by Ian Wedde
Nor, in 1970, could I use words like ‘exile’ or ‘diaspora’, let alone al-Nakba, to describe my uneasy memories of misery in England between 1958 and 1962. It was with chagrin that I measured the combination of suffering and dauntlessness I’d seen in the Palestinian refugee camps against the paltry memories stirred up by visiting the small lodge cottage near the Tudor mansion, Montacute House.
Our school-holiday guardians Reg and Peggy Markwell rented Odcombe Lodge, which was located at a secondary gate to Montacute Park, the mansion’s extended estate, covered in old elms clotted with the ancient wreckage of shambolic rooks’ nests and grazed by cattle. The lodge had two bedrooms upstairs, and a living room, kitchen and bathroom downstairs. At first, Dave and I shared a double bed in one of the upstairs rooms, but for most of our time with the Markwells we stayed in a small caravan beside the house. On one side of the lodge, a secondary road ran from Yeovil to the ham-stone Odcombe Village. This was the road Dave and I would have taken on our YHA bike tours, usually towards the south-west. On the other side of the lodge was the estate with its big old trees, a pond and some adjoining fields. This was where we spent most of our time if we weren’t biking. In many ways, it was another of those extended territories we’d made our own since we were little, something we could do because there were two of us and because we could always egg each other on.
We climbed into the elms and made forts in the ruins of the rooks’ nests; we detonated weedkiller and sugar bombs on floating craft in the middle of the pond; we stampeded the skittish yearling cattle; skirted the perimeter of the tantalising mansion (we’d been warned off the grounds by the Markwells). For a short time towards the end of our stay in England, we had girlfriends from a nearby hamlet which I seem to remember was called Higher Odcombe or perhaps Mudford Sock; with them, we walked solemnly through the parkland, wondering who should make the first move: no one ever did.
I went there in 1970 on the way back to London from Devon. The Markwells hadn’t lived in the lodge for several years, and I was at once glad they weren’t there requiring a visit and guilty for not wanting to see them. I wrote the poem soon after visiting Montacute Park on a dismal, chilly day. Of course, the scale of the place was diminished, but so was the scale of the emotion I’d expected to feel. The place had the effect of making banal and dull a whole succession of enervated images of home or the absence of home: the cottage we’d never quite been at home in, the ruined rookeries, the longing to be welcomed home and warmed up, and a closing image of compliance, which I still remember vividly – the happily running and barking dog coming to heel and walking in a crestfallen way back towards the house by the road.
The man with the dog could have stood for Reg Markwell, since they had a spaniel we used to play with, and which Reg used to throw sticks for. But of course it wasn’t Reg I saw that day. I think the glum image of the man with his obedient dog had more to do with the compliance I remembered as the overriding childhood cost of ‘staying with’ minders, rather than living with family.
It wasn’t that Dave and I were always on our best behaviour. Once, when we were still sharing the upstairs bed, Reg burst into our room where we’d been having a noisy early-morning play-fight, and threw himself on me, lashing out with wild punches and slaps, and yelling furiously, ‘You want a fight? You want a fight?’ Soon after that we were moved out to the caravan. Early on, I wrecked one of his drills in the workshop-garage down the back by the chicken run, and lied that I hadn’t; I saw by his expression that he didn’t believe me. Once, Peggy caught me Bunterishly scoffing left-over roast potatoes that I was meant to have taken as scraps for the hens, and she told me off for implying that she didn’t feed us properly. We kept our homemade weedkiller bombs secret. But, in general, our behaviour around the cottage was circumspect. We obeyed injunctions against filling the bath above a certain point, and against the excessive use of toilet paper.
What I was experiencing wasn’t so much an exile or a diaspora as an extended period of behaving myself – of staying-at-heel – in the house, and of running wild out there in the parkland with Dave. It was a duplicitous existence, though probably different only in degree from that of most kids. And in many ways it suited the mode I was in or the nature I’d cultivated, so to speak: a large, anarchic imaginative life fuelled by addictive injections of sadness and self-pity, which I concealed behind a happy, approval-winning performance of decorum.
Looking at that poem now, though, it’s not the taint of self-pity in the man-with-dog image that strikes me, but my memory of the shambolic rooks’ nests. This much further on from both the childhood experience of Montacute Park and my subsequent adult visit to it, I see in those catastrophic, ancient wrecks of twigs, rubbish and seasonal quotas of dead fledglings, an image of disgust and fear. I remember climbing up into the stinking rookery thickets with a kind of crazy determination – pushing myself up into them and making a place to sit, while at the same time feeling revolted and afraid. Perhaps, as a child, this was a stubborn way of assaulting my disappointment with what home had turned out to be like; or of overcoming my distaste for the nests by forcing myself into them.
But now I also remember that, in 1970, the apprehension and stubbornness I recalled from my childhood were like the complex of feelings I experienced when I first went to the Palestinian ‘camps’ around Amman in 1969 and to work in Russeifeh. This association, bizarre in 1970, was nonetheless what I’ve remembered feeling. I don’t think I admitted my feelings at the time; but I admit them now, in the tangled, shambolic, compounded rooks’-nest archaeology of memory and emotion, which also reminded me of the layers of improvised building in the camps. Those black, fearsome birds, with huge beaks like the pointy fronts of the mediaeval knights’ helmets we saw inside Montacute House, were always homing in on the trees and the ramshackle structures that clogged them, their hoarse yells at once jeering and stupid.
In 1958, it was as though the rooks were jeering at me for trudging dutifully back to a home I didn’t feel at home in. In 1969, the politely repressed scorn I sometimes encountered in the refugee camps told me I couldn’t expect to understand the first thing about what being homeless meant. In 1970, I began to trace a trajectory through these moments. In 2011, re-reading the poem I wrote then, I could own the end of that trajectory with a certain amount of equanimity, or irony. And now I can ask, why the repeated ‘affective’ at the beginning of my poem? Was I admonishing myself for feeling what I did? For being seduced into nostalgia?
Most of all, I think, I was warning myself not to want to recover emotions it had always been better to leave behind. But now I’m keen to recover them. The only danger I see is the rueful one of admitting that I may not understand what happened after Dave and I were made homeless; after our catastrophe – our forced displacement, when we were obliged to live somewhere we hadn’t chosen, to behave according to the prescriptions of others, to repress anger or sadness, to show a smiling face or risk punishment, to be separated from my family, to call ‘home’ a place my heart told me wasn’t that.
Now, the tangled rookeries that frightened and disgusted me in 1958 and shamed me in 1970 seem to be metonyms for home and memory – as if the emotional impenetrability of one and the archaeological chaos of the other have combined in a single object, a home-in-memory: an archive that is at once shambolic structure and disorganised contents.
I can go to this confused place on the limited terms of long-ago jettisoned emotions – and also to reoccupy a vantage point high up in the elms of Montacute Park, from which to see the man throwing a stick for his happy dog, the quaint lodge cottage by the road with a plume of smoke rising from its chimney, the road on which two boys on bikes are pedalling off towards a YHA hostel about 150 kilometres away on Dartmoor: a scene that resembles a board game or model set like the ones we played with back then, little utopian vistas with no emotion present or needed.
Back in 1958, our intact but cheerfully homeless family arrived without catastrophe at the Port
of Tilbury on the outskirts of London. I have the passenger list for 23 March 1958; it’s got Dave’s and my birthdays wrong, and gives our address in London as the Tavistock Hotel, Tavistock Square, in Bloomsbury. I seem to remember we fled this hotel because it was too expensive. It was late winter, and the view from the train window of warehouses and the backs of buildings on the way in to the city was the bleakest I had ever seen. There was no colour whatsoever. It was dark. You could see only a short distance through grey mizzle. Everything looked grimy. The Arcadia had been battered by a huge storm in the Bay of Biscay, its railings and lifeboats swept away, and Dave’s face retained the ghastly, greenish pallor of his seasickness. But we were all happy – or rather, Dave and I were infected with our parents’ happiness. They’d done it; they’d cleared the next hurdle.
After the Tavistock, we were staying in a hotel on the Strand, and the bleakness didn’t matter. It made the lights brighter and the warmth of the Underground cosier. There was a black-and-white television set in Linda and Chick’s bedroom, where we scared ourselves watching Quatermass and the Pit on BBC Television. We ate hot buttered toast in the cafeteria downstairs, and had to learn that in London you couldn’t just order more butter. We went to movies in continuous-screening newsreel cinemas where spivvy men in winkle pickers were snogging their girlfriends and smoking; we hung out at the Science Museum and twiddled the knobs on the mechanical interactives; we went back several times to Madame Tussaud’s.
We rode up and down the long, clattering escalators in the Underground, where the advertising billboards were sensationally glamorous. There was one handbill-sized one that repeated a concept for Smirnoff vodka: ‘I was a … until I discovered Smirnoff!’ I remember Chick’s head whipping around and a look of shock and displeasure on his face the day he clattered up past a Smirnoff ad that read: ‘I was a chartered accountant until I discovered Smirnoff!’
We went to the orthopaedic clinic at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, where the doctor admired the accuracy of Dr Bottoms’ diagnosis and treatment of my wonky heels; I was equipped with firm pink elastic bandages that smelled rubbery and made my shoes tight. I was disappointed to hear that a lot of children had osteochondrosis and they nearly always got better: I could sense my sympathy credit running out. We went to an optician who also admired Dr Bottoms’ improvisation with my glasses, which he’d managed to get more or less right. I was re-equipped with even rounder National Health glasses which everyone called ‘specs’. Then we went to an orthodontist who admired the wire-and-rubber contraptions and plate that the German dentist with visible nipples had organised around my teeth. It was all ripped out and replaced with a new contraption.
Then, suddenly, as if we’d all been waiting patiently for my various appointments to finish, we were staying in the little inn at Sparkford and visiting Hazelgrove School. It was freezing cold, but the headmaster, who was a fresh-air and exercise freak, had the diamond-paned windows of his pipe-smoky study open. Then, humiliatingly, I was being fitted for a tailored school uniform because the second-hands weren’t big enough. I lip-read the woman who measured me miming ‘Oh dear!’ to my mother.
And then, with no transition that I can remember, we were in a clumsy brick house on a hill outside Yeovil in Somerset. The place had some sheds with vaguely menacing farm equipment in them, and a slope of cultivated ground from which fresh mole hills regularly appeared. We had what Dave is confident was a 1957 Vauxhall Wyvern that had to be driven up a steep driveway to the house, which had been rented from the owners who farmed the land around it, including the mole-infested slope.
Just along the road lived Reg and Peggy Markwell, in the quaint little lodge to Montacute House. I have no idea how our parents met them, or when it was decided that they’d look after us once Linda and Chick had gone. It was a financial arrangement, so perhaps the Markwells had answered an advertisement, though that seems unlikely. We went there for morning tea one day – that was when I wrecked one of Reg’s drills, and I saw him get my number when I lied about what Dave and I had been up to in the shed.
We went on a trip around England, Wales and Scotland. Chick photographed us mercilessly. He, of course, was never in the picture because he was taking it. Dave and I took Box Brownie snaps, and he appears in some of them, with a triumphant, slightly leery grin and usually with his arm around Lindy. By him we were posed next to lochs, monuments and the Vauxhall parked in historic locations. As we drove past shaggy Highland cattle and crossed the border into Aggie Horne’s ancestral Scotland, Chick burst into song: ‘Hi ho ye Heeland bastards!’ Actually, Agnes Tait was from the Borders, and we did drive over the Tay Bridge at some stage. It was pelting down with slatey rain.
Chick wept during a piano recital of Chopin at the Edinburgh Festival and we went to the Tattoo in the castle, so it must have been summer. I wept in Ely Cathedral and remember it was cold, so maybe it was winter. I remember a Welsh valley that was at once vividly green and full of black rock; lambs were bouncing there, so it must have been spring. I remember ripe mulberries dropping from a tree at Stratford-on-Avon, so it must have been nearly autumn – but why were we all the way back at Stratford? Did we go back to London to say goodbye to Chick at the end of our trip? There we are, our new uniforms being shat on by pigeons in Trafalgar Square.
I have no idea when it was, though we usually appear with warm clothes on. Now I have an inkling why we were dressed like public school boys, not like kids on holiday – we were trophies. The letter in which I hoped no one caught typhoid was addressed only to ‘Daddy’, and included the news that Linda had brought Peggy and Reg for a visit to Hazelgrove; it was dated 31 May 1958, in the spring. Perhaps this trip happened before we went down to Somerset from London. If I ask Dave, he will know (he says he doesn’t). But for now my truth is as tangled as the rookeries.
Back at the house outside Yeovil (or maybe before we went off on our trip), Chick tried to tell us about sex, but gave up and left the room after advising us not to believe most of what we would soon be hearing at school. Linda took over and told us that sex was wonderful but best when you were married. We still had no idea what it involved, and attempts to open the subject up by asking about the Virgin Birth were unsuccessful. In their private lives, my mother and father were not prudish – both walked around the house with no clothes on and had no objection to us coming into the bathroom when they were in the bath – but they were useless at talking about anything intimate, including feelings.
And then, suddenly, Chick was gone. Of course, by then we’d known this was going to happen. I have no memory of his leave-taking, only the sense of an emotional gear shift in the dreary brick house where we began to settle into a dull routine and where Linda was clearly bored and biding her time. The house seemed chilly and foreign; it had other people’s stuff in it. It didn’t smell right. Once, as if repeating the clod-chucking incident back at Chandraghona, we lobbed snowballs down at the passing cars from behind the hedge at the bottom of the mole-hill field. A fat policeman pushed his bike up the steep driveway and told Linda to keep an eye on us or there would be trouble. She gave us a furious telling-off, which was as much about being exposed and foreign and needing to behave as it was about our crime.
We began to catch a double-decker bus from Yeovil to Hazelgrove School. The bus tore along narrow sunken roads with hedges or hazelnut thickets as high as the tops of the lower-level windows. Dave and I were in different classes – separating siblings seemed to be a policy of the school. We had sports, at which Dave distinguished himself by being strong and fast, and I by being strapped-up and fat. The classrooms were freezing – or maybe that came later when it was winter again – and the health-freak headmaster’s regimen included a ban on extra clothing or congregating on radiators.
We sat at deeply incised, ink-stained desks with lids that lifted and slammed and ink wells whose contents blackened our fingers. We wrote with nibs on wooden sticks which were good for flicking ink. A lot of what I began to be taug
ht was completely new. Though I could speak and read French and German, had a smattering of Latin, and could write fast and fluently, I had never encountered the kind of maths we were expected to be proficient in, didn’t understand the point of history or geography, and extended my hatred of our snooty young Bible studies teacher to the subject he droned on about.
Instead of poems and stories I began to write subversive sketches using as much foul language as I knew (not much); I did this partly in the hope of winning friends by circulating my samizdat texts around the class. The Bible studies teacher found, or was sneaked, a sketch that ended, ‘Come here bloody bum and shit on the bed!’ The point of this obscure punch line had to do with a convoluted story involving puns and someone with a speech impediment. I’ve forgotten the story, which no one could understand, but remember the scriptures teacher gave me some cuts with a cane across the backs of my thighs and made me copy out a long passage from the Bible.
Despite the weirdness and unfamiliarity of the situation, I think we were having a good time. There was a big, lugubrious kid everyone teased to make him throw tantrums; when he did, he’d run roaring in a strange deep voice across the sports field, tearing up handfuls of grass and charging at the jeering mob. I could see he wasn’t happy; his situation was different.
It was about then that Dave and I began to be apart sometimes. At school, we began to have different friends; we did different stuff at hobbies. At night, back in the brick house, we had different homework. That astigmatic focal length in which my twin was almost invisible because he just was there most of the time – that changed. Now Dave became oddly visible sometimes, because he wasn’t just there – and then suddenly he’d go past a bit further away, running with some other kids, his broad grin in the midst of them, all of them yelling.
