from Henry Curry, founder of the fridge and digital goods retailers. This was their social triumph. Their son had joined the Merchant Navy, that may have been a social triumph too. Ken was by then employed as a golf club secretary, which is how choleric passed-over officers nostalgic for mess life often ended up: a house came with the job. Through its picture window, there across blanched fields, shimmered the distant sea. It was no solace to Ken. The country was going to the dogs. And if that man Wilson gets in … That man Wilson did get in.
Here is my father fishing, always fishing: casting a fly in a chalkstream, displaying his catch, up to his wadered thighs in white water, crouching on rocks beneath contorted pines, seated on a dead trunk adjusting a reel with a jeweller’s screwdriver, netting a trout from a rowing boat’s stern with the rod parabola’d by the struggling fish. He often wears a Norfolk jacket with two buttoning breast pockets and a belt. The material is Donegal tweed. The photographer was my mother. There are fewer snaps of her, a towny acclimatising to willowy, watery places with the eagerness of new love. Here she’s standing beside the ford through the Blackwater at West Wellow. My father made lifelong friends of the Gradidge family. He fished their stream, a feeder of the Test, and he shot on their three farms. At the party in the village hall for Mr and Mrs Walter Gradidge’s golden wedding anniversary Mrs Gradidge indicated my girlfriend and asked my mother: ‘Where did Jonathan find her then? I wish Clifford could find himself one … he could buy her a Jag straight off.’ Clifford, then pushing fifty, did find one not long after, a multiple divorcée from Bournemouth who got a Jag straight off and who cost the family one of their farms when she offloaded her latest husband after only three years.
Here are my parents in a country pub’s garden with friends. Young men looked older then. They wanted to look older. Hence the ubiquitous moustache and the absence of a specifically youthful form of dress. But the faces are older too. Diet? Physical endeavour? It is certainly the case that today the only young men who look older than their years are professional sportsmen who sell their bodies for sums that other prostitutes can only envy. That sleek-haired (and moustachioed) fellow raising his glass to the camera is Wagstaff. He is familiar from their wedding photos. The war was a divider on another scale too. When he returned from service he had two prosthetic legs but seldom moved from a wheelchair. Although his wife had been one of my mother’s bridesmaids they soon lost contact. I never met him. Was he called Ray? Or was that her name?
We travelled to a rugby match by stopping train. I loved that journey. Trying to calculate the very point where, above the deep cutting after Wilton South station, the Lush family’s house was. The Nadder valley’s reduced palette – grey woodsmoke, black skeletal trees, brown hillocks, hints of hidden combes. After Semley the landscape changed, shed all intimacy. Big fields; heavy west country plough; Buckhorn Weston, up a slope to the north of the track. (When I returned home that evening I pored over the map till I’d identified its name.) It appeared to be a village of stone houses the memory of whose prettiness I all but destroyed for a time thirty-five years later when I was meant to be doing something else but noticed a signpost and negligently diverted to it. I found a group of galvanised byres and garaged tractors. I cursed myself for having gone back. Never go back. Truism or true? But I had never gone in the first place. I willed the early memory to re-establish its primacy. Gradually it did so, and my Buckhorn Weston today is that of over half a century ago: a snapshot through a third-class window. A modest mnemonic triumph, the victory of the distant past over the recent. We steamed through Templecombe, close to Posty’s birthplace. Milborne Port is not a port, can never have been a port. There’s no river. It was a cloth town and glove town. Some cottages have almost entirely glazed upper storeys to admit light so that weavers might see to weave. (Not enough, they still went blind.) We walked from Sherborne station past the Victorian–Jacobean Digby Hotel, an impressively grand establishment for a small town, then entered the Middle Ages, all ironstone cloisters and pointed arches. It was only by proximity that Sherborne Preparatory School was attached to the public school which, given the former’s moral squalor, would have doubtless preferred to detach itself: for the moment it turned a blind eye. The premises were barrack-like, of no merit. The school’s distinction derived from its being the fiefdom of the Lindsay family whose motto was Dieu et Mon Droit du Seigneur. The ownership and, with it, the headmastership passed from one churchy generation to the next. The then headmaster’s son, Robin Lindsay, was, in the century’s late fifties, in his early thirties. He cannot have believed his luck in being born into such a dynasty, into such a milieu, into such a plenty of prepubescent flesh: a carnivore’s paradise, temptation was just a wet towel’s flick away. He was evidently sated by the sight of ‘his’ naked boys in the showers, fed up with the sameness of his diet. Christopherson, Webster, Sheriff, Barry, Rose … even had they been masked he would have been capable of identifying them by their genitalia, which were on the very point of making the big leap. Visiting school teams offered variety. As a special feast for himself he organised an annual seven-a-side tournament for sixteen schools. Post-match he processed slowly beside the communal showers and cast the expert, appreciative eye of the true professional over the fresh flesh: a beauty contest of unwitting participants staged in water that was now freezing, now scalding. In 2006 a notice inside the door of Sherborne Abbey announced that ‘Choirboys are available for £10’. Tradition in action.
CLOSE THE DOOR THEY’RE COMING IN THE WINDOW
My uncles were Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle. There was also Uncle Eric but Uncle Eric wasn’t blood, merely marriage. And then there were uncles who were not even uncles by that familial fluke, whose title was honorific in accordance with the lower-middle-class practice of the Fifties, uncles whom I’d never have considered addressing without that title. Uncle Ken, Auntie Jessica. Uncle Norman, Boscombe Down boffin, was my godfather. He was an atheist. Wife: Auntie Nancy.
Uncle Cecil, pharmacist. Wife: Auntie Rae.
Uncle Edgar, dislikable optician. Wife: Auntie Cath.
Uncle Edgar, bearded boho restaurateur / potter / antiques dealer / debt welsher whose raggedy truant children, at least a decade and a half my senior, I envied for their licence to call my parents by their Christian name without prefix. Wife: Auntie Grace.
Uncle Os lived far away beyond the Severn; he owned a pub surrounded by orchards and hopyards. Wife: Auntie Margot.
Uncle Jerry, soldier, had been among the first British infantry officers into Belsen. He drank. He killed himself with sleepers and Scotch when I was eleven, thirteen haunted years after he had witnessed the unimaginable: he suffered the guilt of not having had to endure it. No wife, no widow, no auntie.
Uncle Eric might not have been blood, might not have been officer class – he had no rank to attach to his name in Civvy Street in the days when such a device was supposed to prompt respect. He did have a metal leg, the replacement of the original lost when the Cunliffe Owen Swaythling factory (which manufactured components of the Supermarine Spitfire) was bombed in the Southampton Blitz of November 1940. This loss caused him to postpone his marriage by more than a year. He owned a garage called Gibson’s Motors, a subscription to Glass’s Guide to Secondhand Car Prices, an entire set of Giles annuals, a season ticket to watch Third Division South Southampton at the Dell where the sheer numbers excited me and the ancient cantilevered stands frightened me – I had read in Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly that such a stand had once collapsed at Stoke or Bradford or somewhere. I regarded my presence in Southampton’s as a death-defying, as an exhilarating rite to be suffered in the progress towards teenage, which had just been invented and which was associable with crowds, groups, mobs and the crush of cities. I was necessarily familiar with the crush, for Uncle Eric was slow, gimping up the stairs to our seats whence he’d bark barrack-room calumnies: shirker, NBG, fairy.
Until