How were Cold Warriors – nuclear-armed berserkers fashioned from jagged ice – to be distinguished from the guinea pigs of the Common Cold Research at Harvard Hospital who walked the downs and took flight if approached by a civvy? I pictured the Red Menace – a cannibalistic giant whose face was impasted with human gristle and blood; bullnecked mass murderers weighed down by medals; bullnecked sportswomen weighed down by medals; cloud seeding; barbed wire; secret policemen; evil scientists; poor Laika who died in space; the secret and fearsome city of Magnitogorsk where heroic robots made of lifesize Meccano strengthened themselves for galactic travel and men and machines were one; informers; torturers; factories as big as cities; insanitary collective farms; starvation; deportations. ‘You’re going to Siberia!’ was a playground taunt of the Fifties. I confused salt mines with the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
My father’s curiosity about the Great Tyranny was stirred by its willingness to acknowledge Paiforce’s work when the British government would not and by his comradely appreciation of the Russian soldiers he had met and had learnt to beware of after that first encounter. He had no illusions about the USSR. He wanted to visit it in spite of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express, the papers he read and believed, so far as he believed anything in what was not yet called the media. He regarded the News Chronicle as untrustworthy, possibly pinko. Wangle’s postal subscription to the fellow-travelling Manchester Guardian was derided.
Presumably I was nannyless and a babysitter couldn’t be found. Thus I was taken to Uncle Cecil and Auntie Rae’s, who had bought a telly early in 1953 so that it might warm up for the Coronation in June. We watched Eric Maschwitz’s paranoid spy serial Little Red Monkey, whose incidental music by Jack Jordan, all shrill whistles and swirling organ, was as nightmarish as the next year’s hit by The Stargazers, ‘Close The Door They’re Coming In The Window’. My parents had their own television by the time Rudolf Cartier’s production of 1984 was transmitted just before Christmas 1954. This was adjudged preferable to the novel, for though it might have been as stodgy and didactic you were spared having to actually read Orwell’s drab schoolmasterly prose. Ambler, Canning, Fleming and, especially, Household were much more the ticket: plots, action, adventure and no preaching, no spelling it out.
We didn’t need to have it spelled out. We lived, after all, in Salisbury, the Cold War was being waged all around us. Apart from god the Cold War was Salisbury’s defining industry and its true faith.
The red beacon on top of the cathedral spire was a warning to the countless military aircraft that passed overhead day upon day, night after night. Much was hush-hush. So hush-hush that it camouflaged itself with gaudy signs, barred entrances, sentry posts, skeins of barbed wire, concrete roads with a ginger pebble aggregate peculiar to forces’ property, lawned redoubts, Donald McGill windsocks, red flags flying to warn of deafening gunnery practice on the ranges, tank crossings, the War Office’s timorously utilitarian buildings.
The secret world is vainglorious, it cannot resist announcing its presence, proclaiming its force. The power of the bases was all the greater for being vague, unexplained, unchallengeable. These sites fomented rumours, which were only exceptionally confirmed: Geoffrey Bacon’s death from bubonic plague at Porton was such an exception. The Ordnance Survey, based 20 miles away at Southampton, suppressed cartographic probity in defence of the realm. Its numerous omissions were immediately obvious to anyone familiar with the ground. But they were guaranteed to fool the enemy.
This was the front line:
Garrisons at Larkhill (Royal Artillery, the thunder of whose guns was audible ten miles south), Bulford, Durrington, Tidworth, Ludgershall, Fugglestone (HQ Southern Command), Middle Wallop (Army Air Corps). There were still temporary structures in the grounds of Longford Castle where Field Marshal Montgomery had his HQ through part of World War II.
RN Armaments Depot at Dean Hill (100,000 sq ft of vaulted bunkers excavated in a chalk hillside in 1940–41; munitions for storage were transferred at East Dean station to 4 miles of 2 ft 6 in gauge railway).
RAF Munitions Depots at Fovant, Baverstock and Chilmark (a narrower-gauge railway, 2 ft, connected to a standard-gauge spur at Chicksgrove on the Salisbury–Tisbury line).
The former USAF hospital at Odstock where I had my tonsils removed.
RAF bases at Old Sarum, Upavon, Netheravon, Boscombe Down (Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment. The test pilot father of a schoolfriend took a group of us there to look over a V-bomber. I have no idea whether it was a Valiant, a Victor or a Vulcan. It bored me. The baked Alaska we were served in the mess as a further ‘treat’ disgusted me. I have never subsequently tried it).
Porton Down (Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment): always called Porton.
These places and the people who staffed them were ours. Our side, our protectors, our friends, our familiars.
Should we not, then, know the enemy that they were defending us against? In August 1938 – a month before Chamberlain was duped at Munich, three months before Kristallnacht, nine months before they married – my parents went to get to know the previous enemy. That, anyway, is how, in retrospect, my father explained their holiday in tidy Freiburg, ten miles from the French border on the edge of the Black Forest. Where – of course – there was excellent trout fishing in the jovial, laughing, rollicking streams. Where there were beer steins so comically grotesque you split your sides. Where every gurning jetty-end and gargoyle spoke of good fellowship and thigh-slapping merriment. Where ribald goblins leered from belfries.
Group activities abounded: games, sports, singsongs, outdoor concerts, parades, dances, hikes, skipping, swimming, climbing. People were keen. It was heaven on earth for joiners, for the unreflectively team-spirited, for those who yearn to be at school for ever. What a happy hearty florally garlanded family this nation was, this new nation – 1938 was Year Six, and in Year Six it had no colonies, they had been humiliatingly confiscated under the Treaty of Versailles. Yet the Gasthof owner’s courteous son was shortly to begin his second year at a school of colonial administration in anticipation of Germany’s imperial destiny. Rather than tanks crawling through the town’s streets, rather than ubiquitous armed men in uniform, it was the prospect of this youth’s future in Lebensraum management that persuaded my parents of the nation’s expansionist ambitions and of war’s inevitability no matter how cravenly the poodles of appeasement might scrape before Apollyon.
In the Fifties, having lived through two world wars, they were resigned to the likelihood that they might witness a third, not live through it, be obliterated in it. They were of a generation for whom war was a hideous yet necessary norm, a thief of lives who came calling every twenty years, always greedier than last time: ‘never again’ was as great a lie as ‘their name liveth for evermore’. Jumbo Evans was at the bottom of the Atlantic. Mowbray Meades and Joe Baird were Flanders mulch. And the lives it didn’t steal it blighted with unbearable bitterness: Jerry Savage killed himself more than a decade after he had walked into Belsen. Pudge Paul had been a POW on the Burma Road and could not bear to be touched by another human. His unspoken, unshared anguish was brusquely admitted: ‘Pudge had a bit of a thin time of it out east.’ Eric had a metal leg. Wag was in a wheelchair. Mrs Lampard and Mrs Mitchell, young widows, each married a service friend of their dead husband. The next show might start at any moment. It appeared to have started one clear winter Sunday night as we returned from Evesham. There was a dusting of snow. The cold groaning Morris Eight chugged up the snaking slope of the Salisbury road out of Amesbury. It reached the chalk escarpment. The familiar scene beyond the brow of the hill was transformed. What should have been dark downland was illumined by floodlights. I heard my mother gasp.
In the middle distance beyond the ruby strand of tail-lights was a silver structure high as a three-storey terrace, a giant space-beast that had strayed from elsewhere, like Stonehenge and Woodhenge. As we approached it, it resolved itself into a slumped aircraft, th
e largest aircraft I had ever seen. It was out of its element, a fabulous whale from the sky that had demolished a security fence (concrete pillars and slabs, barbed wire) and some sort of watchtower. The fuselage, with its ranks of black windows and portholes, had come to rest, wheelless, in a field. Its blunt snout lay on the now closed road ahead, visible beyond an ad hoc roadblock of vehicles. It was surrounded by lights, generators, fire tankers, lorries, cranes. Dozens of men in white combat gear, hooded, goggled and armed, stood by on aggressive guard. Soldiers? Members of a crack vanguard of extra-special forces? A group of them manned the roadblock. More of them ran urgently among the cars and vans which were backed up in both directions. Several of them noted registration numbers. Men with headsets squawked language into bulky field telephones.
I feared I was witnessing the start of the Soviet invasion.
I hoped I was witnessing the start of the Soviet invasion.
What opportunities there would be for heroism, spying, disguises, codes and hiding in drainage culverts.
They had taken over. Traffic was directed with curt jerks of sub-machine guns. Terrified drivers complied, left in no doubt of what would happen were they to ignore orders. Two soldiers banged on the roof of a gawping dawdler who had slowed to a halt at the point on the road closest to the aircraft. They furiously indicated that he should keep up with the vehicles in front of him and turn off onto the narrow road towards Catsbrain and Durnford. We were told to follow. The hooded men were twitchy. The frightened eyes in a masticating face that peered into the back of the car were hardly those of a man. The finger on the trigger was a boy’s. We could see the distant headlights of diverted northbound traffic making its way by a backroad across the downs towards Idmiston. Our line of traffic moved slowly downhill to the narrow road to the Avon valley.
It was America that my father excoriated. Or, rather, the American presumption that American forces could do as they wished wherever they wished. My mother joined in. They always agreed with each other. They had recognised the aircraft as a USAF cargo carrier. (Presumably a Douglas C-124, confidently named the Globemaster.) It had evidently overshot the western runway at Boscombe Down, almost certainly because of chewing gum, trashy music, absurdly cut trousers and tailfins. What right had these troops to police English civilians? What right had they to impose an extemporised martial law? Here was the full hypocrisy of American imperialism. The vilifiers and destroyers of the British Empire now occupied British soil. Behind it all, no doubt, was John Foster Dulles – the possibly psychopathic, certainly god-bothering, certainly globally menacing sometime Hitlerian and hawk avant la lettre who was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and the ideological precursor of such swinishly gung-ho liabilities as McGeorge Bundy (‘Ridiculous name!’), Robert McNamara, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the lesbians Donna Rumsfeld and Paula Wolfowitz.
My parents’ execrations of Dulles were such that their animus might have been personal. It was personal. There is little that’s more personal than losing your life because of a distant gambler’s addiction to goading an ideological opponent to the point where it becomes a belligerent antagonist. Dulles’s coinage, brinkmanship, glorified the practice of prodding a bear with a stick and presenting it as a legitimate strategy. He was, too, a traitorous ally: his reaction to the Suez adventure was one of opportunistic betrayal, a further chance taken to diminish Britain. So, according to parental orthodoxy, he entered into an improbable coalition with homegrown anti-imperialist pinkos and treasonable clerks who did not understand the Arab menace, who ignored Nasser’s hospitality to SS and Gestapo veterans, who, in their excessive empathy, always took the other side, who were unshakable in their liberal conviction that Britain was wicked.
HARRIS
‘I’ve had my insides removed.’ Olivia Harris confided this intelligence so often that it was a catchphrase, now penitential, now triumphant. ‘All gone,’ she trilled.
The void I imagined was unquestionably disturbing. And the current whereabouts of the insides mystified me. What had happened to them? Where were they? I didn’t like to ask. Olivia had been ‘on the stage’. Where was, again, not vouchsafed. Nor was when. Presumably she had been a soubrette before the war. Rep? Concert party? Pierrot troupe? Her voice and accent were regulation-issue theatrical of her generation: breathy; coquettish; exaggeratedly enunciated mock-Teutonic consonants; truncated vowels. I see her in an ivory blouse pouring drinks in a room whose long drawn curtains nonetheless admit batons of churning light. In the late 1950s she was still wearing her assisted blonde hair in the peekaboo style worn by Veronica Lake and Lizabeth Scott at least a dozen years previously. Not that I was then familiar with those reputedly sulphurous femmes fatales. They and their provocative moues and unwholesome hairdos were forgotten by everyone save Olivia, who would already have been in her mid-thirties when the style was fashionable. I listened, I eavesdropped, I overheard, I picked up oblique hints that it was unbecoming for a woman in, at least, her exceptionally late forties (jocular) to appropriate the appearance of sultry ingénues from the age of the low-key light.
Kenneth Harris was dapper, moustached, brilliantined, brass-button-blazered. He retained the honorific ‘Captain’ and had some undefined connection to the motor trade. His cap’s peak was bent, sportily bent, to form a triangular pediment. This was a sartorial tic popularised by Mike Hawthorn (the son of a garagist), who would be killed the day after my twelfth birthday: it transformed the flat hat from dull duncher into rakish little number. Kenneth, then, also modelled himself on someone twenty years his junior. And he drove a British racing green Triumph TR2, a car supposedly too young for him, a boy’s car, a boy racer’s: not a real sports car. A few years later several of my wealthier contemporaries would receive a TR (or Sprite or MGA) as a passed-your-test parental gift to be pranged at will. In that last era before the accession of youth-cult, which would eventually see adults dress like toddlers and play children’s video games, the Harrises’ mildly affected denial of their age was considered risible or presumptuous.
But to me they were a glamorous couple.
And I attached myself to glamour’s coat tails, the most desperate of hangers-on. Glamour was in short supply in Salisbury. Thus what passed for glamour there might not have seemed so to the worldlings of, say, Bath. I clung to what I could, inflated it. Whatever it was. Anyone, anything, the barrel scrapings. I was too young to leave in search of it even though from an early age I longed to be somewhere else, somewhere other than home, somewhere other than Salisbury. I longed to take the white chalk track with a middle parting which led over the downs to faraway, to promise, to hope. It’s a longing that has seldom left me.
Olivia’s and Kenneth’s childlessness (no doubt attributable to the missing insides) and the practice of the childless of treating children without condescension seemed glamorous. So too did ginny laughter, casual oaths, languidly waved cigarettes, his suede boots (leather soled chukka, not rubber-soled desert).
In the spring of 1955 Kenneth Harris alerted my father to the existence of a 1932 Aston Martin Le Mans for sale. The garage turned out to be a repair shop assembled from holed corrugated iron, planks, bits of pitted doors and abundant asbestos. The car, even then a rarity, was in surprisingly decent condition. My father phoned Hank, who had long desired this car above all others. Hank asked him to buy it for him. And best buy it immediately, before the chance passed, even though the price was high: it no doubt included an ample drink for Kenneth.
My mother, ever mistrustful of my paternal aunt and uncles, advised against this course and suggested that my father wait till Hank’s cheque had arrived from Burton-on-Trent. He didn’t wait. She was proved right. My father never learnt. He was reluctant to acknowledge the baseness of our race, and familial bonds rendered him especially incapable of discerning his siblings’ relentless grasping, scrounging meanness and pious miserliness – even though Reginald answered to Wangle without demur. All too characteristically, despite his many entreaties my father was n
ot reimbursed a sum he could ill afford until a couple of years later when Hank sold the car for three times the sum he hadn’t paid for it. He had, then, received an interest-free loan. The car – high off the road with detached mudguards and unincorporated headlights – struck me as ugly and dismally old-fashioned. There was no glamour in wood, in leather. They were yesterday’s materials.
Glamour was indissociable from the modern. It was a property of sleek, streamlined sports cars which barely expressed their wings – Austin-Healey 100/6, 100/4, 3000; Allard Palm Beach; Bristol 401 to 405; Frazer Nash Mille Miglia and Sebring; AC Ace and Aceca; Jensen 541 and 541R; all Jaguar XKs. It was a property too of Ice-Cream Rigiani’s vanilla Studebaker, an elegant, atypically restrained coupé designed by Raymond Loewy’s studio during the years when American cars, familiar sights in Salisbury because of American forces’ presence, were items of mobile surrealism: googie, baroque, two-tone, zoomorphic. Their appeal was that of the illicit, the forbidden, the occluded: cutaway collars, elephant trunk quiffs, dark nipples in QT and Kamera, sex, prostheses. These cars were too frightening, too monstrous, too freakish to be glamorous. Their reptilian chrome radiators snarled, their voracious eyes and excrescent fins terrified me.
André and Renée Ragot (née Kermarec) were among my grandfather’s Breton friends. In the summer of 1957 they came to Southampton for my grandmother’s funeral and then on to Salisbury where André would fish with my father. Against their advice they took my parents out to dinner at The Red Lion. Served Yorkshire pudding, André prodded it, tasted it warily and pronounced: ‘Mon dieu, c’est du plastique!’
In 1931 he had founded a fly-tying business at Loudéac, a small town in the Côtes-d’Armor. A quarter of a century later Mouches Ragot was known to every fisherman in France and had extended into the manufacture of other lures: plugs, spinners, spoons, all of them gaudier (so more appealing to me) than their naturalistic, almost understated British analogues. My first cufflinks, the only cufflinks I owned till my twenties, were a Ragot promotional device: kingfisher-bright flies suspended in Perspex hemispheres. André’s Citroën DS, bought in the first year of that car’s production, was the apogee of vehicular glamour. There was a bewildering incongruity between the DS – glassy, sculptural, apparently breathing – and the wonky 150-year-old thatched terrace where we lived. It was puzzling that such disparate objects could exist side by side, juxtaposed time travellers. The lustrous machine was from another world, a world which did not yet exist on this side of the Channel. France’s present was our distant future.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 12
