Beaky's Blather

He eventually fell off the end of life, my father; aged 99 years, eleven months and 16 days. It would have really annoyed him. For many decades, he had appeared fairly certain, and a little optimistically I always thought,, that he might not die at all.  But he did however, like everyone else. Although, now, as I consider his long life at arm’s length so to speak, it may have been one of the very few things that he did during his 99 years here that was anything at all like anybody else.  

To us, my brothers and sister, that ‘not-like-anybody-else quality in him used to annoy us. It would have been rather nice if there had been something occasionally, even quite a small thing that he did that was just annoying but normal. Something other kids’ dads, did; something ordinary, dull. Something that in the playground would have entitled us to pipe up and amusingly and say,

‘my dad does that too. Yeah, he’s really stupid, thick, or out of date.’  I never got to say to him out of teenage frustration, ‘Daaad! you’re behind the times, you’ve no sense of style or, that is not the way people do things nowadays.’ because, what he did, how he did it or when, could only be compared with other dads with difficulty. This applied to almost any aspect of anything he did. Nothing could be compared sensibly with what other dads did. What was normal and annoying for them was so remote from our dad’s normal it defied any comparison that we could make. 

Even his own childhood was not like that of other middle class little boys. As a Child, from as early as he could recall, he had not secured any maternal attention from his mother. He had never shared with her a childish fantasy or enjoyed with her a bedtime story. She had never comforted him if he cried, paid attention to him if he sought it or showed interest in him or told him ‘well done.’ After the birth, she seemed to have concluded that she’d done her bit. Others in the family, her spinster twin sister, for example, could do the rest. She did other stuff and then died of bowel cancer before she was 50. At least that’s what Dad thought had happened anyway, although he did admit that he hadn’t paid it much attention.  

He was raised instead by three maiden aunts, Nora, Flora and Dora, a bevy of gentile, ladies who clucked and pecked around him protectively, convinced that he was unquestionably precious and special. Not ordinary. In this one estimation – set apart from almost every other of their judgements – they were right. He was exceptionally intelligent, but in a remarkably impractical way. He had aced his academic subjects at school and was passed prematurely across to Southampton University College to become an undergraduate, three months before his fifteenth birthday. He graduated, three years later, aged seventeen with a degree in marine biology, having scarcely secured a single friendship amongst his cohort of older students, and with not an inkling of an idea how to complete the most ordinary of everyday tasks. 

He had few of the skills required to socialise comfortably, cook a simple meal or speak to a girl, of which there precious few near the Science Faculty at Southampton University in 1929, (an auspicious year for even the most practical and work-adaptable graduate to launch a career, and he was not one). He informed me once that only six women had entered Southampton University in 1928 to study science, two had studied biology but none at all did so in the marine discipline.  Which makes it all the more remarkable that my father met and married one of the few women that were allowed entry to the University. 

My mother had applied to the University to study maths, a subject she loved and excelled in. Before the entry interview – something deemed essential then to ensure access to the Institution was restricted only to the right sort, her headmaster at Fareham  Grammar had summarily altered her application form at a stroke, substituting her chosen subject of study from maths to English, with a brief explanation that, ‘girls didn’t do maths.’ 

‘No,’ he had announced, to a mild-mannered teenager, ‘do English, it’s a more suitable subject for a girl.’ So, she did. Mum, unlike her husband to be, mostly did what her seniors asked of her, as I suppose sadly, do most normal people.

I will continue soon with Part Two of an Ordinary Man.