Element

Dad, so long gone,
suddenly here in khaki
like a dream,
lying on your belly
on a makeshift bed
in a windblown tent
in pouring rain
somewhere near Naples
typing in the half-dark,
in your element!

In Brief

I see that my Dad's letters - those extracts I've posted here - have vividly shown something of the character of the man, and have caught the positive interest of some of my commenters, and that has made me see my Dad in a new light somehow - as something entirely other than my father. What is hard for me is to know how to respond. I have encountered him anew in reading the letters, and feel a very odd mixture of excitement and sadness. I wish I'd known him better, and that he'd lived longer, which might have allowed that to happen.

Maybe a first step is simply to answer the questions as they were posed.

Did your father ever write his novel?
No. It was clear that in his retirement he had once again planned to write one, but there is no material that suggests he actually started it. I guess I see him as what Julia Cameron calls a 'shadow artist', living his creativity vicariously through working closely with authors (see below). He used to write witty political poems for competitions in the Spectator and New Statesman, and frequently won £5 or a bottle of Scotch!

What did he do with his life?
In 1953 he married my mother, and together they went on to have our family - my elder brother and sister, and myself. My parents separated in 1978 - my mother's initiative.
He was a distinguished editor, a director of the Bodley Head, a small highly regarded publishing house based on Bow Street in London. He worked there for his entire working life. Notably he worked with Graham Greene, and his last project before retirement was the Collected Letters of George Bernard Shaw. The Bodley Head had a fantastic children's list, and my earliest memories are of him bringing me home the latest picture book, extracting it like treasure from his battered brown leather briefcase.
In 1987 he retired and in February 1988 he committed suicide aged 62. Some of you already know this from my previous blog.

What is it like reading the letters as his daughter?
Extraordinary. Very moving, and also unbearably tantalising. Here's this intense glimpse into the mind and the life of my father over a two-year period aged 20-21, and suddenly it ends with his long-awaited demob. And he's gone. There are many passages that evoke the inner conflicts he struggled with then, and was to struggle with all his life. Seeing these roots so clearly is both strangely reassuring and utterly heartbreaking.
I have a few vivid memories of him from my early childhood, but then it is as if he went into a slow fade, mirroring the disintegration of my parents' marriage. After my parents separated I saw him infrequently. I lived to regret this.

Pondering

Having told my kind commenters that I would post further about my Dad in an effort to answer their interested questions, I now feel a certain challenge emerging. It's a challenge for me, and a challenge for The Phoenix. Having read the letters all through again - 73 in all, not 150 as I wildly estimated after reading them the first time - and catalogued them after a fashion (numbered, recorded dates and addresses, summarised, tagged), I wait to see what the next step might be.

One step will be to select a few to take and read to my mother in a couple of weeks' time when I visit. I mentioned them to her on the phone when I'd just begun to read them for the first time, and she was very interested, in fact quite excited to hear about them. She had not been aware of their existence. As I progressed through the letters, there were more and more that touched on matters I didn't feel inclined to discuss with her, so another difficult decision is - is it my job to be the censor? After all I could just let her have them for a while, and let her make of them what she will. On the other hand her resilience level has dropped to something of an all time low, and I fear they might upset her in ways she'd find hard to manage alone...

Then there's what I've stirred up in myself by reading them and, paralleling this, your interest kind readers. I'm digesting and pondering. Watch this space.

Dad II

Here's my Dad back off leave in January 1947

'None of my companions seem to have changed in the slightest as a result of their leave. They are as loud and foul-mouthed as ever - all voice and nothing to back it - and damned unpleasant to live with. It is absolute hell by comparison with the pleasant devil-may-care atmosphere radiated by Lymington's jeunesse doree. They are the two extremes, quite unconscious of one another - happily so really, for they would never get on....
I sometimes become very angry with Fate for playing this dirty trick on me. Fate, incarnated in the military authorities, seems to treat me as a football to be kicked hither and thither at will, an inanimate, inconsiderable thing.
I must get really wrapped up in something that will keep my mind far away from its physical environment. I think I will have a shot at writing a novel. At least it will keep me from suicide!'

In March, fairly certain of his demob number coming up in the next few months, he writes

'Honestly, I grow fonder of my coarse, foul-mouthed companions every day, because I realize that in six months' time I shall be saying goodbye, not only to them, but to the spirit which has resulted from our friendship. I don't think anyone who has not experienced it, can know just how strongly bound we soldiers are to one another. There are, I suppose, fifty chaps here who would do anything for me, and for whom I would do anything - we would die for each other if it came to the push, I think. It is not that we know each other very well - most of us - but that there is a team spirit abroad amongst us (just because life is pleasanter that way) which doesn't allow us to let each other down. I think most of us would do a favour for a perfect stranger, if he was in khaki. And why are people so much nicer in the Army than out of it? Simply because they feel secure. They do not have to win the bread - it is given to them. In "Civvy Street" there is always a fear that the bread may run out. This fear drives people to get all they can for themselves - and to HELL with everyone else: an ugly fact, but true. And they just go on and on money-grabbing, thinking that when they have x thousand pounds they will feel secure. But before they have x thousand pounds the thing has become an obsession. What a miserable existence! ..... We must get a team-spirit in the World. To read the papers one would suppose that it existed now - "United Nations" etc - but can you show me anything that it has done, achieved? "Freedom from Fear of Insecurity at some Future Date" is the first stage to be reached, then, it would seem. But why worry about our individual security when the security of the world is at stake. We are fighting a battle - no, that's not true, we're not, but we should be. As long as there is selfishness and patriotism - which is mob selfishness - there is no hope at all for the WORLD, which is what matters to me; not just me, or just Britain, but the WORLD.'

Epiphany

In the school calm prevails today, and young people in green sit in rows and learn. I meet the chaplain and the assistant principal, and the woman whose shoulder the kids cry on when they have a headache or a heartache. On the wall a display of work - they have been learning about Hundertwasser. I walk optimistically along the polished corridor to look at the little room where I shall work, my visitor tag round my neck, and it feels like old times, feels like new times.

Slow Rising

The snow that fell this morning in soft floating flakes like feathers has all but melted, and the day is darkening at 3.30 as fog sinks onto the tops. The school across the road has not reopened. Today is the funeral of one of their teaching assistants who died just before Christmas aged 56. Death seems to be around every corner. Yesterday came the news of Pete Postlethwaite's untimely demise from lung cancer. And my friend K is involved in the final stages of the life of her friend G who has cancer now in many parts of her body. Her friend becomes frail and thin and ill, needs oxygen, a commode, help to walk. And is afraid. As is K.

On I go with Dad's letters. Just at the point where he finally gets to go home on leave in December 1946, after a bout of dysentery, and in poor spirits, having been led to believe he may not be demobilised until early 1948 (in fact it was July 1947).

This winter feels long and hard. My feet inside socks and slippers feel cold. But my conversation with K, and watching an interview with Judi Dench yesterday evening have inspired me. Death waits for us all, and for some of us it doesn't wait long enough. But while we're here we do what we can. My habit of undervaluing myself and what I am doing can be corrosive. Even in this low time my endurance, my patience, my keeping going, are important. Even when I feel utterly impotent to help K with what she is going through, she tells me how much my thoughts, my insights, my support mean to her, and I must believe her. Judi D too seems to struggle to believe that what she does is good. Yet she does not run herself down. She is still and dignified and respectful of what others tell her about her glorious performances.

On Thursday I go back to the school for a second meeting and something new will begin. I have to keep on trusting this slow rising.

Dad

Here's my Dad writing home from Greece in July 1946. He starts by saying he hasn't had a letter from either parent for a fortnight and is worried he may have said something that's upset them.

'If I do say rather startling things sometimes, it is because I am no longer prepared to accept as gospel everything that I see in print or am told by my elders and (would-be) (crossed out) betters. I have thrown off the burden of accumulated conventional ideas, doctrines and parrot creeds, and am now in the process of sifting them in the light of my experience of the world as I find it. I find that a great part of the teachings of the church ... and of our schools, both Public and public, are no more than anti-social propaganda of the most efficient and soul-destroying nature. And I don't like it one little bit ... I was never taught at school that our failure in France in 1940 was largely due to the fact that Baldwin the Bad witheld his knowledge of the full-steam German rearmament, on the ground that if he announced it, there would be such an uproar that he would be ousted at the next election. I have to ferret these things out for myself. We have all been corruptly educated because Mr Bloody Baldwin and his retinue of rich rascals must lie to capacity if they are to keep the proletariat underfoot.

Tomorrow I start teaching English [as part of an Army Education Programme]. I have some misgivings as to my ability to do so, as my knowledge of the parrot-formulae of grammar is negligible, such grammatical astuteness as I possess having been picked up from the reading of the works of authors, whose command of the language is quite evident, and an inducement to emulate them. I shall start off with a brief historical outline, showing how the English language came to its present state. Then I shall tell them one or two good reasons why they should learn to speak a standardized form of English ... For some reason, soldiers are never satisfied with calling a spade a spade. They prefer not only to call it a *!?*!? shovel, but wherever possible to translate the shovel into some obscene tongue, or else to refer to it solely and always as some foul thing which they think it resembles, or with which it rhymes.

Thus bread = Rooty, margarine = mucking, beer = pig's ear, I don't care = Demborazie or Mahleesh or Allah Keefik, tea = char, cake = wad, to mention only 1% of the whole. Such words are their vocabulary. They're (sic) speech is full of such errors as "didn't ought", "It looks like this is them", and other such vile imports from Hollywood. So you can see that I have a hell of a job before me. But it is so important that I hope to make something of it, anyway.'