An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades
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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.