My father died in July 2007, not long before what would have been his 90th birthday. I'm pretty sure he would have made it to 90, and maybe even 100, had he not concealed the symptoms of the cancer that killed him. Or rather, had he not succumbed to complications in hospital shortly after the emergency operation that attempted to save his life. Typically, this foolishly brave, stupidly self-effacing man had concealed his illness for too long because my mother was dementing, and he felt honour-bound to see her through her final years. Only when she had finally been admitted to a care home did he seek treatment, but it was far too late. As I say, typical. What can you do?
This was also typical, of course, of so many decent men of that entire generation, born into the long shadow of the Great War, and destined to follow their own fathers into another conflict not of their making and, like them, to become cheerfully grumpy, insolently obedient, and reluctantly brave enlisted soldiers. Deference and obedience were part of the fabric of society then, and it took a braver, more free-thinking sort of man to question or refuse so-called military "service": it was almost literally unthinkable. But the problem with soldiering, especially as a private or NCO and particularly under wartime conditions, is that it amplifies and consolidates attitudes of compliance and conformity into automatic reflexes, not least by re-badging them as virtues. Do what you're told, and we'll all be OK. Do what you're told well, and you'll be rewarded with praise and promotions. Don't, and you'll cop it, you 'orrible little man. [1]
These questionable reflexes weren't easily unlearned when men were "demobbed", and got carried over into civilian life and the workplace. Before the war, my father had been an apprentice at a local engineering firm, Geo. W. King, which was run by the King family along patrician lines. The head of the firm was known as "Mr. George", and his son as "Young Mr. George". They seemed to know most of the large workforce by name, and it was a successful and innovative enterprise, mainly building conveyor belts and other mechanical handling devices for car factories and warehouses. After returning from six years in uniform Dad was taken back on, worked hard, did what he was asked to do, and rose from the factory floor to the drawing office, eventually achieving middle-management status as a "production controller". Equipped with a little schoolboy French, he was even dispatched to France around 1960 to help oversee the installation of conveyors in the Simca car factory at Poissy.
Things began to go wrong around then, however. As the post-War decades progressed, younger men in possession of engineering qualifications were leapfrogging their seniors in the promotion stakes. Dad found this a bitter pill to swallow, I think: the educational opportunities denied to his generation but secured by them for future generations were being taken up by relative beginners, and this put the older hands like him at a disadvantage. Also, the work environment was changing from the patrician to the managerial as control of the firm slipped away from the King family. Worse, the British car industry was in terminal decline, with knock-on effects all down the supply chain. Then, catastrophically, in 1973 Geo. W. King was taken over by Tube Investments, who saw no future in the mechanical handling side of the enterprise. Seven hundred employees were made redundant, including my father. To add insult to injury, TI stole the King's pension fund, simply because it was a handy pot of money, and the law at that time said they could. None of those long-serving, redundant employees would see a penny of their pension. So much for loyalty, long service, and those ridiculous lapel badges.
This (combined with various domestic troubles and setbacks I won't go into, but including, I'm sorry to say, a rebellious adolescent son who gave frequent and unnecessary cause for worry to his parents) would have embittered any man whose whole philosophy of life had been crumpled up and flung in his face. Loyalty? Long service? Hard work and experience? Fuck off, fool, and welcome to Brave New Britain! Dad became more inward and withdrawn, despite managing to find work for a few years in a start-up run by other ex-King's employees who valued what he had to offer. But the father I had known as a small child – beaming and bearing gifts when he returned from a week working in Paris, or proudly showing us round the King's stand at an Earls Court exhibition – that man had retired from the scene, hurt, before he had even turned 60 in 1978.
In many ways he had been an unusual man and an untypically engaged father, rather ahead of his time. I was never ignored, and I could always get his full attention. Which was worth getting: he always seemed to know everything I might want to know. Whether it was the various types of cowboy pistols, the names of American Indian tribes and their chiefs, how to repair a punctured bicycle tyre or make a trolley out of pram-wheels and planks, how to draw a boxer, how to mix brown paint out of blue, red, and yellow paint, or the best way to build a bonfire... He always knew. He often made me playthings – a sailor's hat from a cornflakes box, a hideaway from wooden pallets in the back garden, an improvised guitar from a rolled up newspaper stuffed in a tube – and taught me, quite consciously, how much better imagination was than expensive, unaffordable toys. True, he would also sometimes offer to wallop me, give me a good hiding, skin me alive, knock my block off, put salt on my tail, and various other hair-raising threats, and I'm sure I must have had the occasional smack, although I can't actually remember any; the threat was usually enough. To this day, the very idea of levering open a tin of paint with the business end of a chisel or forgetting to put the lid back on that tin gives me an almost religious thrill of guilty horror.
After my mother died in 2007, and before his own final illness became acute, Dad had a year of relative freedom, which I did my best to encourage. Things he hadn't done for years "because of Mum" came back into his life. He could go for walks – Mum couldn't walk, and couldn't bear to be left alone – so I bought him boots. He could listen to music – Mum didn't enjoy jazz, his passion – so I bought him CDs. He could read – Mum always felt ignored when sitting in the same room as a reader – so I bought him books and an illuminated magnifier to aid his failing eyesight. Our Sunday evening chats on the phone – a weekly filial chore I had come to dread over the decades – became enjoyable; he was free to talk about things he hadn't talked about for most of his life, and most weeks I would be jotting down a new shopping list as I listened.
Then the inevitable call came: he had been rushed into hospital for an emergency operation. I drove the four hours up to Norwich to visit him afterwards, and he had shrunk alarmingly into a tiny, frail, exhausted old man in a post-op gown. We talked for a bit, nothing of any great consequence, but then I had to leave for the long drive back home. On the way out, I realised I had left a bag behind, so headed back. The curtains had been half drawn around his bed, so he didn't notice me, but I could see him: he was laughing and joking with the three young nurses who had arrived to give him a bed-bath. So I grabbed my bag and left the old guy to it. He was just weeks away from his 90th birthday: how would we best celebrate that now?, I wondered. The very next day, though, I heard from my brother-in-law that he had succumbed to post-operative complications and hadn't made it through the night.
1. A conscript "citizen" army also teaches good men the arts and habits of "dumb insolence": a passive-aggressive, veiled hostility towards lesser but socially-superior men granted unchallengeable disposal over their lives. You do what you're told, sort of, but make sure in the doing that the teller realises you think he's an idiot, quite possibly by sabotaging the outcome by following the letter, not the spirit of your orders. Anyone who seeks an explanation for the craziness of industrial relations 1945-1975 need look no further.