeval objects retrieved from the grid’s canals (i.e. open sewers) when they were replaced by subterranean ones. The museum had long ago amalgamated with the Blackmore Museum, named not for the Dorset vale but for a lawyer, adventurer and eventual suicide who had acquired many of the aboriginal objects excavated in Ohio by Squier and Davis and rejected by the Smithsonian. The collections were eclectic, even haphazard. A taxidermised great bustard, shot between Shrewton and Berwick St James on the hostile Plain in the mid-nineteenth century, was among England’s last. There were detailed scale models of the cathedral (maybe ivory) and of Stonehenge, sculptural capitals from Clarendon, heavy ornate keys (sure signals of status), glazed jugs and so on.
The most eyecatching exhibits were Hob Nob and the Giant, who gave his name to Gigant Street a few blocks away. He was minatory, blackbearded, implacable, a Caliban robed in red and twice the height of a tall man. Hob Nob was a long-necked animal or fowl, possibly a dragon. They belonged to a mediaeval tailors’ guild. They processed through feast day carnivals when Hob Nob would clear the way by jocularly attacking members of the crowd. Jocularly? Both creatures incited a particular terror. Further, they were associated with the morris, a further source of terror. Those ale-breathed beardies with silly hats and clacking sticks and bells around their ruggerbugger calves were far from quaint. My mother delighted in pointing out the bogusness of what passed for folkloric custom. Thus I knew that morris sides were a late Victorian creation, the clumsily terpsichorean analogue of a Voysey house or a Gimson settle. That did not prevent these lumbering clodhoppers promising antic misrule and Merry English violence.
The raucous gaudy of the Giant and Hob Nob seemed incompatible with the donnish archaeologist and numismatist who was the museum’s curator. Hugh de S. Shortt (known, not without mockery, as ‘Hugh de S’) was a fastidious presence on such telly programmes as The Brains Trust and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, whose star was the beguiling vaudevillian Mortimer Wheeler. Shortt haunted his museum with the fugitive air of the White Rabbit. He had scurried into middle age before he married the widow of a man who had been eaten by a crocodile. They lived in a wing of a pretty castellated Gothick house at Britford. Its name, The Moat, was apt given the frequency with which it was flooded.
The past’s imminence was signalled not merely by tumuli and the contents of glass cabinets. Were a social history of c20 English archaeology to be composed its loci need never extend much beyond a thirty-mile radius of Salisbury. The conduits to the past, its decryptors – the seers who read the earth’s yield and heeded the dead’s pleas to be remembered – were close by, almost neighbours. They had all spent time here, many lived here:
Avebury. Alexander Keiller (1889–1955), Dundee marmalade magnate, excavated Windmill Hill and West Kennet Long Barrow. He lived at Avebury Manor and restored or recreated or created the stone circle there. He financed Wessex from the Air, which he produced in collaboration with O. G. S. Crawford. The most revealing photographs were made at dawn and dusk, the ‘lynchet hours’. In the early Thirties he proposed constructing, at his own cost, a subterranean visitor centre at Stonehenge.
Coombe Bisset. Tancred Borenius (1885–1948), quondam art historian, quondam Finn, founder of Apollo, consultant to Sotheby’s. Like many of his contemporaries he came to archaeology from other disciplines. He directed the excavation of the twelfth-century Clarendon Palace a couple of miles east of Salisbury. He began this project in 1933. It was initially abandoned at the outbreak of war, reprised and abandoned again when he died. Whereupon the palace’s remains were once more overgrown with brambles. Rangers Lodge Farm, whose buildings stood beside the road to the ruins, was desolate and sinister, surely a location in a B-feature – all barns stuffed with swag, and stolen lorries, and aspirant Stanley Bakers.
Gorley. Heywood Sumner (1853–1940) was a sgraffitist, watercolourist, calligrapher, textile designer etc. In the earliest years of the c20 he built a house for himself and his family at Gorley on the western edge of the New Forest, less than a mile from the Avon. Like most artists associated with the arts and crafts he was prone to whimsy and twee archaism. Yet there is beauty in much of his work, not least in Cuckoo Hill: The Book of Gorley. After he moved there his life was increasingly dominated by archaeology. He joined the digging hordes. His illumined map of ‘Ancient Sites in the New Forest, Cranborne Chase and Bournemouth District’ is an exquisite thing. In this instance he mercifully desisted from his occasional practice of spelling it Chace. I was aware of the house from my earliest years. We’d pass it on the way to Ogdens, my favourite place on earth, where I’d attempt to dam Huckle Brook, paddle, catch minnows, seek birds’ eggs in the furse. Beside the prevailing mangey thatched cottages, disintegrating cob cottages, shacks, shanties and rural slums – the genuinely vernacular Forest buildings – Cuckoo Hill was grandly incongruous and surprisingly stern, as though Sumner, a decorative artist rather than an architect, lacked the capability to translate to three dimensions his douce sensibility. It was on a slope. High above it on the Forest’s very escarpment stood three twisted pines which according to local lore had been planted as a warning: they represented men hanged in the civil war or hanged as smugglers or hanged as highwaymen. When I was at the age to believe I duly believed it. In the early Sixties, more than two decades after Sumner’s death, the house was owned by a soldier, a barely credible cartoon of a bristling artillery colonel. He fulminated against the ignorance of those who dared to live in the Forest and, not being true Forest people, failed to understand commoners’ rights (pasture, mast, estovers etc.). He fulminated against mechanised agriculture (always a bad sign). He fulminated against the moral decline he detected in his daughters’ generation. He glared mena-cingly at their friends. He discerned dishonourable intentions in teenaged boys. He engaged a French au pair to look after his young son. He left his wife for her. His wife killed herself. Cuckoo Hill became a care home.
Nursling. O. G. S. Crawford (1886–1957), photographer, gullible fellow traveller, founder of Antiquity, pioneer of aerial archaeology, lived on the periphery of Southampton, where he was employed at the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey – where I yearned to work. Among the sites he discovered from the sky was Little Woodbury, between the former Alderbury Union Workhouse and the future Odstock Hospital. He financed its excavation by the German Jewish refugee Gerhard Bersu who was subsequently interned.
Rockbourne. Stuart Piggott (1910–1996), who lived in that village till his marriage broke up, described his contemporaries as making ‘a conscious and concerted effort to professionalise prehistory for its own good’. As a schoolboy he had taught himself to draw by imitating Heywood Sumner. He was employed by Keiller at Avebury. He worked at Stonehenge, Woodbury and Wayland’s Smithy. For much of his life he was exiled from Wiltshire in Edinburgh academe. He collected the work of a generation of archaeologically and geologically preoccupied artists: Paul Nash, John Piper, Graham Sutherland.
West Parley. Trelawney Dayrell Reed (1886–1958) delighted me. He wore a cloak, owned a Rolls-Royce, listened to gramophone records so loud that conversation was impossible. He was dandiacal, fedora’d, mocking, mad, thin as a stick. He had been tried for attempted murder. He had written books. He had a cane and a temper. He was a disputatious charmer, a contrite boor, an earnest dilettante, a self-proclaimed mountebank, an industrious vagabond, a scrounger who affected aristocratic airs and lived far beyond others’ means. My parents first encountered him in the late Thirties as one of Augustus John’s intimates. In the middle of the war he took to calling on my mother, whom he would regale with monologues dense with mordant wit, garrulously ignoble gossip and bitchy mimicry, though everyone he guyed inherited his stammer. He was by then in his late fifties. Just as my great uncle John in distant Sandycove had his nattily uniformed ‘chauffeur valet’, the grossly mute Frank, so did Reed
, despite his indigence, have a ‘major-domo’ who would sit silently as his benefactor performed a doubtless familiar repertoire. It was in imitation of Reed that Peter Lucas affected red socks. Lucas drew the line at suits which my mother said would frighten the horses. He was a self-taught archaeologist, a muralist, a rancorous historian, a Wessex supremacist, the author of a bizarrely fantastical account of immediately post-Roman England and of a survey of shove-ha’penny’s development. His modest fame (or notoriety) had, however, nothing to do with his eclectic scholarship.
It rested on:
An event of Good Friday 15 April 1927. His house at West Parley, then a village, now subsumed by northern Bournemouth, was close to Ensbury Park, that town’s racecourse which in the 1920s was increasingly used for air shows. Having failed by numerous legitimate means to quash such displays he fired a twelve-bore at a Blackburn Bluebird piloted by Squadron Leader Walter ‘Scruffy’ Longton. The aircraft’s wings were damaged, the pilot was untouched. Described as a ‘gentleman farmer aged about 38’ (the farm was barely a smallholding, he was forty-one), Reed was tried at Dorchester Assizes for attempted murder. Not guilty – despite the judge’s advice to the jury. A few days after the trial, on Monday 6 June 1927, ‘Scruffy’ Longton, one of the earliest stunt pilots (‘crazy flyers’), was killed during Ensbury Park’s Whitsun meeting. The air displays moved to Christchurch.
A few years later Trelawney Dayrell Reed sold up and moved to Farnham, where he had been appointed curator of the Pitt-Rivers Museum and press officer of the green, bucolic-fascist Wessex Agricultural Defence Association (Chairman: George Pitt-Rivers, grandson of the General). He and his major-domo lived in a Pitt-Rivers estate cottage. For a while they had a jig-dancing bog-sprite of an Irish lodger, William Joyce, past deputy leader of the British Union of Fascists and future Lord Haw-Haw, hanged at Wandsworth Prison in January 1946. When he appeared in Cranborne Chase in the late Thirties he had been dismissed by Oswald Mosley and had founded the short-lived National Socialist League. As it gradually became known that the former lodger and the notorious propagandist were the same man, his host was tainted by association, his already sulphurous reputation grew.
I remember Trelawney Dayrell Reed, I remember him well. I never met him. He was a figure of familial myth and maternal fairy tale. He belonged to that infinitely mysterious life my parents led before I existed. All I know of him is from their disparate accounts of long ago and from Augustus John’s striking portrait made even longer ago, probably in the mid-1920s. He is not yet grey or scrawny, alcohol has not yet worked its malevolent magic. My mother was flattered to be entertained by him. They would sometimes drink in The Rose and Crown where Reed satisfied a Bedlam-sniffing appetite by observing then sparring with mine drunken host (and my parents’ landlord) Stiffy Edwards. My father grudgingly conceded that Reed was a scholarly countryman, a mine of botanical and geological information, a consummate decipherer of footprints and droppings. That was as far as it went.
YURI
In 1964 all the nice people were still as poor as they had been in the 1945 of Muriel Spark’s 1963 novel The Girls of Slender Means.
My parents had sent their academically inclined only son to a bucolic, defiantly non-academic, dim, backward, muscular Christian bootcamp whose purpose was apparently to make gentlemen of the sons of Somerset farmers and knock Newbolt into Devon’s garagists of tomorrow. There was a better grammar school where we lived, Bishop Wordsworth’s. William Golding still taught there, almost a decade after Lord of the Flies; Derek Warner and Gus Barnes were, locally, famously inspirational teachers. My mother believed in grammar schools as democratic instruments of improvement. She subscribed to The Black Papers on Education and execrated Shirley Williams. I had passed the eleven plus. My essay was on Sir Nigel Gresley. Since the age of seven my mother had made me sit Moray House intelligence tests every few weeks. I thoroughly enjoyed them so found the exam beguilingly easy. The reason why I was sent away to a boarding school was never vouchsafed to me.
Most likely they didn’t want me around (most school holidays I was sent to stay with Uncle Wangle and Auntie Ann or went on an ‘exchange’, often one-way, to France). A striving for social cachet was not really a habit of my parents. And whether social cachet attached to having a son at King’s College, Taunton was, and remains, moot. The whole regrettable business may have originated in my mother’s rich uncle’s offer to stump up the greater part of the fees. My frequent demands to be taken out of the wretched dump were rebuked as displays of ingratitude.
John Baird was my maternal grandmother’s younger brother. He had been a chartered accountant, a partner in Deloitte Plender Griffiths. He retired in his mid-forties in the mid-1930s. He had made his fortune gambling on the stock exchange during the depression. At the time of my parents’ marriage in May 1939 he was living in Langford Place, St John’s Wood, in a sinister, malevolent neo-Gothic cottage which looks in pain, an ideal home for a dominatrix.
Soon after war was declared he moved to Dublin with his bulgy-muscled, aggressively silent ‘chauffeur-valet’ Frank, whom he had met at a boxing club for deprived boys. Every couple of years John designed a new uniform of increasingly Ruritanian dash for Frank. They lived in a Regency house at Sandycove, close by the Martello tower. I doubt that he read Ulysses: he may not even have been aware of Joyce’s existence. Great Uncle John read little but the city pages. He and Frank visited England most summers in an immaculately maintained prewar Rolls-Royce, black and grey with spare wheel covers protruding from the wings.
Togs Must Be Worn. That’s the notice at the entrance to Sandycove Men’s Bathing Association round the corner from his house. He used to watch appreciatively when as a small child I swam untogged in the Nadder and in the sea at Chewton Bunny. He was less appreciative when I got self-consciousness and trunks. Thoroughly unappreciative when I walked out of school, though he chided me only gently. Mute Frank scowled.
My parents despaired. The prospect of having living with them a teenager whose only aptitude, once he had abandoned competitive swimming, was for sullen shirking was too much to bear. Whose idea was it to send me to a crammer? I forget. But the idea was enticing. And Great Uncle John was somehow enthused. And me, I could escape the old, martial, churchy provinces to London: which had not yet been designated swinging – but that American anointment came, of course, after the event. There was something going on. Something new, something long-haired and Cuban-heeled. I could grow my hair, I could walk tall in Cuban heels, wear a black PVC mac, dance in clubs, meet fast girls, chain-smoke Kents and Gitanes, take speed – and retake exams.
But where was I to live?
At a fancy dress party in a roadhouse between Fordingbridge and Ringwood called the As You Like It, my parents, yet unmarried, had, in the late Thirties, met Augustus John. They were introduced by Peter Lucas, a painter who was their contemporary and one of John’s many young acolytes around that fringe of the New Forest. My father was outdoorsy, an unambitious biscuit company rep, fanatical only about chalkstream fly-fishing.
Save for music he had no interest in art: and that interest probably derived from Schubert having had the predictive good sense to write ‘The Trout’ for him. Despite this or because – surely because – John took a shine to him and they struck up an improbable casual bibulous friendship which endured till John died in 1961.
April 1964. Mike B (recently expelled from Stowe for masturbating on socks that didn’t belong to him) and I are hitching to Bournemouth. A (white) forty-year-old evangelical with a beamer and abundant crinkly hair on leave from his ‘mission’ in Ghana picks us up in his open-top Morris Minor.
Despite smoking moodily Mike and I fail to pick up girls in the cafés and bowling alley where we loiter.
Hitch home late afternoon. On Holdenhurst Road we are, weirdly, espied by our Ghanaian friend. He’s clearly pissed. But not totally badered, not speechschlurred. So we climb in. At St Leonard’s, a decrepit shack colony north of Bournemouth, he insists
we go for a drink in a grim bungalow pub: Mike and I have ‘shorts’ – he is pleased to treat us. He enthusiastically gets in another round. We pass the graceful Georgian bridge at Ellingham, the ancient church tower across meadows that are still fulldyke, mad Colonel Crowe’s cottage and the now tatty As You Like It. The evangelist’s next stop was a riverside hotel at Fordingbridge. I had sufficient memories of drunken Christian chaplains not to want to hang about with this increasingly chummy godly sponge whose intentions might prove dishonourable and whose ability to drive would soon be impaired. I nudged Mike.
We walked past dour brick villas and fruitholdings gone to seed and a thatched restaurant. Outside it on offensively ginger gravel was parked its thatched van, a cause of joy to Daniel Richmond, who had once driven me here to show me it and hoot with laughter. We had almost reached the bridge over the disused railway at Burgate when Yuri came into my life.
There was a noise behind us, a motor in decline, it passed us, just, then stuttered, stopped, groaning.
Yuri White – big slab head, straight hair, barrel body – turned astride his sick Vespa and bellowed at Mike B: ‘Christ, you’re the fellow [I shall never forget that ‘fellow’] that wanked on what’s his name’s socks.’
Mike B grinned.
We trudged along beside Yuri as he pushed the motor-scooter. Where the rail track and the river run beside ruinous watercress beds he turned through an aperture in a high hedge. Here was Yew Tree Cottage, cramped and tiny, his parents’ weekend house. His grandmother lived nearby. He was less than a year older than I was, but his sophistication was obviously immense: bell-bottom jeans and horizontal striped ‘Breton’ T-shirt; his self-proclaimed diet was R&B and girls; he lived in London where all the girls were sexually obliging. Unlike the sisters we all knew who lived just across the river.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 32