Читать книгу An Encyclopaedia of Myself - Jonathan Meades, Jonathan Meades - Страница 10

Courtesy demands that the object of this intervention should be made aware of the intent before the act is prosecuted. It is merely good manners.

Were such good manners exhibited towards Jonathan Venus and Jeremy Leveret?

May 1957. Early one Wednesday evening my parents made me attend a choral recital in the gardens of Wilton House. Every stratum of South Wiltshire’s bourgeoisie was represented along with a few grandees: landowners, wiry soldiers of high rank, gentleman garagists, arty nobs. There was the bemusing buzz of chitchat: what do people say to each other, what is it that takes so much time? How long can an expression of deferential greeting be extended? Everyone spoke proper English or aspired to speak it: open ‘o’s and stretched diphthongs peculiar to the area were inadequately disguised by doilies of refinement. Everyone dressed and behaved with all the decorum due to an Earl’s demesne. We enjoyed the privilege of standing on ground granted to his ancestors four centuries previously by Henry VIII as a reward for their loyal services to the royal rectum. It had rained for the first time in a couple of weeks. The grassless ground around beeches’ pachydermal feet shone. There was the elemental odour of damp earth. The returning sun picked out beads of moisture on the Earl’s noble lawns. His ancient trees’ limbs dripped.

A loudspeaker announcement was made. The recital would begin later than intended.

There was an unspecified problem. The makeshift stage, no doubt: it was merely a series of turfed terraces in front of a roofless exedra. Perhaps the singers were in danger of losing their footing in the wet.

England was fecund, inviting. I left my parents and walked alone to the Palladian bridge across the Nadder. A roofed bridge, a fancy which had long drawn me, had fascinated me since earliest childhood. Its lichenous stones glistened. My hand tried the water’s temperature to check whether it was fit for swimming. It was warm enough, but lack of trunks and nervy propriety stopped me even in this place where I was out of sight: until a couple of years previously I’d have had no such inhibition. Then I swam naked in rivers without self-consciousness.

I squatted on the bank so that my grey school shorts wouldn’t get wet. The waterweed danced and wriggled to the stream’s beat. I adored this river and those it conjoined. They were 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 …

Maybe, after all, I just wasn’t pretty enough. How I longed to be loved by a handsome master with the looks of a fighter ace.

When boys lie sated they do not consider kissing each other. Like the Spanish girls (or town prozzies) with nits in their mile-high beehives they never kiss. When Dave told me he had felt his one-year-old sister’s nappy’d vagina whilst she was in the pram at the plum orchard end of the garden I was less shocked than I would have been had he told me that he kissed her. (What actually interested me was Dave’s mother’s negligence in parking her in a place that teemed with wasps gorging on fallen fruit. In my moral hierarchy exposing a baby to the possibility of a wasp sting was a graver offence than casual fraternal violation.)

What was Mr Blythe thinking of? Kissing!

It evidently didn’t occur to me that Michael Lea had merely repeated the euphemism used by whoever had told him the reason for the sacking. It didn’t occur to me that the informant might have been an adult to whom cockfighting was but an ancient memory or even a matter of ignorance and that bugger was a word never to be spoken save as an oath and, even then, not in front of the renchild.

That night they sung without Mr Blythe. The programme was, evidently, amended. I didn’t notice. I didn’t know or care how Mr Blythe’s special bits of lieder were taken care of. I was bereft and puzzled. Why had I not been favoured with his attentions? He liked me. Douglas Blythe was young and charming. His smile was shy and inviting, too inviting maybe. He smelled of lavender cologne. His hair was rakishly long for the era, if rather crinkly; it was stepped and staggered. He wore a British Warm, canary-yellow pullovers and tan suede shoes: someone said ‘he smooths around at suede miles per hour’. He had some pet guinea pigs in the garden of his digs in Salisbury Cathedral Close. His handwriting, which I sought to emulate, was exquisite, derived from italic, as crisply orthogonal as the terraces of his hair.

His expulsion was swift. He vanished, he was not spoken of. What had become of him and his guinea pigs? Any question about his fate was met with a frosty churchy silence that warned not to ask again. I feared for him. My father had spoken in a regretful, uncharacteristically couched way of a Chafyn Grove schoolmaster named Mills who had been a squash partner of his when I was a baby. Mills had committed suicide. He was queer. Very good sort, had a really killing drop shot, just on the cusp of the tin, but queer. And queers committed suicide. Out of shame, guilt, dishonour, self-disgust. That was the received wisdom of the era. Not that it was much discussed. Cruel criminalisation and persecution were unconsidered, never spoken of. For a few days I longed to be assured that Douglas Blythe had not followed the same route as Mills and as Nancy’s bachelor brother Jack Misselbrook who worked at the Admiralty in Bath and slit his wrist. Was Dr Burt-White queer?

Then of course, I forgot Douglas Blythe.

Six months after his banishment from Salisbury I was honoured to be deputed to sort the school’s morning post in a mediaeval vestibule coarsely partitioned with painted plywood. I repaid the faith shown in me, arranging the letters with taxonomical diligence in trays according to boarding pupils’ houses, masters’ common room, bursar’s office, domestic staff etc. Among them were several to the headmaster E. Laurence Griffiths. One caused me to gasp: a small, square, cream envelope addressed to him in what was, unmistakably, Mr Blythe’s writing. It was postmarked Wolverhampton. The junior detective within me, a Blytonian nosy parker, scrutinised the envelope. When I was sure no one was approaching from either the direction of the changing rooms or that of the undercroft I held it to the window. But the paper was frustratingly thick and disagreeably rough: handmade paper was hopelessly old hat. What did the letter say? I toyed with stealing it, pretended to toy with stealing it, knew I was deluding myself. Unlike Stammler, a persistent and boastful shoplifter, I didn’t have the nerve. Its very existence bemused me. It suggested a lack of finality in the affairs of the world: a sacking was not, evidently, a complete rupture. Why was Mr Blythe in Wolverhampton of all places? He spoke with an amused drawl (which I coveted and failed to imitate). What connection could he have with a sooty factory town whose primitive inhabitants’ accent I knew from Uncle Hank’s misanthropic take-off to be a matter of ridicule? Worse: Wolves, in those days a force in English football under Stan Cullis, wore ‘old gold’ shirts which offended my eyes; I hurried past the colour plates of them in Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly and the countless annuals I acquired. Moreover Wolves had had the temerity not to recognise Duncan Edwards’s brilliance. No one went willingly to Wolverhampton. Then it occurred to me: there must be a gaol there to which Mr Blythe had been confined for kissing. How could I confirm this suspicion which would, through the course of the morning, turn into a certainty? It was a terrible secret between the headmaster, Mr Blythe and me. Had I asked any of my teachers about penal institutions in south-west Staffordshire I would have been bound to reveal it. So, tense, I waited till I got home.

But: ‘Go and look it up,’ said my mother.

‘Where, Mummy?’

‘In … Oh, Jonty darling, go and ask Daddy.’

My father, in his den oiling a reel, merely said that it was the kind of thing that Uncle Hank – Deputy Town Clerk of the north-east Staffordshire town of Burton-on-Trent and soon to ascend to the very Town Clerkship itself – would know. But, no, I’d have to write to him. I couldn’t phone Hank because it was too expensive – a trunk call. And it could prove especially expensive if answered by his voluble landladies who might be at home when he, wigged and robed, was attending an important mayoral event. My father went on getting on with the one thing that really engrossed him.

That was the problem with curiosity. When something big came up it was reckoned to be small. But I had to feign casualness in order that no one guess at the overwhelming importance of the matter to me. And I was too embarrassed to disclose my reason for seeking this recondite knowledge. I was too embarrassed or shamed by everything out of the ordinary ever to mention it – as I was when Jeremy Laing died.

Six months previously, and four months after Jeremy’s death, during the Christmas holiday, I had been walking with my father and Posty one Sunday afternoon. We had just descended the chalky flight of steps, booby-trapped by beech roots, from the heights of Bouverie Avenue to Old Blandford Road. There, ruddy-faced from the chill and beating their gloved hands together against it, we encountered Douglas Blythe and Peter Northam who had been walking on the Hill. The latter’s eau-de-Nil Biro, with which he marked my work, so persistently fascinated me that he had given it to me at the end of one term. An act of generosity that seemed to trespass into the conspiratorial, for pupils were forbidden to write with ballpoints, always called Biros and deprecated as non-U: this was a secret between us, I hid it from my parents. Here were my favourite teachers, young, glamorous, shivering – and out of school and out of term time, which somehow made me their equal. Though my father knew them by sight and reputation I introduced them with due formality, as though they were my friends: friends who bore the title Mister. It was getting on in the afternoon. The orange street lights near the entrance to Government House were already on. Winter leaves were crisp beneath cold feet. A frail sun was disappearing over the triangular pines beyond the tennis club. My father had read my mind, he had noted my pride in my friends – or maybe he was indulging his appetite for gregariousness and acquaintance: ‘Why don’t you chaps come back for a warmer?’ I was thrilled. Mr Blythe and Mr Northam were coming as guests to my home. Warmers were drunk at home, noggins in the pub. And because it was a Sunday evening, almost, I would be allowed whisky with sugar and water. That would impress them. I could talk to them man to man about, say, cars – even though Mr Blythe didn’t have one and Mr Northam’s bottom-of-the-range baby-blue Austin A30 hardly suggested an overriding interest in the subject. Or about, say, the red-shirted Busby Babes, still with a year and a bit to live – even though neither master oversaw games and, besides, as future gentlemen we played rugby at school. Football was as common as Biros, haircream and ITV (which we did not yet receive in the south).

We squeezed into the tiny sitting room crammed with furniture intended for a house not a cottage, for a home for married life that should surely have been led in more expansive spaces, free of scraping and renting. Two hefty wingbacked neo-Georgian armchairs, another streamlined armchair, a gross veneered radiogram with a mesh speaker, a perished leather pouffe, an unsteady wrought-metal standard lamp (its shade was crisp, cracked parchment), the television set on the ‘corner unit’ carpentered for it and for outsize books by Mr Smith in his workshop three doors away and painted chipolata pink, a William IV davenport with hidden, spring-released compartments. This miscellany – only the last was of anything other than familiar value (£40, Woolley and Wallis auction, April ’56) – had to be negotiated like a chicane with added pratfalls in the form of threadbare Persian carpets ruched by a chairleg’s faintest movement and Posty who snored, dreaming of food, and more food. Kalu merely glared. And though I hardly participated in the tentative conversation – little more than an inventory of shared Close acquaintances and courteous anecdotes – I was mutely proud that I had effected so special an hour in that tightly fitting room.