An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  Yuri found some filthy wine. Fastidiously, I took no more than a sip.

  A couple of days later Yuri arrived on his mended scooter at my parents’ house. My father liked him. His wretched son was taciturn, offhand, bored, self-conscious, self-preoccupied and a reader. Yuri was exuberant, lusty, outgoing, unreflective.

  My father never found in him the neurosis and despair which would come to define Yuri for me: but, then, we fashion them as we want them. He found instead an appreciative audience for his fishing lore and the stupendously filthy wine he made from his Seyval vines – an annual few hundred bottles of emetic, fit only for distillation. He found, too, Augustus John’s grandson, the elder son – born in Moscow, hence his given name – of the painter’s youngest daughter Vivien and her husband, the haematologist John White, whom Augustus had derided as ‘the hospital orderly’ and ‘the medical attendant’.

  Yuri turned up over and again that spring and summer of ’64. He’d Vespa into Salisbury even when I was away suffering my last term in Taunton. My mother was a generous cook used to catering for people I had picked up. He was a good fit with my parents. Late one afternoon, lying on the scorched lawn beside the river, I looked up from my book to watch him, bottle in hand, and my father, side by side on a bench formed from a broken willow trunk, leaning towards each other rocking with laughter, man to man in some shared intimacy.

  He was not alone in seeking other people’s families. Though it is perhaps a trait more developed in only children.

  In those days before a second home was normal there were provincial people and there were London people. Those who were both were exotics. The sheer worldliness of such siblings as Kate and Carola, Chris and Gay, of Julian …

  I routinely sought out contemporaries whose family had a London base. And here, reciprocally, in Yuri’s, I had found one. I would rent a room from his parents. All the nice people rented.

  Vivien White wore a homemade ‘geometric’ bob. John White wore his very black hair en brosse, as much an oddity then in England as now: it lent him the air of a military policeman who had been up to no good in the cellars of Oran.

  They lived in Holland Park. A century previously it had been one of London’s grandest inner suburbs. Twenty years later it would become so again. In 1964 its long desuetude was in its dotage: not that anyone knew. Like most of London’s core – Islington, Camden Town, Bloomsbury, World’s End etc. – it had suffered from the bourgeois flight to the outer suburbs throughout the first half of the twentieth century, that hardly chronicled diaspora which abandoned Georgian order and Victorian pomp to the dispossessed, to exploited immigrants, to slum landlords – and to bohemia. There was yet little sign of ‘gentrification’ and, indeed, that word was uncoined. Holland Park and the adjacent Ladbroke Estate were all crazed paint and encrusted soot. The Hanging Gardens of Northern Kensington (Christopher Gibbs’s coinage) were goosegrass and nettles. The Clean Air Acts of a decade before were effective: 1960s smog allowed you to see five yards ahead rather than the three of the 1950s. Smog never swirled the way studio-rendered peasoupers did. It was still and thick, like stone that one might pass through. There was, however, movement in the air: sooty stucco peelings flew like freeform bats.

  Most of Pottery Lane was an anthology of wrecked, burnt-out and, at best, semi-ruinous two-storey cottages – a mews hoping for a grand terrace to which it might attach itself. Seal House was, is, at its northern end, and quite different. It adhered to no building line. It gaped down the lane, an imperious punctuation mark built on a different scale, a late Georgian oddity, flat-fronted, double-fronted, tall, one room deep, exclusively south-lit, occupying a space occasioned by a kink in the lane, with a wedge of garden ahead of it. Vivien and John had bought it in the late Forties for, presumably, a song: in 1964 friends of theirs bought a house in the neighbouring, Portland Road, four storeys and basement for £2.2. Thousand, that is. The complexion of Britain was different when there was no such thing as ‘the house price differential’ between, say, undesirable central London and desirable Salisbury.

  That would change that very autumn when Harold Wilson attained power. That most underappreciated of prime ministers achieved three things:

  He acted on Walter James’s vision of the Open University. He resisted LBJ’s increasingly truculent requests for troops rather than for words in support of his no-win war. (A conscripted old Fettesian might have died there.) He effected the centralisation of Britain.

  The politicisation of newness was on its way.

  To walk into Seal House was to walk into a chaotic museum of a world new to me, but far from a new world. Metropolitan neophilia was hugely absent here. Where were the man-made materials and glossy gadgets – those fresh balms? Where were the tokens of the mythic city of the future, the playground of thoughtful hairdressers and getaway people? Elsewhere, evidently.

  The newness in Seal House was the newness of the New English Art Club and its contemporaries, the newness of more than half a century before. I had never heard of Matthew Smith before I stepped on the frame of one of his paintings negligently propped against a crazed wainscot. Nor of Gwen John, who was then largely forgotten, buried beneath the edifice of her brother’s still miraculously intact reputation. Although acquainted with Rodin I had never expected to handle his maquettes. There were sheaves of prints, rolled-up canvases, cairns of precious doodles. The walls were all but invisible behind the works hung on them. Monographs and recherché art magazines formed teetering piles. Augustus John was everywhere. His omnipotent shade made his having been dead for three years an irrelevance. He oversaw Vivien from the grave. She felt it her inhibiting obligation to second-guess a corpse.

  There was a drawing by Henry Lamb, a fine painter whose blond son Valentine had been the ganymede of all Salisbury girls a few years previously. Henry Lamb’s widow Pansy (née Pakenham), en route from Coombe Bissett to the Vatican, had moved to Blenheim Crescent: at a party there I met shaky relics of Bloomsbury who, to my astonishment, were gratified that a mere child should be interested in them.

  I studied in a desultory way. I strolled four days a week down streets of multiply occupied former mansions and seedily genteel terraces to the ‘tutorial college’ less than a mile away. I was flattered when, out of the early evening smog on Holland Park Avenue, a man’s voice asked me if I knew a nearby Turkish bath, sonny: he had obviously taken me for a Londoner. Which didn’t happen at the Café des Artists where a Mod, even more sullenly pouting than I was, marked your hand when you entered with ink that showed under ultraviolet light – the idea being that you could come and go. I went. A girl whom I attempted to talk to jokily called me ‘Bumpkin’. It still hurt. I had thitherto been unaware of the accent I had acquired in Taunton. Why had no one told me? Why had my parents, normally so punctilious in matters of speech and usage, not grimaced in shame? Had they not noticed? I resolved to speak posh.

  And to hang out at The London Cavern, Blaise’s, The Cromwellian. Oh, the humiliations …

  My hair wasn’t right. My clothes from The Modern Shop, Catherine Street, Salisbury turned out – despite the assurance of the owner Mr Wakeham, a fifty-year-old former newsagent from Eastleigh – to be so last month: my John Langford twin-tab, giraffe-collared shirt with French cuffs was crushed raspberry. That autumn mid-grey was the colour. My Anello and Davide Cuban heels didn’t make up for that chromatic solecism. Further, I had served no apprenticeship in long cool silences and it showed.

  My half-provincial, half-metropolitan friends were different when in London – sharper, more assured, familiar with arcane cafés, richer. They knew the form. Their parents’ friends designed film sets and owned important bistros. The long nocturnal walks to their flats and to the clubs which daunted me became more attractive than the destinations. Thus they became increasingly circuitous. I didn’t want to arrive. Frequently I had no chance of arriving because I was lost in the smog and reliant on the tube map which I had yet to realise was diagrammatic. It would be years b
efore I read The City of Dreadful Night. Yet here was that very maze where terror lurked in milky pools of light cast through grubby curtains, in alley shadows, in craterous bombsites where flaccid buddleia sprouted, in walls of brick and seeping mortar, in the teeming slums of Little Napoli (© Colin MacInnes) where the ten-year-old urchins (© Roger Mayne) were more wised up than I was: I don’t know how I learnt that Vince was called Vince. He used to sit up in his hoodless, tyreless pram, eye me and shout: ‘Cunt!’ Westbourne Grove was clamorous. The broad avenues of Maida Vale were always deserted. Not everyone had a phone. St Paul’s was black with soot and smuts. When it was cleaned its magnificence was scrubbed away too; André Malraux has much to answer for.

  A couple of times I dropped by a schoolfriend’s flat in Observatory Gardens near the Victorian water tower on Campden Hill. He wasn’t there. At a party on 21 November 1964 I learned that he had been killed the previous Friday, the 13th, when a furniture pantechnicon was blown over on top of his father’s car on the Hog’s Back. It was years before I dared venture back to that square of oeil-de-boeuf windows and heftily French rustication. I guess that my superstitious avoidance suggests that I was marking out my own London, a city of permanently absent friends and architectonic solaces.

  It was a city, too, that was mediated by Seal House. The interior was like an interior by Sickert or Tonks. I knew this because I spent hours among the paintings and reproductions. It did not occur to me that the house was oddly anachronistic, that it was unmarked by the fashions of post-war Britain, that the Whites’ taste belonged to an era before they were born. Painting was generically francophile, generically post-impressionist, generically splodgy: it was some years before I had the confidence to admit to myself that I prefer the cold northern precision of Fouquet and Schad to enthusiastic impasto.

  In the world of Seal House artists were arty, paintstained, carelessly dressed (in bright colours). Augustus’s widow, the sainted Dodo, was still a make-believe gypsy of sixty years before. Her son Romilly, a priestly man, would sit for hours in quietist contemplation. There was no end to the Johns. Was the thickset man Edwin? There were Johns with Augustus’s profile, beanpole Johns, sober Johns. They constituted more than a diffuse family, they made up a tribe with its own lore and traditions. Vivien’s elder sister Poppet, much less cowed by her parents than Vivien, drank and smoked and laughed with appealing abandon.

  One day she arrived with the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen, her stepdaughter, the starlet Talitha Pol. I stared, conspicuously amazed. She was, however, entirely atypical of the exotically shabby galere which regularly assembled at the house then moved down the road to the Prince of Wales. William Morris, founder of the Free University of London (a shed beyond the North Circular, and the first of several dodgily utopian ventures to bear that name), was a grown-up beatnik. He had filthy clothes, a lopsided beard, barley-sugar fingers, a worse scooter than Yuri’s and a ginger girlfriend whose myopia forced her to wear glass bricks on her wan face. He also had a revolver with which he threatened a friend of mine who wouldn’t sleep with him. Happily the great educator passed out and she ran away with a Spanish basketball pro.

  The night before I left the crammer (and Seal House) Vivien gave a party for me – and herself – in the pub. It was a generous gesture which cannot but have rankled with John White, a man of fabulous meanness. It was also a curious gesture, for even the youngest of the guests were at least twenty years older than I was. But I was now a garrulous expert on Gilman, Ginner, Gore. I could sing for my supper. They had been my age in the war or through the privations of the late Forties. And it was this world that they carried with them – and whose memory and fascinations they had passed on to me, an intangible keepsake. They sort of made me their contemporary.

  Two years later I returned to London, to RADA. I had learnt enough, mostly in France, to take part in the rites of the Cult of Youth – regrettably mandatory, and not to be confused with the immemorial rites of youth.

  With some cause Vivien White was more edgily preoccupied than ever and John White more sullen than ever.

  And Yuri had made a shift, the inevitable shift, from carefree to careless. He had a daughter. He was also a junky. Heroin was fairly rare in those days. But Yuri had always sought to go further, faster, deeper. He packed as many car crashes, scrapes, accidents, fights, trips, binges and blackouts into twenty-three years as most people fail to achieve in several lifetimes. He had no brakes. He was both supra-hedonist and an enthusiast for oblivion – the latter prompted by his loathing of his father. Had he not died when he did he’d probably have turned patricide.

  Talitha Pol, a RADA student seven years before me, was now Mrs John Paul Getty. She and Yuri died within months of each other: overdose.

  Now newness’s time had arrived, at last.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1–2: Parents at Lulworth Cove, autumn 1959.

  3: Author, 1959.

  4: Paternal grandfather, c.1917.

  5: Uncle Eric outside his garage, Cambridge Road, Portswood, Southampton, 1946.

  6: Auntie Mary outside her parents’ house, 58 Shakespeare Avenue, Portswood, Southampton, c.1922.

  7: Mother, c.1919.

  8: Author, between Uncle Wangle and Auntie Ann’s caravan and the Elsan. Walkford Woods, Highcliffe, 1955.

  9: Ken James painting beside the Avon in what would become his garden, Watersmeet Road, East Harnham, September 1960.

  10: The author and parents outside 55 Harnham Road, East Harnham, 1950. The face at the window is The First German Girl, Christine.

  11: Rowing on the Nadder with Posty, 1958.

  12: Holmwood School, on Choristers’ Green, Salisbury Cathedral Close, September 1953. Left to right (standing): Janet –, —, Priscilla –, author, Howard Dodson, Caroline Colville, Janet Wheelwright, Christopher Lush; (kneeling): Elizabeth Morgan, Janet Sanger, Hilary Sinclair, Jennifer Laing, Susan Allenby, Elizabeth Drummond.

  13: Harnham Road Group, at the gates to the Rose and Crown car park, April 1953. Left to right (standing): – Dean, author, Roger Davies, Susan Hapgood, Douglas Sewell, Graham Dean; (squatting): Paul Dean, —.

  14: Kalu, 1960.

  15: Roger Davies and the author, 1955.

  16: Mother, Mary Sutcliffe and Dorothea Craven, Birks Bridge, Duddon Valley, Furness, 1943.

  17: The garden at Watersmeet Road, East Harnham: the confluence of the Nadder and, further away, the Avon.

  18: The author and parents, St Malo, 1955.

  19: Father vaulting over a fence at Offenham near Evesham, c.1932. The building is the Fish and Anchor. The distant hill is where I believed the world ended.

  20: Left to right: Father, Uncle Hank, Auntie Kitty, Uncle Wangle. Foreground: maternal grandmother, Auntie Ann.

  21: Author with 38lb salmon taken at Ibsley near Fordingbridge, March 1952.

  22: Daniel Richmond, July 1965. (Photo courtesy LAT Photographic, with additional thanks to Mark Forster.)

  23: Author with Mother, Port Merion, August 1962.

  24: Paiforce Christmas Card, 1945.

  25: Author, 1964.

  All photographs courtesy of the author, except where noted.

  FOOTNOTES

  Abuser, Sexual

  fn1 Jim Laing believed that he could have saved Jeremy, but Hippocratic ethics of the day forbade doctors operating on their kin. He subsequently rued not risking being struck off. He knew the limitations of the surgeon who did operate.

  Comanche

  fn1 Late one afternoon in the summer of 1984, three and a half years after he had died, I saw my father at Lewes railway station. He was standing at the end of a platform close to where the track enters a tunnel. As I ran along the platform towards him he vanished. He disliked train travel and had probably never been to Lewes in his life. So why there?

  fn2 Ronald Maddison died 06/05/1953. Tony Blair was born the same day. His mother, unhappily, hadn’t enjoyed the right to choose. Maddison came from County Durham, whe
re Blair would live from the age of eight. The Ceauşescus of Connaught Square died, hideously, on 23/09/2016.

  fn3 Ken James was a signatory of the Official Secrets Act.

  fn4 Dr Geoffrey Bacon died on 01/08/1962 after infecting himself in a laboratory accident with Yersinia pestis, the organism responsible for bubonic plague.

  fn5 Dr H. M. Darlow, author of An Introduction to Safety in the Microbiological Laboratory (1960) and Safety in the Animal House (1967), was Porton’s Safety Officer.

  fn6 Like ethnomycologist, entheogen was Wasson’s coinage. It was intended to distinguish between a drug taken in search of god and the same drug taken for pleasure, a mere psychedelic.

  Eels

  fn1 In ‘Night-Time in Mid-Fall’ Thomas Hardy was sceptical: ‘The streams are muddy and swollen; eels migrate/ to a new abode;/ Even cross, ’tis said, the turnpike road; (Men’s feet have felt their crawl, home-coming late): The westward fronts of towers are saturate,/ Church-timbers crack, and witches ride abroad.’

  Egg Beaten in Milk

  fn1 He had a soft spot for a thatcher nicknamed Killer who would turn up with a bleeding sack and a wink: ‘I just happened to run over a stag. Fancy a haunch?’

  fn2 In the early hours of the morning at a party of my parents, Guy and Tim, high-spirited adolescents in their thirties, blew a hunting horn through the letter box of a famously officious neighbour, the ‘ranker’ Captain James, who had complained of noise as early as 9.30. When he crossed the road in his dressing gown to remonstrate he was confronted by his commanding officer who told him not to be so petty.