Loving Monsters
Page 6
– This was my first important piece of knowledge, in some ways the essence of my time in Eltham. The last sixty years have proved its truth to the hilt. –
*
In these early stages of working with Jayjay I knew that part of the disgruntlement which occasionally settled on me like dust as I drove home was due to a sense of being dragged backwards to my own English childhood. There were only twenty-three years between us, and social change in those days had lacked the headlong quality of today’s world. Consequently, much that he described in London in the twenties and thirties was still unchanged in the forties and fifties. Some of his reminiscences evoked details of my own childhood scenery, churning up muddy relics I had been content to leave as indistinguishable lumps beneath the general silt of the past. It was not so much that they were unhappy memories, more that I felt I’d succeeded in deposing that early period of my life in favour of things that interested the person I now am. I had no desire to go back to the buried past. This had nothing to do with the wisdom of monks in woolly socks but entirely with a boring past having been superseded by a stimulating present. Jayjay’s wrenching me into the thirties was doubly irritating because when we’d first met my thoughts were on the political realities of modern Southeast Asia and I resented being distracted. Why then had I agreed to his flattering insistence that only I could write his story? Was it the automatic response of the self-employed writer who daren’t turn down work, no matter how inappropriate? Or was it the prompting of a more insidious inclination? Only time would tell: itself a platitude likely to make anybody glum.
* He hadn’t. Boy was first issued in 1931 in a limited edition and then republished properly in 1934. This was the widely noticed edition that was withdrawn after police action.
5
The landscape that lay immediately in wait for the eighteen-year-old Jayjay was very different from his Douanier Rousseau imaginings. In the summer of 1936 he boarded the Orient Line’s vessel Orontes with a ticket to Suez in his pocket. ‘The first big ship I was ever on,’ he recalled. ‘I can remember more about her and that voyage than I can about most of my other travels. Twin screws, two yellow funnels, 19,970 tons, launched in 1929. We touched at Toulon, Naples and Port Said. After Suez she went on to Colombo and Australia. I travelled steerage.’
He babbles on, full of details about turbine engines and the behaviour of the variously dissolute and reprobate travelling companions with whom he shared his cabin, while I try to remember where I have heard the name Orontes before. (It comes to me much later. It was the name of the troopship that brought the invalid Dr Watson back from India and eventually into the companionship of Sherlock Holmes.) For the present I want to know why Jayjay had gone, what he was going to do.
– My father was getting fed up with me. He kept calling me a dreamer. Perfectly true, I was. But according to him it was self-improvement I ought to have been dreaming of. After School Cert. he wanted me to go on to university and a profession: doctor, lawyer, teacher, whatever. I’m afraid there was a vulgar streak in him. He must have been nurturing some fantasy about the Jerningham Jebbs going from goose-herding to Harley Street in a mere two generations. Maybe that’s unfair. I suppose it isn’t vulgar to wish one’s family to better itself. What else was suburbia about? For his father’s generation of folk who had clawed their way up from smallholdings along the Effra, Eltham was a broad ledge on a precipitous cliff where one could catch one’s breath and consolidate. It was sunny and secure. And if the cliff-face above disappeared abruptly into daunting mists, the downward view was wonderfully clear, revealing just how far one had come and just how unthinkable it would be to slip back. Hence all that anxious rhetoric about backsliders. But my father’s generation saw it differently. By then they looked on the place as temporary. For them it was the view down that was misty and unreal while the peaks overhead sparkled enticingly. Where else to go but up?–
But you were not one of those either.
– No. I was as bored with the mountain as I am by this metaphor. For me the only way from this ledge was outward. Far horizons. The blue empyrean. Follow the heart, though heed the head’s directions. All that. But heavens, the propaganda one had to hold out against! One of those frightful hymns we had to sing at school had a verse which went something like:
Not for ever by still waters
Would we idly rest and stay;
But would smite the living fountains
From the rocks along our way.
A pretty clear statement of the Protestant work ethic, even if it does sound as though it’s recruiting hydrologists for the Third World. Excelsior! Onward and upward! I didn’t fancy a life smiting rocks so I said goodbye to Beechill Road and went off to Suez. My father had leaned on someone in Anderson & Green, the Orient Line’s owners, to give me an office job. Something to do with coaling. He thought I would go, find Suez a hell-hole, and after salutary bouts of homesickness and malaria come back with my tail between my legs, my lust for dreaming satisfied and eager to settle down to a sensible career. –
Leaning back in his chair Jayjay smiles with a sad shake of his head as though he can see his father’s figure superimposed on the Valle di Chio and acknowledge without rancour the man’s blameless misjudgement of a son he never understood. Smoke tumbles upwards from a bonfire of last year’s brambles Claudio has lit down by the orto. Long-dead fathers and their long-dead wishes dissolve into a cloudless blue sky. From within the house come faint domestic sounds as Marcella goes about her cleaning, which presumably includes polishing Lady Amelia’s dildo. On a spring morning towards the end of his life this man is gazing outwards from his terrace with an expression more private and excluding than his frank manner implies, but this is to be expected in the presence of a comparative stranger and with so long a stretch of time sending up its inner wafts. As I glance covertly at him a fleeting facial resemblance reminds me of that famously ambiguous photograph by Islay Lyons of Norman Douglas at the age of eighty staring (maybe seeingly, maybe not) at a bust of himself aged ten. The bust is in the foreground and, as the cynosure, it would seem to dominate the picture. Yet it is the marble boy’s older self we look at as he appears to contemplate his former likeness from behind a grandfather’s disguise. His expression is unreadable, meaning we can read into it any from a swift list of possible interpretations, beginning with melancholy and passing through mischief. (Is that a knowing smile hovering in the great nose’s shadow? Wry amusement that, given the impossible chance, he would cheerfully have bedded his earlier self with full legal rights over his own flesh and blood?) Or finally, is he even looking at the child at all? Those eyes could long have skidded off the bust’s left shoulder and the downward gaze be fixed reflectively on the unseeable vanishing point of eighty years. Nothing is clear except the strikingness of the composition with its two different yet identical subjects, both allotropes of the same elemental person. That and the chasm it shares with the viewer.
And now Jayjay is gazing at the sky with an amiably frozen expression which might be that of an old rogue peering down wells of his former iniquities or else evidence of a sudden minor stroke. Today the biographer feels belligerent. He wants clarity. He has the urge to toss all manner of fig leaves and olive branches into the flames.
No, why did you really go to Suez? Was it for sex?
– That’s your entire month’s vulgarity allowance used up. –
Merely taking your cue, Jayjay. You were the one who told me at our very first meeting that you had had rather an erotic life.
– Very well, then. No, I told you: my father threw me out. –
For not being in sympathy with the Protestant work ethic? His son of eighteen? I don’t believe that. Or else you’ve deliberately misled me about your father, whom I take to have been a mild man with a badly repressed streak of romanticism. Very English, in fact.
– Well, all right, perhaps it was a bit more complicated. Certainly his Englishness extended to the matter of Protestantism. Like many
decent Englishmen he fully endorsed the Christian ethic and had not the slightest interest in Christ. I never remember him showing the least sign of spirituality or churchgoing, not even as an occasional act of solidarity with his wife. I think he was both baffled and embarrassed by her sudden conversion to that bustling low-churchery. All those hymns and prayers and tracts and meetings and exhortations and generally spreading the Gospel: they jarred on his retiring sense of the proper. So no, he might never have been clear in his own mind about a pilgrim’s upward progress, but he did feel to his fingertips the idea of a person’s self-betterment. Where I was concerned he was not unreasonably put out that all his hard work and self-sacrifice at Lloyds in order to give me a decent education was being repaid by a son who showed little interest in study and even less in ‘playing the game’: that numinous British concept which, if you had to have it explained to you, meant that you weren’t properly British.
– Fact is, I’d got into what they called bad company at school and very soon I myself became the bad company about which other boys were warned. There was a lad there named Michael who was a year older than me and to whom I was extremely attracted. It was partly because he was a rebel, but then most boys of seventeen have a streak of that. In Michael’s case, though, it was backed up by real ideological fervour. He used to go to political meetings at weekends instead of playing rugger. Imagine cutting a school sport in order to listen to Harry Pollitt, who by then was Secretary of the British Communist Party, haranguing the faithful in some draughty hall. Mind you, there always was a small element of radicalism in the school, but it was of a politically unthreatening kind. Some of those missionary households still had strong working-class connections and a certain brand of socialism went very happily with evangelism. For instance I remember our kitchen dresser always had saucers full of Co-op tokens on it. They were the equivalent of today’s box-top discount credits, only made of tin. They were the size of coins and came in various shapes and denominations: penny, threepence, sixpence, that sort of thing. Our local co-operative was the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society and my mother was a loyal RACS shopper. Those bits of tin represented her dividends as a shareholder. Joint ownership, social equality, the community. So if you’re thinking of Eltham and Eltham College as just being stuffy and reactionary, I’ve misled you. They certainly had that element in abundance, but they also contained a small degree of old-fashioned working-class radicalism which I suppose had roots going back to the eighteenth-century peasant movements. Did you ever read Mark Rutherford’s The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane? Very much that sort of milieu.
– So Michael’s political enthusiasm might not have been as outré then as it now sounds. Of course you could have gone into many a house in Beechill Road and found nothing in the way of improving literature other than a Hymns A & M, a Bradshaw’s railway guide and a Whitaker’s Almanack. But plenty of other houses had considerable fireside libraries which often included those yellow-jacketed books Gollancz published with the serious-minded autodidact in mind, or Penguin Specials by people like the Duchess of Atholl. Women and Politics was one of hers, I remember. So were Conscription of a People and Main Facts of the Indian Problem. Heavens, how the titles come back! When I was under Michael’s spell I devoured them and dozens like them. Germany puts the Clock Back, Mussolini’s Roman Empire … Funny how one so easily recalls such long-ago books when you would think they’d have been almost immediately swamped by the very events they were warning us about. But there they were, part of my coming-of-age and as much of their period as Captain W. E. Johns who, though scarcely a socialist, was busily campaigning for re-armament with premonitions every bit as dire as theirs. They were restless times both politically and intellectually and all those socialist ideas unquestionably contributed to Churchill’s post-war defeat and Attlee’s Labour government in the next decade.
– The thing about Michael at school was that he was dashing and dangerous. Typically, boys like that were steered on to the games field to become captains of rugger and go on to play for their teaching hospitals if they were medical students. We had a lot of eventual medics at Eltham. Michael was neither so conventional nor amenable. In fact he was downright intractable, which was most of his attraction for me. He used to mock his teachers as fossils. He had a running battle with a geography master who was a real old imperialist. I suppose even in the thirties it was possible still to believe in the Empire if you had been born in the last century, and it must have been made all the easier if your job involved teaching boys born overseas from a map of the world where so much was coloured pink. Michael, of course, supported nationalist leaders like Gandhi. Being younger I was unfortunately never in the same class so I can’t give an eyewitness account of the morning he reduced one of the teachers to tears: of rage, of helplessness, presumably. But it was around the school like lightning and Michael was flung out. Or rather, his guardian was asked to remove him; his parents were Bible-thumping in Tanganyika Territory. I saw him once or twice afterwards at political meetings but he had already wrought his magical damage in me and I think I no longer needed him. Once he had gone, everything at school slumped back into dreary normality. It was as if the communal scapegoat, carefully heaped with all sorts of dirty linen and driven forth into the wilderness, had left the place restored to a state of prelapsarian grace. Absolute balls, of course, but I expect ninety-eight per cent of the boys readily agreed that he had just been a troublemaker. I was among the two per cent who admired his having made trouble by showing that the world could be described in versions other than the received one.
After Michael left the school I was thought to have inherited something of his rebellious mantle and that was why my father was so anxious to get me off to Suez where life was stern and earnest and uncontaminated by polemic. Under Michael’s influence I used to make loud lefty political noises, especially at home, because I knew it irritated my father. Dad promptly got his own back by arranging to send me out of harm’s way for a short, sharp shock. He thought a few months of life in the raw would bring me to my senses and convince me how much there was to be gained by settling down to study for a serious profession in England. Poor man, he misunderstood me completely, not least by taking my adolescent polemics seriously. I might have sounded in public like a junior Red but I was not about to lay my life down for the proletariat. I certainly had no intention of going anywhere near Spain. I suppose you could say that was my first public role as an impostor. –
*
Not a firebrand, then, this urbane man’s adolescent self, but a disciple, a seducee. Something is not quite right, there are still gaps to be filled. My question about sex had been vulgar, of course: a blundering attempt to jolt him into confession. It was crass, and I now blushed for his brief reptilian glare. This was a beady old sophisticate who could well afford to appear stuffy if he chose. Still, all that being said, the fact is that nobody dreams of a private landscape, whether jungled or ideological, without something erotic hovering nearby, bouncing ominously in the thermals. Let it go for the moment. Sooner or later it will alight as it always does: that persistent scavenger of ideals that pecks out visionaries’ eyes and tears away their flesh to expose the bone.
Meanwhile the Orontes has picked up a pilot in Port Said, has passed through the Canal to Ismailiya, down through the Bitter Lakes and the lagoons of Old Suez to Port Taufiq where she docks. Across a stretch of cluttered water Suez town is a jumble of white and ochre buildings seen as through a lattice, so dense are the masts and rigging of intervening vessels. From over the water drift blares and cries and the mechanical howling of cranes, while the air smells of rotten water, ammonia and dried leather mixed in with something dark and spicy. Port Taufiq is clearly more modern than Suez town across the harbour to which it is connected by a causeway with a railway, so it is presumably the industrial suburb created by the Canal. Several black pyramids of coal dominate it, coal Jayjay cannot yet identify as Yorks washed steam mix. Yet anyone approaching Suez port from
the south might be more impressed by the dominance of oil, since clusters of immense petroleum tanks are what first take the eye. On that seaward side of the Orontes’ bows a bay opens out with a red lighthouse standing on an islet in the middle. To either side the roads are dotted with moored shipping. Of this a black tramp steamer, a mile or two off at most, must represent the outer limit of the port’s wiry activities. On the right are the red cliffs of Gebel Ataqa, beyond which the Gulf opens out between dwindling grey-blue hills to a landscape empty as far as the eye can reach. The ultramarine water vanishes into a yellow haze of airborne sand somewhere beyond the distant point of Ras el Adabiya. Nothing breaks its glittering monotony except the white sails of a couple of feluccas. There is a sense of being at the twentieth century’s outermost fringe: that immediately past the harbour’s sullen rainbows of floating oil lie the Gulf’s aquamarine waters and a Biblical world of Sinai and camels and nomads’ tents.