Jonathan Meades - An Encyclopaedia of Myself

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

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

For The Dead

Nothing wilfully invented.

Memory invents unbidden.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Abuser, Sexual

Access to the Unknown

Anal Penetration

Ayleswade Road

Barnett, Miss

Blue Spot

Bobie

Buckhorn Weston

Close the Door they’re coming in the Window

Comanche

Earliest Memory

Edwards, Mrs

Eels

Egg Beaten in Milk

Harris

Kalu

Knee Ligaments

Laker

Major, Bogus

Major Braithwaite

Major Christian

Major Ferguson and Major Veale

Major Howells

Major Johnstone and Major Corlett

Major Mccoll

Major Meades

Marden, Cyril

Market Place

Martin, Doctor

Names

New Canal

No Food, Future Food

Old Manor

Old Mill

Osmington Mills

Owlett’s End

Qualifications

Richmond, Daniel & Bunty

Scutt, Eric

Searle, Mr

Songs: Diana

Songs: Johnny Remember Me

Songs: Singing The Blues

Stewart? Stuart? John?

Subterranean

Yuri

List of Illustrations

Footnotes

Also by Jonathan Meades

About the Publisher

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?

Where indeed?

But those are the big lies.

Little lies, microfibs, are different. They are insidious. They go undetected, pebbles added furtively to a cairn. Every time I write once upon a time I am, anyway, already exhuming the disputable, conjuring a photocopy of a faded print made from a detrited negative. I am striving to distinguish the original from its replays. So why add to the store of the provisional? The forms and shades of what used to be are already hideously mutable, every act of recall is both an erosion and an augmentation. I remember therefore I reshape.

Further, memory is susceptible to contamination by a secondary memory, of the place where I find myself when the first occurs. Thus I cannot help but picture the swaying mane of the weeping willow I was dozing beneath at East Harnham in summer 1996 when my mind was suddenly filled with a dizzy, joyful, chlorinated night more than thirty years before, the night I cut the ball of my right foot beside the swimming pool at West Park Farm (broken glass? crown cork?), didn’t realise I had done so and laid a trail of blood through the loud house where teenagers clutching bottles of fruitgum-bright liqueurs shed inhibitions and just a few clothes.