Bad Blood (15 page)

My father in 1945, my mother in the early 1940s

My mother in the early 1940s

Like many who'd married in the war, my parents were finding it hard to survive the peace. This wasn't because they had discovered that they didn't love each other once their life together wasn't spiced with constant separations and the threat of death. Far from it. But they had chosen each other so much against the social grain that they were tense, self-conscious, embattled, as though something was supposed to go wrong. Their families didn't like their marriage, nor did the village. Hanmer still lived in the era when most engagements were really contracted between legacies and land, abutting acres, second cousins twice removed, or at least a tied cottage and a tea service. The mythically egalitarian spirit of the Blitz only visited Hanmer in rumour, like the returning rumble of the odd bomber a bit off course on its way back from flattening Liverpool Docks. A marriage between the vicar's daughter and the local haulier's son, who did his rounds in black face ( Stockton & Sons hauled coal pre-war, mostly), was dangerous to decorum. You might think that if the haulier's boy went off to the wars a conscript private and came back a captain, this changed things. My parents' story could have been read as the triumphant progress of the sort of clean-cut local lad and younger son who does so well in folk tales. He falls in love with a dreamy virgin in thrall to her corrupt, spellbinding
father; he goes away, wins his spurs in Normandy and the Ardennes, comes back to rescue her from the sterile, vicious vicarage and carries her off to realms of real life – the virtue, order and daylight decency of a proper marriage, and wholesome children. I think in some ways that's how they saw it themselves. However, Hanmer thought differently.

It was bad enough that my parents had gone out with each other in the 1930s, as teenagers. (This would have been a year or so after the Marj episode, Grandpa and Grandma were too busy rowing to care.) If they sat together into the small hours in the parked car he'd managed to borrow, that was further scandalous evidence of my grandparents' indifference to propriety. No matter that these young people, Valma and Eric, deplored vicarage ways and were determinedly chaste; that – if gossip had credited it – would have been further evidence of their nonconformity. And the wrongness of it all was only
compounded by my father's army career. The energy and ambition that took him to Sandhurst – where he learned to his astonishment that the upper classes weren't cleverer after all – were suspect in Hanmer and so were warrior virtues, come to that, for this was largely a community of non-combatants and if you were unlucky enough to get conscripted, you kept your head down, joked with your mates and waited for it to be over.

My parents' wedding, with Auntie Binnie and Uncle Albert

This was what my father's elder brother Albert had done in North Africa. Almost the only leftover signs of Albert's sojourn in the desert were the beret he wore to deliver the coal and the belt he wore to hold up his trousers. Albert was an admirer of Winston Churchill, judging by the framed photo above the roll-top desk where he kept the sooty receipts, but he never talked about blood, toil, tears and sweat. Whereas for my father the war, the Royal Military College, his rise from the ranks, was an experience that remade him. He talked about his adventures on active service compulsively. He always maintained that
he grew two extra inches, at eighteen, as a combined result of army PT and stopping carrying hundredweight sacks of coal for his father every day, as he'd done from the age of fourteen. It was a symbolic story. The army fathered him anew: he sprang full-grown out of the war. And he and my mother married in 1942, just before he got his commission.

He seemed an outsider after his years away, but in fact he was a native. His family lived in Horseman's Green, a hamlet just down the lane, where they owned a pretty square house, that had seen better days, called ‘Ferncliffe', with a front garden, a farmyard where lorries left oily puddles and a couple of fields. He didn't seem much at home when we paid visits to his widowed mother (his father had died in 1943, not long after I was born) and Albert and their younger sister Binnie, and he probably hadn't been even before the war, when he'd had the assurance to start courting my mother.

When he was a boy, during the worst of the Depression, his parents had sent him to live with an aunt, while the other two stayed at home, and this separation had left its mark. Later he'd been reclaimed, but not in spirit, although he laboured loyally for his father once he'd left school. A. Stockton & Sons had muddled along, carrying and delivering coal, sometimes cattle, sometimes labourers' worldly goods (giving the truck a hosing-down first) and doing a bit of farming or renting out a field on the side. At one stage they'd had a small shop, too. When he and Albert came back from the army they inherited the remnants of this shapeless family firm and became partners. However, their attitudes to the enterprise were radically different. Uncle Albert, after the Sahara, was looking forward to muddling on as before. For my father muddle and compromise and inefficiency were the new enemy. A. Stockton & Sons became his peacetime ‘company' and very soon he was giving the orders.

This did not mean that he wore a suit and sat in an office, although he called himself a haulage contractor. A. Stockton & Sons was after all nearly non-existent by 1946. In order (as he said) to Knock the Business into Shape he had to work all hours and do nearly everything himself. He became a driver, a mechanic, a carpenter and welder (making and mending truck bodies), and did the accounts and sent out bills as well. This was the price he paid for a post-war job in which he could Be His Own Boss: being his own exploited workforce too. Albert, meanwhile, following orders, also worked hard, but never so obsessively as my father, for whom the Business rapidly became a devouring myth, a vocation. With the Business he could make his own place in a Hanmer world that had no place for him now – and that made it all worthwhile. In the service of the Business he could redeploy the practical skills he'd perfected in his rise through the ranks (he'd been a transport sergeant at one stage) and the tactical gifts that had served him so well as an infantry officer in the field. He was tirelessly ingenious when it came to fitting together small farmers' orders – two calves here, a barren cow there, three heifers and half a dozen sheep somewhere else – into one truckload on its way to Oswestry or Whitchurch or Malpas market. And he was absolutely in his element faced with a breakdown in a distant ditch on a freezing night.

But when it came to the human and social and commercial aspects of Running the Business he was endlessly thwarted and baffled. As he acquired new trucks, he needed drivers and it was very hard to find men who would play the part of other ranks to his satisfaction – except for ex-servicemen. And even they wouldn't Look Sharp, or Jump to It, in quite the way he was always exhorting them to. He was a paternalistic employer and would never dream of laying off men in slack seasons, so
felt correspondingly outraged and betrayed when they wanted to be paid union rates. Easygoing Albert was a lot better at labour relations and also at passing the time of day with customers. He knew the social map of who was related to whom, and exactly how, like the back of his hand, and loved to gossip about weddings and funerals and wills. Whereas my father, literally and metaphorically, Had No Time for that Sort of Thing. In any case he was never sure what tone to adopt with the farmers, most of whom were pretty obviously not officer material. And he had very little taste for the competition, undercutting and backhanders that would have given him an edge over his rivals: no eye for the main chance. He thought that the best man should win and indeed would win in some ultimate shake-out presided over by the just God of Private Enterprise, Who would congratulate him for Playing the Game, and count the Corners he didn't Cut.

So the Business grew and magically never prospered. But that wasn't its function. Its main purpose was to support the myth of my father as his own man – the Small Businessman, the Realist. In the late 1940s and early 1950s realism was turning into everyone's watchword. My mother's brother, Uncle Bill (who'd been a radio operator in the RAF, but on the ground), was a socialist realist and there'd be a Cold War atmosphere when he came to visit. For Bill, nationalisation was a first feeble step in handing over power to the people, whereas for my father it stood for Red Tape, a brigade of Pen-pushers and Yes-men who Had No Incentive to work or Stand on their own Two Feet and Pull their Weight, and who, if anything went wrong, could always Pass the Buck. He himself was the man of practical vision, the boss-on-the-factory-floor. He knew what it was to get his hands dirty and yet carried the responsibility for the whole enterprise, just as he'd once humped coal.

He was triumphant when the Labour government decided not to nationalise cattle haulage because it was too local, complicated and messy, and anyway embedded in the culture of the Tory shires: for him this proved that nationalisation was inflexible, inefficient and unrealistic. Looking back, however, one can see that he'd have made a splendid regional manager for British Road Services if A. Stockton & Sons had been engulfed and devoured, and would doubtless have risen through its ranks. At least he wouldn't have been carrying those hundredweights of mythic realism about with him every day of our lives. There was no escape from the Business in The Arowry, Dad
was
the Business. His characteristic tone of voice was a sort of self-righteous yell and even when we got a phone to take the orders he yelled down that every evening too, at Albert, the equable and unregenerate enemy within, demanding always a Straight Answer to a Straight Question. Which luckily he never got, so realism survived to fight another day.

He knew who he was when he was working. He wore lace-up boots and brown one-piece overalls over his trousers and shirt when he drove the trucks to market or dived under their bonnets (which was most days) and came home covered in a glaze of filth made of motor oil and manure. It was understood around the house that he had a monopoly of practical virtue: outside was man's work.

My mother, perhaps in deference to this view, had mysteriously forgotten how to ride a bicycle now that they had a home of their own. She would reminisce about her rides in pre-war days (when she sped so sexily through Grandpa's secret diary) as though they belonged in a different universe and boasted too that she'd cycled to the station at Bettisfield to catch the train to Ellesmere to do her war work as a clerk in the Food Office, even when she was very pregnant with me. This was
now unimaginable, so timid had she become. But her new-found helplessness didn't seem as odd as it might have, since this was, of course, the time when married women, having been sent back home en masse, were encouraged in every possible way to stay there – first demobilised and then immobilised. Working in the world was only for Queens and the commonest of commoners, and movie stars, who all had in any case to pretend that they would much prefer domestic purdah, given a chance.