All this time he was basically a worker, a labourer, a number. He was a teenager, but his life had been mapped out to the grave.
I can never stop wondering about the attributes common to me and Dad, and where, in a less socially restrictive world, he might have found a place to shine. Like me, my dad was a profoundly non-practical person. He could make a stacker truck talk but wasn’t quite so adept with his hands. He also enjoyed a stage, a spotlight, which in his case was forthcoming from sport. My first stage, too, was sport. That didn’t work out but still I maintained a physical presence coupled with an intensity of drive and ambition. Basically, those are the qualities an actor needs. My dad had them, as well as the sharp features – the difference being that, for him, the doors to the creative world were welded shut. When I came along, social reformism meant they had been jemmied open a little.
It would have been incredible to see Dad act. Recently, I happened across a book written by an art teacher at Whiteacre. It revealed how in tune so many of the boys were with the idea of imaginative self-expression, how it allowed them to talk about their backgrounds, their sensitivities, and their view of the world around them. It offered an incredible window into the possibilities and potentiality of the young working-class mind. I can only imagine that for Dad the opportunity to act did exactly the same. What I saw in later life, through Dad’s love of music, radio and television, particularly drama, was a man attuned to the intricacies of story, performance and character. He was a wonderful audience. If somebody could do something well, he admired them deeply. On a Friday night, they had a sing-song at the Morning Star in Wardley. Dad wouldn’t sing but he absolutely adored watching those who could. The only time Dad had sung was, quite literally, for his supper. As a young man, he had a friend called Larry Morgan, an endless source of interest. They’d met during National Service at Salisbury in the Lancashire Fusiliers and on leave would go out drinking in Bath or Bristol to try to meet women. After a night on the town they’d go to the Salvation Army hostel and literally sing for a bowl of soup and a bed. Dad, as ever, never forgot generosity and always put money in the Sally Army tin.
Dad found Larry fascinating. Whereas he was completely fat-fingered and cack-handed, Larry was the opposite. He’d explain how he once watched him make a crystal radio from batteries and fuse wire – ‘Incredible. Marvellous.’ That enthusiasm for other people’s abilities was a great quality. There was a quizzicality at its heart, which I experienced from him myself when I started getting somewhere.
‘Marvellous, that,’ he’d say. ‘How did you do that?’ He respected what I was doing more than the fact that I’d had success from doing it. ‘You took off a good part’ – that was always his phrase. My brothers would do it too – ‘Wow, that was fantastic!’ – and look at me like I was slightly alien. I was always uncomfortable with their admiration. I didn’t want to be made separate. I didn’t want my acting to be elevated to something special above what they did. They had their own talent. Aside from acting, I had none. I was given a chance to escape to a rare world. And, unlike Dad, I never had to go back.
5
RAGE
I went to the top of the path and faced the bottom of the road. I knew if I did, when Dad turned into our street, he would spot his little son playing, apparently unaware of his presence. In my head, he’d see me and think, There’s my lad – isn’t he vulnerable?
I heard the car getting nearer and nearer and still kept my back to him. He pulled up and opened the door. I turned round and smiled at him, looking surprised.
And he blanked me.
Dad would exhibit a great and frightening anger as he got older, and it’s hard not to wonder whether the glimpse Whiteacre had given him of another life didn’t act like a stick being jabbed in the back of his neck. ‘What would have happened if . . . ?’ He was denied any opportunity to find out, and the emotion that sparked in him had a direct impact on me.
Maybe Dad’s anger came also from being what I’ve been labelled – an ‘overthinker’. It’s a term I dislike immensely. Why is a desire to analyse, to seek knowledge, presented as a negative?
‘Overthinking’ could just as easily be termed a keen inquisitiveness. Are working-class people not meant to enquire? Are they not meant to have an interest in the world in which they live? Dad was hungry for stimulation, as are my brothers and my mum. They are, like me, intensely curious people. We are far from alone in wishing to seek out information, to open our eyes to what the world has to offer. There are millions the same, sharing an attitude that comes very much from a sense of being denied education, or lack of expectation that a person who lives on a back street or an estate should have any. Overthinking would be considered a positive in any other strata of society.
Dad’s frustration came from a restless intelligence, an intelligence not being met. You got the best out of him when he discovered something new, be it via a documentary or a book. Then you would see his sense of amazement. Occasionally, it would spill over into everyday life. He would stop me in the street and look up to the moon.
‘Can you believe that man has stood on that?’ he’d ponder. ‘Can you believe it?’
I loved that. Again, the intimacy. There was a great deal of boyish wonder in my dad, and I’m the same. Knowledge is wonderful. I’m completely unabashed about going ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ That was a value my dad passed on to me – a value not of money but of knowledge.
‘Do you know how bees make honey?’ he’d ask, and a thousand other questions like it. Life was an adventure. But that side of a person was never encouraged if they were working class. It was never going to be any use in a battle zone or heavy industry.
Dad wanted a life of the mind. Unlike me, it was never in his sway to find it. Instead he was left to recall a lost paradise of, as A. E. Housman put it, those blue remembered hills.
It could not come again. That was the absolute truth of Dad’s life. And his frustration was only worsened at the factory. As time went on, there was a period when he stopped being a stacker truck driver and was made a foreman. The promotion wasn’t undeserved. Dad was nothing if not bright, hard-working and punctual. His bosses rightly thought, Reward this bloke, he can do it. He knows the place inside out, and he can handle himself.
Fine, except suddenly, whereas before he’d been one of the lads in navy blue all-in-ones, now he was the boss of the lads, in with the suits, a lot of whom, having just come out of university, were younger than him. They were talking about new ideas, working models. My dad didn’t know much about working models, but he did know a lot about twenty-five hairy-arsed Salford blokes who drove stacker trucks all day. He also knew the realities of the factory floor and how it worked, the tricks that were pulled, the blind eyes turned if something disappeared. He’d done it himself. It’s how things were, how people thought – This is a big industry; if we get a few tubes of toothpaste, fuck ’em.
While the increased money and responsibility was welcome, being picked out of the pack created an enormous tension in Dad because he found himself in a no-man’s land where he didn’t fit with either side. Key in my dad’s life at that point were some questions: ‘Who do I belong to now? The lower middle classes or the working classes? Am I a suit-and-tie man or a boiler-suit man? Am I a stacker truck driver nicking a bit? Or am I one of the suits keeping an eye on others who might be doing the same thing?’
His answer was to try to occupy both camps. He was in the offices doing admin, but he was also on the factory floor, cajoling the men, talking to them. There’d be some blokes who’d say, ‘That’s it, my days on the truck are over,’ but my dad wasn’t like that. He always said he could make a stacker truck talk and he carried on doing so. There was a practical point – he could get things done – but it was also man management, showing the men that he could still do what they did. The unavoidable truth, however, was that he was trapped in a void. He was no longer the same as his mates and yet would have been highly uncomfortable sitting at the top table
hearing managers describe people he used to work, eat and laugh with as ‘lazy bastards’ or using the phrase ‘When I was at uni . . . ’
Here was a very, very bright man who wasn’t like this group of people on this side or that group of people on the other. No one spoke up and said, ‘No, you’re like us,’ which is what happened to me. He was left to wander that no-man’s land alone.
Dad’s mental soup, like my own, would eventually reach boiling point. But the eruption was a long time coming. For years, he would come home in a very, very stressed state, filled with fury and frustration, which he would then distil around the house.
There was an anger in him, a tangible rage. And it could come. As a child, I felt the temperature in the house was dictated by whether he was there or not. If he was out, fine. If he was in and happy, fine. If he was in and not happy – ‘What’s going to happen now?’ It was a question I was asking from a point of isolation. Everybody else in the house was older than me and so had more sophisticated ways of dealing with the tornado. Alan and Keith had each other. Mum, meanwhile, knew Dad in a way that carried the insight and understanding so lacking in a child. For me, though, while there was so much to admire, so much to love, about Dad, I feared him. And it got worse. There was a period when I was older, just short of my teenage years, when, so intense was his rage, my nervous system, my animal self, thought he might kill me. He wouldn’t hit me, there was never a belt or anything like that. He rampaged around, and that was worse. His rage was so deep and so consistent, so fierce, it traumatised me. It definitely set me up for various issues going forward. He would be heartbroken to read those words, devastated – ‘Me?’ But I attach no blame to my dad. He was brought up one of six kids, the product of a Victorian father, the product of a system where men were brutalised, purposefully. He couldn’t be expected to have a wider perspective. My dad, like me, came into this world thinking the glass was half empty, and in fact for him it was.
Dad’s wrath, absolute wrath, could be about anything, but it would often manifest itself in a belief that everything had to be perfect. This was Salford in the late ’70s. Perfection rarely visited.
‘Bloody burnt offering!’ he’d erupt. ‘Bloody burnt offering of a tea! I’m sick of it!’ Loud. Angry. Real anger. Ferocious. That’s coming from someone you love; someone you want to make feel better.
I’ve thought about it a lot since I’ve become a dad. We have to be aware as parents what we are. If we’re forty-five and 13 stone and have got a terrible temper and are imposing it time and time again over an extended period, which my dad did, then it is going to have an effect. All the time I look at my own children and ask myself how they are viewing the people around them. What I picked up from my dad, and my mum, at such an early age has made me hyper-sensitive to Albert and Esme’s own emotional lives. I have been like that from day zero, because we have to be aware that our children take in our energy before they can speak. I arrived at consciousness thinking my mum was reliable, gentle, natural and unchanging. I came to consciousness thinking my dad was the opposite of all those things. He was not a bad man – he could be tender and we always knew he loved us – but amid that he was deeply flawed and emotionally very immature. He was infantile in the speed of his mood swings and tyrannical too, a mannerism forged in the tradition of many other working-class men. I’m sure my mum and brothers will see it differently, but I can only speak about my own sensibility. I can only speak about what my antennae were picking up. As a child, I had a definite proclivity to internalise what Mum and Dad were feeling, which makes sense when you think about the job I do, absorbing characters, filtering them, and playing with the results.
As in every working-class household, money mattered. Mum had started working Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays cleaning at the baths. That meant Dad was coming home three days a week and having to make his own tea. Looking back, I think he felt emasculated by my mum having a job. At the same time, however, he knew we needed the money.
Thursday and Friday, everything was fine. Monday to Wednesday, the situation was different. I would be home first, then Keith would come in at five past five. Keith was always gentle with me – he knew what was coming. I knew what was coming too, but would have a slightly different take on it. Keith was nineteen, I was eleven. With Alan home too, we tried to do everything we could to have tea ready, but it was never enough. There would then be a short period of calm before the storm, which was when I’d regularly head outside and do my back to the top of the road trick, trying, hoping, really hoping, to summon up a bit of sunshine. The arrival of his green Ford Escort (UNB 172K – I can remember all my dad’s number plates) generally signified the clouds closing in.
Not that I was aware of it at that point, but basically I was creating a piece of open-air theatre in an attempt to keep something out of my life, my house. But Dad wasn’t thinking about my vulnerability. He was thinking, Somebody else who wants something from me. Whatever frame of mind he was in, he was basically saying to me, ‘No, I’m taking this in the house.’ He’d fly through that door in a rage.
I would look at him in his shirt and tie and think, I don’t remember this when he wore the blue.
Even if everything was perfectly prepared, he’d always find a reason to be harassed or frustrated, banging cupboards, slamming drawers. He really didn’t want to come back to a house without Elsie, not because she should have had his tea ready, or because he wanted to sit back and be lazy while she waited on him, but because his idea of family had been forcibly dissolved by financial imperative. He wasn’t alone; we all missed that feminine presence. But for him it was much more pronounced. Elsie took the edge off things. He adored her, and his work was intensely male. He wanted his domestic life with her in it.
After he’d eaten, while we did the washing-up, Dad would disappear upstairs, have a bath, and get changed. Once again there would be calm in the house. He’d come back down with a shiny face from having scrubbed it so hard, to the extent I could almost see my reflection in it. I knew that ever since he’d left Colgates at five o’clock, all he’d been thinking about was sitting in his chair, clean, fed and reading his newspaper. Ensconced in his Manchester Evening News, he’d have his shirt collar up, a mental reassurance, a reminder, that this was a time when he didn’t have to wear a tie. I’d look at him and know his regret about his behaviour was starting – harder to watch than the behaviour itself. After a while he’d start making eye contact and conversation. There’d be a bit of payback from me, monosyllabic, uncommunicative, and I think he understood that inside I was angry about what had gone on.
Eventually, lack of communication would become a problem. When puberty came, I was more argumentative and less willing to accept the status quo of the house and how it operated, the way Dad dominated the place through petty mood swings and anger. As I edged into my teens, whenever I had a row with Dad I was definitely harbouring a feeling of ‘I’m not going to end up like you,’ which sounds nasty and aggressive but to me was just a matter of fact. This was a long, slow process of observation before the inevitable flashpoint. I was fourteen and he was doing his usual, bollocking me for something, when I felt consumed with rage, savagely angry about all the shit he’d pulled, the storming round the house, the instant and childish mood changes, the seemingly blithe dismissal of other people’s feelings.
We squared up to each other. Me, back against the wall, staring him in the eye. Him tapping his finger on my lip. I did something with my eyes, which I now know to be an acting trick, to register my disgust.
‘I wouldn’t let a grown man look at me like that,’ he said.
In my head, I was thinking, Go on, you’ve always wanted to do this, so fucking do it. But I was using the tool of ‘Once you do it, mate, you’ll never get me back. You can physically hurt me, but you’ll be dead to me. Because you’ll be a man who punches his own son.’
There was something in him that understood that, and he withdrew.
If he’d not imposed his mo
od on the house, shouted at Mum, I’d have perhaps been less critical of his attitude, but the basic dynamic was that I didn’t respect his authority in a way I respected my mum’s authority. By the time of the against-the-wall incident, I was properly ‘Fuck you, pal.’
A decade later, I was sat, in my mid-twenties, with a therapist, the first of many. He listened intently, puffing on a cigar, Freud-esque, as I related the story of my doomed attempts to stem my dad’s anger when he arrived home. It was the first time I’d ever expressed it.
‘What do you think of that little boy in the road?’ he asked.
I became quite emotional, but I wasn’t pitying myself. I didn’t feel as if I was talking about me. I felt distant, as if I was examining another human being. Here was this little boy, who happened to be me, and I quite admired him. He was brave and resourceful. I wasn’t saying ‘Wasn’t I brilliant?’ – that boy could have been any child – but I did admire his willingness and ability to summon up something, anything, to take the heat out of the situation. It was about more than standing in a road. On a deeper level, it was as though I was trying to excavate my dad’s personality. I felt like I knew something about him. I internalised his frustration and his dissatisfaction with himself and felt it in a very primal way, as if I shared it genetically, as if I was seeing myself, although it could just have been proximity. Maybe I was one of those kids who, without realising it, takes in tiny nuances of other people’s personalities and then uses them to draw a bigger picture.
Amid my overwhelming desire for recognition, I felt sorry for Dad. I had no idea what his life, seen through his eyes, was like. I knew there was a part of him that hated blanking me. I knew there was a part of him that wanted to give me that smile, give me that one-on-one recognition. But an infantility in him would overrule it – ‘I’m going in this house and I will have it out.’
I Love the Bones of You Page 6