Well Done God! Page 6

  First ranging shot at 8,800 yards . . .

  The final act of building was to place at the very top of the spire a casket containing the holy relics of St. Anselm together with a tiny fragment of the True Cross. John was ill, and old, but could let no one else perform the ceremony. Bearing the small sealed lead container, he was hauled slowly in a chair up the interior of the spire by the same men on the great treadmill who had raised every stone of its fabric. At the top Elias and Nicolas helped him out through a specially enlarged rondel on to the temporary scaffolding erected round the point of the spire. He shook as he slid the lead casket into place, he turned, looked down, heard voices through the wind, did not look at the others, crawled back towards his chair. Elias followed, Nicolas was left to set mortar on the stone entombing the relics.

  . . . second at 8,200 yards . . .

  At the consecration the masons shuffled on the enamel, burnt glass tiles. One felt resentful that the clerics now acted as though the building belonged solely to them ; worse, were ascribing it to God, not them. A friend spat and said : Let them have it, leave it to them. A third was openly grateful that it had given him a living for twenty years, had enabled him to marry and bring up a family : Where else would I have found such work, he said, for there are no other patrons. It’ll be here when those bastards are dead, said another. And their bleeding god, said the first.

  . . . observe, split difference, two more ranging shots, observe, split difference, which should then give me the mean point of impact : the spire of the Cathedral of St. Anselm.

  John and Elias, old men for their time.

  John said : Why do you build ?

  Elias said : I am a builder . . .

  John said : Not for God ?

  Elias said : I am a builder. I’m not sure about God.

  John said : No more am I.

  Elias said : Then why have you spent yourself on this house of God ?

  John said : In order that others shall have a place in which it might seem possible to believe in God.

  . . . Then commence firing for effect. Impossible to check further, till daylight. Range in any case affected by temperature, wear of gun, strength of propellant, weather, other factors largely unknown, I just fire and hope, it’s not a science though they like to make out it is. Try to sleep now.

  By the fifteenth century there was a close ; by the sixteenth a small town ; by the seventeenth boys of the city evolved an early form of handball against the walls and buttresses of the return to the choir from the Chapter House. The verticals were as plumb as they ever were.

  STAND BY BATTERY THREE STOP LAY ON 07364219 BEARING 109° 15' CHECK VISUALLY FIRST LIGHT THEN COMMENCE FIRING ON ORDER BATCOM

  In the latter part of the eighteenth century respect was so far absent that it was found necessary to affix a notice to the eastern wall of the north transept reading DEFENSE D’URINER ; to which within a week was unofficially added SOUS PEINE DE CONFISCATION DE L’OBJET.

  . . on the bleeding spire, he says, who wants to hit the bleeding spire, what sodding use is that, it’s the bleeders underneath we’re supposed to hit, poor sods, though with all the wear this old cow’s seen if we line up on the bleeding spire we’ll be lucky to hit the city let alone the bleeding church. . . .

  An access of piety (or fear about the impossibility of passing a rope through the eye of a needle) in the mid-nineteenth century led to very extensive restoration. The flaking, blackened Caen stone was cut back and an ashlar of very similar stone applied. The crockets and finials where damaged were simply squared off and not replaced. Afterwards the cathedral of St. Anselm was recognisably the same building, but early twentieth century Kunstwissenschaft was misled into a considerable number of errors.

  FIRE !

  What Did You Say the Name of the Place Was ?

  Bournemouth.

  A mild morning in early May.

  The sun shines, my scrupulous eyes need sunglasses, again, for I break them leaning back over the driving seat to the children, repeatedly.

  Two old men running, slowly, a newsagency.

  Unhelpfully one revolves the display, I choose, pay little but enough, wait on the change.

  “They’re worth it for the season,” he endorses my purchase, smiling gradually, directing me the long walk to the sea, the sea first. Outside the sun has gone in, again I am surprised by, disappointed at the triteness of it, life, if you like, that the cliché about buying sun-glasses is made so immediately true for this instance.

  The weather end of the pier, a theatre above and old men fishing a stage below. I have never seen anything caught from a pier:

  except my father hooking out crab after small crab at Southend, stamping on them and kicking them back for taking bait not meant for them, the only time I ever remember him fishing. . . .

  The tidy scrub and sandy cliffs slope back remarkably uniformly at about seventy degrees, ninety-degree cliffs of hotels stand above them, at one point a cablecar drops ninety feet or so, unseriously, a toy. A new church spire, spike, the only thing modern on the skyline, neither blends nor complements, is compromise, is nothing architecturally.

  There is dark change in the west, a squall off the headland, I am pleased to know of rain at sea again, to be able to name it. I move towards shelter.

  Old deck chairs newly varnished for the season, newly stretched with translucent plastic in striped traditional designs. Two old ladies sit down, impatiently tear open their printed horoscopes; both caw with laughter as the first (Aquarius too, I note) reads the as if handwritten headline THIS IS A HIGHLY PREGNANT YEAR FOR YOU. The tide here seems most of the time to qualify as in, neither retreats nor advances far, and does not expose mud but very fine sand, classically sand-golden, an excellent if unexciting beach for young children.

  But there are very few children of any age to be seen here, suddenly I am aware that most of the people around are getting on, indeed have got on, are old, retired, retired to Bournemouth, for the mildness, the climate, the comfort, for reasons of their own.

  The public gardens that run north from the pier seem especially organised for the benefit of the old : being the floor of a small valley or chine, the local word, Wessex word, perhaps, chine, running greenly back, and dividing the town arbitrarily, parodying the countryside.

  Here are a glassed-in bandstand of no particular period or style, a concrete minigolf course of standardly unbizarre shapes, and sub-tropical sub-size subsidised palmtrees, no doubt a pride to the councillors, a source of surprise to some visitors, tatty, but undoubtedly palms, undoubtedly included in the pulchritudo half of the town’s motto.

  In the evergreen walks on the first slopes many well-to-do old ladies, and gentlemen, too, though fewer, yes well-to-do is right, sitting on benches in pairs, together, or a yard apart, watching the pigeons mating, the semi-rare birds in the clapboard cages, one woman writing a postcard in careful blue ballpen, another reading a letter on blue Basildon Bond written in careful blue ballpen, communicating.

  Others chance the gentle descent towards the municipalised stream that gave the town its name, so small for such growth from it, now tidied between equidistant concrete banks and to a common depth, but mouthless, unmouthed : forty yards from the pier it shuffles through a grill into darkness, and there is no debouchement on the beach. No traveller would return from that bourne, either.

  An intersection over the chine, a traffic island, the main traffic island of the town : up the sides of the valley the department stores mount and mount their signs in competition, attracting business, is that the expression ? Bournemouth shops are very good, sounds like a truism, where did I hear that ? My mother-in-law?

  SPECIAL DISPLAY OF

  VERY FINE

  HAND KNOTTED PIECES

  FROM PERSIA

  AND SURROUNDING DISTRICTS

  with green jade figurines and (how fashionably in negative) a blowup of the Venus de Milo.

  Jewellers for one form of their savings, to be sold if nec
essary, to put into something better, perhaps : in one window centrally a single solitaire for £1,750, in another viciously expensive ways of telling their time, but not how much longer, how little. And so many camera shops with displays of expensive equipment : much of it secondhand, used for how long in those fragile, unsteady hands ? But I begin to impose, to see nothing but the aged in Bournemouth, perhaps quite wrongly, yet they are there, begin to dominate my thinking about the place, I only record what I see, what happens, how I feel.

  There are health food stores offering for their salubritas (to name but a few): rheum elixir, natural sedatives, formulæ for kidney, bladder, heart, liver, gall; Lecithin (provides extra protection in middle and later years); royal gelée; super wheatgerm oil; pilewort and witchhazel suppositories; marshmallow and slippery elm ointment; kelp tablets; psoriasis ointment; toothpaste with azulene; lettuce-leaf cigarettes (no nicotine, a really good smoke); blood purifying tablets; bee cappings (for hayfever sufferers); concentrated artichoke bouillon (transfers fat into energy); Zimbabwe yoghourt (the only genuine goatmilk yoghourt); cocoa butter; high-protein high-potency multi-vitamin and mineral supplement; and honey, the sweet natural life-sustainer, in pound jars and seven-pound tins, garnered from heather, clover, acacia, lemon blossom, orange blossom, sunflower; and honey anonymously floral, local, blended : no one cannot afford honey in Bournemouth.

  More use, I would think, are the wine shops, many looking individual, hand-owned, hand-run, not combine from the outside though inside there may be branded products and factory stock: but if I had money and time some of these shops look the kind where I might find fines bouteilles, not rare, but uncommon, strange unfamiliar labels, genuine dust-encrusted, handled with casual love.

  In the central area there are several covered shopping arcades, the best apparently also the oldest. Regency or early Victorian, from the outside, bowed half-round either side of a fanlight-ended glass vault. But even this has been thirties-modernised, mucked about, only if you look up can you appreciate its composition, symmetry : at ground level it is nothing, just shopfront. And similarly inside, the semi-circular glass roof and fanlight are good, but the pillars of the porch are crudely 1930, Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence.

  The premises of the provision merchants appear to have changed little since before the war, either war : curved brass nameplates, mahogany woodwork of the windows, marble slab working tops for sliced tongue and jellied veal, glass jars of chicken breasts in aspic, patum peperium, preserved ginger, all the rest of the traditional bourgeois goodies.

  Down the centre of the arcade are angled glass advertising cases, locked, mahogany and brass again, with hand-lettered posterpaint showcards for hairdressing and tinting, dancing, restaurants, the Bournemouth Casino (members only), two discotheques, theatre and cinema (mainly and surprisingly sex films : ‘I came very near to being shocked’ D. Mirror. ‘The love scenes are very frank’ Cinema) Even more (though unintentionally) titillating are pictures advertising the Foot Clinic and the Public Baths Department : Gen. Manager and Engineer James G. Hawksby.

  And one showcard that trips some trap of unbidden memory, I had

  thought I did not know Bournemouth, but I do not know what I know, nor when I shall know. In this case it is Burley Manor for the friendly drink in the New Forest. Was this the hotel that she whom I have called all those names, Jenny, Gwen, Wendy, worked at all those summers ago, for the vacation before we became lovers, when she was still more closely bound up with the epileptic boyfriend ?

  She was I think a chambermaid there, was she was impressed with or remarked upon to me, later, and no doubt at the time to him, the stains on the sheets of one bed she changed there, five patches in the course of one night, the night of the highest count a man and his secretary, was it, I was sceptical of five times, then, put forward the scatter principle to her as a working hypothesis. There it was she first read Lear, in a thunderstorm, romantically, she was not lodged at the hotel but with an old lady in a cottage of the New Forest, romantic again, would not at least one night let the epileptic come to her there, some form of emotional blackmail, he would not make anything permanent because of his deficiency, thought it would not be fair to her, who only wished for him to lean on her, become dependent upon her, or so I thought, I heard it all only at secondhand, and heard then only what she wished me to know, I was being blackmailed too, I never met him, unfortunately, it might have put things into some sort of perspective. Why was he there ? Perhaps he arranged it, the vacation work, he was at Southampton. The woman who ran the hotel was some sort of good cook, she would be quoted whenever we argued about food, which was not often, as an absolute authority, scampi I remember featuring in one disagreement. She used to go for long walks on this vacation job, in the afternoons, when the chambers were made, I suppose, wrote a short story about it, or which came out of it, the experience, that is, about a girl (her) walking a long way across burnt heathland towards a hill with three pines on it, skeletal, I seem to remember but I might be wrong, the trees, that is, and they were stunted, naturally, burnt out even, I think, feel, three pines on a blasted heath ! Too much Lear and Journey of the Magi, I said, probably, possibly, I didn’t like the story, said so, yet ten years, twelve years later I still remember it, as everything about her, perhaps not everything, but these things come back, she had the power over me. I stare at the rooms in the photographs, wonder if this was the hotel, the Burley, in the New Forest : feel sure it is, or could be, the name too means something, ha, so I want it to be ?

  The stoneclad but steelframed department stores, banks, insurance offices indicate that Bournemouth’s most flourishing building period was during the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties: buildings not particularly good of their time, but certainly of their time, unmistakably. Now this architecture seems to serve nostalgic purposes for the retired, recalling the period of the Savoy, old ladies in touch again with the pleasures (or perhaps what they saw from a distance as the pleasures) of their youths : it means something that they again have them, although once more at a distance, ironically at another remove.

  But at least in Bournemouth the buildings are real, honest, indifferent quality though they may be : not like the London Hilton, whose interior decor seems to have been designed deliberately with this nostalgia for the past in mind, for the widows whose husbands died in making the fortunes they now spend in the surroundings they could not afford while they were young.

  The Dancing Years at the Pavilion.

  Coachloads of old ladies and the occasional gent arriving from wherever in the carpark courtyard, which is graced by a modern fountain of the kind that gets the modern a bad name. The theatregoers must call it ugly and modern, synonymously : and they are right, too. It is almost as if it had been designed for the purpose of reinforcing their prejudices, as a sop; to confirm their opinions : if we put up something ugly at this time then it must by definition be ugly and modern. As opposed to pulchritudo et salubritas, which is what they had then, in the past, ha.

  It consists of aluminium tubes of varying heights and diameters, this fountain, which variety in no case makes proportionate the tininess of the nozzle at the top of each; to these are strutted fibreglass bowls, orange in colour, which fill and spill, fill and overspill, pee weakly from a lip into a pool which is foam-covered, detergent-like.

  The old ladies stand for the Queen : the one in front of me has a cardigan torn near the trapezius, perhaps they are not all well-to-do, perhaps they are just ordinary, perhaps there are also homes for the less-well-off. The more-or-less-well-off one next to me, here with her daughter, perhaps, who looks much the same (hairstyle, twin set, the eyes, the manner) hums the familiar themes of the overture; then the orchestra descends on its hydraulic platform to applause from the lined and handcreamed palms, the lights dim on the grey and tinted heads, the scene number blinks to red one on the proscenium arch, and the curtain goes up to reveal the lederhosen-and-football-socks never-never land of the romantic Germanic past. R
udi Kleber is a young composer living at an inn just outside Vienna in 1911. He is poor — so poor in fact that he is being thrown out because he cannot pay his rent, and his piano, which now stands in the garden, has been sold over his head. All this has happened while Rudi was picking flowers in the early hours of the morning with Grete, the fifteen-year old girl whose aunt owns the inn. When a party of officers and actresses come out from Vienna to have breakfast in the garden, Rudi offers to play waltzes for them in the hope of raising money to buy back his piano. They are joined by Maria Zeigler, star of the Viennese operetta, who is so taken with one of the waltzes that she buys it for a thousand Kronen, and moreover persuades her lover Prince Metterling to allow Rudi to occupy an empty studio in his Palace. Little Grete is being sent to England to school. . . .

  This is theatre at its most primitive, basic — in the uncomplicated, unsophisticated sense, unreal, not like life in any meaningful way. Here they are, for instance, sympathising with and sighing over the poor starving artist, but what have they ever done to support any artist ? Do they even know the difference between an artist and an artiste ?