An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades

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СКАЧАТЬ bag that I’d pour away in the morning. Some days he’d take a bus to Dol de Bretagne, where he had a lady friend of long standing. Some nights he’d miss the bus back. By day he would accompany me on walks around the rebuilt ramparts and at low tide to l’Ile du Grand Bé, where lies the unmarked tomb of Chateaubriand whom he encouraged me to read, thus introducing me to the first of the two Breton fantasists who have marked my life.

      He sold the house in Shakespeare Avenue and moved a mile away to Uncle Eric’s and Auntie Mary’s new house, one of two that my mother designed. That’s two too many. Pop moved with a modicum of souvenirs. What happened to the furniture? Did it end up outside a totter’s premises in Bevois Valley? What happened to the souvenir biscuit tins and the souvenir biscuit tin catalogues? It occurred to me many years later that these were items that my father had given his future parents-in-law to butter them up, to let them consent to a life with their elder daughter who would bear me after she’d given up wearing the coat of aborted lambs’ fleeces captured in a Southern Evening Echo photo a few days before they met in collision on the ice rink. When the house in Shakespeare Avenue was taken from me so was the thrilling walk from the alley behind it by way of roads named Thackeray and Tennyson all the way to the front door. This was a treeless labyrinth, all industrial brick and terracotta of 1910–11. My grandparents were its first tenants. I suspect that a Baird held a shotgun to a Hogg head. My mother was born eight months after they married. They eventually bought the house with a windfall between the wars. But they never changed the way it looked. It was for ever 1911. I lived little more than twenty miles away but in a different world. Salisbury is a church city, an army city. In Southampton there were the red and black funnels of great liners, there were predatory cranes, there were vast hangars on the Itchen where boats were built and where flying boats put down in furrows of silver spume. The river was crossed by the ‘floating bridge’, a chain ferry which landed you in Woolston, where there were streets with names like Vespasian and more houses. Southampton was a city of relentless houses. Yellow brick, red brick. Faced in stucco with bulbous bays in a coarse pastiche of Brighton. There were houses with gables, houses with diapering, houses with overblown capitals and crudely cast mouldings. There were houses where Lascars lodged – that epithet which signified Indian and Malayan seamen was still current. There were the houses where Ken Russell and Benny Hill had grown up. They might have been twins sired by Donald McGill. There wasn’t a house in Southampton that didn’t rock with bawdy laughter. Fat bottoms, bloated bosoms, big jobs, the barmaid’s knickers, all the nice girls love a candle, all the nice girls love a wick. I didn’t know whether to block her passage or toss meself off … The city lacked decorum. Its police lacked decorum. At a public lavatory on the Common, officers, curled in foetal discomfort, spied from the eaves on sailors perpetuating sailors’ mores. Every house I knew had about it the whiff of the public house, of a particular public house, one whose guv’nor was Archie Rice, whose punters’ tipple was navy gin. There was indeed a pub by the old town walls that was licensed to distil its own. The Juniper Berry, of course. Uncle Eric kept a boat moored on the Netley shore. It was a Royal Navy cast-off, a sometime lifeboat. Uses of: drinking bottled beer and gin on Sundays, and navigating under the influence. Apart from Spanish holidays which prompted postcards saying ‘The beach is lovely. Eric can take off his leg and slide down into the water’ and rare visits to relatives in his native Manchester, Eric seldom ventured further than his boat. He didn’t see much point in the country though he was happy enough provided he didn’t have to get out of the car. Like all my mother’s family he belonged to the city, the smoke, the bevelled-glass gin palace rather than the mellow country inn.

      Uncle Wangle, né Reginald, Evesham, 1913, lived, when I first remember him, in a flat overlooking the sea at Southbourne, where Bournemouth straggles towards Hengistbury Head. He was determinedly hypochondriacal: migraine, neuralgia, lumbago, cold, heartburn, grogginess, tummy ache. His wife Auntie Ann was frail, freckled, valetudinarian. She was to be pitied because she was an orphan rather than because she was married to Uncle Wangle. Her maiden name was Pope. That is all I know of her life pre-Wangle. It surely cannot have been as hermetic, frugal and loopy as that which she led during the twenty or so years of her marriage (she was a war bride). Wangle had enjoyed failed careers as a mechanical engineer, a policeman, a conscientious objector, an ambulance driver. Now he wrote technical manuals for the De Havilland Aircraft Company and swam in the sea every day of the year. But mere immersion and a view were evidently not enough for him – or indeed for frail freckled valetudinarian Auntie Ann, whose health, he decided, would improve were she subjected to a more fulsome marine contact. So they bought a caravan which they named ‘Bredon’ and parked it a couple of miles east at Sandhills beside Mudeford Quay. There were pines, dunes, shifting lagoons, crumbling cliffs and other caravans. Theirs was no ordinary lot. The caravan was parked on the very shore. Waves broke over it, they battered the sheet-metal walls of the pioneering home, they caused tympanic mayhem, they promised natural disaster, their potency was amplified so a squall seemed like a gale, a gale like a typhoon. An agency of the local authority threatened action to remove the caravan from the shore before Auntie Ann’s health had had a chance to improve. The congress with the elements would be continued a couple of miles inland in a regrettably less exposed position. The caravan site at Walkford Woods was close by a railway line. The brown and cream Bournemouth Belle raced past hauled by the Southern Region’s green Merchant Navy-class locomotives (designed by Oliver Bulleid, second only to Nigel Gresley in the Steam Pantheon).

      I was forced to spend part of every summer holiday with them and the shared Elsan and the neighbour’s girl Shirley whose favourite record was The Stargazers’ ‘Close The Door They’re Coming In The Window’, which I believed had something to do with a plague of locusts. It terrified me. I prissily told Shirley that my favourite record was Handel’s Water Music. Uncle Wangle’s favourite record was anything depressing by a dead Scandinavian or anything gloomy by a dead Finn. When Auntie Ann’s health once again failed to improve they moved a further couple of miles to Hinton Admiral where they bought the lodge of a decrepit, unoccupied William IV house whose grounds were being covered in bungalows. The sitting room was octagonal. Its floor was marked with Ls of white sticky tape which indicated precisely where to position a chair for maximum auditory efficacy when listening to the new hi-fi which played Grieg, Grieg, Grieg and occasionally Sibelius. Cruder music, the music which excited me, was not welcome. My taste for Elvis Presley was again incredulously mocked. I bought ‘All Shook Up’ and got bollocked for it. I put on a pullover one chill September evening and was told how soft I was – the implication was that I was a mummy’s boy who had inherited his mummy’s sissy city ways. When I admitted to having gone in to Christchurch to see a film called Light Up the Sky, a feeble ack-ack comedy with Benny Hill and Tommy Steele, Uncle Wangle rolled his eyes. He abhorred the cinema, never owned a television, listened only to the Home Service and the Third Programme, read the Listener and the Manchester Guardian (it arrived a day late, by post. The organist, composer and English teacher Richard Lloyd also subscribed to it by post: with sober fury he passed round our class the edition which reported the Sharpeville massacre). Wangle didn’t eat meat; rather, he didn’t buy meat. He was a practised scrounger. He ate Grape-Nuts, a cereal as dentally unforgiving as pebbledash. Auntie Ann made equally challenging nutroasts. Bread and sugar were brown. Pipe and tobacco were brown. Clothes were brown or brownish. Auntie Ann wore oatmeal hopsack and had a diarrhoea-colour pea jacket for best: she was oblivious to style. Uncle Wangle wore Aertex the whole year through, a hairy tweed jacket, a knitted tie, khaki drill trousers, sandals or canvas sailing shoes called bumpers. It goes without saying that the house was virtually unheated, that his Morris Minor was a convertible (it was called ‘Janet’), that Auntie Ann wore no make-up, that he was dismissive of the grandest house in the locality, the ruinous Highcliffe Castle, which he reckoned bogus and ugly – this would, of course, have been the reaction of most of his coevals to Victorian mediaevalism. It was not its retrospection that he deplored but the theatricality of its expression, and the pomp.

      The stratum of old England he sentimentally connected with was that of down-to-earth yeomanry rather than nobility: stout not flash, worthy not chivalric. Uncle Wangle’s and Uncle Hank’s idealisation of a certain England СКАЧАТЬ