Laker
fn1 Anil Kumble took all ten second-innings wickets for India against Pakistan at Delhi in 1999. However Laker’s record of nineteen wickets in a test still stands.
fn2 The architect was Clough Williams-Ellis, who when he abandoned his winsome, cute Portmeirion mode was trite in a different way.
Major Ferguson and Major Veale
fn1 A few years later, cycling along a chalk path between blackthorns at Paul’s Dene on the northern edge of Salisbury, I witnessed a calf trying and failing to make its escape from its apparently unconcerned mother’s vagina. I wondered momentarily if I should make my debut as a midwife but really didn’t want to get blood on my apple-green jeans (orange stitching) so let nature take its course.
Major Johnstone and Major Corlett
fn1 ‘Long time no see’. Phonetically.
fn2 Smiths’ hegemony was near its end. Golden Wonder introduced the UK’s first flavoured crisps – cheese and onion – the next year, 1962, and by the end of the Sixties had become market leader.
fn3 At the subsequent by-election the Union Movement candidate’s agent was the twenty-year-old Christ Church undergraduate Max Mosley.
Market Place
fn1 Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire.
fn2 Like every other small town Salisbury had a number of coffee bars for the sandalled and bearded to waste their days in: The Two Bare Feet (opposite the Art School – I never dared enter), The Man Friday (desert island décor), The Orchid (bullfight posters).
No Food, Future Food
fn1 The car had a Clarence House sticker on its windscreen enabling him to park there whenever he wished. An odd but useful gift from the Queen Mother in gratitude for the splendid face job that Jim had done for her. A few years later he did a second.
Old Manor
fn1 I realised the correspondence when I saw the transfixing opening shot of Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1963), which has a Hans Werner Henze score and locations in the HLMs (social housing projects) of Boulogne-sur-Mer where Franck Ribéry would grow up. The rest of the film is all post-colonial guilt and jump-cuts.
Old Mill
fn1 Duff said that Cecil Beaton was ‘like a very successful Parisian madam who had decided to give it all up, move to the English countryside, and take all her bordello belongings with her’.
Owlett’s End
fn1 My curiosity about these things which were like rivers but which were not rivers had been aroused by a spoil heap of the uncompleted Southampton–Salisbury Canal, 4 miles SE of the latter at Whaddon. It forms a high bank topped by Scots pines and might be taken for a defensive work.
fn2 There are echoes of this unsolved case in David Rudkin’s Afore Night Come (1962).
fn3 To that generation pissartist signified a braggart rather than a drunk, though the two are undoubtedly congruent.
Qualifications
fn1 Subsequently known as ‘the parish Nureyev’.
Richmond, Daniel & Bunty
fn1 Among his close neighbours was the unorthodox entrepreneur Oliver Cutts, sometime owner of the vast late Victorian Rhinefield Lodge, who in reduced circumstances dressed like Max Wall. He once yelled across a river to my father: ‘I say John old man – do you know anyone I could pay to see me towards a K?’ The fact that he wasn’t entitled to did not inhibit him from styling himself ‘Sir’.
Songs: Diana
fn1 Possibly a pseudonym of Ross MacManus, singer with the Joe Loss Orchestra and father of Elvis Costello.
Also by Jonathan Meades
Filthy English
Peter Knows What Dick Likes
Pompey
Incest and Morris Dancing
The Fowler Family Business
Museum Without Walls
Pidgin Snaps
COPYRIGHT
Fourth Estate
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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Jonathan Meades 2014
Jonathan Meades asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Parts of this book have appeared in different forms in London: City of Disappearances, Granta, the New Yorker and The Times
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