O Lucky Man...

ca. 1936

Several people were curious to know more about a remark in the recent post Cabinet of Curiosities: "I don't think Dad believed in luck, or that anyone would have characterised his post-war life as lucky, although he was easy-going enough (and perhaps wise enough) to have disagreed." So I thought I'd revisit, re-write, and stitch together some bits of posts from a few years ago (I did warn you there'd be more of this refitting and recycling going on...). The result is a bit long, so if you have no interest in my family back-story, or are prone to the complaint "TL;DR", I'm sure you can find something more congenial to read elsewhere.

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.

For a while deference and loyalty combined with natural ability seemed to be paying off. At patrician Geo. W. King, considerable effort went into building that loyalty. As it happens, I was born in the upstairs flat of a house just off the Great North Road in Stevenage that belonged to King's. My godparents, also employed at King's, lived in the downstairs flat. The King's apprentices' "charity beat balls" were a big thing, locally: in 1964, the Rolling Stones, no less, performed for them in the Stevenage Locarno Ballroom. Families were not ignored, either; every year there was a children's Christmas party and an outing to a show in London [2]. Every five years, a new "long service" lapel badge was awarded to employees. By the 1970s, Dad had worked there for over twenty-five years, and was still only in his early 50s.

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.

Now, all fathers are weird; it's a weird job, believe me, although it was considerably more weird back then. It took me years to realise my father had always been, under his easy-going manner, a wary, frustrated man; aged 37 when I was born, and probably with one disappointment too many already under his belt. You could never quite take him at face value, particularly when he expressed an opinion or made a joke. Often, when he said one thing, he meant quite another, but you would eventually stop noticing his humorous or ironic intent, if you ever had; children are not generally great at picking up on irony. Take bourbon biscuits, for example. I will now never know whether his pronunciation of "bourbon" as "berben" in the American style was one of his little jokes, or a slightly mistaken bit of Besserwisser one-upmanship. Whatever, within our family "berben" was the Authorized Version. So I will never forget the day one of my partner's parents – very distinguished, university-educated people – requested a bourbon biscuit, pronounced rather pedantically in the full-on French manner, and I got a severe, spluttering case of the giggles. Thanks, Dad.

Burma Reunion 1947 (Dad centre front)

Majorca 1970

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.

Engagement with the wider world outside work and family never seemed to hold much interest for him, although at one point around 1965 he did stand for the local council as a Liberal Party candidate. He lost, Stevenage being solidly Labour in those days, but I can recall the excitement of having a direct personal interest in an election, with all the posters, flyers, canvassing, and "knocking up" of potential voters on the day (no, not like that, fool). I don't think he had been a long-standing member of the Liberal Party – it may even simply have been a membership of convenience for the period of the election. My understanding is that he had been persuaded to stand by an old acquaintance from his pre-war youth in Letchworth and Hitchin who was a Big Noise in the local party, and whom my mother always pointedly referred to as an old girlfriend [3].

And talking of my mother... He loved that difficult, conflicted, and (in my opinion) rather manipulative woman with an exemplary, selfless devotion. Again, I think their relationship was ahead of its time, as a working-class couple aspiring to a modest slice of the "social mobility" pie. He understood her boredom at home and supported her need to have a job – she was out at work full-time as soon as I was settled in at primary school until forced to quit by health problems in her 50s – and he never ignored, embarrassed, or belittled her the way other men seemed so often to do to their wives. In their prime, they were a formidable pair, seemingly cut out for bigger things: things that would never happen, though, largely because they had no actual idea what they might have been, or any plan of how to arrive at them. Both had spent crucial formative years in the army (Mum had been a sergeant in an ATS ack-ack unit), and I think they had placed their entire stake, naively perhaps, on the anticipation of military-style rewards and promotions for loyalty, obedience and hard work. In the end, though, they were let down by a system that had exploited their trust, then betrayed and casually discarded them as surplus to requirements.

As old age set in, and the disabling ill-health that had prematurely ended my mother's working life became a matter for concern, the two of them moved to Norfolk to live in a mobile home in my sister's back garden, entirely dependent on one state pension and the few supplementary benefits they could be persuaded they were entitled to. They had always been inseparable – unhealthily so, really – and now rarely ventured out except to shop, spending every evening at home in front of the TV. They had no friends in the area, no real interests, and nothing much to say for themselves. As a younger man I felt oppressed by what they had become, and my visits "home" were a trial of endurance that never lasted more than one long, tedious afternoon.

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.

Which, as I imagine is always the case when a parent dies, released a number of contradictory emotions, ranging from grief to relief. But I was grateful to have had that final year and those last glimpses of him as the man himself, no longer compartmentalised in the role of father and dutiful husband as I had known him for most of my life. They are good memories to have of a decent, intelligent man who didn't deserve the string of misfortunes that blighted his later life. But, as I wrote in the earlier post, I don't think Dad believed in luck, and would have disagreed with anyone who suggested his life had been unlucky: you simply had to play the cards you were dealt. Unlike me, and despite all the evidence, I don't think he could ever quite bring himself to believe that the dealer might have been stacking the deck all along.

1985: younger then than I am now...

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.

2. I'll never forget those coach-rides into central London, eventually going along the Chelsea Embankment before turning up into the West End. At one Christmas show, I remember looking across at a striped awning opposite the theatre we were being ushered into, which appeared to bear the name STRIPE-ERAMA. Only in later years did I realise it must have been STRIPERAMA, a strip-club on Soho's Greek Street.

3. The name "Elma Dangerfield" always used to come up, but this cannot be right, at least in the "old girlfriend" stakes.