An Encyclopaedia of Myself Read online

  AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF MYSELF

  Jonathan Meades

  DEDICATION

  For The Dead

  Nothing wilfully invented.

  Memory invents unbidden.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Abuser, Sexual

  Access to the Unknown

  Anal Penetration

  Ayleswade Road

  Barnett, Miss

  Blue Spot

  Bobie

  Buckhorn Weston

  Close the Door they’re coming in the Window

  Comanche

  Earliest Memory

  Edwards, Mrs

  Eels

  Egg Beaten in Milk

  Harris

  Kalu

  Knee Ligaments

  Laker

  Major, Bogus

  Major Braithwaite

  Major Christian

  Major Ferguson and Major Veale

  Major Howells

  Major Johnstone and Major Corlett

  Major Mccoll

  Major Meades

  Marden, Cyril

  Market Place

  Martin, Doctor

  Names

  New Canal

  No Food, Future Food

  Old Manor

  Old Mill

  Osmington Mills

  Owlett’s End

  Qualifications

  Richmond, Daniel & Bunty

  Scutt, Eric

  Searle, Mr

  Songs: Diana

  Songs: Johnny Remember Me

  Songs: Singing The Blues

  Stewart? Stuart? John?

  Subterranean

  Yuri

  List of Illustrations

  Footnotes

  Also by Jonathan Meades

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ABUSER, SEXUAL

  Not applicable. I have no sexual abuser to confront.

  There was no simpering, gingivitic distant cousin with crinklecut hair who beseeched me to come and play with a special mauve toy.

  No wispily moustached, overfriendly, oversweaty ‘friend-of-the-family’ whom I was made to address as aunt, who tucked me up then, who must be hunted down now. What, anyway, was signified by that odd epithet? Could the ‘friend-of-the-family’ not make up its mind whom, in particular, in the family, it was a friend of? My family did not have ‘friends-of-the-family’. ‘Friend-of-the-family’ is as much an alarm bell as ‘magician and children’s entertainer’.

  No doddering nonagenarian former ‘magician and children’s entertainer’ whose dirty secret was buried half a century ago and is now all but lost in the soup of dementia.

  No lissom-fingered groin-pirate for me to approach as he opens his gate, all crazed-paint and rot. A ragged cotoneaster hedge flanks the gate. I can see the mange-like patches where the bungalow’s render has slipped to reveal the friable bricks. The own-brand Scotch in his naugahyde bag weighs down that bad bad hand of his.

  No failed oboist, foxed scores all around, listening covetously to a prodigious pupil, gazing at a soggy autumn garden and broken paling.

  No, no, none of those. I was not, in the brusque cant of the day, interfered with. I didn’t have what it takes. No adult wanted to love me that way. I was pretty enough, but it takes more than prettiness. It takes foolhardy insouciance, it takes uncomprehending nerve to return the stare of the not yet abuser, the tempter, and so, in his eyes, legitimise the compact and become complicit, willing and an equal partner in sex crime. Only the rash venture into the unknown from which there is no chaste return. I never had that rashness, was never a daredevil. Look right look left look right again – then repeat it all.

  So, now a pre-dotard, I am left bereft. I am denied the sine qua non of recollective bitterness, mnemonic poignancy. Denied a cause of self-pity … a cause? The cause. Denied, then, the chance to incite the pity of others, to milk the world’s sympathy gland. I lack the paramount qualification of the auto-encyclopaedist. No abuser (I am, apparently, unique in this) – no abuser, so no life, no story.

  Were I to stroll down False Memory Lane at dusk I might pick out a mac lurking in the grubby alders beside a playground: You there! You …

  But that would to be to invoke nothing but dated cliché. Playgrounds! Macs! The predator surely wouldn’t announce himself by that dun uniform: he’d have had a gift for camouflage, he’d have been in mufti, he’d have been anywhere but on the school bus.

  As well as cliché it would be a lie. There are strata of mendacity best left unbroached.

  Why be so fastidious? Lies are humans’ desperate balms and risible solaces.

  Where would we be without monotheism, fasts, judicial impartiality, the eucharist, sincerity, pork’s proscription, Allah’s ninety-nine names and seventy-two virgins, weather forecasts, life plans, political visions, conjugated magpies, circumcision, sacred cows, the power of prayer, insurance policies, gurus’ prescriptions, the common good, astrology?

  Where indeed?

  But those are the big lies.

  Little lies, microfibs, are different. They are insidious. They go undetected, pebbles added furtively to a cairn. Every time I write once upon a time I am, anyway, already exhuming the disputable, conjuring a photocopy of a faded print made from a detrited negative. I am striving to distinguish the original from its replays. So why add to the store of the provisional? The forms and shades of what used to be are already hideously mutable, every act of recall is both an erosion and an augmentation. I remember therefore I reshape.

  Further, memory is susceptible to contamination by a secondary memory, of the place where I find myself when the first occurs. Thus I cannot help but picture the swaying mane of the weeping willow I was dozing beneath at East Harnham in summer 1996 when my mind was suddenly filled with a dizzy, joyful, chlorinated night more than thirty years before, the night I cut the ball of my right foot beside the swimming pool at West Park Farm (broken glass? crown cork?), didn’t realise I had done so and laid a trail of blood through the loud house where teenagers clutching bottles of fruitgum-bright liqueurs shed inhibitions and just a few clothes.

  The secondary location seeps into what is playing in my inner cinema just as the Gaumont’s hefty 1930s-Tudorish décor would intrude on the purity of the screen’s illusionism. Westerns’ canyons, gulleys and hoodoos, Denver Pyle’s badman grin in The Restless Gun, the tarred hut on the dunes in Forbidden Cargo where Joyce Grenfell and Nigel Patrick pretend to be ornithologists, West of Zanzibar’s smugglers’ dhows, the shack-like Snowdonian garage that yields the clue to Jack Hawkins in The Long Arm: they were infuriatingly framed by beams, halberds, casques, tapestries, chandeliers. These interventions from a competing pageant exacerbated my inability to distinguish between the fictive, the factual, the fantastical.

  The formula states that adults are wicked predators, children are innocent prey. In the hierarchy of abuse, paedophilia (which may be literally that, liking children) is demonised, fetishised. It has giddily attained equal status with race crime. (Stabbing an Arab in a Maida Hill launderette simply because she is an Arab is a more serious offence than stabbing her because she jumped the queue for the one functioning dryer or pocketed a garment left in the lugubrious drum by the previous user or because she is a woman. She can of course take comfort from this knowledge as she loses consciousness on a reddening moraine of fresh-baked sheets. The culprit, the gravity of whose crime is determined by motive rather than effect, will, if arraigned, plead a different cause and claim that his action was motivated by something apart from race and ‘otherness’.) Homo faber. Isn’t he just? Man has devised multitudinous forms of child abuse whic
h are not sexual. Not covertly sexual, not displacedly sexual. Their immeasurable consequences may, however, be just as grave as those of sexual abuse.

  Child soldier, child slave, child labourer, child miner, child skiv, child beggar, child bloody from scrounging in the shambles.

  There were children before there was childhood. There have always been children. There has not always been childhood. Steam, foundries, pollution, unprecedented urban concentrations, megalopolitan sprawl, soot, canalisation, dams – the industrial revolution’s manifestations were, as early as 1873, described by Antonio Stoppani as ‘a new telluric force which in power and universality may be compared to the greater forces of earth’. Since then the world’s population has multiplied fivefold. Humankind propels the atmosphere. It has unwittingly created a geological age which the meteorologist and chemist Paul Crutzen named the anthropocene.

  Modern western European childhood is a by-product of industrial revolutions, thus an invention of adults. It is protracted, an antechamber to longed-for adulthood, a mere waiting room before we achieve the real thing. Whilst it is hardly an abuse, it is a temporal space where communitarianism and generational apartheid are enforced. Its characteristic condition is attritional boredom, a boredom that foments the desire to escape, no matter how, and to punish the captors. Until the era of enclosures, rural diaspora and urbanisation, childhood had been the province of the lettered classes. Thereafter, throughout the nineteenth century childhood, like recreational drugs in the later twentieth century, became gradually democratised, available to all save the very poor (who needed it most). The change is readily ascribable to a succession of education acts which ordained the free provision of schooling and ever more elongated compulsory attendance. Schools occasioned a concentration of coevals: the child spends most of his time with other children.

  We take for granted the existence of commercial stratagems to confine children to a specifically infantile ghetto, to prolong the age of play, to emphasise their separateness, to profit from an exclusive and imposed subculture. Yet these stratagems are of comparatively recent foundation. They devolve from the invention of childhood. They are conditional upon mass production, the separation of home and work, the statutory compulsion to submit to education after the end of physical childhood. They extend childhood, they inhibit its elision with adulthood. Not least because what follows is of course another commercially determined niche age, an even more recent created parenthesis: when my parents were teenagers there were no such persons, they often reminded me, as teenagers. We are persistently shocked when children go straight from Lego to legover. We shouldn’t be. It is as though there is a collective will to stunt them with toys, to prolong infantilism and delude ourselves about states of innocence. It is as though we creepily wish to put the pituitary gland on hold and keep them kiddies for ever. The ‘us’ in Toys ‘’ Us is adults who are perennially keen to keep children in stasis, to freeze them at whatever stage of development is sentimentalised as ‘such a lovely age’.

  When, after they had both died, I sold my parents’ house, I got rid of a cupboardful of toys which had collected decades’ dust, and a bookcase of Eagle annuals, Tiger annuals, Buffalo Bill annuals and so on. I picked through tins of broken pens and perished erasers. I wondered where my model cowboys and Indians had got to then recalled that I had lent them to Roger’s younger brother when I had ‘grown out’ of them and had never bothered to get them back. I excitedly anticipated that the past would come rushing back. Each of these rusting tarnished pieces of metal or plastic is, surely, a potential trigger, a mnemonic of some bright day in 1959, a correlative of a particular sensation. They were however doggedly mute. A brown and cream Dinky Austin Atlantic even prompted a chronological anomaly, the recollection that when I was about twenty I had met what wouldn’t have then been called an Austin Atlantic anorak who collected lifesize editions of that pseudo-American tourer. It took time in that house whose purpose was finished to realise that this was a pitiful and self-pitying exercise: I was trying to freeze myself, to transport myself back to the land of yore, to dream days which had, actually, been no such thing. I was trying to do to myself what parents do to their children.

  A further persuasively significant foundation of childhood was the separation of workplace from home and the consequent separation of children from adults. Thitherto children routinely enjoyed prepubertal sex. They also endured incestuous liaisons, were bound in endogamy, or something closely related to it: life was, after all, as predatory adults realised, short.

  Ci-gît le fils, ci-gît la mère,

  Ci-gît la fille avec le père,

  Ci-gît la soeur, ci-gît le frère,

  Ci-gît la femme et le mari,

  Et ne sont que trois corps ici.

  The Levitical taboos on incest – which don’t extend to cousins – were widely ignored. Notably in remote fastnesses and the backwoods. Hence, no doubt, the plentiful supply of village idiots, victims of primal concupiscence and of a feast of recessive afflictions: respiratory problems, developmental stasis, albinism, seizures, club feet, renal and hepatic failures, tons o’ snot, pallor, involuntary urination, jabbering, short life etc. Improved economic conditions, increased longevity, embourgeoisement, urban propriety and internal migration appear to have lessened the incidence in Britain of intrafamilial intercourse save among Muslims.

  This prosperity and civility which encouraged sexual restraint (and moral repugnance at the absence of such restraint) were enjoyed by an ascending proportion of the populace which now lived in disgusted fear of the feral inbreds at the gates, whom they longed to hang or to transport at the first sign of a mare’s slashed belly or burning rick.

  Rather than rape its own children this new middle class beat them instead. There, that’s a kind of progress.

  The anthropocene childhood has changed. But only so much. Like education, which is, astonishingly, still symbolic of it, childhood may have become increasingly ‘child-centred’ rather than ‘adult-centred’ aka ‘sadist-centred’ which is the form of education still practised in preposterous faith schools with their mission to beat the biddable into superstitious submission. But ‘child-centred’ childhood still remains within the ghetto of adult creation. The ghetto that children yearn to escape from is now more gadget-strewn though hardly cushier. Childhood is the condition of wanting to be someone else. In play we seek to emulate the behaviour of adults, our wishfulness caused us to become grocers or soldiers, cowboys or tractor drivers. (Evidently a generationally biased list of models. Today’s children long to be body-piercers, security consultants, the mutant subjects of the tattoos themselves.)

  Rather, we ought to yearn to escape the ghetto. But when we have escaped we discover that its pull is that of the superstition that tempts the atheist, the tenderness that infects the murderer. Childhood tugs at our sleeve all our life. Look at moron executives bonding through paintballing, look at the queues in airports wearing kiddie clothes, look at them unabashedly reading J. K. Rowling. (Would an adult of my childhood have read Richmal Crompton – and in public?)

  Such infantilism is a pathetic refuge. It signals a forlorn effort to be a child again, despite the bulbous evidence of the body distended by sweet comforting childish foodstuffs and the actual children who clamorously demand more, more. It’s a delusory rebirth which can convince only those with a capacity for faith and credulousness. The recall of childhood from a distance – as though peering into a glass cabinet whilst wearing a sterilised mask and surgically scrubbed gloves – is different. It does not imply a denial of adulthood, it is not a soft self-abasement which sweeps us sartorially and mentally backwards. Nor does it imply that what is recalled was actual and enjoyed an existence beyond the laboratory of our imaginings.

  There were projects that never, so to speak, came to fruition, never could have done. At the age of eight I began to conjure up the future, year by year. This prospective speculation was of the lowest grade, a series of acquired banalities which did not
come to pass. Nonetheless it remains potently limpid. For instance, when I was ten – still a long way off – I would definitely be going on very long bike rides through a sandy terrain of broom, gorse and scattered pines (I sense the sea was close by, though it was not visible). The sun shone. I would be laughing and picnicking with healthy, Aertex-clad coevals apparently plucked from the pages of Enid Blyton though I did not then recognise that source. We would compare bicycles in amiable competition: the merits of Campagnolo and Simplex gears and their superiority to Sturmey-Archer, drinking flasks, brake systems (cable, calliper brakes were old hat), tyre makes and pressures etc. This fantasy was partly learnt from advertisements of the period, again unacknowledged. Partly from frequenting Hayball’s cycle shop and scrutinising the ranks of Rudges, Hercules, Raleighs, BSAs. The fancy stuff like Dawes and Claud Butler were hung from beams. The shop’s odour was that of clean oil. It was a serious place. The beefy bespectacled Hayball in a brown warehouseman’s coat never smiled.

  That outdoorsiness and sportiness should have informed so much of my imagined future suggests that I had only the frailest grasp of my capabilities. When I was thirteen I would be opening the batting for an eminent if undefined cricket team with my imaginary friend Andrew Parker. In fact I was a laughably incompetent cricketer. Had I dared wear glasses I might have ascended to mediocrity. But I didn’t because I feared losing an eye to a shard of lens, shattered by an improbably fast schoolboy bouncer. After the age of nine when my (unfulfilled) promise as a swimmer was recognised I was seldom obliged to play cricket. Now I dreamed of emulating teenage Olympians such as the Aberdonian Ian Black and Neil McKechnie who advertised Horlicks and came from Wallasey, which I knew to be nearby the glamorous-sounding New Brighton. My photograph would appear in the Eagle diary with my freestyle and butterfly records listed beneath.

  Hark hark the dogs do bark!

  The beggars are coming to town.

  Some in rags and some in tags

  And one in a velvet gown.