ROVER THE BRAVE

Rover was a little brown pup, not much bigger than a mouse, with a black stripe of coarse fur that ran down the back of his head to the tip of his tail. As he grew bigger the stripe grew with him and eventually he had a noticeable ‘wave’ of darker fur all down the middle of his back.

By the time Rover was grown he was big, wider than a Labrador, longer than a German Shepherd and when he stood up on his back legs, he was taller than I was. He would put his front paws on my shoulders and lick my face in greeting when I had been away from home for more than five minutes.

He was a big softie of a dog, or so we thought. My sisters would play with him like he was a toy; it was not unusual to see him dressed up in various guises. He used to look out of the window wearing one of mum’s headscarves and a pair of sunglasses, but he was never dressed up in dad’s flat cap in the belief that he would catch ‘the bald germ’ from it and loose all his hair and go bald like dad. My sisters used to chase one another round with dad’s cap in an attempt to place it on the other’s head shouting, “You’ll get the bald germ!”

Rover knew his place, we didn’t know this at first, but Rover had worked out that he, and he alone, was the family’s protector. Rover’s territory was more or less the house and garden and once you knew that it was best that you didn’t forget it. The family, that’s to say those of us who lived in the house, Rover’s pack, had nothing to fear, on the contrary, we were under his protection. Anyone else took their life in their own hands if they entered Rover’s domain, as my aunt discovered on one fateful occasion.

In the early 1970s you could go out for a short while leaving your house unlocked without fear of burglary, it really was a different world back then, every house had a coin operated gas meter and you paid for gas as you used it by putting another shilling in the meter, every three months the ‘meter men’ would come around to empty the money out of the meter and they would count the shillings into ten shilling piles in the kitchen table. The amount that you owed for the gas was taken away and anything over was left on the table and went swiftly in to the purse of the lady of the house, who was then seen as an easy touch for any child in need of a few ‘spends’ for the week.

The gas money went into big leather bags that the meter men carried around with them and when the bags were full they were left at the end of the road for collection by a van that would go around the streets, picking up full bags and leaving an open empty one in its place.

This was the world I grew up in, people were assumed to be honest, and for the most part they were, so you could pop out to the shops and leave your doors unlocked without even thinking that anything bad was going to happen. So it was when my aunt popped in on after going to the post office. My aunt came in through the unlocked front door a few minutes after mum had gone out through the back door. My aunt came in and was greeted by a wagging tail and a slobbering dog. After fending off the dog she looked around for my mum and discovering that nobody was in, my aunt put her bag on the coffee table and sat down in one of the armchairs. All the time Rover was lying on the hearthrug with his tail still wagging. Fancying a cigarette, my aunt reached out for her bag on the coffee table, but before she had touched it there was a snarling face with its nose touching hers.

When my mum came home she discovered my aunt being ‘restrained’ in the corner by the dog, who, on seeing mum return, reverted to his normal friendly self, sat back on the rug wagging his tail as if nothing had happened.

I think that mum was the more scared of the two, having never seen this side of Rover’s nature. All my aunt had to say was that a dog like that was worth his keep; after all he was only doing his job.

It transpired that Rover was the kind of dog who would cheerfully let anyone into the house, but he wouldn’t let them out.

GOING FOR A DRINK WITH MY DAD

I don't write this chronologically, so I just write what occurs to me at the time, and what I was thinking about today was this:__________________________________

My dad wasn’t a drinker. He would have a couple of pints and once the alcohol hit home he would be singing. It was worse if there was a stage, which had the effect of drawing him to it in an almost magnetic fashion.

The other thing that happened to dad when he’d had a few drinks was that, I suppose, he became a lot braver. I’ll give you an example.

When he was in his fifties dad was working shifts in a factory at the other end of town and occasionally I would meet him on his way home in the middle of the afternoon, more often than not he would be looking around the shops, but occasionally he might have a couple of pints on the way home, One day I saw him in the street and he took me for a drink in one of the local pubs.

We got a couple of beers and sat in a quiet corner to enjoy a drink and a chat. The bar ran the length of the pub and it was crowded at the other end of the room. There were enough rowdy individuals to have gone twice the length of the entire bar but they were all at one end, three and four deep to the bar and they were very noisy and all seemed to be having a good time.

After a while, the throng parted and one of the men made his way through the gap and wandered off (as you do when you have been drinking beer by the pint) totally oblivious to what was going on around him. Dad recognised him immediately.

“Did you see that?” He said.

“What?”

“Did you see who that was?”

I took another swig of my drink and replied that I hadn’t seen anything.

“That was our Ken.”

I hadn’t taken much notice, but dad had seen my brother wander past where we were sitting and by now, he was intensively scrutinising the gathering at the bar.

“Look at that.”

I said that I couldn’t see anything unusual, but dad apparently had. He told me to keep an eye on the empty glasses that were piling up on the bar.

Sure enough, the men drank up and as each one finished drinking, he left his empty glass on the bar. The unusual thing that dad had noticed was that nobody was buying another drink.

Dad sprang to his feet and pint glass in hand he went over to the men at the bar and in a loud voice that cut through the drunken laughter he said,

“Have you all got something wrong with your hands?”

It went instantly quiet until someone asked him what he meant and dad waved the remaining finger and thumb on his left hand, something I'd never seen him do before, dad neither drew attention to his missing fingers nor hid the fact that they were not there anymore, but on this particular day he said, “I lost three fingers… but I can still reach my wallet when it’s my round.”

It went quiet again and dad continued, “You all seem to be very good at spending Ken’s money for him.”

“Ken’s our mate,” came the reply, “anyway, what’s it got to do with you, you old fool?”

“I’m Ken’s father.”

It went quiet again and then a low muttering started up when the realisation hit that today’s supply of free beer had just dried up and as if with a single thought they all walked in a disgruntled fashion out of the pub.


When Ken came back into the bar he did a classic double take, there was a bar full of empty glasses and nobody in sight but dad and me in the corner having a quiet drink together.

“All on your own are you lad,” dad piped up, “what do you want to drink?”

SEED CAKE

I always think of my grandma as a little old lady carrying one of those once ubiquitous shopping bags that have long since gone out of fashion.

It was the kind of bag that was made of a kind of plastic that tried unsuccessfully imitate grainy leather and it was an unmistakable shade of beige long before any of us had heard of such a colour. It had two rolled and stitched handles reminiscent of a dog's collar, and a large zip that ran along the top.

Everybody's grandma had a bag like that. In those days, nobody thought it strange that she kept her handbag inside her shopping bag; it was no more strange than the fact that she kept her purse in her handbag.

Grandma always had something for somebody in that bag, she was one of those people who thought it unseemly, when making a visit, especially if unannounced, to arrive empty handed, or more correctly, with an empty shopping bag.

Grandma's arrival was always something of an occasion, even when it was just a flying visit on her way to somewhere else.

Grandma would come to see my mum more or less every day, but that did not mean that it was to be regarded as a casual visit, grandma never made a casual visit, she always did things with a purpose and a visit from grandma was something of a daily ritual, usually with tea and cakes. That is where the shopping bag comes in.

Mum made the tea (none of your tea bag muck in those days, real tea, Horniman's loose tea, sold by the quarter pound in yellow packets with a little 'dividend' stamp that you stuck into a book that could be redeemed when full) and grandma brought a cake.

One day, in the school holidays, grandma brought a 'seed cake.'

Grandma had searched high and low without success to find a baker's shop that sold a traditional Yorkshire style caraway seed cake, but one day her perseverance paid off and she came across a baker who had the expertise to make a 'seed cake' and it was duly bought, paid for and ensconced in grandma's shopping bag.

So, when grandma arrived for her afternoon tea, the seed cake was presented to the eagerly awaiting family.

Rover, the family dog, had an old, red and cream coloured 'leatherette' armchair (made of a material not exactly dissimilar to grandma's shopping bag) that was his bed, this was across the room from a stove that was never allowed to go out and heated the water and warmed up the kitchen a treat. When grandma came in through the door, my mum would get a large blanket to cover the chair so that grandma could sit in it without being covered with dog hair.

As soon as Rover saw grandma, he would slide out of the chair to greet her and, knowing his place in the pecking order, he would lie down on the floor at the side of the chair. He probably did this in anticipation of the dregs of grandma's cup of tea and the remnants of the cake that would inevitably came his way.

This particular day was the day that we were to be treated to the buttery delights of a traditional Yorkshire seed cake.

Yorkshire delicacies do not often 'travel' outside of the boundaries of that county, often they are not even appreciated as far away as over the Pennines to our house some twenty five miles away.

Yorkshire bacon used to be famous for its fat content of close on a hundred percent; it was served white, undercooked and totally inedible to all but a Yorkshireman.

When I was a child and relatives from Yorkshire descended, en masse, upon us my mum would send me to the shop for copious quantities of boiled ham for the visitors, but it was never going to be quite right for them. Yorkshire ham is pale coloured, wet and slightly slimy to the touch, but we served up a Lancashire ham, which in comparison is a dark pink meat. Just on the right side of dryness.

Seed cake is one of those Yorkshire treats that actually turn out to be a treat.

The old fashioned seed cake was marvellous with so much butter in it that you could get fat by looking at it and the taste was beyond compare.

So, grandma brought a seed cake, big moist and heavy it must have weighed her shopping bag down considerably, and the kitchen table almost groaned as it sat there on one of our biggest plates.

The tea was made and left to brew, the cake was cut into generous slices and the smaller children came in from playing in the garden, collected a piece of cake and retreated just as quickly.

Tea was served and the seed cake was superb, there really is nothing that compares to it these days when what passes for food is some factory made concoction that is manufactured as cheaply as possible to be sold at a premium price.

Grandma drank her tea, and ate her cake, save for a little of each that, as ever, she placed in the dog's bowls under the kitchen window. Glancing out, the sight that she was greeted with appalled her, for there sitting on the low wall that surrounded the lawn in the back garden was a row of children all picking the caraway seeds out of the cake and making two piles, one of seeds on the wall and another of cake crumbs that were being scrunched back together on their plates to be eaten in handfuls as an almost reformed lump of cake.

Grandma turned round to my mum and in an indignant voice she opined,

"You are not bringing these children up properly."

THE FAIRGROUND

When the fair came to Glossop in the 1960s it was still one of the great events of the year. There was great excitement, not just among the children, but with the adult population as well.

The first sighting of one of the big trucks that brought the fair to town was second only to the arrival of the Christmas tree in the town square in early December.
The fair was something different, the fair held the promise of a little bit of wickedness in what was still a very rigid society. The fair was a solid representation of a time to have a bit of fun.

My dad loved the fair almost as much as mum hated it, this seemed to be the pattern in most families where the dads and children went off t the fair and the mothers all stayed at home, no doublt enjoying an equally rare bit of time to themselves.

When I was little dad took me to the fair. I'm not really sure if I was old enough to know what it was about, but off we went to the fair.

We went around the stalls, threw hoops at the prizes which always seemed just a shade too big to be encompassed by the rings, we shot real rifles at a parade of little, pock marked, yellow ducks we ate hot dogs, toffee apples, candy floss and some of the earliest sightings of the very exotic 'American hamburger.'

We also played darts. The idea with the game of darts was to get your three darts into playing cards so that you scored a number that was associated with a certain prize.

Dad threw three darts and almost won a prize, so he had another go and another and yet another, but the prizes remained elusive.

I wanted to throw some darts to see if I could win a prize and dad reluctantly handed over sixpence for another three darts and handed them to me.

There was something that dad didn't know, something that even I didn't know at the time and it was that I could not see anything outside of my grasp, that meant that anything over two feet away from me was so completely out of focus as to be in a fog, and it was getting worse. Not to put to fine a point on it, I was going blind and nobody knew, not even me, it was just normal to me and so I thought that everyone lived in a world where the fog was creeping in on them.

So, I got my darts and with all the strength I could muster I threw it into the air as hard as I could. It launced like a rocket in a science fiction film, straight up into the air in a great parobolic arc, it attained its zenith and started to come down and landed. It landed point down embedded in the top of the head of the man running the stall.
There was blood running down the man's head and into his eyes. Dad grabbed me by the hand and we made a hasty retreat.

It still didn't occur to my dad, or anyone else that I might not have seen the target and it was a good two or three years after that when it was eventually discovered that I could hardly see and that I was in danger of loosing my sight altogether. Even the fact that I had spent the first two and a half years at school with my nose almost touching the blackboard didn't seem to be a clue for the teachers.

It wasn't until the mobile optician came to the school that abyone had the slightest clue that I could hardly see.

I got glasses and the next time I went to the fair it probably saved many stallholders from the threat of serious injury.

DOG FOOD

I named our dog ‘Rover’ which might seem to be a common name for a dog, but how many dogs have you heard of being called Rover?

Mum used to feed Rover, he had a can of dog food every day and he also ate everything that we left.

Rover became a very large and rather well fed dog.

Mum had a tendency to feed dogs up, all our dogs have been ‘well fed’ ever since.

Before we had Rover one of the neighbours had a little dog, he was called Prince and he used to come to our back door for scraps, I remember that he was particularly fond of sausages, mum used to save a few for him. I bet dad would have gone crackers if he had known that mum was feeding the neighbour’s dog.

Mum did have a history of deeding up other people’s dogs. Even before I was born mum used to feed a dog that came to her back door.

She was actually buying a tin of meat for it every day because she felt so sorry for the poor thing, it was so thin that all it’s ribs were showing and you could see it’s spine poking through, it was all skin and bone.

So mum started to feed it up.

When the owner found out he came round and gave mum a piece of his mind.

He was not a happy man.

Mum had been feeding his prize Greyhound and it had been loosing races, so he had been loosing money.

GRANDMA GOES SHOPPING

When I was a teenager my grandmother came from Yorkshire to live with my Auntie Ivy in Glossop.

Grandma soon made herself at home and became well known in the local shops. This was in the time just before the supermarkets took over, it was when there was a shop on every street corner that wasn’t occupied by a pub.

As part of her acclimatisation process grandma seemed to have a run-in with just about all of the shopkeepers in the area, she went to the bakery where new people had taken over and complained about the taste of their bread, not that it stopped there, grandma’s criticism was constructive, she told them how much salt to use with so much flour and even came back to give a progress report.

One of the local shops sold just about anything that you could possibly want to eat and one day grandma went in for some sliced meat, being from Yorkshire she was partial to boiled ham and unlike most of the shop’s customers, who would buy one or two slices of meat, grandma ordered half a pound of thinly sliced boiled ham.

The shopkeeper sliced the meat on one of those big, hand cranked meat slicers with a circular blade and the slices of meat fell straight onto the scales as they were sliced.

Grandma had one eye on the slices as they landed on the scales and the other eye was on the needle as the weight of the meat increased.

The needle got to the 8 ounce mark the shopkeeper said, “Is that alright for you Mrs. Lloyd?”

Grandma looked at the scales, then at the twenty-odd stone shopkeeper and in a voice loud enough to be heard outside in the street she piped up with, “I don’t mind paying for the meat, but I’m not paying for your thumb as well!”

Granma came to live with my aunty just at the time when the British money changed over to the decimal system, before that there were pounds, shillings and pence which were still referred to as “£sd” and there were still penny coins in circulation with Queen Victoria’s image on them. There were originally 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings (240 pence) to a pound, the ‘new’ money had 100 pence to the pound making each ‘new penny’ as they were called, worth about 2.4 of the old ones.

One of my other aunties had a pub at the time and she gave grandma a collection of dummy decimal coins so that she could learn the ‘new money’ before it came into circulation. By the time the new coins were in circulation grandma had an expert grasp of the value of the new money, so much so that she would lecture us kids on it.

When my Aunty Ivy was in the shop around the corner from where she and grandma lived the woman who ran it said, “You can’t diddle your mother with this new money can you?”

“No,” my aunty replied, “but it seems like you have had a good try!”

SCHOOL

I hated school, and I still do. From the first minute to the last I could not stand school and I loathed everything to do with it.

I was the kind of child who found that school got in the way of learning. When I was away from school I learned far more than I did when I was there, it wasn’t hard to do because when I was at school I was so consumed by the desire not to be there that I didn’t learn anything at all.

My memories of school are mostly sensory; I can remember the smells, the colours and the textures of primary school. I can recall vivid memories of brightly coloured counting blocks, different colours for different lengths. They were used to introduce the concept of numbers. I can still feel the dampness that never seemed to leave school clothes and I can still taste the air that was thick with the fumes from the wet coke that smouldered away in the central heating boiler.

The worst thing about primary school was the floor polish, I could not abide the smell of school floor polish, it adorned all the wooden floors in the place and it had a smell that would make a cat tray smell sweet.

The only worse smell that I ever discovered in a school was the first time I went into the changing rooms next to the gymnasium when I went to secondary school. There is nothing like the smell of school changing rooms; an aerosol of deodorant the size of a petrol tanker couldn’t shift it.

Even the smell of the school dinners was bad. I stayed for it a few times but I didn’t like it, the smell might have been bad but the taste was worse. How it could be possible I will never know, but I wouldn’t have fed it to a dog, and of course I said so. The school meals were served up in one of the classrooms and, of course, it had a freshly polished floor to add to the ambience.

In those days teachers used to wander around the classroom smoking cigarettes, one teacher used to smoke a pipe. It was a wonderful example to us all and to be honest the smell of tobacco was preferable to the rancid dinners and the disgusting floor polish, and most of us were smoking before we got to secondary school.

The things that they taught at school were rubbish and from the first day none of the teachers could answer the questions that I wanted answering. I was five years old and I was pondering the impossible notion of infinity, I couldn’t work out how the universe could go on forever without stopping, I would lay awake at night trying to understand the concept of space going on forever and never coming to a place where there was not space. It still gives me the same feeling now and nobody can tell me what would be there when the universe runs out of space. You can’t have nothingness, even empty space is something.

I wanted to know things, I wanted to understand the nature of existence, I’d think about the reality of the world, the world around me and the world within me. I was very aware that the two things were not the same, I wondered if I was real or just part of someone else’s dream, I thought about the possibility that they would wake up and forget the dream and I would cease to be.

At five years old I was questioning the nature of existence, I was grappling with philosophy and existentialism at an age when I should have been making mud pies in the garden.

I wondered if the stars in the sky had planets spinning round them, I would sneak out through a window in the early hours of the morning and go into the fields to look up at the sky wondering if there was another boy on another planet looking out into the night sky at our sun and wondering if it had a planet in its orbit with a boy looking back at him who was wondering if there was someone looking at his sun…

Nobody had any answers for me, it took half a lifetime for me to understand that it wasn’t the answers that were the problem, it was the questions that were the problem, that and the simple truth that nobody could understand the questions.

Dad always said that I never stopped asking questions and it was true, but he didn’t have the answers and school wasn’t the place to get the questions that I wanted answering.

Then I got glasses and I could read again. I read everything, I read dad’s newspapers, I sat in my bedroom and systematically read twelve volume Waverley’s Encyclopaedia.

The worst thing is that I’m still here and I still have all those questions and they remain unanswered.

Its also the best thing as well because every time you get the answer to something it usually opens up the way to a lot more questions.

EYE TESTS

There is a sequel to the previous story.

I have always had poor eyesight, it’s due to an astigmatism, which means that the shape of the front of my eyes is wrong and no matter how hard I try I cannot focus my eyes on anything. If you think about the rough and ready vision test that is part of the driving test where you have to read a car number plate at 20 metres, I couldn’t see what was on a number plate if it was touching my nose, but luckily for me (and the other car drivers I share the road with) I wear glasses.

When I was about five or six years old my teachers were baffled by the fact that I had come to school at the age of four and I could already read and write, but I seemed to be taking little or no interest in the lessons. One day the nit-nurse and the optician came to the school and they discovered that I had no head lice and virtually no sight. Within weeks I was given a pair of Granny glasses and I could see again, but just as a precaution it was decided that I should see a consultant at the eye hospital.

Dad got a day off work and we went off to the eye hospital. I was logged in on arrival and given a big folder of case notes which of course dad tried to read. We sat on a bench with all the other out-patients and as each one went in to be examined we shuffled up along the bench until it was my turn to be seen. After I was examined by someone in the whitest white coat I had ever seen I was told to sit on another bench so that I could be examined in cubical two. This continued from one cubicle to another each with its white coated inhabitant who shone lights in my eyes, made me wear funny glasses that gradually came into focus, and then sent me on my way to sit on another bench and shuffle along to be seen again and again until I was eventually examined by the consultant who squirted burning drops in my eyes, blinded me with a bright light and told me to sit on the bench outside until I felt well enough to go home.

I felt well enough to go home without sitting on another bench, I couldn’t see where I was going, but I was ready to go home.

This happened every year for ten years, then one day the appointment letter came and it was addressed to me instead of my dad. I phoned the eye hospital and said that I wasn’t going to come, this year or any other year. I was put through to the consultant who wanted to know why I was reluctant to have my eyes tested. I told him in very blunt terms that I’d had ten years of wasting my time so that his students could practice their infernal art on me and he should consider it very good value, I bid him good day and put down the ‘phone.

That’s not the end of the story.

I was getting on for seventeen; on the Friday that I should have gone to the eye hospital dad woke me early in the morning with a cheery salutation telling me he was ready to take me to the eye hospital. He wasn’t happy when I told him that I had cancelled that and all subsequent appointments. He told me that he had managed to get the day off work to take me to Manchester. I told him that I wasn’t going and if he wanted a day out in Manchester he could go on his own.

The thing was that dad liked hospitals, I never understood it, but all his life he loved to go to hospital. For him the interminable queuing up and mindless shuffling about on wooden benches with the paint worn through by countless rear ends was some kind of earthly paradise.

Dad had a day off and went to Manchester, probably wandering around looking for elusive bargains and I had that Friday off school and presented my hospital appointment card as proof when I went back on Tuesday morning, I would have gone in on Monday, but I was still suffering from the effects of the eye drops you know.

SHOPPING AND DAD'S CHILDCARE SKILLS

Mum was always very protective of us when we were children. She was still very protective of us when we were grown up and could look after ourselves. I suppose that from the outside it must have looked like an improbable situation comedy from early 1970s television. You can imagine the scene;

"Be careful crossing the road, make sure that you wrap up warm and come straight home afterwards.”

“Mother!”

“What?”

“I’m forty-six years old.”

It’s so familiar that you might believe that you have actually seen it, but mum’s fear for our safety was probably due to what she had found out about our frequent weekend trips to Manchester with dad.

You have to understand mum’s attitude to Manchester. Mum had a vision of what a city should be, in her eyes a city was somewhere that was dark and dirty, a place that was crowded with unsavoury ‘city people’ who would cut your throat for a farthing.

For mum the big city was something to be avoided and its boundaries started somewhere just beyond the next village. So when dad wanted to go on a shopping trip to Manchester mum went with him, once. The effect of venturing into the city had a traumatic effect on mum which was so great that she never went there again. After that dad’s trips to Manchester were either on his own or with one or more of us kids in tow.

I think that it may help if I explain my parent’s attitude to shopping. I suppose that you could say that it defied the stereotype, in fact it reversed it. I’m sure that you are already well ahead of me by now, but for clarity’s sake I’ll explain it.

Mum hated shopping, she didn’t like shops and she found ‘traipsing’ from one shop to another and looking around inside shops a complete bore. Dad, on the other hand, loved shops and shopping. Even when he had no more than the train fare to Manchester and back he would go out early in the morning and come back late at night having spent the entire day wandering around the shops looking at what was on offer. He would return home with tales of the ‘bargains’ that he had seen, bargains that he would have taken advantage of “if only he’d had the money.”

Dad had so much practice at window shopping that he became an expert at it. When he had money to spend it meant that he knew where all the potential bargains were, he didn’t just browse in the high street shops, nor was he limited to the shady back street shops, dad knew where every warehouse was, even the dodgy ones where things seemed to land when they fall off the back of passing lorries. So if you wanted a bargain, that’s to say a real bargain, he knew where to find it.

Dad’s love of shopping was not exactly shared by me, or any of my sisters for that matter. We would be taken to walk for miles around the back streets of Manchester in search of dad’s bargains. The problem was that everything had to be a bargain, you couldn’t just have a meal, or even a cup of tea or a glass of pop, we had to go through a lengthy process of finding the cheapest place to eat. What this meant was that after walking around town for hours we had to start on another trek around every café in Manchester with dad examining the prices on the bill of fare that was posted outside. What usually happened was that we would eventually arrive back at the place he had evaluated first and he would lead us in and we would gather around a table in anticipation of a good meal.

I’m sure that it never occurred to dad that all this walking around provided us all with good exercise and an even healthier appetite than we would have had if we had been fed sooner.

One thing that I always remember was dad’s assertion to every waitress that there were “no child’s portions in our family” and we all got an adult sized meal. My youngest sister Kathryn wasn’t even old enough to have started school at the time and she had to kneel on the chair to reach the table, but dad insisted that she got an adult size meal.

There was a method in this. Dad had the idea that he could eat anything that we left, in truth he would eat it before we had left it, if he could he would load his plate from each of ours as soon as they hit the table. To combat this I started to shield my dinner by strategically surrounding my plate with one arm and putting my face as close to my food as possible. For the most part it worked; I developed a reinforcing technique of stabbing dad in the hand with my fork if his came near my plate. I contrived to get most of my meal in peace, but dad’s fork still managed to make its way around the rest of the plates on the table, in one swift motion he could get a sausage off of each of my sister’s plates, until they learned to guard their food as well.

That isn’t the part about dad’s childcare skills, but this is; Dad used to get very engrossed in his bargain hunting, so much that he would frequently forget that he had taken us with him. He would be walking along with all of us following behind in a ‘crocodile’ formation, with me, being the oldest, at the front and my sisters behind holding on to one another so as not to get lost, but we usually did get lost. We never lost one-another, but dad would loose us at least a couple of times during the day.

What happened was that dad would be looking in a shop window and he would suddenly remember that there was a warehouse full of ceramic tiles, cutlery, old rags, or whatever else he could go rummaging in, and he would disappear up a back alley while we were looking at the well fed puppies that were sleeping in the window of a pet shop, and he would be gone for an hour or so. Our crocodile would wander around the block with Kathryn moving from the back to the middle then up behind me and she would hang onto the sleeve of my coat in fear of her life.

After what seemed like days dad would reappear in a sweat and almost drop dead from the relief of having found us all again. The admonition that we were not to tell mum about getting lost was what hid dad’s childcare skills from her for many years.

HOBBIES AND STUFF

I’ve never understood the idea of ‘pastimes’ and other activities that people devise so that they can waste their lives away.

The notion that you have to find something to do that helps to while away the long winter nights has always been an alien concept to me. The plain fact is that there just aren’t enough hours in the day for me and I have always considered that these contrived hobbies were just a waste of time.

I’m not saying that I have never had a hobby; in the days before I became a teenager I had a go at most things. For a while I was an avid stamp collector but I am not really of the collecting persuasion, the collector has to be obsessive about the things they collect, they have to believe that their collection maters and they have to be completely bereft of any idea of their own mortality. This is why royalty are avid collectors, they are not individuals, just some small part of a dynasty and the hive mentality that it engenders means that they believe that they can do great things for the sake of their lineage.

I never actually considered sport, I’ve never had the sport bug, I’m not tribal and the idea of chasing a ball around a muddy field never really appealed to me. Imagine football; you get twenty two individuals, twenty of whom chase a ball around a field, and as soon as one of them gets within range of it he kicks it as far away from himself as he can and he, and everyone else chases it again. So, I never became a sportsman.

My dad loved sport and up until he was in his late thirties he was the goalkeeper for our local amateur football team. He spent years trying to get me interested in football, but it never seemed to assuage the boredom that football, or any sport induced in me.

I never seemed to have any hobbies, I watched a bit of television, I read a lot and for most of my life I have surrounded myself with books. I listened to the radio, especially offshore (pirate) radio from the 1960s to the mid 1980s and like almost every schoolboy I ‘discovered’ the comedy of Kenneth Horne and the Goons which seems to come around to enthral each new generation of schoolboys.

I used to listen to all manner of pop music. Almost everyone I knew was into soul music and especially Motown, but it left me totally cold, in fact I found it positively depressing. I spent hours listening to stuff on the radio and most of it was a lot more interesting to me than soul music could ever be. I was very aware that I was not ‘into’ any particular musical scene; I just seemed to like loud guitar music with a bit of a beat to it. I was well into my late teens before I discovered that there were types of music that I preferred as well as the ones that I could not stand.

I just thought that I had a liking for lots of different types of music so the realisation that I had an overwhelming fondness for the heavier kind of rock music came as something of a shock to me, but not to anyone else. Perhaps the denim jeans, the waist length hair and the guitar were a dead giveaway to the rest of the world, but it never seemed obvious to me.

The great thing was that I had started to know who I was at last; even I just knew that I was a guitar obsessed rocker.

As I think about this, it is still very much the same. I was walking my dog and a group of teenagers on pushbikes pulled up by me at the side of the road and one of them asked me if I knew where they could get some guitar strings. I told them and as they made to go on their way I asked why they had picked on me to ask about the whereabouts of the local guitar shops. One of them looked back at me as he peddled away and said,

“Well, you look like a bit of a rocker mate.”

Someone had recognised who I was at last.