Читать книгу An Encyclopaedia of Myself - Jonathan Meades, Jonathan Meades - Страница 16

My uncles were Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle. There was also Uncle Eric but Uncle Eric wasn’t blood, merely marriage. And then there were uncles who were not even uncles by that familial fluke, whose title was honorific in accordance with the lower-middle-class practice of the Fifties, uncles whom I’d never have considered addressing without that title. Uncle Ken, Auntie Jessica. Uncle Norman, Boscombe Down boffin, was my godfather. He was an atheist. Wife: Auntie Nancy.

Uncle Cecil, pharmacist. Wife: Auntie Rae.

Uncle Edgar, dislikable optician. Wife: Auntie Cath.

Uncle Edgar, bearded boho restaurateur / potter / antiques dealer / debt welsher whose raggedy truant children, at least a decade and a half my senior, I envied for their licence to call my parents by their Christian name without prefix. Wife: Auntie Grace.

Uncle Os lived far away beyond the Severn; he owned a pub surrounded by orchards and hopyards. Wife: Auntie Margot.

Uncle Jerry, soldier, had been among the first British infantry officers into Belsen. He drank. He killed himself with sleepers and Scotch when I was eleven, thirteen haunted years after he had witnessed the unimaginable: he suffered the guilt of not having had to endure it. No wife, no widow, no auntie.

Uncle Eric might not have been blood, might not have been officer class – he had no rank to attach to his name in Civvy Street in the days when such a device was supposed to prompt respect. He did have a metal leg, the replacement of the original lost when the Cunliffe Owen Swaythling factory (which manufactured components of the Supermarine Spitfire) was bombed in the Southampton Blitz of November 1940. This loss caused him to postpone his marriage by more than a year. He owned a garage called Gibson’s Motors, a subscription to Glass’s Guide to Secondhand Car Prices, an entire set of Giles annuals, a season ticket to watch Third Division South Southampton at the Dell where the sheer numbers excited me and the ancient cantilevered stands frightened me – I had read in Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly that such a stand had once collapsed at Stoke or Bradford or somewhere. I regarded my presence in Southampton’s as a death-defying, as an exhilarating rite to be suffered in the progress towards teenage, which had just been invented and which was associable with crowds, groups, mobs and the crush of cities. I was necessarily familiar with the crush, for Uncle Eric was slow, gimping up the stairs to our seats whence he’d bark barrack-room calumnies: shirker, NBG, fairy.

Until I was six or seven Uncle Eric, his wife my Auntie Mary, my only cousin Wendy and their corgi dog Jinx lived with my maternal grandparents in Shakespeare Avenue, Portswood. This was the house my mother had grown up in. There were two storeys at the front, four at the back: this part of Southampton swoops precipitously. It was, thus, a house of steep stairs, unsuited to Jinx’s tiny legs. The placid, massively overfed dog developed a stentorian wheeze, adapting himself to a family of chronic hawkers and career coughers. My grandmother could really cough. She smoked three packets of Kensitas per day. Kensitas was not merely a brand of fag, it was an efficacious expectorant. Uncle Eric, no mean smoker himself but a Player’s man, used to confide to me in no one else’s hearing that she needed them for the coupons. Seventy-five coupons brought a Turkish Face Towel from Robinson & Cleaver, 150 a Lady’s Morocco Purse. The coupons carried the warning: ‘If you do smoke cigarettes leave a long stub. Remove from mouth between puffs …’ My grandmother had clearly not got as far as that last bit.

It was a house of brute tables, heavily incised wood, samplers, lardy antimacassars and fussy beading, ornately framed birds (a Redwing Blackbird and a Jay) which my great grandfather John Baird bought in New York, where he had briefly emigrated as a young man in the early 1880s: he returned to Scotland in the middle of that decade to marry his sweetheart Agnes McInnes. The walls were hung with prints and photographs of Bridge of Allan, Stirling, stags and the Wallace Monument, of which my grandmother’s grandfather had been the first keeper, a post no doubt coveted by the central belt’s entire janitocracy.

John Baird and Agnes McInnes were both born in 1861 in the Stirling suburb of St Ninian’s. He was a steamship engineer. His bettering himself took him through a world of horse trams, coal gas, hurdy-gurdies and temperance halls, from grimy port to reeking port. As well as New York he worked in Glasgow, Hull, Liverpool (my grandmother, also Agnes, was born in Bootle in 1888).

When Agnes Baird junior was in early infancy he moved his family to Southampton where he would prosper and live the rest of his life. Agnes Baird junior married Edwin Percy Felix Hogg (b. So’ton 1885). His Scottish forebears had moved south, initially to Niton on the Isle of Wight in the 1840s. They were tenant farmers, market gardeners and lighthouse keepers. Edwin Percy Felix’s father, also Edwin, was a carpenter. Despite the pressure of Scotland weighing on her, my mother (b. So’ton 1912) never considered herself anything other than English.

There was always a catheter attached to my grandfather after my grandmother died of lung cancer. He lived on for five years, Pop did, treating me to frites and ice cream on trips to St Malo where he had old friends from his lifetime with Southern Railways, which ran the cross-Channel ferries, old friends who had stashes of wine from before the fall of France, in cellars that had been concreted to hide them from the Germans – or so it was claimed. They all knew the words of ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’, a place I confused with Timbuktu.

We got cheap fares and trophy wines. Pop gave me prewar Sauternes from a tooth mug in a room we shared in the Hôtel du Louvre in St Malo, just six weeks into his widowhood, the day after he’d bought me the Swiss Army knife I still have. The wine was a colour I got to know well, the colour of the contents of the catheter bag that I’d pour away in the morning. Some days he’d take a bus to Dol de Bretagne, where he had a lady friend of long standing. Some nights he’d miss the bus back. By day he would accompany me on walks around the rebuilt ramparts and at low tide to l’Ile du Grand Bé, where lies the unmarked tomb of Chateaubriand whom he encouraged me to read, thus introducing me to the first of the two Breton fantasists who have marked my life.

He sold the house in Shakespeare Avenue and moved a mile away to Uncle Eric’s and Auntie Mary’s new house, one of two that my mother designed. That’s two too many. Pop moved with a modicum of souvenirs. What happened to the furniture? Did it end up outside a totter’s premises in Bevois Valley? What happened to the souvenir biscuit tins and the souvenir biscuit tin catalogues? It occurred to me many years later that these were items that my father had given his future parents-in-law to butter them up, to let them consent to a life with their elder daughter who would bear me after she’d given up wearing the coat of aborted lambs’ fleeces captured in a Southern Evening Echo photo a few days before they met in collision on the ice rink. When the house in Shakespeare Avenue was taken from me so was the thrilling walk from the alley behind it by way of roads named Thackeray and Tennyson all the way to the front door. This was a treeless labyrinth, all industrial brick and terracotta of 1910–11. My grandparents were its first tenants. I suspect that a Baird held a shotgun to a Hogg head. My mother was born eight months after they married. They eventually bought the house with a windfall between the wars. But they never changed the way it looked. It was for ever 1911. I lived little more than twenty miles away but in a different world. Salisbury is a church city, an army city. In Southampton there were the red and black funnels of great liners, there were predatory cranes, there were vast hangars on the Itchen where boats were built and where flying boats put down in furrows of silver spume. The river was crossed by the ‘floating bridge’, a chain ferry which landed you in Woolston, where there were streets with names like Vespasian and more houses. Southampton was a city of relentless houses. Yellow brick, red brick. Faced in stucco with bulbous bays in a coarse pastiche of Brighton. There were houses with gables, houses with diapering, houses with overblown capitals and crudely cast mouldings. There were houses where Lascars lodged – that epithet which signified Indian and Malayan seamen was still current. There were the houses where Ken Russell and Benny Hill had grown up. They might have been twins sired by Donald McGill. There wasn’t a house in Southampton that didn’t rock with bawdy laughter. Fat bottoms, bloated bosoms, big jobs, the barmaid’s knickers, all the nice girls love a candle, all the nice girls love a wick. I didn’t know whether to block her passage or toss meself off … The city lacked decorum. Its police lacked decorum. At a public lavatory on the Common, officers, curled in foetal discomfort, spied from the eaves on sailors perpetuating sailors’ mores. Every house I knew had about it the whiff of the public house, of a particular public house, one whose guv’nor was Archie Rice, whose punters’ tipple was navy gin. There was indeed a pub by the old town walls that was licensed to distil its own. The Juniper Berry, of course. Uncle Eric kept a boat moored on the Netley shore. It was a Royal Navy cast-off, a sometime lifeboat. Uses of: drinking bottled beer and gin on Sundays, and navigating under the influence. Apart from Spanish holidays which prompted postcards saying ‘The beach is lovely. Eric can take off his leg and slide down into the water’ and rare visits to relatives in his native Manchester, Eric seldom ventured further than his boat. He didn’t see much point in the country though he was happy enough provided he didn’t have to get out of the car. Like all my mother’s family he belonged to the city, the smoke, the bevelled-glass gin palace rather than the mellow country inn.

Uncle Wangle, né Reginald, Evesham, 1913, lived, when I first remember him, in a flat overlooking the sea at Southbourne, where Bournemouth straggles towards Hengistbury Head. He was determinedly hypochondriacal: migraine, neuralgia, lumbago, cold, heartburn, grogginess, tummy ache. His wife Auntie Ann was frail, freckled, valetudinarian. She was to be pitied because she was an orphan rather than because she was married to Uncle Wangle. Her maiden name was Pope. That is all I know of her life pre-Wangle. It surely cannot have been as hermetic, frugal and loopy as that which she led during the twenty or so years of her marriage (she was a war bride). Wangle had enjoyed failed careers as a mechanical engineer, a policeman, a conscientious objector, an ambulance driver. Now he wrote technical manuals for the De Havilland Aircraft Company and swam in the sea every day of the year. But mere immersion and a view were evidently not enough for him – or indeed for frail freckled valetudinarian Auntie Ann, whose health, he decided, would improve were she subjected to a more fulsome marine contact. So they bought a caravan which they named ‘Bredon’ and parked it a couple of miles east at Sandhills beside Mudeford Quay. There were pines, dunes, shifting lagoons, crumbling cliffs and other caravans. Theirs was no ordinary lot. The caravan was parked on the very shore. Waves broke over it, they battered the sheet-metal walls of the pioneering home, they caused tympanic mayhem, they promised natural disaster, their potency was amplified so a squall seemed like a gale, a gale like a typhoon. An agency of the local authority threatened action to remove the caravan from the shore before Auntie Ann’s health had had a chance to improve. The congress with the elements would be continued a couple of miles inland in a regrettably less exposed position. The caravan site at Walkford Woods was close by a railway line. The brown and cream Bournemouth Belle raced past hauled by the Southern Region’s green Merchant Navy-class locomotives (designed by Oliver Bulleid, second only to Nigel Gresley in the Steam Pantheon).

I was forced to spend part of every summer holiday with them and the shared Elsan and the neighbour’s girl Shirley whose favourite record was The Stargazers’ ‘Close The Door They’re Coming In The Window’, which I believed had something to do with a plague of locusts. It terrified me. I prissily told Shirley that my favourite record was Handel’s Water Music. Uncle Wangle’s favourite record was anything depressing by a dead Scandinavian or anything gloomy by a dead Finn. When Auntie Ann’s health once again failed to improve they moved a further couple of miles to Hinton Admiral where they bought the lodge of a decrepit, unoccupied William IV house whose grounds were being covered in bungalows. The sitting room was octagonal. Its floor was marked with Ls of white sticky tape which indicated precisely where to position a chair for maximum auditory efficacy when listening to the new hi-fi which played Grieg, Grieg, Grieg and occasionally Sibelius. Cruder music, the music which excited me, was not welcome. My taste for Elvis Presley was again incredulously mocked. I bought ‘All Shook Up’ and got bollocked for it. I put on a pullover one chill September evening and was told how soft I was – the implication was that I was a mummy’s boy who had inherited his mummy’s sissy city ways. When I admitted to having gone in to Christchurch to see a film called Light Up the Sky, a feeble ack-ack comedy with Benny Hill and Tommy Steele, Uncle Wangle rolled his eyes. He abhorred the cinema, never owned a television, listened only to the Home Service and the Third Programme, read the Listener and the Manchester Guardian (it arrived a day late, by post. The organist, composer and English teacher Richard Lloyd also subscribed to it by post: with sober fury he passed round our class the edition which reported the Sharpeville massacre). Wangle didn’t eat meat; rather, he didn’t buy meat. He was a practised scrounger. He ate Grape-Nuts, a cereal as dentally unforgiving as pebbledash. Auntie Ann made equally challenging nutroasts. Bread and sugar were brown. Pipe and tobacco were brown. Clothes were brown or brownish. Auntie Ann wore oatmeal hopsack and had a diarrhoea-colour pea jacket for best: she was oblivious to style. Uncle Wangle wore Aertex the whole year through, a hairy tweed jacket, a knitted tie, khaki drill trousers, sandals or canvas sailing shoes called bumpers. It goes without saying that the house was virtually unheated, that his Morris Minor was a convertible (it was called ‘Janet’), that Auntie Ann wore no make-up, that he was dismissive of the grandest house in the locality, the ruinous Highcliffe Castle, which he reckoned bogus and ugly – this would, of course, have been the reaction of most of his coevals to Victorian mediaevalism. It was not its retrospection that he deplored but the theatricality of its expression, and the pomp.

The stratum of old England he sentimentally connected with was that of down-to-earth yeomanry rather than nobility: stout not flash, worthy not chivalric. Uncle Wangle’s and Uncle Hank’s idealisation of a certain England contained some dilute element of blood and soil. This hodgepodge of pernicious anthropomorphic sentimentality which dignified itself as a doctrine was not, incidentally, a Nazi creation. It was merely hijacked by that regime’s ideologues. The identification of a particular people with a particular place and a particular past was a parochial goal whose paradox was that in the years when Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle (and my father) grew up it was a pan-European commonplace proselytized by Barrès, Maurras, Hamsun etc. Walther Darré’s programme was merely an extreme manifestation of that commonplace. In England it went no further than the primitivist chapter of the Arts and Crafts, the Boy Scouts, the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, the Kibbo Kift, the English Mistery (get that ‘i’), the English Array, Social Credit, Distributism, H. J. Massingham, Henry Williamson, Rolf Gardiner, John Hargrave, Jorian Jenks, Captain Pitt-Rivers and a few other eco-fascist fruitcakes, some of whom were detained under Regulation 18B. It was peripheral. And so too was England’s proud host of land colonies, repetitive essays in failed communality and spiritual root crops (which also failed). Not that Uncle Wangle ever went back to the land. He was merely a fellow traveller of bucolicism who discerned moral worth in camping. He revelled in discomfort. He was a man who loved a Primus stove and who insisted in defiance of all evidence to the contrary that a half-raw potato half-baked in the embers of a campfire was a peerless treat.

When I was thirteen I put my foot down. I told my parents that I was no longer willing to be farmed out to Uncle Wangle and Auntie Ann during holidays. I’d had enough of being sent to kennels. Two years later Auntie Ann’s health was declining. On the second day of a holiday in Devon she had been hospitalised in Bideford where she would remain for a month. Uncle Wangle visited her twice a week, driving through the night. According to my father her frailty was more conspicuous than ever. Her freckled skin was papery, yellow. She appeared severely jaundiced. But it wasn’t her liver that was the problem. It was her heart. When she at last returned from Bideford she had open-heart surgery, a procedure that was then in its infancy. The operation was performed at the Royal South Hants Hospital in Southampton. It was apparently successful. When she was discharged she spent her days dozing. Her face was drawn and she was junky-thin. But she was in good spirits. As soon as he judged her fit Uncle Wangle took her away to convalesce. They went camping in the Cairngorms. They were accompanied by their arty and – it follows – entirely artless friends Heather and Bertie. A photo, taken by Heather, shows her and Bertie’s Series III MG Magnette, Uncle Wangle’s new half-timbered Morris Traveller, two tents, a boulder-strewn stream, a mountainside, Uncle Wangle beside an upturned plastic bucket, Bertie on a folding chair, Auntie Ann on a second folding chair shrouded in blankets and car rugs, wearing a bobble hat. Soon after they returned home she suffered complications resulting from pneumonia. She died on 25 July 1963. Uncle Wangle wrote in his diary ‘Black Thursday’.

Despite my protests three years previously my parents, on the point of departing for Germany for the first time since 1938, insisted that I go to stay with him. Keep him company! Cheer him up! I failed. After a couple of days, worn down by his litany of complaints (car tyres, drains, workmen, weather, anything) and his deferred self-justification, oblique exculpation and sly self-pity, I packed my grip and went to crash with some friends who had rented a caravan at Sandhills, only a few yards from where in better times he had parked ‘Bredon’ on the shore. One night he turned up on the pretext of checking I was OK. There were girls from another van with us (one of them subsequently married a bigamous car dealer in Swindon). There was pop music. There were bottles of beer, cigarettes. I had never seen an adult look so woundedly bewildered. Outside his own milieu, which was halved by Auntie Ann’s death, he was at a loss.

He was the loneliest man in the world. His wife was dead. Heather and Bertie had returned to Canada. In his widowhood he was virtually friendless. He absented himself from work. He drove aimlessly round rural England and Wales, sleeping alone in a tent made for two, bathing in brooks. He occasionally sailed with our near-namesake Brian Mead, editor of the Christchurch Times, but this was an exclusively marine acquaintanceship. His obstinacy and pride and self-delusion were such that he very likely never admitted to himself that it was his determination to adhere to his code of faith (or whatever it was) that had ruptured his world. When he died five years later, at the age of fifty-five, it was not so much from a broken heart as from an unconquerable isolation, from incomprehension of another world, one that her death had forced him to frequent if not quite inhabit. He was displaced. He was also temporally adrift: for my twenty-first birthday, a few months before he died, he gave me a model railway engine, a Hornby .00 shunter. It wasn’t a joke either.

Uncle Hank, né Harry in Evesham, 1907, also wore Aertex, hairy tweed and khaki drill trousers. He smelt of tobacco and of a sandalwood cologne and of coal-tar soap. He never married. Uncle Hank had been engaged before the war to a woman called Vera, who eventually married someone else.

Uncle Hank lived in digs. He lived in digs while at Birmingham University and he lived in digs when he went to work in that city’s town clerk’s office upon graduating. In 1934 he moved to Burton-on-Trent as deputy town clerk. In 1957 he was promoted and was appointed town clerk, which position he held till he retired in 1972. All those years in Burton he lived in digs with two spinster sisters. There was a hectic week in 1949 when they moved from one suburb of Burton to another, and he moved with them. They addressed each other as mister and miss. At weekends and for holidays he drove to Evesham. Evesham was always home for him. He’d never escaped from his mother – my grandmother. Nor from his sister – my maiden, literally maiden – Aunt Kitty, the Virgin Witch. And when he retired he of course returned to that house to live with Auntie Kitty. It is a life out of Larkin – the carefully delineated confines, the eschewal of the exotic, the Midlands topographies, the walk through the foggy streets back to the digs. But we know now that Larkin’s life was not quite Larkinesque. Both my mother, who was only too happy to entertain such ideas, and the woman with whom I lived throughout the Seventies used to wonder at the precise nature of the sibling relationship between Uncle Hank and Auntie Kitty. Whatever it was, they, like Uncle Wangle, were both childless. Uncle Os, who owned the pub surrounded by orchards and who became the owner of a string of hotels, once said of the three of them that ‘they lived life in fear of life’.

Uncle Hank had a molar extracted when it was poisoned by a strand of pipe tobacco that was caught between it and the gum. That might suggest a cavalier attitude to personal hygiene, but Uncle Hank was a keen washer even in the days when the house had no bathroom, and a tin tub was filled in the kitchen. He was a wet shaver, a cold showerer. When he was eleven he swallowed a watch-chain and never knowingly passed it. It was presumably still there, lurking in his duodenum, when his corpse entered the fire at Cheltenham crematorium on a fine brisk day in February 1978. Auntie Kitty cried more than sisters are wont to cry.

Evesham is where two landscapes conjoin in collision rather than elision, the Cotswolds and the Vale. The Cotswolds and their satellite Bredon Hill are all oolitic limestone. Their buildings are geologically determined, now golden, now silver, now grey – but despite chromatic variation they are essentially homogeneous. All quarried stone. All out of the immediately proximate ground, supra-local. From Stow on the Wold, the road to Evesham descends the Cotswold escarpment through Broadway, the show village of all England, the perfect place – immemorial cottages, weathered stone mottled with lichen, greenswards ancient as time itself. The landscape of drystone walls and limestone cottages is of course atypical of England – but it is so persistently photographed, so persistently held to represent some sort of ideal, that it becomes familiar, a norm.

This mendacious fantasy, this dream of olde Englande ends, harshly and suddenly, at the point where a bridge of the old Cheltenham–Birmingham railway crosses the Evesham road. Beyond the bridge a sort of normality was resumed: 1930s houses in their abundant forms lined the road. There was better to come. An entirely different country, geologically apart too. It might have been designed to offend the sensibility which responds favourably to the homogeneous good taste of Cotswolds.

The Vale of Evesham is a vital, scrappy delight, an accretion of intimate details, dense with incident. It is an unofficial landscape that is, so to speak, habitually swept beneath the carpet. Best place for it, too, was Uncle Hank’s conviction. Badsey, Willersey, Wickhamford, Childswickham: village upon village of fruitholdings, smallholdings, 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.