An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades
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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.
John Morton’s microbiological research was into the viability and infection rates of airborne microorganisms and radioactive spores. Many of his trials were necessarily conducted at sea in the approved gung-ho manner of the day. Like many other middle-aged Porton Down scientists of the Fifties facing an impoverished future he joined what would, in the next decade, become known as the brain drain to the United States, land of plenty, land of handsomely rewarded weapons technologists, land of modernity, streamlining, dams, freeways, cars with fins, cars with gurning radiator grilles, square watches, observation cars, air conditioning, Kodaslide Highlux projectors, teen camps (Adirondack Woodcraft, Western Caravan and Ranch, Gay Valley). But also, puzzlingly, land of the Wild West. How could that be?
He prospered, eventually took American citizenship. His wife Peggy didn’t. After their divorce she returned to England with their son and their pretty twins, dizygotic girls who were readily distinguishable and who I was convinced were not real twins but impostors, perpetrators of an incomprehensible deception.
The Goddard twins, monozygotic boys, were real twins. I couldn’t tell which was which. Identification was exacerbated by their usually being dressed in identical clothes. They relished the confusion they caused. Further, they were so confusingly akin to Freddie and Ferdie Fox in Rupert Bear that I cannot now picture one set without the other. They lived within a few yards of Beaton’s Garage in Ayleswade Road. The Beaton brothers, only a year apart in age, might have been twins. A few minutes’ walk away in one of the Royal Artillery houses there lived, temporarily, Aubrey, Arnold and Ann Sessions. Biscuit-skinned twins? Triplets? Mere siblings?
Ayleswade Road was a street of, mostly, banal Edwardian terraces which concealed multiple births, interchangeable identities and puzzling doubles. It must have been its intricate genealogies which caused a momentous thought to occur to me. I was standing outside The Swan, raised on a bank across the road from the Goddards’ house and Beaton’s Garage. The people coming out of Hands’s shop with their uniform wicker baskets, the people getting off the 55 bus and hurrying home for lunch, the group of people heading for The Rose and Crown – all these people and all the other people I couldn’t see all across the world over were men or women, girls or boys. Why? Why were people restricted to membership of one sex or the other? Perhaps they weren’t. There must, I decided, be a third sex. And that third sex was gypsies, swarthy, leather-faced clothes-peg folk with horses, wild dogs and plentiful scrap metal who were mistrusted precisely because being of the third sex they were given to different behaviour.
For many years after I learnt that gypsies were, according to taste, self-pitying, special-pleading minor criminals or persecuted rovers clinging to an ancient, threatened way of life, I’d still gape at The Swan’s gravel car park and allow the notion of the third sex to capture me.
The far-distant end of Britford Lane where the rutted, puddled, cindered