‘I do,’ I said. And I did.
Normally, on a warm summer’s evening like this, I would have been down at the canal, fishing for mud sharks. But the Doveston had promised me that if I gave him a shilling, he would take me to meet a man who had monsters in his greenhouse and might even let me feed them, if I asked him nicely.
It was not the kind of offer a nine-year-old boy could refuse.
The Doveston tugged upon the big brass knocker. ‘We’ll have to wait for a bit,’ he said. ‘He has to check out the street.’
I made the face of puzzlement.
‘Just wait,’ said the boy. So we did.
After what seemed a considerable wait, during which thoughts began to enter my head that perhaps I didn’t really want to see monsters at all and would rather have my shilling back, we heard the sounds of bolts being drawn and the big front door eased open a crack.
‘Password,’ came a whispered voice.
‘Streptococcus,’ said the Doveston, naming the Gram-positive spherical bacterium responsible for the outbreak of scarlet fever which had all but wiped out class three in the winter before.
‘Enter, friend, and bring your brother.’ And so in we went.
When the front door closed it was rather dark and our host switched on the light. As I hadn’t been expecting anything in particular, I was not at all surprised by what I saw.
The hall was high and wide and rather grand.
A patterned rug upon a polished floor.
A jardinière with peacock plumes.
A glimpse or two of splendid rooms.
A bamboo stand with hats and coats, but very little more.
The sight of our host however, did surprise me. With the Doveston’s talk of the Royal Engineers and the SAS, I had at least been expecting a man who looked like an ex-soldier. But Uncle Jon Peru Joans was small and weedy. His cheekbones stuck out like a cyclist’s elbows and his chin was that of Mr Punch. His baldy head was narrow and high and mottled as a pigeon’s egg. His nose was slim as a paper dart, but his eyes were the very most worrying part.
Some months before I had sneaked in through the back door of the Odeon cinema in Northfields to see an X-certificate film called Mondo Cane. It was a documentary about curious customs around the world and included a lot of footage of bare-breasted native women jumping up and down. But the sequence that really stuck in my mind was the bit about a restaurant in China where they served monkeys’ brains. Monkeys’ brains from live monkeys. They had these special tables with little holes in the middle and the monkeys' heads were stuck up through these and held in place. And then, as coolly as you might peel an orange, the waiters would peel off the top of the monkeys’ heads and the patrons would fish out the brains with little spoons and eat them.
It was the look in the eyes of those monkeys that I will never forget. The terror and the pain.
And Uncle Jon Peru Joans had eyes like that. They looked everywhere and nowhere and they put the wind up me.
‘So this is your brother Edwin,’ he said, his gaze darting over my head. ‘Come to see my beautiful boys.’
I wished him a good evening and called him sir, because adults always respond to politeness. He reached forward to pat my head, but he must have noticed me flinching and so instead he just said, ‘Can he keep our secret?’
‘Oh yes, Uncle.’ The Doveston grinned. ‘He is my brother, after all.’
‘Then I shall trust him as I trust you.
The Doveston winked in my direction.
Uncle Jon Peru Joans led us down his hall. ‘It has been a trying day,’ he told us. ‘The secret police have stepped up their campaign of harassment.
‘The secret police?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said the weedy man. ‘I am followed everywhere. They pose as passers-by, as window-cleaners and postmen, shopkeepers and mothers pushing prams. They know that I’m on to them and this makes them worse. Only this morning, when I went out to buy a packet of cigarettes—’
‘Snowdon,’ said the Doveston.
The uncle turned upon him, the wild eyes wilder yet.
‘I can smell the smoke,’ the boy explained. ‘You’ve only just put one out. Snowdon is a menthol cigarette. It has a most distinctive smell.’
‘Good boy,’ said the uncle, patting the Doveston’s shoulder. ‘I change my brand every day to keep them guessing.’
‘The secret policemen?’ I asked.
‘Exactly. And when I went into the shop there were two of them in there. Dressed up to look like old women with shopping bags. They were watching to see what I’d buy. They keep a record of everything I do. It all goes on file in the secret headquarters at Mornington Crescent.’
‘Why do they do this?’ I asked.
‘Because of my work. Hasn’t Charlie told you?’
‘Charlie?’
‘I thought it would be better coming from you,’ said the Doveston.
‘Good boy once more.’ The weedy man led us into his kitchen, which smelled as bad as it looked. There were bags of rubbish piled up the walls and boxes and boxes of paper.
The uncle’s eyes caught the look on my face, which was probably one of bewilderment. ‘I throw nothing away,’ he said. ‘They go through my dustbins. I’ve seen them. They look like ordinary dust-men, but they don’t fool me.’
I nodded and smiled and sniffed a little bit. There was a strange smell in this house. It wasn’t the cigarettes and it wasn’t all the rubbish. It was something else. A rich smell, heavy and pungent. And I knew where I had smelled it before. In the great glasshouses at Kew.
Uncle Jon Peru Joans lifted a chipped enamel bucket from the cluttered draining board and held it out in my direction. I took a peep inside and then a smart step backwards.
‘It’s only meat,’ the uncle said.
‘It’s meat with bits of fur on.’
‘They don’t mind the fur, it’s natural.’
I took the bucket, but I wasn’t keen.
‘Come on,’ said the uncle. ‘This way.’
He opened the outer kitchen door and the glasshouse smell rushed in. It literally fell over us. Engulfed us. Swallowed us up. It took the breath away.
The heat smacked you right in the face and the humidity brought sweat from every functioning pore. ‘Hurry in,’ said the uncle. ‘We mustn’t let the temperature drop.’
We hurried in and what I saw, to say the least, impressed me.
It was a Victorian conservatory.
I have always had a love for the Victorians. For their art and their invention and their architectural wonders. And while many purists sing the praises of the Georgians, for their classical designs, it seems to me that many of their buildings have the severity of maiden aunts. Those of the Victorian era, on the other hand, are big blowzy tarts. They rejoice in their being. They cry, ‘Come and look at me, I’m gorgeous.’
The Victorians really knew how to build on a grand scale. When they constructed bridges and museums and piers and huge hotels, they simply went over the top. Wherever there was room for a flourish or a twiddly bit, they stuck it on.
The conservatory of Uncle Jon Peru Joans had more flourishes and twiddly bits than you could shake an ivory-handled Victorian swagger stick at. This wasn’t just a blowzy tart, this was a music hall showgirl.
It swelled voluptuously from the rear of the house, all bulging bosoms of glass. The ornamental ironwork fanned and flounced, with decorative columns rising to swagged capitals. Like hymns in praise of pleasure, as Aubrey Beardsley wrote.
But if the conservatory itself was a marvel, the plants that grew within were something more. I had seen exotic blooms before at Kew. But nothing I had seen compared with these. This was exoticism taken to a wild extreme. The colours were too colourful, the bignesses too big.
I gawped at a monstrous flower that yawned up from a terracotta pot. You couldn’t have a flower that big. You couldn’t, surely.
‘Rafflesia arnoldii,’ said the uncle. ‘The largest flower in the w
hole wide world. It comes from upper Sumatra, where the natives believe it is cross-pollinated by elephants.’
I leaned forward to have a good sniff
‘I wouldn’t,’ said the uncle.
But I had.
And ‘Urrrrrrrrrgh!’ I went, falling backwards and clutching at my hooter with my bucketless hand.
‘Smells just like a rotten corpse,’ said UncleJon PeruJoans. ‘You’d best not sniff at anything unless you’ve asked me first.’
I sought to regain my composure. ‘It wasn’t too bad,’ I lied.
‘That’s what Charlie said.’ The uncle smiled a crooked smile. ‘And there was me thinking that children had a more sensitive sense of smell.’
I fanned at my face. ‘What is that called?’ I asked, pointing to the nearest thing as if I gave a damn.
‘Ah, this.’ The uncle wrung his hands in pleasure and gazed lovingly upon a number of large fat white and frilly flowers that floated in a tub of oily water. ‘This is called the Angel’s Footstep.’
I wiped at the sweat that was dripping in my eyes. I was seriously leaking here. My vital fluids were oozing out all over the place. I’d been thirsty when I’d arrived, but now I was coming dangerously close to dehydration.
‘The Angel’s Footstep,’ the uncle repeated. ‘So named because it is said of angels that, like Christ, they can walk upon water. But only when the moon is full and only upon its reflection.’
‘And the leaves are poisonous,’ said the Doveston.
‘Extremely,’ the uncle agreed. ‘Eat one of those and you’ll join the angels. Oh my, yes indeed.’
‘I think I might join the angels any minute if I don’t have something to drink,’ I said.
The uncle’s eyes flicked over me. ‘Put the bucket down,’ he said kindly. ‘There’s a water tap over in the corner there and a metal cup on a chain. Don’t touch anything else, or smell anything, all right?’
‘All right, sir,’ I said.
Being a resilient lad, who had already survived diphtheria and whooping cough and phossy jaw and Bengal rot, I wasn’t going to let a bit of dehydration get me down too much. And so, having revived myself with a pint or two of Adam’s ale, I was once more fit as a fiddle and fresh as a furtler’s flute.
‘All right now?’ asked the uncle.
‘Yes, thank you sir,’ said I.
‘Then let me show you these.’
The uncle drew my attention to a tub of plants. Deep green leaves they had, which spread in a flat rosette, interlaced with violet-tinged flowers. ‘Mandragora officinarum,’ he said. ‘The now legendary mandrake. Beneath the surface of the soil its root is the shape of a man. This is the witch plant, used in many magical ceremonies. It is said that when pulled from the ground it screams and that the scream will drive the hearer mad. Should we give it a little tug, do you think?’
I shook my head with vigour.
‘No.’ The uncle nodded. ‘Best not, eh? The roots in fact contain a tropane alkaloid which taken in small doses can induce hallucinations and visions of paradise. In large doses however, they induce—’
‘Death,’ said the Doveston.
‘Death,’ said the uncle. ‘It was very popular with Lucrezia Borgia. But three hundred years ago the Persians used it as a surgical anaesthetic.’
‘They dried the root,’ said the Doveston, ‘ground it and mixed it with camphor, then boiled it in water. You sniffed the steam. The Romans originally brought it to England.’
‘Your brother knows his stuff,’ said the uncle, patting his prodigy’s head and then examining his fingers for cooties.
I was given the full guided tour. Uncle Jon Peru Joans showed me his poppies. ‘From which opium is distilled.’ His Cannabis sativa. ‘Indian hemp, beloved of beatniks.’ His Menispermaceae. ‘A member of the South American moonseed family, from which the arrow-head toxin, curare, is obtained.’ And his Lophophora williamsii. ‘Peyote. O wondrous peyote.’
We took in the monkshood and mugwort, the henbane and hellebores, samphire and the scurvy grass, toadflax and toxibelle. I didn’t touch or smell anything.
It seemed clear to me that the uncle’s collection consisted entirely of plants which either got you high or put you under. Or were capable of doing both, depending on the dose.
As I watched the weedy man with the weirdy eyes, I wondered just how many of these narcotics he had personally sampled.
‘And that’s the lot,’ he said finally. ‘Except for the beautiful boys you’ve come to see and I’ll show you those in a minute.’
I plucked distractedly at my shorts. My Y-fronts, ever crusty, were filling up with sweat and swelling to embarrassing proportions. ‘It’s all incredible, sir,’ I said. ‘But might I ask you a question?’
Uncle Jon Peru Joans inclined his pigeon-eggy head.
‘Why exactly have you chosen to cultivate these particular varieties of plants?’
‘For the Great Work,’ said the Doveston.
‘For the Great Work,’ the uncle agreed. I made the face that says ‘eh?’
The uncle tapped his slender nose with a long and slender finger. ‘Come’, said he, ‘and meet my boys, and I’ll tell you all about it.’
A corner of the conservatory had been curtained off from the rest by a greasy damask tablecloth. The uncle stepped to this and flung it aside with a theatrical flourish.
‘Wallah!’ went he.
‘Stone me,’ said I, in the manner of Tony Hancock.
On a cast-iron pedestal stood an ancient aquarium and in this some of the queerest plants that I had ever seen.
I was not at first sure that they were plants. They had much of the reptile and some of the fish. They were scaly and shiny and all over odd and they made me feel most ill at ease.
As with all normal children, I harboured a healthy fear of vegetables. Cabbage put the wind up me and I lived in terror of sprouts. Parental assurances that they were full of iron had been tested with a magnet and found to be naught but lies. Exactly why parents insisted upon piling vegetables onto their children’s plates had been explained to me by Billy. Vegetables were cheaper than meat and times were ever hard. When, later in life, I briefly rubbed shoulders with folk of a higher social bracket, I was amazed to discover adults who ate nothing but vegetables. These folk, I learned, were called vegetarians and although they had enough money to buy meat, they actually chose not to do so.
As one known for his compassion, I naturally felt great pity for these sorry individuals, who clearly suffered some mental aberration that was beyond my power to cure. But ever philosophical, I looked upon the bright side. After all, the more vegetarians there are in the world, the more meat there is left to go round amongst us normal folk.
‘My beautiful boys,’ cried the uncle, startling me from my musings. ‘Bring the bucket over here and we’ll serve them up their supper.
I hefted the bucket and cautiously approached. Scaly, shiny, reptile and fish and with more than a hint of the sprout: whatever they were, they were clearly alive, for they quivered and shivered and shook.
‘Are they vegetables, sir?’ was my question.
‘Mostly,’ said the uncle, peering in at his ‘beautiful boys’. ‘Mostly sprout, but partly basilisk.’
‘Chimeras,’ said the Doveston.
‘Chimeras,’ the uncle agreed.
‘And they’ll eat this meat in the bucket?’
Uncle Jon Peru Joans dug into his jacket and brought out a pair of long-handled tweezers. Passing these to me he said, ‘Why don’t you see for yourself?’
The Doveston nodded encouragingly. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘it’s a big honour. Bung them a gobbet or two.’
I clicked the tweezers between my fingers. Sweat drip-dropped from my eyebrows and I felt far from well. But I had paid my shilling and this was what I’d come for, so I plucked some meat from the bucket.
‘Arm’s length,’ the uncle advised, ‘and don’t get your fingers too near.
I did as I was told and
lowered a chunk of tweezered meat into the aquarium. It was as if I had dropped a dead sheep into a pool of piranhas. Nasty little hungry mouths all lined with pointy teeth came snap-snap-snapping. I fell back with big round eyes and a very wide mouth of my own.
‘What do you think?’ the Doveston asked.
‘Brilliant!’ said I and I meant it.
We took it in turns to feed the plants and we emptied the whole of the bucket. The uncle looked on, nodding his head and smiling, while his crazy eyes went every-which-way and his fingers danced with delight.
When we were done he said, ‘There now then,’ and closed the tablecloth curtain.
I handed the uncle his tweezers. ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ I said to him. ‘That was jolly good fun.’
‘Work can also be fun,’ said the uncle. ‘Even Great Work.’
‘You were going to tell me all about that.’
‘Maybe next time,’ said the Doveston. ‘We have to be off now, or we’ll be late for Cubs.’ ‘Cubs?’ I said.
‘Yes, Cubs.’ The Doveston gave me a meaningful look. Its meaning was lost upon me.
‘I’m in no hurry,’ I said.
‘Good,’ said the uncle. The Doveston groaned.
‘Are you all right, Charlie?’
‘I am, uncle, yes. Just a touch of King’s Evil, that’s all.’
‘I’ve a root that will cure that.’
I’m sure that you have.’
‘Am I missing something?’ I asked.
The uncle shook his little bald head. ‘I think Charlie has a girlfriend,’ he said. ‘And is eager to practise upon her the skills he has learned from the lady librarian.’
The Doveston sniffed and shuffled his feet.
I made the ‘eh?’ face again.
‘The Great Work,’ said the uncle, striking a dignified pose. ‘The work that will earn for me a place in the history books. But they know that I stand poised upon the threshold and that is why they watch my every move.’
‘The secret policemen?’
‘The secret police. They have powerful telescopes trained upon us even now. Which is why I keep my boys behind the curtain. The secret police want to know about my work and steal it for their masters at Mornington Crescent. But they won’t, oh my word no.