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I suppose there are two periods of my father’s life. Before unemployment. And afterwards.
My father was a timber salesman. He was a confident and popular community activist. He set up a scout troop - brought people together and organised things. And then the boatyards went to fibreglass and the furniture makers went bust.
Unemployment arrived whilst I was still at school.
Dad, who could tell you the provenance and history of an oak from the grain of its board, was out of work.
When work gave out, so did a child’s image of his father, and the father’s image of himself. The confidence, like the community, crept away.
I loathed myself for pitying him and his self-loathing, a cocktail of disgust that we both swallowed to relieve the unhappiness of our hours together.
When I finally arrived at university my roommate and I both had dads who were out of work. We figured it was an Oxbridge conspiracy, ghettoising us, until we realised that my name began with an M, and his with a P. There were no Ns in college. It was only the alphabet that hated us.
My roommate’s father hanged himself, blacklisted as a trade union organiser. In a coincidence pitifully dramatic, the very night I heard, my dad left me a message. He’d got a job.
It wasn’t much of a job. It meant leaving home and living in a caravan which he kept heated by smoking yet more of the cigarettes that eventually killed him. (But first - please note - they took his legs; his heart; and his lungs.) But it was work, not welfare.
That was the 1980s. Big hair. Bad pop music. The era of Margaret Thatcher. AIDS.
Little family tragedies were not the spark from which the flame of student revolution would be lit.
When I went to work at CBS News and ITN, I got to meet some of the Conservative cabinet ministers who had presided over the economy and passed the laws which destroyed my child’s father.
They were characters. Jolly and entertaining. Before the tape rolled some disarmingly admitted weaknesses to you that on camera they denied. That was the game. Others combined sentimentality with hubris.
Having put away childish things, I knew that none of them had done anything to harm my father. Nor had the bosses who’d laid him off, or the customers who’d been unable to buy.
But that’s not the title of this post.
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Great stuff Adrian. And how does one reconcile that with the reality of rising unemployment under G Brown? (They are not all Lehman workers…)
Keynes was right about modern unemployment. It’s just society’s inability to see a leisure opportunity.
John Braine - Room at the Top 1960
John Mortimer - Rapstone Chronicles 1990
Adrian Monck - _________ 2010 ?
Richard Hoggart quotes Chekhov at the start of his essay, Scholarship Boy:
Great stuff.
It’s not very different here (Netherlands). My mother was first brought down to her knees by her failing health (something that had haunted her even before I was born), and was eventually almost brought down by what we called a conservative government back in the ‘80’s.
But in 1994, it was her body that finally called it a day. Even in those days, she was reasonably taken care of. Even though she’s never been doing well financially, and was living on very little money during the last 10 years of her life, she was able to live in her own (rented) house, with decent care and reasonable comfort. I am sure that, if she would’ve lived today, the privatisation of health care and health insurance and the ‘efficiency operations’ in the industry would have killed her before her body would have caved in on its own accord.
Having gone through this, even though I do not specifically dislike conservative politicians, I find it impossible to vote for them. That’s outside the realm of classical reasoning. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.
ok - so its “The Scholarship Boy” by Adrian Monck, early 2010.
I just put it on my amazon wish list
Only just seen this Adrian. Fucking great post. Write the book, man! Peter’s right.
This post totally held my attention. I would gladly have read more!
Adrian
Have only just read this post. Which moved me more than anything else I have read of what you have written. You wrote it from the heart. But it is also about all sons and fathers.
My Dad, like yours, knew his grains of wood. But he never understood why I moved away from the Conservatism of my youth and early adult years. Because trade unionists in his own factory were encouraging the men to walk out with the factory products. My father sided with bosses, and exposed his workmates, which meant he had a difficult time! But he took solace from the Daily Mail, who told him he was doing right.
That’s why I am not a Conservative. Because I could see how he had been exploited by his employers. Who never appreciated and rewarded his intelligence. Because he was paid to work with his hands, not his brain.
But my father was never a management lackey. And, from how you describe him, neither was yours.
Cheers
Bob Jones