The Drying Rooms - Chapter Twenty

(O, Don't Shut Me!)

Parsons Minor and Parsons Major

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Audio version of Chapter Twenty

The first older brother who died was a solitary man. He died alone aged forty in the room in which he lived. He left poems in that room. Piles of them.

There is a line that sometimes strolls into her head and then sits in a recurring groove for a frozen few seconds — or several minutes.

O don’t shut me, babbling and pissing in your palms.

But he has been shut, her brother. For over thirty years, he has sat on her shelf. Occasionally, she removes him from the shelf and holds him open, gently flicking and pausing through his pages.

She takes him down now. After going straight to the ‘O don’t shut me’ line, she lifts her head from the page and stares through the window. The neighbour’s black cat is sitting peacefully on the roof of her garden shed, the lamp in her sitting room reflected in its fur. Some yellowing winter leaves have fallen on to the bright blue tarpaulin covering her bike.

She got it wrong, of course. O, don’t shut me has an exclamation mark and is in brackets. And the line ‘to lie here slack naked’ comes before ‘babbling, pissing in your palms’. How could she have forgotten that?

She can’t believe her frequent re-rememberings aren’t quite right. But even ‘not quite’, frankly, is just not – not when every vowel, consonant and comma was once carefully measured. She knows this. There is a large leather briefcase in her attic. The briefcase is stuffed with handwritten and typed drafts. A forensic mess of lexical choices, sliced syllables, deletions, insertions, lines broken, reunited, and broken again.

He died of an unexpected heart attack. The piles of poems in his room were published posthumously, after being lovingly sorted and painstakingly edited by her father and her other older brother. He also died of an unexpected heart attack, six years later, aged forty-six.

Loss. The feeling that shot her straight back to homesickness. Loss.

She wants to bite into the soft sibilance of that word and make it scream. She wants jagged consonants that cut and snag in the gullet.

I didn’t go to the same school as my brothers. They went to traditional boys’ boarding schools[1], where they were called Parsons Major and Parsons Minor by the teachers and the other boys. Shortened to Parsons Ma and Parsons Mi.

They were popular and happy at their prep school, or so the story goes. Rupert (Parsons Ma) was a star fast bowler; Simon (Parsons Mi) was captain of the First Eleven football team and even became Head Boy because of his cheerful, fair-minded disposition. They had each other. They were popular. They had friends.

They went on to a public school famous for its outdoor replica Greek amphitheatre, in which boys performed plays in Ancient Greek. I remember the interminable boredom and discomfort of watching one, sitting next to my grandmother under an umbrella in the drizzle.

My brothers were unhappy at their public school. This is reinforced by my mother repeating for years (before and after they both died) how they changed from being happy little boys to morose teenagers. How Rupert was, yes, more watchful, more guarded, but Simon had always been “such a happy, friendly little boy”.

Apart from the boring Greek play, I have one other memory of visiting them at their public school. It’s a memory edged with a sense of lawlessness that held cloistered menace. I was with my brothers in a long, echoey oak-panelled corridor when a gang of honking, bellowing boys pushed past carrying aloft the torso of a naked female mannikin with neat, prominent breasts. That’s it. That’s all I can remember, except for the feeling. The feeling was that I didn’t like that place.

I know now that one of the school’s headmasters was Anthony Chenevix-Trench. I remember my parents bemoaning the fact that Chenevix-Trench, lauded for being an enlightened educator and raising standards at the school, left soon after Rupert started there in 1963. Chenevix-Trench went on to become headmaster at Eton. It’s only since his death in 1979 that it’s become known that throughout his career, he was a serial sexual abuser of the children in his care. Ex-Etonians have spoken out about how Chenevix-Trench enjoyed masturbating while administering the punishment of caning, commonly known as flogging.

My brothers often talked about flogging, usually with the wry, cynical laughter that is instantly recognisable to any member of the Toff Boarding School Tribe. The same laughter that bubbled up when they talked about ‘fagging’ — the practice of younger boys acting as on-call servants to older prefects. A practice they despised and loathed.

Apart from these wisps, I have no memory of my brothers talking about that school. Not to me anyway. And I have no evidence that the arcane brutalities they experienced behind its Victorian brick walls extended to sexual abuse. Maybe. Maybe not. But I am comforted by the fact that my parents took them away from there and sent them to an enlightened international college. Probably the catalyst for their involvement in the student demonstrations of 1968.

Oh the joy of being included by them! Chanting alongside them in central London after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia when I was thirteen. Rupert, an upfront banner-holder; Simon, a protective hand on my shoulder, as I happily bellowed ‘Dubček! Dubček! Dubček!’

In their adult lives, both my brothers wrote. Rupert, alongside running a sweet shop and then a mail-order plant nursery (a small back-garden crammed with beauty). His novel, The Canberran, was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1986. It is set in the Nullarbor desert, where he worked with a gang of men on the Sydney to Perth railway line.

I hero-worshipped my brothers as a child and in adulthood I looked up to them as writers. I still do. When I first read The Canberran I remember the slight ‘what if it’s no good?’ anxiety. I needn’t have worried. This is how the novel opens:

The man of startling redness lumbers towards the three new arrivals from Port, and the train starts pulling out of the camp. And as the last carriage passes, a bundle of blankets is tossed out of the door.

It is very quiet out here in the Nullarbor, very quiet and very still, and nothing much happens hour after hour; only one or two incidents here and there to make the silence more natural, just as an occasional bubble breaks upon the still surface of a pond; and this bundle of blankets somersaulting in the air before skidding to a stop in the dust was just such a moment.

Simon wrote his poetry alongside working as a hospital porter in London. Experiment with an Air Pump, the first volume of his poetry we published, includes an introduction by Rupert. Rupert writes that he comes nowhere close to describing his contradictory, reclusive yet fervent, socially engaging brother. He’s wrong. He nails it. Yet, he clearly feels conflicted:

I have found it extremely difficult to write about my brother. Even after his death, I feel that every word written is an assault on the strongly-held bastion of his privacy.

Rupert’s understanding of Simon and his privacy was a connectedness between them that I knew I would never share.

We are left with more of Rupert than Simon. I see Rupert flash up in the smiles, gestures and humour of his children, my beloved niece and nephew. And I frequently invoke him with their mother, the woman he loved, who has been a sister to me and my no-longer-baby sister for fifty years.

I am now thirty years older than my brothers. When I think of the age they died (40 and 46), I see young men. Yet they will always be my older brothers.

Would they want this? This loyal little sister? This proud skinless memorialising?

No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Fuck it. They’re dead. And that’s what they would say.

I am no longer the younger sister. I’m the one who’s become the grown-up who knows what it feels like to be entering old age. And yet I feel more connected to them now than ever. I want them both here. Right now. I want to have a conversation with them. I want them to include me in a conversation about writing. About the whole business of being alive.

Extract from Simon’s 11-page poem:

Dust Jacket

Not much

To say, not much

And less to sing

To sing about

The author save he

Is proud

Proud

To have been plucked so

From that process

Drawn, eased from the pressure

Ripped in a frenzy

Ripped in relief

Ripped from that choc-a-bloc choking

Fucking Mother of a shelf …

(O don’t shut me!)

… to lie here slack naked

Babbling, pissing in your palms,

No, don’t shut him.

Look around, read.

How many other half

Half botched works

Half poems, half journeys

Do you see lurking among the labels

Still tight in their sockets?

Not much.

No

But don’t shut him

Not yet … because …

Exactly it is

- BECAUSE -

He likes to think

That is

He likes to think

I

Also am

A poem

To finish

I

Also am

A journey

To end

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[1] See Author’s Note 6: Rule Britannia - The British Public School

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