MONDAY,
APRIL 23, 2001
THE HOME FORUM
By Christopher Andreae (me@andreaec.prestel.co.uk)
I couldn't, as a child, imagine my father ever having
had a mother.
In fact, there were quite a number of things I couldn't
imagine about him. I couldn't imagine him playing the drums,
or even the piano. Yet it was passed down to me by my older
brothers that he had, indeed, at some time been a player of
both (though not simultaneously, I presume).
He never spoke about his musical abilities. I occasionally
begged him to play the piano, and he always refused. He never
spoke about his past much at all. In many ways he was a bit of
a mystery.
Thinking about him now, I realize that I have no idea where
he lived before he lived in our house. I have no idea what his
father did for a living. I have no idea where my father's love
of gardening originated. A host of things I don't know.
I never saw him play tennis, either. And yet again the word
was that he had "played for Yorkshire," which meant
that he had been pretty good. I was very proud of this, though
the tennis court by the time of my arrival had become (in
dutiful deference to wartime necessity) our chicken run.
Instead of knocking balls about on a summer evening, one of
my childhood delights was feeding wriggly worms to the hens
through the netting as they scratched and ransacked the
all-weather surface of the court (now as pitted and undulant
as an unruly sand dune). Collecting the chickens' eggs was an
even greater (and less callous) sport. That may explain why,
years later, I retain a soft spot for eggs and no special
affection for tennis balls.
The warmth of a new-laid egg is a tangible pleasantness,
even though the hens would flurry and squawk rather
terrifyingly as they were rudely dislodged from their nests on
behalf of our breakfasts.
When I first met my father - I mean when I first became
conscious of his separate existence, since he was certainly as
permanent a fixture in our home as the unplayed piano - I
started to learn various things about his present-day life,
even as his past remained an unexplored land. He wore black
shoes (brown was for "spivs") that he polished daily
before going to work at his wool-combing-and-cleaning mill.
Back home at teatime, he would stand in front of the coal
fire with his back to it, warming the fundamental part that
presumably had been chilly all day at the mill. As he stood
there toastingly, he liked to count the coins he had in his
pockets, clinkingly arranging the denominations.
In public, he wore a trilby hat with two indentations in
the front. Whenever he met someone, these large felty dimples
were pinched between thumb and finger and the hat raised in a
"good day" salute. This hat was so much a part of
him that now, decades on, I find it hard to picture him
without it. Did he even wear it to bed?
The only snapshot I still have of him shows him (in
monochrome) lying on a grassy bank. This was presumably during
a picnic (he always protested the discomfort of picnics). His
legs are straight out, and his trilby is pulled down over his
brow. But he is only pretending to be asleep, and has a
humorous eye for the photographer (my mother with her box
Brownie?).
I never knew him when he wasn't a car driver. Vauxhalls
were the only make of car he ever bought. (How consistent
people were then! My mother never had a dog that wasn't a
golden retriever.) And Vauxhalls were distinctive for their
long concave flutes along each side of the hood - sort of
trilby cars, come to think of it.
I was not only proud of my father's prowess as a tennis
star, I was inordinately proud of our succession of Vauxhalls.
Since they were his unvarying preference, they were bound, in
my admiring eyes, to be the best cars in the world.
So I knew he drove cars. What I could not imagine was that
he had once owned, and actually rode, a motorbike. I
really could not bend my concept of Dadhood around that
startling notion. He'd have to have been so young and rakish.
Yet, again, the family tradition was certain.
I asked him once. "Dad, did you really have a
motorbike?" I'm sure my tone was incredulous. He admitted
he had.
In fact, he told me about how the elastic band that drove
the wheels was always breaking on the most inconvenient
occasions, usually when he was miles from home and descending
an exceptional gradient. But then the first cars he had, after
his callow biker-days had ended, were also mechanically
primitive. He'd had to drive them in reverse up the more
testing slopes. No other gear was adequate.
Looking back, I'm amazed at how little this rather
self-effacing man told his family about his past. We knew -
because this much he often said - he was a true Londoner,
having been born "to the sound of Bow Bells." We
knew he had lived in New Zealand with his parents, brothers,
and sister after leaving school. When he'd returned to
Britain, only one brother later followed him "home."
Anyway, in my young eyes he was far too old to have ever
been a child.
But one thing above all stretched the elastic of my
imagination to the doubting point. It illustrates, perhaps,
the reason my father didn't dwell on his past. He must have
thought of it as another world. Not so much because my mother
was his second wife. Or that my two oldest brothers were
half-brothers. Or that their mother had died. It was that my
father's views and attitudes had in certain ways radically
altered through these experiences.
My suspicion is that he had once been far more sociable. We
were not exactly reclusive as a family, but I do not think my
father had many close friends. There were children's parties
for us, but my parents didn't go out.
The most outgoing part of our lives, apart from church, was
going to the pictures once a week, with fish and chips as a
treat on the way home afterward. But one of the changes in my
father's life was that he no longer drank any form of alcohol,
and he no longer smoked a pipe. And at that period, not to
drink or smoke was a kind of social death in some circles.
So this is what I simply could not imagine my father had
ever done. Smoked a pipe. Impossible!
Now, Uncle Dick (my mother's brother) - he smoked a
pipe all right. Or at least he made great efforts to do so.
The performance, in fact, was a protracted and undeliberate
comedy. Boxfuls of matches were struck and went out. Sudden
gasping intakes of air followed - great puffings and suckings.
However, he rarely managed to light the thing.
But my father? Even attempting to smoke a pipe? It would be
easier to imagine he had a mother.
. Copyright 2001 The
Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
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