John Coleman
February 10th 1952
Aged 5 years and 6 months
Happiest Memories
I never set eyes on this valetudinarian boy, the subject of whose life was its imminent ending. He was my senior by six months. He lay dying less than fifty yards away across the road whilst I, a longer stretch before me, climbed high in plum trees and hid from marauding Comanches in a gap in between Kalu’s hedge, a trunk seeping fat beads of tawny resin and a woven hurdle. He was too feeble to play. He lived in bed in a blanched room matt with sunbeams. His days were all beef tea and expectoration, plumped pillows and the doctor’s hushed voice. I knew of his secret existence through murmured hearsay, through rumour’s mysterious seepage. He wasn’t talked about. He was hidden away. My parents never referred to him, as though infant mortality were itself infectious like polio, myxomatosis for children, the viral Boney of those years that lurked in wait to maim our bodies, to steal them forever.
Infant mortality? Any mortality. Death might go dogging everywhere but how was I to know? Intelligence of the final finality was only grudgingly vouchsafed me by my parents. For all they spoke of death, I might have believed that we live perpetually, growing ever more crooked, more and more dried up, more rasping, more fearful. (I obviously didn’t know that it was death’s proximity that caused the eyes of the very old to communicate unimaginable terror.) Did my parents talk of it in camera where the renchild could not hear? I doubt it. It hurt my father too much to consider it. Death was denied by near-silence: what was not spoken of did not exist. So it was not addressed, nor were dying and the invisible invaders which honeycomb this internal organ and make leather of that one. The names of the dead were dropped from conversation, as one might drop that of a disloyal friend. Death seemed to be a kind of disgrace. The dead were somehow culpable. They brought it upon themselves. The rare times they were remembered, it was with irked brusqueness. This quasi-muteness might have been designed to protect me from a truth that was evidently considered just about unspeakable. It more likely derived from the near-paralysis that any thought of his father’s death caused my father.
George Meades had died at the age of forty-one in 1920 when his third child and second son was eleven years old. John Meades, who twenty-seven years later would become my father (twenty-six, if measured by the Seathwaite Conception), considered, so far as I could ascertain, that this premature departure was a gross betrayal, like that of a star batsman who has too easily surrendered his wicket to his team’s cost. (This must be an exceptional matter: I have never before used a cricketing simile.) Apprised by life’s whispering campaign that all this ends for all of us, I asked my father about his father’s death. He regarded me with astonished hurt that turned into a defensive flinch I had not seen before, it was an expression of vulnerability that a more malign (or less timid) son might have exploited. I had neither the nous nor the will.
‘How did he die?’
Perhaps he pretended to himself that his father had never existed. He had no photo of him. I had furtively pocketed one that I found buried among piles of Picture Post and tobacco tins filled with screws and wingnuts in the shed behind my grandmother’s house in Northwick Road where, equally, he wasn’t on display. It was obvious whom the photo showed – he was the double of his eldest son Harry, my uncle Hank, save that the ambit of his eyes was sooty with disease or fatigue.
‘Died in the night. Been ill. Grandma told us in the morning.’
My father glared a furious and wounded warning. I knew I must never again ask about, never again even mention my grandfather. And I didn’t.
Was George Meades, as my father had it, a solicitor and Evesham’s part-time town clerk? In Hank’s version he was a solicitor who contributed law notes to the Harmsworth press. I suspect that they had both promoted him out of filial pride. Or out of social shame: they wanted to elevate themselves just as their father, son of a joiner, had wanted to elevate himself by membership of a profession, cynosure of the unimaginatively aspirant. The house in Northwick Road – mean, terraced, dark, no bathroom, outside toilet – was improbably the home of a middle-aged solicitor. And Kitty recalled riding with him across the hills in a dog cart to Chipping Camden where he collected rents, a task more likely undertaken by a solicitor’s clerk rather than a solicitor. In the year of his death he had passed the Law Society’s examinations in trusts, accounting and bookkeeping. Did those successes complete a tardy qualification or was there further struggle and exhausting lucubration to come? With bitchy glee Kitty observed to my then wife that Meades men don’t live long lives. My father once pointed to a double-fronted stucco villa around the corner from Northwick Road near St Peter’s church and ruefully observed: ‘That was where we were just about to move to.’
Further wishfulness? Or was this true? And, if so, was his resentment then worldly, a festering regret about a property denied him, about status unattained? It wasn’t a matter that my father did much to rectify. He had no aptitude for making money, a resigned contempt for those, like Smoothie Derek, who had, and would not own a house till he was fifty-three.
Death was, then, off limits with my father. He told me in a matter-of-fact way that my maternal grandmother had died the previous night as we passed the church at Fugglestone late one Sunday afternoon: I had been sent to the Lush family for the weekend, presumably in anticipation of her death, of whose imminence I had of course not been foretold. ‘Mummy’s upset.’
Charles Wallis, brother of Barnes, married Christine Benn – his first and only, her third (first widowed, second divorced). She cooked Anglo-Indian curries which my father scorned as inauthentic. I was thus obliged to pretend to him that I did not enjoy them. She lived with her two sons in a flat at the top of an Edwardian house overlooking Chafyn Grove School’s lopsided playing fields. The flat below was occupied by a couple with the fine name of Saxon-Harold. Charles was a gentle decent man who rarely shed his crisp white mac. He was amused by my fondness for The Platters’ ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’, a song he recalled from the version in a film of the 1930s. He drowned on his honeymoon trying to save a child in difficulty in a Cornish bay. He was mourned by my father: ‘Christine isn’t taking it too well.’
Anthony, the infant son of my parents’ bent solicitor Eric Broad, had also drowned, early in the war, a few hundred yards upstream from our house. There was little sympathy for his negligent parents who had left him in the garden.
Both the great horn player Denis Brain and the heir to the Sun-Pat peanut butter fortune died at the wheel of sports cars. That was the way to go.
My mother taught Mary N—, the daughter of an army family. In her early twenties, after a brief failed marriage, she took to prostitution in Bristol. She was strangled by a john. My mother, reading a newspaper report, shrugged as though there was an inevitability to that end and that surprise was misplaced although sympathy wasn’t.
Although my mother’s instinct might have been to speak to me about death with qualified candour she acceded to my father’s will. Together they were conjoined in reticence. When alone with me she was slightly more open though hardly voluble. So I developed (or inherited by mimesis) a guardedness in public whilst cultivating a clandestine obsession with the forbidden: if the living reckoned it was that terrible there must be something to it. Like winklepickers, illegitimacy, tinned salmon, canals, hair cream and gross nipples it was a secret vice to be shamefully indulged, guiltily pored over and obviously not admitted. I kept deaths to myself.
Jolyon Spiller. Late August 1957. Richard Griffiths sat down beside me at the Cathedral School swimming pool and told me his father had just been phoned: a fatal bicycle accident in Sherborne. Two years later his father Laurence Griffiths, headmaster of the Cathedral