The Old Manor in Wilton Road had previously been known as Fisherton House Lunatic Asylum. According to its historian Gertrude Smith it was a ‘private madhouse’, the largest such asylum in England. Six hundred patients were detained there, some of them criminally insane. It was the bin. The preface loony was redundant.
Avert your eyes, madness travels at the speed of light. On both sides of the road there were high, stockbrick walls with drifts of dust describing downward curves against them. No one swept the pavements. No one walked them. It was haunted by spectres of the living. This was a place to hurry past.
The frosty demeanour of a pompous, churchy, tall, short-tempered, dome-headed, breast-pocket-handkerchief-brandishing solicitor carrying a shotgun in a tan canvas and brown leather slip was attributed not to his having a daughter who had been confined to the hospital for more than a decade, but to people knowing about it.
Mr Reid was of my parents’ age. He lived with his rich elderly parents in Downton. He ‘had been in the Old Manor’. He masticated perpetually, baring perfectly brown teeth. He rode an overladen bicycle dressed in a long dun rubberised mackintosh (slightly perished): were these signs of madness? Was his psoriasis a dermal sign of madness? I feared that my flaking wrists and ankles were the stigmata that presaged a sojourn behind dusty walls.
Lest they land me there I never admitted to suffering hallucinations even though I wanted to understand why, say, trees, huts, vehicles, cows were transformed as I stared at them. They did not become anything other than trees, huts and so on. It was, rather, that they were, suddenly, more themselves, hitting a higher register of existence. Chromatically intense, vital, above all perspectivally anomalous, moving yet not moving – my eyes and brain conspired to reveal objects as they are shown in a dolly-zoom.fn1 It astounded and disturbed me, an unasked-for treat that I apparently granted myself yet over which I had no control: oh, to hallucinate at will! I was merely an involuntary illusionist whose rapt audience of one was eager for more. There was an evident kinship with masturbation, another gift from within which was accompanied by the warning to keep it secret because it, too, leads to the bin and to blindness or at least myopia. Sure enough, my hallucinations coincided with a startling deterioration in my sight, which only occurred after I had discovered masturbation.
The Revd Keith Wedgwood, succentor of Salisbury Cathedral, was, after all, right to have counselled against it in the talk about ‘things’ he gave us the term we left the school (attendance obligatory). He was no doubt charged with this pointless task because he was a scholar of the Christian approach to masturbation, of the theology of onanism rather than its practice. If only I’d heeded him rather than smirk inwardly. But too late, Keith, too late! As if to indicate to us how grown up we were he delivered his grave homilies in the low-ceilinged sitting room of his house beside Choristers’ Green and Mr Searle’s sentry box. We listened to blatant denials of corporeal inevitability based in Levitical superstition and in the churchy hatred of pleasure. Did this prickly fellow who, ‘faith’ apart, was not stupid, really believe that we’d observe his ponderous warnings? Quite probably yes. Because we remained straightfaced, undissenting, maybe he was able to delude himself that our genitals would indeed do god’s will, that our hands would be stayed by morality’s manacles, that fear (of retribution, disease, shame and – top of the pile, always the winner – uncleanliness) would trump auto-concupiscence which is actually deflected concupiscence: we do not think of ourself but of the yet unattainable labial lips or buccal lips which will one day replace the ever-strengthening fist – we hope. He enjoined us to not to succumb to the temptations cast by the mysterious practice of something called premarital intercourse, which, unless we were very much mistaken, sounded like shagging and fucking. It was ungodly and against the teachings of the church, it was morally corrupt, corporeally unhealthy, socially irresponsible and not for gentlemen in the making. So, like cigarettes and drink, it was to be urgently pursued.
Wedgwood’s relationship to the Cathedral School was close but ill-defined, some pastoral post no doubt. He was sleeker, younger and more urbane than most of the cathedral’s clergy. But he had the usual dogmatic piety and the usual preposterous ‘faith’, i.e. unimaginative irreason, low-grade fantasy, wishful angelism, empiricism’s refutation, subscription to unsubstantiatable, half-witted folk myths, the vanquishment of doubt, pitiable certainty. If you are so crass that you believe in god, annunciation, assumption, transubstantiation, in Jesus-the-sometime-mass-caterer rising from the dead and all the rest of the risible, offensive shit, you must find it easy to believe anything, absolutely anything; to believe, for instance, that boys on the point of puberty will observe strictures which their strutting glands are bound to ignore. We were initiates of Kamera and QT. We envied Gerald Deacon whose father was a newspaper and magazine wholesaler. His warehouse in Brown Street, near the Darby and Joan Club, was a hamper of forbidden fruit. There was nothing we didn’t know about retouching. There was nothing we didn’t want to know about the retouched. Who were they, these fallen women? (That epithet was still current in 1960.) Where did we find them? Where were they? Were they in St Michael’s Home School, a couple of hundred yards from the Old Manor, across the railway lines in Churchfields?
No. The girls there were sad and pallid. They were punished for the mewling consequence of premarital intercourse by being treated as prostitutes and granted ‘sanctuary’ in an 1860s building girt with fire-escapes. They were fed slops, reminded of their sin, made to march in crocodiles of guilt and submit to religious instruction. Their babies were forcibly taken for adoption. This near-prison, which existed till 1968, had similarities to Magdalene Laundries, those concentration camps with a lilting brogue. The gulf between St Michael’s downtrodden inmates and the objects of my sexual curiosity could not have been wider and became a matter of vaguely Gladstonian shame: this was how men (and boys and nuns) could debase girls. Such a realisation would have delighted Keith Wedgwood, for in that moment the desire to be a sexual human was briefly tempered by the incipient Samaritan, the moral rescue dog.
OLD MILL
On Saturday 18 April 1936 about fifty people, among them my father and Peter Lucas, attended a dance recital given by the art student Gwyneth Johnstone at the Old Mill Club at West Harnham. She was accompanied on piano by her mother Norah Back and watched by her father Augustus John. At 11.20 the club was raided by several members of Salisbury’s zealous police force. Although there was no hint of impropriety or actual intoxication Augustus John, Hugh Dixon, Robert Giddings of The Moat, Britford (subsequent occupants: H. Wilson Sheppard and Hugh de S. Shortt), Frederick Maitland-Heriot of Timsbury Manor, Romsey (subsequent proprietor: Oliver Cutts) and Dr Patrick Wallace of the Machine Gun Concentration Camp at Warminster appeared before Salisbury Magistrates Court on 26 May. Each was fined £5 for consuming intoxicating drink during non-permitted hours. The club’s proprietor Elspeth Fox-Pitt (née Phelps) was the daughter-in-law of Augustus Pitt-Rivers, ‘a lady of gentle birth and breeding’. £30 with £60 costs and ‘struck off the register’. (She was a once-celebrated couturier and costume designer who had been involved in a suit after she was sacked from her fashion house when it was bought by Paquin in the 1920s.) In her opinion the club ought to have been run by a fierce sergeant-major, which would have so delighted such habitués as Stephen Tennant, Cecil Beaton, Tom Mitford, Lord David Cecil and David Herbert. Mrs Fox-Pitt staunchly denied rumours of ‘nudist dancing’ and traffic in drugs. The Salisbury Journal was obliged to print an apology stating that even though they had been present neither Lady Hulse (Westrow’s wife) nor Lady Juliet Duff (‘a four mast schooner with mink sails’)fn1 was a member.
The Old Mill’s reputation took years to recover. No one could make a go of it. It changed hands frequently. Even though it had regained a club licence, twenty years after that night it still excited the constabulary’s attention. (Architectural-historical aside: John’s friend, the stylistically various Oliver Hill had dra
wn up plans for an extension to this club, The Old Mill, which are shown in Alan Powers’s exemplary monograph of that architect. The cause of its not being built is unmentioned; it was almost certainly unknown to Powers, as was the connection which got Hill the commission.)
By the time I had overcome my infantile fear of Dog West Harnham (not least because the dog was no longer in attendance – dead, I hoped) it was owned by a lavishly strawberry-marked man. He was repeatedly denied a full licence, which no doubt accounted for his choleric mien. He wasn’t as frightening as the dog had been. Nonetheless he was perpetually and ostentatiously watchful, as though convinced that merely by hanging about near the sluices and weir, gazing at the foaming water, I was determined to inconvenience him. I wasn’t. Observing the patterns water makes is like decrypting a log fire. Faces, gargoyles, grotesques are fleetingly created by the flames, the white water and our fancy. That log is a hare in profile. That spume is a lion’s head. See the leaping ghosts and dancing primates! I took an innocent delight too in the hydraulic ingenuity of the feeders, carriers, leets and gutters which drew water from the river upstream of the mill and caused it to flow at several levels across the floated meadows. The intricate system had yet to fall into the disrepair it suffered in the Seventies and Eighties (from which it has been rescued). There were still ancient, nearly crippled, forever stooping drowners tending the sluices and hatches: Mr Evans and our neighbour Mr Thick.
My father would row to the Old Mill. Or rather to within sight of it, for in the summer months, the boating months, the river below the mill was wide and shallow. The water had fulfilled its function. It was no longer fuel, no longer worth controlling. It went its own way. So the boat’s hull scraped against the gravel bed. I would leap into the water to relieve the load and push it clear. Then we’d float downstream past Alligator Island which wasn’t an island but a willowed tongue of land, strictly an artificial isthmus, bordered by the river and a shaded leet wide enough to take the boat if punted with an oar. This was where he was forever Bevis. This was Stalky territory. That anyway is how my father thought of the Old Mill’s environs, a world away from a smoky, beery club visited by the police. He had done his utmost to excise the memory of the night of 18 April 1936. When my mother (who was not there, they had yet to meet) once referred to it in front of me he responded with tetchy embarrassment which was surprising given the inoffensiveness of her casual allusion. But I had yet to learn that there is no equivalence between cause and effect, that they can be waywardly disproportionate. I had no conception that recall of a distant incident had the power to wound esteem and, further, the self carefully constructed in the image of the sporting countryman. Besides, I thought a raid on a club sounded rather thrilling. I was easily pleased.
OSMINGTON MILLS
It was a scuddy billowy day when I ate the whale. Not the whole whale – I was only four – but enough whale to get the idea of the whale’s quiddity, to get a mnemonic fix, which persists down the years and is ocular and palatal and olfactory and haptic. Grace and Edgar Meluish who cooked the whale in a pie the size of a car tyre were standard-issue bohos of the era. They made bad pottery, sold unprovenanced antiques, ran empty cottage restaurants, welshed on debts, specialised in flitting from one grand ramshackle house to the next dilapidated manor. They rarely paid rent. They often threw parties (bring a bottle!). The whale pie party was on the beach at Osmington Mills close by the chalk-work of George III on horseback which might have been cut by Stubbs. We sat on undulating banks of stones. The cliffs were dirty, pocked candlewick spreads, as though southern England’s nature were in mimetic thrall to cheap furnished rooms. Edgar wore earsplitting tweeds and a knotted Windsor. Grace’s fubsy arms extended sleevelessly from smocked shoulders to lilac nails. When the two of them lifted the butter muslin from the pie they did so with dance steps, daft pride. The pastry was tan and wan. The English could as surely undercook flour as they could overcook meat.
Edgar had levelled a shelf of stones. The pie, the pale wheel, sat on it in an enamel baking dish that might have been a giant’s chamber pot or a vessel for soaking clothes. It was a stench associable with those functions that was released when Edgar made the first incision. A gust struck me, squatting. The smell was that of cat food, of faeces, of bleach. The meat came in grey chunks, mighty dice of eraser rubber. They were set in a dense opaque paste that might have been petroleum jelly. Whale is as gelatinous as pig. It is also faintly granular, another property it shares with pig that has been long cooked. The meat looked smooth and fibreless. The taste was only vaguely marine. It was the oxymoronish combination of the gelatinous and the granular which rendered it so foully emetic. My wedge was about eight inches long and its share of the pie’s circumference was perhaps three inches. It was a lot of whale to lose under pebbles. The rest of the party was more candid about its antipathy, although my father, who had eaten hedgehog and badger, tucked in dutifully, and so did Grace and Edgar’s teenagers, presumably inured to a diet of exotic species.
Since then I’ve eaten the tripe of kine and sheep, sea slug (bêche-de-mer), ox brain, lamb brain, pig brain and trotter and ear, duodenum and other intestines, spinal cord, flying fish eggs, beaver, salmon entrails, testicles (rognons blancs), locust et cetera. But there is a limit to omnivorous curiosity and carnal abandon. Whale is mine. Not another cubic metre will ever pass my lips.
OWLETT’S END
Please, I’d whine, please don’t let’s go through Upavon and Pewsey (where the canal is pastoral, unaffecting, harmless).
Let’s go through Cholderton and Collingbourne.
This eastern route to Marlborough crossed the Kennet and Avon Canal near Burbage. It was the first canal I’d seen.fn1 Duckweed smothered the sluggish water, the decaying water, the foetid water. Duckweed’s primacy was threatened by red bloated inner tubes, rusted chunks of metal, armatures of nothing, aquatic scrap. The straightness was unyielding and perverse. It disappeared into a distant tunnel of trees, shrubs. It prompted a thrilling fear that I retain: I longed to see it, I loathed to see it. A few miles away in Savernake Forest, surrounded by cypresses, there stands a creepily lugubrious church redolent of Victorian death.
Every couple of months on a Sunday we visited Evesham, two hours and eighty miles north.
Marlborough and Swindon were fixed points, linked by a Roman road through Ogbourne St Andrew and Ogbourne St George: Og was a satisfying initial syllable. I admired the eye surgeon John Ogg; would be fascinated by the clumsy and delicate pianist John Ogdon; was stirred by the meaningless west country cry of Oggy, Oggy, Oggy. North of Swindon there was again a choice of routes. They diverged in Stratton Saint Margaret at the signwriter’s crossroads. Again, the eastern route was more engaging. My father never failed to remind me that the improbably baroque small town of Highworth enjoyed Betjeman’s approval. (It was in this context that I first heard his name.) We crossed the nascent Thames at Lechlade. That town’s new public lavatory had been personally inaugurated by the Mayor. The very name of the next village, Filkins, sang of maypoles and ribbons. The name of its squire didn’t: this was the despicable Sir Stafford Cripps Bt, sometime ambassador to Moscow, useful idiot, Marxist Quaker and hairshirted fellow traveller who as Attlee’s chancellor imposed his highminded asceticism on Britain and who, more than anyone, exemplified the state’s usurpation of noblesse oblige.
Burford: a tea shop and wisteria town, all limestone and quaintness, a presage of the Cotswolds to come. The Countryman was edited by Cripps’s son at premises in Sheep Street. Hank subscribed to this worthy magazine whose covers of rough green paper were as unpleasant to the touch as a ration book. You could feel them doing you good.
All around this fringe of the Cotswolds there was a kind of country which, so far as The Countryman was concerned, might as well have not existed. Not the country of oolitic hegemony and picturesquely crumbling walls but of row upon row of Nissen huts in woodland and parkland, beside runways and ranges. Former army and air force quarters, these ru
dimentary wartime buildings now served as Polish Resettlement Camps, DP camps by another name. Here, Poles who had fled Hitler to join the Allied cause reaped the reward of the freedom they had fought for – ablution blocks with asbestos ceilings. Thus was the promised land. But now that Poland had been ceded to Cripps’s chum Stalin they had nowhere else to go other than these forlorn places, reminders of the old country’s industrial death plants where many of their kin had perished: so they shouldn’t grumble. These temporary dwellings were still there in the 1960s.
Stow on the Wold where the wind blows cold.
And where, according to my father, in 1953 or 54 a prep school vanished overnight.
Many such schools were simply businesses run by bluff chancers who took advantage of an ample supply of invariably unheated, barely electric’d country houses which their owners could no longer afford to maintain. They took advantage too of an ample supply of otherwise unemployable ex-officers and otherwise unemployable ex-pupils; these sadistic oddballs were transformed into ‘masters’. Ignorance was passed down from one generation to the next. Qualified teachers were scarce, graduates almost unknown. The domestic staff were dipso bulldykes. Pastoral care was when Sir invited you to give him a hand job.
The school on the edge of Stow did not own the house it occupied. The rent went unpaid. Local merchants’ bills went unpaid. As the debt mounted, the headmaster, on the point of a breakdown, took drastic action. He rented another house, 100 miles south in Somerset, and by cover of night moved the school to it. Pupils, beds, desks, books, goalposts … all were packed into a convoy of coaches and pantechnicons. No forwarding address was left. The parents, many of them overseas, were not informed.
Beyond Stow: the open high road north; watercolour clouds; morose sheep; gust-buffeted swifts. This was one of several places which my father would enthusiastically describe as being on the roof of the world. Any sensation of transcendence or sublimity was immediately quashed by the low comedy of Snowshill being pronounced Snozzle. Laugh. The Fish Inn’s weird pyramidal roof was that of a dovecote or oast. At the bottom of the curling road down Fish Hill lay Broadway, a village of such emetic tweeness that it might be a dream of F. L. Griggs or Norman Jewson – which, of course, it was: a stage set derived from an arts and crafts illustration showing the Village of Yore, the Garth of Days Beyond Memory, a distant paradise of adzes, smocking and deference.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 26
