An Encyclopaedia of Myself Read online

  Period product inventory. Hairy cardboard boxes; hairy Izal toilet paper; Weston’s Wagon Wheels; Nestlé’s segmental chocolate bars with green mint filling and green wrappers, Fry’s segmental chocolate bars with white mint filling and navy wrappers; Fry’s Turkish Delight; Crosse & Blackwell Russian Salad; Trex; Robinsons Lemon Barley Water; Kia-Ora (which meant good health – it was everyone’s single word of Maori); Walls’ disgusting pork sausages; Millers’ even more disgusting pork pies; Smiths Crisps (which often weren’t); parlously balanced displays of Daz, Omo, Persil; Weetabix, Grape-Nuts (for the cleaner colon), Welgar Shredded Wheat from Welwyn Garden City (the name suggested a corner of paradise); Keillers butterscotch; individual fruit pies; Lyle’s Golden Syrup (Out of the strong came forth sweetness); packet soups; tinned soups, fruit salad and cling peaches; bottled sauces – A.1., HP, OK, Daddies, Heinz Salad Cream and ketchup; cut flowers in dank water according to season; glass jars of Black Jacks, bullseyes, aniseed balls, licorice allsorts and shrill boiled sweets; scrubbing brushes; Oxo and Bovril; Rowntree’s Fruit Gums (which caused mouth ulcers) and Fruit Pastilles (which didn’t); baskets of wasp-bored apples and blighted vegetables; towers of biscuits; Camp Coffee; Shipham’s Paste; Sandwich Spread; Sun-Pat peanut butter (smooth – crunchy was still far in the future); Energen rolls and Dutch rusks; red Edam, mousetrap henges, St Ivel lactic cheese and Dairylea; Nestlé condensed milk (sweetened for instant sick), Ideal Milk (evaporated); Spangles and Refreshers; stacks of the Salisbury Journal, the Salisbury Times, Harnham Parish Magazine.

  Dun split peas in burlap sacks seemed hopelessly old-fashioned among the gaudily packaged products of the first age of food colouring.

  By the summer of 1956 an up-to-the-minute freezer had been wedged into a corner beside the slicer and window display to store ice cream, Koola Frutas, Mivvis, Birds Eye fish fingers, Findus fish cakes, Ross peeled prawns and fish and chips in a box designed to resemble crumpled newspaper – a Mudd Pack by H. Mudd & Sons of Grimsby. All this and much more was contained in a shop hardly larger than the combined front and dining rooms of the houses in the adjacent terrace. Mr Hand (cleaner-shaven than his wife, wirewool hair en brosse) had two assistants: the severe, bespectacled Mr Weston (grocer’s stripes) and the chummy one (grocer’s stripes). They wore long tan warehouse coats. They edged nimbly through canyons of boxes. They clambered daintily over teetering crates. Customers were less practised in negotiating the multiple obstacles. When more than eight people were in the store things went tumbling because of the squash. Everyone was so close you smelled your ripe neighbour. No gossipy whisper went unheard.

  Midday, early September 1956. I was waiting in the bunched queue to be served from the freezer when a woman in a pacamac squeezed into the shop, causing the bell on a spring to ring. There was the usual murmur of ‘Good morning or [polite laughter] is it afternoon already?’ The pacamac took her place at the back of the queue. And that would have been that had she not espied the fat-arsed woman in front of me. She busied through. She spoke in hush-voice to her friend’s ear.

  ‘Did you hear … terrible … Dr Laing’s little boy … they don’t know if he was thrown off … fell he could have fell … he fell on his head … his own pony … brand-new … he had one of those hats on cap things but … in the field behind their house … where the barn is … the ambulance took him up Odstock … too late they said … nothing they could do to save the little mite nothing … didn’t regain you know … died in the theatre …’fn1

  She wasn’t as hugger-mugger as she believed.

  The shop fell silent.

  Thus I learnt that Jeremy Laing had been killed. He was my first friend to die. I thought of his nice wise face and his thick round glasses and his quizzical earnestness and the strain of mockery he got from his father. I dawdled home with my lolly – now somehow shameful, undeserved.

  There were, as usual, the gusts of stinging sourness from Hawk Bowns’s dairy, of scorched horn from Curtis’s smithy. I loitered outside Sid the Butcher’s shop: unburdened by horrible knowledge he was, as usual, sawing and gabbing. Sid the Butcher’s bicycle’s rear wheel’s translucent plastic veil to protect his mac from spray that escaped the mudguard was, as usual, crazed and engrimed. Mr Thick the Drowner grunted, as usual, through his abundantly encrusted moustache. The wicket fence that supported his arthritic bones was, as usual, rotten and miraculously vertical. Ian Horn’s parents’ front garden was, as usual, full of axles, tarpaulins and buckets. The Lovely Queenie’s rouge was, as usual, like a scary clown’s. The russet fur round the collar of her peplum’d serge jacket was, as usual, thick as a bush. Iridescent feathers glinted, as usual, in her hat. She greeted me, as usual, with her blowsy cackle and her former-barmaid-trying-but-failing-to-make-comeback leer. Even though it was a minute further from her house than the R & C, The Lovely Queenie was, as usual, off to The Swan for her lunchtime noggin. Old Street’s ragged metalled surface was succeeded, as usual, by muddy gravel, cinders and puddles. The alley off it that was also a drain flowed with foul leucous liquid, as usual. In the small square of reeking rookeries it led to the pye-dogs howled, as usual.

  This was all wrong.

  Someone had ceased to exist in the form he had enjoyed till earlier that morning, had stopped being a person, had made a monumental shift into a state that wasn’t a state.

  Yet this routine itinerary’s stages, scents and personae had not changed. Nor had the way I perceived them changed. There was no revealed acknowledgment that he was dead. What did I expect? Wilting flowers? The collapse of Mr Thick’s fence? A shocking fact was hidden in my head. That it had no effect on the exterior world signified that world’s heartlessness. I tried to calculate where Jeremy was now, what he was now. Was he a void? And was a void like a vacuum? Probably. Where he had been there was nothing – but where was this freshly created nothingness to be found? How did lack and emptiness manifest? Did a hole appear in the sky with nothing beyond it? Was he going to heaven? If so, had he already got there? How long did the journey take? Did it begin immediately after death?

  Jeremy won’t be round to play again, to go out in the boat again, to row upstream to Alligator Island again. I went through the high gate between the brick sheds into the garden. Crazy-paved path, two fruit trees, hurdle fences, cotoneaster hedge, wallflowers and currants, sandpit I’d grown out of just as I would grow out of short trousers, cowboys, water pistols, Jokari, sport, War Picture Library, sleeping with a night light. All of which Jeremy would never grow out of. He was condemned to be forever frozen in Aertex and Startrite.

  My father was already home. So I remained mute. Over lunch I volunteered nothing of what I knew. It was too embarrassing a subject to broach. Even had I wanted to blurt out the news I wouldn’t have known how to. I lacked the moral means to contravene the etiquette of silence he decreed. And, besides, the start of each academic year brought into my mother’s class new pupils, a catalogue of whose foibles and quirks she treated us to. My father and I ate, she picked at her food and talked. After lunch she returned to the C of E primary school a couple of minutes’ walk away.

  My father went to his den to do his ‘writing’. On a 1930s Remington he typed, in multiplicate, the orders he had written down by hand in the shops he had called on that morning. Later in the afternoon one copy of the orders would be posted to Southampton, a second to Bristol, a third to Liverpool, the headquarters of William Crawford and Sons, where Brigadier Sir Douglas Crawford DSO (1904–1981), Lord Lieutenant of Merseyside (1974–1979), presided over the great baking empire. He lived, surrounded by imperial Chinese gewgaws, at Fernlea, an Edwardian barrack between Sefton Park and Mossley Hill. He shared it and a house in Marbella, Costa Lotta, with his widowed sister, Jessie. He never found the right girl.

  It was counted a privilege to shake the white hand of this powdery, childless paternalist and collector. I was twice honoured, at the Royal Hotel in Bristol, which merely reinforced the weird perception that I was being introduced to royalty. H
e seemed to demand deference as though his blood were blue or blueish, a baron of biscuits receiving forelock from his vassals and their children, his dependents: Chas Perry, Mr Berrett, Mr Uren, Mr Tyson etc. I hated to see my father demeaned, blusteringly pretending that he was the old snob’s fellow officer.

  That these painful encounters took place in Bristol was particularly inappropriate, for this was a city that, more than any other, I associated with unmitigated pleasure. This was partly due to a friend of my mother’s charming lodger, Dick Lalonde. His route to the estate agents where he was doing his articles was the same as mine to school. He was a voluble propagandist for Bristol: he had been brought up there, had gone to Clifton College and returned when he qualified. Because I admired him I wanted to share his enthusiasm. That wasn’t difficult. The zoo, unlike London Zoo, didn’t reek of animals with hygiene deficiencies. There were deep-fried egg and chips at the Marine Café on the Triangle. Across the road, I ate my first ‘Chinese’ meal, and, in a barrel-vaulted cellar, my first pizza. At Daniel Neale on Park Street I bought a yellow and black dogtooth shirt and a French navy Windac windcheater. I gazed longingly at the chisel-toe slip-ons in a shop window on College Green. My father returned the old Morris Eight (reg JFM 897) which had been defeated by Hardknott to William Crawford and Son’s car fleet and collected a brand-new Morris Minor in which I took proprietorial pride. The words ‘floating harbour’ were enchanting.

  Later I would bunk off school trips to the Old Vic – Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists was the most memorably dire play imaginable – and head with John Rosser and Jonathan Goddard to The Rummer, the very first Berni Inn, to drink ‘schooners’ of sherry. An exception was Harry H. Corbett’s Macbeth. His performance, immediately pre-Steptoe, was so dourly captivating that I did not accompany my friends to the bar. Three years later I saw Richard Pasco’s Hamlet (in gratuitous Napoleonic garb, which accorded with my childhood nightmare, but can have made little sense to anyone else). I had left school by then and had, I told myself, grown out of schooners.

  And by then I had begun to appreciate the city’s manifold peculiarities. The jazz modern Smiths Crisps factory at Brislington; the literality of Totterdown’s name; the deep flights of outdoor steps; the sudden exhilarating glimpses of verdant hills outside the city; the sheer might of the tobacco warehouses; the streets of red sandstone Gothic villas; the terraced gardens of Clifton; the thrill of the gorge and the heartstopping suspension bridge and beyond them Leigh Woods where Mary N—’s body had been found.

  ACCESS TO THE UNKNOWN

  There was a class divide whose boundary was the two almost conjoined mediaeval bridges across the Avon at East Harnham. South of the river stood modest dwellings of many eras. Over the bridges at the northern end of St Nicholas Road the Liberty of the Cathedral Close culminates at De Vaux House on the corner of De Vaux Place. Liberty means, here, outside the Close but within the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Dean and Chapter whose stewardship of their sublime architectural charges was habitually as crass as their faith: Salisbury’s clergy were not afflicted by aesthetic probity or by doubt. These pious snobbish moralistic desiccated philistine bigots, unusually in their era, actually believed in their sanctioned mumbo-jumbo and its cruel rules.

  Dr Harold Burt-White, the owner of De Vaux House, was probably not the sort of person they looked on with sympathy or wished to have live within the Liberty of the Close. He was a gynaecologist, an expert in puerperal infections and formerly senior house surgeon at Barts. Jim Laing’s atypically bar-room characterisation of another gynaecologist is perhaps appropriate: ‘He couldn’t think of anywhere better to play than where he worked.’ Burt-White was struck off the medical register in 1932 for having conducted an improper relationship with a patient and was cited as co-respondent in a messy divorce (is there any other sort?) which was also public. Dallas Burt-White, his sister, a mainstay of that decade’s society columns, accused the petitioner Harold Bevir of blackmailing her brother. She was duly sued for slander. Harold Burt-White countered by bringing a libel action against Bevir who had described him as a cad. And so it went on: appeals, rapprochements, paltry reputations worth fortunes. He was reinstated by the GMC after five years. A campaign had been waged by three hundred of his patients. He served in the RAMC in Ulster and took up a post at Salisbury Infirmary soon after the war. He was dark, sleek, saturnine, urbanely suited. He was said to drink heavily.

  Outside De Vaux House, in the lee of a slightly raised pavement, stood his drophead Lagonda LG6, bulbously streamlined in the fashion of the late Thirties. It was liver-brown and fetish-black. I was mesmerised by it. The wheels were unperforated, solid-state and stately. There were spats over the rear ones. Such spats and wheels were unsporty, against nature, they spoke of worldliness, of arcane urban depravities. Until my mother or The German Girl tugged me away I followed my reflection in the bodywork’s millpool-deep enamel. That Lagonda was a sinister sleeping animal. And then it was gone. It was the car’s sudden absence, the very fact that it was no longer there, which would fix it for ever in my nervous system.

  Mrs Bacon cleaned every morning at St Nicholas Hospital, the almshouses close by De Vaux House. Two afternoons a week she cleaned for my parents. I sat at the dining-room table toying with the tea she had made me, a glass of squash and a crumbling slice of bread glued with a slab of butter. She was in the kitchen with my mother, garrulously confidential, talking in a deafening whisper which meant that I wasn’t supposed to hear.

  ‘Suicide. Stst ohf … Old-fashioned cut-throat it were he used … That poor woman … Stst ohf I don’t know ’ow ’e could … Pool of blood, pool of blood …’ Her tuts were salacious and prurient. She was a News of the World reader, as moralistic, then, as the Dean and Chapter though more humane. ‘Stst ohf – that lovely ’ouse … Such a gentleman … Always raises ’is ’at. Stst ohf … Don’t ’old with suicide … And a doctor too …’

  I heard the new word again. Suicide.

  A pool of blood was as big as the garden pond at the bungalow in Britford Lane where Uncle Ken and Auntie Jessica lived. She had seen an adder swimming in it. Eavesdropping on Mrs Bacon I saw the water in the pond turn crimson.

  It was autumn. Late the previous afternoon, Harold Burt-White had severed the radial artery of his left wrist and the anterior artery of his right leg. He could have had no better training in the procedures of suicide. His wife found him prone and unconscious on a tiled floor. To attempt suicide was still, in 1952, illegal in Britain. Rather than call the emergency services and risk his suffering prosecution should he survive, she contacted a colleague of his, an anaesthetist called Simpson. Not the obvious choice in the circumstances, but he lived nearby with his alarmingly flat-footed son. In defiance of his specialisation he succeeded in getting Burt-White to come round, only to be told: ‘Don’t bother. If I live I’ll kill myself.’ He didn’t live, he had already killed himself.

  Lagonda. Lagonda is unfathomably complicit. It is not a necessarily rare sighting of a vehicle of that marque but the name, the very word, that triggers a swooning dream of release by the barber’s blade that was a physician’s, of the snake – evidently an adder – on the barber’s pole, of Roman death, of laurels, of the physician in a toga weighted with viscous blood, of noble disgrace and scorn for Christian obsequies. Where was he buried?

  Once I discovered its defining property, which took some time, suicide became a secret within a secret. I kept my knowledge of it from the world. This was before the prepubertal investigation of sex and the dangerous vocabulary attached to it had to be cached deepest in my brain. Suicide was the most special death because it was chosen, as one might choose a Lagonda over an Allard. It was a peculiar luxury.

  The propositions that the suicide may have no choice and that the act is one of necessity were inconceivable. Before we have heard of, witnessed or experienced irreparable despair, betrayal, persecution, boredom, depression, obloquy, self-disgust, guilt etc., suicide is a causeless, strangely glamorou
s occurrence apparently undertaken with free will (as we do not yet know to call it). Like all the manifold mysteries of infancy self-inflicted death is a magnet for the curious. Its contemplation is tonic. Puzzling about this way of death made me feel so alive despite the frustration of having to rely on scraps of information and not being able to ask any question more direct than ‘Where has the Lagonda gone?’

  ANAL PENETRATION

  Courtesy demands that the object of this intervention should be made aware of the intent before the act is prosecuted. It is merely good manners.

  Were such good manners exhibited towards Jonathan Venus and Jeremy Leveret?

  May 1957. Early one Wednesday evening my parents made me attend a choral recital in the gardens of Wilton House. Every stratum of South Wiltshire’s bourgeoisie was represented along with a few grandees: landowners, wiry soldiers of high rank, gentleman garagists, arty nobs. There was the bemusing buzz of chitchat: what do people say to each other, what is it that takes so much time? How long can an expression of deferential greeting be extended? Everyone spoke proper English or aspired to speak it: open ‘o’s and stretched diphthongs peculiar to the area were inadequately disguised by doilies of refinement. Everyone dressed and behaved with all the decorum due to an Earl’s demesne. We enjoyed the privilege of standing on ground granted to his ancestors four centuries previously by Henry VIII as a reward for their loyal services to the royal rectum. It had rained for the first time in a couple of weeks. The grassless ground around beeches’ pachydermal feet shone. There was the elemental odour of damp earth. The returning sun picked out beads of moisture on the Earl’s noble lawns. His ancient trees’ limbs dripped.

  A loudspeaker announcement was made. The recital would begin later than intended.