An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  As if to prove it my father could not work out how to drive it. In normal circumstances such an inability would have been a mild embarrassment, a failure to be laughed off with a self-mockery which invited sympathy. These were abnormal circumstances.

  After showing it off to my father on the long straight roads of the western New Forest at Bramshaw Telegraph and Deadman Hill, André had parked the DS beside an unmetalled track on the Somerley estate between Ellingham and Harbridge. Lugging their rods, reels, gaffs, priests, tackle bags, Mepps spoons, plugs, sprats preserved in reeking formalin etc. they walked three quarters of a mile across fields and fences, stiles and leets to the Avon.

  André was some two hundred yards downstream, close by a clump of willows which partially hid him. So my father, casting into the black-green water, did not see him collapse to the ground.

  It was not for some minutes after he had suffered a heart attack that my father wondered where he was and, with no sense of urgency, ambled along the bank. He found him on his side, wriggling feebly, contorted, sweating, wheezing, semi-conscious. A few weeks previously my father, using hip-flask brandy as local anaesthetic, had cut a hook out of the palm of a fellow fisherman with his alarmingly sharp penknife. He reacted with kindred improvisation, vigorously massaging André’s chest, loosening his clothes then picking him up and carrying him – now in his arms, now in a fireman’s lift over his shoulder – across the fields and fences, the stiles and leets, slipping under the weight of the possibly expiring burden, sinking into unseen troughs. This took a parlously long time. For once the return journey was not quicker. When they reached the car André was all but unconscious. My father attempted further cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Panting like a robber he frisked André for the keys to his car. He unlocked it and lifted him on to the back seat. It is now that he discovers that the technological prodigy from the day after tomorrow is not responsive to the driver of the day before yesterday’s Morris Minor.

  He spent an incalculable time failing even to ignite the engine: incalculable because clock time’s primacy is suppressed by the exceptional. He decided that the only course open to him was to abandon the stricken man and run for help. High summer: but the track was still soft from spring’s floods. He eventually arrived at the metalled, causeway-like road and elected to head for Ibsley and the main road even though it was further than Harbridge. Before he got there he recognised a Daimler that was coming towards him and waved it down. André Ragot and my father were thus driven to Odstock Hospital by Colonel Esmond Drury, a fishing writer who had devised The General Practitioner, among the better-known post-war English salmon flies. This approximate symmetry would be sentimentally relished by all three men involved as proof of l’entente cordiale and the brotherhood of fishermen. André Ragot was detained for a fortnight. He lived for a further twenty years. The day after he was hospitalised my father directed the garagist Jack Miles and one of his mechanics to the DS. Whilst he fetched his and André’s gear from the riverbank the two men, briefed by Citroën UK, had no trouble in starting the car. My father sat mutely beside Jack as he fondly acquainted himself with the alien machine on the road back through Fordingbridge and Breamore: chalk downs to the left, forest escarpment to the right, the bypass at Bodenham not yet built.

  He had saved a man’s life. Yet his mechanical incapacity dogged him. Not because of the possible outcome, not because André might have died, but because of his perceived vanquishment by technology. He felt slighted, humiliated. His shame was the greater because he was technophiliac. He accepted applied-scientific progress as a given. He was besotted with his fixed spool Mitchell 330 Otomatic reel bought at punishing expense from France before it was available in England. This item of piscatorial modernism was manufactured by a precision engineering company on the Swiss border whose products had previously included watch gears, taxi meters and early electric razors. It sits on a shelf in my office, a predatory insect with a crutch. A memento of my father, of course, also an emblem – like the DS, like Roger Excoffon’s typefaces – of that long-vanished France which defined itself as the antithesis of its inglorious recent past, the nation of colourful counter-intuitive objects without ancestors, but with transatlantic cousins. The reel, designed in Year Zero of les Trente Glorieuses, was to have been named Michel after its manufacturer’s dead brother. Commerce overcame sentiment: Mitchell was reckoned to possess greater appeal to the anglophone market. The yé-yé singer Claude Moine agreed. His backing group retained its French name, Les Chaussettes Noires, and disappeared into obscurity whilst he became Eddy Mitchell, the eternally leather-clad veteran teenager.

  My father’s embarrassment with the DS was resolved in a peculiar way.

  The first model to be regularly seen about Salisbury was lemon and black. It belonged to Alan R. Snell and replaced his Sunbeam Talbot. Alan R. was a dapper and courteous chocolatier with a small factory in Crane Street and, puzzlingly, four shops within a few minutes’ walk of each other. Mint crisps, ginger crisps, thin dark slabs: these were delicious, the stuff of treats – grudging treats. Their packaging was as elegant as the man, baby-blue stripes on white with entirely lower case, sans serif lettering. My father referred to him as Alan Arse Smell. The root of his animus was a prep school inter-house boxing bout between me and Alan R.’s son Michael – born to the faintly moustached Tilly in Spiro Nursing Home two weeks after me.

  I had no appetite for boxing as either participant or audience. I was more or less obliged to know such names as Dai Dower, Floyd Patterson, Ingemar Johansson etc. One night in 1955 at about two o’clock my father forced me out of bed so that I might feign interest in a crackly transatlantic radio commentary on Rocky Marciano’s demolition of Don Cockell, mocked in the American press as ‘the barrel of lard’. And he bought me cheap boxing gloves, tried to persuade me of the pursuit’s nobility, which I couldn’t reconcile with its discomforts. He’d kneel on the big Persian carpet which filled the small sitting room. The idea was that I should land blows with the papery gloves which horribly turned my hands into mute clubs. I failed. He parried every half-hearted effort. It irritated him that my heart wasn’t in it. He had yet to learn that I was nothing like him, that I shared none of his enthusiasms; or, if he had begun to realise, he was loath to admit it to himself and perhaps entertained ideas of correcting and conditioning me.

  He had judged some of the previous bouts in the Nissen hut gym but had stood down when it was my turn. He was furious that Alan R. did not stand down and remained to adjudicate in my bout with Michael. He cast his deciding vote and gave the fight to his son. Alan R. was, with cause, proclaimed not to understand conflict of interest or fair play. Besides, he knew nothing about boxing.

  Worse, a couple of years later both Alan R. and the lightly moustached Tilly took up salmon fishing. My father interpreted this as a provocative slight and mocked their brand-new Barbours, virgin rods and shiny waders. They were, thankfully, never as successful as my father. But then they had their own chocolates to preoccupy them whilst my father merely had someone else’s biscuits: to own a business was everything in the petty-mercantile, bookless world of Salisbury and it didn’t come much more bookless than Alan R.’s and Tilly’s twee Thirties house in a road with the even more twee name of Shady Bower, which culminates in the laughable Milford Manor, built circa 1900 for Gerrish of Style and Gerrish, faced in crazy paving, and subsequently the headquarters of Reed and Mallik, manufacturers of REEMA. This form of systems building blighted much of Britain in the late Fifties and Sixties. Alan R. bought a weekly beat at the Royalty Fishery south of Ringwood. With what was deemed beginner’s luck he did kill some salmon – that verb was de rigueur among game fishermen; it was coarse fishermen who caught pike, tench, barbel and so on and meekly returned them to the river in contravention of the logic of want. That Alan R. (whose confections I enjoyed and whose creepily solicitous kindliness I appreciated) owned a DS proved beyond doubt to my father that this car was flawed. It must be the boastful affectation o
f smoothies, parvenus, chulakas and their multifarious kin – even wronguns and spivs. Unless, of course, it was driven by a Frenchman.

  ‘I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.’

  I haven’t forgotten the first time I uttered that commonplace sentence, the first time that I was aware that thought had suffered stillbirth, the first time I was privy to the sharp frustration which succeeds that loss and to the curse of synaptic butterfingers.

  The subject, I know, was to have been the Duke of Edinburgh. The place was the back of my father’s Morris 8. I could see the flint school, the white stucco’d convent, the gateless piers of the entrance to Riverside Walk, I can see the yet uncrowned Queen’s consort in his dashing naval whites. Then the car turned into St Nicholas Road beside the orchard wall spiked with broken bottles. Ahead, on the corner of De Vaux Place, was the ancient house outside which the splendid Lagonda was no longer parked. To the right, the raised spur of grass separating the road from the sunken pavement and above it, the Close wall.

  I’ve had a lifetime to think about what it was that I was going to say to my parents about the Duke of Edinburgh. I have evidently not thought enough. Maybe the proximity of the convent had reminded me of his mysterious mother, the vision-prone, astral-projecting nun Princess Andrew whose delusional states, surely connected to her name, have resurfaced in her eldest grandson.

  Every time I forget what I was going to say an image of the Duke pops up, a protean trickster with as many guises (duncher’d sportsman, Claus von Bülow, bearded sailor, twinkly bigot, plain-speaking flirt, charming curmudgeon) as he has titles, but with a single role in my life – to mock my frail concentration and fallible short-term memory. (It’s a more enviable role than his daughter’s. Picturing the equine Princess Royal is a sure way of inhibiting orgasm and prolonging enjoyment for everyone concerned, so long as one doesn’t picture her for too long and so risk flaccidity. Which is not quite the ticket, Anne.)

  There was no doubt something premonitory whirring within my brain, for the only time I have ever seen this admirably tactless man was here, in De Vaux Place, eighteen months after I had forgotten what I was going to say. Scores of New Elizabethans crowded onto the narrow pavement. Terry Lovell, a couple of years my senior, had been put in charge of me. He told me when I should wave my stiff celluloid union flag. I annoyed him by asking how much longer were we going to have to stand here. Where were they? Why were they late? This was no fun at all.

  Then, at last – wave! The young Queen and her handsome balding husband rode past us towards the North Gate of the Cathedral Close in the back of a heraldically pennanted Rolls-Royce with piebald paintwork lustrous as a racehorse’s coat. I got a glimpse of the magical couple. We had waited going on an hour for an anticlimactic fragment of a second which, I told my parents when I got home, represented poor value.

  They were not as sympathetic as I had hoped. They reminded me that it had been my idea to waste an afternoon demonstrating my fealty with that gimcrack, now splintered flag from the corner shop. They were as indifferent to royalty as they were to republicanism. Old Acton’s dictum on power was fed me with my mother’s milk or rather, since I was not suckled, with my Virol and cod liver oil and Farley’s rusks and NHS orange juice which shared a name with the fruit but tasted of tarnished coins. My parents were equally indifferent to all manifestations of power. They married in church, at St Mary’s, South Stoneham in So’ton. They had me baptised at All Saints, East Harnham – I have a silver mug to prove it, and a piece of paper. My mother taught in Church of England schools for forty years. They sent me to the Cathedral School.

  Yet they were not communicant. They attended funerals and marriages out of social obligation. Otherwise they only ever set foot in churches for reredos tourism and choral concerts. One of my godfathers was an atheist, the other a sort of pantheist. ‘Churchy’ was a word of weary contempt. My parents considered the cathedral’s hieratic cadre of Christ’s bridegrooms to be pompous, snobbish prigs. They developed an animus against the thin-lipped Dean Haworth who sacked Barry Still from the headmastership of the Cathedral School for no reason other than that he had had the temerity to fall in love with and marry the school’s matron. Haworth replaced Still with a holy crony, a lay preacher who eventually took orders. The only churchmen my parents counted as friends were a monstrous sot, Padre, and the indomitable cottager, John Ellis.

  It was peer pressure (already so-called though not yet vernacular) that had caused me to wave a flag at the Queen. Adherence to insidious flock conformity also persuaded me to demand that I be allowed to attend Sunday School. In this case the flock comprised the Harnham Road children whom I knew through Roger and whom my parents probably reckoned to be guttersnipes, street arabs, urchins and so on. Several of them belonged to the swarthy Dean tribe; there were three related families of that name living within a hundred yards of each other. There were Helen, Pauline and Sylvia; the ginger sisters Cynthia and Brenda; the Goddard twins; Peter who despite being himself a dull and backward slow-learner was known to try to read for his literally illiterate, religiously fixated parents – he would later use fireworks as weapons.

  I was confided to Margaret and Ronnie Smith, children of George Smith, the not much more literate carpenter whose duck-billed 4H pencil lived over his ear, whose house and workshop formed an unsightly adjunct to our terrace. Margaret and Ronnie would show me the ropes at Sunday School. We walked a hundred yards up the road and entered the church. This was my first return to where I had been christened. We sat at the back. It was cold. The seat was uncomfortable. For several minutes nothing happened except timid whispering. Then the congregation stood up and sang. The only hymns I knew at the age of seven were ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and ‘Adeste Fideles’. Indeed it had not occurred to me that there were any other hymns. I was confused by this strange new one. By the time I had found the right page in the hymnal it was over. Next there was kneeling combined with muttering in approximate time with the neighbouring mutterer. Because Sunday School began at 2 pm and my parents did not eat Sunday lunch till some time after that hour I was hungry. A woman with glasses read a boring text for several minutes. I began to cry. The congregation turned to gape. One small girl held a finger to her mouth to silence me. Another woman, this one in a sort of smock, came to ask me what the matter was. I persisted in sobbing. I told her that I wanted to go home. This baffled her. Then she sniffed insubordination. She adopted a simpering pitying churchy surely-not smile of affronted annoyance and told me to pull myself together, to behave: did I not realise that I was in God’s house? As soon as she had moved away and the subsequent incomprehensible activity had begun I got up and crept as unobtrusively as possible to the solid door, heaved it open. The hinges squeaked, the foot of it scraped shrilly and shiveringly against the stone floor. I left it open and ran down the road past the phone box, past the entrance to Watersmeet House. I heard The Smock call after me. I ignored her. I had emerged a materialist. So ended my last voluntary attendance at a church.

  It was, equally, the first time I had walked out of anything, that I had had the nerve to walk out. Or had been so desperate. Thus was a lifelong habit initiated. Cinemas, jobs, sexual relationships, exams, opportunities, marriages, commitments, professional partnerships, schools, theatrical performances (a speciality), parties, expeditions, dinners, homes, prior arrangements – I’ve walked out of all of them, often.

  Twenty minutes after I’d left I ran in through the back gate. My parents had not even started lunch. They weren’t surprised to see me, did not castigate me, merely reminded me that they had warned me: Sunday School was liable to be disagreeable. No doubt they were covertly pleased that I made my break for freedom. My father, especially, considered not joining a mark of individualism rather than a possible symptom of sociopathy. He discounted the modern dictum that loners are necessarily ‘troubled’. And he was proud that Jim Laing, whom he liked and admired, should routinely refer to me as ‘a one-off’. He had referred t
o me thus since a day at the new Castle Combe circuit where we watched the young hardly known Stirling Moss in a Formula 3 race (he crashed).

  What I had done or said to provoke this epithet was soon forgotten. But I was stuck with it, even though it made me feel freakish, apart, self-conscious – not that I could admit to this because it would have been graceless in the face of what was, as I was frequently reminded, intended as high praise. It was, then, a trait to be encouraged. I had to live up to Jim’s estimation. And a way to do so was to dissuade me from belonging to a group, any group, whose collective mores might extinguish my peculiarities and mould me in a way that was not to my parents’ liking.

  I didn’t learn of course. In childhood we struggle to both satisfy parents’ expectations and to avoid contemporaries’ mockery. And vice versa. The gulf is exacerbated when the very subject of parental counsel is to beware contemporaries’ conformist influence, any influence, rather than the predictable bad influence (though that too was to be shunned). Even submission to supposedly good influence was liable to mitigate my specialness. Can it have been that frail? I did not go to Sunday School because of a sudden access of piety. I went because I didn’t want to be excluded from a particular group. The Wolf Cubs for instance.