An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades

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СКАЧАТЬ enough. How I longed to be loved by a handsome master with the looks of a fighter ace.

      When boys lie sated they do not consider kissing each other. Like the Spanish girls (or town prozzies) with nits in their mile-high beehives they never kiss. When Dave told me he had felt his one-year-old sister’s nappy’d vagina whilst she was in the pram at the plum orchard end of the garden I was less shocked than I would have been had he told me that he kissed her. (What actually interested me was Dave’s mother’s negligence in parking her in a place that teemed with wasps gorging on fallen fruit. In my moral hierarchy exposing a baby to the possibility of a wasp sting was a graver offence than casual fraternal violation.)

      What was Mr Blythe thinking of? Kissing!

      It evidently didn’t occur to me that Michael Lea had merely repeated the euphemism used by whoever had told him the reason for the sacking. It didn’t occur to me that the informant might have been an adult to whom cockfighting was but an ancient memory or even a matter of ignorance and that bugger was a word never to be spoken save as an oath and, even then, not in front of the renchild.

      That night they sung without Mr Blythe. The programme was, evidently, amended. I didn’t notice. I didn’t know or care how Mr Blythe’s special bits of lieder were taken care of. I was bereft and puzzled. Why had I not been favoured with his attentions? He liked me. Douglas Blythe was young and charming. His smile was shy and inviting, too inviting maybe. He smelled of lavender cologne. His hair was rakishly long for the era, if rather crinkly; it was stepped and staggered. He wore a British Warm, canary-yellow pullovers and tan suede shoes: someone said ‘he smooths around at suede miles per hour’. He had some pet guinea pigs in the garden of his digs in Salisbury Cathedral Close. His handwriting, which I sought to emulate, was exquisite, derived from italic, as crisply orthogonal as the terraces of his hair.

      His expulsion was swift. He vanished, he was not spoken of. What had become of him and his guinea pigs? Any question about his fate was met with a frosty churchy silence that warned not to ask again. I feared for him. My father had spoken in a regretful, uncharacteristically couched way of a Chafyn Grove schoolmaster named Mills who had been a squash partner of his when I was a baby. Mills had committed suicide. He was queer. Very good sort, had a really killing drop shot, just on the cusp of the tin, but queer. And queers committed suicide. Out of shame, guilt, dishonour, self-disgust. That was the received wisdom of the era. Not that it was much discussed. Cruel criminalisation and persecution were unconsidered, never spoken of. For a few days I longed to be assured that Douglas Blythe had not followed the same route as Mills and as Nancy’s bachelor brother Jack Misselbrook who worked at the Admiralty in Bath and slit his wrist. Was Dr Burt-White queer?

      Then of course, I forgot Douglas Blythe.

      Six months after his banishment from Salisbury I was honoured to be deputed to sort the school’s morning post in a mediaeval vestibule coarsely partitioned with painted plywood. I repaid the faith shown in me, arranging the letters with taxonomical diligence in trays according to boarding pupils’ houses, masters’ common room, bursar’s office, domestic staff etc. Among them were several to the headmaster E. Laurence Griffiths. One caused me to gasp: a small, square, cream envelope addressed to him in what was, unmistakably, Mr Blythe’s writing. It was postmarked Wolverhampton. The junior detective within me, a Blytonian nosy parker, scrutinised the envelope. When I was sure no one was approaching from either the direction of the changing rooms or that of the undercroft I held it to the window. But the paper was frustratingly thick and disagreeably rough: handmade paper was hopelessly old hat. What did the letter say? I toyed with stealing it, pretended to toy with stealing it, knew I was deluding myself. Unlike Stammler, a persistent and boastful shoplifter, I didn’t have the nerve. Its very existence bemused me. It suggested a lack of finality in the affairs of the world: a sacking was not, evidently, a complete rupture. Why was Mr Blythe in Wolverhampton of all places? He spoke with an amused drawl (which I coveted and failed to imitate). What connection could he have with a sooty factory town whose primitive inhabitants’ accent I knew from Uncle Hank’s misanthropic take-off to be a matter of ridicule? Worse: Wolves, in those days a force in English football under Stan Cullis, wore ‘old gold’ shirts which offended my eyes; I hurried past the colour plates of them in Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly and the countless annuals I acquired. Moreover Wolves had had the temerity not to recognise Duncan Edwards’s brilliance. No one went willingly to Wolverhampton. Then it occurred to me: there must be a gaol there to which Mr Blythe had been confined for kissing. How could I confirm this suspicion which would, through the course of the morning, turn into a certainty? It was a terrible secret between the headmaster, Mr Blythe and me. Had I asked any of my teachers about penal institutions in south-west Staffordshire I would have been bound to reveal it. So, tense, I waited till I got home.

      But: ‘Go and look it up,’ said my mother.

      ‘Where, Mummy?’

      ‘In … Oh, Jonty darling, go and ask Daddy.’

      My father, in his den oiling a reel, merely said that it was the kind of thing that Uncle Hank – Deputy Town Clerk of the north-east Staffordshire town of Burton-on-Trent and soon to ascend to the very Town Clerkship itself – would know. But, no, I’d have to write to him. I couldn’t phone Hank because it was too expensive – a trunk call. And it could prove especially expensive if answered by his voluble landladies who might be at home when he, wigged and robed, was attending an important mayoral event. My father went on getting on with the one thing that really engrossed him.

      That was the problem with curiosity. When something big came up it was reckoned to be small. But I had to feign casualness in order that no one guess at the overwhelming importance of the matter to me. And I was too embarrassed to disclose my reason for seeking this recondite knowledge. I was too embarrassed or shamed by everything out of the ordinary ever to mention it – as I was when Jeremy Laing died.

      Six months previously, and four months after Jeremy’s death, during the Christmas holiday, I had been walking with my father and Posty one Sunday afternoon. We had just descended the chalky flight of steps, booby-trapped by beech roots, from the heights of Bouverie Avenue to Old Blandford Road. There, ruddy-faced from the chill and beating their gloved hands together against it, we encountered Douglas Blythe and Peter Northam who had been walking on the Hill. The latter’s eau-de-Nil Biro, with which he marked my work, so persistently fascinated me that he had given it to me at the end of one term. An act of generosity that seemed to trespass into the conspiratorial, for pupils were forbidden to write with ballpoints, always called Biros and deprecated as non-U: this was a secret between us, I hid it from my parents. Here were my favourite teachers, young, glamorous, shivering – and out of school and out of term time, which somehow made me their equal. Though my father knew them by sight and reputation I introduced them with due formality, as though they were my friends: friends who bore the title Mister. It was getting on in the afternoon. The orange street lights near the entrance to Government House were already on. Winter leaves were crisp beneath cold feet. A frail sun was disappearing over the triangular pines beyond the tennis club. My father had read my mind, he had noted my pride in my friends – or maybe he was indulging his appetite for gregariousness and acquaintance: ‘Why don’t you chaps come back for a warmer?’ I was thrilled. Mr Blythe and Mr Northam were coming as guests to my home. Warmers were drunk at home, noggins in the pub. And because it was a Sunday evening, almost, I would be allowed whisky with sugar and water. That would impress them. I could talk to them man to man about, say, cars – even though Mr Blythe didn’t have one and Mr Northam’s bottom-of-the-range baby-blue Austin A30 hardly suggested an overriding interest in the subject. Or about, say, the red-shirted Busby Babes, still with a year and a bit to live – even though neither master oversaw games and, besides, as future gentlemen we played rugby at school. Football was as common as Biros, haircream and ITV (which we did not yet receive in the south).

      We squeezed into the tiny sitting room crammed with furniture intended for a house not a cottage, for a home for married СКАЧАТЬ