The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  Over that Christmas of 1958, we had the usual pathetic festivities. My parents, being Scottish, never really celebrated Christmas. We were brought up with New Year’s Eve, Hogmanay, being the most important event of the festive season. But I went up street on Christmas Eve and bought a bottle of British port and a small bottle of my mother’s favourite tipple, eggnog, now that I was such a big wage earner. My father had not been so well. He had caught a bad cold which was making him weak and fed up. But I bought him a small bottle of Scotch and loads of packets of peanuts.

  On the evening of 27 December, I had come home early from being out somewhere with Margaret and gone to bed. I think Johnny was out late, with a girlfriend at a dance. Sometime in the night, I sensed someone had come creeping into my bedroom. I heard a drawer being opened and what looked like a sheet being taken out. I woke up, looked over, and it was my mother. She shushed me and told me to go back to sleep, not to get up.

  I turned over and soon went back to sleep, but subconsciously I had registered something unusual had happened. I didn’t know what, or didn’t want to work out what it might have been.

  In the night, my father had died. My mother might have heard him, a last croak or cry, a turning in the night. His end had probably been half-expected, which was why my mother had gone down to check on him, discovering what had happened and then covering his body with a sheet.

  I did not discover what had happened till the morning. My mother had saved me from it. But in hindsight I did know, or suspected, what had happened in the night. I had turned over, turned my back on the reality or possibility of his death, reassured by my mother that there was no need for me to get up. What else could have I have done anyway, in the dead of the night?

  In the morning, as the oldest, I took charge of the funeral and all the other arrangements. While I was in town, I went up to Margaret’s house and told her. She came back with me to town and we rushed round together, obtaining his death certificate, filling in all the forms and paperwork. When it is your first bereavement, and you have never before had to cope with all the bureaucracy, it can become a nightmare, no matter how clever you might think you are at understanding. I’d never realised there was so much to be done. A further complication was that it was the holiday period, and many offices were closed till after the New Year.

  The official cause of death given on his death certificate was complications brought on by pneumonia, but of course it was the multiple sclerosis that had done for him. He had suffered for so many years, been confined to his bed, which had weakened his body and his soul.

  We managed to organise the funeral and his burial for the first day after the holiday period and invited all our Cambuslang relations – his family – to come down for the wake, which was to be held in our living room. Meanwhile, his body lay in our front parlour, in the bed in which he had died. The undertaker had dressed him, plumped up his face, put some make-up on him. The effect was to make him look strangely himself, but not himself, a dummy version, but rather serene. It was the first corpse I had ever seen. In a way, I recognised him dead better than I had recognised him alive, as he seemed to have been made younger, more content, and cleaner.

  Visitors, when they arrived, were taken in to see his body lying in his coffin. I took Margaret in when she arrived. There was a bowl of flowers beside his bed and a petal had blown on to my father’s face. I flicked it off with my finger and thumb. Margaret was appalled, considering this was dreadful behaviour, showing no respect. She believed anyway that I was hardly grieving, that somehow I had risen above it, moved on and away. I explained that I had so much to do, that was why I might have appeared preoccupied. But I suppose, really, I had never known my father. My happy memories of him were few.

  I was pleased that at least he had met Margaret, that he had seen me graduate, had seen me get a job, go on my first foreign trip, but of course he was never going to know what happened afterwards, in my life, or in the lives of my sisters and brother.

  Our minister came to the house, recited some suitably Scottish funeral benediction. The hearse came, men in black carted out the body of my father in his coffin, all the men piled into black cars and went off to the cemetery. The Scottish tradition, which was new to me but my mother insisted it was the proper thing to do, was that only the men went to the graveside. So I did as she directed.

  It was very early January, absolutely freezing in Carlisle cemetery, but when we all came back to the house, to join my grieving mother and all the women relations, Margaret and my sisters had made ready a splendid funeral tea, with lots of cakes, scones, hot sausage rolls. Margaret even poured and gave out cups of tea. And of course there was whisky for the men.

  One of our Cambuslang relations said what a fine man John had been, how much they had all loved him, but what a struggle my mother must have had, coping with him all these years.

  ‘Yes,’ said Margaret very tartly, ‘and all on her own.’

  ‘What precisely are you insinuating by that, Margaret Forster?’

  What Margaret meant was that during all those years none of our relations had done much to help, apart from having me on holiday when I was young. She had picked up from the twins how they had never been invited to stay in Cambuslang, nor had any of them come to stay in our house, to look after us, to give my mother a break.

  Fortunately, Margaret held back from further barbs or comments. She busied herself offering more scones, realising it was not her place to say such things, and certainly not at this sort of solemn occasion. Which in the end was enjoyed by all. There were no scenes, no words, no further moments of frostiness. We had done my father’s Cambuslang relations proud, not skimped on any ceremonies or hospitalities or traditions.

  My mother was very grateful for how Margaret had helped. Better and more sincerely than me. After that, she became a champion of Margaret. The eye-rolling and clearing of the throat ceased from then on.

  My sister Marion said an interesting thing to Margaret during the funeral tea. ‘You are the first person who has ever been interested in our family.’ By this she meant involved with us, concerned about us, interested in knowing each of us, not just me, as her boyfriend, getting to understand us all and the family dynamics, listening and reacting with sympathy and insight. Margaret was always very good at empathy and also explaining why people acted as they did, and predicting what would happen.

  Marion’s comment reflected my mother’s attitude that she had been let down by my father’s family and also the social services, such as they were. My father’s friends from work had all disappeared, once he became totally bedridden. People did not want to know, to get involved. My mother never commented or complained about this openly, but Marion was more outspoken and possibly more bitter.

  I can’t say I was ever aware of the outside attitude to my family, or if it bothered me. Perhaps I ignored it, caught up in my own world. But Marion was conscious of it. Having been wary of Margaret, they now saw her as a welcome, involved addition to our family. Even something of our champion.

  During the funeral, many of the visiting relations took my mother aside and said the same thing to her: ‘It must be a blessed relief, Marion, now John has gone.’ Every time it happened, she sniffed and shrugged and denied it. She got quite upset and annoyed in the end, indignant at the suggestion that she had wanted him dead. With him being so ill and bedridden, she must now be pleased, or at least relieved, they said. But she would not go along with this. Or at least admit it, even to herself. But of course it was a blessed relief, all round.

  My mother’s domestic situation then began to improve somewhat, over the next few months and years. She was still without a fridge, a phone or a TV, and still did her washing in the tub in the outside washhouse – no mod cons came her way until 1960. The first one I remember her having was a spin-dryer, which she used when it was too wet outside to hang out the clothes on the line. It was a temperamental little brute which rocked and moved around the lino floor of our kitchen, bangin
g into people and things. Doing a lot of spinning but not much drying.

  But she was now free to go out for about the first time in twenty years, started attending fancy salad classes and French lessons, which enabled me to do a bit of eye-rolling. She even joined an amateur drama club in Stanwix and had a part as a Scottish maid. Which of course she had once been. She now had a spare room, the parlour. As happened when I left, vacating half a bed, it was soon filled up.

  Mr Watson, the French teacher from the grammar school who had helped me so much with my O-level resit, arrived at the door one day to ask my mother if she could possibly put up the school’s new French assistant, who was arriving the next day. The lodgings he had fixed for him had fallen through. Goodness knows how he had found out that my mother now had a spare room.

  My mother said of course, no problem, bags of room, be a pleasure. The French assistant was called Michel, at a French university studying English, and he stayed for the whole term. He was replaced by a woman French assistant, Madeleine, who stayed for a whole year. Several others followed.

  The surprising thing was that they loved the house, and my mother so much, that they came back to visit, year after year. Madeleine remained a lifelong friend of our family. Annabelle, my sister, still goes on holiday with her. Not long ago I took two of my own grandchildren to Paris for the day on the Eurostar and had a meal with Madeleine. All this new stimulus and interest, and of course a small income, only started after my father had died.

  Last year I went back to Carlisle cemetery for the first time in twenty years. And I couldn’t find my father’s grave. I wandered around for an hour failing to locate it. How shameful is that? Surely I should have remembered where my own father was buried.

  I wanted to visit it for several reasons. Down memory lane for a start. It was close to where I did some of my courting, back in the fifties, when Margaret lived opposite the main gates. I never realised back then that the cemetery was one of the wonders of Carlisle, nay the county, perhaps of all England, being a classic Victorian graveyard, dating back to 1855, and covering almost 100 acres with chapels, ancient graves and monuments, hills and woods, little streams and bridges, with wild orchids, wild violets. It was one of the first in England to introduce woodland burials, the graves marked with an oak tree.

  It looks immaculate today, with its sad cypresses, the ancient yew trees carefully sheared and shaped, the clippings going off to help make a cancer drug. And yet at the same time it feels wild and natural, a woodland reserve rather than a park.

  It was voted the UK’s Cemetery of the Year four years running, the last in 2008. The competition has now ceased, but surely they would have won it again.

  There are 90,000 bodies buried there. No wonder I couldn’t find my father’s grave. In the 1950s, the office used to be in a couple of small, poky, dark rooms at the right of the front gate – but it had gone. It has now become a café. Never been to a cemetery café before.

  The owner was taking scones out of the oven when I arrived. They looked so enticing I decided to have one, even though I never eat between meals, certainly not. She’d had to convert the old offices into a café herself, when she took on the lease. Helpful friends suggested some jokey names for it: Death By Chocolate, Last Orders, Dead Delicious, Coffin Cake, Mourning Coffee. Or jokey signs to be hung by the counter such as ‘Please Let Us Know If You Suffer From Any Elegies’. She wanted the name to be respectful, so she has called it simply the Gatehouse Café.

  I found my father’s grave in the end – after I had located the office, now behind the crematorium – and was given a map with his plot number, 17-P-57. I had to pull some ivy and ferns away to read his details: Born 1906, died 1958. Reading his name gave me a shock, as it contains my name, JOHN HUNTER DAVIES. Even more of a shock reading it on a gravestone.

  When he died in 1958, he was aged just fifty-two. Every year since I turned fifty-two has felt like a bonus.

  27

  LONDON CALLING

  During 1959, I ceased to be employed by Kemsley Newspapers. I didn’t get the sack. I didn’t leave the company. It was just that Kemsley Newspapers left me – and everyone else. They suddenly got taken over by someone from Canada, of whom most of us had never heard. Kemsley Newspapers, then the biggest newspaper group in the UK, ceased to exist.

  Kemsley had been part of the national media, and of politics, for most of the century. Today, when I mention the name, and say I began life as a graduate trainee with Kemsley Newspapers, I have to explain who they were. Or I just omit the name Kemsley and say I was a Thomson trainee, which technically I was. I had been in Manchester for just under a year when the takeover took place, so I was still being trained, in theory, for my contract had been for two years.

  The newcomer was Roy Thomson (1894–1976), a Canadian with Scottish roots, who made his first fortune selling radios in Ontario. He had bought the Scotsman in Edinburgh a few years earlier then swooped and gobbled up the whole of the Kemsley empire in 1959. The Thomson name is, I suppose, still known today, unlike Kemsley. Lord Thomson, as he became – almost all press barons did in those days become real barons – was a power in the land as a newspaper mogul for the next few decades, and also branched out into other businesses still going, such as Thomson Holidays.

  Unlike Lord Beaverbook and so many of the press lords who had gone before, Thomson had no real interest in self-promotion, or newspapers and politics, and meddled in neither. His only interest was in the bottom line – did his papers make money, could they make more money?

  So it made not a jot of difference to those thousands of wage slaves slogging away in the various major cities that had a Kemsley House when overnight every one became a Thomson House. We were scared at first for our jobs – what would happen, would he start selling off papers? But life then carried on, as per normal.

  I was called down to London in early 1959 to see Mr Fraser, the man who was in charge of the company’s training scheme. I assumed it was just a routine catch-up meeting, for him to meet each of the current trainees. It was on the train to London that I met the other graduate trainee who had started with me on the Chron six months or so earlier, back in September. It was the first time I had properly spoken to her. We walked round the streets behind Gray’s Inn Road before our respective meetings, as we were early. Afterwards we came back to Manchester together. But now I can’t remember her name. Not much of a reporter.

  On the train down, she asked me how I was getting on. I said I loved it, really good. ‘Yeah, well, you have done exciting things,’ she said. Meaning, of course, going to Cyprus. She had done very little, just a bit of rewriting and was now starting to learn subbing. Her home was in the Manchester area, somewhere in Cheshire, and she was an Oxford graduate, but she didn’t appear to have done anything at Oxford, such as student journalism. That surprised me. I assumed every would-be journalist would be like me, busying themselves on student papers, accumulating cuttings, showing journalistic enterprise.

  It then transpired that she had some local connections with the company through her family. Either her father or some friend of his was a director of the Manchester paper and, when she didn’t seem to have much idea about what to do on leaving Oxford, an interview had been arranged with Mr Goulden, the editor, and she’d been accepted.

  I had no idea how many graduate trainees were taken on each year, but probably about six. I imagined they were all high-powered and well motivated, and also Oxbridge graduates, apart from me, so I did feel it was a bit unfair that somebody had apparently managed to get on the scheme without having shown much real hunger or interest in journalism. But then that was my idealistic, romantic vision of journalism, when I was starting out. Later on, I did meet perfectly happy, successful journalists who seemed to have no interest in people, or in writing, or even in newspapers. How could this be so? I used to think. But of course it happens in other so-called creative careers. You meet publishers who never read books, or reviews, or know about other publishing firms
, their history. Or people who work in television who never watch TV.

  I now know of course that journalists come in many forms, which is true of many other professions and occupations. Newspapers need management people, business people, subs and editors, graphic artists and photographers, ideas and organisation people not just writing people. You don’t have to produce any journalism to succeed in journalism. Or need to have what I imagined was the journalistic character and temperament.

  My young female colleague could presumably have carved out a good career in some aspect of journalism or newspapers, not necessarily as a writer – but she left soon after we got back to Manchester. I never saw or talked to her again.

  Mr Fraser said how well I had done in Cyprus, lots of good stories, several of which had been used by some of the group’s newspapers, though, of course, I had never seen them. Then he told me, in confidence, that a bloodbath was expected in South Africa soon. The Sunday Times had no staffer out there, and were thinking they should have one, in which case the group would be represented by the same person. Would I be interested? It was all in the air at the moment, still being discussed.

  The ANC – African National Congress, founded in 1912 – were becoming more militant against apartheid, moving on from peaceful demonstrations to active opposition, under their so-called Defiance Campaign. In reply, the South African government had started banning and arresting ANC leaders and the police were using more physical means of suppressing any demonstrations. All the political experts, in South Africa and in London, were predicting there would soon be bloodshed.