I was so astonished by this find that I’m not sure I found time to be moved. It had never occurred to me that Dad might be, as he claimed to be, a resource. I had seen him only as an authority to be placated and bought off.
It was the same with the Maundy money, the specially minted silver coins distributed by the sovereign that were sometimes given as prizes at the school. Theoretically the recipients of Maundy money are destitute, and the giving of the alms symbolically recapitulates Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper, but I don’t imagine the headmaster of Westminster dressed himself up in foul rags and put himself in the Queen’s path to importune her for Prize Day wherewithal. The school was founded by the first Elizabeth and no doubt royal links survive.
It happened that my little bursts of academic excellence failed to coincide with the times when Maundy money circulated in its eccentric fashion (the number of coins distributed each year, for instance, corresponds to the age of the sovereign). Did I hanker after this archaic accolade? I don’t remember.
Whether Dad actively went shopping, or whether an item in a jeweller’s or antique-shop window caught his eye (there were a number of such shops in and around Chancery Lane), he found and acquired for me a complete set of Maundy money in a little case. The largest coin, the fourpence, was smaller than the sixpence that was then the smallest and most beloved piece of ‘silver’ money. I don’t remember whose royal head endorsed my Maundy set — proof in itself that I didn’t really connect with Dad’s present. I must have it stowed away somewhere, but I don’t know when I last set eyes on it.
I thought Dad had completely missed the point, by going to a shop to give money for something that couldn’t be bought, though it was money itself. I didn’t want to own Maundy money, only to win it. What it came down to was that Dad was cheating. I didn’t see in his present what he wanted me to see, his proud face reflected in that row of tiny worn brownish graduated metal discs.
The correspondence about my poor grade at A-level in Ancient History, though, was a message that caught up with me in good time. It wasn’t ancient history, it could count perhaps as early modern. A cache of letters is the classic posthumous find, particularly when it reveals an unknown aspect of the dead person. I was in a luckier position, with a wider range of options than mere grieving wonder. I wanted to tell Dad how much I appreciated his futile rearguard action against my well-deserved D grade, and I was prepared to take the time to do it well. I wanted to communicate in his style rather than mine. I felt I had a pretty good idea of the terrain of Dad’s character by this time, better certainly than I had ever understood any of Alexander’s battles. Emotionalism wasn’t the way Dad did things, although he was on good terms with anger and its happy property of clearing the air, setting all dials to zero.
The ideal setting was the dinner table, with distinguished colleagues and friends present, all glasses charged. What he liked about roles was exactly what other people dislike: the way they fix relations. He preferred formal occasions to intimate ones and a staged portrait to anything a snapshot might reveal. In such a setting all I needed to do was relate what had happened as an anecdote, playing up the comedy, and end up by toasting his valour.
There was an opportunity before too long. I think it worked. It seemed to go well. The trouble with doing something in someone else’s style rather than your own is that you can’t really expect the other person to notice. Dad wasn’t likely to charge over afterwards to give me the full bear-hug with eye-leaks, saluting my consideration in playing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ in his preferred key. He seemed gratified, he raised his glass with great willing, but this he often did, and perhaps I’m imagining the underlying message of ‘See? Was that so hard? Let’s have a lot more of that from now on …’ A revisiting of you have only so much time to make things up to me.
Dad was very attuned, in the manner of his generation, to the oldest son, who was actively nicknamed ‘son and heir’. By way of compensation I was dubbed ‘pride and joy’, which left only ‘Christmas angel’ for Matthew, which didn’t seem very precise (despite his decorativeness) since he was born in mid-November.
I remember Dad once commenting with troubled admiration about Tim’s physical beauties. Troubled because Tim, twenty at this point, wasn’t particularly biddable, far from keen to walk in the paths laid out for him. ‘Tim is very manly,’ he said, ‘very strong, with that heavy growth of beard — he should shave twice a day — and plenty of hair on his chest already.’ At some point in this reverie he must have become aware that these were not ideal terms in which to discuss Tim in front of his younger brother, who at eighteen was plump and poorly groomed. He cast around for a countervailing compliment. ‘And you …’ he said at last, ‘… you have good posture.’
After his retirement, or at least after his Rachmaninov phase, Dad did less and less. There’s a word that seems to describe the state towards which he gravitated: inanition. It’s a word that might appear on a Victorian death certificate, and it has a technical meaning, to do with starvation. But it also conveys the slow emptying-out process of Dad’s retirement, the physical and mental consequences of doing nothing. It wasn’t that he turned his face to the wall. He turned his face to people when they spoke, he turned his face to the television, and still I had the sense that he was dying in small instalments, leaving us with no more than a digesting ghost to attend to.
When Sheila had upbraided him in retirement for laziness, he pulled together his intellect just long enough to defend his neglect of it: lazy people have something to do, and do nothing. Idle people have nothing to do, and are doing it. He was idle and not lazy. Case closed.
Even after Sheila’s death he could play the part, from Holly’s point of view, of the benign grandfather in a TV spot for heritage toffee — except that he might suddenly denounce her for eating the remnants of his brioche, though he had given gracious permission only minutes before.
Our three generations could watch The Simpsons together very harmoniously. I particularly remember the episode in which John Waters guest-starred as a ‘collectibles’ dealer new in Springfield, who admires Marge’s style, assuming it’s knowingly camp. He gains an ascendancy over Bart, to the point where Homer feels the need to toughen him up with exposure to blue-collar men and manly pursuits. Their first stop is the Springfield steel works, but it turns out all the employees there are gay. A workman pushing a vat of molten metal alerts his colleagues to the danger by trilling, ‘Hot stuff coming through!’ Dry ice starts pumping out when the working day ends so that disco dancing, on suspended breeze blocks raked by searchlights, can begin without loss of time. In the next scene Moe the sleazy bartender lists the traditionally gay professions: ‘Where you bin, Homer? The entire steel industry is gay — yeah, aerospace too, the railroads.’ And you know what else? Broadway.
We laughed tri-generationally at the climactic scene, in which Waters’s character saves the Simpson party from reindeer attack by skilful deployment of a remote-controlled Santa robot.
There was one last joke tucked away in the credits, an announcement that the episode was dedicated to the steel workers of America, with the slogan Keep Reaching For That Rainbow! It was a wonderfully unifying half-hour, even if I couldn’t turn to Dad and make a comment about the subversive potential of popular entertainment, so rarely exploited, any more than I could have that particular discussion with Holly. Perhaps a sign of my decline rather than his, if I was so far gone in punditry that I now needed an audience for the most routine aperçu.