If you keep beating 'round the bush
you lose your push
Listening to dear Captain Beefheart, rest his soul. 69 seems young to die these days. What can I say about the Captain?
Big eyed beans from Venus
don't let anything get in between us
Wild man, loose imagination, wonderful blues voice. Exciting and liberating both then and now to listen to music which tears up every rule book.
And last night we watched the documentary about Eddie Izzard 'Believe'. He too at his best is possessed of a wild imagination, a capacity for surreal flights - following them wheresoever they may go.
Longing for some of this creative freedom. Longing to lose control. Ridiculously anxious at the moment. About snow and ice. About work. About life. What am I doing with it?
I'm now working my way through my Dad's army letters for the second time, attempting to catalogue them in some way as I go. Having read my way through maybe 150 letters it is nigh on impossible without doing so ever to find again the parts that I want to revisit. And there are many. My father at 20/ 21 a trooper in the 40th Royal Tank Regiment, an ex public schoolboy, interrupted in his Oxford undergraduate studies by being called up for the last month of WW2, suddenly must share his life with working class lads whose language and behaviour he finds 'coarse, uncouth and licentious'. Yet he believes passionately in the equality and brotherhood of all men - as an ideal. He struggles to find common ground with his fellow soldiers and sometimes finds it in one to one conversation, though in group situations he is always the outsider, clearly seen as aloof and snobby. He characterises them as interested only in alcohol and sleeping with women, and occupies the high moral ground of a strict Anglican, sounding distinctly prudish at times. Yet he longs to be free of many social conventions he considers hypocritical and empty. He wants 'all men' to be happy, recognises the part played by Capitalism in the misery of the 'masses', and dreams of a kind of Christian Communism, whose ultimate aim would be to allow everyone to work only a few hours a day, giving them plenty of time 'to themselves' (a fantasy that marked his character throughout his life)...
Yet he seems to find it hard to imagine that a 'working class man' could already possess intelligence, integrity or dignity - without the precious (public school) 'education' he has been taught to believe is the only route to becoming a useful citizen, a good person... There is so much to find absurdly snobbish, classist, sexist, naive, and yet... here he is, entirely and inevitably the product of his time and upbringing and education, suddenly thrown into the levelling experience of army life, doing the best he can to be tolerant and helpful, to make sense of a world of which until now he has only seen such a small sheltered corner, and which has just come through a war.
He's also devouring books, dreaming of writing them, making his parents laugh (I hope) at funny stories of this strange army life, wondering what his brother back home is getting up to, sightseeing in Italy and Greece, swimming and sunbathing, playing cricket, and generally wondering what on earth is the purpose of his being there, as the months roll by and still he isn't demobilised.
My young young Dad, just a few years before he met my young young Mum, and the two of them got married and very soon started our family.
Babes in the wood.
3 comments:
I find I look forward to this time between Christmas and New Year for its freedom and seclusion, then frequently find myself beset by anxiety at the sense that I ought to be doing something other than what I am, or in some way structuring it, and worrying quite a lot about the possible hazards of snow and ice and their consequences, even, or perhaps especially when there isn't any or if there is I don't have to go anywhere in it.
Your reflections on your dad's letters are interesting and lucid, I expect their impression on you and it effects will be with you for a long time, and take a while to work itself out. We long to see those whose memories we treasure and whom we wished we had had more time and will to know better revealed as somehow, larger, possessing of undiscovered talents and greatness, I suppose, and when they seem less than that there's a danger of disappointment. But his youthful attitudes and notions sound quite touching really, and worth treasuring the record of withal.
And I wouldn't care to be judged by my non-existent posterity for any pompous and clueless crap I might have been caught spouting at 20 odd! However, listening to Captain Beefheart with you was one of the better bits; RIP Captain.
Fascinating and poignant. Isn't it strange, encountering one's parents when they were young? Hardly seems possible, somehow; so the results seem remote and even fictional (rather than 'fictitious').
Minnie - thanks for dropping in here! Yes I keep doing double takes - this is *actually* my Dad writing this letter back in 1946... so alive, yet now long dead.
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