Loving Monsters (5 page)

Indeed, the impression I had from the start was that despite his having been keen enough to ‘tell his story’ he was by no means certain what that story was until he began to speak. Far from dictating a version that was already clear in his head he would start our morning sessions as unsure as I where his reminiscences might lead. I quickly passed beyond any suspicion that he was making things up as he went along. From first to last I thought Jayjay truthful, whatever that means. But there was always the sense of a person who contained assorted versions of himself, and entirely different flavours of that person could be obtained depending on what one chose to put in or leave out. On successive Tuscan mornings I would drive to Il Ghibli along the appalling
track from my house on the hillside, down through patches of early sunlight slanting between the tangled branches of scrub oaks, curiously excited and half apprehensive as though in the course of the next few hours I might learn something dangerous about myself.

Eventually I did, of course. But that was not for over a year, by which time another spring’s Red Admirals were rising before the nose of my truck with their characteristic floating flight. These scraps of life, vivid scarlet-on-inky-velvet as they balanced on the air, mixed themselves in with what I heard and became associated with the whole experience of that period. Now when I think of Jayjay the butterflies cross over his name and face.

He takes me out on the terrace and says this is all a dream,
this
being a cold, overcast Tuscan morning in early March. Offstage are the insistent, repetitive sounds of a tractor ploughing narrow fields of olives, at each short turn borne on the wind as clankings and revvings. In the valley grey smoke careers upwards from several brisk bonfires of olive prunings. Another agricultural year getting under way. Immemorial as you could wish, he remarks, as seen in two thousand years’ of art from tomb paintings onwards, though minus the tractors, of course. Really happening really now, but a dream for all that.

What is not a dream, then?

– Nothing. Oh, Eltham, maybe. Unlike the present, seventy-five years ago doesn’t feel like a dream. It’s with me awake, asleep, just as with anyone my age. M. R. James’s ghost story ‘A View from a Hill’ had a pair of binoculars filled with liquid distilled from a corpse and through this refractive ichor one could see the past. I think our eyeballs still contain the very fluid through which we saw the world seventy years ago. Aqueous humour? Vitreous?
It is not to be found by dissection. No matter where I look I see only a thin illusion of the present. Only when we reach an age do we realise how long it is since we experienced the uncontaminated present. Somebody once tried to sell me a Zennish subspecies of Buddhism and the only thing I remember now is his insistence on the importance of living in the absolute present, whatever that might be. According to this fellow, who I only let through the door because I was intrigued by the colour of his great woolly socks, the unenlightened are constantly held back by the past, which is irrelevant and illusory. But how else does one learn anything except through memory? How else grow into the person one is? I’m afraid I remain as doggedly unenlightened as that day I gave the chap sixpence for the bus fare to return to his presumably nonexistent home. After all, it’s not that I so love the past I can’t bring myself to leave it. It simply gave me all the bearings by which I know I’m me. What I like is not Eltham but the depth Eltham now gives an otherwise superficial life. Things acquire their own patina. The most the present can do is stick to me briefly like clingfilm until the static wears off. It’s irritating and I can see through it. –

I suppose he
is
calling the shots so I will indulge him his fanciful images and wait patiently, even though it is cold out here on the terrace. Luckily he is
caffèdipendente,
like me, and hates to be separated for too long from his espresso machine.

– If you went back there now you would find whole streets of houses remarkably unchanged. What has changed is their use. Even quite small semi-detached houses have been subdivided and sold off piecemeal or let to students, immigrants, transients. Or else a pair of houses has been knocked together and turned into a des. res. for the upwardly mobile, the front gardens paved over for parking space. In the twenties and thirties the air was more one of stability and permanence. Another difference is that it used to be quieter and more spacious. The streets were twice as wide, not simply because I was small then but because almost no-one owned a car. Nowadays in London cars are parked on both
sides of residential roads which effectively narrows them by ten or twelve feet. The mere fact of their presence shows the householders’ mobility, their unrootedness. In those days we could play in the street, always provided our parents didn’t forbid it as being what they called dirty or common. We boys used to go whizzing around in soapboxes on wheels: completely home-made, of course, like everything else. The best ones were steerable and used the wheels off old prams. Most of them lacked rubber tyres. I can still hear the sound the rims made going over the cracks between paving stones. You could be out there all morning and hardly see a motor vehicle. There were a lot of horse-drawn carts about still. Delivery services. Milkmen. Sweeps. Rag-and-bone men. Ah, rag-and-bone men. I must have M. R. James’s liquid in my ears, too, because that’s another sound I can hear. The streets being so empty and quiet they had much more echo to them. Sometimes at night here in Tuscany I can hear the rag-and-bone man who came through our streets in Eltham. He must have died at least half a century ago but I can hear him as clearly as if he were drawn up outside. ‘Ra’n
boon
‚’ he went. ‘Ra’n
boon
.’ You could hear him streets away, that echoing
boon
the most melancholy cry imaginable, him and his horse clip-clopping slowly away, fainter and fainter into silence. I think he lived with the Gypsies over Blackfen way. Even my nose has been M. R. Jamesed because I can smell his horse, that comforting scent of hot oats and ammonia. We would run out to scratch its face and look in the nosebag and marvel at how well polished the man kept all the tack, especially the blinkers. Glossy black rectangles. Well of course that’s why they said we mustn’t play in the street because it was dirty. It wasn’t oil they meant but horse shit. Heaps of steaming nuggets until the sweeper came along with his handcart and broom, or else we would collect it ourselves for the garden.

– Oh the garden. That was it, you see. Still Kent as much as London SE9. Only thirty years earlier it had been copses and fields and orchards. Just up the road Eltham Park was still pretty
much unreconstructed countryside with a few municipal tokens. A drinking fountain. A shelter. Some railings. Things like that. The park-keeper’s house. That park-keeper was fearsome to us. He’d probably only been demobbed and out of uniform ten years and might well have flown with W. E. Johns in the Royal Flying Corps, but he seemed ancient. He went about in leather gaiters like a nineteenth-century gamekeeper and often patrolled on horseback. We boys lived in mortal dread of him. We’d go up to Shepherdleas Wood for conkers. At the right season you could find mushrooms there: horse mushrooms and parasols, mainly. If you wanted blewits the place to go was Shooters Hill. But whatever we went to the park for, we used never to come back without sticks for kindling. There was a grate in every room. The cleaning-out and laying, the black-leading, the hauling and emptying. Imagine the labour of it. Plus the front doorstep to be scrubbed daily and whitened. And the letterbox, knocker and bell-push polished with Bluebell or Brasso. There was real pride in suburban home ownership. Who nowadays would polish the flap of their letterbox? By the end of the thirties the legend on our flap saying ‘Letters’ had been rubbed away until it was barely legible, like the inscription on a medieval brass.

– Coal fires with gas pokers to light them. Cooking was by gas, of course. If you wanted hot water in the bathroom you lit the geyser, which came on when you opened the hot tap. As the gas ignited it made a great
wumph!
and rattled the windows. Off the kitchen was the scullery, a step down from lino to red quarry tiles. My mother did the laundry there. She had a mangle through which she wound the sheets. They came out hard and curved in a solid mass: ‘mangled’, I suppose. Outside lavatory, freezing cold, with a cast-iron cistern.

– Now I think about it, coal was everything. Before each front doorstep was the round iron cover of the coal hole. The coalman called regularly, a big dray with two Suffolk Punches pulling it because the load was heavy and came uphill from the depot at Well Hall. When I was about ten or twelve the firm bought an
Albion lorry instead with a sunburst on its radiator. Coal’s another thing I can still smell. Hundredweight sacks, often with rope handles. They gave off this wonderful tarry reek, as did the lorry and the coalmen. You could smell them from the end of the street. The men were black with dust. They wore leather jerkins and filthy caps with the stuffing coming out. Their eyes and teeth were very white in the middle of all the dirt and their arms were sinewy from all the hauling, although I now realise the men were often thin and quite probably undernourished. I remember big blue veins amid the filth on the insides of their arms. They would flip the lid off the coal hole and come up the path bent under these great weights. Then in one movement they would stoop and jerk the sack over their heads so it fell mouth downwards over the hole. That’s partly why they wore caps, although all working men wore caps in those days. You could hear the coal crashing down the chute into the cellar. Twenty trips to the ton. Then they would sweep up around the hole, drop the lid back into place and hand over a grimy delivery note. Tradesmen always carried a pencil behind one ear. You wouldn’t open the cellar door for an hour or two until the dust had settled. What with coal deliveries and ash pans and the sweep, soot and coal dust were everywhere. Hence all the cleaning and polishing.

– Since coal was everything in those days London smelt quite different. So did the entire urban landscape of Britain, come to that. Motor traffic was growing all the time, of course, and petrol and oil smelt cruder then. I suppose everything came from lower down the fractionating column, less refined. Coal, gas, creosote, tar. Even the green Southern Railways’ electric trains smelt of phenol, I imagine because their various condensers and resistors and transformers were coated with phenolic resins for insulation. When hot they gave off this clean, medicinal smell. I associated it with doctors’ surgeries, probably because carbolic was still being used as an antiseptic. Tar fractions were in the air everywhere, which of course was exactly the problem and the reason for those famous Dickensian fogs which persisted in London until the
Clean Air Act began to take effect in the late fifties. When I said my father never missed a day’s work it wasn’t strictly true. I was thinking of illness but I’d overlooked the fogs. I don’t know if you remember how bad they could be? So thick and yellow you couldn’t see from one lamp-post to the next? People could get hopelessly lost within twenty yards of their own front gates. A big fog might last for a week, a fortnight, even longer. When it was like that the trains often couldn’t run at all because the signals weren’t visible. My father would stay at home and fret, but only after he had tried every means of getting to the office short of walking up to the City. Occasionally he had to sleep at the office because he couldn’t get home.

– Fog days were exciting if you were a kid. A real pea-souper was as thrilling as a heavy snowfall because it changed the world overnight. You woke to undersea gloom and deathly quiet. Like snow it muffled sounds and there was anyway less traffic to make a noise. People moved slowly through the streets with torches. Moisture condensed out on every cold surface. Everything ran damp and tasted acrid. It would, of course. Droplets of sulphuric or nitric acid which killed people off like mad and ate away brickwork. But there was nothing the matter with my lungs and I loved the disruption, the way things loomed and looked. The pavements and kerbstones became greasy. I liked the irony that it took a really thick fog to make certain things visible. The privet hedges and hydrangeas in front gardens were suddenly festooned with spiders’ webs which you could now see because each strand was covered in tiny grey beads. They were always there, of course, but normally you never noticed them. The smell of the fog was really just an intensification of the smell of any winter’s dusk at tea-time when everyone was lighting fires at once and sending up a million London chimneys the scent of pine kindling and the cool tarry yellow smell of cheap coal. It faded a bit after an hour as the grates warmed up and combustion became more efficient. For me, that smell went with the mournful sound of ships’ foghorns and hooters coming up from the Port of London.

– Do I make it sound harsh and industrial? Too much in the lee of satanic mills? Maybe I haven’t done justice to the gardens, then. As I said, they were where you saw the county of Kent fighting back against bricks and asphalt, and people took great pride in them. A lot of the gardens both front and back had mature trees in them, often big old plums and pears left from the orchards that had been built over when my father was delivering geese as a boy. Even so, Eltham was already full of exotica, especially those suburban staples like hydrangeas, laburnams, buddleias and monkey-puzzle trees. Not one of them native to Britain. As for domestic animals, quite a few people kept chickens. That, as well as the tradesmen’s horses, was why you could go on finding corn chandlers in high streets like those of Eltham and Sidcup until well after the Second World War. The one in Sidcup just by the Black Horse Inn was owned by a man called Patullo Higgs, I remember. Gypsy name, I should think. Another of those Blackfen families, no doubt, who sent their women from door to door with wax flowers and lucky white heather. We kept chickens, sometimes rabbits, even the odd goose for old times’ sake. That’s why there were often farmyard smells mixed in with all the coal and gas fumes and one could hear cocks crowing in the morning above the groaning noise the trams made going up the hill from Well Hall.

– A lot of insect life, too. I began collecting moths as a boy and took thirty-six different species from our own back garden. Old Lady, Red and Yellow Underwing, Cinnabar, Silver Y. A few hawk moths, mainly Lime and Privet from all those hedges, little Hummingbirds that fancied the flowers in people’s rockeries, Small Elephants which liked honeysuckle and rhododendrons. And once, great day, a rather sad and battered Death’s Head, probably from a potato patch or beehive in an allotment up the road. Plenty of butterflies from all the buddleias, though never (and how I hoped and yearned) a Camberwell Beauty. A transient, alas, a migrant. Hopelessly rare. Those rockeries, by the way, often contained few genuine rocks. Instead there were lumps
of fused slag which you could get from the gasworks down in Greenwich. They were odd colours: firebrick orange, black, hectic purple; full of bubbles and craters like lava. If you smashed them with a coal hammer you could smell gas. Ash paths in back gardens. Of course. What else to do with clinkers from the kitchen boiler? Fascinating, that juxtaposition of the rural with the industrial. After all, half the residents of these newish suburbs had come from the country. The irony of today’s London is that it has long since left off being an industrial city, yet despite all those garden centres and that modish environmental concern nobody has a clue about rural things. In those days in Eltham back gardens you’d see a row of runner beans next to a cinder path. Rhubarb leaves frothing from the tops of tall old chimney pots set in the earth. A compost heap of horse dung rotting nicely in a frame made of the old lead gaspipes they dragged out from under the floors when they wired the house for electricity. They left the pipes in the walls, of course. Too big a job. So you had these little stubs pushing up behind the wallpaper where the gas mantles had been capped off … I’m surely boring you?–