I HAD it from MY FATHER

Today is the centenary of my father’s birth. And next January it will be fifteen years since his death. These anniversaries are of little moment to anyone but his two living close relatives: me (his only child) and his younger sister Maisie.

Still and all, his working life in many ways embodies the movement of western capitalism through the twentieth century and so I think his story is of wider interest. The more personal memories and anecdotes resonate only insofar as such stuff has parallels for any family and for other parent-child relationships.

Like anyone, Stan Gilbert began life with a mixture of advantages and disadvantages. His family circumstances were comfortable. His father was a prosperous businessman and the first in the town to own a car, for the driving of which he hired a chauffeur. There were other servants too. The tale was often told of the kitchen maid so innocent that, when she accompanied the family on an excursion to the seaside, she was astounded to discover that the sea was not – as she believed from the evidence of a landscape painting that hung in the house – “in a field”.

But Dad – as I learned for the first time from Auntie Maisie at the weekend – was “a seven-month baby”, born very small and yet to grow finger- or toenails. He needed weeks of constant nursing and – this I have known all my life – he was a martyr to asthma for the greater part of his childhood. As a result he missed a lot of school. I have always believed that my grandmother doted on Dad and perhaps rather smothered him. Auntie Maisie says that it was in particular their maternal grandmother, Granny Wicks, for whom the first grandchild could do no wrong.

At any rate, Dad lacked the basics of primary schooling and when his father proposed to despatch him to the local public school, even as a day pupil, the boy’s fear of the challenge of it all and his mother’s tearful entreaties saw off the threat. Instead, my father ended his education at fourteen and went into the business to learn it from the bottom up.

Between Dad and Maisie – apart from two girls who did not survive – was another son, Douglas (whimsically named after the motorcycle that brought news of the birth to his father at work). Doug was an altogether more confident and assertive character than Stan and his happy enrolment at the public school only underlined the differences. After school, he spurned the family business and trained to be an auctioneer.

The family view was that Dad always bore “an inferiority complex” especially in relation to his brother. There may have been something in this but, as a young man, Doug went through an extended ordeal that fundamentally altered his extrovert demeanour. Having joined the RAF and trained as a pilot well before Britain declared war on Hitler’s Germany, Doug was shot down in the first month of hostilities and was held prisoner for the entire duration. It was a six-year incarceration that he would never talk about subsequently, at least not to his keenly curious nephew.

Dad had a much less harrowing war. As a boot manufacturer, he was in a reserve occupation, so he was not called up early as Doug had been. What’s more, he was that much older: 26 when war broke out. Later he was inducted into the army, drove a truck (though in truth he was ever a dreadful driver) and took part in the Normandy landings. He rose to the rank of Sergeant-Instructor and, on the same day, received his demob papers and a transfer to the Far East. Given the choice, he gratefully came home.

That Dad was ill-educated was one of the wedges that came between him and me. I have always described him as a man who never read a book and it is almost the literal truth: I was certainly never given any grounds for believing that he read any of my own books. While he was at work six days a week through my childhood, my maternal grandfather (who lived with us) inevitably became a surrogate father, not least because I adored him and because his own passion for books and for history fed my own.

By the time I was born, Dad was running the boot and shoe factory that he had inherited from his own father (who died during my mother’s pregnancy). He would bring home the local accent that was the universal argot of his place of work. My mother, who had a degree of social aspiration and whose background was professional rather than industrial, hated it.

Packed off to the public school that my Dad had feared, I disdained this slovenly talk too. My Dad didn’t have the imagination to see that decreeing that I should get the education that he now regretted having missed (“it gives you confidence, boy”) would make me a different kind of person from him, just as being determined that I would be the first (and, as it’s turned out, the last) of the Gilberts to go to university would drive us further apart.

On this day 55 or so years ago, I gave Dad a slim paperback as a birthday gift. I still have it in the reference section of my study, yet unread. It is called Better English. It was only when I saw the crushed, rueful expression cross his face that I understood how the gesture I had made was cruel rather than helpful. Learning ways to bridge the gulf between us was a slow process.

My father had other traits that alienated me. He nurtured a parsimonious outlook that was of a piece with a staidness, a stick-in-the-mud-ness that no doubt spoke to his timid and anxious childhood. He never wanted the bother of doing anything so that it always fell to my mother to initiate an excursion, a family holiday or any kind of social activity. While she set about the heavy lifting, he grumbled on the sidelines – going shopping with him (which my mother had to do for anything other than household staples because he held the purse-strings) was a grim business. He hated paying out money and mourned the cash when it was gone.

I remember vividly the shaming experience of watching him carefully dole out the housekeeping money into my mother’s hand – licking his thumb and checking that there were never two notes inadvertently counted as one – with absolutely no sense of the humiliation that this ritual forced on his wife, something that I could certainly sense from a very young age.

Stan absolutely embodied the old line about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. His idea of a gift at birthdays and Christmas was a few notes folded and pushed into a brown envelope with my or Mum’s name scrawled on the front. He never gave to charity and denounced “scroungers” and “do-gooders”. Yet after the death of his uncle Wallace, he stormed around the house, furious that there was nothing for him in the will. In vain did my mother point out that the two men had never been close: indeed, I find it hard to recall an occasion when I ever met my great-uncle.

In revolt against my father’s anal attitude to money, I have always been notably careless with the stuff. I never know the price of anything, nor do I retain any notion of what anything cost me. I do not claim that my philosophy is in some way “healthier” than my father’s, but I have no doubt as to its origin.

In other ways, I have inherited variations of my father’s behaviour, usually to my great regret. In some eyes, Dad might well be accounted what his own generation would have called a “weak” character. He frequently used my grandfather’s age against him, particularly mocking his increasing deafness – “eh? eh?” he would bawl back in parody of Grandad’s plaintive but frequent response when addressed. He would scoff when the old man forgot to take his cap off in the house. These things seemed to me to be unkind, but I found myself cultivating my own strain of scorn to use against perceived weakness. I hope I have shed that.

Lacking dialectical skills, Dad would often resort to unforgivable tactics in family arguments, telling spectacular lies, making absurd claims and deploying naked emotional blackmail. He was adept at bringing my mother to tears of bitter frustration. Now and again, deep in some domestic tiff, I hear in my own lines of attack a weak but weird echo of my father’s outlandish gambits. I like to think that I immediately withdraw when that occurs.

In so many situations, my mother and I found ourselves allied against him and, though he and I both mellowed over the years, it was probably not until after my mother’s death in 1988 that I began to appreciate him more. But let me give him – or at least his genes – some credit for something that has filled my life with pleasure. Though neither of my parents was much given to listening to it (which their son does daily), they both related strongly to music.

My grandfather – the one who lived with us until his death at 87 when I was 14 – was a village schoolmaster and, for 40 years, ran a children’s choir. On a famous occasion, his meagre group reached the regional finals of a school choral competition and, trooping onto the stage in the wake of choirs that were dozens strong, were laughingly given no chance. In true Hollywood style, Grandpa’s choir won the trophy. That was long before I was born, but I vividly recall an occasion when, for my six or seven year-old benefit, this little old man stood in the corner of the dining room and sang for me with huge gusto some deathless Victorian ballad. I was moved to my core and wept buckets.

Also for 40 years, my Dad’s father was master of the silver band that did regular stints on the town’s bandstands. My parents met in the local amateur operatic society: she was in the dancing chorus, he took some roles. Though no actor, he had a decent light tenor voice and seemed not to suffer from his customary nerves when all he had to do was sing. You may imagine how often the story was told of how Dad came on for his solo at a concert party evening and my toddler voice piped up from the stalls: “It’s Daddy!”

Before my time, Dad scored a great success as Detlef, the fellow who leads the rousing ‘Drinking Song’, in Romberg’s The Student Prince. But he soon abandoned his amateur stage career. When the operatic society started to work through the canon of Rodgers & Hammerstein, Dad was invited to take the role of Mr Snow in Carousel. I was thrilled – ‘When the Children Are Asleep’ is a beautiful number and very grateful to the voice – but Dad declined, pleading pressure of work. Mum and I were utterly crestfallen.

Years later, Dad was persuaded to join the chorus for a neighbouring town’s revival of The Student Prince. Though he no longer led the chorus (and certainly didn’t pass for a student), he did an epic drunken reel across the stage in the middle of ‘The Drinking Song’ and I wondered if perhaps he was an actor after all. I was proud as Punch of him.

His other musical accomplishment was as a natural ballroom dancer, as smooth as silk on the floor and feather-light on his toes. All the ladies wanted to be his partner. I can picture the last time I saw him and Mum dancing – at a wedding, I think – and my eyes prickled then as they fill now. Perhaps that is why the movies of Fred Astaire still give me such joy.

As so often, it was adversity that brought the family more closely together and so I come to my Dad’s exemplary role in the unfolding of capitalism. Though my grandfather was wealthy, my great-grandfather was not, or at least not at the outset of his career. The chief activity of the town was the boot and shoe industry and, in my great-grandfather's day, it was very much a cottage industry. He and his wife set up a modest contribution to the shoe-making process in their own home. It was probably a clicking room: such kitchen-table operations were not unheard of when I was a boy.

But don't ask me what "clicking" was. The shoe trade, like any other, was bursting with a rich, arcane language all its own. As kids we used to enjoy the occasional sign outside shoe factories: "Skyvers wanted".

Footwear is a trade that does well out of war: army boots are in steady demand when there’s a call-up. Consequently, the Boer War, the Crimean War and the First World War successively saw boot manufacturing thrive. By the time that my grandfather and his brothers inherited my great-grandfather's business, it was highly successful.

At some point (I have never known when), the Gilbert family interest was bought out by a man named AJ Bignell. Certainly, although I always knew my father to be the managing director of the firm, I only knew the firm to be known as Bignell’s. Whether Dad was intended as MD I don’t know. But AJ Bignell’s only son died in the war-time bombing of the Café de Paris in London that famously also accounted for the cabaret performer Snake-hips Johnson: the event is lightly fictionalised in one of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time novels.

By my father’s account, Bignell stepped away from the business after his loss and became a recluse. Otherwise, Bignell’s did as well out of World War II as from the previous conflicts. And Dad steered it safely through most of the 1950s. But at some point, in what was seen as a move of some stealth, a controlling share in the company was acquired by a city speculator called Harry Jasper. Jasper & Co specialised in surreptitiously hoovering up modest but profitable concerns of all kinds. The change of ownership might never even have come to light had not a huge financial scandal broken when Jasper’s associate, Friedrich Grünwald, suddenly absconded to Israel with £3millions’ worth of the company assets.

The story raged for weeks on the finance pages of the newspapers and eventually Harry Jasper went to jail. Some of his companies were sold off but most, including Bignell’s, were closed down. In any case, the native boot and shoe industry was (to coin a phrase) on its uppers by this time, undermined by cheap Italian imports and soon to be destroyed by the switch from traditional leather shoes to trainers and other synthetic products. To Dad fell the melancholy task of making all his employees redundant, clearing and closing up the factory for the last time and, for one week only, drawing the dole. He was 50.

The second week after the closure of Bignell’s, with some crucial assistance from generous friends and from drawing on 35 years’ worth of trade contacts, Dad opened a little shop: Stan Gilbert (Footwear) Ltd.

It was hard going. Footwear being the county trade, everyone for miles around had a family member who could get hold of free or at least cut-price shoes. My mother and I (then a teenager) worked long hours to help without pay or indeed thanks (Dad didn’t do gratitude). But by degrees and shrewd use of his contacts, Dad made it pay and survive for twenty years. It helped a lot that, though a narrow, unimaginative and prosaic man, he was transformed into a poet with a well-made shoe in his hands. The first pair that I owned as a child was wholly fashioned by him, by hand, from scratch. I still have the lasts on which he made them.

You couldn’t contemplate starting such an enterprise now. Retail has no spare capacity for the little man and customers no longer comprehend a shop that does one thing and does it well. It wouldn’t occur to many to go to a shoe shop (where there would be a choice) for (say) shoelaces when you can no doubt pick up a standard pair at the supermarket.

Like most of us, Dad was utterly a creature of his time. A mass of prejudices (especially against the Welsh and the Jews), he was utterly uncomprehending of what women might want. I think he had been something of a hound in his youth. Once at a social gathering, he and my mother spoke to a couple whom they seemed to know a little and, watching carefully, I gradually saw that there was history between Dad and the blowsy woman in the couple. Dad said enough afterwards to allow me to surmise that he and she had had a premarital fling long ago.

One Christmas, back in the days when I and my partner each still went to stay with our respective parents for the season, I opened a thoughtful gift from a woman friend. It was Charles Silverstein and Edmund White’s book The Joy of Gay Sex. Happily, I was “out” to my parents by then and so was able to carry off the moment. Later, I came across my Dad curiously leafing through the book. He reacted squeamishly to a line illustration that turned out to be of an act of fellatio. “Did no one ever do that to you?” I asked carefully. Dad pondered. “Yes” he said. “A woman in Italy during the war. But I couldn’t do it”. This calm confession of faithlessness – my parents married in 1940 – quite astonished me.

My mother’s death knocked my father for a loop. His plan had always been to leave her comfortably off. Being widowed had never entered his mind. He cared for her gallantly during her fading months, learning a few cookery skills from scratch. When he was alone he was miserable and, to no one’s surprise, married again within eighteen months. His new wife was very different from my mother but she made him ridiculously happy.

In January 1998, Dad was hurrying Peggy across a main road with a typical show of impatience. They were hit by a car. It was a risky place to cross but the car was certainly speeding. My father died instantly. Peggy was in hospital for a few weeks but recovered. In an absurd piece of poetry, the driver turned out to be the music master from my old school. Had my Dad actually enrolled there, the man’s distant predecessor might well have cultivated Dad’s musical bent and led him along a different path. Who knows? At any rate, for causing a fatality by speeding, he was fined £120.

Near the end of his life, his solicitor asked Dad what he was worth and he essayed a figure that would certainly have permitted the holiday that he refused to sanction during their eight years of marriage. In fact he left five times as much as he thought, founded on the shrewd investments of his father. This inheritance allowed Peggy to live without worry until Alzheimer’s kicked in two or three years ago and allowed my partner and I to buy the property we adore in the west country. In his fear of ever suffering financial embarrassment, Dad amassed a small but idle fortune. It seems hard on his two wives that they should have had to observe constant thrift. Lucky for me, though.