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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2001

Copyright © Philip Hoare 2001 and 2002

The right of Philip Hoare to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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Source ISBN: 9781841152943

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 9780007394586

Version: 2014-08-26

Map

Philip Hoare was born in Southampton and brought up next to Netley’s military hospital. He is the author of Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990); Noel Coward: A Biography (1995); and Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy & the First World War (1997). His film on Hampshire for BBC2’s Travels with Pevsner was broadcast in 1998, and in 1999 he co-curated the Icons of Pop exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. He lives in London.

‘A book that has everything a passionate reader could want – a subject that far transcends the trivial pursuits of contemporary writing, concerns both public and private, astonishing details, stylistic precision, a unique sense of time and place, and a great depth of vision.’

W. G. Sebald, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year

‘A brilliantly evocative memoir of childhood in a landscape, and a sensitive, absorbing account of the Royal Victoria Hospital as a locus of the grandeur and misery of Britain’s apogee as an imperial and global power … Spike Island is [an] intensely personal, compelling work.’

Paul Smith, Times Literary Supplement

‘Punctuated with grief and loss, cross-cut with flashbacks to the author’s suburban boyhood, this biography of a hospital is gruesome, startling, grainily authentic, as if Hoare were inching his way through history’s dark wood with a hand-held camera, reporting what he sees in close-miked voiceover. Spike Island comes as near as it is possible to get to a scholarly equivalent of The Blair Witch Project.’

Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph

‘No one could describe the scenes of this hospital in a more evocative fashion than Philip Hoare. His history of Netley is alternately poignant and brutal.’

Joanna Bourke, Independent

‘A heterogeneous mix of familial reminiscence and conjecture, aesthete’s Bildungsroman, countless fragments of lives, countless fragments of anecdote, meditations on the nature of romanticism and of the Gothic.’

Jonathan Meades, Evening Standard

‘Hoare’s … insights … achieve a similar suggestiveness – a sense of lost worlds dragged back into view – to that of W. G. Sebald’s spooky crisscrossing of Suffolk in The Rings of Saturn … [He makes] you want to go straight down to Southampton.’

Andy Beckett, Guardian

Dedication

For Leonard, Andrew and Peter

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

Dedication

PROLOGUE

PART I

Spike Island

In a Lonely Place

Southern Gothick

PART II

Pray Stop All Work

In the Very Best Style

A Remarkable Improvement

Enter His Gates with Thanksgiving

Remembrance Day

D Block

Towards a Better Britain

PART III

His Dark Estate

The World is Infinitely Forgiving

EPILOGUE

AFTERWORD

Keep Reading

Source Notes

Index

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Prologue

To the unsuspecting visitor approaching from the seaward side, it looked like any other large country estate. Next to the great iron gate topped with glass lanterns was a low porter’s lodge, but on the other side of the drive stood a sentry box, occupied by a uniformed soldier.

To that newcomer, the first intimation of the extraordinary building that lay ahead was the glimpse of Italianate towers over the parkland’s newly-planted firs. As he walked up the lane, the vastness of Netley’s Royal Victoria Military Hospital would suddenly be revealed. Rising over Southampton Water was a classical skyline, dominated by a central dome. From this sublime eye-catcher the visitor’s gaze ranged in disbelief, scanning an edifice so wide that he had to move his head to see it – no one glance could take it all in.

Flanking the grandiose verdigris dome in either direction were great arms of Welsh granite, Portland stone and Hampshire brick – indeed, the clay to make the bricks had been excavated from the site itself – each crowned with their own spires and turrets. At their ends, these elongated wings bent back on themselves – as if too long for their own site – to form galleried barracks at the rear; as one architectural historian was to note, ‘each would make reasonable major buildings in themselves’. In their deceptive embrace, the hospital was actually twice as big as it first appeared: it was as if it stretched into infinity.

Everything about the place was monumental. Its architecture aspired to eighteenth-century rationality, yet it spoke of nineteenth-century imperialism. Somehow the sense of proportion had been subtly overbalanced, as though designed by a team of architects whom no one had told when to stop, its creators having suffered a fit of megalomania. If there had been a soundtrack to that revealing first sight of the hospital, it might have been provided by Richard Wagner, then composing his equally grandiose Ring Cycle.

But the building was also the product of bureaucracy, dwarfing the mere human like some enormous town hall conceived by committee. From a dark interior of the War Office, orders had been issued to E. O. Mennie, Surveyor of the Royal Engineer Department, and his army of assistants in Pall Mall, an architectural sweatshop producing sheet after sheet of plans, measurements and specifications. This was a building under royal patronage, created by the richest and most powerful nation on earth, and nothing was to be spared in realising its imperial vision.

The exhaustive plans demanded ‘the best hard, sound, well-burnt and square stock bricks’, ‘the piers and arches to be of the best Portland stone’, ‘the whole of the ornaments, carvings and enrichments to be done in the very best style, with spirit, boldness and without blemish’. Nor was the interior neglected. In true Victorian tradition, every item was specified in a manifesto published for the contractors, E. Smith of Woolwich. Each fixture and fitting was defined: from ‘blue pointing mortar’ to ‘fresh air tubes’, from ‘Rufford and Finch’s baths’ to ‘Anglo-American stoves’, from ‘wine bins’ to early washing machines; every article of equipment, ironmongery and furnishing was listed ad infinitum. In an age of mass production, this was architecture by multiplication, as though the hospital had been built by a great Victorian machine. Its façade reached one quarter of a mile in length, pierced by row upon row of arched windows, more than two hundred of them, regimented along three cliff-like storeys. The detail was overwhelming, almost hypnotic in its rhythm.

The new hospital was a statement of imperial intent, an advertisement in brick and stone of the country’s international standing; it would make Netley a household name. A later report would note that ‘Passengers by Cape and American line steamers, and those who journey up and down Southampton Water, are familiar with the immense façade of the hospital, built in red brick and Portland stone, with pillared porticoes of granite, and towers and windows which in some way suggest stately Venetian palaces.’ Half-imaginary engravings of the building created before its completion depicted it as a kind of waterside Versailles, complete with parterres and decorative sheep cropping its neat turf, and gravel drives along which carriages could take the air, as if on some elegant gentleman’s estate.

Framed by its greensward and, set back from the sea, looking out magisterially over the empire it was built to serve, the hospital straddled its 200 acres with immutable solidity. A remarkable aerial photograph taken soon after its completion reveals the scale of a building that had to be measured in yards and furlongs rather than feet. The balloon-borne camera rose smoothly into space above Southampton Water, the only way to capture the extent of the hospital as it stretched along the shore, set on some vast pedestal for display to the passing yachts and oyster boats, troopships and liners. Like the Great Eastern, which moored alongside it in 1861, reflecting the new building in Brunel’s enormous million-pound creation – five times bigger than any other ship afloat, part-yacht, part-factory, part-hotel, with its stovepipe chimneys like his stovepipe hat – Netley’s hospital was a grand, if not arrogant display of technological progress.

For the Great Eastern’s passengers, as for the soldiers on troopships en route for foreign postings, Netley was a reminder of Britain’s greatness, a symbol of power and potential succour as they sailed down the water to extend or defend the Empire. But for those inside the building, the hospital held different prospects. For all its glittering window eyes, it remained faceless, impenetrable, keeping its own secrets. Yet viewed in perspective from the literal height of nineteenth-century technology, the entire undertaking appeared almost shimmering in its new brick and stone; a magnificent delusion, a Victorian vision for a miraculous age.

Having paused to take in the enormity of the view that confronted him, the awed visitor would walk along the hospital’s façade, counting the rows of arched windows as he went. Reaching the central portico, he would pass through the great double doors and into the building itself. Here, in a high-ceilinged and panelled hallway reminiscent of a railway hotel, he would be greeted, not by scurrying nurses and doctors in white coats, but by the bleached white bones of a full-size elephant.

This was the hospital’s Museum of Natural History, a room-sized cabinet of curiosities guarded by its ghostly and eyeless pachydermic porter. Ranged above the stone staircase was a cluster of spiky antelope horns and deer antlers – the kind of display you’d find gathering dust in any country house of the time, trophies of exotic shooting parties in the bush or the veldt. But crocodiles also crawled the walls, and a school of stuffed fish swam under the stairs, frozen mid-stream in the plaster. Other animal remains had been cemented in their death rictus, and on the shelves of one long vitrine, the length of a wall, stood tens of glass specimen jars, each containing the spiralled pickled corpse of a snake. It was hardly the kind of exhibition to calm the fears of a nervous hospital patient.

Yet this gloomy dissection of the natural world had an even more gothic counterpart in the hospital’s other collections. One was devoted to military surgery, and had been started in Dublin in 1846 by a retired army surgeon, Professor Tufnell, as ‘a museum of appliances for the transport and treatment of the wounded’. Brought to Netley to grace the new hospital, it displayed ‘native’ weapons next to surgical instruments, described in lugubrious nineteenth-century tones as ‘the implements by which man ingeniously shortens his neighbour’s life and the appliances by which he seeks to preserve his own’ – in other words, a visual lesson in the survival of the fittest. One item on show was a broken lance which had passed through the body of a lancer after his horse threw him. ‘The lance had to be sawn in two before it could be withdrawn’, it was noted, ‘but marvellous to relate, the man survived and was perfectly cured.’

In one corner stood an antler-like hatstand festooned with headgear from the battlefields of the Crimea, resplendent with red plumes and glossy cockades like stuffed birds of paradise. Meanwhile in another nearby case, neatly stacked on shelves like bowling balls waiting for a game, was a collection of decapitated and mummified heads. These represented indigenous peoples from around the imperial world: the inhabitants of Java, New Zealand, Malay and Africa, arranged for anthropological identification and scientifically labelled – ‘Kaffir: Tambuki tribe’; ‘Kaffir: Amulosali tribe’; Hottentot and Maori. Like the animals in the entrance hall, they too were endangered species: Tasmanians killed off by the colonial process or the South Africa San ‘bushmen’ who would even a hundred years later still be regarded as suitable subjects to be hunted.

This index of Victorian anthropology had come from the catacombs of Fort Pitt, Kent, where the director, Sir James McGrigor, had assembled no less than 458 skulls, 29 casts, 7 dried heads and 2 mummies. Expanded by an appeal, made in 1833, for new specimens of ‘Monstrosities’, ‘the bodies of foetuses at different ages’, ‘crania of various races of mankind’, and ‘snakes and lizards from the Colonies, preserved in spirits’, the collection had acquired a national reputation, visited by ‘distinguished surgeons and naturalists’. It had been transferred to Netley when the hospital opened, ‘rather a gruesome sight’, admitted a contemporary account, ‘but to the student of anthropology the facial characteristics of the different peoples are full of interest’. The ‘ghastly array’ was, ‘for those not accustomed to such display … not very agreeable’, agreed another Victorian guide, ‘but people come from far and wide to see it; from Germany, France, America, for it is one of the best collections of Asiatic and African skulls in the world’. Whatever its scientific merits, the ironies of this gothic ossuary in the entrance hall of their hospital were not lost on the inmates. They nicknamed it ‘Skull Alley’.

In a burgeoning scientific age, the new theories of evolution and natural history had spread even to the officers’ quarters at Netley. A gracious villa-like building with twin Italianate towers (a deliberate echo of Queen Victoria’s holiday home, Osborne, just across the Solent on the Isle of Wight), its well-appointed rooms fit for gentlemen were separated from the hospital by fir trees.

These had been planted not only for decoration, but for their medicinal qualities: the healthy scent of pine oil provided a barrier between their quarters and the miasma of the great building across the lawn.

In this refined white contrast to the hospital’s red-brick rigours, surgeons and doctors dined to a theatrical backdrop of aspidistras, palms and a huge decorative screen embellished, not with nineteenth-century ‘scraps’ of ladies in décolletage and blowsy roses, but with florid recreations of Victorian dinosaurs. Besporting themselves in an antediluvian jungle, these monsters were the cousins of those at Crystal Palace, where Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s saucer-eyed ichthyosaurs and arched-neck plesiosaurs reared out of the primordial swamp in a London park. Hawkins had begun his dinosaur theme park in 1853, shortly before work started at Netley, and had invited Richard Owen – the inventor of the name and concept of the dinosaur – to dine with him in the cement carcass of an iguanadon under construction; Netley’s officer doctors would have to make do with eating in the shadow of prehistoric monsters.

As they sat at their mahogany dining table, these men of science doubtless discussed Mr Darwin’s theories, published in 1859 and exemplified by the living dinosaurs of the Galapagos, the lumbering swimming lizards which he called ‘imps of darkness’, just as he called himself the ‘Devil’s chaplain’. Only later would Netley bear witness to the more problematic offspring of evolutionary science: social Darwinism.

Victorian man was busy digging into his past to explain his present, the reason for his supremacy. If ‘Skull Alley’ and the expanding Empire provided living proof of one aspect of the theory, then dinosaurs were the prehistoric exemplars of another. Indeed, the two sensibilities combined in Alfred Waterhouse’s secular gothic cathedral of the Natural History Museum, built ten years after the hospital in 1873, complete with demonic terracotta pterodactyl gargoyles hanging by their leathery wings from a façade which, like Netley’s, appeared to emulate geological strata in its layers of brick and stone, yet which, like the Gothic Revival, also referred back to a medieval past.

That had been an age of unwavering faith. Now the search for an explanation of Man’s origins became a metaphor for the loss of faith, in an age in which science and religion battled for the hearts and souls of Victorian man. In that battle the hospital would become a resonant symbol. For a hundred years it would bear testimony to the rise and fall of the Empire; to reason and rationality subjected to forces of superstition and fear; to issues of class and sex; to experimentation and scientific advance – sometimes at the expense of human beings. This vast building would stand for a century of British history, but it too was a dinosaur, excavated from Hampshire clay; the monster on Netley’s shore.

When I was twelve years old, my family went on holiday to Scotland. It rained most of the time, and we took shelter in a series of guest houses and caravans. At Inverness we spent the night in a bed and breakfast seemingly constructed from a series of extensions joined together by skewed corridors and acrylic carpet. We younger children – myself and my two younger sisters, my brothers now too old for family holidays – were bedded down in a creaky room covered in white-painted woodchip wallpaper. I was excited: the next day we would be arriving at Loch Ness. We were already at the head of the huge body of water which, as I was at pains to tell my parents, was twice as deep as any of the water around Britain. I seemed to feel its nearness and its depth; and in that depth, the presence of its alien denizen, the reason for my excitement.

Ever since I could remember seeing pictures in the newspapers or hearing jokey items at the end of the news, I’d felt affronted by the cynics who rejected its existence, the so-called experts from the Natural History Museum who were trundled out every time there was a new sighting. Implacable in my belief, I knew what it was; a childhood spent with my head in dinosaur books told me as much. Their vivid reconstructions of prehistory were photographically real to me, and as scary as the pictures of deep-sea fish in my encyclopaedias which I could not touch – I had to turn the page with my fingertips, as if the lithographic image could, by a process of osmosis, drag me to unfathomable depths and into the nightmare jaws of the angler fish. My faith in the loch’s monster was a gesture of defiance against the sceptical adult world. At home in Southampton, living within the sound of the sea yet encircled by suburbia, I was always fascinated by monsters and ghosts; by the bottomless ocean and the endless forest; by derelict buildings and damaged beauty; by loss and memory – by the memory of things and places I’d never seen. Myths and legends seemed more real to me than the reality around me. I sought to glamorise my everyday life; to find something strange and perhaps even mystical beyond it – to populate those ruinous buildings with ghosts, and to fill the sea with monsters.

That night, as I slept in my Inverness bunk, I looked down, not into unknown depths, but on the shallow end of the loch, where the waters petered out into reedy marsh. The scene was sunlit, the reeds yellow-russet, the sky blue, the water clear and still. It was picture-postcard bright, not gloomy and grey like other images I’d seen of the place. And as I watched from my elevated position, looking down, as it were, as though filming the scene from a camera on a crane, a slow-moving greenish-brown form slipped up and out of the water beneath me; obscenely snakelike and sinewy, its massive, muscular bulk was not out of place in the natural landscape, but somehow part of it, or lord of it. It undulated through the shallows, its full serpentine length visible through the clear water, its indiscernible lower reaches stirring the silt below. It moved powerfully and swiftly on, its broad slow-worm head held high as it swam towards the open loch.

Then it was gone, and I woke up.

PART

Spike Island

What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

JOSEPH CONRAD

On a foggy autumn morning in Southampton’s eastern suburbs, you can hear ships’ horns cutting mournfully through the thick air like sonorous sheep lost in the mist. By night the clank-clank of the dredger takes over, as it gouges out a passageway from the sea bed. In the still air sound bounces off suburban walls, and behind curtain-darkened windows families gather round flickering TV sets, just like families all round the country, in other suburbs of other provincial towns.

This is Sholing, where I grew up. There was little to distinguish it from other suburbs, still less as an adjunct to a port; a transient place which people passed through rather than visited for itself, Sholing had little claim on the national consciousness. A jumble of Victorian villas, 1920s semis and post-war estates, its name – Anglo-Saxon, meaning ‘the hill by the shore’ – may have dated back to the Domesday Book, but the place no longer had any discernible centre, its borders only vaguely marked by vestigial streams and river valleys once wide enough to earn the area its ancient title. Once the sea came closer to these hills; more recently, this was still open countryside, Hampshire heathland rolling gently eastwards from Southampton, yielding soft fruit from its fields, shingle from gravel pits, bricks out of clay seams, water from its springs. For centuries its common land was used as a military camp, as archery grounds and shooting ranges, a place for soldiers, travellers and horse traders.

Then, gradually, its population began to grow, shifted here by the industrialisation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the incomers this indefinable area needed an identity, something to give it meaning; the one it acquired came from a past which its more genteel residents would have preferred to forget: Spike Island.

Ask any local of a certain age or disposition and they’ll come up with various explanations for the nickname. Some cite the heathland’s characteristic gorse, Ulex europeaus, which still sprouts up wherever it can, spiky and resilient, once collected by furze-cutters for fuel or cattle fodder. Its toughness has its own romance as ‘one of the great signature plants of commonland and rough open space, places where lovers can meet, walk freely and lose themselves, if need be, in its dense thickets’. Others attribute the name to the spike shape of the area itself, a memory of the time when the sea did indeed come closer to its hills, yet an island now only within the extended boundaries of the rivers Itchen and Hamble which separate this peninsula from the rival city ports of Southampton and Portsmouth.

Of little agricultural benefit, until 1796 the heath was marked on maps as ‘Nomans Land’, and held just forty-three permanent inhabitants. Only in the last years of the eighteenth century, as the common land began to be privatised by the Enclosures Act, did houses appear in any number: low brick cottages built by travellers attracted by the troops stationed on the common with whom they could trade.

Marked out by the caravans in which many of them still lived, they were looked down upon by the inhabitants of the older villages of Weston, Woolston and Netley nearby. Perhaps it is no coincidence that ‘spike’ was also argot for the workhouse, or that the gypsies called themselves ‘pikeys’, another potential source for the nickname. Long established in Hampshire and its New Forest, they were living outside the confines of normal life on this furzy heathland, its spiny gorse somehow expressive of their own resilience, and perhaps this sense of being outside, of being beyond the law and civilisation, informed the most romantic of the explanations for Sholing’s nickname. It was claimed that convicts being transported to Australia were held on its common, chained by their feet to a great spike.

Transportees convicted at Winchester’s courts were certainly marched to the ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, and could have been stabled for the night there, just as their fellow inmates from Dorchester gaol were held overnight in a prison-like barn with slit windows and oak studded doors, ‘all chained to a central post’. The place became known as ‘Botany Bay Farm’, just as the first part of Sholing to be settled in the 1790s was nicknamed ‘Botany Bay’ after the new penal colony of New South Wales.

From 1831 to 1840, more than 50,000 men and women were transported from England. The gypsies were particular victims of these purges, subject to persecution in the Southampton area in the tumultuous first few decades of the nineteenth century. With a population driven by the enclosures from the country to the city, crime rates and a general instability necessitated the invention of a new sort of English colony, an ‘official Siberia’. These penal settlements came to occupy some impossibly remote part of the public imagination, places of horror and damnation where men made pacts to kill themselves in order to escape the appalling conditions.

If Sholing’s Spike Island had witnessed the export of unwanted Englishmen and women to become colonial forced labour, then perhaps it was a mirror image of the slave trade that had been carried out from other British ports, at Bristol and Liverpool, where other Spike Islands would be found. But if Botany Bay was the slavery of Britons by any other name, then the most likely explanation for Sholing’s nickname seemed both to reflect this sense of a prison colony on the other side of the world, and to relate it closer to home.

Across the Irish Sea, a small island off Cobh in Cork Harbour had been settled by monks in the seventh century. Its name was Inis Pich – Spike Island – depicted on early maps as a spike-shaped piece of land. Used since Cromwellian times for holding Irish rebels, by 1847 Spike had become a dedicated penal colony, a nineteenth-century Robben Island for deportees, ‘From th’emerald island/Ne’er to see dry land/Until they spy land/In sweet Botany Bay.’ Up to 4,000 convicts at one time were held here, clad in grey jackets, moving great mountains of earth and rock to construct the island’s fortifications, building their own prison walls. Many would be buried in the bleak ‘convicts’ graveyard’ in one corner of the island, marked only by numbered headstones. In 1916 Spike would be used to confine the insurrectionists of the Easter Rising and the seeds of modern troubles. The island was handed back to the Irish in 1938, but its inmates could still be identified by particular tattoos indelibly marking its provenance on their hands, as indelibly as the island was marked with its past.

There was, I now realise, an almost genetic reason for my mythologising of my suburban surroundings, for my fascination with these tenuous traces of local history: their arcane details seemed to reference a greater story; a personal thread which linked the legends of Sholing-as-Spike Island. My maternal forefathers had been involved in the slave trade in Liverpool, while my father’s ancestors had fled Ireland during the potato famine. Such dark romantic notions counterpointed the ordinariness of present-day suburbia, and seemed to ally me to Sholing’s shadowy epithet. They gave my rootlessness an identity.

By a strange process of insult and immigration, the infamy of Ireland’s Spike Island, wreathed in crime, insurrection and its terrifying consequences, had been transposed to an odd little suburb hundreds of miles away in southern England. In the mid-nineteenth century, Irish workers were attracted by the ship-building industries of Southampton and Woolston’s dockyards, and by the shipping lines which had begun to ply between Southampton and New York. Just as the gypsies had acquired the slur of ‘Botany Bay’, so the incoming Irish brought with them the reputation of Spike Island – used either in half-ironic humour by themselves for their southern exile, or by their suspicious neighbours as a slur on their supposedly criminal characters. They would come to glory in the nickname, perhaps as a rebellious gesture against the moneyed class which also began to move into the neighbourhood.

Courtesy of the railway and Southampton’s growing port, land here had begun to command a premium, and in the 1850s came more houses, constructed from the products of the local brickworks and gravel pits; slowly at first, then moving more swiftly along the new railway line from Southampton to Portsmouth, over a horizon as yet undarkened by brick and slate. Then grander houses appeared, wide double-fronted houses in yellow brick, as if their colour marked them out from the commoner product of Spike Island’s clay and its brickworks. Invested with authority and capital, their inhabitants aspired to gentility, with their mock turrets, conservatories and brick walls. Sholing acquired the veneer of respectability; the institutions of church, freemasonry and local politics. Its pines and cedars and holly hedges set out the social status of its merchants, vicars, doctors, shop-keepers, all firm in their expectations of the future.

Then the unthinkable happened, and Armageddon intervened on this complacent scene. After the First World War the serried ranks of ‘homes for heroes’ marched over the land, their strip-like plots providing every Englishman with his own piece of land. The larger, older houses shrank into flats or nursing homes, or disappeared into rubble and rhododendron; gypsy cottages became bungalows or crumbled back into the dirt from which they came. After the Second World War, developers finished what the bombs had started. Spike Island was swallowed up by modern suburbia and the discrete identity of Sholing was blurred – a process almost complete by the time our family moved there in the early 1960s.

On my way to school, I used to walk past a cottage around the corner from our road, one of the low little homes that dotted the neighbourhood. In its garden stood a round summerhouse, ingeniously constructed to turn heliotropically, like a flower following the sun. Its windows were empty, the green paint peeling from the wooden slats. I’d imagine some frail elderly lady sitting inside, dressed in lace like tea-stained curtains, the pale sun falling on her papery skin. Then one day the summerhouse disappeared, and in its place grew a bed of blinding French marigolds.

Along these avenues and cul-de-sacs, the comforting icons of stained-glass sunbursts and galleons on wavy seas would soon give way to the bland stare of plastic windows, and the porches which welcomed the milkman or postman would be boarded up against the world. But for now the corner shop still sold Fruit Salad and Blackjack chews, the grocer sliced cooked meat with scything machines ready to take off an inattentive finger, and the chemist had huge bottles of blue and red water in the window and cream and chrome scales on the counter for weighing babies like quarter-pounds of sweets.

On the other side of the road from the cottage and its summerhouse ran a ribbon of woody valley where a meandering, rusty stream sought the freedom of the sea. Around it lay the vestiges of Sholing Common, the traces of its ancient provenance marked only on old Ordnance Survey maps in the gothic script of tumuli and Roman roads. The valley was crossed by Church Path, a narrow lane which descended steeply to the stream, then rose up towards a stone and slate church with a modest steeple, described in Pevsner’s Buildings of England as ‘prettily set in a pine-backed churchyard in a strange Victorian rural backwater of suburban Southampton’.

Those pines were less covered by sinuous ivy than they have since become, but even then Church Path was a shadowy place. My mother would point out tiny gravestones in its churchyard, memorials to Romany children from Botany Bay, where the dark-faced inhabitants, looking like ancient Britons, spat at us while we waited in the family car as our parents went to buy some plants from their father. Their caravans stood next to their bungalows, and sometimes we’d hear the sound of horse hooves clattering down our road, and run out to see the young blades riding past on a pony and trap.

Invested with the strangeness of the people who lived beyond Church Path, this wilderness at the bottom of our road both fascinated and terrified me. It was where, in my imagination, chained convicts awaited their criminal exile, languishing on the scrubby grass, indolently desperate figures out of Gustave Doré’s Dante. During the war, barrage balloons had been set up on the common, leaving behind rusty iron rings which in my mind became tethers for the manacled prisoners. Now they secured two lonely gypsy ponies, slow-moving, semi-wild beasts with shaggy manes, big round bellies and a sad look in their big black eyes, as if to plead for their release.

Sometimes, on the bus from school, I’d go on a stop and walk back through Church Path. It was a self-consciously daring act. The way home led through a green tunnel overhung by yew, ivy and laurel, dipping steeply into the damp valley before the distant light at the end; the pathway was dark and scary even on a sunny day. I once found a dead mole there, its black velvet unbloodied, tiny pink fin-like paws sticking out stiffly at right-angles to its lifeless and blind body, like an abandoned soft toy dropped from a passing pushchair. On the other side of the path from the churchyard – where a girl from up the road once told me I’d be haunted that night because I’d walked across a grave – was a derelict house. Its garden contained a large rectangular pit roughcast in concrete, apparently a pre-war swimming pool. It may have been the same girl who told me that the house had been owned by a Dr White, and that he had invented something called the tampon. In fact, the owner was a plain Mr White, undistinguished by the invention of anything at all.

Below the churchyard, where dead wreaths and old prams were chucked over the iron railings into the valley’s dip, was another low cottage with a tiled roof and green wooden door; smoke could sometimes be seen coming from its chimney. It looked like a farmhouse left over from a previous century, still standing firm in the last vestiges of wild land as the modern world closed in; or like the old railway carriage in which we used to take our holidays at Gunard on the Isle of Wight, around which the bats flew at night.

Chickens pecked about in the small patch of cultivated land in front of the house, and there was a tethered goat with curly horns and bulging eyes with demonic slits for pupils. Another Church Path legend claimed someone had been murdered in this valley, blasted at short range with a shotgun; I saw the act replayed in slow motion, the blue smoke of the weapon’s discharge, the recoil of the body, the red of the victim’s blood. Although I had no reason to suspect the inhabitants of this cottage – which, like the rotating summerhouse, disappeared sometime later in my childhood – I was scared of the seldom-seen old man who lived there. Sometimes he would stand by his cottage door, white-haired, bent double and propped up with a stick. Perhaps his wife joined him, in a white pinafore, her hair done up in a silver bun. Or perhaps I invented the scene, like the psychic timeslip in The Man Who Fell to Earth, when the orange-and-yellow-haired alien, Thomas Jerome Newton, is driven through countryside and glimpses a family of nineteenth-century hillbillies outside their shack, its chimney smoking, a burst of inter-bred banjo on the soundtrack.

Like the privet cutway that ran up the back of our house where my brothers used to catch bucketfuls of slow worms, these wild places produced tales of innocence and loss, of murder and abandoned babes in the wood. From Church Path, the stream flowed through the old clumps of bamboo planted by the inhabitants of the cottage, past Mr White’s concrete pool and widened out into Miller’s Pond, a still, deep pool overshadowed by the tall brick arches of a railway viaduct. There were tadpoles and sticklebacks in the water, and it froze solid in winter, its glaucous ice spiked with dead bullrushes. On our way to the park we would walk past the pond, and I’d lean over the low wall and look down into its brackish water, imbued as it was with another local legend.

One Sunday in February 1909, Alfred Maurice Mintram, the fourteen-year-old son of Charles Mintram, a coal porter who lived at Fir Grove Road – the road which crossed ours – was spending the afternoon sliding on the iced-up pond. A witness to the subsequent enquiry was walking round the pond ‘when someone shouted that there was a boy drowning’.

He ran round the bank, and saw a constable taking his tunic off, and together they went to the lad’s assistance. They got to within four yards of him, and witness called out that they would soon get to him. Deceased replied, ‘Hurry up, I can’t hold on much longer.’ The next minute, the ice gave way, and they were all struggling in the water. There was ice between them and the boy, and it was impossible to reach him. There were no ladders or ropes or anything they could have used. The boy threw up his hands and went down …

Reported to the coroner, in the still, formal air of the courtroom, the boy’s last words – plaintive, panicking, banal – seemed to presage a forthcoming tragedy which would strike the inhabitants of these streets and households. The melodramatic fatalism of the scene is compounded by postcards depicting the boy’s funeral, his classmates clumped together on a cold day in February, dressed in their Sunday best, bearing wreaths. Another card shows Alfred’s humped grave in Sholing churchyard, surrounded with laurel leaves and a row of five bouquets laid along its top, each protected by an odd wire frame like an upturned hanging basket. Three years later, the same families would lose brothers, fathers and lovers who foundered, like Alfred Mintram, in icy water, uttering similarly plaintive cries as Titanic sank.

I have only a vague memory of the house in which I was born, in Portswood, on the other side of the Itchen which divides Southampton as clearly as the Thames divides London. ‘Akaba’ had been the home of an army officer, and had been empty for some time when my newly-married parents discovered it in 1941, and managed to lease it, for one pound a week, from the major’s widow.

The house was a large, semi-detached, red-brick villa; the names engraved on its lintel and those of its neighbours – ‘Rahwali’, ‘Gwalia’ – were as redolent of the last century as the street itself, named Osborne Road after the late Queen’s Isle of Wight retreat. The monkey puzzle tree that stood along the road was a further mark of Victorian gentility, its spiky exoticness somehow reminiscent of a colonial past. Superstitiously, we’d hold our breath as we passed it, for fear something awful might befall us.

Set on the corner of the road and raised above pavement level with a walled garden, Akaba had a turret which loomed proprietorially over the junction on which it stood. It also had bellpulls to summon servants from its kitchen and scullery, and a wide mahogany staircase which turned at right-angles past a stained-glass landing window. Not that I remember much of this. My only memory – indeed, my very first memory – of Akaba is of waking in my cot; I must have been less than two years old. Gripping the wooden bars, I hauled myself out of prison and, reaching up to the bedroom doorknob, carefully descended, with a toddler’s halting step, the big, wide, dark stairs illuminated by pale coloured light, looking for my mother. It must have been summer – it was still daylight – and as I made my surprise entrance in the sitting room downstairs, I saw the upturned and startled faces of my parents and three brothers. Amused at my audacious jailbreak, my mother scooped me up in her arms and carried me back, with certain praises for my adventurousness, to bed. It is a virgin memory, of a life light and uncluttered and untainted by anything other than love. The dark red brick of the house in which I lived did not register on my consciousness.

In 1962, our house – which my parents had by now bought – was compulsorily purchased to make way for a bypass which would remain unbuilt for twenty years. When it was finally constructed, the planners had no need of the land freed by Akaba’s demolition, which was promptly acquired by a neighbouring garage and yet became a victim of the combustion engine as a forecourt dedicated to the display of used cars. In the meantime, saddled with an empty property, the council had tried to rent out Akaba, but found it difficult to lease. Tenants complained that it was haunted and called the police; later an exorcism was performed. Perhaps we’d left our spirits behind, although as my mother pointed out, the ghosts may have been due to the fact that we had left an unwanted upright piano buried in the garden which still tinkled as you walked over it.

So we left Osborne Road and its monkey puzzle tree, holding our breath, driving in a family convoy – mother, father, my three brothers and their vehicles, my baby sister and our dog – for the sunny suburb of Sholing, away from the urban traffic which was already swallowing up Portswood. For my mother, it was a homecoming. Born that side of the Itchen, schooled in Sholing, she knew its valleys and lanes and funny little corner shops, its peculiar character, its strange mixture. It was a place where she felt at home.

My second-ever memory is of the house in which I would grow up. Ruddy cheeked, round headed, blond haired and four years old, I ran excitedly through the front door and up the uncarpeted stairs accompanied by Bimbo, a blackish mongrel of erratic temper who later grew so wild and savage that when he eventually ran off, his absence went unregretted, at least by my parents. Having reached the top, we both promptly fell all the way back to the bottom, landing, unharmed, at the foot of the stairs. Soon after I had another accident, in the corrugated iron Anderson shelter which still stood in the garden. Trying to reach a large metal and wood model locomotive about half my size on an upper shelf, the train fell on my head, and – in my remembrance, at least – momentarily knocked me unconscious.

The incident left me with an abiding image – as though knocked into my head – of the metal and wood of the toy and the metal and wood of the shed and its dark interior where a family had once sheltered from falling bombs. But life in Sholing was quiet now, following the pre-ordained, uneventful rites of suburbia. I went to a Catholic primary school a mile away in Woolston. St Patrick’s had been founded in 1879 by Fr Henry Patrick Kelly, the chaplain to the military hospital at Netley; its school hall was the old Edwardian ‘tin church’ of green-painted corrugated iron, and the rest of the school buildings consisted of the remains of what had once been the local police station. The boys’ toilets were roofless and open to the air, but dark and smelly inside, and in the grounds stood a bunker-like concrete air raid shelter, overgrown with brambles like barbed wire. A pair of classrooms were housed in corrugated iron huts like extended versions of our Anderson shelter, while in the far corner of the playground stood another shed, a smaller cousin of the tin church, also painted dark green. ‘Miss Enright’s hut’ had also come from Netley, where it had been the matron’s quarters in the First World War.

It was in this little hut, with its tilting floor, that on my first day of school I answered the register by calling out ‘Yes, Mummy’, and shortly afterwards wet myself; the water trickled slowly down the slope to the back of the classroom. I was not easily reconciled to leaving home: no sooner had my mother put me on the bus in the morning than I got off at the next stop and promptly walked back again. An ex-police station, a military hut and open air toilets did little to allay the fears of a knock-kneed boy in a home-knitted green jumper and grey shorts; still less an elderly teacher with an iron calliper on her leg.

In our tin classroom we would dutifully copy out Miss Clements’ copperplate writing from the blackboard, dipping our nibs in china inkwells filled by the ink monitor from a giant bottle of Quink, inevitably staining our fingers and our shirts dark blue. We recited our times tables, and on Wednesday mornings we’d file next door for Mass in the big ‘new’ church, built in 1939 (and promptly gutted by incendiary bombs in 1940). Now refurbished, with its green stained-glass windows, a stone statue of St Patrick over the entrance and, inside, another huge portrait of the saint driving the serpents out of Ireland, it was as invested with Irishness as were our green school uniforms and the bunches of shamrock which would mysteriously arrive from Ireland on St Patrick’s Day. They were symbols of a statehood I did not share, except by the association of faith, and, somewhere in my green eyes, the faint traces of a genetic Irishness.

Class by class we’d troop across a parquet floor dented by a decade of Sixties stilettos, file into our seats and pull down the kneelers. Crouching, I’d look through my fingers to the wounded, contorted figure of Christ above the altar, and the glass mosaics on either side, art deco versions of Byzantine icons. On one side, Jesus pointed to the exposed and radiant heart, red and glowing in His chest; on the other, in front of me, was the Blessed Virgin, her oval face surrounded by a gold tesseral halo. Like her grown-up son, her body lay full length against the wall, floating in space and impossibly attenuated; but in the folds of her transcendent blue gown she clasped an unwounded and perfectly formed Christ Child holding up His baby hand in blessing. Sometimes, as I stared, I felt I too could float into the air, to be suspended above the congregation, to the amazement of my fellow pupils. At the end of term we would return for Benediction and its Latin litany intoned in clouds of intoxicating incense, and on May Day we would process through the church gardens behind a statue of Our Lady carried on a wooden stretcher, her beautiful neat head crowned with a garland of flowers as we sang, ‘Ave, ave, ave Maria’.

One dinnertime I ran down to the school gate to see my father arrive in the big old family car with my beaming little sister, her brown hair in bunches, not yet old enough for school, jumping excitedly up and down on the passenger seat. We drove home to see our new baby sister, pink and bawling in crocheted wool and carry cot by my mother’s bedroom window. She was as blonde as my elder sister was dark; they were a perfect pair, and I loved them and they loved me. The world seemed as safe and secure as our new baby swaddled in her cot, her tiny fingers clasping the wool like soft pink bird’s talons. I read the Beano on my father’s knee on dark winter evenings and he cut my finger- and toenails.

The house was yellow and warm, but one day I came home from school to find my mother airing clothes on a wooden clothes horse in front of the coal fire, upset by the news she had just heard on our old valve radio (with its illuminated dial and place names as strange as the lunchtime shipping forecast). Many children had died after a mountain of coal had fallen on their school in Wales. Later, on TV, there would be grainy black and white images of a destroyed building in a mining village, and men in coats picking over what looked like a bomb site. In my mind’s eye I saw the black soot engulfing the high ceilings of my classroom, pouring in through the big wide window, silently crashing and crushing.*

But mostly life and death carried on over my pudding-basin-haircut head. I went to school as the sun rose at one end of the street, and went to bed as it set at the other. I saw my first streak of lightning make an electrified crack in the sky, and ran home for cover. I played soldiers and feared hospitals, and once visited the dentist’s in an Edwardian house opposite our school to have a tooth pulled out. In grey shorts, another green home-knitted jumper, and a permanent scab on my knees, I saw the brass plate at the entrance, the venetian blinds at the windows, the unadorned front garden: all too neat, too clean, too white to be a home. I panicked as the black rubber mask descended, halo’d by the yellowy examination light that shone on the steel instruments laid out in a tray at my shoulder. The nauseous smell of the rubber was pressed down on my memory with the hiss of the gas as it was clamped over my small face, the dentist’s white coat and stubble and glasses above. The next thing I remember was staggering out of the porch, spitting gobs of gelatinous blood like leeches, reeling on to the front lawn and lying there, the world turning above me as I experienced my first intoxication, mixed with medically-induced pain from a suburban house of torture.

If these were the worst things in my life, the rest of it must have been pretty good. But then everything changed.

It was a Saturday morning. I remember coming downstairs and looking over the banisters – another aerial view, as if I were removed from these proceedings in my life, these out-of-body experiences – and watching my parents moving about in the front room. They were not doing the housework; they were not moving in the way parents should move.

My brother had been injured in a car crash. He was twenty-three years old. After a week in a coma, my mother and his young wife staying at the hospital to be at his bedside, Andrew died.

The news permeated the house like an invisible gas. I remember being told about it while standing by the kitchen door; I knew it had happened, but I must have appeared as if I didn’t. Crouching down to my eleven-year-old level, my brother explained in slow, clear tones that Andrew was dead. ‘I know’, I said, and ran out, down to the bottom of the garden, where the snakes hid in the privet hedge.

Everything seemed thrown in the air, as though the atmosphere itself had buckled and warped. Nothing was right; everything was wrong. It was almost exhilarating, as though you were moving backwards at speed, removed from the events that were taking place, that you knew you were witnessing and yet could not feel.

Later, I tried to access the emotion I should have felt. I tried to remember Andrew, with his thick, dark spiky hair and round head, shaped like mine, and which my parents said was as hard as a bullet. I thought of his kind face, his stocky body, his sports shirt, the tinned steak and kidney puddings he sold from the back of his van, even though he was a vegetarian. But all I could remember was the day he took my sister up to the corner shop and filled her dolls’ pram full of sweets for her birthday. For that act alone he was a hero. He became the lost connexion that would have made the rest of my life happy.

In the back garden of Akaba, sitting against a brick wall, my dead brother cradles me proudly in his strong arms, my plump little baby’s fingers in his. He grins at Dad’s camera, his arms full of me: pale and pudgy, I look straight ahead, eyes unfocused, nonplussed, still vaguely embryonic, as though I’d only just emerged into the world. Over in our new suburban home, with its smaller rooms and without my brother’s wide arms, I would grow like a goldfish grows to the size of its bowl; knees bent as I crouched by the gas fire in grey wool dressing gown tied with a twirly cord, chilblains on my feet in winter, burning ginger biscuits in front of the ash-white ceramic that glowed luminous red with internal heat as the wind whistled up the chimney.

The shadow of loss lay over us, but I can only remember the funeral, which I insisted on attending, dressing myself and running round to Andrew’s house to join the cortège. Shortly afterwards, my eldest brother – still only in his twenties – separated from his wife and came with his two young daughters to live with us. It became crowded in our three-bedroom semi. My mother had to cook for two families: big aluminium saucepans held pounds of peeled potatoes, sitting in their starchy water ready to be boiled like blind white fish. Life was as normal as my parents could make it, but I was a different boy.

From Lance’s Hill in Bitterne, Sholing’s neighbouring suburb, you can look across the dual carriageway to an opposing rise in the land and the tree-surrounded site of St Mary’s College. Its white stucco mansion, with bay windows like the bows of a man-o’-war, is the last great house of the estates which once studded the banks of Southampton Water. Like many of its counterparts, the house reacted to the social changes of the twentieth century by becoming an institution, a seminary for Catholic monks expelled from France; they added a slate mansard roof, giving the building the air of a Normandy chateau. In 1922, a new order, the De la Mennais brothers, took over, adding a utilitarian four-storey brick block to accommodate their school, with a chapel between marking the religious transition from the house in which they lived to the secular block in which they worked.

I’d won a scholarship to St Mary’s in my last year at primary school. All three of my brothers had been there, and in the wake of Andrew’s loss, a sense of tradition, if not duty, settled on me. After a summer of freedom came the day in September when my brother, who wore gold crushed velvet flares and had met his girlfriend at the Isle of Wight festival, drove me in his pre-war Austin, complete with running boards, to my new school.

At the end of a long gravel drive shouldered by rhododendron was the playground, a desert of grey tarmac surrounded by high chain-link fencing. Inside this giant cage was a teeming horde in a strange new uniform of brown and gold. With his hand on my shoulder, assuming his appointed role just as I must assume mine, my brother introduced me to the deputy headmaster. Dressed in a cassock edged and elbowed in black leather, the monk regarded me through his steel-rimmed spectacles: he had the raw, overshaved face of the early-rising religious, Brylcreemed hair and a wide toothy grin that belied his school nickname – ‘Crippen’. I was left in the playground, waiting for the whistle, abandoned to my fate. It was a recurring nightmare, of being lost in some unknown place, not knowing how to get home; it was the same sense of abandonment I felt when, lying in my top bunk in the bedroom I now shared with my two grown-up brothers, I heard in my head ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’, and realised for the first time, with a sudden and sharp pain, the reality of loss.

Marshalled into lines and into the building that was to be home for half my waking life, we filed into long glazed corridors of creaking floorboards smelling of polish and chalk and ink and leather. At the end was the hallway to the chapel, and as we trooped down to Mass we would catch sight of the dark interior of the old house beyond. To cross this point was forbidden. Occasionally, a monk would pass through the connecting door, allowing a glimpse of a stark domesticity. I imagined the monks’ bedrooms to be bare, with iron bedsteads, crucifixes and bedside tracts – whereas the prosaic truth was probably the deputy headmaster with his feet up, reading Sporting Life over a glass of whisky.

Crippen was said to have tailor-made leather straps hanging on the wall of his office, each whimsically named after his ‘girlfriends’ and ready to punish any transgression. He was the most worldly in an eccentric staffroom of characters easily baited by the ingenious cruelty of schoolboys: the shell-shocked language teacher whom we’d tease by imitating exploding bombs; another well-meaning brother who taught maths and whose fury was kept under control only by his undoubted devotion; and a physics master who, it was claimed, had helped invent the aerosol. He may have been a genius, but we could hardly care less. It was our duty, like prisoners of war, to taunt a chalky-cassocked and leather-patched cast who would not have been out of place in Nicholas Nickleby. The sense of them and us, of prisoners and wardens, was emphasised by our uniforms and their cassocks. The wooded grounds provided cover for our transgressions, a place to smoke illicit cigarettes and conduct other experiments, not all of them the kind that even the deputy’s girlfriends could dissuade.

In front of the school buildings, once gracious but now shaggy lawns sloped down to a series of turf banks dividing the school from its playing fields below. We were barred from the manicured grass in front of the White House itself, under which it was rumoured tunnels ran. One came out under the library; others we could only speculate about in our prisoner-of-war fantasies. As my best friend, Peter, and I trespassed in the cellars, he told me – and I had no reason to doubt him – that one tunnel led far out under the playing fields, down and down until it reached the distant shore of Netley.

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