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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
His name was Eric Vachell, except that it wasn't. He was known to me as Uncle Eric, but he was not my uncle. He was born an Anglican and died a Roman Catholic. He never married, because of something he had read in a book. He was a doctor who was laid low by the suffering that he witnessed. He was never famous, and his existence is now recalled by fewer than a dozen people in the world. More than twenty-five years after his death, however, he is still a pervasive influence on my life. And here's the strangest thing: I never met him.
Even that is not quite true. I did meet Eric, but only at my christening, when I was not yet fit for human society. He was present that day, attending what was, by any standard, a minor event in the social calendar, because he was my great-uncle--the brother of my maternal grandfather. I was wearing diapers at the time, and was therefore ill-equipped to engage Eric in discussion of his favored topics, such as Catholic doctrine and herbaceous borders. Even now, though, I wonder whether he did not lean over my crib and confer some murmured blessing: a hint of the link that would bind us.
That was our final encounter. I never saw him again--it was tacitly understood that Eric's preference was for children of the unseen variety--and we never spoke on the telephone. Eric, born in 1897, hailed from a generation that mistrusted the phone and put its faith in letterwriting. According to my late mother, his niece, all his letters began with the phrase "The weather is not clement in Hove." This was unsurprising, Hove being a small town on the south coast of England to which, by tradition, the elderly have retired, there to stagger through tempests of ozone-rich breeze. Although Uncle Eric lived not far from my boarding school, he never visited me there, preferring, wisely, to correspond. I have a distant recollection of tearing open an envelope from him and seeing a couple of stamps flutter to the ground. Without hesitation, I swapped them for a Sherbet Fountain--a tube of sweet powder into which one dipped a rod of licorice, winding up with a fevered mouthful of gray fizz. This struck me as a phenomenal bargain. It was only after my great-uncle died, when I was sixteen, that doubts began to stir. His stamp collection, which he had always kept under his bed, was valued at thirty thousand pounds. It is quite conceivable that, as a means of outwitting inheritance tax, he had passed on some of his prime specimens--mint Mauritian rarities, say, or one-off Victorian freaks with the Queen's head printed upside down--to an uncomprehending great-nephew. I could have dined on sherbet for the rest of my natural life.
Other treasures from Uncle Eric's household met with a kinder fate. There was the small ivory Buddha whose yellowing glaze and otherworldly leer caused my mother to aim him at the wastepaper basket, pause, then offer him to a firm of antique dealers, who twittered with joy and offered eight hundred pounds in return. And the moral is: Never throw gods away. There was a dressing gown of dark-red silk that I thought made me look like Noel Coward but which suggested to others a mildewed necrophile of reduced means. There was a heavy, unlovable wing armchair that reeked of an earlier century, right down to the rapacious ball-and-claw of its mahogany feet; the velvet that covered it was of precisely the same hue as the robe, so that when I wore one item of Eric's legacy to sit in another I could, in effect, disappear, leaving only a disembodied head to bob on a burgundy sea.
My great-uncle was tidiness incarnate. For many years, he won a local award for Best-Kept Small Garden, and, after he died, we inherited a large bundle of his personal papers, pruned with equal care. These include many letters from him to his Aunt Adela, which I presume he reclaimed after she died. That is in itself a peculiar practice; to hoard your own correspondence argues not so much vanity as a rage for order--a wish to keep your cards, including any jokers, close to your chest. Uncle Eric was born John George Eric Koelle, a Germanic name that was pronounced "Kelly" on the English side of the family; it rang dangerously foreign in English ears, and in 1922 he changed it, but there is nothing in his papers about this momentous switch. What he did leave, as though anticipating a future audience, was a four-page typewritten curriculum vitae, plus an appended list of "Narrow Escapes." Here are the highlights:
1917. Commissioned as 2/Lieut. in R.A. [Royal Artillery], 1918. Posted overseas to Palestine. Took part in Allenby's great offensive, which routed the Turks and was the beginning of the end of the First World War., 1919. Went up to Cambridge and started Medicine. Good shooting., 1925. Returned to Army as Regular Officer in R.A.M.C. [Royal Army Medical Corps], 1926. Sailed for India. Many varied stations and experiences, including N.W. Frontier. Delhi Military Hospital 2 1/2 years (one year in Delhi fort)--(very hot!) Three accidents in my baby Austin car--each could have been fatal--one my fault (alcohol)., 1931. Home (Feb. very cold!)., 1937. To Singapore as Skin Specialist. Busy V.D. practice; but contrived also to be M.C. of St Andrew's C. of E. Cathedral; and, in addition, ran a parish in the suburbs and preached every Sunday for 2 years!, 1942. Sailed by "Cathay" in the great N. African landings. On arrival at Bougie, Algeria, ship was bombed heavily, and sunk, losing all my hospital equipment., 1943. A series of battles, and distressing experiences, with heavy casualties and sickness. In action when I was holding 800 wounded (normal capacity, 400). "Mentioned in Dispatches." [A British military award for operational service] Broke down in health and was posted to India. Before leaving, was received into the Catholic Church in Sousse, Tunisia. [added in ink] My father died in September., 1944. Arrived in Bombay. In December, went to command the large Italian Prisoners-of-War Hospital in Yol, on slopes of Himalayas., 1946. Ordered home at last., 1950. Decided to retire! Since then, PEACE, D.G.!! [Deo gratias]; but it took me 10 years to recover fully from the strain of war., 1971. Subsided into the quiet life, aged 75.
It was a subsidence that he had earned. Eric's resume has all the clipped wryness that would be expected from an Englishman of his generation, but there are more unusual gestures, too, toward a history of private suffering, and toward palliatives both trivial and profound. Shooting and climbing were standard pursuits of the British Empire, and at times in his letters home he appears to be reporting not just from another country but from the vales and mists of a barely credible age, as when he writes from the Srinagar Club, in Kashmir, "I found, on arrival, that my house-boat was ready, & was a very fine one, consisting of six rooms, & a boatman, cook and sweeper, and of course my servant, Sankar. . . . The other day, the Maharajah celebrated his birthday, & rowed down the river in golden barges."
That Cleopatran echo comes from 1926. In the ensuing twenty years, much of the gold rubbed away, and the Eric Vachell who retired in 1950 had collided with more brutish and calamitous patches of experience than, even as a doctor, he cared to contemplate. The remainder of his life was a rebuke to that chaos. He had the True Church; he had his stamps; he had my mother, his devoted niece, who, on her visits, would never stay with him but check into a nearby hotel, where he would join her for a feast of brown soup and cutlets; and he had his rocks. Whenever Eric went climbing, he would return with a suitcase full of geological samples. On subsequent expeditions, he would bear with him as much of this collection as was physically manageable, in a gasping attempt to avoid replication of his finds: a Sisyphean task that reminds me of Molloy, the character in Samuel Beckett who repeatedly removes a stone from his pants or jacket, sucks it for a while, then transfers it to another pocket.
There were two further items in Uncle Eric's legacy. One was a voluminous study of Charles Dickens, by Eric Vachell. He toiled on it for years, and I wish I could suggest that it was worth his labor. Instead, it is little more than a dogged march through the novels; my mother gave it to the Dickens Fellowship, in London, where a curator informed me that the typescript was "of no conceivable scholarly interest." More worthy of scrutiny was the final gift. Uncle Eric left me his madness. This was not congenital, for nobody on either side of the family has suffered it before or since. Although my parents took possession of it, I appointed myself the sole beneficiary. Like his red armchair, the madness resides in this room as I write: not all of it, but enough to keep sanity at bay. I can see it squatting there, on the windowsill, in twenty-three volumes. Each of them bears the name of P. G. Wodehouse.
It is hard to know where to start. Logic tells me that there must be people on this planet who do not know who Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright is, or the meaning of the heliotrope pajamas with the old gold stripe, or what Lady Sprockett-Sprockett drank in the drawing room when Mordred Mulliner was hiding on a high-backed sofa, or even why Rupert Baxter...
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