Dispatches From a Dilettante

by Paul Rowson

  After calming down and repairing to the young priest’s room, we continued drinking and listening to Bowie before I went to bed at around two am. I got up the following morning, jogged round Holland Park to sober up, went to the Board meeting, endured further bickering between the estranged founders, and then drove home to Wales. When I next saw my priestly drinking buddy a few days later I remarked on what a good evening I had enjoyed with him chatting and listening to music. He looked sheepish and said that he had been so hung over the next that he had to beg a colleague to say the eight o’clock morning mass for him, and had also missed taking confession that afternoon even though he had been unable to find a stand in priest. I was, at this point, clearly hearing his confession, and quite liking it, because I could easily paint a mental picture of the sinners of Kensington becoming angry and frustrated at not being able to unburden themselves of their weekly transgressions when faced with an empty confessional.

  As our friendship grew we occasionally went out for a meal or to the cinema. He’d expressed an interest to go and see the new film about The Doors with Val Kilmer getting rave reviews as Jim Morrison and no sooner than he said the words we made a snap decision to go there and then as it was showing round the corner. It was such a quick decision that he had no time to change and still had his dog collar on as we made our escape from the presbytery. Our luck was out when, seeing us leaving, the snobbish priest from the north east invited himself along although he clearly had no idea what he was going to see. He too had his dog collar on so this peculiar threesome took our seats in the cinema but minutes later.

  The film charts the rise of The Doors and their initial breakthrough on the west coast of the USA. There were some fairly graphic scenes of Jim Morrison’s prodigious drug abuse and lively sexual encounters. I had, on either side of me, two priests who had signed up to a life of celibacy. One was handling it quite well while our man from the north east was looking distinctly uneasy which I felt served him right for forcing his company on us.

  About half way through the film when The Doors have established a cult following, with Jim Morrison as the iconic face of the band, there is a scene with him getting into a lift on the ground floor of a Los Angeles hotel. A young attractive woman gets in with him and by the time they emerge it is clear that she had given him a blow job on the way up (It must have been a tall building but I and the rest of the audience were prepared to suspend disbelief). As Jim is zipping his flies I could see that the man to my left was already reassessing whether ministry “was better served in the capital” as he had so pompously offered when we first met.

  On the mercifully short walk back to the presbytery we discussed the film which two of us had enjoyed and then it was never mentioned again. I say never mentioned but it wasn’t quite the last of it. The only other time the three of us were ever together subsequently was a couple of weeks later when a general invitation to an arts event at the nearby Kensington Roof Gardens popped through the letter box at the presbytery. We were the only ones around, apart from the parish priest who had his Coronation Street and East Enders commitments, and so we toddled along.

  As the three of us got into the lift which was unoccupied I pressed the button for the fourth floor. Just as the doors (pun intended) were closing an attractive and rather immodestly dressed woman got in. Two of us could barely suppress giggles and one priest emerged with a crimson face that took several minutes to return to its’ normal palor.

  Back on the BUNAC front senior communication was breaking down and although we had made genuine offers on houses I was still stuck at the presbytery during the week and outstaying my welcome. A friend of mine once said, after I had thanked him for an overnight stay at their large house that ‘real hospitality is when someone gives up their own bed for a guest to sleep’. On that basis it was never full house at the presbytery and the rent I paid in cash went into a TV upgrade for the parish priest. Nonetheless I was grateful to stay there even though the madness of it all made me feel like the little boy in the story of the Emperor’s new clothes.

  So many parents say that they wished they could have spent more time with their kids while they were growing up and I never wanted to be one of them. When someone asked me one Wednesday in London how it felt to be an absentee father it cut me to the quick. I used to get up at 4am on Monday mornings to drive from Wales to London and often did not return until late on Friday night. I also thought two of the three other directors were total pricks and so I did the brave, stupid, admirable or selfish thing and quit after a particularly feisty Board meeting seven months to the day after starting. It never struck me at the time that this impetuous, even petulant method of exiting, was entirely predictable and maybe even inevitable given what had gone before.

  13.

  UNDERSTANDING

  Our house was directly opposite the main gates of the Headingley cricket ground in Leeds. Through the steamed up windows in the front room I sat watching as a line of men in long macs and flat caps queued in the rain to get in for a Test Match. It is my earliest memory. I can remember it only in black and white, but more than half a century later whenever I drive past the much changed and colourful entrance, and then on past our old house in Escourt Avenue, the memory is vivid and clear.

  My father had moved from his native Liverpool after a promotion from the insurance company he worked for, but he had been a wanderer for much of his life. He grew up in abject poverty in a large family and left school early with no qualifications - a feat I strove manfully to emulate and only narrowly failed. There was no great bonding between us, and only after he died when I was just fifteen did I begin to learn about the life he had led.

  His first wife had died in childbirth and to this day I have a half sister somewhere. Thus he was fifty three when I was born. His four years in a Turkish prisoner of war camp (during the First World War as opposed to the Second where he was an air raid warden by the Liverpool docks) was never discussed. One of his sisters casually mentioned going to meet him at the quayside on his return and tending to the foot long bayonet wound on his left leg. Nothing was mentioned about the fact that he rode sidecar in the TT motor cycle races in the Isle of Man on two occasions. His formation of a tennis club in Liverpool was something I found out when I was forty and what he did before he joined the Royal Liver Insurance Company remains a mystery to this day. I have dim recollections of a drive to Manchester to see a brother of his about a possible job at one point after he had joined the world of insurance, which suggests that he remained restless even later in life. My last memory of him was on the day before he died aged sixty nine. He had retired but taken a part time job working as a phone dispatcher for the RAC and was leaving for work as I was getting up for school. As he shuffled up the road to catch the bus I watched, noticing that his shoes were worn at the heels and his that coat looked threadbare. The smoke from his ‘Senior Service’ full strength second cigarette of the day curled in a farewell arc behind him, wafting into nothingness on the morning breeze. He died of a heart attack that evening.

  After an initial seizure during the afternoon he was rushed to hospital. I declined the opportunity to go with my mother to see him and was secretly pleased as I wanted to watch Top of the Pops. Whispered conversation and sobs woke me in the dead of night. It was my mother, and an ‘auntie’ who had come to offer support, discussing whether to wake me to tell me now or to wait until morning.

  There is one particular photograph, undated but probably taken in the late nineteen twenties and discovered many years after his demise, that evokes a sense of regret about conversations not had and memories not shared. It is a black and white publicity photograph for a jazz band and it sits on the study windowsill in front of me now. Printed by ‘Dobsons - 132 Bold Street, Liverpool’ it shows the seven band members posing quite confidently for the shot. There is the trombone player with instrument to lips next to the piano man with his hands on the ivories. Sitting on the piano and grinning cheekily is the banjo player with the f
ingers of his left hand carefully shaped in a chord and on either side of the drummer are a violinist and a trumpet player. Behind them standing tall and looking the camera straight in the eye is the crooner – my dad. On the bass drum and obviously painted by hand it says simply ‘Rowsons Columbia Dance Band’.

  There is no one else left alive to ask now but there are so many questions left unanswered. How long did the band play together? Did they play as a pick up band or were they full time professionals. Did they record anything? What material did they use and what did my dad sing? What I do remember around the time I was five or six is being allowed to stay up late in a relative’s house in Liverpool while the adults drank and sang round a piano played by an uncle. The acrid smell of the tobacco made my eyes sting but the sense of bonhomie was palpable. Other than that I cannot recall my dad singing at all round the house or of having any musical discussion with him of substance. There was though the occasion when, after a row caused by me turning up the volume to hear the Beatles sing ‘Please Please Me’ on ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’, he tried to diminish the importance of the moment by announcing that he had read in the Daily Express that ‘the Dave Clark Five were going to be bigger than the Beatles anyway’. Other than that there was nothing that hinted of his love for music.

  Here was a man who had been a prisoner of war, a sportsman, a minor entrepreneur, a bandleader, a middle ranking business man (strangely I do still have clippings from the early nineteen fifties Yorkshire Evening Post of speeches my dad gave at Insurance or Chamber of Commerce dinners) and yet in that non touchy feely age he kept almost all of his varied experiences to himself. Snippets come back to me. When there was a rare chance to see Leeds United on television in the early sixties and they were playing Everton my dad mentioned that he had known Dixie Dean and had once been in the Directors room at Everton when the great man had appeared in his kit just before kick-off to take a slug of whisky. This was met by a request from me for quiet so that we could watch the game and an opportunity was lost.

  Although I was the captain of the successful junior school football team my dad never came to any of the finals and only came to watch me play once - after nagging by my mother. I was nervous and conscious of him on the touchline where he uttered not a word of either support or criticism. At the end I went up to him eagerly waiting for his endorsement. Not deliberately cruelly, but nonetheless crushingly, he delivered his verdict. “You were on the ground to much – stay on your feet”. With that we walked back to the second hand Morris Minor he had recently bought and we drove home without further reference to the game.

  He worked assiduously as a volunteer and one time local president of the Catenians – ‘offering practising catholic laymen and their families friendship, social activities and support’ - to which I would say ‘bollocks’. On the morning of his funeral none of them came because a local bishop was being buried on the same day and it was a better career move to be seen there. The one time I ever saw my mother lose her temper was when the Catenian president finally, six months after my father’s death, dragged himself round to our house and patronisingly asked if we needed any support. He was sent away with total clarity as to my mother’s view on him and his ‘bunch of creepy hypocrites’. The seeds of my disenchantment with religion started then, although I didn’t know it at the time.

  My mother was from a much more well-heeled family from Little Crosby - just outside Liverpool. She had a career as a physiotherapist, and passed her driving test early which gave her a freedom that eluded most women of her era. I was born in Leeds when they had just moved there and my mother was forty four. During the Second World War she had treated injured service men at a specialist rehabilitation unit outside Glasgow and by all accounts worked hard and played hard. She was a straight down the line catholic and my dad went along for peace and quiet is how I read it now. Any indiscretions in her single life, if indeed there were any, were committed a long way from home and in the thrall of war.

  Wrapped up in my own painful adolescence I was blissfully unaware of the physical emotional and financial struggle it must have been for her, as a single mother, to bring up my sister and I. She overcompensated by being too strict and we inexorably drifted apart with a reconciliation only taking place in my mid twenties. I got out as soon as I could and scraped my way into a mediocre teacher training college. By the time I was twenty two I had already quit after two months in the sixth form, quit my first job in insurance, quit several jobs in the States, quit my first teaching job and unknowingly begun a pattern of leaving that continued for years.

  Thus the BUNAC exit should have been no surprise. For a while I did anything and everything. I was interviewed for a job at the World Student Games which were to be held in Sheffield and withdrew, judging correctly that it was going to be a catastrophe which would take the city years to pay for. I did some more work for the Prince’s Trust and then fell on the kindness of a head teacher friend who gave me a month’s supply teaching at his special needs school. One morning as I walked through the playground to work one of the pupils strode up to me and without rancour said “Morning Sir……it’s fucking crap here”.

  After his accurate summation I resolved to concentrate more on my own special needs by getting a permanent job.

  14.

  A SERIOUS MAN 1997-2010

  The decision could not be put off any longer. The ceo was going to have to use email. A shiny new computer was placed in the office by the IT guys and instructions as to how to use it were given. IT guys often speak a different language and if you are not born with the technology gene it can be hard to understand them. They left the office confident that their and my chief executive Julia Cleverdon could send and receive emails - a misconception that was to be ruthlessly exposed within minutes.

  It was unusually silent in her office as she grappled with the new technology and then began furiously typing. It transpired that the first email she opened was from a government minister who she held in pretty low esteem. When forwarding his email to me, together with her thoughts on a suitable response, she also described him as ‘another time serving charisma free bean counter’. Julia then made the classic mistake of pressing the ‘reply’ button, thus enabling the government minister to be fully appraised as to his character defects.

  Years away from having the competence to retrieve the email in the hope that it hadn’t been opened, she decided to challenge the known speed at which electricity travels. “Bernie quick”, she screamed at her PA and pointed to the computer lead. “Unplug it”. Bernie then took out every plug within twenty metres in a doomed attempt to stop the email which they half expected to find trapped in the wiring.

  These sorts of things were fairly regular happenings at Business in the Community who were led when I joined, by the fearless, big hearted, brave, intelligent, quirky, funny, compassionate and sometimes ruthless workaholic Julia Cleverdon. She was the only women I knew who could imbue the word ‘darling’ with menace and foreboding as in ‘Paul darling why is your budget in such a putrid state’, delivered as a judgement rather than a question.

  Under her leadership the organisation, which worked to inspire businesses to make a positive impact on society, was fast paced, innovative, extremely creative, demanding and fun. Quite soon after starting as their Director in Wales, I was packed off to a conference in San Francisco as a reward for doing something vaguely right, and was to travel there with a colleague known for his eccentric work habits and alcohol consumption. He was at the time our account manager for British Airways where Bob Ayling, who had been on the initial BITC visit to Penrhys, was ceo. “Don’t worry my colleague confidently assured me, we’ll be flying first class and they’ll look after us”.

  As someone who at that point had never flown business class, I was quite looking forward to the first class pampering on offer, only to be told that on arrival that we were on standby as the flight was full and would be travelling economy if indeed we made it on board at all. My colleague t
ended to over promise and under deliver but at the last moment we were called forward and given business class seats. I mention all this only because of the drinking opportunities available in that grade of travel. Said colleague had demolished three cocktails before we had taken off and continued drinking until he fell deeply asleep somewhere over Greenland.

  We had been booked into a small hotel a few blocks from the conference centre where, to his delight, they served complimentary wine at around five in the evening. Thus we floated over to the evening sessions where he snoozed until it was time to start properly drinking when they finished at nine. I gave up trying to keep up with him but my memory of the conference content matter became confused and resulted in a very brief report on return. For the final afternoon of the three days, delegates were given the opportunity to sign up for external visits to businesses. Severe disappointment was the order of the day as the visit to a winery in the Napa Valley was oversubscribed and we were bumped off it.

  That evening my colleague resolved to make up for lost time and we ended up in a tiny bar called The Saloon. The packed house of tourists and locals were loosening up for the weekend enjoying the music of the magnificently named Johnny Nitro and the Doorslammers, who to this day still play there. Half way through their second set one of the bar staff motioned to me, while at the same time pointing to one of the speaker stacks. There, comatose on the floor was my colleague. Somehow the barman and I bundled him into a taxi after which I abandoned him and went back to the music.

  As he was on a different return flight to me I didn’t see him again for weeks. When we finally met again at the senior management meeting he gave a coherent and insightful account of what we had achieved at the conference complete with prioritised recommendations and actions. As I couldn’t remember much after the first complimentary drinks session, I nodded sagely as we moved on to the next agenda item.