An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades

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       CLOSE THE DOOR THEY’RE COMING IN THE WINDOW

      My uncles were Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle. There was also Uncle Eric but Uncle Eric wasn’t blood, merely marriage. And then there were uncles who were not even uncles by that familial fluke, whose title was honorific in accordance with the lower-middle-class practice of the Fifties, uncles whom I’d never have considered addressing without that title. Uncle Ken, Auntie Jessica. Uncle Norman, Boscombe Down boffin, was my godfather. He was an atheist. Wife: Auntie Nancy.

      Uncle Cecil, pharmacist. Wife: Auntie Rae.

      Uncle Edgar, dislikable optician. Wife: Auntie Cath.

      Uncle Edgar, bearded boho restaurateur / potter / antiques dealer / debt welsher whose raggedy truant children, at least a decade and a half my senior, I envied for their licence to call my parents by their Christian name without prefix. Wife: Auntie Grace.

      Uncle Os lived far away beyond the Severn; he owned a pub surrounded by orchards and hopyards. Wife: Auntie Margot.

      Uncle Jerry, soldier, had been among the first British infantry officers into Belsen. He drank. He killed himself with sleepers and Scotch when I was eleven, thirteen haunted years after he had witnessed the unimaginable: he suffered the guilt of not having had to endure it. No wife, no widow, no auntie.

      Uncle Eric might not have been blood, might not have been officer class – he had no rank to attach to his name in Civvy Street in the days when such a device was supposed to prompt respect. He did have a metal leg, the replacement of the original lost when the Cunliffe Owen Swaythling factory (which manufactured components of the Supermarine Spitfire) was bombed in the Southampton Blitz of November 1940. This loss caused him to postpone his marriage by more than a year. He owned a garage called Gibson’s Motors, a subscription to Glass’s Guide to Secondhand Car Prices, an entire set of Giles annuals, a season ticket to watch Third Division South Southampton at the Dell where the sheer numbers excited me and the ancient cantilevered stands frightened me – I had read in Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly that such a stand had once collapsed at Stoke or Bradford or somewhere. I regarded my presence in Southampton’s as a death-defying, as an exhilarating rite to be suffered in the progress towards teenage, which had just been invented and which was associable with crowds, groups, mobs and the crush of cities. I was necessarily familiar with the crush, for Uncle Eric was slow, gimping up the stairs to our seats whence he’d bark barrack-room calumnies: shirker, NBG, fairy.

      Until I was six or seven Uncle Eric, his wife my Auntie Mary, my only cousin Wendy and their corgi dog Jinx lived with my maternal grandparents in Shakespeare Avenue, Portswood. This was the house my mother had grown up in. There were two storeys at the front, four at the back: this part of Southampton swoops precipitously. It was, thus, a house of steep stairs, unsuited to Jinx’s tiny legs. The placid, massively overfed dog developed a stentorian wheeze, adapting himself to a family of chronic hawkers and career coughers. My grandmother could really cough. She smoked three packets of Kensitas per day. Kensitas was not merely a brand of fag, it was an efficacious expectorant. Uncle Eric, no mean smoker himself but a Player’s man, used to confide to me in no one else’s hearing that she needed them for the coupons. Seventy-five coupons brought a Turkish Face Towel from Robinson & Cleaver, 150 a Lady’s Morocco Purse. The coupons carried the warning: ‘If you do smoke cigarettes leave a long stub. Remove from mouth between puffs …’ My grandmother had clearly not got as far as that last bit.

      It was a house of brute tables, heavily incised wood, samplers, lardy antimacassars and fussy beading, ornately framed birds (a Redwing Blackbird and a Jay) which my great grandfather John Baird bought in New York, where he had briefly emigrated as a young man in the early 1880s: he returned to Scotland in the middle of that decade to marry his sweetheart Agnes McInnes. The walls were hung with prints and photographs of Bridge of Allan, Stirling, stags and the Wallace Monument, of which my grandmother’s grandfather had been the first keeper, a post no doubt coveted by the central belt’s entire janitocracy.

      John Baird and Agnes McInnes were both born in 1861 in the Stirling suburb of St Ninian’s. He was a steamship engineer. His bettering himself took him through a world of horse trams, coal gas, hurdy-gurdies and temperance halls, from grimy port to reeking port. As well as New York he worked in Glasgow, Hull, Liverpool (my grandmother, also Agnes, was born in Bootle in 1888).

      When Agnes Baird junior was in early infancy he moved his family to Southampton where he would prosper and live the rest of his life. Agnes Baird junior married Edwin Percy Felix Hogg (b. So’ton 1885). His Scottish forebears had moved south, initially to Niton on the Isle of Wight in the 1840s. They were tenant farmers, market gardeners and lighthouse keepers. Edwin Percy Felix’s father, also Edwin, was a carpenter. Despite the pressure of Scotland weighing on her, my mother (b. So’ton 1912) never considered herself anything other than English.

      There was always a catheter attached to my grandfather after my grandmother died of lung cancer. He lived on for five years, Pop did, treating me to frites and ice cream on trips to St Malo where he had old friends from his lifetime with Southern Railways, which ran the cross-Channel ferries, old friends who had stashes of wine from before the fall of France, in cellars that had been concreted to hide them from the Germans – or so it was claimed. They all knew the words of ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’, a place I confused with Timbuktu.

      We got cheap fares and trophy wines. Pop gave me prewar Sauternes from a tooth mug in a room we shared in the Hôtel du Louvre in St Malo, just six weeks into his widowhood, the day after he’d bought me the Swiss СКАЧАТЬ