An Encyclopaedia of Myself Read online

  The rhyme was hardly affecting.

  The illustration, in a poster style brazenly filched from the Beggarstaff Brothers, terrified me. The leader of the motley sordids was indeed resplendent in a scraggy, ermine-trimmed ceremonial robe – a hanging judge’s twin gone to the bad. He was gross, ruddy, unshaven, voracious, with obese predatory lips, a prognathous jaw and bared mustard-coloured teeth. Here was a truly aggressive beggar, a figure of abominable daymares. And my parents abandoned me to him. The very presence of the book on a shelf near my bed was discomfiting. Yet I was drawn to this beggar-king and, all affright, I would dare myself to peep at him with the pages hardly parted before I snapped them shut again lest he escape into the room. He was not the only figure I feared. Many of my earliest books had been my mother’s. A child born in 1912 was routinely subjected to imaginative horrors that her son, a New Elizabethan born thirty-five years later, might easily have been spared, protected from in that golden age of euphemism and evasion which saw our young Queen crowned. But I wasn’t spared: my mother still had those books, Grandma and Pop had not dumped them out the back in the steep alley behind the house in Shakespeare Avenue.

  Here were Joseph Martin Kronheim’s giants and child-stealers. Here was Gustave Doré’s nocturnal butcher slitting the tender throats of sleeping children who had feasted on birds: poisoned birds? Here were the babes in the wood, the dark wood, the eternal wood, asleep now for evermore in each other’s arms. And everywhere was Camelot, swathed in dusty crêpe, in tendrils of desiccated caul, haunted, benighted, all decay, all death. Tom the chimney sweep died, he turned into a water baby swaddled in art nouveauish clusters of weed, befriended by crustacea and sea trout. To be a child was to be close to death. How I pitied the boy sailor sprawled weeping across his mother’s grave in Arthur Hughes’s Home From Sea: but at least he had a sister to comfort him, I would have no one. I feared for the filial resolve and life of the grave little boy being interrogated in And When Did You Last See Your Father? I fretted about him. What became of him? I knew all too well what became of the princes in the tower. Prescient of their fate they cowered together on a hamper in their cell or they clung to each other on a four-poster bed or they were smothered with a pillow by an armoured man whose rude companion holds a burning lamp or they were smothered by coarse mechanicals with beards and fringes or their bodies were lowered down a steep staircase by killers with the faces of angels taking them to a better place. Royal, incarcerated, innocent, prepubescent, (perhaps) pretty, defenceless, dead or about to die: the attractions of these victims to Victorian illustrators are evident. But the greatest appeal must have been that the plight of these two hapless princes of long ago would – through chromolithographs, steel prints, etchings, silk Stevengraphs – terrify countless children, incite them to tuck their head beneath an unsmothering pillow and will the image to quit their brain. Those artists manipulated my occiput which tingled in the night. Their gleefully cackling cruelty outlived them. They died knowing that children yet unborn would wake screaming from the nightmares they kindled, the nightmares that I craved: I relished oneiric abuse – the nightmares’ foals would do.

  I dreamed of malevolent sheep surrounding me near an isolated railway halt in a landscape of drystone walls and tufty grass. Every attempt to escape over those walls was thwarted by further flocks who penned me in, baaing at high volume till a Wolseley police car arrived to apprehend me.

  I dreamed of a lugubrious, flickeringly lit gilded room, with glimmering fabrics, a chaise longue, heavy dark scarlet velvet curtains from behind which, terrified lest I make a sound and am discovered, I spy on a brooding Napoleon. (I had never witnessed a performance of Hamlet. But I had read it, slowly, painstakingly. More importantly I had seen stills of distant, dusty productions. Paintings of prince and arras excited me.) There was the flash of a blade, a vegetal tearing and with it a rent in the curtains. Many years later it occurred to me that some part of my brain had, in REM, conflated the names Napoleon and Polonius and had decreed that my fate should be the latter’s at the former’s hand: he was, after all, still Boney. I no doubt belong to the last generation of British children to be casually warned of that spectral ogre. Mr Coleman used to caution me: ‘Old Boney’ll get you if you dawdle about there, Sunny Jim.’

  If only! I wanted him to try to get me so I might experience the thrill of being quarry. I would of course escape. ‘There’ was the covered alley in the middle of the terrace on the other side of the road. It ran between the house where Roger lived with his parents and grandmother and its neighbour: the first floors had a party wall, a sliver of both ground floors had been sacrificed to this narrow passage. It was where I waited for him to come out to play. It led to the perpendicular alley between the Rose and Crown’s car park and the gardens of this terrace of about twenty houses (red brick, c.1912, each with a name incised in stone beside the front door, as well as a mere number like ours). Mr and Mrs Coleman’s house was three away from Roger’s.

  Mr Coleman, a grocer on his day of rest (Wednesday half-day closing excepted), would open his back gate and say testily: ‘Can’t you nippers keep it down!’

  His tone towards me when I skulked silently was more jocular.

  ‘Can’t do better than join ’em when you’re big enough, Sunny Jim,’ he’d instruct me, well-meaningly, on Wednesday evenings whilst Bishop Wordsworth School’s blanco-gaitered Sea Scout Troop, led by a youth twirling a baton with thrilling abandon, marched past hammering their drums and bugling their one and only tune under the martinet’s eye of a naval-uniformed and atypically spruce William Golding.

  ‘You make sure you eat them greens, Sunny Jim,’ Mr Coleman instructed me, well-meaningly, whilst I queued on my mother’s behalf at Mr Rose’s vegetable van.

  ‘Enjoy your pop, Sunny Jim!’ he’d instruct me, well-meaningly, whilst I bought my two bottles (fluorescent lime and American cream soda) from the gleaming Corona lorry. I resented being addressed as Sunny Jim. But I didn’t show it, would not have dared answer him back, for I knew that the reason the Colemans never smiled was that their son had been taken from them. Listening to the whoops and cries of their boy’s living contemporaries can only have intensified their loss. There were now just the two of them. It was for only five years that there had been the three of them. It must have been grief that made Mrs Coleman pendulous-breasted, gingery-grey, myopic, musty, thin-lipped: staleness surrounded her. It must have been grief that made Mr Coleman glue hair from faraway sources to his pate. My bald father mocked these strands as grocer’s stripes. They gleamed like oily feathers. The coarse artifice was appealing to a child who preferred plastic to leather, formica to wood, who delighted in prostheses. Every morning save Sunday the Colemans drove in an old Ford delivery van to their little shop where they whiled away their days till they too died. They left Little John Coleman in heaven and in a shaded corner of All Saints churchyard. The dead could be in two places simultaneously. At least two places: Mowbray Meades was in heaven, he was in all his family’s heart, he was in a war grave at Lille, where on 9 July 1918 he had succumbed to pneumonia. Afterlife and transubstantiation, prayer, angels, hell, miracles, holy rocks, voices from above, flying horses, visitations and the very notion of the sacred, are creations of aberrant hallucination and desert fasts which might have been expressly devised to ensnare credulous children. There’s no more willing religious warrior than the child ignorant of everything save what he is instructed in by his abusive imam, himself in turn a victim of doctrinal abuse – so the wheel goes round: tradition is no more meritorious than is sincerity. The flowers were fresh each week (and still are; a dwarf pine has been recently planted). The tiny headstone was scrubbed.

  John Coleman

  February 10th 1952

  Aged 5 years and 6 months

  Happiest Memories

  I never set eyes on this valetudinarian boy, the subject of whose life was its imminent ending. He was my senior by six months. He lay dying less than fifty yards away across the
road whilst I, a longer stretch before me, climbed high in plum trees and hid from marauding Comanches in a gap in between Kalu’s hedge, a trunk seeping fat beads of tawny resin and a woven hurdle. He was too feeble to play. He lived in bed in a blanched room matt with sunbeams. His days were all beef tea and expectoration, plumped pillows and the doctor’s hushed voice. I knew of his secret existence through murmured hearsay, through rumour’s mysterious seepage. He wasn’t talked about. He was hidden away. My parents never referred to him, as though infant mortality were itself infectious like polio, myxomatosis for children, the viral Boney of those years that lurked in wait to maim our bodies, to steal them forever.

  Infant mortality? Any mortality. Death might go dogging everywhere but how was I to know? Intelligence of the final finality was only grudgingly vouchsafed me by my parents. For all they spoke of death, I might have believed that we live perpetually, growing ever more crooked, more and more dried up, more rasping, more fearful. (I obviously didn’t know that it was death’s proximity that caused the eyes of the very old to communicate unimaginable terror.) Did my parents talk of it in camera where the renchild could not hear? I doubt it. It hurt my father too much to consider it. Death was denied by near-silence: what was not spoken of did not exist. So it was not addressed, nor were dying and the invisible invaders which honeycomb this internal organ and make leather of that one. The names of the dead were dropped from conversation, as one might drop that of a disloyal friend. Death seemed to be a kind of disgrace. The dead were somehow culpable. They brought it upon themselves. The rare times they were remembered, it was with irked brusqueness. This quasi-muteness might have been designed to protect me from a truth that was evidently considered just about unspeakable. It more likely derived from the near-paralysis that any thought of his father’s death caused my father.

  George Meades had died at the age of forty-one in 1920 when his third child and second son was eleven years old. John Meades, who twenty-seven years later would become my father (twenty-six, if measured by the Seathwaite Conception), considered, so far as I could ascertain, that this premature departure was a gross betrayal, like that of a star batsman who has too easily surrendered his wicket to his team’s cost. (This must be an exceptional matter: I have never before used a cricketing simile.) Apprised by life’s whispering campaign that all this ends for all of us, I asked my father about his father’s death. He regarded me with astonished hurt that turned into a defensive flinch I had not seen before, it was an expression of vulnerability that a more malign (or less timid) son might have exploited. I had neither the nous nor the will.

  ‘How did he die?’

  Perhaps he pretended to himself that his father had never existed. He had no photo of him. I had furtively pocketed one that I found buried among piles of Picture Post and tobacco tins filled with screws and wingnuts in the shed behind my grandmother’s house in Northwick Road where, equally, he wasn’t on display. It was obvious whom the photo showed – he was the double of his eldest son Harry, my uncle Hank, save that the ambit of his eyes was sooty with disease or fatigue.

  ‘Died in the night. Been ill. Grandma told us in the morning.’

  My father glared a furious and wounded warning. I knew I must never again ask about, never again even mention my grandfather. And I didn’t.

  Was George Meades, as my father had it, a solicitor and Evesham’s part-time town clerk? In Hank’s version he was a solicitor who contributed law notes to the Harmsworth press. I suspect that they had both promoted him out of filial pride. Or out of social shame: they wanted to elevate themselves just as their father, son of a joiner, had wanted to elevate himself by membership of a profession, cynosure of the unimaginatively aspirant. The house in Northwick Road – mean, terraced, dark, no bathroom, outside toilet – was improbably the home of a middle-aged solicitor. And Kitty recalled riding with him across the hills in a dog cart to Chipping Camden where he collected rents, a task more likely undertaken by a solicitor’s clerk rather than a solicitor. In the year of his death he had passed the Law Society’s examinations in trusts, accounting and bookkeeping. Did those successes complete a tardy qualification or was there further struggle and exhausting lucubration to come? With bitchy glee Kitty observed to my then wife that Meades men don’t live long lives. My father once pointed to a double-fronted stucco villa around the corner from Northwick Road near St Peter’s church and ruefully observed: ‘That was where we were just about to move to.’

  Further wishfulness? Or was this true? And, if so, was his resentment then worldly, a festering regret about a property denied him, about status unattained? It wasn’t a matter that my father did much to rectify. He had no aptitude for making money, a resigned contempt for those, like Smoothie Derek, who had, and would not own a house till he was fifty-three.

  Death was, then, off limits with my father. He told me in a matter-of-fact way that my maternal grandmother had died the previous night as we passed the church at Fugglestone late one Sunday afternoon: I had been sent to the Lush family for the weekend, presumably in anticipation of her death, of whose imminence I had of course not been foretold. ‘Mummy’s upset.’

  Charles Wallis, brother of Barnes, married Christine Benn – his first and only, her third (first widowed, second divorced). She cooked Anglo-Indian curries which my father scorned as inauthentic. I was thus obliged to pretend to him that I did not enjoy them. She lived with her two sons in a flat at the top of an Edwardian house overlooking Chafyn Grove School’s lopsided playing fields. The flat below was occupied by a couple with the fine name of Saxon-Harold. Charles was a gentle decent man who rarely shed his crisp white mac. He was amused by my fondness for The Platters’ ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’, a song he recalled from the version in a film of the 1930s. He drowned on his honeymoon trying to save a child in difficulty in a Cornish bay. He was mourned by my father: ‘Christine isn’t taking it too well.’

  Anthony, the infant son of my parents’ bent solicitor Eric Broad, had also drowned, early in the war, a few hundred yards upstream from our house. There was little sympathy for his negligent parents who had left him in the garden.

  Both the great horn player Denis Brain and the heir to the Sun-Pat peanut butter fortune died at the wheel of sports cars. That was the way to go.

  My mother taught Mary N—, the daughter of an army family. In her early twenties, after a brief failed marriage, she took to prostitution in Bristol. She was strangled by a john. My mother, reading a newspaper report, shrugged as though there was an inevitability to that end and that surprise was misplaced although sympathy wasn’t.

  Although my mother’s instinct might have been to speak to me about death with qualified candour she acceded to my father’s will. Together they were conjoined in reticence. When alone with me she was slightly more open though hardly voluble. So I developed (or inherited by mimesis) a guardedness in public whilst cultivating a clandestine obsession with the forbidden: if the living reckoned it was that terrible there must be something to it. Like winklepickers, illegitimacy, tinned salmon, canals, hair cream and gross nipples it was a secret vice to be shamefully indulged, guiltily pored over and obviously not admitted. I kept deaths to myself.

  Jolyon Spiller. Late August 1957. Richard Griffiths sat down beside me at the Cathedral School swimming pool and told me his father had just been phoned: a fatal bicycle accident in Sherborne. Two years later his father Laurence Griffiths, headmaster of the Cathedral School, was giving me daily lessons during the holiday to remedy my innumeracy. I arrived at his house beside the school at 9.30 sharp. The door was opened by his elder daughter Lilian. She told me that her father was unwell. I learned a few hours later that he had died in the night. Her calm stoicism was extraordinary.

  David Hayden. September 1958. It was said that his parents, coach tour operators, never got over the loss of their beefy son whose brother had already died. Alan Moss, elder brother of my contemporary Melodie, was injured and hospitalised. Car crash near Tilshead on Salisbury P
lain.

  Richard Sturdy. April 1959. He and his father, a Wareham vet, were drowned when their skiff capsized in Poole Harbour. I heard from a friend whom I had run into outside Beach’s bookshop, my de facto alma mater; most of the staff had been taught by my mother and were happy to let me sit on the floor reading for hours on end without pressing me to buy anything.

  Seven years earlier, in February 1952, I had been on the very same spot with my mother when she noticed the lowered flag above the Close Gate and realised that King George VI had died. We were on our way to The House of Steps a few yards away. My first act as a New Elizabethan was to eat hot buttered crumpets in that most sinisterly named tea-rooms from whose owner my parents bought my first bicycle when his son Peter Rothwell had outgrown it: a maroon BSA with a curved crossbar, an American design made under licence.

  Spiller and Sturdy were my fellow pupils though I hardly knew them. David Hayden was seven years my senior. I have no idea how I met him. But at the age of eleven my aptitude for indiscriminate acquaintanceship was already coming along hummingly.

  Since my parents had improbably heard of any one of them during their life I didn’t bother to familiarise them with them now dead. My silence, in these instances, was guiltless.

  It was not always so.

  A. Hand & Son (groceries, provisions, post office) stood on the corner of Ayleswade Road, Harnham Road and St Nicholas Road, at whose southern end two bridges cross branches of the Avon: the houses between the bridges were often flooded and A. Hand was not immune. As the handle of a high-geared Berkel bacon slicer was turned ponderously the blade rotated at twenty times the speed in an enticingly lethal blur which prompted me to tuck my scrotum between my legs. A spiral staircase rose to a storeroom, and a wooden ladder, smooth as a shove-ha’penny coin, to the highest shelves whose glass-fronted compartments held cotton reels, Kirby grips, pins, needles, decorative combs, Germolene and lint. A wire-mesh screen signified the post office area.