A Day Like Today: Memoirs. John Humphrys

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A Day Like Today: Memoirs - John  Humphrys


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whether religious or lay, really began to change at the end of the last war – when the soldiers came home and the women, who’d been forced to work in the factories, decided they didn’t want to go back to the old ways.

      ‘You can’t go in there,’ he told me sternly.

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘Because you’re not wearing your ID.’

      ‘But you know who I am and I’m on air in two minutes.’

      ‘Sorry. No ID, no admission.’

      ‘OK,’ I said, ‘you do the bloody programme.’

      Mercifully, he gave in. Yes, I know I was being petulant and he was just doing his job but I thought at the time I was striking a small blow for freedom. Today, I suspect I was just being difficult because I don’t like authority.

      Mine 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.

      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?

      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.

      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.


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