By the time we went on holiday that August, he had recovered his old spark. Friends had lent us a caravan on the west coast of Scotland, and he was desperate not to sit it out while the rest of us went shrimp-catching and flounder-spearing. Fishermen’s waders would not accommodate the plaster cast; he used an empty plastic fertilizer bag instead, tying the top with string so he could wade out up to his thighs. It worked for a couple of days, until, inevitably, water penetrated the bag and the cast began to loosen and break. He had to go to the local hospital and get it reset. He came back, not shamefaced and reproached for having been so irresponsible, but triumphantly carrying the old cast, signed by most of the hospital staff.
I put his medical history back on the desk, and start opening drawers. A diary from 1940 (his spell as houseman in Charing Cross Hospital). A newspaper cutting from 1942 (‘CITY DOCTOR GOES ON MERCY TRIP … A Manchester RAF medical officer was among the crew of a Coastal Command Aircraft which saved the life of a Portuguese boy dangerously ill with Tetanus on one of the Atlantic islands of the Azores. Flight-Lieutenant A B Morrison answered an SOS call and delivered a supply of serum to 11-year-old …’). A programme for the Duke of York’s Theatre, October 1946, to see E. Vivian Tidmarsh’s farcical comedy Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? (it was his honeymoon). A menu for the Annual British Medical Association Dinner at the Swan Royal, Clitheroe, 1948 (shrimp cocktail, roast rib of English beef, assorted cheeses with celery, the toast to His Majesty the King). A ticket for the Colne Golf Club dance, 1949. The official racecard for the Pendle Forest and Craven Harriers Point-to-Point Steeplechase, April 1955 (winners marked in pencil). A diary record of our first family holiday abroad, Majorca, 1961 (what bought, what drunk, where visited, rows over sun-loungers on the terrace: ‘Fat Jew tried to pinch one we’d reserved’). Four torn-off cinema stubs (it must have been South Pacific , the only film we saw together as a family, my mother’s idea, but my father in his cock-eyed element: ‘A hundred and one pounds of fun/ That’s my little honey-bun’). A ticket to the stock car races, Bellevue Stadium, Manchester, 8 October 1963 (my birthday, one of his magical mystery treats). A receipt for the Regent Palace Hotel, 29 July–1 Aug 1966 (the World Cup Final: we were standing down by the Russian linesman when he gave that goal , and left thinking the final score was 3–2 because the Germans didn’t kick off again, joined the celebrations afterwards and heard the horns hooting all night in Piccadilly Circus). Another hotel receipt, for a week at the Cairngorm Hotel, Aviemore, 1969, cost forty-seven pounds, twelve shillings and threepence (our first shot at skiing, a holiday I’d buggered up for him by being confined to bed, my leg swollen from some insect bite).
I shut the drawer again. Every lunch and dinner, every theatre and sports outing, even the hotels where we stayed in the year of UCCA and my efforts to get a university place (he insisted on driving me to the interviews, of course, would have sat in on them if he could), nothing has been chucked, nothing let go of. I try another drawer, and another: cigarette lighters; leather watch-straps; a magnifying glass; Remembrance Day poppies; unsigned, cheeky-suggestive valentine cards (he to my mother, she or someone else to him, who could say: he always asked us not to sign greetings cards within the family, so they could be reused); a green plastic dagger with ‘Dettol’ written on it, his pharmaceutical freebie letter-opener. I shut the drawers again and close my eyes, and try to say their contents back to myself, like that memory game when a tray is put in front of you, then whisked away. And the objects I can recall all belong to the time before I was born. I hang on to them in a kind of desperation, as if, suddenly, all that I never had is lost and gone—a myth of having missed the best years by a breath: my parents first meeting each other; the war, and the strange numbness after the war; their marriage; their first and only practice. I close my eyes and try to see through the mist, the myth. But no picture comes into my head except a man at his desk under a Venetian blind, a man in a forties suit holding an HB pencil, a man trying to sketch something—a design for what? a valentine? a menu? the first National Health Card?—but drawing a blank, and finally screwing the paper up: ‘No good. Try again.’
*
At three I take his car out, pulling on the pair of leather gloves he’s left on the passenger seat. I drive towards Elslack Moor, which I can see ahead fighting clear of the roak. I take the right fork in Elslack village and wind up the steep hill, over the beck, past the farm where the sheepdog used to run out and chase the car, up to the fir plantation where my father and I once found a magical object made of metal and canvas with a piece of withered rubber and a tag: a weather balloon (we had to complete and send back the tag), but to me, aged seven, a miracle.
I stop the car and walk to the summit, the white concrete cairn. The mist has wiped out the valleys below and I can hear only the tug and chomp of grazing sheep. My father used to say the places up here got their names from the time that Charles the First, or was it Cromwell, crossed the Pennines, en route to one of the great Civil War battles, Preston or Marston Moor. ‘Hereby I pitch my tent’ became Earby. ‘Lo, there’s a dale’ became Lothersdale. ‘What’s yon foul ridge?’ became Foulridge. I’d not believed him—as if the King or Lord Protector had had a scribe diligently at elbow to rename the kingdom—but never mind: he had told me, that’s the only history that matters.
I walk back to the car. A Range Rover crashes across the cattle grid. There’d been a time when a drive out on the tops would be a long stop-start process through the sheep-dividing gates of various hill farms, my sister and I taking it in turns to get out and swing the five-barred gates open while the car passed through. You never got traffic in those days; you were the traffic. Now this is a busy road, the scenic cut-through from Colne to Keighley. I drive on a bit, then park again at the viewpoint the council has created above Earby. How different had it been when my parents arrived in 1946? There must have been half a dozen mill chimneys then, not just the one. The houses would all have been in that dark cobbled centre of terraces, not sprawling off in estates towards Sough and Barnoldswick. There would have been the wooden sleepers and iron flash of a railway line, whereas now there’s only the white limestone underlay and (hapless, capless) two pillars where a bridge once stood. There would have been haberdashers and ironmongers, not Chinese take-aways and video rentals. There would have been more smoke, more fields, less noise, fewer cars.
But the huddle of streets round the surprising green clearance of the cricket ground is little altered. And I can see our old house, the Crossings, where the main road, the A56, meets the Colne—Skipton railway line. There was a song when we lived there, ‘The Train Runs Right through the Middle of the House’, which seemed to have been composed especially for us. It wasn’t a good place for patients to come with migraines, but until the practice moved to Water Street, in the fifties, they had no choice: surgery was held in the side of our house. I could remember a roll-top desk, antiseptic smells, a leather-covered bench in the waiting-room, silent, head-down, pale-faced visitors. The trains were an hourly nuisance. My mother’s weighing-scales vibrated. My father gripped his syringe tightly. I was once found standing in the middle of the tracks.
What had he felt about Earby in his first years? He couldn’t pretend to like the place much, the last and least of an eastward sprawl of mill-towns. He’d said during the war that, when it was over, he’d never want to stray more than fifty miles from his home, Manchester. Once out of the RAF, he’d begun by looking for something in Cheshire, nearer his parents. But the money his father had lent him to get started wasn’t enough, could secure only this dead-end practice. There were consolations. He loved the Dales. He wanted to be topdoc, number one GP, and succeeded in wooing patients from the other two local practices. He was still young, just over thirty, when the National Health Service began in 1948, and—though a Tory voter most of his life—was in many ways a model NHS pioneer, receptive to new ideas, with a woman partner, and glad that he no longer had to chase up patients for the two and six o
r four and six or whatever it was they owed him. In the sixties he flirted briefly with emigration to Canada or Australia, and with lusher practices in North Yorkshire, but in the end he stayed put until he retired—for thirty-five years, decade after decade of inexorable routine: surgery at eight-thirty, visits from twelve till two, a quick pint, home for a sandwich, zizz and cup of tea, surgery again from four-thirty till seven-thirty, another visit or two squeezed in on either side.
I’ve often wondered what kind of doctor he was. ‘One of the most irascible buggers I’d ever come across,’ was how one patient had described his first impressions, adding: ‘It didn’t take me long to realize my mistake.’ But perhaps those first impressions were right. My father could be brusque and bad-tempered. He didn’t go in for kind words and placebos. ‘Fresh air and exercise’ was to him the greatest cure for everything, and though by the end he handed out pills as freely as the next doctor I sometimes thought he’d have been happier in an older world of quack medicine and home-made cures. ‘Give them drugs and they’ll be better in a week,’ he’d say, ‘give them nothing and it’ll be seven days.’ I knew how unscientific he could be: masturbation was bad, he warned me when I was a teenager, ‘because it weakens the organ for adult life.’ He had his passions, notably diet: blaming himself for his father’s coronary (if only he hadn’t let him get so overweight), he cut down his own weight (from twelve and a half stones to eleven) and drew up a diet sheet for his patients. But what a diet sheet: ‘YOU MUST NOT EAT bread, cakes, pastry, biscuits, butter, margarine, cream, fatty meats, sugar, jam, chocolate or potatoes,’ it ran. ‘YOU CAN EAT , in small amounts, green vegetables, lettuce, fresh fruit, fish, chicken and lean meat, ALWAYS get up still a bit hungry after each meal, and remember that if you eat enough of anything, grass even, you get fat—look at cows. AND REMEMBER: NO FAT PEOPLE CAME OUT OF BELSEN .’ Earby and Barnoldswick had quite a few Polish refugees. We ourselves had an Austrian Jew for a housekeeper. He was lucky, perhaps, that no one passed his diet on to the local paper.
My father hadn’t the temperament to be anything other than this kind of offensively no-nonsense doctor, though my mother—who worked less full-time in the surgery than he did, but to whom many patients, especially women, preferred to come—always justified his blunt manner by saying that it was what your average Earby patient needed: he didn’t talk down to them, didn’t dissemble, didn’t muck about. And his toughness didn’t run very deep: there was vulnerability and cack-handedness, too. One night he was called to deal with a drunk and violent man and decided that he couldn’t sedate him by conventional means (impossible to get the needle in) and would have to knock him out instead: ‘I went for a right hook rather than a jab.’ The man was mildly shocked by the blow to his chin, calmed down and quietly went off to bed. My father had to go to hospital, having broken his little finger.
I peer down on the dimming lights of Earby and try to remember the last time I saw him in action. Only this morning, on his desk, I’d seen the chart he had with the names of his ‘chronic’ patients, fifty or sixty or more. Since retirement he’s had a ritual of going to see them around Christmas, and of recording the date of every visit. The names of the deceased, marker-penned through in yellow, now outnumber those alive. This is going to be the first year he’s not paid his Christmas visit. So maybe his last time as a doctor was five months ago, on holiday with me in Suffolk. A girl came off her bike outside our gate, a fat, piggy-pink twelve-year-old moaning and bleeding all over the road. I was worried about moving her, but he dragged her on to the lawn and pushed her hair back, trying to find where the blood was coming from. I ran inside for cotton wool, ran back, went in again to ring her parents. By the time I got back he’d washed the blood from her and was dabbing iodine on her face and legs—the iodine left ugly yellow stains, uglier than wounds. Her parents came and took her to hospital, ‘for an X-ray, just in case’. A Thank You card came next day. My father was elated to have been useful again, to have helped and healed. But I kept thinking of those yellow stains and imagined the doctor in Casualty saying, as they brought her in: ‘God, iodine, we don’t use that on face-wounds any more. Who the hell’s done this to her?’
Chastened, afraid, it’s tempting for me to melt all his contradictions into a stream of hagiography. But I know the contradictions are there: the unsnobbish protector and defender of ‘ordinary decent folk’ had his big house, his Merc, his live-in maid, and was acutely aware of his social status; the sentimental family man could be a bully and tyrant; the open-hearted extrovert had a trove of secrets and hang-ups.
I drive down the hill past his old surgery in Water Street, the stream running fiercely under the stone footbridge that links the terraced houses to the street. When I get back to the house around five—the moon pouring in with a new child in its arms, grief coming through like a tooth—I find my mother still sitting as I’d left her, nothing and everything the same.
Carwash
I’M IN BED , avoiding my father. I know he has jobs lined up for me, because it’s Sunday, and everywhere’s closed on Sunday, and he’s keen on us doing things together and being ‘useful’. I hate being useful. Once I used to escape to church, to the choir—a chance to dress up in a white cotton surplice and hairy black cassock, a way of meeting the other three boys in the village. But now that I’ve stopped believing in God, now that I’m running away from the holy family, my one escape is the football I play on Sunday afternoons. Rain flusters against my bedroom window. I worry that today’s match, against Bradley, will be called off. I close my eyes and imagine water gathering in the mud-brown stud-holes of Barnoldswick’s recreation field. Please God, let it stop raining.
I have another worry, that my father will want to come and watch me, which embarrasses me, because he’s a doctor, not like other boys’ fathers, and with a posh car, a black Mercedes, which I don’t want them to see. Luckily, he’s not much interested in football. His sports as a boy were rugby, squash and tennis: ‘Good eye for a ball I had. You have it, too. You should try rugby or tennis as well.’ I did try tennis once, but he beat and barracked me so heavily I have not tried it again. Now that he’s fifty, he is trying other sports, but he’s not had much success. Yachting in Abersoch, he couldn’t get the hang of tacking; the wind died on us, and we had to be towed back by a kid with an outboard (the car we’d left on the beach was about to disappear under the high tide). Riding in Anglesey, he lost a stirrup while galloping along the beach and for a mile or more clung on to the horse by its neck; friends hootingly observed it from a hotel balcony; he came back pale but grinning: ‘Destry rides again.’ He’s fond of telling me to stick to ball games, and I want to tell him to do the same.
The rain eases at the window. It is eleven o’clock. I plan to stay here, reading Kerouac or Salinger or Mailer, until my ritualistic pre-match lunch of steak and chips. But now here’s my father, pushing straight in, hoping to catch me up to no good.
‘Come on, nose out of that book, up. I’ll give you five minutes to get some old clothes on, I need some help washing the car.’
‘I’ve a match later.’
‘So? Plenty of time till then.’
‘But it’s cold.’
‘Up. Half an hour it’ll take, that’s all. You’ve got to learn how to wash cars. You’ll be starting to drive next year. Come on, up.’
I put my clothes on, wishing it were spring, when the job I help my father with is not car-washing but mowing the lawn. Mowing is a drag too, most of it—the sloping front lawn, the two raised back ones—but I love cutting the grass verges out by the road (a chance to look at girls in passing cars, and for them to look at me), and I love the moment when I turn the engine off and run my fingers through my hair—the mower’s vibrations soften my hands and make my hair feel silky-sensual, like a shampoo advert.
It’s freezing up by the garage. There is a cobbled area in front of the old barn, and this is where my father’s car is standing, his black Mercedes, his red-and-white Metropolitan,
his drop-head Triumph Vitesse, his maroon Alvis, or whatever model currently meets his requirements of being open and sporty. Car-washing, he thinks, is a DIY task: coin-in-the-slot alternatives have begun to spring up, with their woolly roller-bales and double row of changing-room showers, but he’ll have no truck with them. Car-washing is as integral a part of his Sunday as a cooked breakfast or the blazer and cravat worn to the pub. It’s more than a conforming, middle-class anality. Car-washing to him is part of learning about cars, a process he’s inducted me in since I was eight, when he put a moped engine in the back of my old pedal car and taught me to drive, a process continued more recently, in his car, on the Polish airfield near Pwllheli, the beach at Black Rock Sands, the skid patch at Criccieth, and anywhere else you don’t need a driving licence. But car-washing is about something else, too: he wants his cars to look clean and respectable because he thinks that makes them less noticeable , less criminal , when he’s speeding, as he usually is. Police-evasion is high-priority with us: he has had a second mirror installed, on the left of the windscreen, so that passenger as well as driver can keep a look-out for patrol cars behind. When my mother isn’t his front-seat passenger, my sister or I play security man for him. He did the driving, and I did the mirror, during his greatest ever journey—when he covered the 181 miles to North Wales (no motorways, B-roads mainly) in 180 minutes. He prefers dawn runs like that because the roads are clear, and he can drive at eighty in built-up areas. Once he had to speed off down narrow side-streets in Rawtenstall to lose a chasing police car; another time he was stopped, but sorry-sirred the squad car constable, let drop the fact of his profession, and got off with a warning. He has never been fined, never had his licence endorsed. He puts this down to the self-effacing cleanness of his cars.
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 8