Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  – Fog days were exciting if you were a kid. A real pea-souper was as thrilling as a heavy snowfall because it changed the world overnight. You woke to undersea gloom and deathly quiet. Like snow it muffled sounds and there was anyway less traffic to make a noise. People moved slowly through the streets with torches. Moisture condensed out on every cold surface. Everything ran damp and tasted acrid. It would, of course. Droplets of sulphuric or nitric acid which killed people off like mad and ate away brickwork. But there was nothing the matter with my lungs and I loved the disruption, the way things loomed and looked. The pavements and kerbstones became greasy. I liked the irony that it took a really thick fog to make certain things visible. The privet hedges and hydrangeas in front gardens were suddenly festooned with spiders’ webs which you could now see because each strand was covered in tiny grey beads. They were always there, of course, but normally you never noticed them. The smell of the fog was really just an intensification of the smell of any winter’s dusk at tea-time when everyone was lighting fires at once and sending up a million London chimneys the scent of pine kindling and the cool tarry yellow smell of cheap coal. It faded a bit after an hour as the grates warmed up and combustion became more efficient. For me, that smell went with the mournful sound of ships’ foghorns and hooters coming up from the Port of London.

  – Do I make it sound harsh and industrial? Too much in the lee of satanic mills? Maybe I haven’t done justice to the gardens, then. As I said, they were where you saw the county of Kent fighting back against bricks and asphalt, and people took great pride in them. A lot of the gardens both front and back had mature trees in them, often big old plums and pears left from the orchards that had been built over when my father was delivering geese as a boy. Even so, Eltham was already full of exotica, especially those suburban staples like hydrangeas, laburnams, buddleias and monkey-puzzle trees. Not one of them native to Britain. As for domestic animals, quite a few people kept chickens. That, as well as the tradesmen’s horses, was why you could go on finding corn chandlers in high streets like those of Eltham and Sidcup until well after the Second World War. The one in Sidcup just by the Black Horse Inn was owned by a man called Patullo Higgs, I remember. Gypsy name, I should think. Another of those Blackfen families, no doubt, who sent their women from door to door with wax flowers and lucky white heather. We kept chickens, sometimes rabbits, even the odd goose for old times’ sake. That’s why there were often farmyard smells mixed in with all the coal and gas fumes and one could hear cocks crowing in the morning above the groaning noise the trams made going up the hill from Well Hall.

  – A lot of insect life, too. I began collecting moths as a boy and took thirty-six different species from our own back garden. Old Lady, Red and Yellow Underwing, Cinnabar, Silver Y. A few hawk moths, mainly Lime and Privet from all those hedges, little Hummingbirds that fancied the flowers in people’s rockeries, Small Elephants which liked honeysuckle and rhododendrons. And once, great day, a rather sad and battered Death’s Head, probably from a potato patch or beehive in an allotment up the road. Plenty of butterflies from all the buddleias, though never (and how I hoped and yearned) a Camberwell Beauty. A transient, alas, a migrant. Hopelessly rare. Those rockeries, by the way, often contained few genuine rocks. Instead there were lumps of fused slag which you could get from the gasworks down in Greenwich. They were odd colours: firebrick orange, black, hectic purple; full of bubbles and craters like lava. If you smashed them with a coal hammer you could smell gas. Ash paths in back gardens. Of course. What else to do with clinkers from the kitchen boiler? Fascinating, that juxtaposition of the rural with the industrial. After all, half the residents of these newish suburbs had come from the country. The irony of today’s London is that it has long since left off being an industrial city, yet despite all those garden centres and that modish environmental concern nobody has a clue about rural things. In those days in Eltham back gardens you’d see a row of runner beans next to a cinder path. Rhubarb leaves frothing from the tops of tall old chimney pots set in the earth. A compost heap of horse dung rotting nicely in a frame made of the old lead gaspipes they dragged out from under the floors when they wired the house for electricity. They left the pipes in the walls, of course. Too big a job. So you had these little stubs pushing up behind the wallpaper where the gas mantles had been capped off … I’m surely boring you?–

  *

  Perhaps, Jayjay (I feel and then suggest out loud as the tractors of Tuscany clank and blare on and on in the distant background), perhaps you ought to be writing this yourself, you seem to be remembering it all so vividly. Buy yourself a tape-recorder, like me. Maybe what you need at the end of this tumult of reminiscence is an editor, not a biographer. No, he says emphatically, while managing to suggest both wistfulness and contempt. Me write? God, no. Though no doubt I have the required sensibility. (Oh no doubt, I remark bitterly to myself. In another moment he’s going to tell me that the only thing keeping him from being a latter-day Shakespeare – or Mozart, come to that – is a rueful lack of self-discipline plus too many other interesting things to do. Really, Parnassus is pretty much like Everest these days: open to practically any Tom, Dick or Harriet who can be bothered to take a week off, make the effort and afford the gear.) The sensibility (he repeats) but not, I fear, the application. Though (this comes out more graciously) it no doubt takes a certain gift as well? One wonders. (Goodness, one does. Mean old faggot, if that is what he is. What is he? Why did I agree to this? What am I doing here, meteless and moneless on Tuscan hills? Or rather, cold and coffeeless?) Town gas was very formative in my young life, he is improbably saying.

  – There was of course the lamplighter episode. I must have been about five. I was fascinated by this man who went around the streets of the neighbourhood with a long pole, lighting up the lamps as it got dark. No doubt you’ll be able to check this, but I vaguely remember the lamps had little pilot lights that were always burning so perhaps they came on when he nudged a tap on with the tip of his pole. I do remember the lamp-posts had an arm sticking out at the top, a bracket to prop a ladder against. This lamplighter had a pouch of tools on his belt. I think I fell in love with him. One does at five. One day he suggested I feel the front of his trousers to guess what he had inside. I had the image of a large piece of wood and connected it somehow with the pole he used for lighting: an extension, maybe, or a spare part. Why he would have kept it inside his trousers is not a question a five-year-old asks in a world where everything is so new and marvellous that no single thing is more rational than any other. Things just are. I believe I quite often felt his bit of wood. –

  You don’t think (I enquire in my role as fact-checker and tester of likelihoods) that someone among the good burghers of Beechill Road might have noticed and said something?

  – Oh no. It was lighting-up time, getting dark. Besides, in winter he wore a long coat that smelt tremendously of gas. And linseed oil, too, since he carried a ball of putty in one pocket, presumably to repair leaks. Lots of things smelt like that in those days. Even coal cellars smelt of gas and putty because that’s where the meter was. The other thing about coal gas was that it could be used to help you escape the army. I remember after the National Service Act of 1947 plenty of young conscripts tried to dodge being called up and they used the same tricks some people had used during the war to avoid active service. When you were called up the first thing was to report for a medical. If you wanted to fall at this early hurdle you could try telling the MO you couldn’t wait to be enlisted and get among all those gorgeous young male bodies. Claiming to be queer wasn’t guaranteed to work and besides it could lead to official records and all kinds of unpleasantness. A less stressful gambit was to drink a pint of milk through which you’d let coal gas bubble for an hour or so. It tasted unspeakable but it did give you several very convincing symptoms which included palpitations, lead-coloured lips and tongue, foul breath, dilated pupils. Just about everything an army doctor least wanted to see except hammer toes and syphil
is. Quite simply, you were temporarily poisoned. Some people did actually die of it, I gather. Hardly the way to win the approval of a man like Captain W. E. Johns, in any case. –

  *

  Mercifully we break here for a long-overdue fix of caffeine. For a while we sit in comparative silence, his presumably reflective and mine more convalescent after his unbroken onslaught of memories. The bonfires of olive branches mark the progress of pruners moving about the hillside with billhooks and chainsaws, carving surplus wood from the trees. I have already heard Jayjay on the subject of Tuscan rural life, couched in terms of a Horatian eheu fugaces (how contagious his style is!). Not that he isn’t accurate and even evocative in his descriptions of harvesting olives in late October and November, about how days are lost when rain clouds droop low over the hillsides like mist and the beaded nets waiting beneath the trees become like the cobwebs of Eltham made visible by fog. He is good, too, on olive-picking as a neighbourly activity when friends come to do their stint, balancing on home-made ladders among the swaying branches, their gossip interwoven with cheery obscenities and inventive blasphemy. He notes that these days the friends are mostly middle-aged or older and behind this festive ritual, as behind so many others in the agricultural calendar, there is the undisguised apprehension that what has gone on for a thousand years is not guaranteed to last indefinitely.

  It is here that Jayjay and I part company in that I lack his strong nostalgia and his sense that change necessarily means irreparable loss and degeneration. He is rueful that the sons and daughters of Tuscan hill farmers have increasingly little interest in such laborious ways of spending their lives. They prefer driving delivery vans or working in a supermarket. Boys with little formal education are happier to work on a garage forecourt and to feel part of the glittery stream of life that daily washes through. Not for them the uncanny quiet of the hills, tapping ancient knowledge for a hard living, labouring alone in the woods and the groves … Jesus Christ, Jayjay (I say), are you surprised? The Eltham of your childhood was no Eden, either. Why would people today bother growing their own runner beans when they can buy deep-frozen bags of them at the supermarket for a fraction of what they would have spent in cash, time and effort to grow the damn things themselves? The same goes for olive oil. I, too, have heard these local Tuscans grousing in their kitchens. Is it not a kind of treason, they say, the way the certainties of millennia are being overturned in a single generation? One worked in order to leave carefully tended fields of vines and olives for one’s children, even in the days when one didn’t own the land, to be passed on in turn to theirs; and so the generations went by. But now, Ddio boia, on the edge of the twenty-first century, we own the land and the bad old feudal days of mezzadria are safely dead and it’s no longer clear what it means to be a small farmer, a coltivatore diretto. It’s not even clear, my friends, what it means to be a father these days, with disobedient children who have too much money and who do exactly what they want … Golly, how they do go on, and so does Jayjay in similar vein until I tell him this is a boring and hackneyed threnody. It’s just that people don’t like change unless it’s obviously going to make them rich. End of story. (I admit I take issue with him at least partly to conceal my own unease about the same thing. It’s bleakly comforting to demolish one’s own position when someone else is too fervently holding it.)

  Jayjay and I drink our coffee without speaking. I am conscious that the sounds of ploughing fill the silence left by his passionate reminiscences. As a fellow resident of these parts he is as susceptible as I to having certain trains of thought started by seasonal activities. At length the grandson of a goose-farmer who made a living beside the vanished Effra says:

  – My father. My father. I became sidetracked. I was describing him as the typical nine-to-five man. But there was another side to him, one I never remember him showing at home, and that’s the bit I probably inherited from him. I only ever saw it on the rare occasions he took me to the Port of London. He truly loved ships and shipping. For him it was never just a matter of office work and ledgers. He knew hundreds of ships by name and not merely British ones, either, although in those days the British merchant fleet probably made up a good half of the world’s tonnage. With his Lloyds pass he could go all over the docks and I would trot along beside him, absolutely transfixed. In those days ships were still romantic, even the cargo vessels. They were the complete opposite of these modern container hulks laden with anonymous steel boxes. Container ships aren’t worthy of the name, in my view; they’re little better than oceangoing lorries. But the London docks in the thirties were something to see, believe me. Every kind of merchandise from all parts of the Empire being lifted out of holds and swung into heaps on the quays. The smells, especially in summer: those are what I remember best.

  – Those East End thoroughfares like East India Dock Road were full of commercial stores and warehouses and godowns. If a shipper had queried a consignment’s condition my father might go in person and inspect it. There could be huge sums of money involved. I have an image, no doubt compounded of several different occasions, which has come to feel like a specific memory. I was in a godown stacked to the rafters with tea and coffee and spices. No, that’s wrong for a start: no coffee merchant would store his sacks in the same warehouse with spices because the flavours would contaminate each other. But anyway. It was hot in there and the spices only added to the warmth. There were crates and barrels and boxes and jute sacks piled up in cliffs with only narrow passageways between them. I was dwarfed, a twelve-year-old. And on every side were these millions of mysterious berries and leaves, buds and pods, beans and seeds, all giving up their scents at once. My father said something about the smell of tropic suns. I could feel myself becoming drowsier and drowsier, anaesthetised almost. At the same time I was excited. All this produce came from a world completely hidden from me, full of unknown people eating strange foods and living unimaginable lives. I wondered what boys my own age did in those far-off lands. Were they, too, saving up for a bicycle? But there was something else as well, something unconnected with imaginary people doing imagined things. It was altogether vaguer, more powerful. It started what I think was a deep restlessness in me. Something akin to longing? That’s maybe it, muddled up as it was with schoolboy ideas of roaming the world’s seas on endless adventures. Then the oddness of going back outside the warehouse again and finding the air suddenly chilly and smelling of coal gas and river. And although the London bustle was familiar enough it no longer seemed the same London of an hour earlier. You know what I mean. A dream can do it sometimes and make an entire day feel unreal. Yes, I knew the clatter and grind of those steel-tyred barrows over polished cobbles, the splodges of horse dung, the sad hootings and blarings of the river traffic in the background. All these were the London I’d known from infancy. But now I was in a different world. I’m not sure that I ever completely found my way back again.

  – I think my father shared something of these feelings, which is why he never did become Mr Pooter. We neither of us ever talked about it directly, not beyond expressing enthusiasm for the docks in general. But I would see the way he watched a ship as it berthed, the tugs taking the strain and grey Thames water being wrung out of rope hawsers in a fine mist. The cranes would groan at the hatch covers and the seagulls wheel. Hatches being lifted that had last closed on the sun in Rangoon or Surabaya or Bombay. I think he was secretly as moved as I was by the ships and warehouses and the smells of distant places. By the poetry of them (Jayjay says unexpectedly). I can’t think of a less absurd way to put it (he adds, abstracted and quite pink with recall). Stand on any dockside with water at your feet and tell me you don’t secretly believe that real life is going on somewhere over the horizon. Especially if you’re twelve. –

  Jayjay admits that an obvious next move would have been a cadetship in the merchant navy. Well over sixty years later he can remember discussing it with his father though not what his father’s attitude was. This is odd since my image of Harol
d Jebb is of a man with quite firm opinions even though they went with a character not that of a disciplinarian. Maybe he knew too much about the reality rather than the romance (Jayjay hazards), and discouraged his son with accurate descriptions of what apprenticeship could entail?

  – John Masefield’s Dauber ought to have made any sea-struck adolescent think twice about a sailor’s life, especially if he were cursed with any kind of sensibility. The boy in the poem was an artist, of course, while I had no artistic talents whatever. Still, I remember studying the poem at school and thinking things must have changed since those days under sail when boys were sent up aloft in all weathers. And then there was all the fuss about James Hanley’s Boy, which was banned when it came out. Maybe I’d left Eltham College by then?* Not that my father would have read it, or anyone at school, come to that. It was far too near the knuckle: savage and scandalous and gaff-blowing. Much more harrowing and outraging than anything D. H. Lawrence ever wrote, in my view. That court case about Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 was really about the triviality of being able to print the words fuck and cunt. Lawrence’s aristocrat-and-gamekeeper business was just a vulgar and titillating fantasy. But Boy was much more radical because it was stark social realism, not fantasy at all. It was about how thousands of British working-class children had actually lived and sometimes died in twentieth-century Britain. Anyway, I never did join the merchant navy.

  – Still, I felt myself tugged outwards even then. I was a centrifugal boy, you might say, but content to wait because I was sure that before long my life was destined to push me out to the rim, to the strange and the distant. For one thing, nearly all my schoolfriends at Eltham College had been born abroad. Maybe I picked them because of that. Their real homes were far overseas and not just in the Empire, either: the dreaded Gospel knew no bounds. I listened to them talk about their amahs and servants, their syces and punkah-wallahs, about snakes in their bungalows and jackals in the garden and the hooded crows that pecked out the eyes of sleeping babies; about the bandits who periodically came down from the hills and looted their homes; about corrupt local police chiefs secretly in league with the bandits, and local militias who could be trusted on parade only with wooden rifles. All this became mixed into the exotic smells that had so fascinated me in Docklands. In my imagination I must have built up a land that lay in wait for me. It didn’t exist but it was vivid all the same. Tropical, full of dense greenery with flashes of brilliant plumage and hung with extraordinary fruit. Lawless, too; or at least its cultural norms stood on their heads all the hallowed precepts of British society. I was fascinated by the idea of a cultural difference that was radical yet still perfectly viable on its own terms. What my friends unwittingly convinced me was that the British, Christian way was not the only possible kind of life for something as grandly diverse as the human race.