An Encyclopaedia of Myself by Jonathan Meades

Author:Jonathan Meades [Jonathan Meades]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

MAJOR FERGUSON AND MAJOR VEALE

Christine, known when she had successors as ‘The First German Girl’, woke me, helped me to dress quickly, led me down the wide staircase and out of the barrack-like hotel’s front door. I was too bleary to ask what was happening. I never asked what was happening. At the age of three and a half I simply accepted. We crossed the dark yard to a cowshed which smelled of milk, hay, dung, paraffin. A group of adults, my parents among them, were half-illumined by naked bulbs and flickering lanterns. My father and Major Ferguson grasped whisky glasses. My mother took me by the hand and squatted beside me. She told me that a calf was on the very point of being born and that Major Ferguson thought I’d like to see it. Major Ferguson ruffled my hair.

Another novelty! How I adored Eggesford.

My friend the cowman had a ruddy grin for me.

The brown and white cow lay on straw in a wooden pen. She was on her side with her head raised helplessly trying to make out from the corner of an alarmed eye what was happening behind her. Her mouth was open, her tongue flapped, her moos were moos of pain. She heaved and quivered and spasmed and twitched as though she were a great beached fish.

From an aperture below her restless tail poked a head smaller than hers, gift-wrapped in a sort of stretchy transparent rubber. Its little face was puppyishly eager for adventure. The aperture’s circumference contracted and expanded like bellows. The wet nose ruptured the rubber. The cowman held out his hand which was duly licked by the calf’s tongue. He felt around beneath its breast and smiled triumphantly. The cow responded with an attempted whinny. The calf struggled to escape, its mother pushed with waves of force.

I wondered if my mother had done the same. I hugged her in my excitement at this spectacle which blended zoo, magic, surgery and – thinking ahead – the butcher’s. With the cowman’s gentle manipulation the calf was prised from its squelchy cave. Its first performance was a slapstick turn: the stage drunk whose legs give way. It was delighted with itself, delighted too to be on the lam and in the light, blinking, guzzling new sensations. Now it revelled in being licked by its mother who treated herself to the transparent rubber as a reward for her ordeal, munching and slurping till it had disappeared.

Do I owe my lack of squeamishness to this exposure? Probably not.fn1

Major Ferguson was inescapable at the Fox and Hounds. Here he is, up to his waist in the Taw’s waters casting a fly. Here, still in his waders, he’s trudging back from his beat through ‘red’ mud, fishless but cheerful as ever. Now he’s at his table in the dining room with his bottle of hock, beaming. When, timidly, I put my head round the door of the fuggy bar his big bottom is seeping over his stool, his tankard lifted like a trophy before him.

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