My Father, the Restless Emigrant

My dad with me in 1963

In 2005, at the age of 67, my father and his second wife sold everything, left the country with just what they could carry, and settled in Aubusson, a town of 3000 people in the most sparsely-populated area of central France. 
It was the first time in his life that he had ever been abroad.

What drove someone from a peaceful western country, with no threat of war or persecution, to take such a drastic step?

He died a few days ago, at the age of 85.  This is my attempt to make some sense of a life which often seemed to alternate between hope and disappointment, to teeter towards disaster, but never actually succumb.  This won’t be a conventional obituary.  I can’t write in the gushing media style, of a wonderful man who did so much for others.  I owe him a lot – mainly through learning from his mistakes.  He was a man of many flaws, but he was also a man of his time, and that’s what makes this story worth telling.  To understand what motivated him, and indirectly influenced me, and my sister and brother, you have to go back to the harsh but hopeful years of postwar reconstruction.

Poverty and the Way Out

He was born in 1938, too young to remember the war, although he remembered “people being happy that it was over.”  He was the third of four children.  His father was a sheet metal worker, an occupation exempt from military service, and his mother was a housewife.  His father was a violent man, who used to beat his wife, and sometimes his children.  They lived all their adult lives in Anfield, near Liverpool’s famous football ground, in a terraced house rented from private landlords.  I remember their cobbled yard with the outdoor toilet, a bench with a small hole in it, which was only replaced in the 1970s.

In those years when one wage was supporting all six of them, they were not just working class, they were poor, and that made the next milestone in my dad’s life all the more remarkable.  He was already in primary school when the Butler Act made secondary education free for all, but with a catch: selection by exam, known as the 11 plus.  A myth has grown up in recent years, that the 11 plus, and the grammar schools for those who passed it, helped the working classes gain social mobility.  The truth, revealed by many studies at the time and since, is that grammar schools were dominated by the middle classes and their values.  People like my parents, who went to grammar schools from poor families, were exceptional. 

Some other studies have described the conflicting pressures on working-class children in grammar schools, how the world of school separated them from their peers but never entirely accepted them.  It left some, including my father, with a lifelong sense of belonging nowhere.

A Catholic Background and Rising Expectations

My Dad’s family were Catholics.  All of their lines went back to Ireland, which could have offered a stronger sense of identity, but it was not one that he, or his father, ever claimed.  In one of my last conversations with him, he recalled the volunteers, who would knock on doors along the Catholic streets, warning people that the priest was about to arrive, and to be ready with a large enough donation.  My grandfather resented these demands, so my grandmother would surreptitiously hand over a ten-shilling note with her blessing.

The grammar school he went to, De la Salle, was run by Catholic Christian Brothers, who he remembered as bullies.  During a visit by school inspectors, one of the teachers asked my dad, his star pupil, to stand up and demonstrate his mathematical prowess.  His mind and his tongue froze, until the teacher, disgusted, told him to sit down again.  He could still feel the humiliation as an old man, telling that story to my brother, Tim.

My dad never expressed any religious beliefs to me, so I was surprised to learn from my mum that he sometimes spoke with affection of the rituals of the Catholic church, particularly the Gregorian chants.

The sad history of Irish emigration to Liverpool had afflicted the city with sectarian conflict, which my Dad “remembered the tail end” of.  He told me a story of the Catholic children being kept late in school, for fear of attacks on the way home.  We think he was probably referring to their primary school, which lay on the other side of Loyalist Protestant streets.

Despite those problems, the postwar period was one of rising expectations.  One book talks of working-class youth “imbued with fantasies and dreams of grandeur”, often conflicting with the daily realities of life.  That certainly applied to my dad.  Many years later, when so much had gone wrong in his life, my maternal grandmother said to me: “your dad always had ideas above his station.”

Although grammar schools were difficult environments for working-class teenagers, they did offer opportunities to enter ‘white collar’ occupations.  With good ‘O’ levels (a rarity in Liverpool) my dad was able to start a career in insurance, with a company called Commercial Union, interrupted at the age of 18 by national service. 

Many men of that era have talked fondly about their national service.  My dad told my sister it was “the worst time of my life”.  He hated living by rules and timetables and could still remember the irritation caused by the regulation coarse-fabric underpants.  After listening to a politician, extolling the virtues of national service, he said to me: “national service never disciplined anyone.  The thugs in everyday life became thugs in the army.”  On a lighter note, when he met my mother, he showed her a photograph of himself in uniform, on a beach north of Liverpool, and told her he was serving in the desert!

A Shotgun Wedding

My mother has just sent me some old photographs of him, holding us as babies, and I have suddenly realised something I had never appreciated until now.  He wasn’t big or particularly strong but when he was young, he was a good-looking guy.  Like his evident intelligence, that quality would also prove a mixed blessing.

My dad and mum met at a dance on one of the famous Mersey ferries.  Decades later, their daughter would move back to Liverpool to become marketing manager for Mersey Ferries, a coincidence that would have been difficult to imagine back then.  My mum had also left grammar school with good ‘O’ levels, but higher education was out of the question, for now.  Instead, she went to the College of Commerce to study secretarial skills. 

In 1961 I was the cause of what used to be called a shotgun wedding, not that there were any shotguns in my mum’s three-generation female household.  She was 19 and he was 23.  For both of them, marriage offered a way out of households and neighbourhoods they wanted to escape.  They moved into a rented flat, while my dad took on second jobs, including one as a bingo caller and another serving in a bar, to save for a deposit on a house. 

He hated that pressure.  He told me how he was doing a mental calculation as the boss of the bar admonished him.  As he turned away the boss said “I haven’t finished with you yet”, and my dad, who had done the calculations and reckoned he now had enough, said: “well I’ve finished with you” and walked out.

My sister was born 18 months after me.  Her real name is Christine, Chris to most people, but my dad nicknamed her Tilly Mint, which became shortened to Tilly.  I have only just discovered the origin of that nickname.  It was quite common in Liverpool, and referred to a young woman with ideas above her station.  After a meteoric career in marketing, she became a Chief Executive at the age of 38, but to us she was, and will always be Tilly.

I was two years old and Tilly was a baby when we moved to our first house in Crosby, a middle-class suburb north of Liverpool.  If you worked for an insurance company you could apply for a cheaper mortgage, and my dad was determined to take full advantage of this.  We moved twice more over the next nine years, to a posher neighbourhood, and then to a bigger house nearby. 

Drinking Debts and Posher Neighbourhoods

In later life, my dad admitted what we all knew, that he drank too much throughout his life.  This wasn’t always obvious: he could “hold his drink”, so we hardly ever saw him drunk.  Heavy drinking was normal amongst working class men and much of the business world in Liverpool.  My dad was a social drinker.  We rarely met his friends because they were part of that separate world of men down the pub, where he was, apparently, sociable and well-liked.

My mum said to me: “we kept having to move and remortgage to pay off your dad’s drinking debts”.  I don’t know how much he spent on drink, but we were living amongst people who were comfortably off, and we were not.  As adults, Tilly, and I would joke about our tendency to grab food when it appeared on a table, because there was none in the house when we were kids.  I remember a long period when the only thing in the fridge was a half-eaten jar of cranberry jelly left over from Christmas.  When the next Christmas arrived, one of my parents bought a second jar, forgetting about the first one.  For much of the following year, the only things in the fridge were two half-eaten jars of cranberry jelly.

We had a few caravan holidays in North Wales, which have left us with some of our happiest childhood memories.  None of us had seen much countryside and North Wales seemed wild by comparison to everything we knew.  I remember my dad telling us to look out for exotic animals, like polecats, which we never actually got to see, but just the prospect of a glimpse in the car headlights was exciting enough.

On one of those holidays Mum and Dad began arguing, and then the holidays stopped, for lack of money.  In school, I remember being made to watch a film of my classmates having fun on a school-organised holiday to the Isle of Man, costing £13, which is why I couldn’t go.

If you are not from Liverpool, and you visit the streets where we lived, near West Allerton station, you might be surprised to hear them described as “posh”.  They are semi-detached suburbia.  They were only “posh” by comparison with the rest of the city.  Back then, Liverpudlians had a finely-tuned sense of social hierarchy.  There was both snobbery and reverse snobbery, particularly amongst young men, for whom a solid working-class Scouse identity proved you were a real man and not a “poof”.  I was more ashamed of our posh address than the poverty in which we lived. 

My dad was happy to leave his working-class Scouse identity behind.  Over the years, his accent changed from soft Scouse to something close to Received Pronunciation.  Some of his intonations did eventually come to sound posh.

Although university was never an option, he did study while working, to pass the professional insurance exams, the ACII.  Then he was promoted to Insurance Inspector.  With that came a half-share in a company car, a Morris Minor.  It also came with more pressure.  Sometime after that, things started to go wrong.  One incident, for which he got the blame, was a sign of other problems to come.  He agreed to insure an open-air event, which was hit by theft and vandalism.  The senior management wanted to know: who had agreed to insure such a risk in a crime-ridden city like Liverpool?


Dad and Tim in 1971

A New Start in a New City

In 1974, when I was 12, my dad left the Commercial Union after 19 years, and moved us all to another city.  Chester is only 20 miles from Liverpool but felt very different.  It was smaller, prettier and more affluent.  Its streets felt safer, but also less exciting.  We moved to another middle-class neighbourhood but this time the house was smaller; Tim and I lost our separate bedrooms and had to share.

I never asked dad about the details of his work, but his new job, for Provident Mutual, seemed more sales-oriented, and he became more like a salesman, a role he was never entirely comfortable with.  I remember him identifying with characters in plays or novels who felt compelled to present a false face to the rest of the world.  One of the earliest plays I remember seeing with my parents was Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.

I could draw several parallels between my dad and Miller’s salesman, Willy Loman, but none of us ever discovered him with another woman.  Later, when his first marriage was over, he told us with some regret, that he had spent nights drinking with friends, picking up women and sometimes staying out overnight, leaving my mum at home with us.

We still had some connections in Liverpool.  Tilly and I would sometimes take the train and my dad would sometimes drive there.  Occasionally he would give us lifts, although the parental taxi service, as we know it today, had not yet become normalised.  I remember the two of us waiting on a street in Liverpool for my dad to pick us up.  He arrived late, which annoyed me, so I asked him what had kept him (he had probably been drinking).  He thumped the steering wheel and cried out: “why am I spending all my time doing things I don’t want to do?” and I remember thinking: actually, you’ve got a point, there. 

If that makes my dad sound selfish, he certainly could be, but he wasn’t vindictive.  He never intentionally harmed anyone.  He also had a cultured side.  He had eclectic tastes in music and literature.  He was interested in ideas – although we rarely agreed on them.  When I was 15, he saw an advert for an evening class in Economics and asked me if I would like to go with him, which I did.  It was an adult course, so we both lied about my age.  I took to the subject and a few years later, went to study it at university.  I wished he had pursued it a bit further; it might have helped him to avoid some of the mistakes he made.

In our last year in Liverpool, my mum decided to return to education.  She says my dad was not enthusiastic about this; he didn’t want to look after kids in the evening, and perhaps he sensed what it might unleash.  She continued after we moved to Chester, passed A levels and then became the first person in either of our families to go to university.  She came home with different books and new ideas – feminism in particular.  She became less willing to accept the role of a traditional mother and housewife.

I remember their differences coming to a head when the three of us watched a BBC reconstruction of the infamous Gay News Blasphemy Trial in 1977, when I was 15.  The disputed poem by James Kirkup, where a Roman Centurion sucks the cock of the dead Christ, horrified my dad.  I totally supported anyone who shocked the sensibilities of stuffy adults.  My mum took a middle line, saying: look at where it was published.  It’s doing no harm in Gay News.  My dad said to me: “I’m not interested in your views – they’re stupid.”  (The feeling was mutual.)  Then he turned to my mum and said: “I don’t understand you.  You’ve changed.”  I said: “So what? People change.  What’s wrong with that?”

Around the same time, before their divisions became too deep, he started talking about emigration.  One of his childhood friends, who took the assisted passage to Australia, came to visit us with his sun-tan and Australian wife.  Their lives sounded so much more exciting than ours.  None of us had ever been abroad.  My dad was more interested in Canada, but it remained a dream.  My mum says “he often used to daydream.”

The Family Tears Apart

I was 15 when my parents finally split.  The three of us were listening outside their bedroom as they argued inside.  It sounded worse than usual.  My dad was shouting at first, then his tone turned to supplication.  Their door burst open.  My mum was trying to pull away and my dad was trying to stop her.  I stepped in to separate them.  As my mum headed for the front door my dad burst into tears on my shoulder.  It was the first time I had ever seen him cry.

I remember what followed through fragments of memory, like a Patrick Modiano novel, the order and timing all jumbled.  I was sitting beside my dad, who was driving towards Liverpool, promising to take me to some of his favourite pubs and show me how to pick up women.  He was drunk at the wheel, which everyone knew was illegal but no-one seemed to think was particularly wrong back then.  He talked about his marriage, what had gone wrong, and what he had done wrong.  It was dark when we reached the New Ferry Bypass, a dual carriageway with a long straight stretch and a bend in the distance.  He began to accelerate.

“I could just carry on when we hit that bend.  What does it matter now?” he said and I started to worry that he might actually mean it.

“Yeah, but it’s not just dying, Dad, you might be crippled.  You might have to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair.”

Then he came to his senses and braked, muttering that, of course, he’d never intended to drive off the road.  When we reached the Mersey Tunnel toll booth, he realised he had come without his wallet and started to worry about his drunken state.  He asked the man in the toll both if he would let him drive through to turn round.  The man lifted the barrier and my dad reached out to him saying: “thank you my Old Jug” with an effusiveness which made my toes curl.

Then he turned round and drove home.  We never talked about that incident again, but I have often wondered how I worked out, aged 15, that appeal to enlightened self-interest is more effective than moral exhortation!

A week later my mum returned, having secured a flat in one of Liverpool University’s halls of residence.  She came to collect a few things, and to take Tim and Tilly.  I was due to take my O levels in a few months, so we all agreed that it was better for me to stay in Chester.  I also felt: it’s just as well someone is staying with Dad.

Tim was eight when all this happened, so it must have seemed bewildering for him.  Tilly and I felt, after years of boring suburban life: at last, something is happening! I used to travel to Liverpool to see them, in my mum’s bohemian flat, full of folk music and poetry.  Back in Chester, one of the useful skills my dad helped me to acquire, was how to brew beer.  We drank copious quantities of it, long before I reached adulthood.

I passed my O levels and discovered that you could sign on as unemployed, whilst studying part-time.  This meant I could take out a loan to buy a moped, which was very useful for my new split-site life.  As I was under 18 my dad had to sign the agreement.  The shop said the finance company would write to me with a payment book, but it never arrived and I forgot about it.

A few months later a man knocked on the door asking for my dad, who was out, then asked me why I hadn’t made any loan repayments.  I said: “you haven’t sent me anything”, and then he told me that all the correspondence had been sent to my dad.  I realised that anything arriving in Dad’s name looking like a bill, a reminder or a threat of legal action would go straight in the bin! I paid off the arrears and never knowingly missed any repayment for the rest of my life.  Thank you Dad.

Independence and Life Alone

While my mum was moving on to a different life, my dad still hoped for a reconciliation.  Instead of selling the house and buying something smaller, he moved the two of us to another family house, back in Liverpool, not far from my mum.  By then, I was 16 and yearning for full independence.  My dad encouraged me to leave college and look for a job, and it proved good advice, though he didn’t realise what it would mean for him.

I remember visiting Careers Offices in different parts of Liverpool in early 1979, telling them: I want a real job – I’m not interested in government training schemes.  One of them said: “Oh, that’s all we’ve got.”  Another told me: “unemployment is getting worse”.  How much worse, we had no idea. 

Somehow, I managed to get one of the few real jobs available to school leavers at that time, in the office of a building firm, with day release to do some technical training.  Later that year, aged 17, I found a bedsit with a rent I could afford: £5 a week.  I got ready to leave, taking just what I could carry, as my dad would do 26 years later.  He came home just before I left, looked at me and said:

“So that’s what it means, all this talk of freedom – the freedom to get away from me.”

In fact, my relations with both my parents improved considerably after I stopped living with them.  I enjoyed visiting them in my new-found status as an adult.  I was seriously poor to start off with, but I saw that as the price for my precious independence.  I only had to borrow money from my dad once, and I paid him back in instalments, on time, as agreed.  It was an example he was unable to reciprocate, when I became the lender, a few years later.

On one of my visits to my dad, he produced a bottle of wine and said: “I’d like to go round and see your mum.”  I winced, but went along with him.  As we arrived outside the big old house owned by a housing association he shook his head and said “this is what we were trying to get away from”.  She answered the door and did not look pleased to see him.  He was holding the bottle of wine, trying to persuade her to let him in, but she refused.  I felt embarrassed for him; the marriage was clearly over, so why was he abasing himself?

Sometime after that incident, he must have seen my mum for the last time, though he always talked fondly of her in later life.  He used to call round to pick up Tim, but gradually those visits stopped.  On at least one occasion Tim, who was still at primary school, waited for over an hour in the courtyard in front of their flats for his absent father who never arrived.

Of all the mistakes my dad made, there is one which is most difficult to forgive.  He never paid any maintenance money for Tim or Tilly, forcing my mum to work full-time to bring them up alone.  In later years, when she might have considered legal action, he had no money to give, but in those early years, when he was still in regular employment, he could have contributed but chose not to.  Was it a form of revenge, or did he hope it might bring her back? Whatever the reason, it left her with a grievance that would last for most of her life.  Tim says most of what he knows about Dad, he learned from Mum – and it wasn’t complimentary. 

Recession, Crime and Victim of Violence

Employment in Liverpool had been declining for many years when the recession of the early 1980s hit Liverpool harder than any of the English cities.  In April 1981, on the eve of the Toxteth riots, 89,629 unemployed adults were chasing just 1019 job vacancies.  Alongside this economic despair came a rise in crime.  The Liverpool Echo announced in July 1980 that “Merseyside has entered the 1980s on a tidal wave of rising crime, particularly violent crime.”  I was burgled several times and attacked for being a bystander in someone else’s argument.  I remember, in my first job, how theft, petty fraud and dealing in stolen goods were openly discussed.  No-one bothered to conceal their conversations from a teenage office boy, but one of my supervisors decided to give me some avuncular guidance.  He wanted some roofing felt for his home, so he asked the foreman if he could take some from the site.  The foreman was happy to oblige.  My supervisor turned to me and said: “that’s the lesson you need to learn – always ask the foreman.”

That story horrified my mother.  She remembers nothing like that when she was young and I realised these things were only discussed openly between men.  How that crime wave compared with other cities at the time I have been unable to establish, but it is now thankfully fading into history.  Today Merseyside’s crime rate is lower than the other Metropolitan areas. 

As far as I know, my dad never stole anything.  He associated petty crime with the world he had worked hard to leave behind.  But that culture of crime would help to scupper his dreams of self-employment and trigger the most traumatic experience of his life. 

I don’t know what circumstances caused him to leave his regular employment in insurance but he began to dabble in various businesses.  The first one I remember was a video rental business, operating through petrol stations around Merseyside.  My dad was a minority partner.

Later in the 1980s, I worked as a personnel officer, recruiting computer salesmen.  I remember my boss telling me: “salesmen are suckers for a sales pitch” and I thought of my dad.  He had a curious mixture of cynicism and hopeless naivete when it came to sales pitches and get-rich-quick schemes.  I had returned to education, studying economics again.  I tried to explain to him about ‘product life cycles’ and why it wasn’t a great idea to invest in videos at that time.  But I couldn’t compete with the larger-than-life “businessman” who convinced him to part with his money.  When the business collapsed, he gave me just one explanation: people kept stealing the tapes.

A few years later he went into partnership running a pub, which fared no better.  The man they employed as a manager came highly recommended amongst their drinking friends, but “he was stealing from us hand over fist, so we had to let him go.”  Other unsavoury characters were involved in supplying Liverpool's pubs.  One of them was in dispute with one of dad's partners.  He came to the pub, found my dad there and beat him up.  The police arrested the man and were ready to bring the case to court when my dad, like many victims of violence, decided to let it drop.  One of his drinking buddies was a detective inspector, who said to him: “don’t expect any more help from us."  After this incident, he decided to end his involvement.

That pub, which I never visited, was close to Liverpool’s waterfront, in the area where the city’s renaissance would begin in the late 1990s.  My dad was too late with the videos and too early with the pub.

Boom Years and Dodgy Companies

For decades after their separation my parents remained married, because my dad couldn’t afford the £100 or so to pay for a divorce and my mum said: I’m damned if I’m going to pay for it! She gave in and paid up eventually.

So my dad was still technically married in 1988, when he met Karin, who would become his second wife.  She was working behind the bar at the Quill Club, one of the places he frequented in Liverpool’s small business district.  She was 23 and he was 49.  Although he never had much money, he could still maintain the appearance of a businessman.

In the boom years of the mid 1980s there was rapid growth in financial services.  The Financial Services Act of 1986 created two categories of financial advisor: those who were supposedly independent and those who were tied to a particular company.  It was introduced with the declared aim of protecting investors, but it was followed by a series of mis-selling scandals, which successive waves of regulation have tried to rein in ever since.

In those years, my dad moved from insurance into investment products.  He became a tied financial adviser, a career for which you will now realise, he was ideally suited.  I don’t know when he passed from salaried employment to commission-only arrangements, or which companies he worked for, but I remember thinking: I wouldn’t trust them with my money.  

I had moved to the London area after graduating, and then to Paris, so our contact became intermittent.  Neither of us was very good at keeping contact by phone or letter.  Dad moved to Bolton, where Karin remembers him doing “telesales work for commission only.”  One of the dodgy characters he worked for was branching out into telephone porn.  My dad overheard him discussing the potential demand for various sexual practices, and then he asked if my dad would like to join the new chat line.  My dad was shocked and refused.

Karin remembers another offer, which reignited his dreams of emigration, in this case, to South Africa.  He seriously considered that one, until he discovered that it would mean smuggling money, and possibly drugs, across the border to Botswana!

One period where I lost contact with him included my wedding day in 1991.  He had met my fiancĂ©e, and I had told him of our plans, but in the weeks leading up to the wedding I didn’t know where he was living.  My mum said afterwards: “I’m glad he didn’t come.  It might have brought up difficult feelings for me” and I thought: I’m glad there wasn’t a showdown!

Another contingent missing from our wedding was my father’s family.  I had grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins on my father’s side but had lost contact with them all when I moved away and my father fell out with his father.  He had reconciled himself to the memories of domestic violence by then.  It was money which finally split them: my dad borrowed money from his dad and didn’t pay him back.  He also lost touch with Tilly and Tim for long periods of time.  Partly because of that, but also because of the distance between them, Tim’s son, my dad’s only grandchild, hardly knew him.

By that time, he had lost the home he owned and was living in a garret flat at the top of an old house, similar to the ones where I had lived as a teenager.  His social descent caused him great bitterness, which lasted for most of his life.  After a couple of beers, he would rant for hours against the system which had offered him such enticements, then reduced him to poverty.  Deep down he may have recognised his own contribution to that process, but he would never mention or accept it when having a good rant.  His targets were: the banks, the moneyed elites and sometimes politicians – he despised politics and tended to consider them as a single group.  My selection as a parliamentary candidate in 1996 didn’t really change that view.  Years later, when I started work as a university lecturer he added another group to the list: “the academics”, but by that time, I could laugh it off.

You may notice what was missing from that list.  He wasn’t racist.  He never blamed immigrants, single mothers, benefit scroungers or any of the scapegoats offered by the popular media to men in his situation.  He was too intelligent for that.

A Lucky Break and One Last Chance

In the mid-1990s my dad had his first lucky break for many years.  He was offered a salaried job, selling computers to schools.  I don’t remember him having much aptitude or interest in IT but he was probably better at that than financial advising.  This reopened the possibility of home ownership and allowed him to dream once again, this time of moving to the countryside.  I don’t know how he secured a deposit, but he was granted a mortgage in his late 50s, to buy a small semi-detached house in the village of Gregson Lane in Lancashire, just outside the Trough of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.  On visits there we discovered a shared interest in country walking.  To the outside observer, in his waxed jacket and walking boots, he may have looked like a businessman enjoying the fruits of his leisure, but a couple of beers were all it needed to start him ranting again.

He stayed in that house for about ten years, alternating between contentment and resentment.  Then at some time in the early 2000s it all went wrong again.  You can blame my dad for many of his setbacks, but not this one.  The company made him redundant in order to move him from salaried employment back to commission-only.  Then they started delaying the commission payments.  So he ended his long working life unemployed, with no prospect of repaying the mortgage on their house.

However, another perennial British social problem unexpectedly turned to his advantage.  While the Social Security were paying the interest on their mortgage, house prices were strongly rising.  This would be of little benefit to anyone who wanted to stay in Britain, but there was another possibility: emigration.

After several months of trying to sell their house, he saw an advertisement in France Living magazine for short-term lets in the small town of Aubusson in La Creuse.  La Creuse is a beautiful sparsely-populated Department of central France, where you could buy a house for the price of a lock-up garage in England.  

And so we return to where this story began.  By 2005, when they sold up, my dad was drawing the Old Age Pension and some small private pensions from his early years with the insurance companies.  They had just enough from the sale of their house to buy one in La Creuse, and just enough income to live on, plus a bit more if Karin could find work.  After a life of recurring disappointment, fate was offering him one last chance.

Emigration

It was a freezing winter when they arrived in Aubusson in December 2005.  Everything looked beautiful in the frost.  There was a small English expat community in the town, who helped them to settle.  My dad had some schoolboy French, which he was determined to improve.  Karin was learning for the first time.

Aubusson in 2006

In July 2006 my wife and I took a ferry across the English Channel and cycled across France to visit them.  I was struck by the beauty of the town and its surroundings.  I was fascinated by the story of Aubusson’s tapestry and wrote this article for France Magazine, three years before the town gained World Heritage status.  My dad asked me not to mention his name in the article, as he didn’t want people in England to know where he was.  I told my wife, laughing, that he must owe money to some of them, but I was forgetting the trauma of that assault, which he never mentioned again.

He and Karin seemed quite happy and optimistic.  With some hope restored, he wasn’t ranting so much but I noticed that he was spending a lot of money.  On one evening we went out for a big meal, which my dad insisted on paying for.  This worried me.  I said to him:

“Dad, I don’t want you to pay for expensive meals for me.  I want you to keep out of debt.”

He looked offended and said:

“I think I’ve got more money than you now.”

He would sometimes say bizarre things like that, as if we were locked in a competition of his own invention.  Karin said he would talk proudly of his children to others but he found it difficult to express such sentiments to me.

While they were renting, they found a house to buy nearby.  It was in the quartier de la Terrade, the old weavers’ quarter, listed on tourist websites as one of the most beautiful areas of the region to visit.  The house was three stories tall, built of local stone and cost about £50,000 at the time.  It needed some work to refurbish it, but someone had told him that €10,000 would cover it.  (And you believed him, Dad?) They had just enough to buy it outright, but a financial advisor advised him that he could make more money by taking out a mortgage and placing the money in some wonderful investment, which no doubt paid him a commission.

“Dad – the laws of economics tell us: that is impossible, but you don’t have to study economics to understand why.  If such a wonderful investment really existed, with no catches, then why doesn’t the bank place their money there, instead of lending it to you?”

Did I ever have that conversation with him, or did I just scream it to myself after he told me what he had already done?

With hindsight, I am not sure he really cared about the investment.  What he really wanted was to do was spend it.  For the first time in his life he did some travelling, around France and they started work on refurbishing the house but the money soon ran out.  They took out a home improvement loan but soon reached the limits of what French banks would lend.  French financial institutions are much stricter than their British counterparts.  The easy options to overdraw, or run up credit card debts, are not available there.  Karin went looking for work, trying her hand at anything on offer, but wages were low and opportunities limited, particularly for foreigners who are still learning French.  To make matters worse, the pound, in which his pensions were denominated, gradually depreciated against the Euro.

We bailed him out just once, when the bank was threatening to repossess their home.  It wasn’t a large sum, but it was enough to avert the threat.

As their money ran out, my dad’s mood darkened and he started suffering bouts of depression, not helped by his drinking. On my later visits, he was back to his usual ranting only now he also ranted about Aubusson, how boring it was, with everything closing at eight o’clock in the evening.  On one point he never wavered: under no circumstances would he ever return to Britain, but he also said: “it’s not that easy, leaving somewhere you’ve lived most of your life.  It’s still part of you.”

Despite all that, I have fond memories of Aubusson and visiting him there.  He was always pleased to see us and we did have some good times, visiting the surrounding area.


With Dad in France in 2010

The Brexit referendum knocked the pound again and threatened to further complicate to his life.  As usual, he blamed the politicians, but didn’t bother to vote.  He asked me about his Irish ancestry, which my mum had researched, but I had to tell him, unfortunately, it was too long ago to apply for a passport.

His ranting and depressive bouts were taking their toll on Karin, who was trying to make her own life in France.  She told him their marriage was over, although they continued living together for practical reasons.  He found this difficult to accept.  For the second time in his life, I watched him imploring a woman who was telling him quite clearly: our marriage is over.

His restless urge resurfaced and he started talking about moving further north, possibly to the Channel coast.  Moving closer to us sounded a good idea, so my wife and I arranged to meet him at Saint Brieuc, on the northern coast of Brittany.  He visited a couple of estate agents, picked up some brochures for rented flats, then came for a walk on the coast path.  It was the first time he had seen the sea for several years.  When we reached a viewpoint at the top of a cliff, he looked out over the bay and said: “that makes me happy, just knowing that this exists.”

Scattering ashes is illegal in France, but I intend to return to that spot to scatter a tiny symbolic part of him there.

Decline and a Trap

He didn’t move away.  Perhaps he never intended to.  If they could keep paying the mortgage and Karin was willing to stay living with him, he still wanted to be near her. 

He remained in fairly good health until he tripped on a missing paving stone and broke his shoulder, in his early 80s.  The local hospital gave him a metal shoulder joint, but his mobility never fully recovered after that.  He went out less and spent more time watching television.  His French never reached the level he had hoped, so he didn’t enjoy watching French TV.  They didn’t have British TV, but could access some American channels online.  He became obsessed with Donald Trump and the parallels with Hitler, fearing that fascism would come to America, and threaten the rest of the western world.  With his restless spirit beginning to fade, so did his rage.  Quiet surroundings now suited his temperament and he could now talk about his life with more resignation than anger.

In 2022, aged 83, he collapsed and was taken to hospital.  They diagnosed him with a gall bladder and urinary infection, but when they discharged him he became housebound.  The floors of their house were connected by a spiral staircase, which he could no longer climb.  So Karin bought a special bed and the living room became his home for his final years.  She was working away for much of the time, but she would regularly return to look after him.  As his health declined, she became his carer, for which we were all grateful. 

Eventually, the burden became too much for her to support alone.  Tilly and I visited him and tried to explore other options.  Tilly suggested that he come to live in a nursing home near her.  He baulked at the prospect of returning to England, until she told him how much she would love him to be near her.  He looked up at her.  “Really?”

“Of course” she said with such emotion that all the years of their separation seemed to evaporate in that moment.

Unfortunately, with social care in crisis, British citizens living overseas are caught in a trap.  He had spent all his working life and paid nearly all his taxes here, but he could not join a waiting list for social care until he returned to the country.  We could place him in a private care home, if we could spare £5000 a month or more – but no-one could say how long he would have to wait for a local authority place.  Tilly wrote to her MP.  She talked to the foreign office and the British Consulate in France.  She had a friend who used to be a director of social services: was there any other way round this problem? There was one, and some families have done this, though he wouldn’t recommend it: take your elderly relative to A&E and leave them there.  We were never going to do that.

And so he stayed in that one room, with support from Karin and brief daily visits from nurses, until this year, when strokes paralysed most of his body.  He was admitted to hospital, then discharged into a nursing home.  If the stay was authorised for medical reasons, his medical insurance would pay for a few weeks.  And after that? In the end, it didn’t matter.

I went to see him in July, in the nursing home in Felletin, on the edge of the Millevaches Regional Park.  I was staying in a bed and breakfast on the hillside above the nursing home.  The weather was hot and sunny and everything around me seemed teeming with life.  I climbed the slope and turned to look over the town and the surrounding hills, as if the Earth was trying to send me some message I could not decipher, bringing me here and filling me with this fleeting euphoria at the end of a life.


My dad was a shrunken man, unable to move out of bed, but still lucid, most of the time.  He argued with Karin and the nursing staff, in a mixture of England and broken French.  No, he didn’t want to join the other residents in the canteen; he wanted his dinner in bed.  I helped him out of bed and into a wheelchair.  He felt so light but I was worried that I might drop him.  The home had a garden with a meandering path, where I wheeled him under the shade of a tree.  All his bitterness seemed to have evaporated leaving only melancholy.  I asked him if he could remember any good times from the past and he said: “alcohol has drowned so many of my memories.  I used to drink every day, you know.”  I did.  I reminded him of the holidays we had in North Wales, and that brought a smile to his face.  Then he turned towards me and said:

“I want you to know, I’m really proud of all you’ve achieved.”

A month later, Tim and Tilly were with him at the end.  He was alternating between consciousness and sleep or delirium.  He understood a question about the food.  “Bloody awful” was his reply.  His last intelligible words were: “you’re good kids.”

His Restless Spirit

Between the three of us, we have done many of the things he might have wanted to do in his life, and avoided most of the pitfalls.  In different ways, we have inherited his restless spirit and learned from his mistakes.  All of us have married once and stayed married.

And so Dad, if an omnipotent being offered me the chance to live my life again, and asked me who I would choose as my father, despite all your failings, or maybe even because of them, it is you I would choose.

 

James Melia 1938 - 2024