An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  A further attraction was this annual’s cover and its title page. The word Playfair was written in a typeface that imitated handwriting. It was compellingly fascinating. This typeface absorbed me. I tried to figure what was so simultaneously strange and familiar about it. I’d repetitively turn back from the Sheffield Shield match between Queensland and New South Wales to the cover. It suddenly became clear that this was the handwriting that I had been aiming for, this very hand, these very strokes of dashing insouciance. And someone had stolen it from me before I had created it. It wasn’t a case, so to speak, of baby-snatching but of foetus-snatching. The unborn letters that I would have formed, had I had the chance, the time, inspiration’s prod, had been untimely ripped from – from where? I was looking at a usurpation, a plagiarism of my writing, yet a writing which had never existed. It had almost existed, I told myself, almost …

  The artefacts that prompt this spine-bristling, neck-tingling delusion are rare. The sensation is more than a delusion. It calls into question aesthetic independence, individual integrity. It alerts us to reason’s limitations. Memory slyly asserts that it is beyond our control. I have been here before. I have seen this bough before. I have felt this murmuring wind before. A few times in our life we are involuntarily enjoined to consider reincarnation as the root of déjà vu. The paranormal bullyingly gatecrashes our conscious. This was the first time in my life – in my current life – that it occurred. At that age I was doubtless susceptible to it, for was I not instructed daily that Jesus was born of a virgin impregnated by god’s projectile ejaculation, that he rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, performed miracles and led a life of impeccable paranormality. I gazed and regazed at the seven letters which made up Playfair.

  Most probably I had seen this font in France. Had seen it but had not, so to speak, catalogued it. I may have seen it – the verb is approximate – in the way we see the places that become the loci of our dreams. Acquired, so to speak, by the retina but not processed or only partially processed by the brain. This is a possible explanation for dreamscapes being akin to flipped or reversed photographs.

  The font, a word I didn’t know, was Mistral. The typographer, another word I didn’t know, was Roger Excoffon. This was the man who had had the temerity to ape my potential handwriting. Chapeau! That this quintessentially French font – as emblematic of les Trente Glorieuses as cobalt blue, the DS and OAS graffiti – should grace a book on the quintessentially English game of cricket is oddly apt: Excoffon was a dandy with a taste for le style anglais – puppytooth suits from Savile Row, Jermyn Street shoes, cravats and so on. What is incongruous is that Mistral should have attained such status in France, for Excoffon based it on his own hand, which is wholly atypical of a French hand. It is the very antithesis of the squat cursive web that infant pupils are taught to weave without first having learned to print separate letters. This may be why French writing tends to be ponderous, wrist-achingly laborious. It is certainly homogeneous. And a French person’s writing seems seldom to develop with age. Most citizens write as they did when they were ten or twelve years old, as they were told to. Excoffon’s exuberantly fluid hand might be English. Most scribes – fonts that imitate handwriting – are based in stylised calligraphy, cursive copperplate or cursive italic. Mistral was as close as a font can be to autobiography. To autograph. But whose autobiography? Whose autograph?

  As children, once we have heard the name of, say, a dead actor or forgotten scandal – Edmund Kean, Druids Lodge – we hear it over and again, repetitively. We learn to hear it. Once we have gaped at a plane tree’s bark long enough for the sight of it to adhere, it recurs. Our eyes are drawn to plane trees that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. On my first visit to St Malo after the revelation on the cover of the Playfair Annual, my eyes had been opened. Mistral was unmissably ubiquitous. A Jeep with four GIs drew up beside us. The driver addressed my father. I didn’t hear what he said for I was transfixed by the Mistral sign on a café’s awning: Le Pharo. The Jeep sped off.

  ‘Bloody cheek!’ said my father. ‘Chap said [heavy American accent] “Ooh eh la root ah Wren?” Down to the junction and go right. So he turned to his buddies, and said: “Hey, the native speaks English.”’

  There was Mistral on a traiteur’s van, a haberdasher’s wrapping paper, a pharmacy’s fascia, in letters ten or fifty times the size of Playfair’s 20 point.

  Flashy, too clever by half, borderline vulgar, lacking discretion, gloriously impure … a minimalist’s nightmare. And the nightmare’s brood is Excoffon’s subsequent fonts, Calypso and Choc, a scribe that derives not from mere handwriting but from scrawl, a base element which is transformed by typographic alchemy, it’s like making haute couture from denim. As for Calypso – no typeface has ever boasted louder of its maker’s virtuosity, so shouted about his uniqueness. These uplifting fonts, literal tonics, are the highwire acts of an artist who has nothing to be modest about, an artist whose appeal transcends the discipline he worked in.

  It goes without saying that Mistral became a crib. I copied my ideal self’s hand. My writing was touched by the ghost of my father’s – upper case only, by Hank’s more generally, not, so far as I can discern, by my mother’s and by something of Excoffon’s, though that something is restricted to the letters A, F, I, L, P, R, Y.

  MARTIN, DOCTOR

  Ancient Ulsterman a generation older than my parents. In my mother’s eyes kudos attached to him because he was related to Naomi Jacob, a manly-looking novelist (and sometime vaudevillian) whose work, or fame, she admired. Every autumn Doctor and Mrs Martin visited Jacob’s home in Italy. When at the age of eleven my sight was adjudged so poor that I’d have to be prescribed glasses he tried (and failed) to console me by telling me that although he had grown up only a few miles from them he had not seen the Mountains of Mourne till his myopia was corrected. Only then was he able to appreciate their beauty. I didn’t believe a word of it. I was grateful, however, for his gentle fantasy just as I was for his amusement at my use of the word duncher (pron. donncha), Ulster patois for flat cap which I had learnt from the indecipherably accented, endlessly voluble, abundantly moustached, indefatigably jolly, perpetually ravenous trainee rep called Freddy, a loyal old boy of Portora Royal, who for several weeks in the autumn of 1956 travelled with my father learning the ropes and leaving a trail of porkpie crust, cheese rind, and crisp packets.

  NAMES

  I made lists.

  Why were people called Salmon, Pike, Gudgeon, Whiting, Chubb, Grayling, Roach, Haddock, Spratt, Bass? But not Tench, Minnow, Eel, Lamprey, Perch, Carp, Huss, Plaice.

  Why were people called Hogg, Fox, Wolf, Bull, Lion, Lamb, Stoat? But not Horse, Donkey, Cow, Tiger, Weasel, Otter.

  Why were people called Salisbury, Winchester, Chichester, Lichfield, Worcester, Lincoln? But not Gloucester, Canterbury, Exeter, Hereford, Peterborough, Ripon.

  Why were people called Hill, Vale, Field, Wood, Ford, Rivers (always plural), Bridge, Brook, Park, Street? But not Road, Track, Path, Stream, Ditch, Garden, Copse, Canal.

  Why were people called Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset, Cornwall, Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cheshire, Somerset? But not Devonshire, Sussex, Surrey, Warwickshire, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Rutland, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Cumberland.

  Why were people called Brown, Black, Green, Grey? But not Red, Pink, Yellow, Blue.

  Why were people called Jay, Crow, Sparrow, Hawk, Eagle, Finch, Raven, Starling, Robin, Nightingale? But not Buzzard, Chaffinch, Chough, Jackdaw, Magpie, Seagull, Tit, Vulture, Harrier, Kingfisher, Plover.

  Why were people called Butcher, Baker, Cook, Smith, Farmer, Fisher, Hunter, Fletcher, Archer, Tranter, Wright, Carter, Scrivener? But not Soldier, Sailor, Notary, Dentist, Driver, Scribe, Alchemist, Ambassador, Minstrel, Furrier, Musician, Navigator.

  Why? I asked. The answer was invariable: That’s the way it is. It isn’t important. I was adjudged tiresome or frivolous or time-wasting. Thus adults masked their ignorance and, worse, their incurios
ity. My obsessive insistence on the acquisition of what was deemed useless knowledge was a goading reproach to them.

  NEW CANAL

  This central Salisbury street was known simply as the Canal. It was named after a canal which had once flowed here. Flowed may not be the word to apply to what was little more than an open sewer.

  Bloom’s, at its eastern end, was a drapery and haberdashery store, remarkable for its exceptional dowdiness. The red-brick building was higher than most in Salisbury, a ruddy intruder from the industrial north. Its gauntness was relieved by an attic storey of pedimented windows, a clumsy attempt at the misnamed Queen Anne style. There were entrances in the Canal and in Catherine Street. It retained a system of pneumatic tubes contemporary with the building. The sales staff, also contemporary with the building, put cash and details of purchases in canisters that resembled cartridges. These were placed in an overhead tube which magically transported them to an unseen central accounting department. A further tube propelled change and receipts from that department. Tubes webbed the ceilings, turned corners, crisscrossed staircases. They popped and exhaled and whistled like gusty drafts. It was a rare technological survival, a legacy of the world inhabited by Kipps and Mr Polly, a world of deference, counter-jumpers, shiny brown paper parcels, balls of string slung from the ceiling and folded bolts of taffeta displayed like zoological specimens in curved glass cases.

  The nearby branch of Richard Shops with its exciting range of pastel bouclé suits and fur-collared, raglan-sleeved coats was positively dernier cri (in comparison).

  Whitehead, Vizard, Venn and Lush, solicitors, had premises close by Pothecary’s, hairdressers. Both Leo Lush and George Pothecary had sons at the Cathedral School. Their acquaintance would improbably have extended beyond a polite greeting. In the stiff provincial hierarchy a lawyer was many rungs above a barber, even a non-barbering barber-businessman with interests in retail greengrocery (Swanage) and property (everywhere). The lawyer shot game and drove a Rover. George Pothecary drove a Jag 2.4 with spats over the back wheels for added flashiness. Whilst waiting for a haircut in a fluorescent room scented with cologne and lined with shelves of such classy haircreams as Keg ‘With Bay Rum’ and Tru-Gel you could read John Taylor on clothes in Reveille or shock articles in Tit-Bits, e.g. ‘A Thousand Hell Holes In My Arm’ by Chet Baker. You’d be lucky to get that in a solicitor’s waiting room. George, his wife (from Braintree – ‘there are cornfields for as far as you can see’) and son Nigel, my contemporary, moved house every two years. Between houses they would live above the barber shop in a flat which may have had windows.

  The Gaumont’s façade was lavishly timbered, super-Tudor and, of course, late Victorian. The hall within was lavishly timbered, super-Tudor and, astonishingly, echt Tudor, if heavily restored. A swashbuckling chandelier was suspended from a cat’s cradle of beams above a long bare room with randomly disposed stained-glass windows and lustrous floor tiles. Neo-codpiece and halberd tapestries were hung on the walls of the theatre itself. Its unidentifiable omnipresent smell was pleasant. It never occurred to me that this cinema was an incongruous oddity. Salisbury’s other two, the Odeon and the Regal, had conventionally off-the-peg moderne façades concealing hangars. They too had their own attractive smells. It is of course possible that some sort of ambient scent was liberally dispensed. Before the advent of indoor bathrooms, launderettes and washing machines humans were frequently malodorous. Crowds reeked. Ubiquitous cigarette smoke had a use, it covered up the stench of multiple secretions. Houses smelled too. Every house had a distinctive smell. Such olfactory signatures were not necessarily unpleasant. Their source or combination of sources was rarely apparent. It was a secret, buried within the building and its occupants, who were so inured to it that they were ignorant of it.

  At the Salisbury Journal’s offices I passed hours leafing through old editions, now crisp, now turning to dust, sewn into stiff boards. Two incidents at Salisbury railway station so fascinated me that I read their accounts time after time: the 1906 crash in which twenty-eight people lost their lives as a result of a Plymouth–Waterloo train being driven at 70 mph round a curve where 30 mph was the limit; the suicide of the painter Christopher Wood who threw himself in front of the Atlantic Coast Express in the summer of 1930. My access to this archive was sanctioned by John Bennett, the owner and editor, a watercolourist who painted in the idiom of the post-war romantics. His face reminded me of Hals’s Laughing Cavalier, who wasn’t laughing but smirking. Bennett himself however was often laughing. He was genial, gregarious. According to my father he was making up in obstinate good cheer for the barbarities he suffered as an adolescent at Malvern College. Really? It was difficult for a child to believe that the indignities of thirty years ago could still affect behaviour, adult behaviour. For adults existed in a world that was not contiguous with that of childhood. My prospective self, the grown-up me, would share my name but little else. Childhood and adolescence would have been long since cauterised, all scars and gaffes sealed in an oubliette, all immaturity excised.

  I would no longer frequent Wilton’s toyshop whose dapper, suede-shod proprietor was happily named Mr Kidwell. This is where, in the early autumn of 1956 between Suez and Hungary, I bought a tank transporter, a Thornycroft Mighty Antar Tractor (Dinky Supertoys No. 660). Price 17/6. I already owned the Centurion Tank (Dinky Supertoys No. 651) which I would load onto it.

  The shop’s many rooms also contained: Britain’s model cowboys and Indians – the change from lead to plastic circa 1955 was momentous; .00-scale locomotives, trains and track; farms with churns and troughs and trees; Escalado; board games; Subuteo; Meccano; Minibrix and Bayko building sets; Airfix kits; expensive imported Revell kits, which I coveted. But since I was hardly capable of completing an Airfix Lancaster such sleek modern USAF jets as the Crusader (99 pieces) and the Sabre were denied me. When I was an adult I would no longer be obliged to make my maladroit fingers struggle with centimetre-long tailfins, gun turrets, glue and transfers. Unless, that is, I turned into one of those worrying adults who protract childhood with such hobbies and invite children to share them. I determined to avoid such a fate.

  Bobby Stokes’s parents were tenants of The Wheatsheaf, next door to Wilton’s and across the street from the Gaumont. He wore glasses so I pitied him, but nowhere near as much as I pitied myself four years later when I received my first prescription for severe myopia from an optician who was himself severely myopic, smelly and elaborately sadistic: it goes with the job. My only experience of Saturday morning pictures was in Bobby’s company, at the Regal. The entirely forgettable western yarn and detective serial I saw on that sole occasion were not a patch on the delicious lunch that Bobby Stokes’s mother cooked in the flat above the pub: grilled lamb kidneys with onions and mash. Nor were they a patch on my then favourite films, West of Zanzibar (dhows, piracy, Technicolor) and Forbidden Cargo (dunes, smuggling, Tower Bridge). This Saturday entertainment is supposed retrospectively to have been a weekly rite of 1950s childhood. That should be amended to 1950s working-class childhood: hence the lower middle class’s fearful eschewal of it. The era’s cinema audience was, like football’s, predominantly working class. The films they watched were all suppressed emotion and received pronunciation. When at the end of the decade there was an outbreak of Sillitosis and the working class itself became the subject of a grittily sentimental strain of regional cinema the audience changed accordingly.

  The gloomy entrance to Clark’s shoeshop gave way to a skylit space lined with pale-green boxes. In the middle of it, like an altar, there rose a veneered Pedoscope. This instrument resembled a vertical coffin. The standing customer stood against it placing his shod feet into apertures. An X-ray image of the feet’s ever-growing bones and the outline of the possibly, Madam, too constricting shoes was shown on a fluorescent screen on the box’s top which my mother and I would take our turn to gape at. The yet unrecognised dangers of radiation were nothing beside the licence to pomposity that the device granted t
o the sales staff. They considered themselves doctors, scientists or, at least, foot boffins, technicians. They smugged, they chinstroked, assuming that they alone could interpret what the screen showed, they spoke with the portentousness of bad actors in a hospital drama. The assistants in Boots Lending Library, upstairs from the chemists, combined exceptionally low-level literary criticism with an officious attitude towards hygiene. A book being withdrawn would invite captious appraisal of the characters, as though they were ‘real’; a book being returned would invite accusatory scrutiny. Had it been sneezed on? Had it been bled on? Had it been … Ah, but Boots, Quakers, didn’t stock that sort of book. Shield-shaped plastic membership tags played some part in each transaction: held by the library till the book was returned?

  Robert Stokes’s premises were a hundred yards west of Bobby Stokes’s home. What tons of fun were to be had from that nominal coincidence! Salisbury’s most august grocer emitted a heady odour of roasting coffee beans matched only by that of the shop at the top of Above Bar in Southampton which sold nothing else. Stokes sold everything that was then available. Glacé fruits were strewn like the aftermath of an explosion at Murano. Sacks of dry goods might have been sandbags. It was hushed as a holy place. Hefty rectangles of industrial cheese-style lactic product, cylinders of Gorgonzola, Stilton, Danish Blue. Boxes of stuffing mix, gravy powder, baking powder and custard powder. As a superior grocer it naturally sold wine. ‘Roodge which is red. Blank which is white. And rosy which is in between.’