My dad was a sprinter. He was fast—really fast—and like many boys from ordinary working-class homes, he imagined a better life opening up through sport. If it hadn’t been running, there was always the boxing gym on the upper floor of the Thomas à Becket pub on South East London’s Old Kent Road. My dad’s teachers told him he might even have a chance at the Olympics, so they were coaching him for competitions beyond the school. But those Air Raid Precautions men had different ideas. They went to the schools in London, picking out the fastest boys to be message runners as Britain prepared for an invasion or sustained bombing. The Blitz came soon enough, and my thirteen-year-old father was running through streets of burning buildings taking messages from one post to another.
The strange thing is that I never knew any of this until I lived in California. My parents were visiting and we were sitting in my kitchen with a group of friends who had dropped by to meet them. I was telling the assembled company about my father’s aptitude for speed, and how my brother and I were probably a disappointment because we were not sprinters—we were both pretty good long-distance runners, but it was speed my dad was interested in. One of my friends turned to Dad and asked, “Were you a message runner during the war?” And my father said, “Funny you should say that—yes, I was.” I was shocked. How could I never have known this about my dad? In fact, I don’t think even my mother knew. He recounted the story of being chosen, and how his teacher had said how sorry he was, because the war was ruining the chances of boys like him—boys who had something amounting to opportunity because they were good at sports. It made me wonder whether he was relieved to be apprenticed to a painter and decorator when he turned fourteen in October 1940. It wasn’t until he was in hospice care in 2012 that I discovered more about Dad’s apprenticeship, and again I wondered, “Why didn’t I know this?” Unlike my mother, my father kept stories to himself, but I believe the work involved in that apprenticeship—and the exposure to toxic materials that were likely not tested for human tolerance—was at the root of the illness that finally took his life.
4
Before They Began
My parents were married in the summer of 1949, in a wedding ceremony that kicked off three days of celebrations. As my mother told me, “We were so broke after the parties, we had to take all the bottles back to get the deposit money.” Though she was already qualified as a bookkeeper, my mother had joined the Civil Service and was working on the secure government telephone exchange. My father was employed as a painter and decorator, having returned to his original trade following army demobilization in 1948. He met my mother soon after leaving the army and was in the process of reenlisting when their paths crossed—but he changed his mind about what might come next. His reason for planning a return to the service was simple—he had been offered the chance to train at the army catering college. Though some might not believe this, the army knew how to train a chef for the officers’ mess and the many dinners and dances officers enjoyed. My dad loved to cook and it would have been his chance to do something he could give his heart to. So perhaps it’s time to tell you more about how a young soldier who had become an explosives expert at the age of eighteen came to the attention of the army cook in Germany. We have to join that young man just as he’s beginning his apprenticeship at fourteen years of age in October 1940—this boy who hated loud noises, but had been tasked with running through the Blitz to deliver messages.
I heard the first part of this story when I was eighteen, and the most important part when my father was in the hospice, just days before he died. So much became clear with the telling. My father meted out his stories with care, as if he had squirreled them away to season with time.
His first employer won a lucrative contract to paint the buildings of every Royal Air Force depot, airfield or decoy airfield, inside and out, with a fire retardant. Airfields had been targeted by the Luftwaffe, so to save people and buildings from the spread of fire, the retardant had to be applied—and the RAF was building and rebuilding aerodromes at a fast pace. So my father, the apprentice, joined a crew and was sent from place to place, living in billets in country towns and small villages, wherever the government found room and board close to an airfield. There was an advantage to the job—it was a “reserved profession.” That meant my father would be protected from enlistment because he was employed on essential government work. But he was also working with highly toxic materials, so his steady hand was an advantage.
In one area Dad was billeted on a farm, walking along country lanes each morning to meet the crew—he was older by now, sixteen going on seventeen, I would imagine. He loved that farm. During his stay—a long one, because there were several airfields within traveling range—the farmer taught my father how to work with sheepdogs, and Dad began training two of them before and after work. These were Old English sheepdogs, not collies. My father loved those dogs. But the painting job had begun to wear on him, and he wanted to go home to his family—he’d hardly seen them since starting the apprenticeship. In 1943 he gave notice. His boss told him he was a fool, warning that he’d be called up and that would be him in the army. But he was young, and he thought the war would be over soon—how long could it go on, after all? The previous war had lasted four years, so they were probably close to the end—or so he told himself. He also thought it would take a few weeks for the authorities to find out he’d left his reserved profession; he would have some time. The farmer was sorry to see him go, and as a gift gave him the two sheepdogs, Tiny and Tiger. When I first heard the story, I wondered what the heck he thought he was doing, taking two big working dogs to a house in South East London. But my father believed he would soon return to the land with his dogs and stay there forever as a farmworker—and he was only seventeen, after all.
The government had other plans. My father received his call-up papers within twenty-four hours of officially leaving his job. He was instructed to report to barracks without delay. He left the two dogs with his parents, organized a local lad to take them for walks in the park—he told the boy he wouldn’t be away for long—and joined the army. Following the usual medical and tests, together with an assessment of his previous work, it was discovered that my father was one of those people who remained very calm under pressure. He was an unassuming, thoughtful person. So they sent a young man who had grown up in a quiet house—who had lived with a man suffering shell shock—to train in explosives. In the meantime, though he was sending home most of his pay to keep the dogs, it wasn’t long before my grandparents wrote to tell him they’d sold them. It broke his heart. I would never have told my father this—and no doubt it crossed his mind—but I believe the dogs were euthanized, because people in Blitz-hit areas were instructed to take their dogs to be put to death humanely given the extent of the bombings. It was hard enough saving human lives and dealing with the dead without having to account for household pets.
It was in Germany, before the war’s official end, that my father ended up working in the army kitchens. Germany had yet to surrender, and the armies of Britain, the United States and Russia were moving in. My father was with a unit blowing up German communication lines, bridges and roads, and at the end of one long day they were instructed to pitch their tents for the night on the banks of a river. My father looked at the river and realized the best place to get a good night’s rest was on the other side—he’d watched the flow of water and believed, correctly, that the location his commanding officer had chosen could easily flood. Ever resourceful, Dad found a place to cross the river and pitched his tent. He woke up the next morning surrounded by Russians in their tents. His commanding officer was shouting at him from the opposite bank that he was being put on a charge for disobeying orders and would be peeling spuds for a very long time if he didn’t get right back over that river. My father’s fellow soldiers were on the British side of the rushing water, wringing out their sopping wet clothes.
It wasn’t such a long time in the kitchens, as the tellin
g goes, but it was enough to persuade one branch of the army that the young soldier with a steady hand on the detonator had a gift when it came to preparing food. He was offered a place at the army catering college, but turned down that first offer because, in his words, “I didn’t want my mates to laugh at me.” In the meantime, despite having marched him to the kitchens, his commanding officer missed his “calm under pressure” demeanor, because there were still bridges to be demolished. And there were horses to ride, because as the soldiers worked their way across enemy territory, and as the war came to a close, Dad’s unit moved into a barracks abandoned by a German cavalry regiment. The groom had remained behind to look after the horses. My father could tack up a horse and stay in the saddle—as a child he’d trotted along the streets of London on his father’s cart horses—but the German taught him to ride like a gentleman. In truth, my father really wanted to ride like a cowboy, which probably has some bearing on the fact that my brother and I both ended up in California. It was Dad’s tales of the Wild West that did it—but that’s another story.
We talked about all these things when my father was in the hospice. He told me about his dog, Tiger, how he would walk under the kitchen table and lift it up with his back, and how my grandmother would complain and his father would laugh. He told me about that job where he was exposed to the powerful fire retardant used to protect the airfield buildings. One of his first tasks was to mix the emulsion and pour it into buckets for the painters. Then he had to test it after each wall dried. The testing amounted to lining up a series of blowtorches along the floor, with only a couple of inches between the searing hot flame and the dry fresh paint.
“Then we’d leave the torches right there for three or four hours,” said Dad.
“Wow—didn’t that leave a burn?” I asked.
“Not a mark. Not a mark,” he replied.
“What was that stuff called?”
“Oh no name, love. It just had a number.”
I knew then that the viscous emulsion had probably never been put through tests for human tolerance. Such things happen in wartime—consider the effects of Agent Orange on a later generation of soldiers.
My father had been diagnosed with a serious blood disorder categorized as “idiopathic.” That means there is “no known cause.” When I recounted the circumstances of my father’s passing to my doctor in California, she told me that when she was in medical school one of her professors maintained that idiopathic really meant that the doctor was an idiot and couldn’t figure it out. But I think I figured it out—of course with the help of Dr. Google. While my father’s illness is known as “idiopathic,” research has revealed a link between exposure to toxic substances and the condition, which leads to a breakdown of the red blood cells; the young cells—the blasts—die at birth, and if they survive, they don’t enjoy a long life, so the blood’s clotting ability is diminished. In the end you simply bleed to death. Fortunately—though in truth there was nothing “fortunate” about it—that bleeding is, for the most part, internal.
At a vulnerable age he’d been exposed to a powerful fire retardant with no name. Then explosives, followed by the paint he used as a master craftsman, from the days of lead through to polyurethane. And of course there were the years he worked on the farm where I was born, which meant exposure to the powerful insecticides and fertilizers that came into use in the 1950s to increase food production in a country still subject to wartime rationing. As they say in America: Go figure.
Dad hated painting airfield buildings, and wasn’t thrilled about explosives, or the noise. He loved the farm, though. The land was our special place. We’ll go there soon. But first—more about my mum.
According to my mother, my grandmother told her that when she was a baby, she’d tried to kill her by putting a pillow over her head as she was sleeping, but my mother wouldn’t die. Nanny Clark—we added her last name to differentiate between the two grandmothers—confessed to my mother that by the time she was born, she’d had enough of children and didn’t want any more.
Something must have gone wrong, because my mother was in the middle—number five in the family of ten. I remember commenting to my mother that during her childbearing years my grandmother probably hadn’t seen her feet for a good fifteen years. Mum had laughed and said, “We’d be in bed at night, all squashed together, and then we’d hear a wail and someone would say, ‘Oh no, we’ve got to make room for another one.’” Apparently, Nanny Clark “carried small” when she was pregnant.
My mother’s father worked in the printing industry; he was a lead compositor for the Daily Express. This was in the days when the journalists, copy boys, compositors and anyone who didn’t have to work into the night would gather in a Fleet Street pub as soon as the afternoon edition was put to bed. And they would drink. And drink.
When I first came to California and decided to become the writer I’d wanted to be since childhood, I signed up for a journalism course at UCLA. The instructor was a freelance US correspondent for London’s Daily Express. I told my mother about the course and my instructor, and she said, “Oh, you should tell her that your grandfather was a drinking buddy of Lord Beaverbrook’s.” (Beaverbrook had owned the Express during the war and later became one of Winston Churchill’s most favored advisors.) I responded, “Let’s face it, Mum—your father was a drinking buddy with anyone who would drink with him.”
If I had asked any of my mother’s sisters and brothers about my grandfather, they would have all described his drinking, and each would have a story to tell. But the aunt closest to my mother knew the truth, that my mother was the old man’s “whipping boy.” Mum often repeated the story of something that happened one evening after the old man returned from work. I never heard anyone refer to him as “Dad.” He was always “the old man.” He had come home at about five o’clock in the afternoon. It was long after lunchtime last orders, and more likely the landlord had pulled down the blinds so the regulars could remain for a while. My grandfather had enjoyed a few too many and had gone straight to bed.
A couple of hours later, Nanny gave my mother a plate of food to take up for him. Now, what my grandfather didn’t know was that his family never had enough food. My mother was hungry, and as she walked up with the plate, the food slid toward the edge and she could not resist hooking her finger into the gravy to come out with a lump of mashed potato. She smoothed over the dent and knocked on the door. The old man opened the door and looked down at his plate. He took the plate and dragged her into the room, where he removed his leather belt and beat her until her buttocks and legs were striped with welts. Her mother told her it served her right for touching his food—he was the breadwinner, after all.
To be fair, in that day and age looking after the breadwinner was paramount in any home—the man who brought home the money came first, so the fact that my grandfather was not allowed to go hungry would not have been unusual. But the question lingered—why didn’t he know his children weren’t getting the same sort of food on their plates? He was a man who earned a very, very nice living, given his position, and he drank a good deal of it away. But Mum said he gave my grandmother sufficient funds for their keep. Yes, that was my question—where did the money go? As she entered her seventies, my mother began to question it too—though she also blamed herself, admitting to me that “I could be a saucy little cow when I wanted.”
But there was no getting away from the fact that Grandfather Clark knew how to throw money away. “I was coming out of school when one of my friends said, ‘Quick, come on, down the road—there’s a man throwing money into the street!’” Mum looked at me as she recounted the tale. “So I ran down the road, around the corner, and there were all my school friends running around picking up florins and half-crowns and pound notes, and screaming that there was more to come. But I just walked away so no one could see me. I went straight home and then to the toilet outside. I sat there for a long time crying. My dad was t
hrowing all his money away because he was drunk.”
Whenever my mother talked about her father, she looked up as if she were viewing a statue of someone revered on a pedestal. On some level she adored her dad and I believe that, despite everything, she saw the best in him. She saw the man who believed in education, who loved to recite poetry and who loved his wife very much—to the extent that he couldn’t keep his hands off her, or she him.
Years later, I was emailing back and forth with my cousin Jim—named for his father and our grandfather—who had fallen down a never-ending rabbit hole when he began tracking the family tree via an ancestry website. I told him about the only time I remember meeting our grandfather. My mother hadn’t seen him since she was eighteen, since she had given evidence during her parents’ divorce. Her brother—cousin Jim’s dad, the eldest boy in the family—had given her away at her wedding. The next time she saw Grandfather Clark my mother must have been thirty-three, because my brother was a babe in arms, and I was five years old. I’d arrived home from school and was in the kitchen having a cup of tea while Mum prepared vegetables for dinner. Dad wasn’t home, so it was about half-past four. There was a knock at the back door. My mother grabbed a tea towel, wiped her hands and ran to the door, but as fast as she opened it, she drew it almost closed again so only she could see who was there. I’d managed a brief glimpse of the visitors and I’d heard the voices, so I knew it was my Uncle Jim with another man. I tried to squeeze my head into the space between her skirt and the door, but she pushed me back.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 4
