LITMIR.BIZ

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Ocean. Children generally imagine all medals to have been won in much the way you gain a VC. In fact, most of them testify to more mundane activities. When I was about eight I remember approaching him as he sat slumped in an armchair reading the paper and asking whether he had ever been shipwrecked. ‘Six times!’ he replied, and reburied himself in the newsprint. He was really saying ‘Leave me alone!’ But I so wanted to believe him.

      At the end of the war, huge numbers of men were demobilised and returned to civilian life. But Dad decided to swim in the other direction, and applied to be commissioned as a Royal Navy officer. In October 1945 he was appointed Temporary Acting Sub Lieutenant. A group photograph of sixty or so young officers gathered at the naval base at Gosport shows him in the third row, one of the few lieutenants with war service medals – an indication that his time in the ranks had resulted in his being older than many of his peers. Within a few years he had been promoted to Lieutenant and given the posting sought by every naval officer, command of his own vessel, a motor torpedo boat.

      Quite apart from the awful loss of life, the war deprived a generation of young men and women of the opportunity to enjoy their youth. I imagine the period after the end of hostilities to have been the happiest time of my father’s life – the navy then included great numbers of men who would never have joined in peacetime, there were endless practical tasks, the company of shipmates, and – by contrast with his wartime service – freedom from the prospect of imminent death. But what was he like as a Royal Navy officer? In the time I knew and tried to understand him, the blunt, salty humour of the wardroom always seemed his natural environment, and the reports from his commanding officers talk of him as a cheery mess companion, with a well-developed sense of the absurd. Another report, though, worried that he was sometimes too hard on his men. Whether this was because not so long ago he had been one of them is only speculation, of course.

      None of the reports answers the great enigma of my father’s early life: why did he decide to give it all up? There is no one left to ask. Perhaps it was because his war service in the ranks meant he was older than most of the other ‘snotties’ commissioned with him. Did someone tell him that his late start meant he’d never make it to the very top? I have a suspicion that marriage and the fairly rapid arrival of three children made him think he ought to be spending more time at home. It vaguely troubles me, thinking about it, that I cannot imagine him feeling that he wanted to be at home more. Whatever the reason, it was a disastrous decision.

      Though he continued to play the sailor all his life (the naval cry of ‘Two, six – heave’ accompanied any manual labour in the family, such as pushing the car), in 1954 he resigned his commission, bought a motor scooter and took a job as a typewriter salesman. Just about my earliest memory is of being woken by a commotion one night, slipping out of bed and creeping downstairs to see my father standing in the kitchen in a pool of blood. The back of his pale gabardine coat was stained a dark brown, and Mother was helping him take off his peaked crash helmet. When she succeeded, more gouts of blood fell onto the stone floor. Accidents can happen to anyone, but the contrast between this bloody spectacle and the glamorous wartime figure I had imagined in uniform, sword and even a cape, seemed for years to demonstrate the unhappy consequences of the decision he had made. My abiding feeling is that leaving the navy was the biggest mistake of his life. We cannot pretend to be what we are not, and my father was by no stretch of the imagination a family man. Like many others who never had a chance to enjoy their youth, being a sailor was his métier. He should probably never have pretended to be anything else.

      Whether or not this was the reason, he had an appalling temper. He was accustomed to chains of command, and the merest suggestion of insubordination would send him into a fury, during which he’d grab the nearest hard object with which to beat whoever had provoked him. I was thrashed with sticks, shoes, cricket stumps, cricket bats or the flat of his hand. In the most intense row – or at least the one I recall most intensely – he sent me to my room for disobeying him, and when I stood my ground, he tried to drag me upstairs. Within a minute or so all that was left of the shirt I had been wearing – it was a black-and-white check – was the collar.

      It is in the nature of childhood that we only know what we know. The phrase ‘dysfunctional family’ could certainly be applied to ours. But then, it describes just about every family in the land. Did I love my father? My feelings ranged from resentment to passionate hatred. It was not a sophisticated reaction, but I was too young for sophisticated reactions. Now, I see a damaged man. Many years later my younger sister told me that she had once walked in on him lying on the floor of the bathroom, sobbing. He asked her to leave him alone, which she did at once. It was a traumatic moment for both of them, and was never mentioned again.

      Ours was perhaps not so different from many other families of the time, with their largely uncomplaining mothers making do and mending, and insisting that if you didn’t eat what was put in front of you for supper you’d get it again for breakfast. There were certainly moments of tenderness – the Saturday-morning visits to Woolworths in the local High Street with Dad to buy twisted little greaseproof-paper bags of salted peanuts, the times he’d help us build model warships, or his snorting laughter at The Goon Show on the radio. Jenny, his youngest child, seemed to bring out the best in him, and he could arrive home with posies of violets or anemones for her. But he could also change in an instant.

      He had lost his own father, to whom, according to his sister, he had been devoted, when he was only eight years old. The death had apparently plunged the family into a financial crisis – an eccentric aunt once told me that even when he was on leave during the darkest days of the war, my father never went home because he had become convinced that his mother had decided to remarry for money. Although he was educated at a school in Bradford established for the sons of Methodist ministers, he had an absurd affectation of pronouncing selected words as he imagined Southern posh people pronounced them – so a waistcoat he always called a ‘wiskett’, and a hotel ‘an ’otel’. In material terms he had ‘married well’ – although Mum was certainly not posh, her father being a self-made man who spoke with flat Yorkshire vowels and talked of ‘having a luke in the buke’. With the marriage came a cushion of prosperity, but I have a strong feeling – though without any evidence to support it – that Dad later came deeply to resent the fact that it was his father-in-law who paid our school fees, and we all believed that the house was in Mum’s name.

      Certainly, my childhood impression was of a man incapable of expressing affection, concerned with keeping up appearances and permanently on the edge of an explosion which might well be expressed in physical violence. In my late teens he was taken into hospital for some undignified operation on his bum. When I went to visit him I had only been there three minutes when he said, ‘You can go now. You’ve done your duty.’ He understood duty a lot better than he understood affection. Perhaps as an adult I might have come to forgive and forget and understand, but by then he had left England for the South Pacific.

      It had been a wartime romance. Mum was working as an ambulance driver at Grantley Hall, an enormous seventeenth-century mansion near Ripon in North Yorkshire, requisitioned for use as a convalescent home for wounded servicemen. Dad’s sister Margaret was also working there, and it seems to have been through her that Joan and Keith met. It was an on-off courtship which lasted for several years before finally leading, in 1949, to marriage. Shortly before she died Aunt Margaret told me that Dad had said that if he didn’t marry Joan he probably wouldn’t marry anyone. Joan was twenty-nine when they married, he was twenty-seven, and the relationship seems to have been troubled from the start. Although they did not separate until over twenty years later, there had been some sort of tension on their honeymoon in the Scilly Isles, when, as Mother told us later, she felt Dad paid too much attention to a Wren whom they had met on a ferry between the islands. Children rarely imagine their parents being troubled by sexual feelings, but the incident clearly still rankled with Mum decades later.

      Dad’s elder sister, our maiden aunt Kathleen, whom we visited many times, remained loyal to him to the end. She lived in a tall Victorian house in a leafy corner of Richmond in south-west London – or, as Richmondites then insisted, ‘Richmond, Surrey’. In practice she lived in two rooms on the ground floor, with the rest of the place let out to various slightly desiccated characters, from Sheila, a French teacher who rented the basement, to Mr Lewis, a bald,

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