On my way to school, I used to walk past a cottage around the corner from our road, one of the low little homes that dotted the neighbourhood. In its garden stood a round summerhouse, ingeniously constructed to turn heliotropically, like a flower following the sun. Its windows were empty, the green paint peeling from the wooden slats. I’d imagine some frail elderly lady sitting inside, dressed in lace like tea-stained curtains, the pale sun falling on her papery skin. Then one day the summerhouse disappeared, and in its place grew a bed of blinding French marigolds.
Along these avenues and cul-de-sacs, the comforting icons of stained-glass sunbursts and galleons on wavy seas would soon give way to the bland stare of plastic windows, and the porches which welcomed the milkman or postman would be boarded up against the world. But for now the corner shop still sold Fruit Salad and Blackjack chews, the grocer sliced cooked meat with scything machines ready to take off an inattentive finger, and the chemist had huge bottles of blue and red water in the window and cream and chrome scales on the counter for weighing babies like quarter-pounds of sweets.
On the other side of the road from the cottage and its summerhouse ran a ribbon of woody valley where a meandering, rusty stream sought the freedom of the sea. Around it lay the vestiges of Sholing Common, the traces of its ancient provenance marked only on old Ordnance Survey maps in the gothic script of tumuli and Roman roads. The valley was crossed by Church Path, a narrow lane which descended steeply to the stream, then rose up towards a stone and slate church with a modest steeple, described in Pevsner’s Buildings of England as ‘prettily set in a pine-backed churchyard in a strange Victorian rural backwater of suburban Southampton’.
Those pines were less covered by sinuous ivy than they have since become, but even then Church Path was a shadowy place. My mother would point out tiny gravestones in its churchyard, memorials to Romany children from Botany Bay, where the dark-faced inhabitants, looking like ancient Britons, spat at us while we waited in the family car as our parents went to buy some plants from their father. Their caravans stood next to their bungalows, and sometimes we’d hear the sound of horse hooves clattering down our road, and run out to see the young blades riding past on a pony and trap.
Invested with the strangeness of the people who lived beyond Church Path, this wilderness at the bottom of our road both fascinated and terrified me. It was where, in my imagination, chained convicts awaited their criminal exile, languishing on the scrubby grass, indolently desperate figures out of Gustave Doré’s Dante. During the war, barrage balloons had been set up on the common, leaving behind rusty iron rings which in my mind became tethers for the manacled prisoners. Now they secured two lonely gypsy ponies, slow-moving, semi-wild beasts with shaggy manes, big round bellies and a sad look in their big black eyes, as if to plead for their release.
Sometimes, on the bus from school, I’d go on a stop and walk back through Church Path. It was a self-consciously daring act. The way home led through a green tunnel overhung by yew, ivy and laurel, dipping steeply into the damp valley before the distant light at the end; the pathway was dark and scary even on a sunny day. I once found a dead mole there, its black velvet unbloodied, tiny pink fin-like paws sticking out stiffly at right-angles to its lifeless and blind body, like an abandoned soft toy dropped from a passing pushchair. On the other side of the path from the churchyard – where a girl from up the road once told me I’d be haunted that night because I’d walked across a grave – was a derelict house. Its garden contained a large rectangular pit roughcast in concrete, apparently a pre-war swimming pool. It may have been the same girl who told me that the house had been owned by a Dr White, and that he had invented something called the tampon. In fact, the owner was a plain Mr White, undistinguished by the invention of anything at all.
Below the churchyard, where dead wreaths and old prams were chucked over the iron railings into the valley’s dip, was another low cottage with a tiled roof and green wooden door; smoke could sometimes be seen coming from its chimney. It looked like a farmhouse left over from a previous century, still standing firm in the last vestiges of wild land as the modern world closed in; or like the old railway carriage in which we used to take our holidays at Gunard on the Isle of Wight, around which the bats flew at night.
Chickens pecked about in the small patch of cultivated land in front of the house, and there was a tethered goat with curly horns and bulging eyes with demonic slits for pupils. Another Church Path legend claimed someone had been murdered in this valley, blasted at short range with a shotgun; I saw the act replayed in slow motion, the blue smoke of the weapon’s discharge, the recoil of the body, the red of the victim’s blood. Although I had no reason to suspect the inhabitants of this cottage – which, like the rotating summerhouse, disappeared sometime later in my childhood – I was scared of the seldom-seen old man who lived there. Sometimes he would stand by his cottage door, white-haired, bent double and propped up with a stick. Perhaps his wife joined him, in a white pinafore, her hair done up in a silver bun. Or perhaps I invented the scene, like the psychic timeslip in The Man Who Fell to Earth, when the orange-and-yellow-haired alien, Thomas Jerome Newton, is driven through countryside and glimpses a family of nineteenth-century hillbillies outside their shack, its chimney smoking, a burst of inter-bred banjo on the soundtrack.
Like the privet cutway that ran up the back of our house where my brothers used to catch bucketfuls of slow worms, these wild places produced tales of innocence and loss, of murder and abandoned babes in the wood. From Church Path, the stream flowed through the old clumps of bamboo planted by the inhabitants of the cottage, past Mr White’s concrete pool and widened out into Miller’s Pond, a still, deep pool overshadowed by the tall brick arches of a railway viaduct. There were tadpoles and sticklebacks in the water, and it froze solid in winter, its glaucous ice spiked with dead bullrushes. On our way to the park we would walk past the pond, and I’d lean over the low wall and look down into its brackish water, imbued as it was with another local legend.
One Sunday in February 1909, Alfred Maurice Mintram, the fourteen-year-old son of Charles Mintram, a coal porter who lived at Fir Grove Road – the road which crossed ours – was spending the afternoon sliding on the iced-up pond. A witness to the subsequent enquiry was walking round the pond ‘when someone shouted that there was a boy drowning’.
He ran round the bank, and saw a constable taking his tunic off, and together they went to the lad’s assistance. They got to within four yards of him, and witness called out that they would soon get to him. Deceased replied, ‘Hurry up, I can’t hold on much longer.’ The next minute, the ice gave way, and they were all struggling in the water. There was ice between them and the boy, and it was impossible to reach him. There were no ladders or ropes or anything they could have used. The boy threw up his hands and went down …
Reported to the coroner, in the still, formal air of the courtroom, the boy’s last words – plaintive, panicking, banal – seemed to presage a forthcoming tragedy which would strike the inhabitants of these streets and households. The melodramatic fatalism of the scene is compounded by postcards depicting the boy’s funeral, his classmates clumped together on a cold day in February, dressed in their Sunday best, bearing wreaths. Another card shows Alfred’s humped grave in Sholing churchyard, surrounded with laurel leaves and a row of five bouquets laid along its top, each protected by an odd wire frame like an upturned hanging basket. Three years later, the same families would lose brothers, fathers and lovers who foundered, like Alfred Mintram, in icy water, uttering similarly plaintive cries as Titanic sank.
I have only a vague memory of the house in which I was born, in Portswood, on the other side of the Itchen which divides Southampton as clearly as the Thames divides London. ‘Akaba’ had been the home of an army officer, and had been empty for some time when my newly-married parents discovered it in 1941, and managed to lease it, for one pound a week, from the major’s widow.
The house was a large, semi-detached, red-brick villa; the names engraved on its lintel and those of its neighbours – ‘Rahwali’, ‘Gwalia’ – were as redolent of the last century as the street itself, named Osborne Road after the late Queen’s Isle of Wight retreat. The monkey puzzle tree that stood along the road was a further mark