An Encyclopaedia of Myself
LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2014‘A symphonic poem about postwar England and Englishness … A masterpiece’ Financial TimesThe 1950s were not grey. In Jonathan Meades’s detailed, petit-point memoir they are luridly polychromatic. They were peopled by embittered grotesques, bogus majors, vicious spinsters, reckless bohos, pompous boors, drunks, suicides. Death went dogging everywhere. Salisbury had two industries: God and the Cold War. For the child, delight is to be found everywhere – in the intense observation of adult frailties, in landscapes and prepubescent sex, in calligraphy and in rivers.This memoir is an engrossing portrait of a disappeared provincial England, a time and place unpeeled with gruesome relish.
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AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF MYSELF
Jonathan Meades
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Jonathan Meades 2014
Jonathan Meades asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Parts of this book have appeared in different forms in London: City of Disappearances, Granta, the New Yorker and The Times
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover typefaces: Mistral and Antique Olive by Roger Excoffon
Cover design: Jonathan Pelham
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9781857028492
Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007568918
Version: 2015-02-05
Contents
Close the Door they’re coming in the Window
Major Ferguson and Major Veale
Not applicable. I have no sexual abuser to confront.
There was no simpering, gingivitic distant cousin with crinklecut hair who beseeched me to come and play with a special mauve toy.
No wispily moustached, overfriendly, oversweaty ‘friend-of-the-family’ whom I was made to address as aunt, who tucked me up then, who must be hunted down now. What, anyway, was signified by that odd epithet? Could the ‘friend-of-the-family’ not make up its mind whom, in particular, in the family, it was a friend of? My family did not have ‘friends-of-the-family’. ‘Friend-of-the-family’ is as much an alarm bell as ‘magician and children’s entertainer’.
No doddering nonagenarian former ‘magician and children’s entertainer’ whose dirty secret was buried half a century ago and is now all but lost in the soup of dementia.
No lissom-fingered groin-pirate for me to approach as he opens his gate, all crazed-paint and rot. A ragged cotoneaster hedge flanks the gate. I can see the mange-like patches where the bungalow’s render has slipped to reveal the friable bricks. The own-brand Scotch in his naugahyde bag weighs down that bad bad hand of his.
No failed oboist, foxed scores all around, listening covetously to a prodigious pupil, gazing at a soggy autumn garden and broken paling.
No, no, none of those. I was not, in the brusque cant of the day, interfered with. I didn’t have what it takes. No adult wanted to love me that way. I was pretty enough, but it takes more than prettiness. It takes foolhardy insouciance, it takes uncomprehending nerve to return the stare of the not yet abuser, the tempter, and so, in his eyes, legitimise the compact and become complicit, willing and an equal partner in sex crime. Only the rash venture into the unknown from which there is no chaste return. I never had that rashness, was never a daredevil. Look right look left look right again – then repeat it all.
So, now a pre-dotard, I am left bereft. I am denied the sine qua non of recollective bitterness, mnemonic poignancy. Denied a cause of self-pity … a cause? The cause. Denied, then, the chance to incite the pity of others, to milk the world’s sympathy gland. I lack the paramount qualification of the auto-encyclopaedist. No abuser (I am, apparently, unique in this) – no abuser, so no life, no story.
Were I to stroll down False Memory Lane at dusk I might pick out a mac lurking in the grubby alders beside a playground: You there! You …
But that would to be to invoke nothing but dated cliché. Playgrounds! Macs! The predator surely wouldn’t announce himself by that dun uniform: he’d have had a gift for camouflage, he’d have been in mufti, he’d have been anywhere but on the school bus.
As well as cliché it would be a lie. There are strata of mendacity best left unbroached.
Why be so fastidious? Lies are humans’ desperate balms and risible solaces.
Where would we be without monotheism, fasts, judicial impartiality, the eucharist, sincerity, pork’s proscription, Allah’s ninety-nine names and seventy-two virgins, weather forecasts, life plans, political visions, conjugated magpies, circumcision, sacred cows, the power of prayer, insurance policies, gurus’ prescriptions, the common good, astrology?
