FINGERS

Everyone with a family must have some family photos. The ones that I always seem to remember are the ones that show me as a baby being held up to the camera by my dad. One in particular is of me in the garden of our flat on Queen’s Drive in Glossop.

It was taken by my Uncle George, he wasn’t my real uncle and his wife was not my real Aunty Alice, but they lived next door and when I was a kid that was good enough for me. They naturally doted upon me, probably because I was always there. Anyway, to get back to the plot, in the photo I am being held at chest height with my arms waving, my feet dangling and eight of dad’s fingers can be seen holding me in a firm grip. There may be nothing remarkable in a picture like this, I expect that there are lots of family albums with pictures of fathers holding one of their children like a sack of potatoes, to be honest there were bundles of black and white photos of me being held in this ungainly way, but some at some time, I think when I was about three years old, around 1960, my dad had an accident at work and lost three fingers from his left hand, so pictures of me, dad and anything more than a finger and thumb on one hand were quite spooky.

I can’t remember a time when dad had the other three fingers, he just happened to have three fingers less than the average and he seemed to accept it to the point of ignoring it. It wasn’t as if he felt that he had anything missing, but I think that he reserved all his feelings of loss for his missing hair.

The world was just moving into the 1960s, hair for men had come back into fashion almost a decade earlier and my dad had none. At a time when most men of his age were growing a bit of hair for the first time in a hundred years, he had none to grow. Well that isn’t strictly true because even in the 1950s dad had sported almost a foot of long hair. The thing is that it all grew in a clump on one side of his head, just over his left ear where there was a very low parting and the hair was combed over the top of his head where he had no hair at all.

Dad had the hairstyle that was later to be made famous as a ‘Bobby Charlton.’