by Ian Wedde
Surely my memory of the cheesy smell of the dairy at the Hastilows’ farm in Tua Marina was connected in some way with James Tait, ‘Cheese Maker’? But I didn’t know this. All the same, the presumption of the over-confident (and self-serving) narrative with which I’d got this far was complicated by that aroma, so strong in my memory. And I knew (because my accurate brother Dave had told me) that Aggie had gone to live at Tua Marina after we left for East Pakistan, and had died there.
These lives began to sheet back into landscapes where families lived and where skills were deployed – where children were raised, horses shod, cheese made and grain assessed. There were tragedies large and small; romances and redemptions. The narrative tracks I had cut through all this to get to my mother’s and father’s home, to the nest of circumstances in which they’d raised Dave and me, began to branch into complexities I hadn’t anticipated. It wasn’t that I’d ‘made up’ my mother’s unhappiness or dissatisfaction and my father’s restless ambition. Rather, I’d believed that what I was ‘remembering’ was as close as I could honestly get to the truth of my childhood experience. Yes, these memories were assisted by various prompts such as photographs, and by the family’s stories. But I’d tried to keep these in perspective, and to declare them.
Recently I received an email from Robin Hastilow, whom I would have known as one of the Hastilow kids back in the 1950s. She passed on a story about a shooting accident on Christmas Day 1927.
In Tua Marina on 25 December 1927 after the cows had been milked and a cooked breakfast enjoyed by the Hastilow family on a typical hot Marlborough morning Mary and daughter Agnes turned their attention to preparing Christmas dinner on the wood fueled range, the Horne family from Blenheim had been invited to the farm for their traditional annual gathering and there was much to do before nine people sat down to dine at midday.
Though this was the first I’d ever heard about the longevity of the Hastilow–Horne family relationship, let alone seventeen-year-old Bill and fourteen-year-old Dud’s shooting accident, the story immediately found its way to a chamber of my childhood memory where I could visualise the adult Dud’s feet in wool socks going into gumboots on the back porch of the homestead at Tua Marina; I even think I can remember him squirting milk from a cow’s teat into a tin can for us to drink. But I also know how contingent these memories are; how their triggers may be unconnected to events I experienced; how broad the narrative is through which I’ve cut my narrow path.
After visiting Norma, I knew I needed to adjust or loosen this viewpoint and see what else changed. For example, the photograph of the Swiss teacher called Herzig climbing a coconut palm, which I described some pages ago, was pasted to a Christmas card sent to my parents by someone called Donald. It contains a handwritten message that I can now read as slightly jeering: ‘P.S. Can you recognise who is climbing? Yep – it’s Herzig!!’ The twin exclamation marks suggest that poor Herzig was probably ridiculed. At once I want to side with him against the snotty expats in the compound at Changraghona. I now want to suspect that the rumours we heard of Herzig going crazy and wandering the streets of Calcutta with his cardboard suitcase may in fact have concealed a different reality – that of an adventurous and fun-loving man who climbed trees with us kids and pre-dated the influx of hippy wanderers around India by a decade. This inflection of the Herzig story runs a few degrees counter to the one I’ve already told. That one wanted to move swiftly and even impatiently past Herzig (who I wanted to have gone mad with loneliness), and get to what I thought was more important, the story of Robert Lübker and the ‘hat penthouse-like o’er the shop of your eyes’.
Now I think I need to move more slowly and uncertainly.
Which story of the Italian water pitcher should I tell? The one I thought I was going to tell, with its redemptionist sub-theme of triumphant imagination and a home in contingency and fortune, whose template I believed I’d found in my mother’s story of impatient dissatisfaction; or the revised one I now find myself with after visiting cousin Norma? In the latter, the story tilts away from a drama of extremes towards something at once simpler and more complex. It’s simpler because I now believe my mother and father, and in particular my mother, weren’t as ‘unhappy’ with their lot before the war as I’d scripted them to be; but it’s more complex because I now think they passed the baton of redemption to their twin boys, and themselves went on to live lives unencumbered by much need to gamble a life-wished-for against a less satisfying reality.
If I choose the second, I have to leave behind the gloomy, blame-full kid on the hill above Hazelgrove School, gesturing wretchedly towards his absconded parents, and relive the happiness of his successor and the conditions he was happy enough to be at home in.
The Italian water pitcher was in a shop mostly filled with tourist souvenirs in the hilltop town of Assisi, where we went to see the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi, with its frescoes by Giotto and Cimabue. The frescoes didn’t mean much to me in 1959 when I was eleven years old, but coming back down the hill I stood my ground and insisted that my parents buy the large metal water pitcher whose lid was attached to it by a chain. The pitcher looked old but probably wasn’t; it was sturdy and quite heavy, with molded brass animal motifs on its lid and spout. Its outside was dull copper but not tarnished, and I liked it that way. The inside was lined with tin or perhaps pewter. It was expensive, heavy and awkward to add to our carload of travel gear.
My mother and father protested, refused, cajoled, walked off. I stayed by the shop until they came back. The shop’s owner, seeing her ally in this small drama, allowed me to hold the pitcher; I was still holding it when the family returned to put a stop to this nonsense. Dave was grinning as usual, Chick was angry, but I saw Linda hesitating.
Behind my obstinate arguments that this was a beautiful thing and why couldn’t I have it, especially as I’d promise to give up any other treats for the rest of the trip, lurked a simple truth. The water pitcher was my ransom. It bought my freedom. And it bought off my parents’ guilt at abandoning their twin boys.
Can a child think this way? Of course the water pitcher, which would always be ‘Ian’s Italian jug’, didn’t come back to school with me. It went with my parents around the world, first of all to Khulna, where I admired it with satisfaction when we went to visit, and subsequently to wherever they stopped for a year or two. I asked to have it when Dave and I divvied up the things in Linda’s flat after she died. And when I brought it home to our house in Wellington, I remembered the feeling of triumph as I walked down the hill in Umbria behind my fuming father, conspiratorial mother and grinning brother. Of course I’d known what I was doing. Wherever they went, my stand-in went with them. I didn’t have to remind them that I existed; they didn’t have to remind themselves. The transaction of the water pitcher freed me to be happy elsewhere, however fortune threw the dice.
And now my mother and father could also do whatever they wanted, seeing in the water pitcher the liberating sign of everything they’d been able to give their children, which was everything they’d been denied themselves until the moment when they leveraged our advantages off their own freedom. Even our peculiar education to that point, during which we’d learned French and German but not a lot else, was transmuted into an advantage of sorts.
I don’t remember much else about our last holiday with Chick, before he and Linda made the final break and left us in England. There are photographs of us carrying Box Brownies with Mont Blanc in the background; Chick and Linda had a map-reading argument somewhere near Lake Como, and Chick got out of the car and stormed off, so Linda drove along slowly behind him with a hint of a chevron-shaped smile on her face. We’re somewhere like Austria where there’s a clock from which mechanical figures emerge and bash bells with hammers; we’re grinning in a gondola in Venice. I remember eating a delicious sole in France, and being allowed a sip of wine with it. Once, desperate to pee during the night, I tipped the flowers out of a vase in an upstairs room and pissed into it,
then emptied it out the window; below in the courtyard, some people who’d been singing yelled at me in a funny, guttural language.
And then we were back at Hazelgrove, with the scant food, mass dormitory wank-ins, cold baths and tuck-box wars. The loony kid ran about bellowing and tearing up sods of grass. The Bible teacher popped in on us in the changing sheds. We crash-rode bikes around a kind of dirt track through thickets of nettles. In our last year at the school we wore long pants. In the holidays, we went on bike trips to YHA hostels. Once, Reg and Peggy took us with them to visit friends in Ireland, where we were on permanent best-behaviour. Mostly we stayed in a little caravan outside their Odcombe Lodge. We slept in sleeping bags on narrow squabs; we mucked about in the parkland. We were allowed to watch The Black and White Minstrel Show and Bruce Forsythe compering Sunday Night at the London Palladium on the TV in Reg and Peggy Markwell’s front room.
It was better fun at school. Then we took a Common Entrance exam to see if we could get into the senior branch of the school, a few miles away in Bruton. We did well enough, at least in languages, which was a vindication of some kind. On our birthday we’d get a letter from Chick’s lawyer, with a five-pound note each enclosed. ‘Your father has asked us to wish you a very happy birthday.’ When we passed our exam to go to senior school, we got a lawyer’s letter with a cash present, and a letter from Linda and Chick telling us how proud they were.
Seven Samurai
The headmaster of Kings School Bruton, the senior branch of Hazelgrove where we went when we were thirteen, was an unusual man, as excellent as his counterpart at Hazelgrove was an incompetent health-freak wacko. His name was R.C. Davy – I don’t know what the ‘R.C.’ was short for. I remember him as a big, leathery-faced, kindly, quiet-spoken, but unexpectedly frightening man with bushy eyebrows. He wore baggy tweed suits and a faded black schoolmaster’s gown. He had very large hands and ears, and a smoker’s yellowed teeth. Dave remembers the mop of straight dark hair that hung aslant his forehead.
He taught Latin and German across the whole school and English literature to the senior classes. It was rumoured that he was a poet. I remember him mentioning in passing that John Steinbeck had once spent several months in Bruton, working on a book.
The school was an old one, with buildings that sometimes stood alone and sometimes mingled with those of Bruton village. Many of the buildings were grand, built of tawny local sandstone; others were more modest, especially those that abutted the village high street; they were all comfortably run-down. The school was organised along traditional all-boys public boarding school lines, with ‘houses’ (whose names I’ve had to ask Dave about) in which a traditional governance system prevailed, with a housemaster, prefects, fags and a matron. Dave remembers the names of the houses. The first one we went to was old, with an entrance from the village high street; it was called Old House.
There was a chapel, a brass band, sports teams, many clubs or ‘societies’ as they were called, and we wore uniforms that included shirts with stiff detachable collars fastened with studs at the back: you changed the collar more often than the shirt. We had to shine our shoes daily, Latin was compulsory, and every night we did two hours prep after dinner.
There was a music conservatory, and a large art department run by a long-haired, chain-smoking bohemian in corduroy trousers. During the holidays, he and I once bid against each other for second-hand picture frames at a junk auction in Yeovil – at the time I was flirting with the idea of becoming an artist. The art room was located by a river, which was where the art teacher’s pet, who was the school’s resident moody genius, threw the art gear I’d bought with my birthday money (he’d also chopped the bristles off my brushes with a razor blade): thus ended my brief aspiration to be a painter. The remains of my gear were rescued downstream by a big smiling boy with a strong Dorset accent – he spent all his spare time alone by the river, catching little trout.
I have a copy of the school magazine, The Dolphin, for the Winter Term 1961. For some reason it was among Linda’s papers. It opens with an anonymous editorial complaining about VIth Form ‘apathetic indifference to or unawareness of important world-scale issues’, and closes with a stirring quote from John Osborne: ‘Let’s pretend we’re human beings and that we’re actually alive.’ There are various society reports, including one by ‘D.B.’ for the Film Society. The 1949 Christopher Columbus directed by David MacDonald and starring Fredric March is unfavourably compared (‘a flat, superficial version’) to the ‘rebel psychology’ of John Osborne’s play Luther, which probably outs D.B. as the anonymous rabble-rousing writer of the editorial. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) is praised for working its clichés well (‘the saloon brawl, the sluttish woman, the good men fighting outnumbered’) but is apparently compromised ‘by the monotonous succession of second-rate television cowboys’. Viva Zapata (1952) with Marlon Brando is D.B.’s favourite: ‘… the film lets the ideal of complete democracy live on, symbolized by [Zapata’s] white horse.’ I’d like to know where D.B. ended up.
The Gallows Society, which would have staged the Osborne play, went to the Bristol Old Vic to see a production of Brecht’s Mother Courage, and watched the film Blackboard Jungle (1955) with Sidney Poitier and the first installment of a series called Maniac Theatre (‘which aims to examine the trend of lunatic violence in to-day’s plays’) – this was devoted to ‘Edward Albee’s electrifying Zoo Story’.
I’m surprised to find myself listed as the captain of the Junior Colts rugby team, for which Dave also played. I don’t remember this, or have lost it in the red haze of my rugby at Hazelgrove. The team had an undistinguished season, with two wins and six losses.
The school had a reputation for academic excellence. It presented itself as a small but distinguished traditional private school that might appeal to the professional middle classes of the south-west – the prosperous citizens of Somerset, Devon and Dorset, a few clicks out from the Home Counties, with a rural base.
There were dandies in our house (Dave and I were in separate dormitories and classes) who skited about hunting; they meant fox hunting. Apparently the best part was getting blind drunk afterwards. They had girlfriends with whom they boasted they had frequent sex in the holidays; girls liked it when you stuck your tongue in their mouths and your fingers up their cunts, but what they liked best was sucking on your cock – even more than when you stuck your cock into them, which was risky as they might get pregnant. The logistics of exactly where you stuck your cock continued to baffle me. The rural dandies imparted a glassy shine to their shoes by using homemade concoctions smelling of turpentine nicked from the art room. They went to balls.
They had homes. Their parents came to get them for the holidays, arrived with picnic hampers on sports days and sent them stuff in parcels. They had pocket money. I was wistful about this rather than sad – I’ve no idea how Dave felt. But it was the headmaster Davy who appeared to take note of our situation, which was probably shared by other expat kids at the school, and he began to talk to me, a gruff sentence or two at a time.
One day he said, ‘You write a bit of poetry, don’t you? That’s what I hear.’ My silence must have been familiar to him. Of course I was going to say yes, but I didn’t know how to. The whole point of having a secret whose hiddenness was apparent to those who chose to notice was that it couldn’t be spoken about. Before the silence could go on long enough to be embarrassing, he just said, ‘That’s good,’ put his pipe back in his mouth and walked on.
I seem to remember that my face was hot with a combination of shame and pleasure; but that was a sensation I was to feel often over the next few years, and I may be remembering what was typical rather than distinct. I still have my Kings School Bruton copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin, a small red book whose spine has faded, as have my little scribbles in the margins. I think it was around the use of that book in Latin classes that Davy discovered what I was up to – or our English teacher, whom I don’t remember, may have noticed my
covert activity.
The 1961 Dolphin has three of my poems in its Literary Supplement. They are mawkish, and have over-elaborated metrical and rhyme schemes. One has the rhyme scheme pencilled in its margin: abcdcae. Another stumbles from an erotics of summer heat to an image of an itchy dog, ‘which must nibble all day,/ And scrabble and twitch.’ I know where the erotics came from, but not the formal obsession. Perhaps I was sending secret signals to Davy, who spent patient hours trying to get our heads around Latin prosody.
Looking back, I can see that what Davy was doing with the school as a whole was highly unusual. Beneath its façade of public-school conventions, no doubt essential to its brand and its appeal to the largely well-off parents of its pupils, Davy was subverting most of the school’s institutional traditions. There was a prohibition on corporal punishment of any kind. Writing ‘lines’ as punishment was not practised either (I’d spent hours of excruciating boredom at Hazelgrove copying and re-copying passages from the Bible). The ‘prefects’ moved into quotation marks, since their role involved more obligation than privilege. I was assigned as a fag to a prefect whose name I don’t remember; although I shined his shoes for him, he had to look after me and make sure I was getting what I needed. He showed me how to use the library, the telephone I was terrified of, and the post office I didn’t understand; he tried to help me with the maths I never did get the hang of; he warned me that the scrumpy sold illegally by the local off-licence would make me vomit. It did.
Davy himself seems to have been a pacifist, or was at least sceptical of the school’s military obligations. He’d devised a way of dealing with the army cadet corps which, dressed in hobnailed boots, scratchy khakis, and puttees plastered with mud-coloured muck, was mustered on the parade ground or the tennis courts where it drilled using old .303 rifles. There was also an RAF corps, to which Dave belonged. Map-reading, rifle-range practice, drilling, and shambolic orienteering expeditions into the surrounding countryside took place; but if you said you didn’t want to do any of this, you could join the brass band. It was common knowledge that the band was the best option, though giving up on the chance to fire .303s at the rifle range was a tough trade-off. As a result, the school probably had one of the largest and least-trained brass bands ever assembled.
