How many times do I have to tell you that I will not have you wearing that C.N.D. badge in this house?
Fuck off.
What did you say?
Nothing.
The sulky heroes of the American cinema stood their ground with contemptuous passivity. Hands sunk deep in the pockets of their jeans, lips curled in a sneer, they kicked at the dust with their boots and dispatched the father figures with a mean wriggle of their shoulders.
Have you been smoking in your room again?
Nah.
It smells like a French estaminet in there. Yeah.
In the parish halls on Saturday nights, the James Deans and Neal Cassadys of the south coast lounged over a shared quarter-bottle of Scotch and waited for the girls to make the first move. Highcliffe, or New Milton, or Milford-on-Sea was just an illusory trick of the light. You were on the road, somewhere far out in that America of the spirit where Allen Ginsberg had seen the best minds of his generation destroyed, et cetera.
You’re not dancing?
Nah.
Want to dance?
Yeah. Okay.
The boys slopped about the floor in their long sweaters, knees bent, shoulders hunched, like easygoing gorillas. The girls, who were so soft and bosomy from the waist up, were curiously slippery and reptilian from the waist down. Every time you came together, you could feel not flesh, but the elasticated roll-ons which they wore under their skirts. Safely girdled against American influences, they danced like spinning tops, talked brightly, and wouldn’t even smoke.
Later, much later, after the girls had gone home in their fathers’ cars, the bums and hoboes came into their own. They stood on the dark verges of the Hampshire roads, thumbing lifts. The A33 from Bournemouth to Southampton was Highway 5. Red taillights faded out over the hill, going south to L.A. and San Diego. Trucks cruised through the long cloisterd avenue of black pines.
Can I score a Woody off you, man?
Sure thing.
Sooner or later, the driver of a Hillman Minx or a Ford Popular would come to a stop, seeing a pair of schoolboys out too late for their parents’ peace of mind. He’d reach across from the driver’s seat and the door of a Chevy sedan would open.
Where ya goin’, fella?
I dunno. Purdy far.
If only I could actually see into the bungalow windows now, I’d probably manage to spot a fellow hobo or two there—fathers of sons and daughters older than themselves. Did they stay up till all hours, waiting to “read the riot act” and sniff their children’s breath for booze, or, shakey with apprehension, ask to see their children’s forearms for signs of something worse? Tramping past their houses in Gosfield Maid, it seemed to me that I had taken the whole game a great deal more seriously than it was ever intended to be played. Like, I was still on the road.
The past and the present were too all of a piece to be true. In the low sun the tongues of foam on the wave crests were as thick and yellow as gouts of clotted cream. Ahead, the Needles were standing proud of the chalk cliff behind them, looking more like stumpy thimbles than needles. Feet planted wide on the wheelhouse floor, I swayed pleasantly in time to the boat’s rhythmical lurching in a slow and easy sea. A Buddy Holly number.
Tha-ere you go and baby,
He-ere am I-I,
Well, you left me he-ere so I could sit and cry-y …
A 45 in a torn white paper sleeve. Holly’s voice, throbbing with glottal echoes, came more clearly over the waves than it had ever done out of the Dansette, jumping the spark gap of twenty-something years.
Well, golly gee, what have you done to me?
I guess it doesn’t matter any more …
No, indeed. Rocking and rolling, trying to get a bearing on the Needles lighthouse in front and on 1959 behind, I thought, I’ve thrown away my nights and wasted all my days over You-
u-
u-
oo, and brought the boat’s head round a point to starboard.
Lymington, where I berthed, was in the money: it both was and wasn’t the town I knew, and it was hard to recover my land legs as the streets rose and sank in a sick-making swell. On home ground one moment, in bottomless water the next, I floundered up Quay Hill and out into the High Street.
The Lymington I remembered was handsome, spinsterly and dull. It was just the kind of bourgeois burg in the deep sticks that a self-respecting angel-headed hipster was honor-bound to light out from at the first possible opportunity, preferably riding on a boxcar roof. Its rosy brickwork and bowfronted shops were Georgian and Queen Anne; its dominant voices were refined and Edwardian.
They played a game called goff on the links, and larnched their boats down at the quay. The forsythia in their exquisitely tended gardens bloomed yaller for them in the early spring, when they were quite orfen to be seen taking cups of cawfee on their wrought-iron bal-coneys. I was occasionally introduced to their granddaughters, who were, without exception, fraffly nice gairls. The Lymingtonians handled words like envelope, fanfare and garage as foreign upstarts, and corrected my pronunciation of them by saying them again in French. Ongvelopp. Fongfarr. Gahraj. Their manners—at least whenever they encountered the bums and hoboes—were distinctly frorsty.
Born in the 1880s and ’90s, the retired gentry set the tone of the place and did their best to maintain Lymington as a museum in which their own ways of speech and feeling were reverently conserved. Their conservatism, in every sense of the word, was ardent. The key to their character lay in their beautifully preserved shoes—brogues, handmade in 1923 or thereabouts, which had been so waxed and buffed that their polish lay in a deep lucent film on a spiderweb of tiny cracks like the glaze on a Ming vase. Their tweeds, apparently of much the same vintage, were fluted and patched with leather at the elbows, cuffs and knees. The skin of their faces, most of which had seen long service in the tropics, had the same crazed, antique finish as the leather of their shoes.
They were so spry, so sure of the way in which they ran their world, that I was gloomily convinced that they had the gift of eternal life. In the year 2000, they’d still be changing their books at Boots’ Lending Library and gruffing the time of day in the bar of the Royal Lymington Yacht Club, the retired rear-admirals jostling for precedence over the retired air vice-marshals. They’d look after themselves exactly as they looked after their shoes. Their loving thrift was justified only by the assumption that they’d live forever, saving, investing, turning their collars and reknitting their old jerseys, as perpetually self-renewing as winter trees.
As soon as I stepped ashore, I knew they were dead. The windows of Lymington’s quayside restaurants were bright, slaphappy collages of credit cards. They wouldn’t have stood for that. Eating out was something that you grumbled over having to do, once or twice a year, at an hotel, where you spent a contented half-hour reading the bill at the end and making noises of irritable disbelief. Nor would they have tolerated the nautical boutiques with their displays of high-fashion storm gear and the port and starboard lanterns which were meant to grace not a boat but an inglenook fireplace or the cocktail bar in the (shiver my timbers!) lounge.
But all this was nothing compared with what had happened to the salt marshes, a wide southward sweep of banks of springy glasswort, where herons creaked into the air on rusty wings and long-legged curlews went prying in the mud for lugworms. From the Royal Lymington Yacht Club, the official HQ of the gentry, you could sit at the big telescope on its brass tripod and combine some unobstructed ornithology with a few choice remarks about how Major DashPouncet had just managed to gybe his old Bristol pilot cutter off Jack-in-the-Basket.
In the Club, the word “development” was pronounced in the same tone that one used for the word “war.” Chaps were taken aside. The whisper went round. Cabals were formed in scented drawing rooms. The gentry were capable of every strategy and subterfuge known to the ingenious military mind when it came to protecting the town from incursions on its comfortable old architecture and brimming, looking-glass Natur
e.
Yet somehow, sometime between 1959 and 1982, Lymington had been sacked by the barbarians of the new. The marshes had been quarried out to make marinas. Where the herons used to fish was now a solid mile of car parks, catwalks and floating jetties. The clink and jangle of steel rigging against alloy masts rang out over Lymington like the bells of a demented herd of alpine cows. The boats themselves, wedged into their slots like bits of a gigantic Lego kit, appeared to be identical. Shark-nosed and white, they wore their slit-eyed windows of smoked Perspex like an army of mobsters in shades. They loafed sulkily in their berths, their white plastic fenders sighing a little as they grazed the jetty.
The gentry had seen the coming of fiberglass yachts, and knew it was a fad that wouldn’t last. “Tupperware,” they said, consigning the material from which the boat was made to its proper station in the lower-lower-middle class. The gentry’s own boats were made of wood, with unwieldy gaffs hanging from their masts like gallows trees. They treated them as they treated their shoes. In floppy sun hats and old trousers, they sanded and varnished their brightwork, re-whipped the ends of their cherished manila ropes, stitched their sails, and found themselves so happily engrossed in their life’s calling of conservation that half a summer of manual labor would go by before they’d risk an afternoon’s voyage across to the Isle of Wight.
The boats in the marinas needed no such maintenance. Many of them never left their jetties and were used only occasionally as weekend chalets. Some were left unvisited by their owners from one year’s end to the next. These big plastic toys spent nearly all their time lying idle, spoiling the view and frightening the birds with the incessant tintinnabulation of their halyards.
There were, so I was told, about 1,300 yachts on the Lymington River. At, say, £18,000 a throw, that would mean a total value of nearly £25 million. The berthing fees alone would come to about a million pounds a year. And all this money was invested in a newfangled toffeelike substance made of resin and glass fiber called GRP. This unalluring acronym officially stands for glass-reinforced plastic; looking at and listening to the vandalized salt marshes of Lymington, I thought it might more appropriately stand for gloatingly rich possession, and be pronounced to match, as a tonsillitic rumble in the throat, Gurrrrp.
I had arrived in Lymington as a bum; I was now indignantly on the side of the fogies. The frippery of the place! The gewgaws! The waste! The destruction! The money! If any of the old guard did still survive, they must be boiling, puce-faced, from behind high windows. This was worse than “the hippies,” worse than the infamous Beaulieu so-called Jazz Festival, worse than the crackpot Wykehamist, Gaitskell, worse than—there was no other word for it, it was worse than worse, it was the worst.
It took a little while to remove the pepper-and-salt mustache from my upper lip, undo the threadbare regimental tie and cool down into being a bum again. I was in no position to rail against the craze for owning boats, and the Lymington marinas were simply the inevitable consequence of a lot of people sharing my own dream of making an escape from an overcrowded country in a private ark. They were a perfectly fair reminder that the dream was not an innocent one: it violated the landscape and the wild things that lived there; it created its own kind of industrial pollution; as with so many dreams, there was an ugly twist to the idyll.
Yet it still seemed odd that this should have happened to Lymington, of all places. In the late 1950s when Britain had money to spare, no town could have been more genteelly frugal. Now, in the middle of Britain’s worst slump for half a century, the town was awash in hard cash.
Lymington wasn’t in the sticks anymore. In 1959 it had been a three-hour drive from London along a road on which the traffic fretted and squeezed through a dozen big villages and small towns. On Quay Hill, London was hardly more than a rumor, and the London people who did come down for the weekends, like the Rapps in their gun-metal Aston Martin, were exotic foreigners. But the motorways which had been built in the 1960s and 1970s had shrunk England to a country less than half the size of the one in which I grew up. Lymington was now an hour and a half away from Hyde Park Corner, and not much more than two hours from the cities of the Midlands like Coventry and Birmingham. Its keynote was struck not by its live-in gentry, but by the weekenders, the guys with the real gravy.
The marinas represented just a small tithe of the profits still to be made in Mrs. Thatcher’s England. Behind each mean-eyed boat there lay the rich pickings of the real estate business, the money markets, the motor trade, North Sea Oil, silicone chippery or the legerdemain of tax accountancy.
I ate at the Stanwell House, a hotel I remembered for its constrained and dowdy hush and its prevailing smell of overboiled greens. It had been a favorite of my grandmother’s, who used to moor Fritz, her miniature dachshund, a neurotic dandy in his lime-green knitted winter coat, to the table leg with a round turn and two half-hitches, and bribe him with scraps to stop him from warbling like an off-key flute. Fritz would not have been welcome in the dining room now. People were scoffing chicken-liver pâté with walnuts and knocking back Château Langoa-Barton at £22.50 a bottle. They were not hushed. Their boisterous gold-card voices rang out over the tables, and they talked in the new slang of space and computers.
“We have lift-off on the Swanley deal …”
“I find the Volvo pretty user-friendly …”
I recognized their faces. They had the family features of Stepmar Securities Offshore (I. O.M.) Ltd. It took me a few moments longer to realize that had I been spotted at my table by a surviving retired rear-admiral, I would myself have been put down unhesitatingly as a Stepmar clone. It was my sort of people—sloppy-shouldered townees with loud voices and plastic money—who had lowered Lymington’s tone and driven the herons away from the marshes.
I walked the two miles out of Lymington to the parsonage. The gorse was in flower on the common, where a leggy, fair-haired girl was up aboard a cantering pony. So Diana Double-Barrel, in hard hat and jodphurs, did still survive; but I couldn’t remember whether the pony was called Achilles or Ajax. Ajax, I rather thought.
The parsonage hedge had been severely pruned and no longer rolled and billowed like the sea. The house’s leaded windows showed clearly through the holly branches: new paint, new guttering, new curtains, new people. Staring in, I found my stare returned by a pale and sexless face behind the glass of my own room. I made a pantomime of following the flight of an imaginary bird—from the parsonage lawn, up over the Crowthers’ roof, and into the stand of pines behind. The face was still watching. I turned and went on down the road, a marked man.
At St. Mark’s, the name of a new clergyman had been painted on the parish notice board by the lych-gate, but I recognized nearly all the names on the slabs of the fresh graves. In the porch I ducked my head and absentmindedly took on the pious hunch of someone entering a church. But the door was locked against vandals.
I found my parents less than twenty miles away, in the red-light district of Southampton. The directions I’d been given for reaching them in their new quarters were entertaining to follow. You had to turn right at the tattooist’s, right again at the Indian grocery and off-premises license, then left along the terrace where the prostitutes hung out their shingles. My parents’ house was on the first corner.
The terrace was built of blue-tinged Edwardian brick, and the faces of its houses were aggressively English. The bulbous ornamental stuccowork around their doors and windows had once very nearly entitled them to be called villas. They had the wholesome snobbery of Mr. Pooter, the dim clerk in Diary of a Nobody, and there still clung to them the stuffy, cozy, anxiously superior air of the bowler hat, the Bicyclists’ Association and the meat tea.
The original Pooters, who’d been proud to pay off their mortgages at five bob a week, would have been baffled by the appearance of the street now—by the turbaned Sikhs on the corner, by the small brown boys who scuffled decorously on the pavement, and, most of all, by the notices in the windows. Where there should h
ave been aspidistras on gothic stands, there now hung pink striplights with black transfer lettering, irregularly spaced and positioned:
FRENCH MODEL JAQUI MISTRESS
The blush-pink lights were just the right color for this quiet and suburban combat zone; they promised mild naughtiness rather than serious red-light depravity, a spot of slap and tickle, not the heavy stuff with ropes and rubber. Even so, it was an odd street on which to find oneself looking for one’s parents.
Their corner house was much the biggest on the terrace. My father had bought it from an Indian landlord who had run it, so he said, as a warren of student lodgings. It looked to me as if it might make a handsome brothel. There wasn’t a twig of hedge round it: in their retirement from the Church, my parents had chosen to advance full-frontally on the secular world, and their new house was a sort of parsonage-in-reverse, deliberately picked for its exposed position in this louche and gamey quarter of the city.
I kissed my mother on the doorstep. “What an amazing place to discover you in.”
“We like it. It’s got so much character, don’t you think?”
The lingering notes of Swiss finishing school in my mother’s voice were accentuated by the way in which, on turning sixty, she had somehow managed to regain the bobbed and boyish figure of the girl in the 1930s photographs. I wasn’t altogether surprised to hear that only that morning she’d been propositioned by a cruising motorist on her way home from the shops.
“I was rather bucked, actually. He was extremely polite about it when I said no.”
My father appeared in the doorway behind her. “Hullo, old boy.” But the old boy was the only surviving component of the father I remembered. The beard which he’d started in the 1970s had grown out into a luxuriant tangle of ginger, jet and silver. Bespectacled, six-foot-two, with a long straggle of hair round his collar, he looked improbably like Lytton Strachey in one of his more etoilated and bony postures. He wore a C.N.D. badge on his lapel, and his pipe, like mine, was couched in the left-hand corner of his mouth. Squaring up to each other with lopsided, smoker’s smiles, we bobbed and weaved like image and essence in a looking glass. Father and son, definitely. But an outsider might have found it difficult to tell who was which and which was who.
Coasting Page 17
