An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades

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СКАЧАТЬ blinding greenhouses, rich earth, wheelbarrows, hurdles, wickets, glinting cloches, orchards, narrow paths between beanpoles, rusty rolls of wire, stacks of pallets, wooden warehouses, rotavators, crates, raised beds, palings, fences made of doors, unscared crows perched on scarecrows, punnets, hoes, corrugated iron, rudimentary dwellings in vegetable plots, shacks, sheds and roadside stalls selling pears and asparagus according to season, a landscape bright with the red industrial brick houses of market gardeners and with the caravans of itinerant pickers. Ordered lines of cabbages and kale stretched to the horizon. The light falling on furrows made them iridescent. It was an open-air factory. Polythene, stretched across fields, shone like an inland sea. It was a bodgerscape, knotted with twine, secured by Birmingham screwdrivers, roughly improvised. Everything was reused, a vehicle chassis here, a mattress there, damp burlap and mould-bloomed tarpaulin, prams, a jerry can. Uncle Hank’s despisal of it was prompted by its crudeness, by what he considered the ugliness of the structures. Many of the market gardeners were Italians. They had no sentimental bond with the land. They had rendered the Vale of Evesham an industrial site. The earth was, for them, merely a resource. It was unholy, commercial, material. If you grow greengages or cauliflowers for a living you are very likely disinclined to seek spiritual succour from the earth – unless you have been instructed in such practices by an animistic townie. Uncle Hank wanted everywhere to be like the Malverns or Bredon Hill, places that were sacred to him, places of which he had taken solipsistic possession, places that spoke to him, places that were repositories of mysteries, places that had been invested with the most morbid magic by Housman, who came from the Birmingham satellite town of Bromsgrove. Uncle Hank’s conception of these places was a sort of religiose affliction.

      Piety demands that we respect other people’s faith, but what is there to respect in the delusion that a transcendental bond exists between people and place? Awe in the face of geological phenomena or overwhelming natural beauty is one thing. It is quite another to grant landscape powers other than affective ones. It is aberrant to conceive of the inanimate as though it possesses feelings or thoughts or human capabilities. It is daft enough to attribute these qualities to animals, but to hills and dales …

      In Evesham, the exotic was represented by a singular trophy which captivated me when I was tiny, a Gothic arch formed by a whale’s jawbone, brought back to the town by some long-dead lad who’d signed up as a whaler in the 1870s. Uncle Hank never went whaling. So far as I know he never left England in his seventy-one years. To have done so might have cracked the shell built of layers of habit which protected him from, say, the Brummie blue-collars who used to picnic in the park where the whale’s jawbone stands, who used to ride in the pedalos on the Avon. He enjoyed eavesdropping on them and mimicking their twanging inanities, a task he prosecuted with unmistakable despisal for the subjects of these parodic monologues. He had no fondness for them whatsoever. City dwellers were targets; townies were targets (he excused himself); towns themselves were targets, especially towns that had been built after the advent of canals and railways and which were not thus reliant on local materials for their buildings, e.g., Burton-on-Trent. Under his stewardship Burton destroyed itself. The mega-brewers, whom Uncle Hank sucked up to and who plied him with cases of limited-edition beers each Christmas, were men whose all too English mores he admired. They were given carte blanche to demolish the great brick warehouses that defined Burton, the brewery of the Empire. The oast houses, the maltings, the cooperages – they all went. They were expendable (and Victorian). Cities are temporary things. Only the country, the specially sanctioned parts of the country, are eternal.

      Uncle Hank’s and Uncle Wangle’s bucolicism may have been a state of mind – they were not, after all, farriers or farmers or hedgers – but they certainly practised the sort of thrift associable with the rural indigent. Uncle Wangle, who much preferred to be called Reg, owed his name to a supposedly charming childhood capacity to persuade people to give him things. Uncle Scrounger would not have had the same ring to it but would better have summoned his oblivious, unembarrassed tendency to ‘borrow’ and never to return. He was happy to abandon his vegetarianism if someone else had bought the meat. Uncle Hank was even more costive. My father, who earned less than him and had a family to support, was serially swindled by him over family wills – small sums certainly, but that’s not the point – and over what turned out to be an interest-free loan for the Aston Martin. Uncle Hank persistently tried to touch my parents on behalf of Auntie Kitty, who had never worked. And when Uncle Wangle, who was over six feet tall, died, Uncle Hank, who was barely five foot eight, had all of Wangle’s meagre wardrobe shortened to fit him so that had my father, also six foot, been inclined to claim a share in it, it would have been no use.

      Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle never met Uncle Eric. They belonged to the country. Or so they deluded themselves. And they never made much effort to dissemble their contemptuous bemusement that their brother, my father, should have married a city girl. They wouldn’t have thought much of Uncle Eric. I was apprised from an early age of their footling snobbery, of the hierarchy of places they believed in, of their explicit conviction that an affinity with England’s grebe and pheasant was aesthetically and – more importantly – morally superior to a fondness, a weakness, for the fleshpots of the city.

      Some fleshpot, Southampton: the Port Said of the Solent.

      A poor whore has only to sit in a window in Derby Road, and a major police operation will be launched. All the coppers who’ve been on Cottage Patrol squeeze out from beneath the rafters to race a mile east from the Common. Their route takes them past Great Aunt Doll’s chaotic bungalow where there were peals of dirty laughter and sweet sherry and sweet Marsala, and a room heated to eighty degrees and fish and chips for a dozen in an enamel bowl, and gossip and ribbing and silly stories, and gaspers, and will someone let the dog out else he’s going to wee on the couch, and Jonathan you better go with him if you want a widdle ’cos Eric’s been and done a big one and you won’t be able to get in the karzy there for half an hour – ooh the whiff! And there was chortling wheezing and the feeling that you might be alive.

       COMANCHE

      The lithe back of the brave in the foreground; the petroleum sheen of his black hair; the headband; the unoxidised tomahawk (Made In Birmingham); the wigwam; the Winchester ’73; the smoke signals like freak cloud formations; the heliographic bottle shard …

      All these could be staged through a compact between my brain and the back garden – more or less, give or take. What couldn’t be staged were: depth of field; Monument Valley; canyons’ cliffs; Technicolor’s peculiarities; squaws.

      At the age of seven it occurred to me that there was a squaw-shaped void in my life. This coincided with my leaving Holmwood School. My parents had been asked to remove me: they pleaded on my behalf, to no avail. They were inured to my misbehaviour: Mrs Douglas Guest, wife of the cathedral organist, and Mrs Morgan, a vicar’s wife, were among those who sent me home from their daughters’ parties for infractions of pass-the-parcel’s rules or spitting out disgusting food. The school too had had enough of my unwitting disruptiveness. I hadn’t meant to projectile-vomit melted butter in class: I had requested half a pound for breakfast and The Third German Girl had obliged me. I hadn’t meant to yelp every time I was pinched by Janet Wheelwright who lived in a house with its own squash court. I hadn’t meant to step in dog shit and trail it through the school. But I had. I was castigated too for my persistent lateness, and my reveries. It was at Holmwood that I first suffered the intermittent hallucinations which have visited me all my life.^fn1 Then, like my dreams, they often involved loutishly aggressive sheep. I was sitting on a bench outside the windowless room where we hung our coats. A flock ascended the staircase towards me. I gasped with delight. This was a secret world which, instinctively, I knew not to tell my parents about. Rather, then, like masturbation, but without RSI.

      Because I was too young yet to enter the Cathedral School I was sent for two terms to the Swan School, founded in 1931 by the redoubtable Miss Swanton СКАЧАТЬ