An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades

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       BOBIE

      Long O. My parents’ affectionate nickname for each other. Only used vocatively. Derivation unknown. Its infantilism embarrassed me. It belonged, like much else, to an era, close but quite ungraspable, when they had yet to make me, when they had been a world of two, unintruded upon, carefree and yet to be separated for almost half a decade: I was no doubt the glue designed to reunite them, to transport them back to the Thirties, to the coming enormity whose germ was there to be ignored by all, to collective amnesia about a future bereft of treasure hunts and roadhouses.

      Not yet Bobie and Bobie, they meet in Southampton, at the Banister Park ice rink, in 1937. My future father falls at my future mother’s feet. He is a tyro skater, she is practised. She literally picks him up. Is it a deliberate fall? What the morons of the football industry now term simulation? Probably. He was, though, a clumsy dancer and an awkward swimmer. The likelihood of his being able to remain upright on skates was slight. Still, the matter of predetermination was never discussed. Maybe romance’s integrity was better served by ascribing it to chance. And maybe they were loath to admit to each other, let alone to me, that they frequented somewhere so proletarian as a glacial meat market. Between that encounter and their marriage three months before the outbreak of war their life was one of heedless enjoyment recorded in crinkle-bordered monochrome.

      Here is a sailing holiday on the Broads aboard Perfect Lady with Ken and Jessica Southwell: Ken wears a short-sleeved Aertex shirt with a lace-up front. Post-war they would be addressed as Uncle Ken and Auntie Jessica though I knew they weren’t. They came and went according to Ken’s RAF postings. He lost his temper, often; subcutaneous ropes swelled in his forehead. He had also lost control of his hair which refused to be tamed by brilliantine and rose in Mayan strip lynchets. They found me a tiresome child. I found them frightening adults. I was occasionally foisted on them at wherever they were currently calling home – a bookless cottage at Boscombe, a bookless bungalow along Britford Lane with an adder in the pond, subsequently rented by the Braithwaites. The last time I saw the Southwells was near Barnstaple in the summer of 1964. Now they found me more than tiresome, an insolent, sneering teenage know-all with, as Jessica said, a tongue in his head. They were inordinately proud that their lame daughter was engaged to be married to a member of the family descended from Henry Curry, founder of the fridge and digital goods retailers. This was their social triumph. Their son had joined the Merchant Navy, that may have been a social triumph too. Ken was by then employed as a golf club secretary, which is how choleric passed-over officers nostalgic for mess life often ended up: a house came with the job. Through its picture window, there across blanched fields, shimmered the distant sea. It was no solace to Ken. The country was going to the dogs. And if that man Wilson gets in … That man Wilson did get in.

      Here is my father fishing, always fishing: casting a fly in a chalkstream, displaying his catch, up to his wadered thighs in white water, crouching on rocks beneath contorted pines, seated on a dead trunk adjusting a reel with a jeweller’s screwdriver, netting a trout from a rowing boat’s stern with the rod parabola’d by the struggling fish. He often wears a Norfolk jacket with two buttoning breast pockets and a belt. The material is Donegal tweed. The photographer was my mother. There are fewer snaps of her, a towny acclimatising to willowy, watery places with the eagerness of new love. Here she’s standing beside the ford through the Blackwater at West Wellow. My father made lifelong friends of the Gradidge family. He fished their stream, a feeder of the Test, and he shot on their three farms. At the party in the village hall for Mr and Mrs Walter Gradidge’s golden wedding anniversary Mrs Gradidge indicated my girlfriend and asked my mother: ‘Where did Jonathan find her then? I wish Clifford could find himself one … he could buy her a Jag straight off.’ Clifford, then pushing fifty, did find one not long after, a multiple divorcée from Bournemouth who got a Jag straight off and who cost the family one of their farms when she offloaded her latest husband after only three years.

      Here are my parents in a country pub’s garden with friends. Young men looked older then. They wanted to look older. Hence the ubiquitous moustache and the absence of a specifically youthful form of dress. But the faces are older too. Diet? Physical endeavour? It is certainly the case that today the only young men who look older than their years are professional sportsmen who sell their bodies for sums that other prostitutes can only envy. That sleek-haired (and moustachioed) fellow raising his glass to the camera is Wagstaff. He is familiar from their wedding photos. The war was a divider on another scale too. When he returned from service he had two prosthetic legs but seldom moved from a wheelchair. Although his wife had been one of my mother’s bridesmaids they soon lost contact. I never met him. Was he called Ray? Or was that her name?