Loving Monsters (4 page)

Maybe it was partly this aspect of his father, that of the hard-working small burgher with aspirations, to which Jayjay was referring as having had consequences for himself. Harold Jebb’s own schooling, such as it was, had stopped when he was fourteen, a year before he allegedly entered night school at Well Hall under the tutelage of that ardent socialist, E. Nesbit. Harold’s eventual redemption through his apprenticeship at Lloyds evidently left him determined his son should have a
better chance. Accordingly the shipping broker stretched his modest though reliable income in order to send his only son to Eltham College.

Eltham College was, and still is, an independent school with a reputation for solid academic standards. It was founded in the 1840s for the sons of missionaries who were usually sent home for their secondary schooling from India and Africa and China. Typically, such children boarded or were farmed out to relatives or church families in the locality, living out of steamer trunks in spare bedrooms, exiled from their parents by thousands of miles of ocean. English literature of the period is full of the cries of children who grew up articulate enough to describe the desolation these banishments could entail. Kipling and Saki were both examples of the type. This was no direct part of Jayjay’s own experience, of course. By his own account his suburbia was benign and supportive. Yet from time to time a certain melancholy would tiptoe in behind his descriptions of childhood Eltham and just stand there, like a summoned employee respectfully waiting for his boss to get off the telephone before he can speak. Later, having myself become familiar with the area in the course of my researches, I can say that anybody might visit one of those semi-detached houses in streets named after Scottish glens, all of them built to much the same pattern as Jayjay’s birthplace in Beechill Road, and sense how it might have been for a child uprooted from his family overseas. Each landing halfway up the stairs has a sash window and, unless it has been modernised, each window has ornamental borders of stained glass. The exact patterns and colours may vary in detail from house to house, from street to street, depending on the whims and supplies of the original builders. It is possible to stand on the landing halfway up the staircase and, at the head-height of a child, look through a panel of coloured glass and completely transform the world outside. By slightly moving one’s head the back garden plunges through acrid green to desert ochre, from ultramarine to hellish red. It is the Saki trick, turning a suburban garden into an exotic world, somewhere else,
anywhere
else: a cool, undersea land
of mysterious longing or a vengeful inferno as the doomed planet falls into the sun. To visit these houses is still now and then to be fleetingly possessed by the clamorous ghosts of children who once stood, chin on forearm at the narrow sill, staring out for hours, temporarily transforming their world by means of tinted glass, mesmerised by unformed thoughts which, as soon as they turned away, slipped from their minds even as the mist of their breath vanished from the pane.

When Jayjay first went to Eltham College in 1930 he just failed to overlap with a boy seven years his senior who was to become a writer and an artist: Mervyn Peake. The future inventor of Gormenghast was born in China and sent back to Eltham to school and a suburban adolescence. It seems plausible that this experience crystallised into Gormenghast itself: less an extravagant gothick castle than a metaphor for a world fossilised by the conventional, the elderly and the stiflingly dull. Perhaps it is too easy to see how Peake’s internal image of Gormenghast might have been built up stone by stone in Eltham on medieval foundations laid in China, the Castle’s bleak flagged corridors and loveless characters proliferating in his exile’s mind. Yet the wrench of being sent half across the world was real enough; and one begins to glimpse how the stolid, conventional community in south London Jayjay so often described must actually have been stranded through with nervelike threads leading straight to the roughest corners of the world and nurturing powerful, even violent fantasies. Kent’s lost Arcady might lie shallowly beneath tarmac and crazy paving, which was how Jayjay presented it, but a potential for subversiveness had always undermined this early commuterland. Great angers, despairs and yearnings were confided to awful wallpapers in small bedrooms dotted about an outwardly placid and respectable community. The same everywhere, no doubt. One must always suspect the placid.

Eltham College’s records show that Mervyn Peake left in 1929, the year before Jayjay entered. As to Jayjay’s own career there, the school’s annals do little but note that he left at the end of the
summer term of 1936. He himself was not at first forthcoming about his schooldays, although he did cite going on the Eltham College Travel Club’s trip to Andorra in 1934 which he remembered as being led by a Mr McIver. I very easily found McIver’s name in the Staff lists and for some reason this corroborative detail gave me a confidence in Jayjay’s account that the mere dates of his entry and departure somehow had not. Why? What was there to distrust? He even looked out a little booklet done in faded violet ink on a duplicating machine that commemorated the trip. It was almost as though he wished to reassure me of the authenticity of his past self, which it did until I began wondering why he should ever have kept such a trivial relic.

In fact he often turned out to be surprisingly good at producing obscure pieces of documentation. I remember a lengthy session one morning during which he reminisced fairly uninterestingly
about some Vietnam peace talks of the nineteen-sixties and various conversations he had had with President Thieu of South Vietnam, General Ky, Henry Kissinger and the US Ambassador of the time. Towards the end Jayjay remarked that Ky had been little more than an airborne cowboy and fancied himself as a jock in a fighter plane’s cockpit when he flew with the Tiger Squadron out of Bien Hoa. A proper warrior like Biggles, on the other hand, would doubtless have settled the Vietnam war in a week, given only his three trusty henchmen and some stout British biplanes. – You remember Biggles? W. E. Johns’s heroic air ace? Have I mentioned that I met him? Johns, I mean. –

It was at this point, surfeited with Kissingers and Johnsons and Ho Chi Minhs, that I accused Jayjay of name-dropping. He promptly excused himself, left the room, and after only a brief delay returned with a faded autograph book which he tossed into my lap. Typical of its period, which was the thirties, it was a four-by-three-inch booklet with
Autographs
stamped at a slant in gold script on the cover. Alternating pale pink, blue and green pages were covered with signatures, short messages with exclamation marks and hasty sketches.

– We all had one of those at school. I don’t know why. It seemed important. Find the picture of a biplane. –

I leafed through until I came to a neat pencil sketch of a First World War aircraft falling out of the sun on an unsuspecting Hun, guns blazing. It was signed, but not dated, ‘W. E. Johns, with best wishes’. I take it all back, I said.

– I never claimed I
knew
him. He was my boyhood hero. He visited the school one day. I suppose he was talking about his experiences in France, inspirational stuff for boys with the idea of drumming up recruits for the RAF. It would have been about 1933 or 1934: it’s a pity he didn’t date it. Like plenty of others who’d fought in the war Johns was watching Hitler’s rise to power and Germany’s re-arming with dismay. He used to bombard the Air Ministry with warning letters. Like Baden-Powell, the gist of his message was ‘Be prepared’. –

There was something touching in seeing Johns’s little drawing and signature in Jayjay’s book. I myself would have killed for it when I was twelve, Biggles having been a hero of my own back in my pre-teens in the early fifties. By then, of course, Hitler’s Luftwaffe had long since made the fatal error of coming up against this legendary British pilot and had been obliged to retire in disarray, its hands raised en masse. I had been a Biggles fan at the age of twelve, but hardly at fifteen and still less past the age of fifty. Biographers are vulgarians at heart, of course, always sniffing around casual asides and reminiscences for the significant, for the childhood enthusiasm that can be press-ganged into foreshadowing the adult character trait and thus
explain
things. (This over-valuing of explanation, of dreary old cause and effect, is immensely tedious but made necessary by the narrative convention into which most readers, as well as subjects, expect a biography to fit.) So I, too, had gone away to sniff at Johns’s life, provoked by Jayjay’s hoarded autograph book and enthusiasm in order to discover something about this portly old pilot that might justify the nostalgia of a septuagenarian. At the time, I failed.

– I really admired Johns. At school that day I definitely wanted to become him. He was large and assured and a great raconteur. He made us boys think there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do provided we had the nerve. –

At the time the ex-pilot signed Jayjay’s autograph book he was the editor of a flying magazine, a scholarly columnist in gardening magazines and a regular contributor to the
Boy
’
s
Own
Paper
,
as well as a churner-out of innumerable stories and novels, adult as well as juvenile. He lived in a whirl of energy on the move from one journal’s office to another, dashing off passionate editorials, lightning stories and flaming letters to Whitehall about the Nazi menace and the unprepared state of Britain’s Air Force. The authorities found him dangerously radical because
Popular
Flying
had a large and lively circulation and his editorials were widely read. All this threw some moderately interesting light on an author about whose life I myself had hardly speculated while
reading him. Still, I couldn’t quite see why Jayjay had been so taken. Then he added a titbit which I filed away in case it had a bearing on this old man on the sofa opposite who was leafing through his school autograph book with an unreadable half-smile.

– Did you know Johns had a secret love? Soon after he returned from the First World War his marriage collapsed and he began a lifelong affair with a lady named Doris. Because his wife was a vicar’s daughter he hadn’t quite liked to talk about an official separation and by the time he was a famous children’s writer in the thirties and forties his publishers absolutely refused to allow him to divorce and marry Doris. They said that the creator of Biggles, that paragon of British virtue, couldn’t possibly acknowledge in public that he was divorced. So Johns was obliged to go on living in sin. When he died in 1968 he and Doris had been cohabiting, technically unmarried, for over forty years.

– How could anyone fail to be taken by the idea of this peculiar man? Here is Biggles, a hero whose daredevil flying and brilliant tactics made him an ace in the skies over France. Yet his creator’s own flying must have brought aid and comfort to the Kaiser, while the morality of the times obliged him to live a lie. That’s the good thing about writing, isn’t it? On paper you can always go back and do things properly. Is that what I’m doing, do you think? –

*

I am not at all sure yet what to think but am beginning to brace myself to hear the career of a man of action rather than of one who has indulged in a lifetime of Proustian reflectiveness in heavily curtained rooms. Who would mention a boyhood hero in such detail unless he thought the matter relevant? Have I made a silly mistake in taking on this literary chore? And at what point will I realise that I’m merely compounding the mistake?

*

In those early days of listening to Jayjay’s diffuse reminiscences I was, like any other biographer feeling his way, still unsure about what was strictly germane and what digression. In general I use a
tape-recorder sparingly. I am not fond of the machine. It encourages an interviewer not to listen but to drift off in daydreams of his own, knowing it can all be replayed later. So it can, at the cost of a further tranche of time, but the tensions and nuances are generally lost for ever. Still, a tape-machine is an essential backup for the political stuff I occasionally write. I am not about to leave myself unprotected from the casual displeasure of ex-dictators and assorted monsters who cannot believe their words in print were those they actually spoke. But Jayjay’s memoirs are a different matter. He is not going to have me mugged or arrested in some steamy Asian capital. With him I can simply respect the laws of libel as well as those that govern truthfulness. When interviewing real people like him I prefer to rely on speedwritten notes, which have the advantage of retaining the spontaneity of one’s immediate judgements as to what is relevant and what merely padding. Perhaps because sheer chance arranged that I was working on ex-dictators and Jayjay simultaneously, I used both a tape-recorder and speedwritten notes haphazardly with him for many months. This was to make for curious and sometimes unsettling variations in his narrative voice but I’m not displeased with the effect since it does preserve the flavour of the man’s own ambiguity, as though in his confessions he were for ever skirting around a secret.