Fathers and Sons Page 14

  But if a strong female presence raised the adolescent sexual temperature, it had the opposite effect on the boys’ tendency to belligerence. The atmosphere was far calmer and friendlier than at Coopers and bullying was rare, largely because the girls loudly denounced it if they spotted it. For me, knives and air pistols in the playground were things of the past.

  Brentwood–a corruption of the medieval ‘Burnt Wood’, so named after a long-forgotten inferno–was once part of a great forest that covered much of Essex. An expanse of timber to the northwest at Epping is the largest surviving chunk, but Hartswood, on the southern edge of Brentwood, is pretty big too. My parents had had an eye on the spot ever since Ford moved their HQ to the area from its massive factory in nearby Dagenham. So when a semi went on the market they snapped it up.

  The Madeleys’ vista from their front door in Romford had included a launderette, a tobacconist’s and a bus stop. Our new home looked out on a dense wall of trees standing immediately opposite on the other side of the street. Only a few more houses continued along our side of the road before it was swallowed up by thick woodland on either side. A mile or so distant lay fields and ancient parkland. My hunger for the countryside, an appetite sharpened by so many holidays to Shawbury, was at last satisfied.

  In the months after we moved to Brentwood, before I fled Coopers, I would press my nose against the carriage window as my train rattled in or out of the station, staring at the ploughed fields and spinneys that narrowly–but definitely, satisfyingly–separated the town from what William Cobbett described as ‘the great wen’–London’s sprawl. The sense of living in a small town surrounded by a moat of greenery–a narrow band of greenery, admittedly, towards the capital, but broad and expansive on the other side looking towards Suffolk and Hertfordshire–held great importance for me. I was now able to pretend to myself that we ‘lived in the country’, a concept few in Brentwood even thirty-five years ago would have shared. It is only today, looking back on my early adolescence, that I realise how deeply so many visits to Kiln Farm had affected me. I so longed for its fields and hedgerows, copses and streams, that I tried to replicate it wherever possible.

  When I was thirteen my father, nagged incessantly by my grandfather, gave me an air rifle for Christmas.

  ‘The boy must learn how to shoot,’ Geoffrey had insisted. ‘When he comes to Shawbury he can help me keep the vermin down.’ By vermin he meant the wood pigeons that raided his cornfields and winter greens, the rabbits that caused havoc in his wife’s vegetable garden, and the grey squirrels that robbed him of almost all the hazelnuts the brakes in his orchard produced every autumn.

  My mother hated my air gun and there was a matriarchal no-shooting decree back home. But with what to me seemed a limitless forest on my doorstep, I couldn’t resist temptation and secretly crept across the road on many dawns to practise my shooting skills. Two brothers who lived next door had air guns too and we usually went together. We were never caught; our parents slept on, oblivious, and the wood was empty at such an early hour. After filtering a few yards through the trees, we had entered another world.

  But increasingly we left our rifles behind. We were falling under the spell of a great English deciduous forest.

  In winter, Hartswood was pungent with the scent of decaying leaves, moss and wilting bracken. We might pick up the unmistakable rank scent of a fox and track him to his earth. Badger setts were harder to find but when snow fell it was easier to follow their spoor home, a dugout usually hidden under an old tree root in a clay bank. We marked where the animals slept and when spring and summer came spent hours watching their young playing. Sunset was the best time to see the fox cubs; you needed at least a half-moon to see badgers. I loved these expeditions. Most of all, I looked forward to describing them to my grandfather on my next visit to Shawbury.

  He always listened with grave attention, followed by precise questions and, finally, his advice on woodcraft.

  ‘If you hear jays starting to scream in the distance–you know jays are members of the crow, family, don’t you, Richard? Yes, of course you do–well, jays are the forest watchdogs. If they start to make a fuss, they’ve like as not seen a fox moving under the trees. Stay still and you’ll probably see him too, as long as you’re downwind of him. That’s another thing, Richard–always enter the wood with the wind against you. Your scent won’t carry ahead to the wild things…you’ll see much more that way.’

  For my fourteenth birthday, Granddad gave me The Book of British Birds, inscribed, ‘To my fellow bird-watcher’. His present didn’t embarrass me in the slightest, something which surprises me a little now. After all, I had recently moved to a co-ed school and was busy discovering girls. It was 1970 and I was increasingly immersed in the rock and pop culture; I was into Yes, Free, Al Stewart and Cream. I was growing my hair long–to my father’s utter consternation–and learning to play guitar under the instruction of a teacher who had once accompanied Paul Simon on stage. I was even part of a rudimentary folk-rock band, called, appallingly, ‘Alchemy’. Our high point would be to play a set at the 1974 Windsor Pop Festival.

  Yet I was secretly delighted to be described by my grandfather as a ‘bird-watcher’. I emphasise the word ‘secretly’–this was not a soubriquet I could possibly share with friends. But I cherished the bond that was forming between us and I basked in the old man’s approval. I took The Book of British Birds to bed with me most nights and studied it carefully, particularly the section on species that lived on farmland. Once, in an earnest discussion with Granddad about the prolific reproduction cycle of the hated wood pigeon, he smiled and nodded at me. ‘Quite the expert ornithologist, eh?’

  Today, I understand the dynamic that was shaping my emerging friendship with Geoffrey. We had discovered common ground. Until this point ours was a polite but perfunctory relationship. Now the fourteen-year-old boy and seventy-year-old man had found a common interest. We may have been discussing jays or pigeons or green woodpeckers; what we were really doing was developing shared language. We could just as well have been discussing football; it was the form of our conversations, not the content, that really mattered. We had become friends and delighted in each other’s company on our long walks through Kiln Farm’s fields and spinneys, or sitting on the banks of the Roden waiting for the fish to rise on summer evenings.

  Geoffrey had plenty of time to spare for such moments. A few years earlier, soon after he turned sixty, he had been poleaxed by a near-fatal heart attack. Years of smoking untipped Player’s had narrowed his arteries to wormholes and one night, after he had gone to bed, his heart contorted and twisted in furious attempts to expel a treacherous blood clot. It was touch and go; the doctor who came to him in the night told Kitty to expect the worst by morning.

  But Geoffrey’s life force was strong. He recovered. In later years, cancer came to take him, and was denied in its turn.

  His destiny was to survive, intact, into old age. He could not slip away. Not quite yet.

  After Geoffrey’s coronary, my Uncle Jim ran Kiln Farm.

  It left my grandfather with a lot of time on his hands. He went on long walks around Shawbury–doctor’s orders–and my mother often joined him. It was on these long rambles that he began increasingly to confide in her. He told her how he had felt when he realised his family had gone to Canada without him; about the girl he fell in love with there years later; about William’s betrayal. He even spoke something of John, and the pain of losing his little boy. But not much about this: the subject of John remained deeply painful territory.

  Classical music became an even greater comfort to him than before. My father bought him a modern hi-fi unit, replacing the ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder and gramophone he had used since the 1950s, and the two of them listened to classical music together, eyes closed, lost in the discourse of the great composers.

  Of course, stereo sound was no use to my grandfather. He had been deaf in one ear since the trenches and could only hear in mono.

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nbsp; Once, I watched them sitting side by side in armchairs pushed together in the middle of the room, with speakers on either side, and heard my grandfather ask, ‘Where’s the soloist, Chris?’

  His son pointed to a corner. ‘Over there.’

  My grandfather nodded. ‘Extraordinary.’

  It was the way they were able to communicate emotionally. Timeless music had become an alternative language they appreciated together. After one long session, they slowly opened their eyes and shyly nodded and smiled at one another. They understood what the other had felt. It was a touching moment to witness.

  By now I was sixteen and clear on what I wanted to do. Go to university to study English, and then get a graduate trainee placement on some newspaper. I was going to be a reporter, like my dad. Earlier dreams about becoming a fighter pilot had blurred and faded along with my eyesight; you needed 20/20 vision to fly supersonic jets–the only things I wanted to fly–and the slight myopia and astigmatism that materialised when I was thirteen grounded that ambition for good.

  But everything I read and heard about journalism sounded fun. Even my father’s starving days in Canada had a touch of glamour about them, I thought, and anyway times had changed. Newspapers were thriving and local radio and regional television news were flourishing too.

  In June 1972 I sat my final O level–the GCSE of the day–and dashed off a letter to my local paper. I suggested to the editor of the Brentwood Argus that he let me spend a few weeks in his newsroom, making tea, fetching and carrying generally, and getting a flavour of life on a weekly title.

  The reply was curt. His reporters were far too busy newsgathering to keep an eye on some sixteen-year-old lad and anyway they made their own tea, thanks. I could come in for a quick chat about the business on a slack day if I liked, though.

  I secretly admired the brusqueness. This was what newspaper people were famed for, wasn’t it? My father coached me on what questions to ask and a few days later I sat in the editor’s office, surrounded by inky proofs, newsroom rotas and expense claims that lay in a tray marked ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’. Every single person I glimpsed in the newsroom next door was smoking furiously and hammering away on ancient Underwood typewriters.

  I had never felt more at home.

  I can’t recall much about the interview but I do remember how it ended. The editor–a Dorset man called Brian Davies who I learned later had once hurled a pitchfork at a German Messerschmitt as it thundered low over his parents’ farm during the Battle of Britain–eyed me up speculatively before saying, in his West Country accent, ‘I’ve got a cub reporter’s job going. Was going to advertise. Yours if you want it. Three-year apprenticeship. We call ’em indentures. Start tomorrow. Pay’s rubbish, but you can fiddle your expenses a bit. What do you say?’

  I said I needed to discuss it with my parents and tottered out on to the street. The editor’s sash window on the first floor above slid up with a crash and his head appeared. ‘Need to know by ten tomorrow.’ He vanished again.

  I called my father when I got home and he immediately left his office for a crash summit at Hartswood Road.

  ‘Well, what do you think, Dad? It means not going to university, not even going back to school to do A levels…’

  ‘Your mother thinks it’s completely bonkers.’

  ‘I know, she already said. What do you think?’

  My father sighed and removed his glasses, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘To be absolutely honest, I have no fucking idea.’

  It was the first time I had ever heard him use the F-word. I was speechless.

  He jammed his specs back and reached for the phone. ‘But I know some people that probably do. Give me a couple of hours.’

  For most of that evening my father rang round his contacts in the press. Some were friends from the old post-war days, others were journalists and columnists he’d got to know through the Ford press office. To a man–and the occasional woman (it was the early 1970s)–they said I should grab this unexpected opportunity with both hands. If all went well I would be years ahead of the game when my contemporaries–and potential career rivals–were still waiting to hear if they’d got their degrees.

  There was only one caveat. ‘He is sure this is what he wants to do, isn’t he, Chris? Otherwise he’d better just go back to school.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I looked at my father, bleary-eyed and husky-voiced from hours on the phone, most of a pack of Piccadilly filter tips screwed into a pile of butt-ends in the ashtray on our hall table.

  ‘Yes. I think so. Would…would you have been?’

  ‘I think so. Yes. Absolutely.’

  ‘Mum’s going to hate this.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her.’

  I stole a beer from the fridge and took it to bed. As I drifted off to sleep I heard my parents talking in their room down the hall, and went to use our shared bathroom so I could listen in.

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ my mother was saying. ‘I just wish he’d never gone to see the bloody man so we didn’t have to decide.’

  My father coughed and the light coming from under their bedroom door snapped out.

  ‘Me too.’ There was silence, and I was almost back in my room when I heard Dad say sleepily, ‘Well, sod it, anyway. If it’s all a ghastly mistake he can always take his A levels at evening classes, can’t he?’

  I loved being a reporter. Any lingering doubts over leaving school at sixteen evaporated in the excitement of learning my trade. There is no doubt I romantically identified with my father as a young man. I was too young to drive a car but I could legally ride a moped, and the puny 50cc Honda I bought with my first wages–eleven pounds forty pence a week–was, to my mind, the roaring Norton of my father’s youth. The fact that I was doing exactly the same job he had done made me feel extraordinarily grown-up.

  I told him the stories of my days when I arrived home whether he wanted to hear them or not and this, I failed to realise in my coltish enthusiasm, became increasingly wearing. In fact, when I think back to my incessant chatter at the end of what was after all a working day for him, I grow warm with latent embarrassment. He did his best to hide his mounting irritation at my callow youthfulness, but by the time I was eighteen there was much tension between us, and the atmosphere in the house was increasingly charged. One evening I bounced, Tigger-like, from the room after a bad-tempered exchange about the best way to cover a breaking story and a few minutes later I overheard my father telling my mother, ‘Honestly, Mary, I’ll be glad when he gets a place of his own. I know he doesn’t mean to, but he’s driving me nuts.’

  Too much testosterone under one roof. By chance, I was about to transfer to the biggest newspaper in our group, the East London Advertiser, so I arranged to rent a room in a friend’s house in Leytonstone. I can still see the look of suppressed relief on my father’s face when I gave him the news.

  It was the beginning of a long, and ultimately final, separation from my father. Not emotionally–within weeks of my moving out the claustrophobic ill temper between us vanished–but I was not a particularly dutiful son in the period that followed. Visits home became fewer and fewer as I pursued my career. By the time I was nineteen, I was News Editor on the Advertiser; then Assistant Editor. I was a young man in a hurry; I secretly fretted that perhaps I should have stayed at school and gone to university after all. So I made every moment, every opportunity, count.

  I was still only nineteen when I decided I should move into broadcasting. A couple of years earlier, I had gone with my father to watch an edition of The Money Programme go out live on BBC2. The subject matter was stodgy enough–a profile of Ford–but the atmosphere surrounding the transmission of a live networked programme was a revelation to me. It was electrifying. We stood in the director’s gallery where a dozen monitors flickered and a girl counted time on interviews which had to run to the second. The director called his camera shots and the producer bit his nails with tension while on the studio floor
the presenter stayed cool and laid back. But, just a few feet behind the cameras, you could have squeezed the adrenalin out of the air.

  After the programme, my father and I went out for dinner with the host, Brian Widlake, to a French restaurant in Shepherd’s Bush. It was the first foreign restaurant I had ever eaten in and I felt grown-up and sophisticated. The young production team joined us. They were confident and cool and sexy and I wanted to be like them.

  On the last train home from Liverpool Street, my father said, ‘It’s too late for me, but if I were you I’d be hoping to get into television. That’s where the fun is. Boy, wasn’t that great?’

  Now I was applying to join the local radio stations that were starting to mushroom across the country. Most of them rejected me with a variation on the same theme.

  ‘Sorry, son. Too young.’

  I persisted. Finally I was given an interview at BBC Radio Carlisle, 350 miles north. Somehow I talked my way into a job there as a reporter and in May 1976 found myself hammering up the M6 to start a one-year contract.

  My father professed himself delighted. ‘BBC, Richard–gilt-edged. You’re on your way.’

  Secretly, I now know, he was sinking into a strange depression. I might as well have emigrated to Australia as far as he was concerned. He told my mother, ‘We’ll hardly ever see him now. We hardly ever saw him after he moved out and he was only six miles down the road. It’s my fault; I drove him away with my grouchiness. He heard me saying I wished he’d leave me that time. Perhaps I’ll never see him again.’

  My mother told him he was talking melodramatic twaddle, and so would I had I known the direction his thoughts were leading. But he didn’t speak to me about it.

  Now, his conviction that we would somehow lose touch with each other has a slightly sinister aspect to it, in the light of subsequent events.