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       Why Do You Talk Like That?

      Some people claim to remember their own birth. I don’t believe them, and I certainly can’t do so. The night my second younger brother was born, and the day I arrived back from school to find I had a younger sister, I recall vividly. Where I left the book I borrowed from the London Library last week I have no idea.

      When I was growing up we lived in an absurdly pretty pink-washed, mullion-windowed cottage at the edge of a village green in Hampshire. Rose Cottage really did have roses around the door, and at weekends we could watch the local team play cricket on the green without leaving the front garden. There was a big old fig tree in the garden which splattered ripe fruit onto the ground each September, and a pump in the middle of the lawn with a white-painted seat around which I learned to ride a bike.

      In the cottage next door lived Mr and Mrs Ball. Mrs Ball was very old, and baked a lot. The only thing I can recall about Mr Ball was that he drowned kittens in a sack. Mother wore her long black hair tied back in a bun, and rode a black sit-up-and-beg bicycle with a child’s seat over the back mudguard which I occupied as she pedalled the four miles into Fareham for groceries. What little I remember of Dad – he was away at sea a lot – is of a curly-haired figure in loose trousers and lightly checked cotton shirt. There was a black-and-brown family dachshund named Dinah.

      My first education was at the redbrick Victorian primary school at the end of the village green. Mum would walk me down to the playground, and was there at the gate when classes finished. The teacher sat at a raised desk, and the classroom was high-windowed and cavernous. I cannot help that it all sounds such a clichéd picture of a vanished England, but that’s just how it was.

      My father, Keith, was stationed at the Royal Navy base in Portsmouth, and was away at sea when I was born. In the final days of her pregnancy my mother, Joan, took the train north to be with her family, and I was delivered in a nursing home near Leeds. At the time, Yorkshire County Cricket Club operated a selection policy under which only those who had been born in the county were eligible for selection. My Yorkshire father occasionally offered this as an explanation for my mother’s long pilgrimage from the Solent to Leeds, though he never seemed to take that close an interest in the game. While I failed to acquire any great skill with bat or ball, I never lost an unreasonable pride (insufferable smugness?) about having come from God’s Own County, even though I never really lived there.

      We were not a close family – as Mother told it when she was older, there was one occasion when Dad returned from sea service and I ran away screaming, because I had no idea who he was. This must have distressed him, but relations between us never really improved much. I suppose the family would have been classified as middle class, but there was always a slight sense that we were hanging in there by our fingernails. The constant refrain of my childhood was ‘We can’t afford it,’ which I now recognise wasn’t really a declaration of poverty so much as mere Yorkshireness, although it didn’t seem so at the time. We shared the generally improving standard of living in the fifties, but did not live extravagantly: there was only one foreign holiday, in 1959, when we took a boat from Southampton to Vigo, in Spain – on the return journey the ship carried great numbers of Caribbean immigrants, whom my brothers and I, never having seen a black person, found fascinating.

      As a family we did not number doctors, dentists, bank managers or similar worthies in our circle. No one in the immediate family had been to university, though one of my mother’s sisters had spent some time at RADA, hoping to become an actress. It was a very brief career which distressed her parents almost as much as her incomprehensible decision to become a Roman Catholic. But my father was a naval officer, and while Mum’s father had started out as a travelling salesman, he ended up with his own canning factory and a small country estate in North Yorkshire. It was he who paid the fees when I, my younger brothers Giles and James, and my sister Jenny later went to private schools.

      All children like to imagine their parents have heroic histories. In my childhood I believed Dad to have spent the war on convoy duty, protecting the supplies which came from North America to Britain, or those sent from a remote Scottish sea loch to Russian allies in Archangel and Murmansk. Of the many miserable fates which stalked the war generation, unannounced death from a U-boat torpedo in the icy waters of the North Atlantic has always seemed one of the worst. I imagined Dad as the sort of figure played by Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea, binoculars hanging around his neck, standing on the bridge of a destroyer in a naval duffel-coat, with mountainous seas breaking across the foredeck, calmly ordering ‘Full ahead both’ into a voice tube as a torpedo wake glows white under the briny. But when I unearthed his records a few months ago his military career turned out to have been rather more prosaic. He seems to have volunteered for the navy straight out of school, giving his civilian occupation as ‘bank clerk’. The records show early training at a requisitioned holiday camp at Skegness, from which he emerged as a rating, followed by another training period at an airfield in Luton, as he hoped to become a navy pilot with the Fleet Air Arm.

      This did not come off, possibly because, as he later told his sisters, he was grounded for ‘hedge-hopping’ and flying his aircraft beneath the arches of bridges. Perhaps it was actually for more humdrum reasons – only a very small proportion of those who wanted to become wartime pilots were successful. At any rate, in March 1941 he began a less glamorous naval life as a ‘Writer’ on board HMS Fernie, a largely administrative role aboard a destroyer assigned to escort shipping in the Channel. As it did for many people, my father’s war doubtless passed in bouts of intense fear and excitement, separated by very much longer periods of great tedium. By the following year he had been promoted to ‘Leading Writer’, in which capacity he was shuffled from one ship or shore base to another, either at home or abroad. In 1944 he is recorded as serving in the Persian Gulf on board a series of vessels, including converted Norwegian whaling ships and at the Royal Navy base in Basra, Iraq.

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