LITMIR.BIZ

      I was forced to spend part of every summer holiday with them and the shared Elsan and the neighbour’s girl Shirley whose favourite record was The Stargazers’ ‘Close The Door They’re Coming In The Window’, which I believed had something to do with a plague of locusts. It terrified me. I prissily told Shirley that my favourite record was Handel’s Water Music. Uncle Wangle’s favourite record was anything depressing by a dead Scandinavian or anything gloomy by a dead Finn. When Auntie Ann’s health once again failed to improve they moved a further couple of miles to Hinton Admiral where they bought the lodge of a decrepit, unoccupied William IV house whose grounds were being covered in bungalows. The sitting room was octagonal. Its floor was marked with Ls of white sticky tape which indicated precisely where to position a chair for maximum auditory efficacy when listening to the new hi-fi which played Grieg, Grieg, Grieg and occasionally Sibelius. Cruder music, the music which excited me, was not welcome. My taste for Elvis Presley was again incredulously mocked. I bought ‘All Shook Up’ and got bollocked for it. I put on a pullover one chill September evening and was told how soft I was – the implication was that I was a mummy’s boy who had inherited his mummy’s sissy city ways. When I admitted to having gone in to Christchurch to see a film called Light Up the Sky, a feeble ack-ack comedy with Benny Hill and Tommy Steele, Uncle Wangle rolled his eyes. He abhorred the cinema, never owned a television, listened only to the Home Service and the Third Programme, read the Listener and the Manchester Guardian (it arrived a day late, by post. The organist, composer and English teacher Richard Lloyd also subscribed to it by post: with sober fury he passed round our class the edition which reported the Sharpeville massacre). Wangle didn’t eat meat; rather, he didn’t buy meat. He was a practised scrounger. He ate Grape-Nuts, a cereal as dentally unforgiving as pebbledash. Auntie Ann made equally challenging nutroasts. Bread and sugar were brown. Pipe and tobacco were brown. Clothes were brown or brownish. Auntie Ann wore oatmeal hopsack and had a diarrhoea-colour pea jacket for best: she was oblivious to style. Uncle Wangle wore Aertex the whole year through, a hairy tweed jacket, a knitted tie, khaki drill trousers, sandals or canvas sailing shoes called bumpers. It goes without saying that the house was virtually unheated, that his Morris Minor was a convertible (it was called ‘Janet’), that Auntie Ann wore no make-up, that he was dismissive of the grandest house in the locality, the ruinous Highcliffe Castle, which he reckoned bogus and ugly – this would, of course, have been the reaction of most of his coevals to Victorian mediaevalism. It was not its retrospection that he deplored but the theatricality of its expression, and the pomp.

      The stratum of old England he sentimentally connected with was that of down-to-earth yeomanry rather than nobility: stout not flash, worthy not chivalric. Uncle Wangle’s and Uncle Hank’s idealisation of a certain England contained some dilute element of blood and soil. This hodgepodge of pernicious anthropomorphic sentimentality which dignified itself as a doctrine was not, incidentally, a Nazi creation. It was merely hijacked by that regime’s ideologues. The identification of a particular people with a particular place and a particular past was a parochial goal whose paradox was that in the years when Uncle Hank and Uncle Wangle (and my father) grew up it was a pan-European commonplace proselytized by Barrès, Maurras, Hamsun etc. Walther Darré’s programme was merely an extreme manifestation of that commonplace. In England it went no further than the primitivist chapter of the Arts and Crafts, the Boy Scouts, the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, the Kibbo Kift, the English Mistery (get that ‘i’), the English Array, Social Credit, Distributism, H. J. Massingham, Henry Williamson, Rolf Gardiner, John Hargrave, Jorian Jenks, Captain Pitt-Rivers and a few other eco-fascist fruitcakes, some of whom were detained under Regulation 18B. It was peripheral. And so too was England’s proud host of land colonies, repetitive essays in failed communality and spiritual root crops (which also failed). Not that Uncle Wangle ever went back to the land. He was merely a fellow traveller of bucolicism who discerned moral worth in camping. He revelled in discomfort. He was a man who loved a Primus stove and who insisted in defiance of all evidence to the contrary that a half-raw potato half-baked in the embers of a campfire was a peerless treat.

      When I was thirteen I put my foot down. I told my parents that I was no longer willing to be farmed out to Uncle Wangle and Auntie Ann during holidays. I’d had enough of being sent to kennels. Two years later Auntie Ann’s health was declining. On the second day of a holiday in Devon she had been hospitalised in Bideford where she would remain for a month. Uncle Wangle visited her twice a week, driving through the night. According to my father her frailty was more conspicuous than ever. Her freckled skin was papery, yellow. She appeared severely jaundiced. But it wasn’t her liver that was the problem. It was her heart. When she at last returned from Bideford she had open-heart surgery, a procedure that was then in its infancy. The operation was performed at the Royal South Hants Hospital in Southampton. It was apparently successful. When she was discharged she spent her days dozing. Her face was drawn and she was junky-thin. But she was in good spirits. As soon as he judged her fit Uncle Wangle took her away to convalesce. They went camping in the Cairngorms. They were accompanied by their arty and – it follows – entirely artless friends Heather and Bertie. A photo, taken by Heather, shows her and Bertie’s Series III MG Magnette, Uncle Wangle’s new half-timbered Morris Traveller, two tents, a boulder-strewn stream, a mountainside, Uncle Wangle beside an upturned plastic bucket, Bertie on a folding chair, Auntie Ann on a second folding chair shrouded in blankets and car rugs, wearing a bobble hat. Soon after they returned home she suffered complications resulting from pneumonia. She died on 25 July 1963. Uncle Wangle wrote in his diary ‘Black Thursday’.

      Despite my protests three years previously my parents, on the point of departing for Germany for the first time since 1938, insisted that I go to stay with him. Keep him company! Cheer him up! I failed. After a couple of days, worn down by his litany of complaints (car tyres, drains, workmen, weather, anything) and his deferred self-justification, oblique exculpation and sly self-pity, I packed my grip and went to crash with some friends who had rented a caravan at Sandhills, only a few yards from where in better times he had parked ‘Bredon’ on the shore. One night he turned up on the pretext of checking I was OK. There were girls from another van with us (one of them subsequently married a bigamous car dealer in Swindon). There was pop music. There were bottles of beer, cigarettes. I had never seen an adult look so woundedly bewildered. Outside his own milieu, which was halved by Auntie Ann’s death, he was at a loss.

      He was the loneliest man in the world. His wife was dead. Heather and Bertie had returned to Canada. In his widowhood he was virtually friendless. He absented himself from work. He drove aimlessly round rural England and Wales, sleeping alone in a tent made for two, bathing in brooks. He occasionally sailed with our near-namesake Brian Mead, editor of the Christchurch Times, but this was an exclusively marine acquaintanceship. His obstinacy and pride and self-delusion were such that he very likely never admitted to himself that it was his determination to adhere to his code of faith (or whatever it was) that had ruptured his world. When he died five years later, at the age of fifty-five, it was not so much from a broken heart as from an unconquerable isolation, from incomprehension of another world, one that her death had forced him to frequent if not quite inhabit. He was displaced. He was also temporally adrift: for my twenty-first birthday, a few months before he died, he gave me a model railway engine, a Hornby .00 shunter. It wasn’t a joke either.

      Uncle Hank, né Harry in Evesham, 1907, also wore Aertex, hairy tweed and khaki drill trousers. He smelt of tobacco and of a sandalwood cologne and of coal-tar soap. He never married. Uncle Hank had been engaged before the war to a woman called Vera, who eventually married someone else.

      Uncle Hank lived in digs. He lived in digs while at Birmingham University and he lived in digs when he went to work in that city’s town clerk’s office upon graduating. In 1934 he moved to Burton-on-Trent as deputy town clerk. In 1957 he was promoted and was appointed town clerk, which position he held till he

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