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?
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 fiancée, 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.”
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.
“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