A bit more family

My mother’s parents had more humble backgrounds than my father’s.  

Esmond Lloyd Rea was a Yorkshireman, from Wakefield. I know nothing about his early history.  He was employed by the Inland Revenue, which entailed being sent to wherever the job demanded, which is probably why my mother was born in the Welsh borders and fetched up in Bournemouth to meet my father there. 

Grandpa must have been allowed to stop being peripatetic, or perhaps to retire, because by the late thirties he had settled down and bought 66 Watcombe Road, just down the road from us.  He was a jolly man, who enjoyed his beer and his music.  We’d be taken down the road for Sunday lunches and record sessions, and sometimes sleep over, presumably when my parents had other engagements (which doesn’t feel very likely) or more probably just wanted to be shot of us and have some time together alone (though that doesn’t seem very likely either).  It was presented to the children as a treat – you’re going to sleep at Granny and Grandpa’s tonight, won’t that be lovely? – and of course accepted without question. 

Ethel Jones, Granny, had roots in County Cork, but I don’t think she was Irish.  It’s impossible to find out anything more from the internet – the surname doesn’t help – and no family documents that I know of have survived.  How she met Esmond in the Welsh borders is yet another unanswered question.  I’ve explained what I know of how he got there, but how did she get there?  Anyhow, they were in Coleford, in the Forest of Dean, when my mother (their only child) was born in 1907.

Family Christmasses concluded (for now)

So now all the cards are down* and the tree is sitting naked outside the porch, ready for its final blaze of glory on the bonfire, it’s time to tell you about Christmas with my fourth and last family. 

Except I can’t, because circumstances have dictated that the two I’ve had so far have been only partial gatherings of the entire clan, and although I could retrofit several full assemblies and make it up, that’d be cheating.  So I’ll just say that the two so far have been wonderful in quite different ways, and instead share a few more details from previous lives:

The only first family Christmas I remember clearly was when my brother was born, on December 23^rd.  My sister and I were standing in the hall beside my father when the phone rang, he listened, and told us the news.  It was snowing heavily, and we played out in it next day.  That’s the whole memory, anything more would be made up; but its sharpness still sparkles so I’m sharing it unembellished.

The singsongs started out a bit tentative, but over a couple of years settled down into a tradition: Sloop John B (a gleeful travesty of the Beach Boys, everyone wanting to do the ‘doo-do-da-doo-doo’ part); Alan and my immaculate harmony on the Ev’s All I Have To Do Is Dream; in the early years a lovely solo of a pre-war song I shamefully forget by Alan’s dad Les; my take on Buddy Holly’s Everyday; other stuff; and the grand finale, American Pie, in full.   Eventually it became a chore for me (I was the bandleader, after all) and I almost started to dread it nearly as much as the present-issuing routine.  Now, I wouldn’t mind another crack (if I could still play the guitar – must check that sometime).

*I might do my spasmodically annual Xmas card audit soon, if I can be bothered.

Family Christmasses (cont’d)

When I got married in 1988, I joined my third family.  That was in August, and in about October the subject of Christmas came up.  I’d already realised that they did it on a scale I hadn’t yet experienced, so in a moment of self-confident rashness I said “Well, we can have it here, can’t we?”  There were expressions ranging from bewildered through delighted to highly relieved.  Afterwards, I was consoled.  “Well, you weren’t to know...”

It turned out that we were sleeping eight adults and two pre-teens in our just occupied, barely habitable three-bedroom house.  That proved easy once modesty, privacy, all that kind of stuff had been sufficiently downgraded – after all, I was used to roughing it.  What proved to be harder to cope with was the sheer scale of the thing.  Especially the presents.

This family’s approach to present-giving, it seemed, could be summarised as: if you know you need it, or are going to need it – a shirt, a suit, a pair of shoes, an electric toothbrush, anything –  in the next twelve months, wrap it up and call it a Christmas present.  (I exaggerate, but not much.)  This wasn’t in itself a bad idea, and it did add to the general jollity for the first hour or two – everybody likes a pressie, whether their own or someone else’s, don’t they? – but the rule, it also seemed, was that each one had to be opened, inspected and if you were unlucky passed round the whole family to be admired, before the paper on the next one could be touched.  Time passed.  Slowly.  Eventually lunch came to the rescue.

My exact memory of how it went is hazy now, but I’m sure that at some point after the pudding and before the next round of gifts – probably during the coffee and brandies, come to think of it – I had an inspiration. 

“Sing-song anybody?”

Twenty eyes lit up.

This story will be concluded in my next post.

 

 

Family Christmasses

I reckon I’ve belonged to four families so far, if a family can be thought of as a bunch of people you spend Christmas with. 

All four families were very different, but all four Christmasses were the same in essence, which I don’t need to spell out but will anyway  - gifts; food and drink; laughter and love; the occasional spat and reconciliation; exhaustion and unexpected energy reserves… I didn’t need to, did I?  So I’d like to have a look at the differences.

When I was growing up, Christmas was a time to be taken for granted, of course – I was a child, and children have the feelings they’re taught to and don’t question them much, do they?  So I won’t dwell on childhood Christmasses except to note that gifts were pretty frugal: this was the forties and fifties, and though my parents were well off by most people’s standards, there wasn’t that much left over for extravagance, which in any case wasn’t in their nature.  So our stockings would be bulked out with  tangerines and walnuts – strangely, those are the gifts I seem to remember most vividly.

Then I joined an Italian family.  The emphasis there was on the food and drink.  I read an article recently which feared that this was in danger of dying out, and there’s probably a risk of that, but I have few direct connections with Italy any more, so can’t say.  My Italian family was from Reggio-Emilia, which meant antipasto, then capelletti (or tortellini) alla panna (in cream; none of your wimpish brodo round there), then a huge bollito misto with salsa verde and rosso; cheese (appropriate wines to accompany all that, often home-made lambrusco, but not as you might know it – real lambrusco is raspingly dry and low in alcohol, drunk more in the manner and quantities we’d drink bitter); various desserts probably including zuppa inglese (English soup: trifle to you); rounded off with coffee, a slice of panettone and a grappa or cognac or several.  After all that there wasn’t much time, space or energy for anything else.

The third and fourth families will be along tomorrow.

Mothers Day

Next Sunday is Mother’s Day, right?  Well no, not according to my mother it isn’t.  It’s Mothering Sunday. 

For a progressive woman, she was remarkably traditional in some respects, this being just one of them.  She hated the term ‘Mother’s Day’, and I’ve obviously inherited some of her attitudes, because so do I; though for possibly different reasons.

My mother always said that, though change for the good was to be fought for, change for change’s sake was a bad thing.  Traditions have value, and shouldn’t be cast aside simply because they’re old.  I subscribe to that.  (Although I don’t entirely accept her secondary motive, which was that ‘Mother’s Day’ should be resisted because it was ‘American’.  She was irrationally against nearly all things American, at least in her later years.  The thinking, or emotion, behind that shift I’ll never know: after the War she had nothing but praise for America’s role in defeating Nazism, and Lend-Lease and the subsequent Marshall plan, without which, she rightly thought, Europe would have collapsed back into the same kind of chaotic vacuum as it did in the twenties and thirties.)

Anyway, to come back to the point: she was wrong about ‘Mothering Sunday’.  It was originally nothing to do with motherhood, but was invented to lure people back to their ‘mother church’, and only fairly recently became subsumed into a celebration of the role of a mother.  But that’s a quibble: what’s in a name?  What it stands for is what matters.

I do, when I notice or remember it, think of my mother on that day, but not exclusively then.   I think of her quite often, randomly and unexpectedly.  Everyone has a mother, and it’s a bit glib to compress one’s recognition of her into this one day a year, isn’t it?  I can imagine a mode of thought which says “Right, that’s her done for another year.”

That’s reprehensible, and that’s why I dropped the apostrophe in the title of this post.  Even better, shift it to the right: “Mothers’ Day”.  Let’s celebrate all mothers as well as our own – the deprived, starving, abused, unwitting, unwilling.  We all owe them our existence.

Is it over yet?

It must be, no bangs yet this evening. 

When I were a lad, bonfire night was the 5^th of November, and lasted precisely one night.  (All right, it might have been shifted to the nearest weekend, but still, one night.)  And it was as much about bonfires as about fireworks.  Certainly the construction of the pile of the summer garden cast-offs was a drawn-out process, carefully engineered by my father to ensure maximised combustion when the time came.  (He was like that.) 

And when the time did come, nourished by a few splashes of petrol or paraffin, and there was that crackling skyward rush of flame and sparks and the fire grew from inside so that the edges of the pile became a black lattice against the fierce yellow interior, like streaks across the sun, and then the bonfire gently matured into a vermilion face-scorching glow into which you could thrust potatoes until they turned black on the outside and molten under the skins, and slap lashings of salted butter on them and deliberately burn your tongue eating them – well, who needed Standards or Brocks?

Of course, we did have fireworks too.  Wobbly rockets in milk bottles (which sometimes went haywire and spun off sideways); crackerjacks (which I hated because I was convinced they were chasing me); Catherine wheels (are they still called that?  I hope not, given the gruesome derivation); Air Bombs (unbelievably, the deputy scoutmaster once organised a firework battle, with these as handheld weapons) …  

I didn’t really like it.  The next days were much better.  My father would split open spent Roman candles, tip out the powder onto the drive and ignite it with a miniature display of sparks and colours that was better than the real thing.  My friend Mike and I once used leftover bangers to try and blow up a rotting tree stump in his garden – I think we may even have partially succeeded.   And I even used to enjoy collecting the rocket sticks.

I wrote here - gosh, five years ago! – about my best ever firework display.  I can’t recommend this approach though.

 

More Island Notes

As it’s a slow blog day, a bit more on the Jersey trip, mostly about the hotel.

It’s called the Ommaroo, located on the coast road from St Helier to Gorey – just go up round the hairpins past Fort Regent, drop back down and it’s on the left, can’t miss it; though the car park is a bit harder to find, as I discovered three times. 

It can’t be on the right, because that’s the sea, or what passes for it here – a rather scruffy curve of beach with some anonymous industrial constructs to the far south.  Before these, you see an elliptical area, ringed by a  rather brutalist concrete wall, which fills with water at high tide.  There’s a rather charming blue and white art deco pier running out beside it.  Apparently this was (and possibly might still be) a swimming pool.  During the Occupation, it was the only location on the island at which German soldiers (officers mostly, one would guess), because they weren’t in uniform, could consort freely with local girls.  Afterwards, they might repair to the Ommaroo for entertainment.  None of the Jersey natives I speak to are able to confirm or deny this legend.

The inside of the hotel is multi-levelled.  Although there are notionally three (or possibly four, hard to say) floors, each of these contains many mini-floors, so that if you’re entering from, say, the car park (as we did, naturally), you will ascend and descend four flights of two or more steps before you reach the reception area.  The charming Polish receptionist will then cart your cases halfway back the way you came until he sends you off  in another direction (through the coffee lounge) whilst he hauls them up some stairs “because the lift isn’t strong enough.”  (Lord knows why – I’ve shown you the lift’s rules.)   The lift is just inside the door from the car park.

K. manages, with my guidance, not to fall up or down any of those steps (although she does succeed next day in tripping over the baby gate at the top of her grand-daughter’s stairs, whilst trying to evade their labradoodle, but that’s another story*.)

At breakfast next morning, the waiters present K. with a surprise – a birthday cake, which has been delivered by some relatives.  She’s overwhelmed, of course, and the waiters aren’t even slightly perturbed by finding that there aren’t any candles to light.  Some other guests (who turn out to share her surname) come over and sing Happy Birthday.

Later, I ask John the taxi, who’s from the Midlands but has lived here for thirty-five years, knows everything there is to know about the place, and doesn’t like it, why it’s called the Ommaroo.  “Nobody knows,” he says.

I believe him.

I think it's one of the most delightful hotels I've ever stayed in.  I have Somerset Maugham visions.

 

*By the way, anyone want to buy a labradoodle puppy sometime next autumn?

Five notes from a small island

1.      Jersey roads are carefully designed such that all right turns from side roads onto mains are blind.  The solution is to edge forward, gently or aggressively according to how local you are, until someone gives way.  The driver who gives way will invariably have ‘H’, for ‘Hire car’, on their number plate.  I suspect this is an island sport.

2.      The Jersey Bug.  The hospital has closed for all but A&E admissions.  It strikes without warning, literally – one person had to exit from a high-powered meeting, again literally on the trot – and then wipes you out for twenty four hours.  This happened to almost everyone I had contact with, from Friday evening through to Monday morning.  The worst thing is that none of the doctors seem to be able to guess at the incubation period.  So I’m possibly still in with a chance.

3.      The toilet in the General’s house doesn’t have a lock.  We are instructed to sing loudly to advise our presence, K’s song being ‘The White Cliffs of Dover.’  Hence a new bit of local near-rhyming slang: “Just off for a white cliffs …”

4.      Here’s the notice in the hotel lift, which amused me.  I could have rounded up some candidates …

 

5.      What was 5?  Oh yes, it was K’s 90^th.  Despite some important guests being unable to make it due to (2.), she bounced back from the disappointment, feisty old tough Yorkshire pudding that she is, and had a great evening.  One thing that moved me was that people sent huge bouquets even though they knew she wouldn’t be able to ship them back home, just to show their affection.  (K, of course, moaned about ‘waste of money’, hiding her obvious delight; the General has arranged for surrogate bouquets to be delivered to Reading.)

Sibling Rivalry

Milimajor is crossing the Atlantic because he can a) no longer bear the scoffs and scorn of his erstwhile so-called colleagues in the so-called Labour party; b) no longer bear the carefully disguised pitying over-the-shoulder eye contact from Miliminor; or c) has been offered a seriously better paid job doing something useful, read the subtle tweets from godfather Tone, and thought ‘fuck all that, I’m outa here.  And I wasn’t really that into football anyway.’ 

As a fellow victim of sibling rivalry, I feel for him.  Tell me about it.  My brother has, throughout his life, outplayed me in almost every aspect of attainment.  I hardly know where to start, but the motorbike will do.  At seventeen, I mooted the idea of getting one, like my mates, and was forcibly made to wash my mouth out with two-stroke and write a hundred times ‘I must not think about motorbikes’.  Five years later, guess who’s whizzing around Bournemouth on some kind of Norton.  Or maybe it was a Vincent Black Shadow.  Doesn’t matter.  I’ve got over it.

Let’s go back further.  I was expected, at the age of ten, to look after him whilst my parents were swanning around doing work and stuff and my sister was trying to become a teenager.  Did he ever do the same for me?  Did he hell.  Even when I dropped him on his head in a train game involving dining room chairs, he showed no gratitude.  He just got up, bleeding from his eyebrow, and howled.  I was gutted, I remember: at least, I thought, you could have thumped me, shown some recognition.  But no, it was all about him.  And he must have been at least four, you’d expect some maturity, wouldn’t you?

And don’t start me on technology.  He was configuring wireless networks when I was still stringing coax cables across the pull-down kitchen clothes dryer.  He had the country’s first Pioneer 100-CD multi-changer just after I’d moved on from 78s, and the day after I got one, he gently, without a smidgeon of smugness, told me about this new gadget called MP3.  And don’t start me on the Fiesta XR2 – how heartless is it to upgrade to a Peugot 309 GT something-or-other the day after, on his advice, I’d bought one of those?  (Or my employers had, to be exact.)

And now – and now! – he’s moving house!!  Just like that: a mere eighteen months in the process, start to finish.  I’ve been trying to achieve this for at least three years, and haven’t got past the stage of ‘who’ll empty the attic for me?’, never mind ‘ where might I move to?’ or even ‘why would I want to?’ or ‘where’s the vertical equivalent of this sofa?’  And the little tinker just ups and does it!

Clearly, I’m going to have to rethink this relationship.  Right, done that: I still play better guitar than him.  Oh, but he plays better mouth organ than me. 

Visible Means of Support

On the Antiques Roadshow, someone had a collection of walking sticks.  They all seemed to be quite valuable, so I dashed out to the hall to check the two I have.  I’m fairly sure they are both worthless in money, but they’ve made me wonder, as seems to happen quite often recently about things, where they came from and what they might really be worth, in history.

 

The one on the right, I suspect, belonged to my maternal grandfather, Esmond Lloyd Rae.  I remember quite a lot about him, but mostly dating from his latter days when he was stroke- and bedridden, blind, and I had to kiss his stubbly cheek goodnight in his smelly room.  In earlier years he was a jolly music-loving toper who grew raspberries and kept chickens; and he played the violin well, I was often told.  I don’t think I ever heard him play, although can one ever be sure about that kind of thing? – when was the first time you ever heard the sound of a violin? 

That walking stick, with its cool black ebony finish and the firmly functional no-nonsense knob at the top, looks to me exactly like the kind of accessory a proud Yorkshireman called Esmond would brandish on a youthful promenade in Wakefield.  So that’s the imaginary story I’m assigning to that one.

 

The one on the left intrigues me more.  The handle is carved ivory, and looks as though it’s been well-caressed.  (The carvings round the top are quite worn.)   More importantly, although you can’t see it in the photo, the ferrule bears the inscription ‘F G L’.  Knowing what I do of my family history, the ‘F’ must stand for Frank, and the ‘L’ for Large; but what about the ‘G’?  It could only be George, couldn’t it?  But there isn’t a Frank George Large in the family tree my sister compiled, which took that side back to at least 1840. 

And off goes my imagination again.  I want to see Frank George, in the early 19^th century, switching this walking stick around, sauntering along the towpath at Lechlade, just for show.  And I want to know what he was thinking about.

I never will, obviously, so I’ll have to make it up.  Meanwhile, I’ve just recently spotted someone else’s collection of shooting sticks … 

Christening

Great- or Grand-Nephew Bertie (not sure of the correct terminology – he’s my niece’s son; come to think of it she’s my niece by marriage rather than blood, so that complicates it further: Grand-Nephew-in-Law?  I quite fancy being a Grand-Uncle-in-Law) got christened on Sunday, in Jersey, and I was there.  Something I don’t experience that often, so I thought I’d jot down a few notes, in no particular order, just for the record.

Bertie, who is five months old, is one of those people who will look at a situation, assess it and decide on the appropriate reaction, before actually reacting.  Much like his mother.  So he decided that all this talk, in an unfamiliar language, needed a bit of pepping up, and joined in.  His father, who seemed a bit embarrassed by this, briefly took him off to see the church organ, which obviously made more sense than the Order of Service, and was a bit less boring.

The water-splashing-on-the-head bit, though, was obviously what he’d been expecting and looking forward to.  I wish you could have seen Bertie’s face just after this when the vicar turned him right-way-up to face the congregation.  Astonishment, delight, a tickle of resentment, even a wry raised eyebrow – I imagined I saw all of these.  Who’s to say?  I’ll ask him in ten years’ time.  (No I won’t.  But I thought he was thinking those thoughts.)

As part of the service, a relative gets to do a reading of their choice (subject presumably to divine approval).  N announced her reading as “a poem you will probably know – ‘If’, by Rudyard Coupling – erm, Kipling.”  She swore to me afterwards that it wasn’t deliberate, but I don’t believe her.

 

I’ve recently expressed some rather feeble reservations about a Christening being bracketed with a birthday, an anniversary, or even a funeral as an excuse for a piss-up.  It seemed to me that it was, uniquely, a Christian religious ritual, of initiation rather than celebration – a thought that was reinforced by the actual ceremony, as sensitively conducted by the clever worldly vicar.  But then we got back to the house and champagne started to flow, downwards, and the hog-roast got carved, and I put such childish qualms behind me.

Grandma

This is my father’s mother.  She was a figure of awe in my family, until she died at the age of ninety in 1960, when I was eighteen.  She was called Emmeline, a good Victorian name that has been carried forward in the family to my niece (whose fortieth I will be celebrating in a few weeks’ time, as it happens, but who is not at all Victorian).

Grandma was Victorian, and suitably formidable.  Her maiden surname is also my middle name, and I firmly believe (without a shred of evidence) that this naming protocol, which continues down the generations on the male side, may have been one of the conditions of my parents being permitted to marry.  The surname is still eminent in Jersey. 

Her husband, my grandfather, although born in the same year, 1870, died in the thirties, so I know nothing of him apart from a couple of old photos.  She was evacuated to England before the invasion of Jersey, and I think she spent much of the rest of her life being shuttled between various relatives.  She was one of numerous siblings, which I guess is how the family fortune got dissipated.  Certainly there was an uncle who absconded to the Argentine and lost a bundle on ill-advised railway investments.

Of course, I was too young to know any of this background firsthand, so I’m doing a certain amount of reconstruction here.  It’s a fact to be pondered that the historical record inevitably gets diluted, even for famous people, never mind the likes of us; and there are probably now only four people alive who have direct memories of Grandma.

She’d come to stay with us for some weeks during each summer, in the fifties.  This was a cause for domestic repositioning in our household.  My mother was stressed out for weeks beforehand.  And Grandma played to her strengths, more or less reordering things in her own image.  She was pretty good at that.  A friend of mine makes great play (in a knowing self-referential way) of the ‘controlling female’ stereotype – she should have asked my grandmother for a few tips.

And yet, I remember her as mostly kind and wry.  If you saw the photos, you’d see that in her face.  Every late afternoon, she would retire for a while to her room; I later learned that this was for her gin.  She once criticised me for using too much toilet paper, making some joke about rationing.  And one year, it must have been about 1953, we kids had been allowed, on a hot summer day, to play in the garden with the hose.  This had to be stopped before Grandma came, but the evidence can’t have been fully concealed, because when she arrived she enquired what had been going on and elicited a confession.  I can hear her now, in her rich Victorian voice.  “Oh, don’t be silly, it’s very hot.  Of course they can play with the hose.  I almost wish I could join them.”

Thanks to my sister for details; more memories please!

And thanks to Z for sowing the seed.

One thing ...

There's a website here wherein you can post photos and descriptions of the objects you would save if your house suddenly started burning down.  Most people assemble a whole lot of stuff and arrange it artistically for the photo-op, but if I did that I would pretty certainly be incinerated by the time I had rummaged through the wardrobes, cupboards, drawers, attics for the many items I might wish to select.  Presumably those people keep it all in one box, just in case - but where do they keep the box, eh?

I think it would be more interesting to ask us to select just one thing, and write a little story about why they would choose it.  So here's mine.

My parents had quite a lot of brass knick-knacks around the house.  I know this because it became one of my domestic tasks to polish them every week, with nice-smelling Brasso, for a shilling.  When I was about six (probably before the polishing regime started), they decided that my sister and I should be given custody, which was presented to us as ownership, of one each of these.  On offer was a fierce Bengal tiger, or this frog.  My sister, being the elder, was given first dibs.  Naturally, she picked the tiger.

I was downcast.  No, I was devastated.  I had coveted, craved for that tiger.  I think I assaulted her, I'm certain I cried with envy and disappointment.  Of course, when you're six, a week of despondency is a lifetime; I certanly don't hold the grudge any more.  In fact, now, when I look at and fondle this fellow, with his plump body and his blind eye, I reckon I got the best deal.

My Autobiography

I know, it looks like a solecism, but it isn't: in this case, it could legitimately be someone else's if I'd left out the word 'My'.  (A cricketer or some other sportsman published a book with that title a few years ago - that is definitely a solecism.  And I bet that's the first time the word 'solecism' has been used three times in the first paragraph of a blog post, without any of us knowing quite what it means.)

Anyway, the point is, I've completed, or abandoned, the first draft of what, in a New Year's Resolution, I jokingly called that.  It isn't, of course: if anything, it's a memoir of my early life, filtered through the element of music, and focussed on the band I eventually belonged to, Dave Anthony's Moods.

I'd like to publish this somehow, not for commercial gain or anything, just so that anyone who wants to can have a look.  But I don't know how to do that.  Anybody know how?  It's 150 pages long, so the blog isn't really an option.

In the meantime, here are the first two paragraphs:

I first became aware of my musical talent quite late on. At school, I tended to be timid (my first name, which I hated) so other boys who weren’t so timid or shy took the lead. Although I had heard, loved, and even listened to music since my ears opened (my father singing me to sleep with ‘A Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’; I think those songs will be my last memory traces to erase themselves), the idea that boys like us could actually do it ourselves never occurred to me, until we heard Lonnie Donegan, Johnnie Duncan and the Blue Grass Boys, the Vipers, Nancy Whiskey. Mike Caddy, Tony Barney and Pete Jennions were those leading, unshy boys who naturally formed skiffle groups. I was given the washboard, and begged my mother for thimbles (the washboard itself acquired from a long gone ironmongers in Southbourne Grove). But that’s getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back.

Let’s imagine Bournemouth in the post-war years, before the end of rationing. We lived in Southbourne. From the cliffs, the vista was defined by Hengistbury Head, then the distant Isle of Wight (the Polar Bear) to the left, Old Harry Rocks with the lights of Swanage beyond, on a clear night, twenty miles to the right, and in between, the vast expanse of blue or grey or silver sea, and the endless horizon. The cliffs, the beach with its alarmingly seasonal changes of sand levels, the tarmac prom, the barnacle-crusted seaweed-tangled breakwaters, the green paint-flaking beach-hut, the icy finger-whitening water – this was where I felt best. Once the barbed wire had been cleared from the beach (placed there just in case Hitler decided that Bournemouth was going to be one of his Normandy beaches; both piers were blown up for similar reasons: we weren’t going to let him dock his pleasure-boats here either, were we?), the family beach-hut was quickly salvaged, painted and reinstated by my energetic father, who had doubtless learned this principle of continual recovery, repair and restitution from his years in the Merchant Navy between the wars. I can’t be precise about the dates of ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. My father was away for most of the war, in Malvern and other places, on important scientific business which the family believed to have been to do with the development of radar, though he never talked about it, having presumably signed the Official Secrets Act. Come to think of it, he never talked about anything much until his very late years, preferring to retreat to his workshop, where he mended things, did obscure works of electronics, and crafted exquisite pieces of woodwork and furniture. But on home visits, he sang me to sleep with these songs, I think, before I could walk properly. There were others – ‘Waltzing Matilda’, ‘My Darling Clementine’, even Leadbelly’s ‘Good Night Irene’ – these melodies and lyrical stories plunged into my psyche at a very early age. I remember his pride in me when he came back on a visit and I had mastered the use of a wheelbarrow (I was four); at six, I helped him shift the sand from the road to the back garden when he single-handedly built the new garage at the side of 37 (which still stands). But after he came home for good, he never sang to me again.