An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades
acquired nothing but browns and blacks. He was the only boy in the school to have done so. Advised by Miss Swanton that he was a disgrace he burst into tears. I wanted to comfort him. When we resumed for the summer term he wasn’t there. Perhaps he felt himself unworthy of the school. Perhaps he had been asked to go elsewhere. Some weeks later I learned that he had moved. His father had been posted from CDE Porton Down to Cornwall. A far-off wild sea county which I knew of as the home of my father’s late uncle, the Revd John Tarpley, vicar of Roche, and of his daughter Molly, who had enjoyed the privilege of sitting – inapt word – for no less a coyly erotic painter than Russell Flint. A far-off wild sea county where production of Sarin and VX had begun at CDE Nancekuke.
Diana Colombine’s skin was deliciously fawn like a doe’s, like a high-baked biscuit. Precisely, like a Huntley and Palmers Breakfast Biscuit – a smooth 10-mm-deep rectangle whose corners were curved, whose centre was marginally concave and which I longed for because it was forbidden (rival manufacturer). I longed for her too and her sweet smooth limbs, her sun-streaked bobbed hair whose bangs she was coltishly learning to throw. She didn’t know that she was going to be my squaw even though her qualifications were impeccable: she was the only girl of my age whom I now saw regularly. She had arrived in Wiltshire from Colombo with her parents Harry and Beryl, who had quickly become great friends of my parents. Colombo was in Ceylon. I knew that. And knew too that Ceylon was nearly India. She bore a name that derived from that city and whilst nearly Indians and Red Indians were from different continents they were clearly kin for otherwise they would not be so called. A further link: a lifesize painted statue of a Sioux warrior stood above the entrance of the Indianerhof, a prodigy of Viennese social housing designed by Karl Dirnhuber, father of one of Harry’s co-authors of microbiological and bacteriological papers. That proved something.
The interior of their thatched cottage at Winterbourne Gunner was dark. The sitting room was all files and bookshelves. The ceilings were unusually high. He would sit at a staunch table placed against the back of a high-back pub settle to whose planks he drawing-pinned notes. He wrote on foolscap notepads unfazed by any activity around him, lit as though by an annunciatory beam. The house was set back from the road beyond a lush paddock which a pony cropped. I confidently impressed Diana with assurances of my equestrian prowess though I had never ridden a horse. I confidently impressed her with my Apache outfit one day when she and her parents came for lunch.
I greeted her naked save for a Lone Ranger mask over my eyes, a paisley handkerchief round my head with a rook feather stuck in it, bolts of warpaint lipsticked on my cheeks, a leather belt round my waist and an improvised breechcloth – a length of fabric secured by the belt to cover my genitals and my bottom. This ensemble was completed by an air rifle and a bow and arrow, more mature choices of weapon than a plastic tomahawk. Beryl was startled by my appearance. She was a tense woman forever on the point of breaking into tears. She looked at me with a look my parents wouldn’t see, a look which I knew I could not mention. She must have wondered what they were thinking of in allowing me to dress thus. Harry was balding, saturnine, dark-eyed, restless, energetic. He had skin as smooth as his daughter’s, well-cut clothes and what I supposed to be the mien of a brahmin.
He joined my fantasy with the amused bonhomie he displayed towards both children and adults. I liked the way he could turn on life-and-soul joviality. And I was grateful that an Indian of a sort – even an Indian who, unlike me, did not look the part, but who like me did not speak with an Indian accent – was apprised of the Apache’s homelands. He was familiar, too, with Cochise, the Chiricahua chief I favoured over the publicity hog Geronimo who had the face of an ancient charlady. I knew that the Apache used poisoned arrows. Harry explained how they were poisoned: with the pounded liver of an animal (often a deer) which had been bitten by a rattlesnake, or with that snake’s venom glands. Such arrowheads were used against enemies but not for hunting. Did I know why? Because they might contaminate the meat of beasts so taken. This was information that grown-ups seldom imparted, were seldom interested in. He did not, however, share my preoccupation with the homicidal (and probably right-handed) Henry McCarty aka William Bonney aka Billy the Kid. This oversight was a disappointment to me. No matter. Apaches ate plants which made them dance and reel for hours, which made them courageous in battle, which made them see things they had never seen before. Visions? Precisely! Holes in the sky, Old Chap. Mountains changing shape as much in a minute as they had done in a million years. Cacti smiling at them. They stared at the sun till it blinded their eyes. Were they mad? Harry clapped me on my naked Apache back, congratulated me on my perception – and how delighted I was to be so patronised!
He asked me how I was enjoying the Swan School, he hoped I appreciated the historic building. I described the smell of the old people waiting to die in Trinity Hospital. He made a caricaturally quizzical face. A few moments later as we were sitting down to lunch he laughed at whatever aperçu his brain had conveyed. He was also laughing at me. I had learnt early that I prompted laughter without intending to, a characteristic I rued. He suggested that what I thought was the smell of old people was the smell of the mash in Gibbs Mew brewery just along the street from Trinity Hospital. I had surely noticed the building with the hoists, the cranes, the barrels? He explained how beer is made and why the process smells the way it does. He explained in detail I could not understand. He was suddenly oblivious to his audience’s shortcomings, making no allowance for children or indeed non-scientists. I was taken by Harry’s enthusiasm. But I still thought that was the way old people smelled.
After lunch Diana and I crept under the plum tree into the cheap plastic and canvas conical tent that I called my wigwam. She agreed to be my squaw. I gave her a headdress of plastic feathers that just about fitted. I stroked her skin.
The next day:
Diana and I returned as pupils to our respective schools.
My mother walked 200 yards up the road to the school where she taught. My father rose early to go off on his rounds.
Beryl probably congratulated herself on not pouring her first drink before noon.
Dr Harry Cullumbine (not Colombine, not that I realised for years) drove five minutes from the cottage at Winterbourne Gunner to CDE Porton Down, where he monitored marmosets on atropine, observed rats breathing kerosene fumes and pigs hooked to ethanol drips, fed Datura stramonium to monkeys and ketamine to lambs. Having attended to his zoo of junky primates and barbiturate-dependent quadrupeds he dosed human volunteers with LSD. This perpetually tanned Yorkshireman (who occasionally failed to suppress the ghost of that accent), sometime Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Colombo, was now head of the Physiology Section at Porton. The volunteers were national servicemen. In this context volunteers is today habitually written ‘volunteers’. A little less than a year before, Leading Aircraftman Ronald Maddisonfn2 had died in Salisbury Infirmary four hours after participating in a Porton experiment which exposed him to 200 mg of Sarin. The Coroner came under pressure from the Home Office, from the Intelligence Services, from the Minister of Supply, Duncan Sandys. Nonetheless, it is conceivable that the verdict of death by misadventure might have been returned even without those illegitimate influences: autres temps, autres moeurs.
Exceptionally, a second inquest was held fifty-one years later in 2004. To the doubtless smug delight of Attorney General Goldsmith and DPP Calvert-Smith, brown-nosed cretins of the New Labour establishment, it returned the altogether predictable verdict of unlawful killing. Like the quotes round ‘volunteers’ this verdict was the presumptuous judgment of the present on the past. Here was the Age of Apology or Rights or Compensation or Complaint castigating the Age of – what? Duty? Exploitation? Service? Mortal Quackery? Such retrospective perdition is cooked up in a whiggish void. With confidently 20/20 hindsight it overlooks the threats of nuclear devastation, Soviet aggression and world war which were omnipresent at Porton half a century previously. A society which deludes itself that risk can be eliminated is unlikely to understand one which accepted privation and danger with stoic fatalism, with forelock-tugging resignation. The volunteers’ choric plea that they believed they were assisting in the researches of the Common Cold Unit at Harvard Hospital eight miles from Porton on the other side of Salisbury would be plausible were it not for the fact that experiments had been conducted over two years before Maddison’s death and would continue subsequently.
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