England and Other Stories

AJAX

WHEN I WAS a small boy we had a neighbour called Mr Wilkinson, who was a weirdo. He must be long gone now, but I’ve often wondered what became of him. I was his undoing.

Let me stress that I never thought he was a weirdo, it wasn’t my word. It was an opinion I was made to have of him. I was too young to have opinions of my own, or so it was thought. I was just a small boy going to primary school. But I didn’t think Mr Wilkinson was weird. I thought he was interesting, I even admired him. I was driven into taking an opposite view.

When I was with my mother and we met him in the street he’d always be well mannered. He’d doff his hat. He’d always wear a hat and be well dressed, often in a suit, even if the suit had seen better days. He’d ask courteously after my father—‘Mr Simmonds’—and he used words with a feeling for them, as if they were things you should treat appreciatively, not just mechanically, employing standard phrases. Maybe it was his enthusiastic use of language that first made my parents think he was weird.

He looked entirely respectable. The dearest wish of all the grown-ups in our street was to be respectable and, by being respectable, to better themselves. So you’d think they might have regarded Mr Wilkinson as a model. It was obvious even to me that he was in some ways a cut above our street, he’d come down in the world to it. It was also obvious that he was what people called ‘educated’.

I’d had it drummed into me by my parents from the earliest age that education was the most important thing in life and the key to everything, and I believed them. ‘Education’ was one of the first long words I learnt, and learning it was — rather magically — an example of the thing it proclaimed. At school I had no problem with teachers. I revered them. They were the purveyors of this most important thing. It struck me that Mr Wilkinson had the qualities of a teacher and perhaps had been one once. He seemed, in fact, even more educated than any of the teachers at my primary school, and for this reason too I couldn’t see why the whole street didn’t look up to him, instead of thinking he was weird.

But Mr Wilkinson lived alone. That was one mark against him. And though he’d always be respectably dressed when you met him in the street, he was in the habit of engaging in physical exercises in his back garden in just his underpants. In all weathers, even in mid-January. Just his underpants.

It wasn’t only exercising. There seemed to be a whole ritual medley of things that sometimes involved simply breathing — a vigorous expanding and deflating of his lungs — and sometimes involved not doing anything in particular except chanting. Chanting was the best word for it. You might sometimes have called it humming or even singing, but chanting was the word that got used. In his underpants.

Anyone can do what they like in the privacy of their own home. This was something my parents would have firmly and fairly asserted. But they also said, about many things, that there were limits.

Our street was like thousands of others built in the outer suburbs on vacant land just after the war, but for some reason it had been decided to erect a pair of semis, then a bungalow, then another pair of semis and so on. If you had a bungalow you only had the one floor, but you had the privilege of being detached. There wasn’t a great deal of space, but you could walk all the way round your own home. Even in your underpants.

On the other side of us, in the adjoining semi, were the Hislops. They’d been there, as had my parents, since the houses were built, but were a slightly older generation. Their two boys — I never thought of them as ‘boys’—were old enough for one of them to have done National Service. I remember him in a beret, with an unexpected moustache and a kit bag. Their father ran a small printer’s. The boys had girlfriends, tinkered around with cars and got married. There was nothing particularly educated about the Hislops, they were even slightly rough-edged, but they were a family and normal.

On the other side was Mr Wilkinson.

There was a high wooden fence, with a bit of trellis on top, between ourselves and Mr Wilkinson, so the only way you could see him in his underpants was from our spare bedroom or my parents’ bedroom, both at the back upstairs. This put us in the position of spies, while all Mr Wilkinson was doing was — minding his own business. Nonetheless, my parents and particularly my mother didn’t want to live next door to someone who was even known to stand around in his underpants and chant. And you could hear the chanting sometimes without needing to look.

Mr Wilkinson, I should say, was quite old. By that I mean that he seemed old to me. He must have been in his fifties. He had thinning, whitish hair, but had none of the stoopingness or vulnerability of old people. He was well built, even quite muscular (as could be seen) and, plainly, he kept himself fit. He was a good advert for physical education too.

I only remember him as ‘Mr Wilkinson’. I can’t recall ever knowing his first name, perhaps it was considered wrong to know it. Mr Hislop was also Tony. My parents christened me James, and gradually gave up the battle against ‘Jimmy’. When I was first introduced to Mr Wilkinson (before we knew anything of his habits) it was as James, but he immediately and perhaps only in a spirit of friendship called me Jimmy. I saw that this set my mother against him.

Not only was there the fence and the trellis, but because the street was on a hill and Mr Wilkinson was above us, it was virtually impossible at ground level to see the back of his bungalow or into his garden. In the months when the trellis wasn’t overgrown you might just glimpse his white-haired but imposing head moving past, or even a pale pink shoulder. Which could make you wonder if he was wearing underpants this time or nothing at all.

On warm days I used to like playing by the flower bed at the foot of the fence, near the back of the house. Playing really meant re-landscaping the flower bed according to my infant purposes, which naturally displeased my parents. But I remained so set upon this activity that they eventually allowed a (strictly limited) part of the bed to be used for it. Perhaps they thought it was good for my development and that I might one day become a civil engineer. In fact, though they didn’t know it, I was rearranging, in miniature, our street. I was in charge of every household in it.

Imagine a region of pebble-dashing and occasional bursts of mock-Tudor, of rowans, laburnums, trim hedges, trim lawns and clumps of purple aubrietia. You have the picture. I think of it now with an odd fondness, but with an abiding, far-off sense of its own weirdness.

One day, engaged in my flower-bed projects, I caught Mr Wilkinson watching me intently through the trellis and the tendrils of clematis. He must have been doing it for some time before I looked up, but, if I was surprised, I wasn’t frightened. He wasn’t spying on me (as we spied on him) so much as waiting to speak to me.

He asked me if I was interested in agriculture and if I was a vegetarian.

These were two long words I didn’t know — I found them even difficult to remember — and I must have disappointed Mr Wilkinson with my answer. But he seemed eager that I should be a vegetarian. I told my parents (I was at heart a truthful, conscientious boy) and I must have repeated the words accurately enough. They said agriculture was farming and vegetarians were people who didn’t eat meat.

Then my mother said, and my father backed her up, that I should never speak to Mr Wilkinson through the fence, or anywhere else, if I was by myself, even if he spoke to me. This had probably been the first conversation — or one-to-one encounter — I’d had with him anyway.

He stood around in his back garden in his underpants and he was a vegetarian. This settled the question of his being a weirdo. Every Sunday, without fail, the whole street smelt of roasting meat.

If the underpants and the vegetarianism didn’t clinch it, there was the matter of the visitors. Mr Wilkinson didn’t go out at regular times as people did who had jobs, but he had visitors. They came just now and then, not in a steady flow, and didn’t stay for very long. They were all sorts, but it’s true that among them were a number of what my mother called ‘young girls’.

There was nothing intrinsically improper about this and, again, you had to keep watch on Mr Wilkinson’s bungalow even to notice it. The simple explanation — that went with his teacherly demeanour — was that Mr Wilkinson gave some kind of lessons. He taught music perhaps. Given the chanting, perhaps he taught singing. But no one arrived, it’s true, with a musical instrument and we never heard, though we heard the chanting, the muffled sounds from within the bungalow of a piano or a poorly sung scale.

He taught something anyway, for which people were prepared to come for an hour or so and pay him. I actually had the misplaced fantasy that I might go round to Mr Wilkinson’s myself and be taught whatever it was he taught. Since the key to life was education. But I was glad I kept this thought from my parents.

The teaching theory never held much water, even if it was plausible and I wanted to subscribe to it. My mother — in overheard conversations with my father — kept coming back to the young girls, as if that in itself disproved it. But I could easily imagine Mr Wilkinson teaching young girls something. Elocution, deportment. I’d discovered that even very small girls at my primary school could be subjected by their parents to bouts of extra-curricular improvement. And if Mr Wilkinson had some dubious interest in young girls that was simply to do with their being young girls (and which I knew nothing of), why didn’t he restrict his visitors to young girls only? But I never voiced this argument either.

The teaching theory was scotched anyway by what, it became known, Mr Wilkinson had himself disclosed about his occupation and livelihood. Some other neighbour, bolder or more prying than my parents, had pinned him down on the matter and been obligingly told that he practised his own form of ‘alternative medicine’. It was something he’d evolved over the years through study and application. He advertised professionally and had many satisfied patients. He had even asked the inquisitive neighbour (I think it was Mrs Fox at number seven) if there was anything he might do for her.

My mother said, ‘Alternative medicine?’ Then said, ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’—a favourite phrase of hers which I much later thought was particularly apt in this case. Then she added, ‘In his underpants?’

These were remarks put to my father that, again, weren’t for my ears, though I overheard them. My father said (and, thinking about it much later too, I thought it pretty near the mark), ‘Alternative medicine? If you ask me, I think he might once have practised ordinary medicine. But now — if you see what I mean — he has no alternative.’

I retained those words because, though I didn’t understand them, I could tell my father thought he’d said something clever. The cleverness had even taken him by surprise. And though I didn’t know what the cleverness consisted of, I felt pleased for him because for a moment at least he seemed to possess the artful and inventive way with language that was characteristic of Mr Wilkinson.

I couldn’t, myself, picture Mr Wilkinson as a doctor. My childhood experience of doctors was that they were gruff, chilly people who could do nasty things to you. I continued to see him as a teacher, an educator, and perhaps alternative medicine (if it wasn’t just something bad-tasting in a bottle) was really a form of teaching. Perhaps Mr Wilkinson had some special wisdom to impart. He wasn’t a weirdo at all. The visitors who turned up now and then to ring his doorbell were his followers.

One day I had another ‘conversation’ with Mr Wilkinson which proved to be rather more than a conversation. I did the thing I wasn’t supposed to do, and I exceeded even that. It was in the school holidays. My father was at work, my mother was going to see her mother for the afternoon. I was to be dispatched, while she was gone, to play with my friend Roger West at number ten, and thus be under the watchful eye of Mrs West. But some minor crisis in the West household prevented this, and my mother, for whatever reason, couldn’t suddenly disappoint my grandmother.

For perhaps the first time in my life I was told that I’d have to be alone in the house for a whole afternoon, though it wouldn’t be so long really and I was old enough for it. But I was, strictly, to stay in the house or in the back garden and not to answer the door to anyone.

It was a warm summer’s day, so I was happy to keep to the back garden, doing more reconstruction of ‘my’ section of the flower bed. I don’t think Mr Wilkinson can have been aware of my exact situation, because of the question he asked me. But there he was again suddenly, peering through the clematis, and there was no one to witness that I was breaking my solemn oath not to speak to him.

He said, ‘Excuse me, Jimmy. Does your mother — does Mrs Simmonds — have anything for clearing drains? I’m awfully sorry to trouble her, but I’ve a spot of bother with my one at the back here. Nothing drastic, but in this hot weather, you know. .’

I could see that Mr Wilkinson was sporting a shirt collar. He wasn’t just in his underpants.

I had the child’s instinct not to say that my mother was out, the child’s alertness to the possibility of adventure — at least to the possibility of getting to know Mr Wilkinson better. Not to mention the child’s excitement at the forbidden. I didn’t know about clearing drains, but I knew there was a cupboard in the kitchen where the sort of thing that might clear them would be.

I said to Mr Wilkinson, ‘I’ll go and ask her.’

Did I say truthful and conscientious?

In the cupboard there were various jars and bottles, but there was a big tall tin labelled ‘Ajax’. I vaguely knew it had a variety of uses (my father sometimes used it for something in the garden) and that it was my mother’s answer to anything unpleasant. There was another tin of the stuff in the lavatory upstairs. Drains? Why not?

I picked it up and decided that, instead of trying to pass it over the fence — impossible for a small boy anyway — I should take it round to Mr Wilkinson directly. It was only a matter of opening the side door, which fastened with just a latch, then walking up his front path. The truth was that I was impelled by a sly curiosity: I would be just like one of those mysterious visitors, of whom there might already have been one or two that morning.

Mr Wilkinson opened his door. He looked at me and smiled. He was wearing clothes. His strong arms projected from rolled-up sleeves. ‘Oh that’s good of you, Jimmy. And so kind of your mother.’ He studied the Ajax tin, perhaps frowning a little even as he continued to smile. He could hardly reject my offering. ‘Well, perhaps it might do the trick.’

He looked at me again, the frown deepening, and seemed to hesitate. I can see now that he was coming to a significant decision: whether to take the tin, say he’d return it later, and send me away, or whether, since I was there and it was our tin, to make me a party to his drain-clearing operation. Perhaps he thought I was just a small boy and there was no danger — that is, to him. Or perhaps he was just infected with the same impetuous rush towards the hazardous that had overcome me.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘we may as well go straight round the side.’

This disappointed me. I wasn’t going to be allowed to pass through the house. On the other hand, I could see (or could see later with hindsight) that he’d decided, wrongly, to trust me. If trust even came into it.

He liked me, I think. He thought he’d found a friend.

We walked along by the flank wall of the bungalow. There I was on the other side of the fence over which he’d peered at me and over which he could sometimes be seen standing near-naked and ululating.

He’d taken the tin from me and, raising it now like an exhibit or something in a lesson, he said, ‘Isn’t it a sad thing, Jimmy, that one of the great heroes of the Greek myths, one of the most glorious of those who fought in the Trojan War, should be reduced to being a tin of scouring powder?’

I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about, but these words made a great impression on me and have stayed with me ever since. I still hear them being spoken in the eloquent, playful yet lamenting way Mr Wilkinson uttered them.

The fact is that it is to this unintelligible but memorable remark I owe all my later discovery and enthralled exploration of the Greek myths. I owe a whole world of narrative and magic and meaning. I owe a whole education.

When my parents asked me later that year what I wanted for Christmas I said at once (having done some precocious research at my primary school) that I wanted a book that would tell me all the stories of the Greek myths, the Trojan War included. This request rather surprised my parents, but they found me such a book. It was a little beyond me at first, but I grew into it. I have it still.

But more than this. Much more. I owe to Mr Wilkinson’s remark all my lasting fascination not just with how a great Greek hero gets turned into a tin of scouring powder, but with all the strange turns and twists and evolutions this world can take, all the bizarre changes of fortune, for good and bad, it can offer. And I should know about them.

I owe to it an education. And an education.

‘When we say scouring powder, Jimmy, we really mean lavatory cleaner, don’t we? No doubt at your age you have your lavatorial interests. Did you know, Jimmy, that in Elizabethan times a lavatory was called a jakes? A jakes. Ajax. Do you see the connection?’

Again, I hadn’t the foggiest what he was on about, but I found it all beguiling, tantalising.

He took me round to the back of the bungalow where an outflow pipe from his kitchen led into a little gully with a drain hole and a grille. We had something similar beneath our own kitchen. I could see he was now hesitating again, that he wasn’t sure he should be doing this in my company, but I could also sense his mood of wilful risk-taking, that he wanted to let me, even, into his secret. I could see that he’d removed the grille and had been poking about with a stick.

‘Ajax,’ he said. ‘Will it — will he — do the trick?’

Whatever it was that was clogging his drain it was deep down, or else there was some uncooperative bend in the pipe. The hole was abnormally full, almost to overflowing, of dirty water. But it wasn’t just water, it was water with a distinctly reddish colour. It made me think at once of the slop bucket that would be sometimes visible in our local butcher’s, where I’d go with my mother and where there’d be sawdust on the floor and halves of pigs hanging on huge hooks and dripping.

A little bobbing shred of something, a mere gobbet of scum, floated in the water.

Let me say that everything was so much more primitive in those days, even if gentlemen doffed hats. It was so much nearer the Middle Ages. There’d been a war and there’d been rationing. My mother was perfectly capable of skinning and cooking a rabbit, but there came a point when she wouldn’t have liked to admit to this, or even to eat rabbit. When my parents developed their desire for respectability and advancement they really wanted to move into the clean modern age and leave behind them all traces of the ancient gutter. They weren’t squeamish and they weren’t innocent, but they wanted to live tidy lives, and they didn’t like weirdness.

I could see that in theory our street didn’t mind Mr Wilkinson’s being weird, but they minded his being weird in our street. They hoped that somehow something would be done about it. But, short of some superior agent’s stepping in, they believed that by the sheer force of their adverse opinion Mr Wilkinson might be compelled to leave and take his weirdness elsewhere. They wanted him flushed out. In this situation was the whole history of the world.

I could see that the mucky water in Mr Wilkinson’s drain was composed partly of blood and I could see that for some inscrutable and perilous reason Mr Wilkinson wanted me to see it, and not to say anything.

But, yes, I was at heart a conscientious, a truthful boy. I honoured my father and mother. I had a sense of moral responsibility. I’d told my parents about the vegetarianism when I might have said nothing. Now I’d have to tell them about breaking the edict that had followed from that first honesty and — worse — about taking the Ajax tin and going round to Mr Wilkinson’s when I should have stayed within clearly prescribed bounds.

But all this was capped by the greater and more glaring obligation to truth I had: to let it be known that Mr Wilkinson clearly wasn’t a vegetarian — a slander of my own unwitting instigation — and was even, though I hadn’t been able to see into his kitchen, a fairly zealous eater of meat. And, by implication, he was at least in that respect so much less of the weirdo than he’d been unfairly made out to be.

I can never be sure whether it was this action on my part, with all its complexity and for which I was punished by not being allowed out, even into the garden, for most of the next day, which led directly to Mr Wilkinson’s leaving us, which led to his being, as I was to discover later, taken into custody while a search warrant was issued and (discreetly) acted upon for his bungalow.

Having been so roundly punished, I was soon being, confusingly, asked questions by a kindly and patient policeman while my mother tenderly held my hand.

There were things you couldn’t do in those days, the law didn’t allow it, which you can do now. It was all very primitive, and perhaps the changes which have occurred since then are further evidence of the importance of education. For example, Mr Wilkinson lived alone, he might have been a homosexual, but he wouldn’t have been allowed by law to be one in any practical sense.

I say this because I’m a homosexual myself, though I didn’t know it then, I discovered it later. You might say I had to be educated into it. There’s a whole other story I might tell, involving me and my parents, which is even more painful in some ways than the story of Mr Wilkinson. But this is not the time, and perhaps you can imagine it. There are plenty of stories, but this is not the time.

But I think about Mr Wilkinson and about what I did to him.

He disappeared anyway. It was what the whole street wanted, but I missed him, I even felt a little bereft. I wish I’d known his first name. A nice couple, the Fletchers, who soon had their first baby, a little girl called Jilly — I remember her name — whom my mother unashamedly adored, moved in. And that was what the whole street wanted too.

There are some people who might say or think of me, now, that I’m a little weird, or at least odd. But then if you’re a professor of Greek you’re allowed to be that, the world even rather expects it of you, especially if your hair has become a snowy fleece and you wear tweed suits and affect white-spotted red bow ties.

I have never, so far, walked across the court here to the senior common room — across the grass on which only a few are permitted to walk — in just my underpants. Or, for extra brio, with my Fellow’s gown on too. But I’m sure if I did this (and frankly I’m tempted) it would be forgiven me, at least once, since I’m the Morley-Edwards Professor of Greek. And I’m sure that far more scandalous acts have occurred in Oxford colleges and yet been permitted, or at least smoothed over — acts that would never be countenanced in suburban streets.

All my life I’ve taken seriously — pursued and furthered — my parents’ creed that education is the most important thing, education that leads us on an ameliorating journey through life. I am their exemplar, their vindication. What could better have answered and glorified their tenet than that I should have become a professor at an Oxford college?

If you want weirdness, real weirdness, the weirdness we’re all made of, if you want the primitive that never goes away, then go to the Greek myths and to what the Greeks made out of them. Though don’t forget your Ajax tin.

Ajax, son of Telamon and mighty warrior, second only to Achilles, but ousted by the brain of Odysseus, went mad in the end, mistaking sheep for people. I know this now.