An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades

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СКАЧАТЬ my playgrounds, my familiars, my companions, my solaces. To have remained there gazing at the taut green glassy surface was a greater enticement than a concert. Many of my teachers and certain of my fellow pupils who would be singing tonight comprised Salisbury Cathedral’s choir. They were specialists in the multiple idioms of Anglican joylessness. Music was a trial I endured at school. An extra dose out of school was cause for resentment. I had, apparently, regressed. My infantile appreciation of Britten’s folk settings and Handel’s operas – an appreciation born of subjection to little else – had been quashed by the sensational barbarities of early rock and roll: Elvis Presley, Charlie Gracie, Little Richard. Most of all by Tommy Steele. I longed for his cantilevered quiff and for drainpipes with a sequinned stripe down the outer seam. My taste was for crass trash, mindlessness: I knew because I was told so most days of my life at a school where every room had a flimsy music stand. Teachers who otherwise treated me fondly, even indulgently, remonstrated with me, mocked me, told me I would come to no good if I listened to such ‘music’.

      I walked back along the river past reeds and willows, between cedars and follies, to rejoin my parents. There was an agitation in the audience, a more vital din, a more intense clamour than earlier. Many people had abandoned their crude folding chairs, exemplars of the ergonomic discomfort of those years, and were knitted in preoccupied groups. My mother and father were seeing off midges with their stiff white programme sheets. They exchanged glances which I was slow to read.

      My father said: ‘They’re rearranging things. Mr Blythe isn’t going to be singing tonight.’

      Mr Blythe was one of the less proscriptive among the musicians on the school staff. But I couldn’t have cared less whether or not he was going to be singing a load of lieder. A few rows away I saw Chris for whom, to my father’s irritation, I had spent prep transcribing the lyrics of ‘Singing the Blues’ earlier in the year: he had remonstrated with me in his car whilst waiting for a gap in the traffic to turn from Exeter Street into St Nicholas Road, at a T-junction where I used always to think of the Duke of Edinburgh.

      I pushed through the chairs towards Chris. Their crescentic ranks were now disrupted. His mother and one of his sisters were with him. Of all my friends’ mothers Beryl Lush was the most impressive: cinched waist; black hair; dramatic clothes – gypsy skirts, tailored blouses with an upturned collar; ill-planned house where Brack the labrador snoozed by the Rayburn and game grew high in a larder and The Times was read – a marker of social superiority.

      Beryl, whom I would never have addressed thus, made delicious rusks, soaking stale bread in milk and cooking them in the bottom oven overnight. She was vaguely haughty, handsome. She wasn’t cosy. She was often exasperated. Like my parents she often seemed to forget I was thirty-five years her junior, forgot to treat me as a child, sometimes addressed me as though I were an unusually doltish adult – which I persuaded myself was a form of flattery. She had been an only child. She pitied me for that state. As Beryl Gray she had studied ballet – even if only in Salisbury. She liked theatre and performance. She tried to infect me with her tastes, Chris being resistant to them. Four years later she would take me, whilst on holiday at Thurlestone, to the Drake Cinema in the newly rebuilt city of Plymouth, to see South Pacific. Result: a lifelong antipathy to humourless Hollywood musicals and to anyone called Mitzi, a name fit for a poodle. But that evening, as I extricated my clumsy feet from a chair’s crossrung, she glanced at me discomfitingly, looked away as though she had more pressing matters to deal with. Chris was brother to three elder sisters, hence practised in a gamut of sophisticated gestures I was a stranger to. He somehow made it clear that he had not seen me and that, even had he seen me, he was otherwise occupied. So, a yard away from Beryl, two from Chris, I did what I did through so much of my childhood. I pretended not to be there. I turned invisible. I beat it. Without showing I was beating it. Oh, there are Poth’s parents – father from Swanage, mother pining for Braintree in far-distant Essex which I had never seen but knew to be all golden wheat and white clapboard mills. But Poth wasn’t with them. And they too were determined not to catch my eye. I turned again as though I had forgotten something I had to do and went on pretending till I felt all eyes – what eyes? – were off me.

      I was skulking alongside, almost inside, a yew bush. I took comfort from yews, from their gloom, their peeling red bark, their alluringly treacherous berries, their dust, and from their shed needles’ incapacity to absorb water so that drops rested like mercury on their surface beside twisted trunks and writhing roots.

      Michael Lea whose middle name was Simcott – the son of the vicar of Miserden in the Cotswolds, a scrumcap-wearer, a future Rugbeian and orchestral player, a chorister due to sing treble that night – sidled up to me, smugly excited, his breath, as ever, scented with Meloids. His catchphrase was ‘mitts off’. I suspected that he would claim ownership of the yew as he did of stray pens, rubber bands, Wrigley pellets.

      But: ‘D’you know what? D’you know what! Mr Blythe has been sacked. He kissed Venus One. Sacked!’

      At Salisbury Cathedral School the convention of major, minor, minimus did not apply.

      Jonathan Venus was Venus One, his younger brother David was Venus Two. Terry Lovell remained Lovell Two although his brother had left. The accretion of unrelated Youngs was such that there existed a small ginger creature called Young Five.

      Mr Blythe had kissed Venus One? I was mystified. For many reasons. The long e and terminal sibilant meant that Jonathan Venus and Jonathan Meades were near homophones to the latter, whose hearing had been permanently damaged at the age of five. Thus when the name of either Venus brother was called I would sometimes respond. On the occasions – very rare – that convention was suppressed and our shared Christian name was used I would always respond. I confused myself with Jonathan Venus. Had Mr Blythe suffered a similar confusion? Was I not the boy he wanted to kiss?

      Kissing was of course sissy.

      In the Cathedral School’s swimming pool changing hut, a riot of asbestos, degraded concrete and REEMA panels, just-prepubescent boys boxed with their penises in a spirit of friendly companionability and competitive violence: he who drew blood won. They aptly dignify this as cockfighting, insouciantly associating covert pugilism with the hedgerow gamblers’ sport conducted between roofless brick cowsheds where flames from pyres of palettes relieve the ruined farmyard’s midden chill and lend ceremony to the bucolic rite.

      On Harnham Hill where the chalky paths down the steep slope were diagonal and polished there were hidden places among the blackthorns and barrows which became familiar in late childhood summers. Exploratory sex – I never actually articulated that word to myself – with two girls, my mother’s former pupils, was no more or less than a form of play, innocent and delighted discovery and, not that we considered it, an ancient rite in an ancient Jutish place. Deep beneath the grass which we recreated ourselves on were buried the skeletons and flint tools of our distant forebears who had been at it too, in their time. That’s why we were here. We nuzzled, we felt each other’s genitals, we laughed and giggled and never kissed – that was for adolescence and going out with and love, which was also sissy. The hillside was littered with knotted frenchies, rubber-wrapped seed. They were as common as crisp packets. We knew what they were for. They used to tease me: ‘About time you was able to fill one of them up.’

      Prepubescent sex with both boys and girls provoked no guilt though we knew that it should. It was ‘mucky behaviour’. It was wicked. But it didn’t involve anyone who wasn’t our age. What occurs between coevals is not necessarily willing – but with us it was, it was all enthusiastically consensual, we taught each other as children always have. It was fun, it was living well at a tender age. It was illicit, another intimation that pleasure derived from pain – smoking hurt and was dizzying, stolen sweet liqueurs burnt my mouth. It would obviously have been different had an adult been involved, even if that adult had not been coercive. That adult might have been enjoined by us or, yet better, persuaded by me alone. If only …

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