Don’t feel obliged to read this. I just felt obliged to write it. It’s about some time I spent with my father. My mother is not mentioned much, not because I didn’t love her and learn from her but this is about my father! Living With The Squire: I was in a pub a while ago and got chatting to some lovely folk about Swindon, a town in Wiltshire in the UK, and a place near there where I a shared house for, oh I guess around 3 years, with my father, referred to henceforth as the Squire. Mama and the Squire had lived there together but I had never lived there full time until I got my first teaching job. (Home was boarding school and then Uni, first time around, in God’s Own Country.) Mama was by that time living in their house in Herefordshire and the Squire used to go down to see her most weekends and during the hols. Just as I was to become, he was a headmaster (and my mother was a headmistress, just as the Squire’s mother had been) so we had, let’s be honest, the luxury of great, hugely rewarding jobs and terrific holidays. The chat in the pub took me back, so when I got home, having heard that many houses were being built in the area, I looked on Google Earth and found the one we had shared. As it happens, no houses had been built anywhere near it and it still has gorgeous, wide views, though it remains a rather ugly place, on the outside, anyway! Looking at it was a bit of an error though, perhaps, because it chucked me back around 45 years. Suddenly I was a young man and the Squire, who I loved most dearly, was alive and well, his wonderful smile and large presence in my life again, and I realised just how much I missed him and owed him. I looked at the windows and almost thought I could see his face, great mop of jet-black hair all over the place, and some absurd part of me was trying to will it to happen! He was tall – 6’2”+ in old measures, as is my eldest son, meaning I am the midget at only 6’0” - and it was generally agreed, good-looking and a striking presence – yep, I missed out on that as well! He was also, next to my eldest sister, also long dead, in many ways my best friend. He was a bit eccentric, I suppose; respectable headmaster, suited and booted, sticking his spectacles together with insulating tape, carrying his papers around in a small, brown leather battered suitcase and usually driving a Campervan, so if he got pissed off at work he’d go up onto Hungerford Common to calm down, Hungerford being where his school was, and have a couple of cups of coffee or make himself some lunch. For all his ‘funny ways’, his staff loved him and I think probably his pupils did too. I taught in Newbury and if, as was known to happen because I kept putting increasingly larger engines in my cars, I had a break down, he’d drop me at Hungerford station and I’d get the train and then he’d pick me up there at the end of the day … if he remembered. If not then I’d walk up to his school and if he wasn’t there, then generally I’d find him at the home of one of his senior staff who had followed him from job to job round England, as did, to be fair, some of his other staff, but Vee also used to come to the house above Menton, in the Col de Castillon and was always part of his life, mine and, it appears, most amicably, my Mama’s. When the Squire quit and went to Herefordshire, Vee quit and got a place down there too. A strange situation, but she was lovely and I was greatly saddened when she died just a week after he did. Not suicide, no suspicious circumstances – a broken heart perhaps? We never discussed this, but it was always nice if I found him down at Vee’s because it was most convivial, she was lovely and she was a truly wonderful cook. I used to sometimes go via Hungerford on my way back from work, when my car was working anyway, joy of joys, play squash in a local club where I was a member and then go round the corner to Vees, and generally that’s where I’d find the Squire. He, too, had culinary skills … well, one. He could make cheesy scrambled eggs to die for. I guess he learned this from Vee and I never acquired the magic of it as he banned me from the kitchen when he was performing! I did catch him in the kitchen once though, when he suddenly lowered a fork in a most shifty manner and pushed a can aside. I asked him what he was doing and reached for the tin. It was dog food! I saw then that there was a bit of it on a piece of partly eaten toast. He said he was curious as to what it was like. Fair enough. Actually, I tried it and we agreed we wouldn’t want to live on it, but it wasn’t bad, a bit like a cheap pâté. Going back to lady companions, we had a sort of unspoken rule that we wouldn’t pry, ask or speak about it if anybody else was present, including Mama. He extended this to most kindly, if I had the pleasure of somebody’s company, adopting a ‘rule’ that I would close both my bedroom and my study door, it being conveniently beside my bedroom, and if he was up first he would put a coffee in a mug the way I liked it outside the door of my study, where we agreed I would have done the gentlemanly thing and slept on my studio couch, and another on a little tray with milk and sugar beside it outside my bedroom door where my guest would have slept chastely alone, and then go down stairs noisily, oft times whistling because on a thick pile carpet even the Squire had trouble making a good racket. We used to have a lady who came in a few times a week and kept the place tidy, did a bit of cooking, the washing and ironing and so forth, but don’t imagine she had to work hard, for we were quite a tidy pair. One thing we didn’t do, however, was polish the silver, and nor did she. This proved a blessing when the place was burgled. All sorts of stuff was taken and the place was somewhat trashed, but the mucky silver remained. Amateurs who had been told what to look out for, we later learned. The first break through by the police was a kettle which had a lash-up, wrong coloured lead. They found that in the house of a local lag and that lead to another couple, a fence the police didn’t know of and a crooked antiques dealer who had sent some of the stuff to the US and some to Australia. Crooks were arrested in both countries and all was retrieved – a triumph of international policing - put on ships, returned to the UK and put in a police bonded warehouse. From there … it was stolen and we got back just the kettle! I imagine the insurance company were not amused, but by then the folks had mentally said goodbye to it all, their ‘precious’ stuff (i.e. of sentimental value to them) being in Herefordshire, so they enjoyed the pay-out instead … the Squire, as usual, finding and spreading the silver lining on the cloud. Que sera sera. I remember it was I who found the house had been broken into. It was the summer and I’d been hitching round Europe for a few weeks. I phoned the Squire, he being in Herefordshire with Mama. He came home, looked around and then talked with the police who had, to give them their due, come immediately I phoned them, dusted the place and generally jumped into action, and then came back promptly to meet the owner. After the conversation with them he went to phone the insurance company, having a crime number or whatever. Mama was the paperwork demon so we couldn’t find the policy but remembered the name and, we thought, the address. One did in those days! So, he turned to the phonebook, something else one did in those days. Suddenly my heart sank. It was in two parts. I had proudly shown some delightfully impressionable lass, a little before I had gone away, how I could rip one in half. (It’s all to do with the action of the wrists.) He picked up the two parts from the windowsill by the phone and slowly turned and looked at me, questioningly. I admitted my crime, fumbled an explanation and he raised a somewhat disappointed and pitying eyebrow and started to search. As luck would have it, the tear went straight through the insurance company’s details and it was impossible to make out the number. Trying to dig myself from some of the excrement I suggested he phone directory enquiries. He tried that but we had the address wrong, so it was no go. He very gently put the phone down and quietly told me that I knew what I had to do, and then turned and went to play the organ. I, thank God, had a chance to make some amends! I went and drove round Swindon, it seemed endlessly, until I saw the place. I went in, parking illegally on the pavement – I would risk almost anything not to experience the Squire’s quiet disappointment again – went and got their number and returned home, triumphant. He had, by this time, stopped playing the organ, had phoned Mama who had told him where to find the paperwork, got the number and phoned the insurance company and arranged that they come out. I think he sent me off so that he could find his real inner calm. Smart man; I’m glad he did! He wasn’t a drinking man, not like me, but he would come out for a jar with me from time to time, or we’d stop off if he’d picked me up at the station. We enjoyed shooting the breeze. We talked cars, education, philosophy, music, art, literature, engineering, whimsy, psychology, life, the universe and everything. I learned so very much from him, contextualised things I already knew also, but somehow it was always a conversation of equals. He listened to my views and didn’t shoot me down but none-the-less managed to educate me. He had a great joy of knowledge and learning; Mama did, too, though hers was more strictly academic, his more broad. It was one of his greatest gifts to me. He’d also play the organ or piano on a, ‘You hum it, I’ll play it’ basis. Mama played with much more technique but where his flowed, Mama made most things sound like, ‘Deutschland über alles’ and one could vaguely imagine hearing an accompaniment of approaching jackboots! Anyway, I digress. The evening of the phone book incident he, atypically, suggested we go down the road to the local pub, ‘The Black Horse’ I think it was, and so we strolled there and he told me to put my money back in my pocket and it would be his pleasure. I found it, as a turn of phrase, a little odd. Anyway, we sat down and he said that he wanted me to know that he was sorry he’d been a bit distant, that he loved me dearly and someday, when we had access to an old one, he’d be really interested to see my trick of tearing a phone book in half. He then asked me to talk to him about my travels and we got into a general conversation on the joys of travel, this place and that, and when we pottered on back home the atmosphere was most convivial and the whole business was behind us. I never had the balls, somehow, to ever tear a phone book in half again, and nor was I asked to! That life with him was rich. I didn’t realise then that it was so, in a serious sense, or how rich and important it was in my life until long afterwards, though I did enjoy it at the time whilst also taking it for granted. I left there when I got married first time around and moved to a beautiful old house in the country, backing up to some woods in the then relative wilds of Berkshire. We were fortunate enough to have a large, proper sized croquet lawn. We would invite friends over and play at weekends. It was very mellow, and became even more enjoyable when the Squire came over and showed me how to play dirty without cheating – much. (Which reminds me of how, when we played Monopoly, he used to turn his hotels into brothels and charge more, much to Mama’s annoyance! Vee, however, thought it very funny. Chalk and cheese?) I can remember the first time he came for dinner at that house. I arranged to meet him at a particular junction off the motorway. I stood on the bridge, looking down and, on time, he appeared, didn’t indicate, didn’t come off and drove under the bridge and off into the distance. About 15 minutes later he returned. Apologetic, he said his mind had been elsewhere. When I asked where he said he was pondering on the implications for space travel in Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, in that the space-time around Earth would be not only warped but also twisted by the planet's rotation and this would be the case with every planet and star in the universe. What, he wondered, would be the end result if astronauts used planetary warp and twist to help them shift their craft faster? Would it possibly be a form of time travel? I said ‘Oh’ and later that evening after he’d gone started to look into it further. There was no internet then but I had my books. In those days I periodically bought different sets of encyclopaedias to try to keep up to date in a rapidly changing world. I went to bed way too late and to the library after work the next day! I wonder what he makes of the LHC, quantum mechanics, superpositioning, entanglement and tunnelling? Anyway, that was life with the Squire, and so very much more. I was really very lucky, from birth, to be able to be ‘infected’ by a lovely, deeply curious brain, from the point of view of learning, and also, learning how to live – a moral code. My school gave me a great deal, for which I am eternally grateful, but it was he who introduced me to Schopenhauer's hedgehogs and societal moral contracts. It was he who got me to look differently at Zeno’s paradoxes and tie them into work by Aristotle, Socrates, Plato et al about the true nature of reality, leading on to Leibniz, Kant, Nietzsche et al. (Reality and consciousness remain something I’m obsessively studying even now, trying to move from dear old Descartes, cogito ergo sum to a kind of cosmic cellular gestalt immersed in a quantum soup!) It was he who taught me, too, about the reality of tolerance, not something submissive, but measured and thought through, and most certainly not always to be given. He made me think about making the real, sometimes complicated and hard effort of empathy, and doing it, and also the absolute duty to speak out and resist that which is wrong, not in a knee-jerk manner, not righteously, not just pissing into the wind, but really, if one thought there was any chance of making a difference. Don’t get me wrong; he was not perfect, and time has allowed me some perspective, with further time allowing me perspective on that perspective, but he still comes out as a terrific human being. Later, because I left Magee and got divorced he didn’t speak to me for a year, and I decided after I had the offer of the slaying of the fatted calf that I’d not speak to him for a year in return. How stupid was that … two years wasted! Eventually peace prevailed, our deep love was to the fore again, and years later when he was now living full time in Herefordshire and was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, with an outlook which wasn’t good, as a result of the way I viewed him I quit my job, sold my house and moved near my parent’s home with my, to be, second wife. Sometime after I moved there, when it looked pretty certain he was going to pop his clogs, he asked me to drive him down to the bridge in a local village where he and I had often stopped, as adults, and played ‘Pooh Sticks’. It transpired this was going to be his equivalent to a moment of death bed confession and penitence! He showed me how he’d always stood in one place, in the middle between two arches, and I’d been obliged to stand slightly to one or other side of him. This meant that when he dropped his stick it floated straight through whereas mine was always caught in a little eddy caused by the arches and therefore came through more slowly. What a swine! And how thick and trusting was I! Anyway, it looked like he was getting better after his op but then it came back. Eventually we moved in with the Squire and Mama and, oddly enough, the Squire and I still managed some rare old times. We’d sit up all night watching videos of ‘Noggin The Nog’, sipping whiskey and smoking. He got to be a regular boozer like me, and took up the fags again after being off them for about twenty years. One night, around 3 in the morning, he took a large swig of whiskey, a big drag on his cigarette and said to me, “My boy, it’s almost worth it.” Style! In the end though it all got somewhat unpleasant for him, and eventually when the drugs weren’t doing much good and he suddenly heaved half his insides out I gave him a huge shot of morphine, called for Mama and he died peacefully. We could almost see his soul leave his body. It was a shitty end though, in truth, but he managed to do it with style until the very last bit. Donne’s line, ‘No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe’, sticks in my head. Everybody is an island, actually, at the very end. People can be with you but they can’t do it for you. I’ve seen it far too often,and that always true. He was right though in the lines, ‘any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde’. The Squire's death diminished me, in some ways, as have those of some other, special folk. I’m glad this little trip down memory lane has helped, after all these years, to knock that back a bit. For all his funny ways, I love him, I learned from him, I miss him, and I look forward to seeing him again when it’s my turn. Respect! (P.S. I hope I too have time to take up the fags again for a while before I croak. Lucky, Pooh Stick cheating, wonderful giant!) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………… No Man Is An Iland No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. John Donne (Taken from the 1624 Meditation 17, from ‘Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions’.)