Grief

Posted on 15th March 2020 by Ian

Dad loved David Jason in A Touch of Frost. The television crime series about a detective inspector captured Dad’s feelings about justice and injustice, about freedom and authority, about truth and lies.

David Jason seems able to express the entire range of human emotion, from the profoundly tragic as well as the deeply comic. His character Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses is selfish and superficial and completely untrustworthy, but the character was transformed in a single moment the episode when Grandad has died. Del is his usual buoyant, ebullient self, taking everything in his stride. He spends an evening drinking and laughing with his friends. Grandad was old, old people die; what should Del Boy feel about it? The next morning, when Rodney challenges him, he breaks down; he hasn’t even begun to cope.

Get over it. I ain’t even started yet! Ain’t even started, bruv! And do you know why? Because I don’t know how to! That’s why I’ve survived all my life with a smile and a prayer! I’m Del Boy, ain’t I? Good old Del Boy- he’s got more bounce than Zebedee! “Here you are pal, what you drinking? Go on! Hello darling, you have one for luck!” That’s me! That’s Del Boy, innit? Nothing ever upsets Del Boy. I’ve always played the tough guy! I didn’t want to, but I had to and I’ve played it for so long now, I don’t know how to be anything else! I don’t even know how to…

Following Dad’s death on Tuesday, there seemed nothing to be said. Dad had been very ill and would not suffer anymore.

When he was discharged from hospital two years ago, I had joked with him that the list of co-morbidities on his discharge letter was so long that it might have been easier to have written what was right with him.

Last Saturday, when we brought him home from hospital, we had joked with him that we would smuggle him out if necessary. When we got him home and back into his armchair I had laughed with him, “Do you know, Dad, I thought we had been rumbled when we were smuggling you out and that security guard asked to see inside the coffin. I suppose we had better take the hearse, back now.”

Last Sunday, he watched Scotland defeat France in the Six Nations rugby tournament.

It was hard to imagine that by Tuesday morning he would no longer be with us.

Like Del Boy, I don’t cope so well with things. There is nothing to do other than carry on, because I don’t know any other way. I don’t even know how to . . .

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Going to work

Posted on 7th March 2020 by Ian

Dad was sat beside his hospital bed, in one of those wards where no-one seemed to think that natural light might improve the patients’ sense of well-being. It was hard to know whether it was day or night outside, even harder to know what the weather might be like.

“What is it like outside?”

“It has been a super day – blue sky and bright sunshine. I had to close the blinds and open the windows of my classroom at half past nine this morning because the students were complaining they were hot. But there was a sharp frost this morning. It was minus two when I was heading to work at quarter past six. I had to de-ice the car.”

“That’s not too clever, what were the roads like?”

“Fine. Very dry. No ice and it was light at half past six. Not like driving on icy roads in the winter.”

“Tell me about it. I did that many times. I used to leave home before seven and the roads were not treated then in the way they are now.”

I remembered my Dad in his working days. He always got up at six o’clock and would make tea and sit at the kitchen table reading or doing a crossword before he set off for work.

Dad was proud of his work, proud of having served in the Royal Naval Air Service and then proud of having continued as radio and radar technician working on naval jets in his civilian life. For thirty years after leaving the Royal Navy, he continued doing the job he had learned in his days on air stations and aircraft carriers.

Dad’s morning journey wasn’t as much about work as about a way of life. When he was made redundant in 1992, at the age of fifty-five, it seemed a mark of Ministry Defence ingratitude for all the years of service he had given. In January of the previous year, the British forces fighting the First Gulf War had been so short of ground crew that Dad and his workmates had agreed to fly to one of the airbases to support the effort. They had reached Sicily when the war ended.

Standing in the kitchen last night after returning from the hospital, there was a moment of imagining. A dark-haired stocky man wearing blue overalls, with Airwork Services embroidered in red on the breast pocket, sat at the red formica topped table with his mug of tea. It took little effort to hear his car start and move over the gravel before beginning his journey to work through the dark, narrow lanes.

 

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Tea and books

Posted on 1st March 2020 by Ian

Perfect contentment in teenage years was a mug of tea and a book. I drank tea that was excessively sweet, three spoons of sugar, and read voraciously. Perhaps the lack of alternative diversion explained the tea and reading, but there seemed not much need for any alternatives.

My parents were both enthusiastic readers, moving their membership of Somerset County libraries from one branch to the next as they exhausted the range that interested them in each of the libraries.

For a child, there was a pride in having your own library tickets. The tickets were pockets formed from card. The pockets were open on two sides, a ticket bearing the title of the book borrowed was tucked in each of the pockets. Having four tickets was a privilege for older readers – and for children who could read four books in a week and then wonder when there would next be a visit to the library. Loans were for a fortnight, the date for return being stamped on a counterfoil inside the front cover. It would have been a matter of disappointment if all of the books had not been finished in the two weeks.

While giving up sugar in the 1980s, my fondness for tea has never declined. Picking up a mug while reading CJ Sansom’s novel Tombland, I recalled the countless hours I had spent reading during my childhood. Oddly, there are not many of the hundreds of books that I must have read that I can still recall. Worzel Gummidge was read at primary school, The Otterbury Incident when I was ten. There was the boys’ own stuff, the adventure novels of Willard Price, the Biggles stories by W.E. Johns. The artwork of Hergé’s adventures of Tintin remains a vivid memory; the only drawback was that the stories were quickly read.

My parents still have books that they had when I was a child, some of them probably not often read in the past fifty years. Sometimes there is an impulse to lift one off of a shelf and leaf through the pages, not to read, but to establish some link with the times when books represented an escape from the mundaneness of life in a small and dull West Country village.

Perhaps we are people who hoard, to give books away would represent a huge wrench (and to throw them away would be unthinkable). Who knows when one might make an appropriate accompaniment for a cup of tea?

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Acquiring a fortune through a respectable trade

Posted on 22nd February 2020 by Ian

BBC Televisions’s The Good Old Days was for thirty years compered by Leonard Sachs, who is said to have introduced acts, “with a resounding barrage of garrulous and loquacious avidity.” Eighteenth Century memorial tablets on church walls seem often to have the loquaciousness of Leonard Sachs; they can be compulsive reading. Who is there who still uses such words?

On the wall of All Saints’ Church in Langport, a tablet bears words that were probably not part of the everyday vocabulary of local residents. In the final two lives that are commemorated, the inscription takes a sad and then a sinister turn.

Sacred
to the memories of RICHARD WEECH Gent
and ELIZABETH his wife
(Daughter of John Jeane of Thorngrove Gent)
Who in the connubial state
Gave an eminent example
of Domestic harmony and affection
And which by proper education
They transmitted to a numerous progeny
The first died the 22 day of Nov. A.D.1753. AE55.
The latter the 14 day of March. A.D.1778. AE80.
Richard their Son, who died July 20. A.D.1740. AE6.
Susanna their Daughter, who by a paralytic seizure
Was deprived of almost all her mental faculties
She was liberated from this painful experience
The 24 day of Sept. A.D.1786. AE58.
And of Henry their Son, who in the vigour of youth
And in the pleasing prospect of acquiring a fortune
In the Island of Jamaica
Was snatched away by an untimely death
The 26 day of July. A.D.1766. AE29.

The death of Richard in 1740 when he was just six years of age would not have been an experience that was unusual. Childhood mortality was high, illnesses had no regard for social standing or wealth. The belief that death was a liberation for Susanna reflected the spirit of Eighteenth Century evangelical Christianity. It was inspired by a firm faith that this life was only a preparation for the life of the hereafter.

The words recording the death of Henry were those that were a cause to ponder. “And in the pleasing prospect of acquiring a fortune
In the Island of Jamaica,” meant only one thing, that Henry Weech was involved in the slave trade. Details of his role as a plantation overseer are readily available online. Thomas Thistlewood, an Englishman resident in Jamaica makes mention in his diaries of Henry Weech.

Henry Weech would not have been a bad man. He would have been respected as a gentleman; he would have been regarded as engaging in a respectable trade. The retrojection of Twenty-First Century values can lead to a harsh judgement of the people of the time. Henry Weech’s attitudes were the attitudes of the people of his time.

In two hundred and fifty years’ time, people may judge harshly people of the current times. Attitudes thought reasonable now may  be thought wholly objectionable by our descendants.

 

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Dad and Skip

Posted on 16th February 2020 by Ian

“How are you, Dad?”

“Not well, Skip.”

Spending most of the winter in hospital, Dad wishes to be nowhere other than his own armchair. Conversations with the ward staff only bring a re-emphasis of the need for him to remain a patient. “He has not been sufficiently stabilised,” comments one nurse.

It is years since he last called me “Skip,” perhaps forty-five or fifty years. It was his nickname for me when I was a child. Dad served in the Fleet Air Arm.  “Skipper” was a term of affection: shortened to “Skip,” it became my name, perhaps used more often than “Ian.”

Skip was the name that went with Saturday mornings in the days when he worked five and a half days a week. In times before terrorist threats existed, I was allowed to accompany him onto the naval air station and to move freely in the hangar among the jet aircraft that stood with folded wings and open cockpits. The half-days left me with a profound sense of caution, an awareness that there were places where children did not run around and where they should take careful note of hazards. In memory, there was a tangible sense of fear at catching sight of striped the yellow and black handles above each cockpit seat, to pull one would fire the ejector seat. Of course, the seats would have been disarmed during maintenance periods in the hangar, but no-one would have persuaded a small schoolboy that there was no danger.

Skip was the name that went with the hours we spent fishing. Fishing might be on the banks of the River Yeo, a few minutes from home; it might be on the harbour wall at Lyme Regis; or it might be from the beach st West Bay. My Dad would explain that a different rod was to be used in each location. There was a light split cane rod with a cork float that was used on the river bank. A short, boat rod was used to fish from the harbour wall. At West Bay, a long, beach caster rod with a multiplier reel ensured the heavily weighted trace travelled many yards out into the sea. Skip always delighted in such moments.

Skip was the name during the many, many journeys sat beside Dad in his car. It was a time before seat belts, a time when there was no prohibition on small boys sitting in the front seat. Dad always had tales to tell, stories that lingered long in the memory of the boy.

Perhaps, deep inside, Skip lives on.

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