An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades
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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