An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades

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СКАЧАТЬ woman in front of me. She busied through. She spoke in hush-voice to her friend’s ear.

      ‘Did you hear … terrible … Dr Laing’s little boy … they don’t know if he was thrown off … fell he could have fell … he fell on his head … his own pony … brand-new … he had one of those hats on cap things but … in the field behind their house … where the barn is … the ambulance took him up Odstock … too late they said … nothing they could do to save the little mite nothing … didn’t regain you know … died in the theatre …’^fn1

      She wasn’t as hugger-mugger as she believed.

      The shop fell silent.

      Thus I learnt that Jeremy Laing had been killed. He was my first friend to die. I thought of his nice wise face and his thick round glasses and his quizzical earnestness and the strain of mockery he got from his father. I dawdled home with my lolly – now somehow shameful, undeserved.

      There were, as usual, the gusts of stinging sourness from Hawk Bowns’s dairy, of scorched horn from Curtis’s smithy. I loitered outside Sid the Butcher’s shop: unburdened by horrible knowledge he was, as usual, sawing and gabbing. Sid the Butcher’s bicycle’s rear wheel’s translucent plastic veil to protect his mac from spray that escaped the mudguard was, as usual, crazed and engrimed. Mr Thick the Drowner grunted, as usual, through his abundantly encrusted moustache. The wicket fence that supported his arthritic bones was, as usual, rotten and miraculously vertical. Ian Horn’s parents’ front garden was, as usual, full of axles, tarpaulins and buckets. The Lovely Queenie’s rouge was, as usual, like a scary clown’s. The russet fur round the collar of her peplum’d serge jacket was, as usual, thick as a bush. Iridescent feathers glinted, as usual, in her hat. She greeted me, as usual, with her blowsy cackle and her former-barmaid-trying-but-failing-to-make-comeback leer. Even though it was a minute further from her house than the R & C, The Lovely Queenie was, as usual, off to The Swan for her lunchtime noggin. Old Street’s ragged metalled surface was succeeded, as usual, by muddy gravel, cinders and puddles. The alley off it that was also a drain flowed with foul leucous liquid, as usual. In the small square of reeking rookeries it led to the pye-dogs howled, as usual.

      This was all wrong.

      Someone had ceased to exist in the form he had enjoyed till earlier that morning, had stopped being a person, had made a monumental shift into a state that wasn’t a state.

      Yet this routine itinerary’s stages, scents and personae had not changed. Nor had the way I perceived them changed. There was no revealed acknowledgment that he was dead. What did I expect? Wilting flowers? The collapse of Mr Thick’s fence? A shocking fact was hidden in my head. That it had no effect on the exterior world signified that world’s heartlessness. I tried to calculate where Jeremy was now, what he was now. Was he a void? And was a void like a vacuum? Probably. Where he had been there was nothing – but where was this freshly created nothingness to be found? How did lack and emptiness manifest? Did a hole appear in the sky with nothing beyond it? Was he going to heaven? If so, had he already got there? How long did the journey take? Did it begin immediately after death?

      Jeremy won’t be round to play again, to go out in the boat again, to row upstream to Alligator Island again. I went through the high gate between the brick sheds into the garden. Crazy-paved path, two fruit trees, hurdle fences, cotoneaster hedge, wallflowers and currants, sandpit I’d grown out of just as I would grow out of short trousers, cowboys, water pistols, Jokari, sport, War Picture Library, sleeping with a night light. All of which Jeremy would never grow out of. He was condemned to be forever frozen in Aertex and Startrite.

      My father was already home. So I remained mute. Over lunch I volunteered nothing of what I knew. It was too embarrassing a subject to broach. Even had I wanted to blurt out the news I wouldn’t have known how to. I lacked the moral means to contravene the etiquette of silence he decreed. And, besides, the start of each academic year brought into my mother’s class new pupils, a catalogue of whose foibles and quirks she treated us to. My father and I ate, she picked at her food and talked. After lunch she returned to the C of E primary school a couple of minutes’ walk away.

      My father went to his den to do his ‘writing’. On a 1930s Remington he typed, in multiplicate, the orders he had written down by hand in the shops he had called on that morning. Later in the afternoon one copy of the orders would be posted to Southampton, a second to Bristol, a third to Liverpool, the headquarters of William Crawford and Sons, where Brigadier Sir Douglas Crawford DSO (1904–1981), Lord Lieutenant of Merseyside (1974–1979), presided over the great baking empire. He lived, surrounded by imperial Chinese gewgaws, at Fernlea, an Edwardian barrack between Sefton Park and Mossley Hill. He shared it and a house in Marbella, Costa Lotta, with his widowed sister, Jessie. He never found the right girl.

      It was counted a privilege to shake the white hand of this powdery, childless paternalist and collector. I was twice honoured, at the Royal Hotel in Bristol, which merely reinforced the weird perception that I was being introduced to royalty. He seemed to demand deference as though his blood were blue or blueish, a baron of biscuits receiving forelock from his vassals and their children, his dependents: Chas Perry, Mr Berrett, Mr Uren, Mr Tyson etc. I hated to see my father demeaned, blusteringly pretending that he was the old snob’s fellow officer.

      That these painful encounters took place in Bristol was particularly inappropriate, for this was a city that, more than any other, I associated with unmitigated pleasure. This was partly due to a friend of my mother’s charming lodger, Dick Lalonde. His route to the estate agents where he was doing his articles was the same as mine to school. He was a voluble propagandist for Bristol: he had been brought up there, had gone to Clifton College and returned when he qualified. Because I admired him I wanted to share his enthusiasm. That wasn’t difficult. The zoo, unlike London Zoo, didn’t reek of animals with hygiene deficiencies. There were deep-fried egg and chips at the Marine Café on the Triangle. Across the road, I ate my first ‘Chinese’ meal, and, in a barrel-vaulted cellar, my first pizza. At Daniel Neale on Park Street I bought a yellow and black dogtooth shirt and a French navy Windac windcheater. I gazed longingly at the chisel-toe slip-ons in a shop window on College Green. My father returned the old Morris Eight (reg JFM 897) which had been defeated by Hardknott to William Crawford and Son’s car fleet and collected a brand-new Morris Minor in which I took proprietorial pride. The words ‘floating harbour’ were enchanting.

      Later I would bunk off school trips to the Old Vic – Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists was the most memorably dire play imaginable – and head with John Rosser and Jonathan Goddard to The Rummer, the very first Berni Inn, to drink ‘schooners’ of sherry. An exception was Harry H. Corbett’s Macbeth. His performance, immediately pre-Steptoe, was so dourly captivating that I did not accompany my friends to the bar. Three years later I saw Richard Pasco’s Hamlet (in gratuitous Napoleonic garb, which accorded with my childhood nightmare, but can have made little sense to anyone else). I had left school by then and had, I told myself, grown out of schooners.

      And by then I had begun to appreciate the city’s manifold peculiarities. The jazz modern Smiths Crisps factory at Brislington; the literality of Totterdown’s name; the deep flights of outdoor steps; the sudden exhilarating glimpses of verdant hills outside the city; the sheer might of the tobacco warehouses; the streets of red sandstone Gothic villas; the terraced gardens of Clifton; the thrill of the gorge and the heartstopping suspension bridge and beyond them Leigh Woods where Mary N—’s body had been found.

       ACCESS TO THE UNKNOWN

      There was a class divide whose boundary was the two almost conjoined mediaeval bridges across the Avon at East Harnham. South of the river stood modest dwellings of СКАЧАТЬ