An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades

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СКАЧАТЬ was a burly gust of tweed out of Margaret Rutherford by Nancy Spain. The school occupied a timber-framed house of c. 1500 which would be destroyed in 1970 when Rackham, the vandal employed as City Engineer, built an inner relief with a spur on stilts that led nowhere and was inevitably known as the ski jump. I had to wear a uniform: navy blue blazer with white swan on the breast pocket, navy blue and grey quartered cap with a second white swan. This was a novelty which I enjoyed. My parents didn’t. All that expense for just two terms; hence, no doubt, their pleading with Mrs Mears at Holmwood.

      The beginning of Easter term 1954 was exciting. I got to walk to and from the Swan School with Roger, who had attended it since he was four. He introduced me to parts of Salisbury’s mediaeval grid that I didn’t know, intersecting streets which allowed us to take a variety of routes, to explore alleys and courtyards safe in each other’s company. But after a few weeks he left for Brazil, where his father had been seconded by the Royal Mail to assist in the planning of São Paulo’s telephone network.

      I was alone among unknown antagonists who were bigger and rougher and maler than Janet Wheelwright. Many had three years’ start on me during which they had formed gangs and alliances. This first experience of a single-sex environment was a shock. Janet Wheelwright apart, I missed the girls: Liz, Elizabeth, Jenny, Sue, Clare, the two further Janets, Penny, even the haughty Caroline, who seldom deigned to speak to me and who was chauffeured in a tudorbethan lodge on wheels by her mother, a headscarf rumoured to know the Queen. No girls meant no calm solicitude, no sweet fragrance of talc and cleanliness, but, rather, the soilpipe smell of almost a hundred shrieking, blubbing, blundering, chucking, grubby, boisterous, energetic, savage, merciless small boys.

      And there was another smell, a far worse smell. One of the permutations of route that Roger and I could follow through the grid took us up Trinity Street. It’s no doubt fitting that a city whose major industries were god and war should have in its centre a dozen almshouses for Christ’s brides, old soldiers, pious widows of the fallen etc. Trinity Hospital was crumbly red brick and worn stone quoins. It has been grotesquely restored when it should have been allowed to perish like the generations within it. A Wrennish chapel stands on one side of a courtyard which we investigated unnoticed. It was too ordered to appeal to us. Nonetheless some time later I did creep in again, alone this time, daring myself to trespass. A parchment woman was upright and immobile on a chair by the chapel’s door. She was unconscionably old, older than my paternal grandmother, older even than my father’s nanny Mrs Hopkins, who could remember reading the news of General Custer’s death at the battle of the Little Bighorn during the smallpox summer of 1876, older than anyone I had ever seen. She appeared not to notice me. And as I left, silently, a man shuffled out of his set towards her. He was, incredibly, as old as she was. These people must belong to the third sex, which I had thitherto believed was the domain of gypsies. They were all matt, all dried up. They bore the complexion of split cement sacks, which caused me to shiver. Trinity Hospital was heaven’s (or hell’s) antechamber where the pallid waited for judgment. In late winter they emitted no odour. You could not smell them. You could not smell their mortal fear. You could not smell their food. Initially the reek was faint and fleeting. By the time my nostrils had got a message to my brain it had disappeared, an olfactory vanishing act. Such instances of evanescence did not last. As the weather grew warmer so did the odour increase. Even though there were days when I detected nothing it was becoming ever more assertive, more frequent, more protracted. It was putrid, clammy, vegetal and carnal. It prompted disgust, then dread, then confused compassion. This was the smell of old people as they relinquished life. This was the stink of death, as rank as that of the long-hung pheasants Padre inflicted on my parents. That route past Trinity Hospital was far from the only choice. I could have taken St Ann Street and Love Lane, or Payne’s Hill where the German spy who worked at a tannery had lived, or grey Rampart Road’s raised pavement, or Dolphin Street and Culver Street. But these were the ways I did not go, for I was drawn to putrefaction, I took shameful pleasure in whatever disgusted me. Were the old living corpses who began to rot before they died? Did maggots seethe beneath their skin? Did they flap helplessly to repel the rodents that gnawed their limbs? The rats in the nearby Friary slums were said to be as large as cats.

      Mine was not a case of nostalgie de la boue. That would imply a yearning to return to brute sordor. I had never left it. It had merely been shepherded into abeyance by the everyday presence of girls who even in prepuberty insouciantly inflict couth on the rough puppies that will grow into the dogs called men. My mother had wanted a girl. And I wanted a sister among whose contemporaries I would find a squaw. Boys with sisters had girls on tap. It was easy for them. Everyone knew that.

      My gregarious parents had a quick turnaround in new acquaintances. Not because a mutual animus was struck, though that did inevitably sometimes occur. It was, rather, due to the transitory nature of Salisbury’s population. Service postings were often less than two years. People came and went. Their children came and went throughout my schooldays. At the Swan School there were menacing charts on the wall with our names listed down the left. Along the line from each name, performance in class and obedience were marked by shiny triangular stickers. Blue and green indicated achievement and good manners, shit-brown and Satan-black were the signs of academic failure and moral impoverishment. At the end of my first term I had an averagely polychrome horizontal mix. Now that Roger had gone I considered my best friend to be a boy called Richard Hallmark, whose chestnut hair was beautiful. We never spoke. But he didn’t hit me. In all likelihood he did not wish to add to the log of his offences. He had acquired nothing but browns and blacks. He was the only boy in the school to have done so. Advised by Miss Swanton that he was a disgrace he burst into tears. I wanted to comfort him. When we resumed for the summer term he wasn’t there. Perhaps he felt himself unworthy of the school. Perhaps he had been asked to go elsewhere. Some weeks later I learned that he had moved. His father had been posted from CDE Porton Down to Cornwall. A far-off wild sea county which I knew of as the home of my father’s late uncle, the Revd John Tarpley, vicar of Roche, and of his daughter Molly, who had enjoyed the privilege of sitting – inapt word – for no less a coyly erotic painter than Russell Flint. A far-off wild sea county where production of Sarin and VX had begun at CDE Nancekuke.

      Diana Colombine’s skin was deliciously fawn like a doe’s, like a high-baked biscuit. Precisely, like a Huntley and Palmers Breakfast Biscuit – a smooth 10-mm-deep rectangle whose corners were curved, whose centre was marginally concave and which I longed for because it was forbidden (rival manufacturer). I longed for her too and her sweet smooth limbs, her sun-streaked bobbed hair whose bangs she was coltishly learning to throw. She didn’t know that she was going to be my squaw even though her qualifications were impeccable: she was the only girl of my age whom I now saw regularly. She had arrived in Wiltshire from Colombo with her parents Harry and Beryl, who had quickly become great friends of my parents. Colombo was in Ceylon. I knew that. And knew too that Ceylon was nearly India. She bore a name that derived from that city and whilst nearly Indians and Red Indians were from different continents they were clearly kin for otherwise they would not be so called. A further link: a lifesize painted statue of a Sioux warrior stood above the entrance of the Indianerhof, a prodigy of Viennese social housing designed by Karl Dirnhuber, father of one of Harry’s co-authors of microbiological and bacteriological papers. That proved something.

      The interior of their thatched cottage at Winterbourne Gunner was dark. The sitting room was all files and bookshelves. The ceilings were unusually high. He would sit at a staunch table placed against the back of a high-back pub settle to whose planks he drawing-pinned notes. He wrote on foolscap notepads unfazed by any activity around him, lit as though by an annunciatory beam. The house was set back from the road beyond a lush paddock which a pony cropped. I confidently impressed Diana with assurances of my equestrian prowess though I had never ridden a horse. I confidently impressed her with my Apache outfit one day when she and her parents came for lunch.

      I greeted her naked save for a Lone Ranger mask over my eyes, a paisley handkerchief round my head with a rook feather stuck in it, bolts of warpaint lipsticked on my cheeks, a leather belt round my waist and an improvised breechcloth – a length of fabric secured by the belt to cover my genitals and my bottom. СКАЧАТЬ