was autumn. Late the previous afternoon, Harold Burt-White had severed the radial artery of his left wrist and the anterior artery of his right leg. He could have had no better training in the procedures of suicide. His wife found him prone and unconscious on a tiled floor. To attempt suicide was still, in 1952, illegal in Britain. Rather than call the emergency services and risk his suffering prosecution should he survive, she contacted a colleague of his, an anaesthetist called Simpson. Not the obvious choice in the circumstances, but he lived nearby with his alarmingly flat-footed son. In defiance of his specialisation he succeeded in getting Burt-White to come round, only to be told: ‘Don’t bother. If I live I’ll kill myself.’ He didn’t live, he had already killed himself.
Lagonda. Lagonda is unfathomably complicit. It is not a necessarily rare sighting of a vehicle of that marque but the name, the very word, that triggers a swooning dream of release by the barber’s blade that was a physician’s, of the snake – evidently an adder – on the barber’s pole, of Roman death, of laurels, of the physician in a toga weighted with viscous blood, of noble disgrace and scorn for Christian obsequies. Where was he buried?
Once I discovered its defining property, which took some time, suicide became a secret within a secret. I kept my knowledge of it from the world. This was before the prepubertal investigation of sex and the dangerous vocabulary attached to it had to be cached deepest in my brain. Suicide was the most special death because it was chosen, as one might choose a Lagonda over an Allard. It was a peculiar luxury.
The propositions that the suicide may have no choice and that the act is one of necessity were inconceivable. Before we have heard of, witnessed or experienced irreparable despair, betrayal, persecution, boredom, depression, obloquy, self-disgust, guilt etc., suicide is a causeless, strangely glamorous occurrence apparently undertaken with free will (as we do not yet know to call it). Like all the manifold mysteries of infancy self-inflicted death is a magnet for the curious. Its contemplation is tonic. Puzzling about this way of death made me feel so alive despite the frustration of having to rely on scraps of information and not being able to ask any question more direct than ‘Where has the Lagonda gone?’
Courtesy demands that the object of this intervention should be made aware of the intent before the act is prosecuted. It is merely good manners.
Were such good manners exhibited towards Jonathan Venus and Jeremy Leveret?
May 1957. Early one Wednesday evening my parents made me attend a choral recital in the gardens of Wilton House. Every stratum of South Wiltshire’s bourgeoisie was represented along with a few grandees: landowners, wiry soldiers of high rank, gentleman garagists, arty nobs. There was the bemusing buzz of chitchat: what do people say to each other, what is it that takes so much time? How long can an expression of deferential greeting be extended? Everyone spoke proper English or aspired to speak it: open ‘o’s and stretched diphthongs peculiar to the area were inadequately disguised by doilies of refinement. Everyone dressed and behaved with all the decorum due to an Earl’s demesne. We enjoyed the privilege of standing on ground granted to his ancestors four centuries previously by Henry VIII as a reward for their loyal services to the royal rectum. It had rained for the first time in a couple of weeks. The grassless ground around beeches’ pachydermal feet shone. There was the elemental odour of damp earth. The returning sun picked out beads of moisture on the Earl’s noble lawns. His ancient trees’ limbs dripped.
A loudspeaker announcement was made. The recital would begin later than intended.
There was an unspecified problem. The makeshift stage, no doubt: it was merely a series of turfed terraces in front of a roofless exedra. Perhaps the singers were in danger of losing their footing in the wet.
England was fecund, inviting. I left my parents and walked alone to the Palladian bridge across the Nadder. A roofed bridge, a fancy which had long drawn me, had fascinated me since earliest childhood. Its lichenous stones glistened. My hand tried the water’s temperature to check whether it was fit for swimming. It was warm enough, but lack of trunks and nervy propriety stopped me even in this place where I was out of sight: until a couple of years previously I’d have had no such inhibition. Then I swam naked in rivers without self-consciousness.
I squatted on the bank so that my grey school shorts wouldn’t get wet. The waterweed danced and wriggled to the stream’s beat. I adored this river and those it conjoined. They were my playgrounds, my familiars, my companions, my solaces. To have remained there gazing at the taut green glassy surface was a greater enticement than a concert. Many of my teachers and certain of my fellow pupils who would be singing tonight comprised Salisbury Cathedral’s choir. They were specialists in the multiple idioms of Anglican joylessness. Music was a trial I endured at school. An extra dose out of school was cause for resentment. I had, apparently, regressed. My infantile appreciation of Britten’s folk settings and Handel’s operas – an appreciation born of subjection to little else – had been quashed by the sensational barbarities of early rock and roll: Elvis Presley, Charlie Gracie, Little Richard. Most of all by Tommy Steele. I longed for his cantilevered quiff and for drainpipes with a sequinned stripe down the outer seam. My taste was for crass trash, mindlessness: I knew because I was told so most days of my life at a school where every room had a flimsy music stand. Teachers who otherwise treated me fondly, even indulgently, remonstrated with me, mocked me, told me I would come to no good if I listened to such ‘music’.
I walked back along the river past reeds and willows, between cedars and follies, to rejoin my parents. There was an agitation in the audience, a more vital din, a more intense clamour than earlier. Many people had abandoned their crude folding chairs, exemplars of the ergonomic discomfort of those years, and were knitted in preoccupied groups. My mother and father were seeing off midges with their stiff white programme sheets. They exchanged glances which I was slow to read.
My father said: ‘They’re rearranging things. Mr Blythe isn’t going to be singing tonight.’
Mr Blythe was one of the less proscriptive among the musicians on the school staff. But I couldn’t have cared less whether or not he was going to be singing a load of lieder. A few rows away I saw Chris for whom, to my father’s irritation, I had spent prep transcribing the lyrics of ‘Singing the Blues’ earlier in the year: he had remonstrated with me in his car whilst waiting for a gap in the traffic to turn from Exeter Street into St Nicholas Road, at a T-junction where I used always to think of the Duke of Edinburgh.
I pushed through the chairs towards Chris. Their crescentic ranks were now disrupted. His mother and one of his sisters were with him. Of all my friends’ mothers Beryl Lush was the most impressive: cinched waist; black hair; dramatic clothes – gypsy skirts, tailored blouses with an upturned collar; ill-planned house where Brack the labrador snoozed by the Rayburn and game grew high in a larder and The Times was read – a marker of social superiority.
Beryl, whom I would never have addressed thus, made delicious rusks, soaking stale bread in milk and cooking them in the bottom oven overnight. She was vaguely haughty, handsome. She wasn’t cosy. She was often exasperated. Like my parents she often seemed to forget I was thirty-five years her junior, forgot to treat me as a child, sometimes addressed me as though I were an unusually doltish adult – which I persuaded myself was a form of flattery. She had been an only child. She pitied me for that state. As Beryl Gray she had studied ballet – even if only in Salisbury. She liked theatre and performance. She tried to infect me with her tastes, Chris being resistant to them. Four years later she would take me, whilst on holiday at Thurlestone, to the Drake Cinema in the newly rebuilt city of Plymouth, to see South Pacific. Result: a lifelong antipathy to humourless Hollywood musicals and to anyone called Mitzi, a name fit for a poodle. But that evening, as I extricated my clumsy feet from a chair’s crossrung, she glanced at me discomfitingly, looked away as though she had more pressing matters to deal with. Chris was brother to three elder sisters, hence practised in a gamut of sophisticated gestures I was a stranger to. He somehow made it clear that he had not seen me and that, even had he seen me, he was otherwise occupied.