FATHERS’ DAY
I’ve always regarded father’s day as an excuse for even more retailing, but notice that this year it coincides with the date of my father’s death. It was a Sunday. I’d been out in the morning to church where I was a chorister, and had come back to read the papers in the front room. My mother was in the kitchen cooking Sunday dinner. She went upstairs to see how my dad was and then I heard the hurried, panicked movements of her coming down the top couple of stairs, realising instantly. Dad was in his last couple of weeks, we knew that: he’d been dying of a cancer that had spread from his bowels to the liver. He’d begged the doctor to finish him off. That morning the doctor had visited and, though we will never know, had probably, with a morphine injection, given him what he wanted. If it was just a little more than the recommended dose, our little family was grateful to him. It was a beautiful June day. I went up to sit with my dad where he lay in the big double bed, looking suddenly younger than his 59 years. Downstairs visitors began to arrive. I kissed him and went down.
I was fifteen. My O Levels began the following day – thankfully Maths the first papers, no revision required. I can still remember the timetable: French was on the Tuesday; Wednesday a day free of exams because it was the funeral. It was also Royal Ascot Week and my Uncle Roy asked to put the television on at the funeral wake. ‘Well, Albert would have wanted it,’ was Roy’s response to the objections. Sometime during the Spring, Albert, my dad, bedbound, had given me a brown envelope to take to the bookies. ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he had said. I don’t know what amount he bet that day, only that after his death his savings, previously of about four thousand pounds had reduced to two and a half thousand pounds. This was 1962. He was almost certainly wanting to leave us comfortably off. We didn’t own our house – it was rented (see ‘Peaceful Piccadilly’). There was no life insurance and neither my mother nor me knew what that was until some ‘kind’ colleague of my father’s, who visited after his death, raised the issue. ‘I wish people wouldn’t visit,’ my mother said. It wasn’t just the uncomfortable feeling that we had somehow missed out in life’s lottery. We were, in a funny way, content in our sadness (we had had plenty of time to accustom ourselves to dad’s death) and wanted to be left alone. My mother had come into her own in the months of his illness in looking after him. I remember some feelings of exclusion, but couldn’t have helped him the way she did and think I did the best thing in just getting on with my normal life. In anticipation a death sentence, such as he – and we - we had received, sounds insupportable. It isn’t. You get on with it.
The first indications that something was wrong was when I came down one morning two years before – I was just fourteen – to find him washing his pyjamas in the sink. He was what people call a fine figure of a man, a recently retired Police Inspector, but had been, unusually, distressed and embarrassed. He’d fouled himself during the night – the first sign of what would be diagnosed as bowel cancer. A few uncertain days followed. My dad went into hospital. It was the school play. I’d got my first big part, Gamaliel, the High Priest, in Caesar’s Friend’ which we played three nights – Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday. It was only after the last night that my mother told me my dad had had an operation: ‘We didn’t want to spoil it for you.’ I went in to see him on the Friday evening and remember a long Victorian ward in the old Chesterfield Royal Hospital. The hospital was on my way to school, and as I came up Eyre Street my dad had arranged during his stay to wave at me from his ward. I’d been told he was in for tests, and believed it. But I think, looking back, there must have been a lot of shutting out on my part.
He emerged with a lot of the bowel removed and a colostomy. It was difficult for him. I never saw his little bag and he hadn’t wanted my mother to see it but the District Nurse, Bessie – Nurse Bestwick – arranged matters with my mother. ‘When I start singing you come up stairs with a bowl of warm water.’ Bessie stripped my dad to wash him and started singing. When my mum entered the room there he was, exposed. He started to cry. But it got it over with. I wrote Bessie into my first stage play. That cheerful actress Hilda Braid took the part. The play, slightly distanced from my own experience – about an old man dying, at home, in wartime – helped get a great deal of grief out of my system. Neil Kinnock, then a young MP, whom I’d recently got to know, came to see it. I sat next to him and noticed him crying (so the play was doing its job…). I hadn’t realised till then his mother was a District Nurse.
My dad himself was a Tory, hated (in particular) Barbara Castle, later Neil’s friend and heroine. Dad was a gentle man and his strong dislike of ‘that woman’ still puzzles me. We got the Daily Express (when it was worth reading) at home, but mainly, I think, for Peter O’Sullevan and Clive Graham, its racing correspondents. Years later, when I wrote a television play about horse racing Clive Graham came in to read out an (excited) fictional race commentary. I was star struck, and told Clive so: I couldn’t believe I was in the same room as him. Dad would have never been quite so impressed as me, but probably quite proud and amused.
After his operation there were some good months. We went to Bridlington in the car in the summer. The hope was that the cancer had not spread. But he knew before us. At the end of September my mother was asked to see the doctor on her own, something she communicated to me: it was for a Thursday evening. She told my dad she was going to the doctor for some imaginary ailment of her own. As she never went to see the doctor he can’t have been fooled. I knew it was ‘serious,’ but dad looked well. I attended the weekly Thursday evening choir practice at the Parish Church. My life at that time moved between home and school and church: I was completely happy. Charlie Bryars, our choirmaster, (see the film ‘Angel Voices’) on his way down from the organ loft, found my mother waiting in the choir vestry. He came into the body of the church and said, quietly,‘Wakelam, your mother wants to see you.’ Dad had been given three weeks to three months to live. The doctor had wanted to talk to mum first to see if dad should be told. I have a mental image of my mother and me turning into our ‘lane’ as we called it, wondering how to put it to him. But as we walked into the living room where he was sitting he said, ‘You don’t need to tell me, Else. I know. How long?’ We sat and held each other.
He lasted nine months. At Christmas we thought a miracle might have happened. He was well enough to go to a Police Christmas party. Was it after that that we watched the wartime film ‘Since You Went Away’ on television? It’s what we now call a weepie, and the story – I’ve never seen it since – must have had some resonance to us because I remember looking round at my dad, who was crying. By February half term he was still OK. It was snowy. We had a new (second hand) radiogram with a very limited selection of records – Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ and ‘Rosamunda’, Tchaik First Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ They would have got a spin. I read, for the first time, ‘Rebecca.’ Dad would be reading; my mother knitting. With the fire lit, grey snowy skies outside, I look back at the three of us and what feels, despite the circumstances, like happiness.
He began deteriorating about Easter time. I was pretty occupied with O Level revision (we were a ‘racing’ stream and took them a year early). It probably helped. Dad started losing weight rapidly. ‘I’m going to be a crisp before too long,’ he said, with gallows humour. It was a joke; it was also true. I needed to get his books for him from the library – he was fond of Galsworthy. I doubt if, at this stage, he read them. Portable radios were just about available then but he didn’t want one in the bedroom. Nor did he want visitors, though was always polite when they arrived. The Archdeacon (in gaiters) came to see him. Dad wasn’t a churchgoer, still felt angry I think, about the death of his brother, 24 year old Stephen, down the pit near forty years before. The Archdeacon, who had confirmed me, wanted to receive my dad into the Church. It was (no doubt) gently refused - but he was touched by the Archdeacon’s visit. One night both my mother and me heard dad calling out in his sleep,‘Two weeks’ and assumed that was how long he had left to live. But it was less than that. Maybe people always die before you imagine they will. Charlie Bryars, my choirmaster, took time off from school where he was music master to play the organ at the funeral (he hadn’t been asked and I didn’t know). It moves me. It was an impressive affair, many town worthies. I got back to my exams, and find it interesting that my results (then awarded in percentages) deteriorated from the high of the Maths exam the day after his death to a failure in German, two and a half weeks on. In the English exam, the Tuesday of the second week, a small spot of blood landed on my paper. I’d got conjunctivitis – was stressed in other words. A month after the death my mother and me decided to go to Folkestone for what she always called ‘a little holiday.’ We’d been to Folkestone as a family, happily, twice before. But it was a mistake. We were glad to come home, though note that it was on that holiday that I first visited Canterbury, where I currently type this.
And so we started our new life, the two of us together. There was a police widow’s pension, and my mother went out to work – as a shop assistant at £9 a week. Though she would moan from time to time she enjoyed the nine to half past five after all the years as a housewife. A couple of years later, I got almost a full grant – £360 a year - to get me through University. Some of it went to my mum: we felt well off.
After his death I had his spectacles made up to fit my prescription. They were heavy frames but I wore specs - like him – only now and again. And there was another appropriation. In his wardrobe (which I still use; it’s in my bedroom) I came across a rubber johnnie (no protective pack) with what I remember as a light dusting on it. Had it been unused for years? I put in on, then re-rolled it and put it back, so my mother would never know. The next time I looked it wasn’t there. She claimed later that they had never much of a love life, that he had ‘lost interest’ in her after I was born, but the bright little snooper I was read a letter once that he had sent her from Germany in the war, referring to ‘that “dirty” form of lovemaking you say you don’t like.’ The letter, in his beautiful distinctive hand (I have only the odd signature as a memento of it) was destroyed by my mother in a fit of tidying (‘moving on’ it’s now called) after I left home. Also destroyed were all the photographs of him with the American unit he was with during the war. I am still angry about this Taliban-like behaviour: I didn’t know they’d gone till after her death. But she forged a new life for herself in the dozen years she had left. They weren’t unhappy as a couple but she said that she did a great deal more after he had gone. Widowhood suited her. She learnt (there were three failed tests) to drive. When she came down in the ‘little jalopy’ to pick me up from Cambridge she navigated by way of pub signs. No good saying to her, ‘You turn right off the A612..’ For her, you turned right at that big ‘Wheatsheaf’. I once looked out of my college room windows at her arrival and saw her reversing into a flower bed. We were good pals and went on more adventurous holidays than Folkestone together. We bought a tent and camping equipment and headed to France one year. I’ve only just got rid of the tent (near unused since) over forty years on, very reluctantly. After we got back I heard her talking about the holiday to a neighbour, extolling not the chateaux at Chinon or Blois but the toilets at somewhere or other. We also went to New York, visiting my University friend who was a journalist there. I have a memory of her at the apartment windows 32 floors up looking down the length of Broadway. She was knitting. ‘I’d never have done this with your dad,’ she said.
She’d met him, as a young woman, only just out of her teens (he was near ten years older) on point duty, in those days holding up traffic if necessary. That old junction (Horns Bridge in Chesterfield) has long gone under a vast roundabout. She’d been told by a fortune teller once that she would marry ‘ a man who waved his arms about.’ Well, it wasn’t Toscanini. She always said they got married because Windsor Lad won the Derby. He was at decent odds – 15-2 starting price, only third in favouritism to the red hot ‘certainty’ of Colombo, who, I’ve read, both got a poor ride and probably didn’t stay. That was June 1934. They married in July. I took a long time come along. Sometime in the war she had an operation ‘to clear me out’ – her fallopian tubes I would imagine. ‘Your dad never wanted another baby after you,’ she said. I don’t know if this is true, but I had all the indulgence of being an only child. I couldn’t have been more secure. They pretended to be younger (by ten years) than they were but I was not bad at adding up and subtraction and a bright little fucker. ‘If you’re only 42 how were you in the police in 1926?’ There was some prevarication. I wasn’t that bothered and went out of the room. When I came back in they told me that they’d fibbed about their ages because other children’s parents at school were younger than them and they didn’t want me to be worried. I wasn’t but should have been: dad died at 59, mum at 62.
He taught me to read. She – adept with her hands – constructed a clock out of a cereal packet, with a drawing pin holding moveable cardboard hands and taught me to tell the time. We played cards and draughts together. He taught me chess. She liked jigsaws and generally, patiently, saw the right piece before me. I loved it when he came back from work and, as a little boy, I would sit in his lap and get him to rub his whiskers into my face. I remember the veins standing out of his hands the way mine now do. And in that six month period of respite between his operation and the realisation that the cancer had spread, I remember coming from home from school on a sunny Spring afternoon – May time - seeing him at first at a distance, walking up the lane towards me, not on the pavement but by the bushes on the other side of the road. He was getting his health and strength back. ‘I’m going to walk to the wall,’ he said – a dry stone wall towards the end of the lane – ‘and then see you back home. Tell your mam I won’t be long.’
I’ve always regarded father’s day as an excuse for even more retailing, but notice that this year it coincides with the date of my father’s death. It was a Sunday. I’d been out in the morning to church where I was a chorister, and had come back to read the papers in the front room. My mother was in the kitchen cooking Sunday dinner. She went upstairs to see how my dad was and then I heard the hurried, panicked movements of her coming down the top couple of stairs, realising instantly. Dad was in his last couple of weeks, we knew that: he’d been dying of a cancer that had spread from his bowels to the liver. He’d begged the doctor to finish him off. That morning the doctor had visited and, though we will never know, had probably, with a morphine injection, given him what he wanted. If it was just a little more than the recommended dose, our little family was grateful to him. It was a beautiful June day. I went up to sit with my dad where he lay in the big double bed, looking suddenly younger than his 59 years. Downstairs visitors began to arrive. I kissed him and went down.
I was fifteen. My O Levels began the following day – thankfully Maths the first papers, no revision required. I can still remember the timetable: French was on the Tuesday; Wednesday a day free of exams because it was the funeral. It was also Royal Ascot Week and my Uncle Roy asked to put the television on at the funeral wake. ‘Well, Albert would have wanted it,’ was Roy’s response to the objections. Sometime during the Spring, Albert, my dad, bedbound, had given me a brown envelope to take to the bookies. ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he had said. I don’t know what amount he bet that day, only that after his death his savings, previously of about four thousand pounds had reduced to two and a half thousand pounds. This was 1962. He was almost certainly wanting to leave us comfortably off. We didn’t own our house – it was rented (see ‘Peaceful Piccadilly’). There was no life insurance and neither my mother nor me knew what that was until some ‘kind’ colleague of my father’s, who visited after his death, raised the issue. ‘I wish people wouldn’t visit,’ my mother said. It wasn’t just the uncomfortable feeling that we had somehow missed out in life’s lottery. We were, in a funny way, content in our sadness (we had had plenty of time to accustom ourselves to dad’s death) and wanted to be left alone. My mother had come into her own in the months of his illness in looking after him. I remember some feelings of exclusion, but couldn’t have helped him the way she did and think I did the best thing in just getting on with my normal life. In anticipation a death sentence, such as he – and we - we had received, sounds insupportable. It isn’t. You get on with it.
The first indications that something was wrong was when I came down one morning two years before – I was just fourteen – to find him washing his pyjamas in the sink. He was what people call a fine figure of a man, a recently retired Police Inspector, but had been, unusually, distressed and embarrassed. He’d fouled himself during the night – the first sign of what would be diagnosed as bowel cancer. A few uncertain days followed. My dad went into hospital. It was the school play. I’d got my first big part, Gamaliel, the High Priest, in Caesar’s Friend’ which we played three nights – Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday. It was only after the last night that my mother told me my dad had had an operation: ‘We didn’t want to spoil it for you.’ I went in to see him on the Friday evening and remember a long Victorian ward in the old Chesterfield Royal Hospital. The hospital was on my way to school, and as I came up Eyre Street my dad had arranged during his stay to wave at me from his ward. I’d been told he was in for tests, and believed it. But I think, looking back, there must have been a lot of shutting out on my part.
He emerged with a lot of the bowel removed and a colostomy. It was difficult for him. I never saw his little bag and he hadn’t wanted my mother to see it but the District Nurse, Bessie – Nurse Bestwick – arranged matters with my mother. ‘When I start singing you come up stairs with a bowl of warm water.’ Bessie stripped my dad to wash him and started singing. When my mum entered the room there he was, exposed. He started to cry. But it got it over with. I wrote Bessie into my first stage play. That cheerful actress Hilda Braid took the part. The play, slightly distanced from my own experience – about an old man dying, at home, in wartime – helped get a great deal of grief out of my system. Neil Kinnock, then a young MP, whom I’d recently got to know, came to see it. I sat next to him and noticed him crying (so the play was doing its job…). I hadn’t realised till then his mother was a District Nurse.
My dad himself was a Tory, hated (in particular) Barbara Castle, later Neil’s friend and heroine. Dad was a gentle man and his strong dislike of ‘that woman’ still puzzles me. We got the Daily Express (when it was worth reading) at home, but mainly, I think, for Peter O’Sullevan and Clive Graham, its racing correspondents. Years later, when I wrote a television play about horse racing Clive Graham came in to read out an (excited) fictional race commentary. I was star struck, and told Clive so: I couldn’t believe I was in the same room as him. Dad would have never been quite so impressed as me, but probably quite proud and amused.
After his operation there were some good months. We went to Bridlington in the car in the summer. The hope was that the cancer had not spread. But he knew before us. At the end of September my mother was asked to see the doctor on her own, something she communicated to me: it was for a Thursday evening. She told my dad she was going to the doctor for some imaginary ailment of her own. As she never went to see the doctor he can’t have been fooled. I knew it was ‘serious,’ but dad looked well. I attended the weekly Thursday evening choir practice at the Parish Church. My life at that time moved between home and school and church: I was completely happy. Charlie Bryars, our choirmaster, (see the film ‘Angel Voices’) on his way down from the organ loft, found my mother waiting in the choir vestry. He came into the body of the church and said, quietly,‘Wakelam, your mother wants to see you.’ Dad had been given three weeks to three months to live. The doctor had wanted to talk to mum first to see if dad should be told. I have a mental image of my mother and me turning into our ‘lane’ as we called it, wondering how to put it to him. But as we walked into the living room where he was sitting he said, ‘You don’t need to tell me, Else. I know. How long?’ We sat and held each other.
He lasted nine months. At Christmas we thought a miracle might have happened. He was well enough to go to a Police Christmas party. Was it after that that we watched the wartime film ‘Since You Went Away’ on television? It’s what we now call a weepie, and the story – I’ve never seen it since – must have had some resonance to us because I remember looking round at my dad, who was crying. By February half term he was still OK. It was snowy. We had a new (second hand) radiogram with a very limited selection of records – Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ and ‘Rosamunda’, Tchaik First Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ They would have got a spin. I read, for the first time, ‘Rebecca.’ Dad would be reading; my mother knitting. With the fire lit, grey snowy skies outside, I look back at the three of us and what feels, despite the circumstances, like happiness.
He began deteriorating about Easter time. I was pretty occupied with O Level revision (we were a ‘racing’ stream and took them a year early). It probably helped. Dad started losing weight rapidly. ‘I’m going to be a crisp before too long,’ he said, with gallows humour. It was a joke; it was also true. I needed to get his books for him from the library – he was fond of Galsworthy. I doubt if, at this stage, he read them. Portable radios were just about available then but he didn’t want one in the bedroom. Nor did he want visitors, though was always polite when they arrived. The Archdeacon (in gaiters) came to see him. Dad wasn’t a churchgoer, still felt angry I think, about the death of his brother, 24 year old Stephen, down the pit near forty years before. The Archdeacon, who had confirmed me, wanted to receive my dad into the Church. It was (no doubt) gently refused - but he was touched by the Archdeacon’s visit. One night both my mother and me heard dad calling out in his sleep,‘Two weeks’ and assumed that was how long he had left to live. But it was less than that. Maybe people always die before you imagine they will. Charlie Bryars, my choirmaster, took time off from school where he was music master to play the organ at the funeral (he hadn’t been asked and I didn’t know). It moves me. It was an impressive affair, many town worthies. I got back to my exams, and find it interesting that my results (then awarded in percentages) deteriorated from the high of the Maths exam the day after his death to a failure in German, two and a half weeks on. In the English exam, the Tuesday of the second week, a small spot of blood landed on my paper. I’d got conjunctivitis – was stressed in other words. A month after the death my mother and me decided to go to Folkestone for what she always called ‘a little holiday.’ We’d been to Folkestone as a family, happily, twice before. But it was a mistake. We were glad to come home, though note that it was on that holiday that I first visited Canterbury, where I currently type this.
And so we started our new life, the two of us together. There was a police widow’s pension, and my mother went out to work – as a shop assistant at £9 a week. Though she would moan from time to time she enjoyed the nine to half past five after all the years as a housewife. A couple of years later, I got almost a full grant – £360 a year - to get me through University. Some of it went to my mum: we felt well off.
After his death I had his spectacles made up to fit my prescription. They were heavy frames but I wore specs - like him – only now and again. And there was another appropriation. In his wardrobe (which I still use; it’s in my bedroom) I came across a rubber johnnie (no protective pack) with what I remember as a light dusting on it. Had it been unused for years? I put in on, then re-rolled it and put it back, so my mother would never know. The next time I looked it wasn’t there. She claimed later that they had never much of a love life, that he had ‘lost interest’ in her after I was born, but the bright little snooper I was read a letter once that he had sent her from Germany in the war, referring to ‘that “dirty” form of lovemaking you say you don’t like.’ The letter, in his beautiful distinctive hand (I have only the odd signature as a memento of it) was destroyed by my mother in a fit of tidying (‘moving on’ it’s now called) after I left home. Also destroyed were all the photographs of him with the American unit he was with during the war. I am still angry about this Taliban-like behaviour: I didn’t know they’d gone till after her death. But she forged a new life for herself in the dozen years she had left. They weren’t unhappy as a couple but she said that she did a great deal more after he had gone. Widowhood suited her. She learnt (there were three failed tests) to drive. When she came down in the ‘little jalopy’ to pick me up from Cambridge she navigated by way of pub signs. No good saying to her, ‘You turn right off the A612..’ For her, you turned right at that big ‘Wheatsheaf’. I once looked out of my college room windows at her arrival and saw her reversing into a flower bed. We were good pals and went on more adventurous holidays than Folkestone together. We bought a tent and camping equipment and headed to France one year. I’ve only just got rid of the tent (near unused since) over forty years on, very reluctantly. After we got back I heard her talking about the holiday to a neighbour, extolling not the chateaux at Chinon or Blois but the toilets at somewhere or other. We also went to New York, visiting my University friend who was a journalist there. I have a memory of her at the apartment windows 32 floors up looking down the length of Broadway. She was knitting. ‘I’d never have done this with your dad,’ she said.
She’d met him, as a young woman, only just out of her teens (he was near ten years older) on point duty, in those days holding up traffic if necessary. That old junction (Horns Bridge in Chesterfield) has long gone under a vast roundabout. She’d been told by a fortune teller once that she would marry ‘ a man who waved his arms about.’ Well, it wasn’t Toscanini. She always said they got married because Windsor Lad won the Derby. He was at decent odds – 15-2 starting price, only third in favouritism to the red hot ‘certainty’ of Colombo, who, I’ve read, both got a poor ride and probably didn’t stay. That was June 1934. They married in July. I took a long time come along. Sometime in the war she had an operation ‘to clear me out’ – her fallopian tubes I would imagine. ‘Your dad never wanted another baby after you,’ she said. I don’t know if this is true, but I had all the indulgence of being an only child. I couldn’t have been more secure. They pretended to be younger (by ten years) than they were but I was not bad at adding up and subtraction and a bright little fucker. ‘If you’re only 42 how were you in the police in 1926?’ There was some prevarication. I wasn’t that bothered and went out of the room. When I came back in they told me that they’d fibbed about their ages because other children’s parents at school were younger than them and they didn’t want me to be worried. I wasn’t but should have been: dad died at 59, mum at 62.
He taught me to read. She – adept with her hands – constructed a clock out of a cereal packet, with a drawing pin holding moveable cardboard hands and taught me to tell the time. We played cards and draughts together. He taught me chess. She liked jigsaws and generally, patiently, saw the right piece before me. I loved it when he came back from work and, as a little boy, I would sit in his lap and get him to rub his whiskers into my face. I remember the veins standing out of his hands the way mine now do. And in that six month period of respite between his operation and the realisation that the cancer had spread, I remember coming from home from school on a sunny Spring afternoon – May time - seeing him at first at a distance, walking up the lane towards me, not on the pavement but by the bushes on the other side of the road. He was getting his health and strength back. ‘I’m going to walk to the wall,’ he said – a dry stone wall towards the end of the lane – ‘and then see you back home. Tell your mam I won’t be long.’