My Dad Was Nearly James Bond

by Des Bishop

  I asked him about it when I got older and he said unashamedly that a bit of bronzer made him look better on the floor at Burberrys. He was right too. The slight tan brought out his grey hair and strong features.

  My dad spent a hell of a lot of time in the bathroom. Much more than my mother or any of us. His time in the bathroom was ritualistic, but he had to perform his ritual amidst the traffic of everyone else popping in and out. We had only one bathroom, so you were not allowed to lock the door because if you were in the shower with the door locked, that meant that someone else would not be able to use the toilet. So in our house you just went ahead and used the toilet while the other person was in the shower. But you had to warn someone if you were using the sink because it affected the temperature of the water in the shower. Of course, it was funnier when you didn’t warn them.

  My dad would get in the shower first because he had so much stuff to do afterwards, and then we would use the bathroom while he was shaving, bronzing, brushing his teeth and combing his hair. He combed his hair in such a specific way and he used the same broken hairbrush for his entire career. It always went back into his mirror cabinet and no one else was allowed to use it. It was not a special hairbrush either. It was a cheap plastic one with the handle broken off, but it was his and it was always there in the same spot.

  We pissed while he did it, and we showered while he did it. You did not even need to ask, but the minute you turned off the water in the shower, he would pass a towel over the top of the rail to you. It was almost as if he was not even thinking; the movements were almost robotic. You dried yourself off in the shower to stop water getting on the floor.

  Then finally, when everyone was done, the cry would come down the stairs: ‘Is everybody finished with the bathroom?’ My dad needed to have everybody done because then he could lock the door. My father could not look after his business in the morning, knowing someone might use the toilet after him. He was very paranoid about the smell and all that went with it. Of all the things we joked about, the bathroom was a sacred place. He was very private about that. He was like clockwork too: he had set his digestive system to kick in once Aidan was done with the shower.

  And to our horror, after it was over he would light a match and throw it in the toilet, the belief being that it got rid of smells. Personally, I always found that just made it worse, or at least gave my dad’s business a distinctive smell. Of all the odours you want to have specific, that is not one of them.

  He had the performer’s nerves every day going to work, and he would torment my mother if things were running late. He could not handle a variation in the schedule. He could not handle letting people down. It was other people’s approval that was of utmost importance. He was miserable if there was a delay, and you could feel the anxiety building once there was a chance he would be on a subway train ten minutes later than normal. The later subway would get him there on time, but it still did not stop him panicking.

  Looking back, I got a real insight into my dad through going to work with him. I worked in Burberrys during the summer and for most Christmas sales from 1992 right up until the end of the decade. At the start he struggled with the commute because I did not hit the marks at exactly the right time. I did not put the token into the slot as quickly as him or remember to buy tokens on the Manhattan side in the morning when we arrived so we would not have to wait in the rush-hour line going home later that day. But eventually I figured out the routine. It was the same with my brothers when they ended up working there.

  I loved the way every morning outside 179th Street station my dad made the New York Post guy smile by calling him ‘my friend’ before he got on the F Train. I loved the way everybody in Burberrys would always tell me what a lovely man my father was and how good he was as a boss. I was there long enough to have an awareness of the genuine affection everyone, from the stock room right through to the executives, had for him. But I think most of all I loved the performance in Burberrys myself. I loved the fact that because I could do my dad’s accent perfectly I could entertain all the staff by mimicking his actions and words. I loved it when some of the higher-level executives asked me to ‘do’ my dad. I would really love it when he was there to see me in action and he enjoyed the way everyone was laughing. I did not take him off in an insulting way, and he never took it as an insult. I didn’t realize it at the time, but really I was just a cliché: I loved going to work with my dad. (On top of that, for a teenager, I was a pretty good salesman of conservative male clothing. I banged out a load of bullshit to convince people they needed to spend $1,200 on a raincoat.) It was not just our family that worked with my dad in Burberrys. There must be at least twenty guys from our area who worked for my dad at some stage. Some of them still work there today.

  Dad’s obsession was ‘making the day’. I assume making the day meant meeting the sales target for that day. I think the target was based on the previous year’s sales for the corresponding day, but it may have been based on estimates. In the early years he always seemed to make the day. Most days, our welcome home to him would be: ‘Did you make the day, Dad?’

  In the early ’90s my father’s position came under threat. A number of people who wanted his job or in order to make space for their own advancement began to collude in having him removed from Burberrys. One of the pieces of ammunition used against him was that my father was unable to keep up with the modernization of systems when things had become more computerized. He went through a period of intense stress around this time and eventually he gave in to the pressure and took a demotion and went to manage the store at the Americana Mall in Manhasset, Long Island.

  My father was very demoralized by this. Worse, after a year or two he ended up back in the New York store, but only to manage the men’s department. Now he was working under the people he had once managed. I knew the people involved who plotted against him, but I was not experienced enough to understand how people could be that conniving. I used to obsess about one day making enough money so I could buy Burberrys and destroy one particular man’s life.

  For years I wondered why my dad did not tell those assholes to go fuck themselves and get himself a new job. But he had three boys, all needing to go to college, and all that goes with that. He took that shit and kept his head. I really felt bad for him at that time, while at the same time wishing he was more powerful and had not had to go through something like that.

  In 1997 the top management team in Burberrys changed, and those executives who had conspired against my dad all got the sack. He was given a new position as head of customer relations. He really enjoyed those final years in Burberrys with less responsibility. He was adored by the new president, with whom he struck up a very strong friendship.

  I was and remain very grateful to the management team that brought my dad back into the fold. What happened to him really affected his confidence, so it was a real triumph to know that he had been the victim of a heave. The fact that the new people saw him as indispensable meant so much to him. They called him Mr Burberry, and it was a huge part of his identity. He tried to retire and they would not let him. They accommodated him in every way, and for the last year or two they basically told him that all he had to do was come in and hang around and make people who were not happy feel better.

  My dad with colleagues from Burberrys in his early days working there.

  Finally he put his foot down and retired. My mother had a little bit to do with that. She was the one who had to take him to the subway every morning and pick him up every night, and she could not handle another winter of worrying about him walking in the snow. He had already had to have an angioplasty and was slowing down quite a bit. She couldn’t handle the stress of him getting ready for his daily performance either. As he got older he got very set in his ways and would get extremely agitated if they left the house even a minute late. He did not want to let down his audience at work.

  While I think retirement is overrated,
I think in the end my dad was happy to call it a day. He had worked Saturdays since 1977. He worked really hard too. All my life he told me that I should never get into retail, but I know that deep down he loved his job. I still see messages on my Facebook page from people who remember him in those final years when Irish people had more euros than they knew what to do with and would go in to get some Burberry to bring home. They would meet my dad, and the first thing he would ask them was if they had ever heard of me. He loved that. He loved telling me about it, too. He worried about my career, and I guess it temporarily put his mind at ease that I might just be doing all right.

  Burberry organized buses throughout the day and evening to bring people to my father’s wake. When all those Burberrys staff members and the company president turned up, it really got me. They were his fans and saw him as the soul of the store. It was such a lovely thing. He would have been delighted that they did that for him. He would have thought it was worth all the bronzer he put on to look good for them all those years.

  One of the guys from the neighbourhood who got into Burberrys through my dad and who still works there says that people still come in asking for him. Some people come in looking for the Irish man, and some people come in looking for the English man. Even strangers could not figure out exactly who my dad was. But they always say charming.

  Though he loved the job – once he was ‘on’, he loved the daily performance and having an audience – fairly early in my adult life I realized that my father always felt that his performance at Burberrys was something he had settled for, the price he paid for the stability he felt his family needed. After coming from the exciting London life of his twenties, the semi-suburban life we had in Flushing was a strange compromise for my father. He ended up in a working-class neighbourhood, far removed from the elegance he had known in his cosmopolitan past. It was a life of working Saturdays and inventory nights. I used to hate it when my mother would say, ‘Your dad will be home late tonight, it’s inventory night.’ I knew that would mean my dad would be pissed off when he got home. He would eat his dinner in silence on his own, chewing his massive bites with venom.

  I know that sometimes he regretted his decision and I could hear the discontent in his voice when he would tell me about the things he could have done. These regrets were not always about acting either. He told stories about owning a beauty salon in London with a former girlfriend, Valerie, at one stage, and also about having had the opportunity to buy a pub on the East side of Manhattan after he had married my mother. He always brought these things up when he got on a roll about missed opportunities. This was a common conversation all throughout my dad’s life. Sometimes there was the arrogance of an insecure man trying to prove that he had once done or could have done amazing things. Other times there was just the tone of regret. It was always what could have been. The past seemed to bring the opposite of satisfaction for my father.

  But my father had a ceiling in his mind and he believed that there was only so far he could go. There was an alarming number of things my dad felt he should have done. These thoughts were motivated by a creeping belief that he should not be here on 188th Street, licking ass for a living in Burberrys in a job in which he knew he could go no further because he had no real education. That ate away at him. The truth is that as I got older I realized that he saw a lot of his career as a sacrifice made for us. I must be honest and say that way too often he seemed unsure if the sacrifice was worth it.

  When I was in my teens my father could see that I enjoyed working at Burberrys. He would turn to me and say, ‘Just promise me you will never get into retail.’ He probably worried less about me being an alcoholic than that.

  13

  My father talked a lot about the ‘nearly James Bond’ life in London, and he told us whimsical stories when we were growing up about playing hurling in cow shit in Midleton; but it was only after I stopped drinking at nineteen that he told me the truth about his upbringing. The first time he told me the story of his childhood we were out in the Hamptons. It was the summer of 1996 and I had been sober for a year, and that had brought us closer. I think it was just the two of us; my mother had gone back into Queens with the other two lads, most likely for something sports related, and me and my dad were just chilling out there together. We were sitting at the table and he began to tell me all these things about what really happened to him as a child.

  Up to this point my understanding had been that he preferred Ireland to England as a boy and that his father was unable to be a parent as result of his wounds in World War II. This was the version he had decided was palatable for his young sons.

  He told me it was around the time of the war that my father began to notice strange mood swings in his mother. Suddenly, without any explanation, he would get vicious smacks across the face, which came as a tremendous shock to him. Until this time, his mother had been a fun-loving, caring mother who spent a lot of time singing. His father, my grandfather, blamed this turn of events on the war. He was wounded at Dunkirk and had spent a long time recovering in a hospital in Folkestone in Kent, after which he was returned to light duties. As a result of his long absence it seems he was not aware of the full extent of the violence that was occurring in their home. I guess he thought she was under pressure, being effectively a single parent, and he must have lived in hope that she would somehow learn to cope better.

  My dad’s parents’ wedding day. Stanley was the younger of the two and was still in his teens when he got married.

  Despite the tragedy of my grandfather’s wounds, for a number of years the war would bring a respite for my father from his mother’s savagery. Churchill called for children who had relations in safer parts of the UK and Ireland to be sent there until the war was over, and my father was sent to his maternal grandparents in Midleton. Even before he left for Ireland, my father remembered a female neighbour in Bexhill telling his mother she would never be welcome in her house again if she did not stop beating her children.

  So, on leave from light duty, my grandfather and grandmother brought my father and his sister Joan to Ireland on board the Innisfallen. After a few days, they left, leaving the children in the care of their uncles and my father’s grandparents.

  My dad’s first communion portrait.

  I always wondered why a man with an English accent would be so connected to Ireland. I always wondered why he held on to an almost mystical version of Ireland in his mind. But once I got a deeper understanding of his past, I could see that Ireland offered a respite from the chaos of his life back in England. Not only that, but his uncles and his grandmother absolutely adored him. I learned that later on, when I visited the house in Midleton. They spoke about him with deep affection and told wistful stories about his time there. Sadly, Ireland would always be the only place where my father experienced the love and safety a child should know. Though he never finished it, when he retired from Burberrys my father made an attempt at writing a memoir. It is full of warmth about his time in Midleton.

  As a boy in Ireland I had a full working day with many chores to perform and going to school was not a top priority. Every day I would be woken up by my grandmother at 6 a.m. The house had no running water, so I would make three or four trips to the water pump up the lane and fill the white enamel buckets with water from the tap and drag it back to the house. My next chore was to scour the barn and the outhouses and collect the eggs where the chickens and geese had laid. I would then go into the forge and pump the bellows for my Uncle Willie as he shod the horses. Then I’d take the pony and cart, drive it to the poor house and pick up the offal, bring it back to feed the pigs. I would round up the cattle and bring them back for milking that evening. Milking the cows with my uncles was great fun. As they squeezed the milk into the buckets, they would play tunes and sing songs to the cows. They always squirted the milk in my face when I least expected it. My uncles William and Dick were always singing and making harmonies of Irish folk songs
. There was always great laughter with me because my enemy around the farm was the gander and he was always trying to take a bite out of the arse of my pants. They would fall about with laughter when the gander tried to catch me.

  A lot of men in the town were unemployed and they would stand on street corners wasting the day away. I recall one year that was a very tough year financially. The family had decided to grow barley and it was one of the worst summers, with belting rain every day, and the rain had flattened the barley and they managed to salvage just a few sacks. When they took the barley to the mills, they got only a few pounds for the entire crop. Many days I would have one potato in a saucer mashed in milk for dinner. I was always hungry. My grandmother would say, ‘Times were hard,’ but there was always laughter at the worst of times.

  There was a great celebration when my Aunt Esther’s third child was born. His name was Billy, and he survived because my Aunt Esther had gotten a council house on the land that my uncles had sold to the County Council to pay off some of my grandfather’s debts. My Aunt Esther was overjoyed: there was no dampness, she had hot and cold running water, with a toilet and a bathtub. My grandmother considered it a tremendous luxury.