by David Lodge
It’s a big new Sainsbury’s built on a brownfield site near the railway line. The cafeteria is clean and brightly lit, cordoned off from the long loaded aisles of the shop on one side, and overlooking a vast car park on the other. The food, I have to admit, is not bad, and extraordinarily good value. You bag a numbered Formica-topped table and line up with a tray, taking your cold items from the cabinets on the counter and ordering your hot dishes when you pay. One of the cheerful motherly women who mostly staff the place brings them to your table after an interval which depends on how busy they are. On the wall behind the counter are glossy coloured photographs of the dishes on offer which Dad stares at for some time before taking his place in the queue: this is his big treat and he is anxious not to waste it by making a bad choice. He usually has steak and kidney pie with two veg or fish and chips, with apple pie and custard for pudding. The bill for the whole meal for the two of us probably comes to less than the price of one starter at the Savoy Grill.
We must look an odd couple to the other customers, a mixture of students from the local sixth-form college, young mothers with babies and toddlers, local shop assistants taking their lunch break, and the chronically unemployed. It’s a multiracial working-class area, and people dress casually in the grungy modern style: layers of synthetic clothing emblazoned with trademarks, and trainers of baroque design with thick sculpted soles. Perversely I regretted having criticised Dad’s ragged attire earlier in the morning, thus goading him into a sartorial counter-attack. I am a rather formal dresser myself, never at ease with the fashionable open-neck look, and always wear a tie with a jacket or the navy-blue blazer I was wearing yesterday. I felt we were both conspicuously over-dressed for the venue; as if we had set out to go to the Savoy Grill but found we didn’t have enough money, so settled for Sainsbury’s instead.
Dad ate his meal quickly and greedily, then sat back with a sigh of satisfaction. Over a cup of tea he began to reminisce. Like all deaf people he finds it easier to talk than to listen, and I was happy to let him. Having heard all his stories many times before I don’t have to pay much attention in order to follow and respond appropriately. Something, probably the drizzle that had started to fall outside, darkening the tarmac of the car park, had reminded him of coming back from India at the end of the war to be demobbed, after a nine-month tour of duty in a small Air Force band. He has polished the phrasing of the story in the course of many repetitions. ‘We docked at Southampton, and took a train to London. It was raining, but we didn’t mind. It was lovely soft English rain, and the country looked so green! We hadn’t seen any green for months. Only dust. “Dust, spit and spiders, that’s India,” as Arthur Lane used to say. “If the Indians want it back, they’re welcome to it.”The green of the fields and the trees, coming up through Hampshire, was incredible, like water to a man dying of thirst. It was as if we were trying to drink England. We couldn’t get enough of it. We hung out of the windows as the train went along, getting soaked with the rain, not caring. And Arthur Lane - trust Arthur - he opened the door of our carriage - you know, the trains had separate compartments in those days, with doors - he pushed the door wide open and sat on the floor with his feet hanging out over the wheels, just staring at the fields, saying “Unbelievable, un-bloody-believable”.’ Dad chuckled at the memory. Arthur Lane was the drummer in the band Dad had spent most of the war with, and figured in many of his anecdotes, admired for his dry wit and independent spirit. I never met this legendary character in the flesh but have seen a snapshot of him and Dad in baggy khaki shorts, grinning and squinting into the glare of the Indian sun, Dad tall and thin with his hand on the shoulder of the squat and rotund Arthur.
Then the smile faded from Dad’s face and he sighed and shook his head. ‘Poor old Arthur,’ he said. ‘Dead now. Dead years ago. Did I tell you?’
‘No,’ I lied.
‘Yeah. Cancer.’ He lowered his voice as he pronounced the dread word, and mimed drawing on a cigarette.‘Lungs. Always was a heavy smoker, Arthur. Even when he was playing the drums, he’d have a fag on.’
‘Did you keep in touch with him after the war?’ I said, like a comedian’s feed.
‘We used to see each other in Archer Street,’ he said, naming the drab little street behind Piccadilly Circus where dance musicians used to congregate on Monday afternoons to fix up gigs, settle debts and exchange gossip, before discotheques took away their livelihood. ‘But when Archer Street died out, I lost touch with him. I heard he’d packed in the music business and got a day job, like so many. Then one day I thought I’d give him a ring, see how he was getting on. I don’t know why. Thinking of the old days I suppose, I just wanted to hear the sound of his voice again. His wife answered the blower. I never met her, but I recognised her voice. I said, “This is Harry Bates, is Arthur there?” And there was a long silence. I thought at first I’d been cut off. And then she said, “Arthur died eight years ago.” Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Arthur dead all that time, and I had no idea. He was younger than me, too.’ He pursed his lips and shook his head again. ‘There aren’t many blokes I knew in the business who are still around now.’
‘No. You’re a survivor, Dad.’
‘Well, I looked after myself, see? Gave up fags when I developed that cough - you remember? And I was never a drinker, not what you’d call a drinker. A glass of beer yes, but no spirits.’ He mimed holding a glass of liquor between finger and thumb and raising it to his lips. ‘Spirits was the death of many a good musician. When a customer in a club or the gaffer at a Jewish wedding treated the band to a round of drinks most of the boys would order double whiskies, but I always had just a half of bitter. You can get a taste for whisky.’ He added severely: ‘I hope you don’t drink whisky.’
‘Very rarely,’ I said. ‘Wine is my tipple, as you know.’
‘Yes, well, I don’t mind a glass of sweet white wine now and again, but not that sour red stuff you like.’
‘Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll get in some Liebfraumilch for you at Christmas.’
He looked at me with a rheumy eye. ‘Am I coming to you for Christmas, then?’
‘Of course you’re coming.You can’t spend Christmas all on your own.’ In fact nothing would please me more than not having Dad to stay at Christmas. Christmas is bad enough without the extra stress of looking after him and trying to smooth the inevitable friction between him and Fred and Fred’s mother, but the guilt at leaving him all alone in London for the duration of the holiday would be even worse.
‘I’m not sure I’m up to the journey,’ he said.
‘I’ll fetch you in the car, as usual,’ I said.
‘But I need to pee practically every half an hour,’ he said.
‘There are plenty of drive-ins all the way up the M1,’ I said. ‘And we’ll have a bottle in the car for emergencies.’
‘What?’
I looked around to check there was nobody seated near us. Fortunately the lunchtime rush was over, and most of the other tables were unoccupied. ‘You can have a bottle in the car,’ I said in a louder voice.
‘Oh, very nice,’ he said bitterly. ‘Supposing we’re stuck in a traffic jam and all the people in the other cars are looking at me through the windows?’
‘Then you can do it under a blanket,’ I said irritably. ‘Anyway, you’re not as bad as you make out.You haven’t needed to go since we came in here.’
‘Now I do,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘That tea’s gone right through me.’ It’s the kind of remark that sets Fred’s teeth on edge, and Fred’s mother’s teeth even more.
When we had both been to the Gents we went round the shelves picking up some groceries for Dad. Although he knew I would pay at the checkout he insisted on buying the cheapest products - so cheap that many of them have no brand names on them at all: cans of baked beans with a plain white label stating baldly in black type ‘Baked Beans’, or loaves of sliced white bread with ‘Economy White Loaf ’ printed on the plain plastic wrapper. They
even had bottles of ‘German Liebfraumilch’, with no other information on the label about its provenance, for under two pounds. When we got outside, with a couple of full carrier bags, the drizzle had turned into a steady downpour, which I made the excuse to grab a black cab that was just delivering a passenger, bundling Dad into the back seat before he had a chance to protest. He kept his eye on the meter throughout the journey, commenting incredulously every time the digits moved forward, and averted his eyes when I paid the driver as if it was a transaction too shameful to witness.
Back at the house, Dad covered his eyes with a silk handkerchief and fell asleep in his armchair in front of the electric fire. I dozed off myself for a while, but I woke first and did not rouse him. In truth, the longer I can perform my filial duty of keeping him company without having to make conversation, the happier I am. He was slumped in his chair, with his head back and his mouth open, as if gasping for air. He is, indeed, a survivor. When the war broke out he had the wit to volunteer for service in the Air Force as a musician instead of waiting to be called up and drafted into some probably more dangerous and certainly less congenial occupation. On East Anglian airfields he paraded in marching bands at the funerals of young airmen killed in training accidents, and in the evenings played at dances and ENSA concerts for the entertainment of heroes returned from bombing missions over Germany, who had a one-in-two chance of not returning in the future. He was posted to the Shetlands, possibly the safest place in the British Isles at the time, and sent me, his three-year-old son, cartoon-style sketches of himself fishing and playing golf watched by puzzled sheep. In the last year of the war his band was sent to India, another combat-free zone. He always travelled by train and boat, turning down the offer of a lift home from Bombay in a military plane although it would have meant a much quicker demob, and completed six years’ service in the Royal Air Force without ever going up in an airplane, a form of transport he regarded, not without reason, as inherently dangerous. Nor has he ever been up in one in peacetime, though he has sat inside several parked on the ground, impersonating passengers in TV airline commercials. He is a man of great resilience and resourcefulness, who overcame a disadvantaged background and adjusted deftly to changing circumstances. A natural but largely untutored violinist as a youth, he left school at fourteen to work as an office boy, was turned on by jazz, a kind of music not hospitable to the violin (Stéphane Grappelli excepted), taught himself to play the saxophone and clarinet, supplemented his office-job earnings by playing in dance bands in the evenings, went professional, played in nightclubs, orchestra pits, radio big bands, sang ballads on the air in a sweet high tenor voice that suited the taste of the Thirties, came back from the war to find crooners were all the rage, blew the dust off his violin when Mantovani made the instrument popular again, played palm-court background music for banquets and wedding receptions, learned to play reels for hunt balls, and had a regular job with a quartet of his own in a West End nightclub for several years. When the club closed and he tried to get back into doing gigs he found they were few and far between, so acquired an Equity card and an agent to find him work as a TV and film extra in the daytime. He still catches glimpses of himself on television occasionally in repeats of very old sitcoms and rings me up to ask if I saw him, and I always pretend that I did.
He has also been a man with many other interests - serially. At different periods of his life he always had some hobby or recreation which consumed all his spare time and energy until he would suddenly lose interest in it and let it lapse, sometimes returning to it years later. For a long period it was golf - a convenient recreation for a man who worked in the evenings and was free in the weekday afternoons when municipal courses are uncrowded - but try as he might, practising for hours and studying golf manuals, he could never get his handicap down into single figures, and eventually his knees began to trouble him and he gave up the game. Then it was sea angling, taking day trips to Brighton to fish off the West Pier until it burned down, a disaster that upset him deeply and seemed to crush his enthusiasm for the pastime.Then it was collecting antiques, trawling through the local second-hand stores and flea markets for promising-looking small objects (there was no room in the house for large ones) and poring over library books in an effort to date and value them. Then it was dealing in stocks and shares. Then it was calligraphy.Then it was oil painting. He invariably taught himself these various skills from library books and magazines, or cadged advice and information from more experienced practitioners. The idea of, for instance, joining a painting class was anathema to him. He was an instinctive autodidact. Perhaps for this reason he never really excelled either as a musician or in any of his leisure activities, but I take my hat off to his professional versatility and the range of his enthusiasms, beside which my own life seems dull and narrowly specialised.
All the more poignant, then, is it to contemplate him now, stripped of all these life-enhancing interests. He has only one hobby these days: saving money, observing prices, economising on food, clothing and household bills. It’s no use asking him what he is saving the money for, or pointing out that if he drew more deeply on his assets he would be very unlikely to exhaust them, and that in such a contingency I would provide whatever funds were necessary. Indeed he is apt to take such comments as unfeeling hints that he hasn’t got much longer to live - which is of course, in actuarial terms, true, but not what I mean to convey. One of the reasons I selfishly let him drowse on in his armchair was the consciousness that we hadn’t yet touched on this sensitive area, and the less time there was available to do so before I had to leave, the better. I knew that the drawers of the bureau desk behind my back were stuffed with a disordered collection of old bills and bank statements, tax forms and share certificates and National Savings certificates, chequebook stubs and paying-in books and building society passbooks and Premium Bond counterfoils and God knows what else, and that when he woke up he would almost certainly want my advice on some item plucked from this financial midden. Sure enough, when he awoke of his own accord, and had revived himself with a cup of tea, he went over to the desk and pulled out some correspondence to do with National Savings.
‘This woman up north keeps pestering me to buy more Savings Certificates,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with her?’
‘I don’t suppose she signed them personally,’ I said. ‘They’re computer-generated.’ I glanced at the papers, which were form letters bearing the printed signature of the Commercial Officer of the National Savings headquarters in Durham.‘You’ve got several certificates that have expired. They want to know if you want to cash them in or buy new certificates.’
‘Can’t I just leave them there?’ he said.
‘Well, you can, but they’ll earn less interest than new ones.’
‘But if I buy new ones I’ll have to wait another five years for them to . . . whatd’youcallit . . .’
‘To mature, yes.’
We silently contemplated the possibility that he might not live long enough to enjoy the accumulated interest on his loan to the government.
‘I think I’ll leave them where they are,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you cash them in and treat yourself to something.’
‘What?’ he said, meaning, for once, not What did you say? but What sort of thing?
‘I don’t know . . . Hire a limousine to take you to Brighton.’
‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous,’ he said.
‘You’re always complaining you miss the sea. You could fish off the marina.’
‘I tried that for a while. It’s nothing like the old West Pier. You have to walk for miles to find a place to cast. Then it’s miles back to find a lav.’
He obviously felt this was a knock-down argument against my frivolous suggestion, and I did not contest it.
‘There must be something you would like to do,’ I said.
‘No, there isn’t,’ he said dourly. ‘I’m past doing things. If I can get through the night without getting up more th
an three times, if I can do a decent job in the lavatory after breakfast, if I can make my dinner without burning anything, if there’s something worth watching on the telly . . . that’s as much as I can hope for. That’s a good day.’
I could think of nothing cheering to say to this.
‘Take my advice, son,’ he said. ‘Don’t get old.’
‘But I am old, Dad,’ I said.
‘Not what I call old.’
‘I’m retired. I’m on a pension. I have a Senior Citizens railcard and a bus pass. I always have to get up in the night at least once. And I’m deaf.’
A faint grin lightened his countenance. ‘Yes, you are a bit Mutt and Jeff, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I’ve noticed. I wonder where you get that from? At your age I had perfect hearing.’
Having asserted this superiority over me, his mood improved. ‘What would you like for your tea?’ he said. ‘We could have those baked beans with a bit of bacon.’
I looked at my watch. ‘I’ll have to be going soon,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you stay the night? The bed in your room is made up.’
‘No thanks, Dad. I’ve a lot on tomorrow.’ Lie.
‘Well, have a bite to eat first.’
I said I would if he would let me cook it and show him how the grill on the cooker worked.
‘No need, I’ve got it taped now,’ he said.
But I insisted, to ensure that the meal was edible, and grumblingly he acquiesced.
I left the house at about six. He watched me putting on my overcoat in the cramped hall under the low-wattage bulb, and pulled back the felt curtain over the front door to let me out. We shook hands, his musician’s fingers cool and soft in mine. ‘Well, goodbye Dad,’ I said. ‘Take care of yourself.’
‘’Bye son, thanks for coming.’ He gave me a smile that was almost tender, and stood at the open door until I passed through the front gate. I raised my arm in a final salute, and set off for the station with a guiltily light heart. Duty done.
