My Father's Fortune Read online

  One night something actually happens, though it’s not the Fire Watcher but George Davis in his pyjamas who comes running wildly across the road. ‘Tom! Tom! I’ve got an incendiary on my veranda!’ My father, also in his pyjamas, rushes into the garage to look for the strirrup-pump, but soon gives up the struggle to squeeze between the car and the tangle of rusty bikes. From somewhere, I think from behind the garage, in the confusion of beanpoles and raspberry canes at the back of the stagnant water butt, he manages to produce the long-handled shovel, though not I think the bucket of sand, which my sister and I have been playing with, and between them they get the white-hot phosphorus off George Davis’s veranda and out into his back garden, where it leaves an impressively large blackened clearing in the jungle.

  Mostly, though, the Fire Watcher’s nights are quiet. When it’s my father’s turn, and the sky is clear, he takes a pair of binoculars and a map of the constellations with him, and learns probably more about the universe than he ever did at school. One night he wakes me and takes me out to watch one of the big raids on the City and the docks, a dozen miles north-east of us. I recall not just the red of the northern sky, but a fairy palace of lights built high overhead, with searchlight beams supporting a multicoloured ceiling of gently parachuting flares. His office, in the Borough, is somewhere on the edge of all this. Kerry for some reason has to do his fire-watching at the office, and up on the roof. The bombs exploding nearby rock the building so badly one night that Kerry looks over the side and sees the whole structure keeling over beneath him like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, then runs to the other side and gets there just in time to see it keeling over in that direction.

  So Kerry says. Or so my father says Kerry says.

  *

  It’s difficult to know, when you look at someone’s life, what you should give them credit (or blame) for, and what you should put down to luck. My father didn’t start with many advantages. Sharing two rooms with six other people and leaving school at fourteen isn’t a privileged upbringing. Finding himself with not just one but two collapsing families to support wasn’t much of a gift from the gods, either. But he made a go of his life, and not only because he was able to move out to Ewell and wear a homburg hat. I think that most of his success, and the happiness I’m fairly sure he enjoyed, have to be attributed to his own efforts, to his hard work and quick wits. But he had a bit of pure luck as well. His date of birth, for a start; just as he was too young for the First World War, so he was too old for the Second. Then again, however little else he inherited, he was somehow endowed with the confidence that enabled him to make use of his abilities. He must also have had some experience of the love that he was able to show to me and my sister, and that we in our turn felt for our own children. And then the biggest bit of luck: going to the party with poor Bert Crouchman that night in 1919. All these turn-ups for the book had lasting consequences. There’s not many more of them to come, though.

  Actually, my father could never have been called up for the second war, even if he had been younger or they had started taking men in their forties. He’s growing increasingly deaf, which isn’t such good fortune. I don’t know when it first became noticeable, but by the middle of the war he’s just about as deaf as his brother and sisters. He has to get a hearing aid. It comes in a black granulated leather case, with the name of the manufacturer, Ardente, imprinted in gold, and I long to possess it. The case opens with a pop, and there on the midnight-blue velvet lining sits the polished black amplifier and earpiece on its silky cord. You put the box in your waistcoast pocket and your hands in your trouser pockets, so that your jacket’s pulled back to leave the microphone facing your interlocutor. It’s a discreet and magical instrument, as beautiful in its way as my mother’s violin; and it’s not the slightest use.

  He has to start again with something much clumsier and more complex, a serious instrument prescribed by a specialist. This is a Bonochord, made by Allen & Hanbury. If I remember it rightly the microphone and the amplifier are separate, and they’re attached to half a pair of headphones, which covers one ear completely. There are certainly two batteries, a low-tension one about the size of a pocket Bible, and a high-tension one more like a Bible that you might carry to church each Sunday. A web of wires runs between jacket and pockets and waistcoat, between waistcoat and back trouser pocket.

  I watch him winding himself into this harness before he leaves the house in the morning, like a medieval knight arming himself for battle. The wires become tangled. He taps the microphone, or gets Vi or me to say something into it. He listens anxiously; nothing’s coming through. A hidden connection somewhere is loose. One of the batteries is flat. A switch here or a knob there is in the wrong position … And, then, when he gets home in the evening, I watch him unwind himself from it all again and lay the various components and leads out in good order on his dressing table. I have no desire to own this grim array, unlike the last one, even though it seems actually to work.

  I never asked him what it was like, being deaf, and getting deafer. I never asked him what he felt about this very visible muddling of his dapper appearance, this invisible undermining of his quick understanding of the world around him on which all his sharpness depended. How on earth did he manage to carry on with his job? I realise now that nerving himself to go bouncing in with his big smile had always cost him more than he ever revealed; my cousin John says that at some point in the thirties my father came to stay with them to recuperate from overwork, which I suppose means stress. Now, before he goes into battle, he has to sit in the car plugging in the batteries and switching on all the switches, tapping on the microphone, checking all the connections … Then he has to establish friendly relations with a stranger whose personality he can’t quite assess, or re-establish them with an old acquaintance whose familiar joshing and banter he can’t quite catch. How does he field all the objections and prevarications, all the technical inquiries about the product, all the haggling over discounts and delivery dates, when they come to him from beyond this widening invisible ocean, this confusion of unwanted ambient noise that the hearing aid so impartially magnifies as well? Where does he find the courage to struggle on with it, day after day, week after week?

  One technique he develops to help him through is to make himself more of a character. He puts on a performance, and in so far as he can he keeps the conversational initiative. He doesn’t leave the person he’s talking to much chance to say anything that needs to be heard. He joshes and banters, and smiles, of course, so that all the customer has to do is to be an audience, and smile back. And if the customer does say something inaudible which seems to need a response, my father uses his natural bent for exaggeration to invent a humorous distortion of it that will make his interlocutor laugh and then repeat himself. ‘But, Tom, how many square feet per hour of this stuff can an unskilled fitter actually run out on site?’ – ‘How many what at night?’ – ‘On site. Square feet.’ – ‘I suppose so, but safer if they wear boots.’

  There are some inaudible announcements, though, that he can’t joke his way around. ‘I’m driving through Herne Hill this morning,’ he tells us, ‘and I’m just thinking, “That’s funny. Why are there all these people lying in shop doorways?” – when woomph! About two streets away, I should think.’

  For many years I waited to inherit the family deafness in my turn. My hearing is now, in old age, getting decidedly shaky, and so is my cousin John’s, but neither of us, nor any of our siblings or cousins, has suffered anything like the curse that dogged the two previous generations. The performance that my father put on to cope with it, though, set an example that came to hand later when I had other difficulties of my own – then stayed with me, and became a professional resource, rather as it did for him.

  *

  There’s another reason, too, why he would never be called up. He’s in what’s known as a reserved occupation. As a rep? Yes, as a Technical Representative, which is what he now is, and it’s reserved because of the importance o
f what he’s selling and who he’s selling it to.

  The ‘TAC’ on all his stationery and brochures stands for Turners Asbestos Cement, and the customers to whom he’s now representing the firm are the government and the armed services. The firm’s logo shows a female figure in Greek robes doing rather what my father’s doing as Fire Captain. She’s confronting a sea of flames, armed not with a stirrup-pump or a long-handled shovel but a shield made of asbestos. This is the great selling point of the product, particularly now that the Luftwaffe’s attempting with some success to repeat the effects of the Great Fire of London: unlike wood and various forms of wood substitute it’s non-inflammable (and it doesn’t rot). Unlike corrugated-iron roofing and cast-iron drainpipes it’s also rustproof. Asbestos has no vices. Everywhere we go my father can point to great grey corrugated cliffs and hillsides of asbestos cement, most of it manufactured by Turners, the industry leader, some of it sold by himself, and a lot of it housing aircraft and munitions, locomotives and troops. There’s something profoundly dreary about its lifeless greyness, even to my uncritical eye, but at least it will remain grey and not go charcoal-black or mouldy-green or rust-red. My father probably hasn’t had to struggle to hear many objections or rejections from the civil servants and senior officers he deals with, now I come to think about it. The nation can’t get enough of the stuff. He’s part of the War Effort.

  He even has a petrol ration. Archie Dennis-Smith’s Triumph Dolomite retires to the garage for the rest of the war, like almost all the other cars in the district. Barlow is spared any further expenditure on petrol for his heap of rust. Our car is the only one left in the street. What do the neighbours make of this? Particularly when we somehow manage to go by car to the West Country for at least three summer holidays in the war.

  The samples of asbestos that my father brings home are another of our resources against wartime shortages – a version of the carver’s perks that he appropriates from the ever-smaller weekly meat ration. The samples, though, unlike the Sunday joints, grow bigger and more numerous – no longer pocket-handkerchief-sized miniatures but complete sheets of roofing and lengths of piping. They’re one of the chief raw materials that we improvise things out of. The anti-duck fence is not the only asbestos in the garden. There are also many heavy rectangular boxes, about the size of orange crates and the same grim industrial grey as the hangars and warehouses. What purpose they’re intend to serve in the building trade I don’t know, but we use them as planters. We turn them over and punch drainage holes in the bottom by hammering a rusty screwdriver through them with the back of the rusty chopper, then grow tomatoes and lavender in them. I build an aircraft out of them. I saw the samples up with a rusty hacksaw from the coal shed, filling the air with asbestos dust. The result doesn’t fly, of course. It doesn’t even look much like an aircraft – it doesn’t look anything like an aircraft – but it’s large enough for me to sit in and imagine that it’s an aircraft.

  Our other great resource is Uncle Sid. He keeps bringing the cigarettes, on which life in wartime apparently depends even more heavily than in peacetime – Senior Service now, in packs of five hundred or a thousand from the NAAFI. He’s an RAF officer – not a fighter pilot, like Fielding’s son-in-law, but a controller in Bomber Command. He sits in the tower at base and solidly, reliably, reasonably talks down shattered crews limping home after a long night of fear over Germany and occupied Europe. They’re sometimes off-course, lost, low on fuel. They’re flying on three engines, have half the undercarriage gone or a live bomb jammed in the bomb bay, crew dead or dying. He sits through the small hours waiting like a patient parent for them to be back in radio contact. He smokes and drinks cocoa and joshes them and is the voice of normality and home in the darkness. They all call him Uncle, just as I do. His avuncularity, like my father’s smartness, has been channelled into the War Effort.

  In the daytime, though, he gets on his blue-and-chrome sports bicycle and cycles round the Lincolnshire farms buying eggs and an occasional rabbit, which he brings to us at the weekends with the cigarettes. He also brings his own carver’s perks – small scraps that have fallen from the overflowing tables of the armed services. The RAF has more parachute silk than it can ever make parachutes out of – and there are many things apart from parachutes that waiting wives and sisters-in-law and their mothers can use it for. Late in the war the RAF also finds itself oversupplied with thick yellow felt. It has acquired it for aero engines to sit on when they’re taken out of aircraft to be repaired and serviced. Uncle Sid has done a deal, involving perhaps farm-smoked Lincolnshire bacon, with a contact in the workshops, and out of his laden kitbag, together with the cigarettes and the silk, emerge fat yellow rolls of felt. He comes to us, on a 36 or a 48, for a short break from the war – to relax in the health-giving cigarette smoke and asbestos dust of the Surrey Hills; but he spends his leave just as busily as he did when he was cutting up and gluing cardboard models of the Tower Bridge and the Coronation Scot. Only now he’s cutting up the yellow felt and sewing it together with huge stitches of red thread to make slippers. Soon everyone in the family is shuffling about the house in thick yellow slippers with red stitching.

  On Sunday evening he pushes aside the felt trims and tangles of thread that now cover the dining-room table and three-piece suite, and gets out his RAF officer’s tunic and overcoat. Still wearing his own pair of yellow slippers, he fetches his brass button-stick and a tin of Duraglit. Also wearing yellow slippers I sit watching him, as four at a time he traps and buffs the gleaming buttons, each with the embossed RAF eagle and crown that I love to run my reverent index finger over. Still as good-humoured and phlegmatic as ever, he’s preparing to return to the long nights in the tower alone with the unseen crews, and the days scavenging for food and scraps to keep us going. Back to the War Effort, back to his modest part in levelling the bricks and mortar of Germany.

  My father, meanwhile, wearing his yellow slippers, writes his reports and checks the batteries of his hearing aid, ready for Monday morning. Back to the War Effort on the home front, back to his modest part in raising the asbestos roofs and pipes of Britain.

  7

  A Glass of Sherry

  And on the war goes. By this time I have forgotten, even if my parents haven’t, that there was once a time before the Duration. The Duration is the duration of the war, but it has become a freestanding abstraction in its own right, and is the condition of our life. It’s the reason why the beaches on the South Coast are blocked with forests of slimy green scaffolding, why there are pig-bins on the corner and mosquito-infested static water tanks in back streets, why cakes taste of baking soda, and ice cream of … I don’t know what: something grey and neutral … asbestos dust, possibly. It has become not so much a period of time as a purpose in itself. What are we fighting for? – For the Duration.

  Not all the effects of the Duration are bad. The shortages that everyone now faces make the scruffy compromises of our lifestyle a little less egregious. Then again, in the thirties London was advancing relentlessly upon Ewell. The fields over the hill just above our house had already ceased to grow any crops except half-a-dozen species of new house, and bald concrete roadways through the overgrown wasteland where more new houses would one day be. Sooner or later the developers would be in Hillside Road itself, driving a concrete roadway between Miss Hay at No. 4 and Miss Johnson at No. 5, where a narrow entrance, choked with nettles and elder, old paint tins and piles of abandoned asphalt, leads to the little landlocked triangle of countryside behind the houses. Then the farmlands just beyond us would go the same way. On over Epsom Downs the houses would march …

  Only now the whole unstoppable advance has been stopped. For the Duration.

  For the Duration the enormous wastelands of the estate being developed by Gleesons over the top of the hill, and the tangled triangle behind Hillside Road, have become patched with allotments where the adults of the district Dig for Victory, and overgrown with rank grasses where the children build camps
and huts, where they smoke and bake potatoes and bully each other. In the reprieved farmyard we maintain foul-smelling sloshy contact with agricultural life, and in the vast prairies of the meadows we wander at random – this way, that way – walk, run, lie in the long fallow and look at the sky. We cycle up to Epsom Downs and gaze out over the panorama of London and the Thames Valley under their attendance of silver barrage balloons. No one worries that we will be run over; there’s no one on the roads to run us over – only my father when he gets back from work, only Dr Wilde on his rounds, only a few army dispatch riders and horse-drawn milk-floats. No one thinks we will get abused or murdered; all the abusers and murderers are in the services, abusing and murdering someone else.

  Yes, for some of the other people out there the Duration is not so enjoyable. I’m chastened now when I read the histories of the war or see the film archive, and am reminded once again of the horrors that are occurring while we are so blithe and uncaring. Even at the time I’m occasionally aware of events in the wider world, and not just the of Battle of Britain and the Blitz. I sense the sudden lightening of mood among the adults in the summer of 1941, when Germany invades Russia, and people begin to feel that we really might have a chance after all. On one of our mother’s half-term treats for us in London we see an exhibition about Bomber Command, with a huge model of Essen burning, a thousand red and orange fires pulsing in the darkness, though with no sign of the burning bodies among them. Another treat: a family visit to a show at the Kingston Empire on 8 September 1943 – my tenth birthday – when the manager comes on stage and stops proceedings to announce Italy’s surrender. Then at Christmas 1944 a shadow falls over the festivities as the Germans counter-attack in the Ardennes, and for a few weeks seem to be on the way to driving the Allied armies back to the Channel and re-occupying Europe.