The Fowler Family Business

The Fowler Family Business

Jonathan Meades

Dedication

For: H, R, L, C – and C

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Once it had been Henry and Stanley, Stanley and Henry. Stanley was the card, not Henry. Stanley was a caution, Henry wasn’t, Henry was cautious. Stanley was his da’s boy – all chat, and then some, such a tongue in his mouth. Henry’s tongue was fixed in the prison of his teeth whose incisor accretions, plaque, molar holes and food coves were his friendly familiars. You chum up with those ravines and contours if you’re tongue-tied. You go in for interior potholing. You have friends inside, three dozen of them, each with its tidemark of salts from forgotten meals, from grazes taken with Stanley, from wads shared on the way to school, from midnight feasts when they stayed over at each other’s.

It was always Henry and Stanley. Stanley was such a one. It was always the two of them together, Stanley taking the lead, Henry gingering along behind whilst Stanley got into scrapes and scrumped and larked about and scaled the old Victoria plum tree which Mr Fowler called ‘Her Majesty’. Mr Fowler watched in trepidation as Henry clambered about the lower boughs (Stanley was already at the top, his head poking through the leaves). He feared that his precious son might tumble and crack his crown and so be taken from him and Mrs Fowler – though, heaven knows, it was Stanley’s da who had more cause to harbour such a fear for he and Mrs Croney had lost an infant girl to diphtheria the winter before the war ended. Stanley was the hasty replacement, born less than a year after Wendy, poor mite, had perished.

Mr and Mrs Fowler were paranoiacally protective of Henry who reciprocated with a dutiful obedience which masked his timidity: he never ventured out of his depth, he never ran across the road, he was a responsible cyclist. Henry was irreplaceable.

In their family they were, all three of them, fans of Charlie Drake, the squeaky knockabout comic. Knockabout! He surely put himself through it. His weekly television show was a self-inflicted assault course. They howled with laughter in the curtained room lit by cathode blue. Mr Fowler with his Saturday bottle of Bass, Mrs Fowler with her fifty-two-weeks-a-year Christmas knitting, Henry in his raglan and pressed flannels, the three of them wondering what the irrepressible little trouper would get up to next. He tumbled, our Charlie fell. He crashed through walls. He went A over T into porridge vats. He’d better watch out for himself – Mr Fowler said as much. ‘Ooh he’s going to come a cropper Mother!’

Then he added, he always added, he put down his tankard and added gravely: ‘Don’t ever – don’t you ever – you listening Henry my boy – don’t you ever think of trying that. Don’t you ever.’

Pearl one, stitch one, take one in. ‘And don’t,’ Mrs Fowler joined in, ‘ever do what Stanley was doing up Her Majesty either. I don’t know …’

Henry Fowler didn’t require such warnings. He was a watcher. He anticipated the worst. He observed Stanley’s clinging limbs as he did Charlie Drake’s flying ones. He observed them with contained blood-lust – the ability to put the limbs together again, nicely, for the relatives, was, after all, the family trade. When Charlie Drake crashed about Henry rocked to and fro on the settee, with his tongue in his teeth, rooting out the rotten holes, laughing with his mouth shut. He got eager, he got agitated. He willed injury on Charlie who lived nearby in Lawrie Park Road – he dreamed of being the one who would make Charlie, our Charlie, look more like Charlie, in death, than he had ever looked in life, so like Charlie that his kith’n’kin would hardly notice he’d passed over. He wanted Charlie to hurt himself that badly so that he might practise the trade passed down to him by his father and his father’s father who had founded the business in 1901 when he was just a young undertaker and Her Majesty the Queen and Empress Victoria had only lately died. He dreamed too that Stanley might one day be thrown from weak, ungrippable branches by a high gust and so leave the tree for the ground. The sky would be dazzling lactic grey.

Stanley was his friend, he was such a friend he was a brother – he implored his parents to give him a real brother but they disobliged. Stanley was so much a brother he loved him, he loved him so much that he wanted to break him, the way that adored toys are dismembered. They put toy boxes beneath the carpet in Henry’s bedroom to simulate B- Western canyons. The Sioux would ambush the cowboys. The transgressors, defeated, would be beheaded by Henry’s fretsaw. When the change from lead to plastic models was made, towards the end of their Indian wars, a penknife sufficed. After he had cut the head off Henry always wanted to reattach it, he always regretted what he had done.

Head wounds were Mr Fowler’s speciality. He had the good fortune to work in the golden age of head wounds. Health and Safety legislation was something he gloried in as an employer. He was a grateful beneficiary of its loopholes and of the laxity of its implementation. He had followed a war, in the company of an army padre, burying the still helmeted at Arromanches, in a wood near Rouen where ‘the chalk was like concrete’, and all around Caen (‘Canadian lads – hardly got their bum-fluff some of ’em’). In that war he had risen to sergeant-major, and after it he had dropped the sergeant part. And after it, too, he had revelled in the automotive potency of the age. Cars might not have been as routinely quick as they are today but they still got up a fair lick on roads that were built for old legions, horses, first-generation internal combustion. He had served in a war for his King and he believed from the very bottom of his still undicky ticker that mortal risk was the prerogative of everyone – save Henry, who was precious and irreplaceable.

Mr Fowler was happiest with A-roads, with arterial roads with central flower displays. He loved road-houses which men drove to with their bit on the side to get tight in, to adulterate marriage in a private room secured with a wink and a tip, to drink more after, to exit into the path of an oncoming vehicle. The metalled pelt of roads outside road-houses was frosted in winter, soft in summer (the season of minor mirages). The whole year through it was constellated with the evidence: red glass, rubber, chromium, cloth, Naugahyde, oil, body tissue, blood, especially blood. Every road-house had a bloody road in front of it. There were deaths galore. Racing drivers set an example to the male nation. They led short fast lives: Collins, Hawthorn, Lewis-Evans, Scott-Brown with his two names and one arm. They expected nothing more. In their mortal insouciance and dashing dress they aped The Few. They drove to die in flames and glory. After them young death would be delivered by the pharmacopoeia: no head wounds there.

And there were no seat-belts then, no collapsible steering columns, no impact-triggered air bolsters fighting for space like naked fatties. There was no obligation on motorcyclists to wear helmets. The first British motorways – the very name acknowledges the unsuitability of previous roads – were being dug and levelled when Mr Fowler was in his prime. In his old age he was sad but philosophical about the diminution in road deaths effected by motorways and about the decline of ‘random culling’, an epithet which, as a child, Henry believed to be in general use rather than specific to his father. ‘It’s Nature’s way. Nature always finds a way. War, disease, pogroms, the South Circular, a faulty earth. You make the place too safe and, well – it’s not just the trade that’s going to feel it. The world’ll be full of old ’uns. Miserable old parties like yours truly … Life was meant to be a banana skin. Look at the Bible, my lad.’

The week the Ml opened Mr Croney took Stanley and Henry for a drive up it. He couldn’t get the hang of the lanes, but neither could the rest of the grockles – this road was not a utility but a site to see, a novelty attraction to participate in. Every car was filled with children agape at the infantile simplicity of the enterprise, children who recognised that their solemnly playful way of making a road had been borrowed by grown-ups. Here was a model road whose scale had been multiplied by giants. It was so obvious, it was so uncompromising in its totalitarian certainty. It had started from zero. It was the road to the future which was already here, in Herts and Bucks. In the future there were picnickers on a December hard shoulder. They were scudding along part of the apparatus that would take them to the moon. Stanley, who dreamed of becoming a pilot, would by 1980 be an old moon hand, a veteran of weekly trips. Henry, who never considered any trade other than the family’s, would by 1980 be burying people on the moon, if, by 1980, people didn’t live for ever. Tomorrow: monorails. The day after tomorrow: the defeat of gravity. All mankind will be happy and there will be no lapels. Our shoes will shine for ever. The Queen’s means of transport will allow her to visit every one of her subjects each year for a cup of rehydre and a chat.

Mr Croney couldn’t wait to leave the future behind and get back to the roads of the present. He slowed in the outside lane indicating right (he was not the only one to do so). It was obvious to the boys, who had never driven, how to exit from the most exciting road they had seen. By the time he had veered across to the nearside lane complaining of a life sentence on this bloody road he was sweating and tetchy. At last he succeeded in getting off it. They crossed a bridge where children stood waving Union flags at the adventurers below. Mr Croney unscrewed the top of his pigskin-covered flask and swigged, relieved, steering with one hand, muttering: ‘Now this is what I call a road. The MI’ll never catch on you know.’

Stanley and Henry knew that overhanging bushes and muddy verges and drunken curves would be eliminated by their generation. Mr Croney drove down labyrinthine lanes and parked on the gravel outside a pub with a red sign and plenty of two-tone cars (baby blue and cream, carmine and tan). ‘Church,’ announced Mr Croney and went inside. The boys knew the form. He soon reappeared with crisps and ginger beer for them to share in the car. ‘I want real beer, Dad – this is for kids.’

Henry was shocked by Stanley’s brashness. He’d never dare make such a demand of his father. He was puzzled too by Mr Croney’s resigned acquiescence: he returned a few minutes later with two bottles of beer and a couple of pork pies. Stanley, enthused by the motorway and comparing it to American highways, hardly thanked his father but took the bottles and said to Henry: ‘I’ll have yours. You don’t want it do you?’ Stanley put his new grey winkle-pickers on the dashboard and lounged with proprietorial abandon listing the attractions of America which is where he would live when he was a pilot: ‘They all go on the first date … fantastic money even before you’ve finished training … square watches … record-players in cars … open-plan houses …’ Henry sat on the back seat masticating the pie’s pink meat. Stanley lobbed his from the window: ‘Electric windows … amazing jeans. It’s the country of the foreseeable future,’ he said, repeating a magazine headline.

Henry’s foreseeable future was already mapped out within a three-mile radius of the old Crystal Palace which his father had watched burn down in 1936, ‘a tragic night for Sydenham, son.’ But then Stanley had no family business to take over, so had to make amends. Besides, for Henry America was the country of the past, of Custer and Wyatt Earp and Jesse James and William Bonney whose head he had cut off more than a dozen times and whose photograph – was he left-handed or had the print been made back to front? – he had shown to his father who told him: ‘That’s an Irish face. A bad Irish face, a wicked face. Never trust that sort of face, Henry – bad blood, bad genes.’

When Mr Croney came out of the pub he smelled of whisky. His friend Maureen smelled of perfume made from boiled sweets.

‘I’m more of a Mo than a Maureen.’ She squeezed on to the front bench seat between Stanley and Mr Croney. She smiled at Henry. She was no oil painting, more a distemper job. She had a puffy pub-diet complexion but was thin with it. There were the ghosts of bruises round her eyes. Her lipstick didn’t confine itself to her lips.

‘Just giving Maureen a lift home, fellers. Her mum’s come over bad.’

‘Mo.’

Henry watched her gnawed, knotted fur collar ride high over the seat back as she twisted to touch Mr Croney’s thigh. Stanley turned to Henry and winked. Mr Croney reciprocated her gesture, close to where the gear lever would have been had it not been on the steering column. Mo giggled. Henry had her straight off as a disrespectful daughter, out cavorting whilst her mother suffered stomach cramps or whatever, whilst the old lady hawked and spluttered and gasped for breath. The car crunched gravel. They were off on their mercy mission.

Mo’s way of showing proper concern for her mother seemed inappropriate to Henry. He considered that it lacked decorum. She sang. She knew all the songs. Her songbook memory stretched back to Henry’s earliest memory of what Mr Fowler called the Light Pogrom. Her voice was true, fluid, banal. She could do husky too. She loved a big, powerful, meaningful ballad. She was more herself when she was Denis Lotis or Lisa Rosa or David Whitfield than when she was Maureen nicknamed Mo.

When she was Mo she was a pub belter, so loud that Mr Croney told her to go easy for the sake of their eardrums, whereupon she exposed a wedge of slimy grey-pink mucous membrane and wiped his ear with its tip. She withdrew it into her mouth and sang ‘Que sera sera’ with a giggle. Stanley joined in: Henry felt left out, in the back – he wasn’t part of the party. He felt that even before Mo called him ‘a quiet one’ in a testily admonitory tone and Stanley neglected to speak up for him. Later, as they drove through a town with a swollen river and formal public gardens, Stanley listed for Mo what he aspired to wear: Aqua Velva, a burnt-in parting, almond-toe Densons, Cambridge-blue trousers with a fourteen-inch cuff.

‘And he wants a white mac don’t you, Stanny … That’ll turn the birds’ heads. What you think Mo?’

‘Oh it’d suit him ever so.’

Henry wondered where such sartorial licence would end. He knew, because his father had told him so, that the sort of clothes Stanley would be wearing after Christmas were wrong – which is why he kept his copy of the Denson shoes catalogue with his copies of Kamera and QT and Spick, hidden beneath toys he’d grown out of. He didn’t want to own that catalogue any more than he wanted to own those corrupting photographs – but both shoes and flesh shared a lubriciousness, both belonged to the forbidden world of sleek sinuousness. He was ashamed of his thraldom to it, of how it might taint him, of how those possessions debased him, of how they represented the threshold of sinfulness, of how they made him betray the trust of his parents. He was used to the complicity between Stanley and Mr Croney, to their familiarity: it was so unlike the proper relationship he enjoyed with his father. He envied Stanley, yet despised Mr Croney’s laxity.

It took Mr Croney a while to see Mo home once they’d stopped in a lay-by next to the woods. Her mother must have lived in a cottage in a clearing, with a little curl of smoke from its fairy-tale chimney and no road to it. Mr Croney had taken Mo’s arm as they set out on a worn path between the trees. He had held her arm to prevent her slipping on the leaves and the bony roots exhumed by years of feet. As they had vanished from view Henry had seen Mr Croney take her by the waist: he needed to support her because she was wearing stilettos and a hobble skirt like a regular piece of homework. It wasn’t the kit for a hike.

Stanley grinned: ‘That’s my mac taken care of I’d say.’ He took his father’s flask from the glove compartment. ‘Just so long as I don’t split on him to Mum … I saw a beaut with leather buttons in Wakeling’s. Swig?’

Henry shook his head. He leafed through a leatherette-bound guide to hostelries, hotels, inns, the entries annotated in Mr Croney’s hand. He was a commercial who sought bargain beds and bargain bed mates. He travelled in hosiery and jocular smut. He preyed on what Mr Fowler called the Holy Order of the Sisters of the Optics. He was a saloon-bar flatterer who gave his samples to floozies, in hope. He referred to himself as Knight of the Road.

‘He’d buy you a tie if you wanted.’ Stanley was already a future man, already drawn into men’s deceits and duplicities.

Henry replied, lamely: ‘I’ve got enough ties at the moment.’ It had not occurred to him, till Stanley made it plain, that Mr Croney was doing anything other than see the girl back to her infirm mother. To have accepted a tie would have made Henry tacitly complicit. In Henry’s family, the universe of three, bribes were not offered because there was no need, there were no secrets shared between two parties to the exclusion of the third.

Mr Croney did not possess his son’s candour. Henry saw him returning, saw him brush himself down, trying to divest himself of hanks of earth and moss and leaf meal and clinging twigs. When he realised that Henry had been watching him he said: ‘Had a fall … Slippery way … Don’t want to dirty the car.’ He was breathless, he was panting. He had to refuel with air between each lie. He gulped gusts bearing fungal spores and intimations of winter. His trouser knees were wet. His welts were encrusted. His improvisational fluency was polished: ‘Hasn’t been herself, Maureen’s mother, not since she lost her husband. Gets very browned off, it seems, down in the dumps. Takes a lot of ladies that way, their loved one passing on – your dad’d know about that … They feel at a loss – it’s rotten luck on them. And what with the winter …’ He shook his head in grave sympathy. ‘Maureen’s a good girl I’d say, tries to help the old dear keep her pecker up but the old dear’s lost her will. It’s a horrible sight lads, seeing someone wanting to do away with theirself. Tragic. Tragic. I tell you one thing Stanny – I don’t want Mum to hear about any of this. She gets most upset by any talk of suicide. It’s a woman thing and us men got to protect the womenfolk. You can bet that Henry’s dad doesn’t bring his work home, in a manner of speaking. Am I right Henry? Wouldn’t be quite nice. Not on. Mum’s touchy Stanny … They say that women never get over losing a kiddie. A little bit of them dies inside.’

They drove into the early dusk of a thick sky. The fields were flat, the earth was heavy and laden with moisture, mist hung over dully lustrous cabbage rows.

‘What,’ asked Stanley, idly, as though curiosity was merely an alleviation of boredom, ‘did she use? How did she do it? Gas oven, sleeping pills? Barbiturates? Razor in the bath Dad?’

‘You’re well up on it. You been reading a Teach Yourself? Barbiturates – I hadn’t even heard of barbiturates when I was your age. Does Mum know you know about barbiturates?’

‘Is that what it was then Dad?’ he asked sweetly.

‘Yes … Or something like them. Neighbour come by for a natter and saw her through the window. Thought she was asleep till she noticed the bottle. Had an ambulance there quick as a flash.’

‘Didn’t they take her to hospital then?’

‘She’s a veterinary nurse the neighbour. Knew the form. Fist down the neck – brought up the entire stomach contents.’

‘Must have smelled.’

‘They’re walking her round and round her little lounge – stop her nodding off. Very shaky. Keeps bumping into the furniture. And tripping over, oh what-d’you-call – hassocks. Kneelers. She embroiders them.’

Henry watched Mr Croney’s scrawny pomaded nape. He marvelled at his off-the-cuff inventiveness. It didn’t sound like a story that he was making up … it sounded plausible, credible: he wasn’t the sort to conjure veterinary nurses and embroidered hassocks out of nowhere.

Could it be that Stanley was ascribing adulterous wickedness to his father to glamorise him, to lend him a raciness that he didn’t possess? Was Stanley creating his own father, supplying him with moral deficiencies which Stanley himself hoped one day to manifest and which in the meantime gave him something to boast of in the want of anything else, such as a family business, in which to take filial pride?

Henry said nothing to his parents about the near tragedy that he had so nearly witnessed. He was loyal to Stanley and to Mr Croney and, besides, he knew the embarrassment that suicides occasioned at Fowler & Son. Their burials were grudgingly prosecuted. The specific grief prompted by such willed deaths was more than usually infected by remorseful guilt. It was the denial of fate that took the kith’n’kin so bad – that was Mr Fowler’s opinion, and he’d put on his philosophical hat to ponder the rank arrant presumption of cheating on chance. And he’d put on another hat, a black topper that shone like metal, to complain of the practical problems of a suicide’s funeral. No one enjoys them. That was trade wisdom in those days when shame and disgrace attached to the nears and dears and the welcome death stained the name of all who bore it and the deceased was a skeleton to be buried deep in the family closet and will not, please God, set a familial precedent for we know that it does run in families whether through genetic command or exemplary licence. Not that, Mr Fowler insisted to Henry, it was merely the trade which abhorred such self-abnegation but the entire Commonwealth of Her Majesty’s (the Queen’s, not the tree’s) subjects. Funeral directors do not lead the nation in matters of moral choice. They follow. That is why the state of undertaking perfectly reflects the state of society at a given moment, that is why Mr Fowler considered himself and his peers social barometers. Each year at conference, which Henry would attend from the age of fifteen, speakers would emphasise this point and append the corollary that should the day come when bodies were piled into limeless pits or left by roadsides it would be a mark of society’s decomposition and anarchy’s abominable triumph rather than a mark of the trade’s failure to resolve industrial disputes or to attract the right quality of digger. Henry didn’t know then that every trade flatters itself thus; engineers, shopkeepers, bricklayers, quantity surveyors – the state of Denmark is reflected in the state of Danish quantity surveying, now.

Chapter Two

On Monday 28 October 1968 Henry Fowler, just twenty-three, twice a runner-up in the Oil Fuels Guild-sponsored Young Funeral Director of the Year competition and recently the proud bridegroom of Naomi Lewis, stood beside a Greek revival mausoleum close by the entrance to West Norwood Cemetery sniffing autumn in a pseudoacacia’s yellow leaves, musing on the greenhouse potential of the seeds in its leathery pods, never forgetting to remember that this was the eighth anniversary of Stanley Croney’s death, reflecting thereon, whistling beneath his breath a tune of his far-off teenage when he had been immature, and knew it.