No. 28 - Of Wisdom, Angels & Imaginary Cheese.

My father was a teacher, a headmaster and a Sunday school teacher, so I assumed he knew pretty much everything. His answers to my questions were the indisputable truth, as if it were straight from the Arthur Mee Children’s Encyclopaedia, which it sometimes was. This ten volume set was lined up in the dresser next to a further eight volumes of bible commentary: the encyclopaedia and Dad were the Internet of the time as far as our household was concerned. He seemed to know a little about everything, animal, vegetable or mineral. He had an innate curiosity which his children and grandchildren have inherited. Personally, I love to know the where and the why of things, so like Dad I know a little about everything, but not a lot about anything.

Each day when Dad got home from school, I would sit on his lap beside the fire. He’d tear two corners off the newspaper and stick them to his fingers with spittle. He made them live: “Two little dickybirds, sitting on a wall. One named Peter and one named Paul.” They would fly away and they would come back (sometimes but not always). Occasionally, I’d see the two little dicky birds again, stuck to Dad’s face, after a shave. 

He took the trouble to make an entire village for me out of cereal packets, paperback jackets and other bits of cardboard. It even had a garage with a huge window in the front so that my Dinky cars could be displayed, as if for sale. I really loved it, which is why I remember it so well over sixty years later. 

The most important thing my father taught me, was how to read and write. I could do this before I first set foot in Penlleiniau school, Pwllheli, in September 1962, at the age of four. Beside the fire, sitting on his lap the two little dickie-birds were usurped by Peter and Jane as he would get me to read to him. “See the ball Pat! Fetch the ball Pat!” I started with a blue book, progressed to a green and then a red one. I remember the ‘new’ smell of them and the texture of their covers. Although he’d been at school all day, he was patient and never cross about my mistakes.

It was Dad who taught me to make tea and coffee when I was first trusted to do something in the kitchen and we described the process in writing at school. It was his way of helping us to break down any given task into stages, learn how to write instructions and also how to read, understand and follow them. This was an important lesson, particularly for someone who would eventually become a Westminster civil servant, where following written instructions, and indeed writing them, was central to everything I did.

Rite of Passage

Perhaps it is an inevitable rite of passage for a child to begin realising that his father is not infallible, by noticing him getting a few things wrong. I once thought I’d seen a firefly in church and dancing with excitement, I told him about it after the service. He assured me that I couldn’t have seen one, and he was probably right about that, but he went on to say with absolute authority that there are no such things as fireflies. This put him directly at odds with the Arthur Mee Children’s Encyclopaedia, but I didn’t like to say. 

The Arthur Mee Children's Encyclopaedia.

Then there was the cheese. When I was a child there seemed only two kinds - the yellow, rather plastic Welsh Cheddar my parents favoured and the crumbly, white Cheshire I preferred. Other than that, not even Caerphilly made it into our refrigerator. Wandering around Spar one day, I spied something that claimed to be Lancashire cheese! I bet not many kids spend their pocket money on cheese, but I absolutely had to buy some. Having scoffed the lot, I demonstrated the sophistication of my palate to Dad by conversationally asserting that I found Lancashire cheese to be even tastier than Cheshire. Dad informed me that the Lancashire cheese I’d not long consumed cannot in fact have existed, because there was 'no such thing'. Once again, I dared not contradict him, but I knew that I hadn’t wasted my pocket money on imaginary cheese.

In retrospect, I had cause to doubt his wisdom far earlier than that. One morning, I was sitting at the table enjoying my breakfast of a boiled egg, from my Gussie the Guardsman egg cup, which had a furry bearskin to keep the egg warm. Buttered toast had been cut into ‘soldiers’ for me to dip into the bright yellow yolk, but my enjoyment was rudely interrupted by the pan of hot water he spilled all down my front. This was somehow my fault, because I had ‘moved unexpectedly’ or something. This sort of thing only ever happened when Mum wasn’t around. He flew into a panic and ran to the medicine cabinet, in which resided gauze, pills and ointments, remedies for every known human ailment, short of death. He seemed to be relying on me, a small child, to diagnose the severity of the scald. He pulled off my shirt and started frantically rubbing some yellow ointment into my chest and belly. It can’t have been all that bad because I finished my egg.

On another occasion I was packed off to bed with a bad cold. He tucked me in and went to see what he could find in the medicine cabinet. Never one to let nature take its course, he was always looking for a solution. What he found should literally have been a solution, but of course, he knew better. He returned with a paper sachet of Beecham’s Powders, which were meant to have been dissolved in a glass of water. Dad reckoned that they would be even more potent if they weren’t diluted, so he poured the contents of the sachet onto a teaspoon and pushed it into my mouth. On contact with my saliva, it exploded and left me snorting out foam like a rabid dog. This was wrong of me, because the Beecham’s Powders would do me no good at all dripping onto my winceyette pyjamas and candlewick bedspread. Dad was cross that his ‘fool-proof’ remedy had been thwarted by a fool.

Confounded Nuisances

Mum and I dreaded the occasions when Dad decided to save money by doing something himself rather than hiring a tradesman. He was confident of solving any problems involving cisterns, electrical wiring, or carpentry and he had a tool for every purpose - although having it and being able to lay hands on it are two different matters. As he worked on whatever it was, Mum and I had to be in attendance in case he needed the 'what-d’you-call-it' or the 'thingamy-jig' passing to him. Focusing intently on the task, whenever he required a tool he would stretch his arm out behind him and wiggle his fingers, and woe betide us if we were to pass him the 'thingamy-jig' when it was really the 'what-d’you-call-it' he wanted. As eager as he was to attempt these tasks, he was never happy in his work. He was extremely bad-tempered and whenever a snag arose, what wasn’t my fault was certain to be Mum’s. He seemed exasperated that his wife and son knew nothing at all about plumbing or electrical circuits and cursed the fact that the pair of us were such ‘confounded nuisances’. 

Typical contents of my Dad's bureau drawer.

The medicine cabinet was no use at all in these situations, but fortunately there was another sacred source for more practical problems. Whatever the difficulty, there would be something in the bureau drawer that Dad reckoned would ‘do the trick’. Nuts, bolts, screws, nails, string, flex, brown Bakelite switches and electrical roses, tobacco tins, Allen keys, cigarette cards, wire wool…. anything you can think of was in there somewhere. It fascinated me and I’m glad that I have that same bureau today, although I fear that the contents of the drawer would prove disappointing to a curious child.

Pasolini’s Angel

I have cause to remember one particular DIY occasion. For the first fifteen years of my life, we lived in a large, terraced house in Pwllheli where I had a tiny back bedroom to myself. Beside the single bed there was a table that had once been a piano stool, a chest of drawers and a cupboard. The walls were uneven, and the room was so damp that the wallpaper hung like an arras in places. I would poke it and hear a small avalanche of dried paste tumble behind it.

In the mid-1960s when I wasn’t yet ten years old, somehow, my parents had been all right with me going to The Palladium to see The Gospel According to Saint Matthew by Pasolini, in Italian with subtitles. It was about Jesus, so what harm could it possibly do? In fact, I was considerably disturbed by it. It left me terrified of angels for a start. The Angel of the Lord in the film isn’t horrific, in fact if she hadn’t said, you’d never have known she was an angel at all. But I certainly didn’t want anyone suddenly ‘appearing unto’ me, angel or not, because I do not like surprises.

When I got home, I was to find that my bedroom had become an unfamiliar, echoing chamber. In my absence the wallpaper had been stripped from the wall and the skirting board painted, so it didn’t sound right and it didn’t smell right either. As it was way past my bedtime they stopped decorating and packed up for the night. All the scraped wallpaper was gathered and a particularly large fragment was used to contain it, and this loosely wrapped detritus was left on the bedroom floor awaiting disposal.

My father, probably around the time I was born. I was an 'afterthought' born 16 years after the eldest.

With my mind racing with Pasolini, the unfamiliar echoes of the bare room and the smell of paste and paint stinging my nostrils, I drifted into an uneasy sleep. At some point during the night, the wallpaper parcel began to move as though there was a rat in it. It hadn’t been packed very stably and every sound in the bare room was amplified. Suddenly I was wide awake, petrified and waiting for something awful to happen. Then, with an almighty crash, it did. The parcel burst open, showering the darkness with debris and dust. I screamed at the top of my voice for I had no doubt that this was an angel ‘appearing unto’ me.

My parents came running, as most would on hearing screams of bloody murder from their child’s bedroom. As soon as they switched on the light, it was easy for them to see what had happened. They did not rush to embrace and comfort me, nor did they talk to me soothingly to help calm my hysteria. Mum went back to bed and Dad gave me a row for being so silly and frightening them. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I woke them again, angels ‘appearing unto’ me would be the least of my worries. 

Perhaps it was a harbinger, because although Dad was an excellent teacher and wonderful with children, soon I would be a teenager, and my relationship with him would become very different.