An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades
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of Britford was a narrow footpath bordered by a thorny hedge and, on its other side, a barbed wire fence. Beyond the field that way, unseen, signalled by a suspended mist strip, ran Navigation Straight. A gilded copperplate signboard on legs in its garden announced that Britford Lane’s penultimate building, a pebbledash chalet-bungalow, was a school, a sort of dame school, my first school. The single classroom occupied most of the ground floor. Its ceiling was impressively high; all ceilings were impressively high in comparison with my home’s. I had never seen such a bright room, I had never seen such light before. The end onto the back garden was entirely glazed. Late in the morning it admitted stout rods of sunlight dense with churning motes which vanished when I went to stroke them. Where did they go? To the garden where stooped the vestiges of an orchard, withered plum trees that no longer bore fruit? To the lane behind where wooden sheds and ad hoc garages teetered and rotted? On the third day of term we were instructed to paint these barren trees with our watercolours. I made some sploshes on a sheet of paper then drank the muddy water from the jar in which we cleaned our brushes. It tasted interesting. I drank more. A fellow pupil grassed me up to Miss Barnett, a spinster in pince-nez which caught the sun. They heliographed a virgin’s hatred of life. She marched to my desk and hissed. She told me that I was not just stupid to have drunk the water, she said that I would die, that I deserved to die. But that I was not to die at school. Her assistant teacher, a young woman in plaid, drove me home in her van so that I might die in my own bed. The alarmed German Girl ran up the road to my mother’s classroom to fetch her. I waited anxiously. I hoped to see my mother before I died. Until the moment when I had to retire to my deathbed I waited for her on the dining-room window seat. The assistant teacher paced between the van and the front door, smoking. I wondered how to check for symptoms. How would I know when I was dead? Was transport to heaven immediate? What form did it take? If handsomely liveried tourist coaches were used I prayed that the vehicle would not be a wheezy Bedford which might fail to climb the slopes but a sleek Guy with a cast-metal Red Indian’s head above the radiator: I prided myself on being able to distinguish lorries by the sound of their engine. I could tell a handsome Foden (those crazy radiator grilles!) from a Dennis (locally tested, in skeletal form, no cab, no bonnet, all working parts revealed as though the driver was driving an exploded drawing). I craned my neck for a sight of my mother. Had I been a good son? Then my mother was hugging me, telling me I wasn’t going to die, wiping the tears I had thitherto been too numb to shed, getting The German Girl to make me cocoa. She comforted me so long that my fear abated. Then she went outside, out of my hearing, to talk to the assistant teacher. I had never seen her gesture before, never seen her shake her head that way. She was berating the young woman whose expression was increasingly sheepish. Whatever was said was presumably mild beside what was said to Miss Barnett herself later that day. That was the end of that school. I did not enquire whether I was expelled or withdrawn.
When my father carried me high on his shoulders grasping my ankles in his giant’s hands I would caress a circular blemish on the top of his head, a birthmark made visible by baldness. (He had already lost most of his hair by the time he married at the age of thirty.) This fascinating spot, the circumference of a cigarette, was approximately the colour of the penicillium mould in blue cheese. Prying in some long-lost book I had been frightened by a Medusa’s head in what I could not then identify as the brothelish style of Rops or Moreau, whose paintings, like all others, I accepted with a dogged literality. My father called Gorgonzola ‘gorgon’, thus conflating in my mind the worms that were rumoured to seethe through the all too living lactate with a Gorgon’s venomously vermicular hairdo. It was this homophone which made me shun the stuff. Besides, I preferred the saltier, less rich Danish Blue, which my father took a dim view of because it didn’t taste of cow. At Christmas there would appear a stoneware crock of Stilton festering in grocer’s port, a sludge as repulsively pungent as an adult’s stool. Mercifully this cheese which, macerated or not, I have never appreciated, was in those days a seasonal ‘treat’ and so unglimpsed and unsmelled throughout the rest of the year. That was not the case with Cheddar, always called ‘mousetrap’. Salisbury’s best grocery, the coffee-and-bacon-scented Robert Stokes, stocked wheels of farm Cheddar, a rarity, for the majority of prewar producers now sold their milk to factory-dairies such as Cow & Gate in Wincanton or Horlicks in Ilminster which processed it into lumps of generic cheese-style product. That was the future: industrial food, rational food, soon to be plastic-wrapped food. It was a future which my parents scornfully opposed whilst I succumbed, shamefully, to Primula, Dairylea triangles, citric Philadelphia, Huntley and Palmers cheese footballs which tickled mucous membrane, Roka cheese crispies in their recyclable blue and yellow tin (pencils, dividers, erasers etc.). I knew I shouldn’t enjoy such foods: I was so advised often enough. I longed to leave childhood taste behind me but it wouldn’t leave me. Even at the age of seventeen I would be excited by Golden Wonder cheese and onion crisps, the first flavoured crisps manufactured, the first flavoured crisps I ate, in that sweetest of all summers, 1964.
At least this litany of vintage lactic colour did not include Kraft cheese slices, tan leatherette rectangles whose textural bounce and astonishing flavour were tours de force of chemical engineering. However, they did not appeal to me. Nor does it include Cracker Barrel ‘Cheddar’ – oblong, granular, fudge-like, a stinging palatal assault which my father would probably have dismissed had it not been advertised on telly by James Robertson Justice, who like Jimmy Edwards and Stinker Murdoch, was generally (and maybe erroneously) accepted to be a jolly good chap rather than a mere actor; bluff, beery, down to earth. He was occasionally to be seen in Salisbury hauling his big-boned beardie bulk from a gull-wing Mercedes.
The Cracker Barrel commercials were directed by Lindsay Anderson. Another cause, then, of his gnawing self-despisal.
Long O. My parents’ affectionate nickname for each other. Only used vocatively. Derivation unknown. Its infantilism embarrassed me. It belonged, like much else, to an era, close but quite ungraspable, when they had yet to make me, when they had been a world of two, unintruded upon, carefree and yet to be separated for almost half a decade: I was no doubt the glue designed to reunite them, to transport them back to the Thirties, to the coming enormity whose germ was there to be ignored by all, to collective amnesia about a future bereft of treasure hunts and roadhouses.
Not yet Bobie and Bobie, they meet in Southampton, at the Banister Park ice rink, in 1937. My future father falls at my future mother’s feet. He is a tyro skater, she is practised. She literally picks him up. Is it a deliberate fall? What the morons of the football industry now term simulation? Probably. He was, though, a clumsy dancer and an awkward swimmer. The likelihood of his being able to remain upright on skates was slight. Still, the matter of predetermination was never discussed. Maybe romance’s integrity was better served by ascribing it to chance. And maybe they were loath to admit to each other, let alone to me, that they frequented somewhere so proletarian as a glacial meat market. Between that encounter and their marriage three months before the outbreak of war their life was one of heedless enjoyment recorded in crinkle-bordered monochrome.
Here is a sailing holiday on the Broads aboard Perfect Lady with Ken and Jessica Southwell: Ken wears a short-sleeved Aertex shirt with a lace-up front. Post-war they would be addressed as Uncle Ken and Auntie Jessica though I knew they weren’t. They came and went according to Ken’s RAF postings. He lost his temper, often; subcutaneous ropes swelled in his forehead. He had also lost control of his hair which refused to be tamed by brilliantine and rose in Mayan strip lynchets. They found me a tiresome child. I found them frightening adults. I was occasionally foisted on them at wherever they were currently calling home – a bookless cottage at Boscombe, a bookless bungalow along Britford Lane with an adder in the pond, subsequently rented by the Braithwaites. The last time I saw the Southwells was near Barnstaple in the summer of 1964. Now they found me more than tiresome, an insolent, sneering teenage know-all with, as Jessica said, a tongue in his head. They were inordinately proud that