An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  Ken James, who once mentioned that he had coined the Porton nickname for LSD – ‘sparkle’ – told me casually that: ‘In our generation it was only the gullible who took to religion … the semi-educated … the Irish of course. You know – we thought we were through with all that.’ That was the generation which defeated Nazism, a genocidal theocracy which led the easily led to the abyss. That generation was immediately obliged to prepare for war against another genocidal theocracy, the Soviet Union. It witnessed religion raising its beardie halitotic head throughout the Middle East, font of all of monotheistic lunacy. It suffered the indignity of seeing LSD hijacked by DIY animists, headbanded transcendentalists, camper-van mystics, campus shamans, epiphany tourists, vision diggers, the credulous armies of kaftans seeking The Simple Answer to The Big Question. LSD became a shortcut to the states achieved by fasting. And only the credulous ever fasted (or dervish-whirled or flagellated themselves or perched on desert pillars).

  Albert Hofmann’s delightful key to the fairground within every skull was reduced to soma, ambrosia. He himself was enjoined by R. Gordon Wasson, the New York banker who styled himself an ethnomycologist, to participate in Mexican field-experiments – all shamans and fungus, peyote and gods. Wasson was doctrinaire: any use of psychomimetic plants and drugs to ends which were not specifically religious was frivolous. He thus dismissed their purely aesthetic capacities. Hofmann’s collaboration with Wasson was an implicit admission that LSD, the mighty force he had synthesised, was nothing more than an entheogen:fn6 but, then, maybe Stradivari was not much of a fiddler. It seems indisputable that religions, their supernatural mythologies (ascensions, miracles, mutations) and the very notion of divinity owe their existence to ancient hallucinogens.

  In their wonder our ancestors believed that their marvellous visions owned a reality that was external. They misunderstood the mechanics of Amanita muscaria and mandrake. They understandably failed to acknowledge the enchantments of secular solipsism. But that was no reason for the transcendental vanguard of the New Age to do so too. In a gross abnegation of science the most advanced of psychoactive agents came to serve backwardness, to be employed in pursuit of threadbare superstitions, in validation of inexcusable ignorance, in confirmation of hackneyed nostrums. Such mystical decadence was not inevitable. Harry Cullumbine’s work with LSD was eventually curtailed.

  In the summer of 1956 he left England for ever, taking his wife and my squaw with him. The following year my mother bought an insanitary cottage in the village of Boscombe for a few hundred pounds. Builder Rigiani did it up. My father refused to move there so to my mother’s and my chagrin it was sold. Every time we drove there we passed the Cullumbines’ house, former house. I pined for Diana. Her father no doubt quadrupled his Scientific Civil Service salary as Professor of Pharmacology at Toronto University. Some years later we heard that Beryl had died: I imagined that, shortly before, her hair had turned white overnight. Later still Harry wrote to say that he had remarried. In the mid-Sixties he went into commercial pharmaceuticals in Pennsylvania. He joined a country club between Philadelphia and Trenton, somewhere round about there. He was elected its president in 1969. How much did his fellow members know of his past as a germ warrior and of his psychotropic progress though the world’s laboratories?

  By the pool, in the sexually active prepubescent summer holidays of 1957, in an access of that most childish of delusions, identification, I would suppose that Paul Anka’s perky, mawkish song of pre-teen angst, ‘Diana’, was my song of my lost squaw. And then I forgot her. Until twelve summers later. 1969.

  In his steep-ceilinged garret on the top floor of a house opposite Holloway Gaol David Sadgrove put on Happy Trails. Quicksilver Messenger Service. The record was no more or less wearisomely tuneless than any other by San Franciscan longhairs of that era. But its cover! It comprised a retina-fixing painting of a cowboy on a galloping pony waving his hat in farewell to his sweetheart. The subject matter is that of Charles Russell or Frederic Remington, pictorial mythologists of the Chisholm Trail, Abilene, Wichita – the place names Roger and I knew so well. The style is almost Maxfield Parrish’s. Was this the work of some neglected master of their era? It turned out to be an accomplished psychedelic pastiche. The rocky landscape is drowsy and saturated. It’s lit by the last of the sun, at the golden hour. The Old West had never seemed so intense, so distilled. The scene appears to be atomising. The painter George Hunter’s eyes had been cleaned to a sparkle by LSD.

  I thought of Diana Cullumbine for the first time in over a decade. I imagined my full-grown squaw in the fringed chamois dress which the buxom Dale Steinberger, the Jewish Cowgirl of R. Crumb’s priapic imagination, burst out of. I wondered idly if, three thousand miles away, she had seen Happy Trails and, if she had, whether it reminded her of her childhood brave. Probably not. No, definitely not. I then forgot her for a further decade and a half till one summer night on Oslofjord, fishing for cod from a skiff, I watched a carmine sky bleed behind pines’ silhouettes on the western shore. It was the décor of Hiawatha. I was infected for a moment with a longing for my dreamy-eyed Minnehaha, the daughter of the ancient arrow-maker, a figure from so long ago that she was as graspable as quicksilver, as mnemonically substantial as the ghost of an imaginary friend. The past won’t sit still for a moment.

  EARLIEST MEMORY

  My earliest memory is churning white water and an Alsatian dog. The sluice’s deafening roar must have shut out the snarling creature’s barking, but there is no escape from its restless sinewy prowl, its bared teeth, its milky saliva. The place is the Old Mill at West Harnham which in my infancy I called ‘Dog West Harnham’, a better effort than Soming (Homington) or Trimet (Triumph).

  When I see an Alsatian approaching I cross the street.

  My earliest memory is being pushed in my pram along Exeter Street by Nanny Barham. Another pram approaches us from the direction of town. As it passes I throw my rag doll and a cup into it. This merits a scolding. Above us looms the crenellated Close wall. Across the street are a monkey puzzle tree and the convent of the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, dry-skinned wimple-people who belong, like gypsies, to a third sex.

  My earliest memory is of the half-timbered state-owned shop in Exeter Street’s continuation, St John Street. This shop sold, or exchanged for ration coupons, thick orange juice which might have been cooked, Virol, rusks, cod liver oil, rosehip syrup, Energen rolls.

  My earliest memory is of lying supine, watching swaying poplars stretch to the sky. I suppose this must be in Riverside Gardens, close by the sewage works in what used to be called Bugmore.

  My earliest memory is a swooping, undulating road. The distant sea beckons. It would be indistinguishable from the blue sky if it did not sparkle with such promise. Then, as the car hurtles downhill, it disappears. Now the horizon comprises merely the hill’s tarmac brow and dusty green downland. I am cheated by landscape’s vagaries.

  My earliest memory is a sloping street of uniform grey stone houses and regular pollards with leaves like tutus, bracelets, necklaces. A lorry – just a cab with an unladen rectangle behind it – is parked beside the spreading boughs of a churchyard yew.

  Years later, when I am six, I will identify the yew as being beside the flat square in the centre of Wilton.

  The same day I will identify the street as the high street of Hindon, ten miles west of Wilton, where there is no such churchyard but there are a marked slope, pollards, stone cottages.

  My earliest memory is loitering in False Memory Lane, idling in blissful suspension on amniotic briny, constriction without fear, muffled voices, gradations of temperature, quotidian rhythms: perpetual dusk with interludes of static red darkness and agitated red light, hurdy-gurdy gurgling, groaning machine parts that are separate from me, up and down, big dipping.

  This is an invention, probably.

  What is sure is that when we’re in utero:

  we don’t know the definite article;

  the state of tota
l dependence we enjoy is a preparation for addiction. Instead of the womb, over which we exercise no choice, we can select whom we relinquish our body to: Bogota gangsters; Seagrams; rogue chemists in a Minsk suburb; heavy-gutted microbrewers; pharmaceutically inclined utopians; Glaxo; overconfident mycophiles; Medocain patricians; Old Tozer with his pot-still he believes no one knows about in the asbestos and tarpaulin shed you can see from the alley between the gardens through a gap in the rotting pales.

  EDWARDS, MRS

  Harnham is the southernmost part of Salisbury. It stretches along the valley of the Nadder upstream of that river’s confluence with the Avon. To its south is an escarpment of the downs which was hardly built on till the 1920s. Much of Harnham was owned by the Longford Castle estate, seat of the Earls of Radnor: hence such road names as Bouverie and Folkestone. Until the mid-Thirties when New Bridge was built (to the design of Owen Williams) East Harnham was joined to the city only by a narrow bipartite bridge of the same era as the cathedral, and West Harnham by a pedestrian causeway across the water meadows, the floated meadows.

  In the 1950s the pre-c20 vestiges were these.

  At East Harnham:

  The half-timbered Rose and Crown (boxing, cockfighting).

  A meekly neo-Gothic church where I was baptised (and whose only congenial incumbent would be done for cottaging in Bournemouth).

  The neighbouring school where my mother taught.

  Three brief terraces of cottages.

  Government House, an officer’s mess – formerly owned by the Radnors; then it was known as The Cliff, the name Mrs Dear still used. It was sited in a bowl between precipitous beech-covered slopes and was comically lugubrious.

  A whiting works’ owner’s blowsy mid-Victorian villa, again on former Longford Castle land. Its overgrown riverside spoil tip might have been a ‘natural’ feature.

  Further lavishly tile-hung villas of the 1880s and 90s in park-like gardens of cedars and wellingtonias.

  On the hill above East Harnham:

  A sanatorium built as a private house by Bishop Wordsworth but never occupied by him: his wife considered its proximity to a chalk pit dangerous for children.

  A workhouse of the 1870s, the Alderbury Union’s Tower House Poor Law Institution, in a style by then thirty years out of date.

  At West Harnham:

  A dull Norman church (chequer walls: Chilmark limestone, knapped flint).

  A dull Victorian chapel.

  A horizontal mediaeval mill (chequer walls, again); beside it an austere, vertical, latest-Georgian brick warehouse.

  A pub and houses of the same time by the same hand no doubt.

  An incongruously wealden former vicarage.

  Some uniform, so perhaps tied, cottages; stylistically similar to those built by the Wilton Estate at Netherhampton.

  All subsequent accretions conformed to Salisbury’s twentieth-century architectural norm.

  West Harnham: low-rise council housing of the immediate post-war; Wellworthy’s piston ring factory and its modesty fringe of see-through poplars; a sprawling chalk pit, the latest in a line of such quarries – the green hill gnawed as though it were a giant apple, leaving a trail of half-eaten grubby white precipices, ramparts, slipped cliffs, coves. Matt powdery dust lay on every surface – nothing glistered.

  East Harnham, where I lived, had expanded in the 1910s and 20s: drab red-brick ribbon development, jerry-built terraces of varying degrees of meanness.

  Yet this was the décor of my everyday existence, adored and mysterious and ever-expanding – the more I looked the more I saw. I revelled in minutiae’s minutiae, in the gamut of sensations provoked by different sights and smells a mere few steps from each other – a patterned fanlight, the manhole cover outside the Horns’ gate, the reeking gust from Bowns’s dairy, the grooved rails attached to door jambs to accommodate slates against floods, a house name incised in stone in a pompous font, the flashing flames and scorched bone stench and doomy hammering in Mr Curtis’s smithy, a tarred fence stake, the shambles reek of the cold store which Sid the Butcher leant his bike against, Mr Thick’s hollyhocks and foxgloves which marked him as old, as much as his arthritic drowner’s limbs did.

  I did not then discern the unfailing banality and offensive timidity of the buildings which had caused two former villages to coalesce into one inchoate suburb. And even though, when I go back, the all too English dreariness is inescapable, it is my dreariness, the dreariness I was born to and longed to escape but which is so indelibly imprinted in my memory, so much within me whether I like it or not, so wholly appropriated by me, that the paramountcy of old familiarity is entire: it extinguishes the dismissive indifference that I might feel in any similar site of such architectural paucity.

  Nostalgia is not simply a yearning for a lost home, a yearning which can never be satisfied by revisiting that home, which could only be satisfied by becoming once more the child who inhabited that home, at that time. It is also primitive, pre-rational, pre-learning. It quashes developed taste, aesthetic preference, learnt refinements. It insists that the chance associations of infancy are more obstinately enduring than the chosen positions of our subsequent sentience. It tells us that we are lifers in a mnemonic prison from which there is no reprieve.

  53–59 Harnham Road is a white-rendered terrace of four double-fronted cottages. Thatched terraces are uncommon, even in this part of England where thatched roofs abound. Thatched porches on tree trunk pillars are rarer still. The pillars, if they are contemporary with the rest of the terrace, indicate that it was built around 1800. The terrace otherwise displays none of the fancy associable with the cottage orné. Even if not expressly intended for that purpose, for many years the cottages housed the staff of The Rose and Crown, then a staging post on the road from London to Exeter. An incident in The Woodlanders derives from a coach accident at the junction of Harnham Road and (what was not then Old) Blandford Road, less than two hundred yards west of The Rose and Crown. Thomas Hardy, truffling in the Dorset County Chronicle’s archives, read a report of it in the edition of 20/07/1826, fourteen years before he was born.

  My parents were married in the early summer of 1939. They rented 55 Harnham Road for six months whilst they searched for a house to buy. They would remain there for twenty-three years. In those last months before the war the house was still owned by The Rose and Crown, which had just been bought by a retired Malayan rubber planter, Stiffy Edwards, and his second wife. They lived at number 59, which possesses an extra bay.

  Stiffy was doubly badered – he suffered alcohol-induced Tourette’s and amputations of both legs. He propelled his wheelchair from house to inn down the middle of Harnham Road swearing and cursing at whoever was available to be sworn and cursed at. He left two children by his first wife who had died in the early Thirties and his gentle shy reclusive widow who retained ownership of the cottages whilst selling The Rose and Crown to Ushers, a Trowbridge brewery. She had no job so presumably lived off capital and the meagre rents she received. The elder of those children was Jane, whom I confuse with Jane Robertson who lived at no. 57 and owned the first Posty: they were both dark-haired. The younger child, Glynn, would become a ubiquitous television actor, whose heavy features’ increasing resemblance to his father’s my parents never failed to remark on.

  As a boy Glynn seems to have spent a lot of time with my parents. He was boisterous, noisy, outdoorsy, outgoing. This was the sort of son my father had hoped for. He was amused rather than angry when Glynn and John Jacobs were violently sick after smoking tea leaves in a roll-up. It was, after all, just the sort of thing that my hedgehog-eating, trout-tickling, clay-pipe-smoking, hare-bone-whittling, Stalky-imitating father would have got up to when he was a boy.

  This most staunchly down-to-earth actor – who would play Dave, proprietor of the Winchester Club, in Minder – is no one’s idea of a romantic lead: a Badel, a Delon, a Stamp. Yet he was a distant figure of romance to a small boy.

  Glynn is learning to be a sugar pl
anter in the West Indies – the West Indies!

  Glynn runs a nightclub in Trinidad – a nightclub!

  Glynn has a girlfriend! A girlfriend! How I wanted to be old enough to have one of those, a real one beside me in my sports car, hair streaming in the wind. My prepubertal approaches failed to secure me a girlfriend rather than girls to muck about with.

  Glynn abandons colonial commerce to become an actor: I wasn’t quite sure what an actor was but if Glynn was going to be one … Later I would be grateful that he had chosen to successfully pursue what I could never bring myself to call The Profession.

  I was a baby when he left Clayesmore School, left home, left the country. Maybe because he was so often spoken of I carried an idea of his lithe largeness from then, though my first accredited memory of him is from 1953, when he returned to England. He was twenty-two, I was six. I was beginning to figure that there were people who were a) not children, b) not of my parents’ distant age but c) somewhere in between. Of course there were teachers such as Miss McFarlaine and the delicious Miss Bundy in her tight cherry cardigan and tight grey skirt. There were my nannies, Nanny Mary, Nanny Barham and Nanny Chant with buck teeth who came from Shrewton, close to where the last bustard had been shot. There were the serial German Girls: Christine, Lotte, Ruth. There was the hulking Brigitte, Edwina’s Breton au pair, who had big bones and a totalitarian attitude towards the composition of a vinaigrette. But they suffered the handicap of being female. And boys look up to men. The hideous construction role model – favoured by, inter alia, football pundits, asinine politicians, conformist chief constables and moron journalists – had not yet been coined, nor its arithmetical progression role supermodel. There is nothing a prepubescent boy wants more than to be a young man, to be over toys, to be doing real things – cars, drinks, smoking, girls – in a young man’s world.