An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades

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СКАЧАТЬ of pernicious anthropomorphic sentimentality which dignified itself as a doctrine was not, incidentally, a Nazi creation. It was merely hijacked by that regime’s ideologues. The identification of a particular people with a particular place and a particular past was a parochial goal whose paradox was that in the years when Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle (and my father) grew up it was a pan-European commonplace proselytized by Barrès, Maurras, Hamsun etc. Walther Darré’s programme was merely an extreme manifestation of that commonplace. In England it went no further than the primitivist chapter of the Arts and Crafts, the Boy Scouts, the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, the Kibbo Kift, the English Mistery (get that ‘i’), the English Array, Social Credit, Distributism, H. J. Massingham, Henry Williamson, Rolf Gardiner, John Hargrave, Jorian Jenks, Captain Pitt-Rivers and a few other eco-fascist fruitcakes, some of whom were detained under Regulation 18B. It was peripheral. And so too was England’s proud host of land colonies, repetitive essays in failed communality and spiritual root crops (which also failed). Not that Uncle Wangle ever went back to the land. He was merely a fellow traveller of bucolicism who discerned moral worth in camping. He revelled in discomfort. He was a man who loved a Primus stove and who insisted in defiance of all evidence to the contrary that a half-raw potato half-baked in the embers of a campfire was a peerless treat.

      When I was thirteen I put my foot down. I told my parents that I was no longer willing to be farmed out to Uncle Wangle and Auntie Ann during holidays. I’d had enough of being sent to kennels. Two years later Auntie Ann’s health was declining. On the second day of a holiday in Devon she had been hospitalised in Bideford where she would remain for a month. Uncle Wangle visited her twice a week, driving through the night. According to my father her frailty was more conspicuous than ever. Her freckled skin was papery, yellow. She appeared severely jaundiced. But it wasn’t her liver that was the problem. It was her heart. When she at last returned from Bideford she had open-heart surgery, a procedure that was then in its infancy. The operation was performed at the Royal South Hants Hospital in Southampton. It was apparently successful. When she was discharged she spent her days dozing. Her face was drawn and she was junky-thin. But she was in good spirits. As soon as he judged her fit Uncle Wangle took her away to convalesce. They went camping in the Cairngorms. They were accompanied by their arty and – it follows – entirely artless friends Heather and Bertie. A photo, taken by Heather, shows her and Bertie’s Series III MG Magnette, Uncle Wangle’s new half-timbered Morris Traveller, two tents, a boulder-strewn stream, a mountainside, Uncle Wangle beside an upturned plastic bucket, Bertie on a folding chair, Auntie Ann on a second folding chair shrouded in blankets and car rugs, wearing a bobble hat. Soon after they returned home she suffered complications resulting from pneumonia. She died on 25 July 1963. Uncle Wangle wrote in his diary ‘Black Thursday’.

      Despite my protests three years previously my parents, on the point of departing for Germany for the first time since 1938, insisted that I go to stay with him. Keep him company! Cheer him up! I failed. After a couple of days, worn down by his litany of complaints (car tyres, drains, workmen, weather, anything) and his deferred self-justification, oblique exculpation and sly self-pity, I packed my grip and went to crash with some friends who had rented a caravan at Sandhills, only a few yards from where in better times he had parked ‘Bredon’ on the shore. One night he turned up on the pretext of checking I was OK. There were girls from another van with us (one of them subsequently married a bigamous car dealer in Swindon). There was pop music. There were bottles of beer, cigarettes. I had never seen an adult look so woundedly bewildered. Outside his own milieu, which was halved by Auntie Ann’s death, he was at a loss.

      He was the loneliest man in the world. His wife was dead. Heather and Bertie had returned to Canada. In his widowhood he was virtually friendless. He absented himself from work. He drove aimlessly round rural England and Wales, sleeping alone in a tent made for two, bathing in brooks. He occasionally sailed with our near-namesake Brian Mead, editor of the Christchurch Times, but this was an exclusively marine acquaintanceship. His obstinacy and pride and self-delusion were such that he very likely never admitted to himself that it was his determination to adhere to his code of faith (or whatever it was) that had ruptured his world. When he died five years later, at the age of fifty-five, it was not so much from a broken heart as from an unconquerable isolation, from incomprehension of another world, one that her death had forced him to frequent if not quite inhabit. He was displaced. He was also temporally adrift: for my twenty-first birthday, a few months before he died, he gave me a model railway engine, a Hornby .00 shunter. It wasn’t a joke either.

      Uncle Hank, né Harry in Evesham, 1907, also wore Aertex, hairy tweed and khaki drill trousers. He smelt of tobacco and of a sandalwood cologne and of coal-tar soap. He never married. Uncle Hank had been engaged before the war to a woman called Vera, who eventually married someone else.

      Uncle Hank lived in digs. He lived in digs while at Birmingham University and he lived in digs when he went to work in that city’s town clerk’s office upon graduating. In 1934 he moved to Burton-on-Trent as deputy town clerk. In 1957 he was promoted and was appointed town clerk, which position he held till he retired in 1972. All those years in Burton he lived in digs with two spinster sisters. There was a hectic week in 1949 when they moved from one suburb of Burton to another, and he moved with them. They addressed each other as mister and miss. At weekends and for holidays he drove to Evesham. Evesham was always home for him. He’d never escaped from his mother – my grandmother. Nor from his sister – my maiden, literally maiden – Aunt Kitty, the Virgin Witch. And when he retired he of course returned to that house to live with Auntie Kitty. It is a life out of Larkin – the carefully delineated confines, the eschewal of the exotic, the Midlands topographies, the walk through the foggy streets back to the digs. But we know now that Larkin’s life was not quite Larkinesque. Both my mother, who was only too happy to entertain such ideas, and the woman with whom I lived throughout the Seventies used to wonder at the precise nature of the sibling relationship between Uncle Hank and Auntie Kitty. Whatever it was, they, like Uncle Wangle, were both childless. Uncle Os, who owned the pub surrounded by orchards and who became the owner of a string of hotels, once said of the three of them that ‘they lived life in fear of life’.

      Uncle Hank had a molar extracted when it was poisoned by a strand of pipe tobacco that was caught between it and the gum. That might suggest a cavalier attitude to personal hygiene, but Uncle Hank was a keen washer even in the days when the house had no bathroom, and a tin tub was filled in the kitchen. He was a wet shaver, a cold showerer. When he was eleven he swallowed a watch-chain and never knowingly passed it. It was presumably still there, lurking in his duodenum, when his corpse entered the fire at Cheltenham crematorium on a fine brisk day in February 1978. Auntie Kitty cried more than sisters are wont to cry.

      Evesham is where two landscapes conjoin in collision rather than elision, the Cotswolds and the Vale. The Cotswolds and their satellite Bredon Hill are all oolitic limestone. Their buildings are geologically determined, now golden, now silver, now grey – but despite chromatic variation they are essentially homogeneous. All quarried stone. All out of the immediately proximate ground, supra-local. From Stow on the Wold, the road to Evesham descends the Cotswold escarpment through Broadway, the show village of all England, the perfect place – immemorial cottages, weathered stone mottled with lichen, greenswards ancient as time itself. The landscape of drystone walls and limestone cottages is of course atypical of England – but it is so persistently photographed, so persistently held to represent some sort of ideal, that it becomes familiar, a norm.

      This mendacious fantasy, this dream of olde Englande ends, harshly and suddenly, at the point where a bridge of the old Cheltenham–Birmingham railway crosses the Evesham road. Beyond the bridge a sort of normality was resumed: 1930s houses in their abundant forms lined the road. There was better to come. An entirely different country, geologically apart too. It might have been designed to offend the sensibility which responds favourably to the homogeneous good taste of Cotswolds.

      The Vale of Evesham is a vital, scrappy delight, an accretion of intimate details, dense with incident. It is an unofficial landscape that is, so to speak, habitually swept beneath the carpet. Best place for it, too, was Uncle Hank’s conviction. Badsey, Willersey, СКАЧАТЬ