A Day Like Today. John Humphrys
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was a childhood of smells: the horrible smell of the chemical Mam used for perms and the even more horrible (and probably dangerous) fumes from the chemicals Dad used when he had to polish furniture in the kitchen – which was often. One of the tricks of his trade – I was never quite sure why – was to pour methylated spirits onto, say, a tabletop, wait a few seconds and then set fire to it. There’d be a great ‘whoosh!’ Job done. Remember … this was in the kitchen where my mother cooked and the family ate. Even worse, because it was so noxious, was his use of oxalic acid. The crystals were boiled up in a baked beans tin on the gas stove and the liquid used as a very powerful bleach if he needed to lighten the colour of a particular piece of furniture. The fumes got into the back of your throat. God knows what they did to your lungs. My mother suffered the most and died a relatively early death. The doctor said her lungs ‘just gave out’. Unsurprising really.
Dad would have had an easier life had he been a bit less stroppy. He hated ‘snobs’ – a word that encompassed a vast range of people – and he hated authority in all its manifestations. Almost all. There was one exception. He did a lot of work at Cardiff and Port Talbot docks polishing the officers’ quarters on the banana boats and iron-ore carriers. I sometimes worked with him as an (unpaid) labourer and was always surprised to see how he treated the captain. He even called him ‘sir’. That was a word I’d never heard him use.
His politics were perfectly balanced. He hated capitalism – specifically those who got rich from it – and inherited wealth. And he hated socialism. When he turned up at a really grand house to do some work he would always ring the bell at the main entrance, and if he was ordered to use the servants’ entrance – which happened from time to time – he would tell them to bugger off and walk away. He was, as he unfailingly pointed out, a skilled craftsman. He was absolutely NOT a ‘servant’. The fact that he needed the work took second place to his pride.
He had a special place in hell reserved for the bosses of large companies, specifically the ship owners and the banks, who hired him to do a job and did not pay him for at least a couple of months. I decided long ago that when I become prime minister the first law I shall propose will be one that forces all companies to pay their bills within one month – except in the case of one-man firms like my father’s in which case it will be one week. Why not?
Dad hated royalty too. He was the only person in our street who did not go to see the Queen when she visited Cardiff soon after her coronation, even though her motorcade passed down a road only a few minutes’ walk from our house. ‘Why should I?’ he’d demand. ‘She’s just another human being … she’s no better than me.’ He was thrown out of his club because of her. It was a busy Friday night and the only spare seat was beneath a portrait of her. ‘Buggered if I’m sitting there!’ he announced. And that was the end of his club membership. He hated socialism equally. He regarded trade union leaders as dangerous and their members as dupes. The welfare state was an excuse for lazy men to live off hard-working men like him. He made an exception for women who had lost their husbands in the war or were struggling desperately to bring up their children. The Man from the Board, with his large notebook, intrusive questions and prying eyes, was hated by everyone in our street. If you applied for benefits you had to prove your need. One of our neighbours, who’d been widowed and was struggling desperately to bring up her two children, told my mother how he had demanded to know why she had four chairs around her kitchen table when there were only three in her family, her husband having died in the war. The Man from the Board said it would count against her when ‘the office’ reached a judgement on her case. Obviously my father hated him too.
The curious thing was that Dad never admitted we were poor – even when there was no work and we were really on our uppers. I remember one night – I was probably seven or eight – being woken up by him screaming when he should have been snoring. My brother told me he was having a nervous breakdown – not that he really knew what that meant. I understood much later that he was at breaking point because he didn’t know how he was going to put enough food on the table for all of us. I think what I understand now is that he regarded himself as a failure and that was more than he could handle.
In fact, we kids never really went hungry. We knew when times were hard because there would be lamb bones boiled for a very long time with potatoes and onions for dinner (meaning lunch) and sugar sandwiches for tea (meaning supper). In better times meals were strictly regimented. I can remember exactly what we had for dinner every day of the week. It almost never varied and it gave me my unshakeable conviction that the cheapest meat is the tastiest.
Scrag-end of lamb neck made the perfect stew, and point end of brisket the perfect roast – so long as you left it in the oven for about six hours. It was at least seventy per cent fat but that was fine because my father preferred fat to lean meat – especially when it was burned to a crisp. I can’t imagine it was terribly healthy food, but he made up for it by drinking the water the cabbage had been boiled in. And, yes, it was just as disgusting as it sounds.
Tea was slightly more flexible, especially in summer when the allotment was producing lots of lettuce and other salad ingredients. Funny how the middle class came to discover the joy of allotments for themselves in later years. Unlike the working class who grew the food because they needed it, the middle class grew it for the pleasure of it. Nothing was wasted in our house. I mean nothing. Stale bread was soaked in water and used to make bread pudding and, on the vanishingly rare occasion when one of us left some food on our plate for dinner it would be served up again for tea. Obviously there was no fridge, but that didn’t matter because nothing stayed around for long enough to go rotten. On hot days the milk stood in a saucepan of cold water. It worked.
My father’s nervous breakdown did not last long. He was not a man to show emotion of any kind. In the language of the time he ‘pulled himself together’ – almost as though his breakdown had been a fault in his character. I’m not sure the word ‘counselling’ existed in those days, possibly because there were so many men who had survived the war but were still suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. We had no language for PTSD then.
My favourite uncle, Tom, had fought in the Great War and was still suffering horribly. He had been gassed in the trenches, shipped back to Britain and put to work in the docks. Unbelievably, given the state of his lungs, his job was offloading coal. The coal dust completed the job that the gas had begun. His lungs were wrecked. He was never again able to lie down to sleep because his lungs would fill with fluid. His life had been hellish enough anyway.
He and Auntie Lizzie had one child, Tommy – or ‘Little Tommy’ as everyone called him even though he was a very large man. His brain and his face had been terribly damaged at birth and he had the mental age of a toddler and no speech. In fact, he had nothing – except an unlimited supply of love from his utterly wonderful parents. Whenever I went to his house Little Tommy would bring out the photograph albums and point gleefully at every picture of me and my siblings and parents and look terribly proud of himself for having made the connection. Then he would laugh uproariously.
Uncle Tommy and Auntie Lizzie had a hard life by even the harshest of standards. Desperate would be a better word. Their one constant worry was what would happen to Little Tommy ‘when we are gone’. But I never once heard them complain. Yes, I know that’s one of the oldest clichés in the book but so what? It happens to be true. Whether their lives might have been improved if they had complained we shall never know.
My father’s proudest possession was a medallion he won representing Glamorgan on the running track. He carried it with him in his jacket pocket everywhere. He was a first-class sprinter but two things held him back: his eyesight and his poverty. It’s not easy to race if you can’t see the man in front of you clearly. A friend of his told me how Dad once ran off the course and into a barbed-wire fence alongside the track. He kept going. He always did. But poverty proved to be a bigger problem. He had been selected to run for his athletics club in a meet some fifty miles from Cardiff. He had no money and so the club paid his bus fare for him. But those were the days when athletics was a strictly amateur sport and when the Amateur Athletics Association got to hear about his subsidised bus fare he was banned. Like Uncle Tom he did not complain. Unlike