Meades has featured only once in A Personal Anthology, and it’s for this story, chosen by his long-time publisher John Mitchinson.
Meades has parallel careers as a journalist, essayist, critic, broadcaster and novelist, which may explain why his short stories, once widely acclaimed, are now overlooked and undervalued. ‘The Sylvan Life’ first appeared in the genteel pages of Harpers & Queen in November 1982 and later in his debut collection Filthy English (Jonathan Cape, 1984), published when Meades was employed as Features Editor at Tatler. As well as four hefty collections of his non-fiction writings, two novels would follow: Pompey(1993) and The Fowler Family Business (2002), both (to my mind) overwrought and overlong. As a fiction writer he’s at his best in small doses.
Filthy English made quite a stir at the time. Seven short stories, all as dark and transgressive and as disturbing as anything by Ian McEwan. ‘The Sylvan Life’ was set in the 1950s and is an account of impoverished rural life and incest in the New Forest. It opens thus:
“A chicken that is killed by being swung round and round by the neck will evacuate itself and so leave a thin cloacal trail all across the walls and the ceiling (the colour of a diseased lung) and across the bursting sofa and the happy family gewgaws and the nicotine brown photo of the Saints and the pin-up photo of the girl in the peanut adverts (dead now – tuinoll and gin) and the poker-work antimacassar stapled to the door and across the matted slab of carpet and the ragged hairy moist rug pile where the cats slept and the meat- encrusted plates they ate off and the mallets and the axes and the right across the mirror whose lost silvering already gave it the look of a slide constellated with gonococci.”
The matchless squalor, precisely and almost lovingly catalogued, culminates in the show-off flourish of “constellated with gonococci,” the young Meades flexing his literary muscles. Things get really nasty after that because the author, like Dickens’s Fat Boy, ‘wants to make your flesh creep.’ This he does, gleefully and repeatedly.
First published in Harpers & Queen, November 1982, and collected in Filthy English, Jonathan Cape, 1984
