First Confession Read online

  At the corner of our road was the Conservative Club, once plainly a farmhouse. It was the battle HQ of the local party, who fought a titanic struggle against Labour every election in our marginal constituency of Ealing North, a few hundred votes either way deciding the result. Ealing South, by contrast, was a pretty safe Conservative seat. The club was also a boozer, somewhere I imagine between the average saloon bar and a golf club. We never set foot in it. My parents voted Conservative, took the Daily Express every day in the years when it was a very good right-wing newspaper, and once put a Tory sticker in the window. But their political views were understated and moderately felt. They might have been mildly surprised if I had turned out to be a socialist, but would not have regarded it as any sort of treason. Anyway, the Conservative Club stood on duty at the end of the road, a sentinel for the worthy values of suburban England.

  Travel was by foot, bus or Tube, or, from the time when I was in junior school and onwards, in our car. Walking to school was often a perilous business in the winter. There were regular peasouper fogs, and in December 1952 there was the great London smog, which killed upwards of 12,000 people. I do not suppose it did much good to our lungs, but of course I had the bigger risk of the Deadly Nightshade to worry me. Buses became an important part of my life when we moved to Courthope Road. I got the 92 bus into Greenford and, when I changed to a secondary school in Ealing, then caught the 97 from outside the Playhouse cinema. Once in Ealing, buses like the affable 65 wandered off to all sorts of more salubrious destinations like Kew, Richmond and Barnes. My father always aspired to ownership of a Rover or a Jaguar, though he never quite made it. But we did once have a Lanchester saloon, which we took on our first foreign holiday to Paris and Luxembourg, where my father was pursuing his developing interests in music publishing with the popular radio station. There was something about the car which required the petrol to be put into the tank very slowly. At the first garage at which we stopped in France my sister, who had just started learning French at secondary school, was told by my father to instruct the attendant ‘to fill her up gently because she blows back’. Reasonably enough she threw a strop. My father would have found it hard to credit that the engineering which was created for these beautiful cars with their fluid flywheels is now owned by an Indian company, Tata, which no longer manufactures them.

  Those of us like my sister and me who had such happy childhoods should be able to sue for deprivation of literary royalties. No horror stories of abuse, no beatings, no lack of love, no real shortage of anything needed to keep me happy, no serious illness. The only thing I ever used to bother about was a bit of loneliness, particularly in my early teens. Greenford was a bus journey from my friends at school. I had to look after myself quite a lot since I was too idle to cycle and, later, too nervous to ask for a motor scooter. I am grateful that I had always had some imagination. For years in my primary school all that I needed for entertainment in the garden was a bamboo cane or a cricket bat and ball. With the cane, I would, when young, wander about imagining myself the King of Spain intent on the conquest of more of Europe than Napoleon ever seized. Later, throwing a squash ball against our garage doors and trying to hit the rebound, I would play whole Test matches from Cape Town to Brisbane. I do not believe I was ever on the losing side.

  Far better than the garage door was my father, who had been a pretty good cricketer at school and who followed the fortunes of Lancashire county cricket team. He was enlisted as part of my preparations for international stardom at every opportunity. My mother tried to protect him from my demands, usually in vain, and cricket became one of the central aspects of my relationship with him. At just before 7 p.m. on summer evenings I would wait at the front gate and as soon as he came around the corner on the road from the Central Line station I would wave my bat and holler. The poor man would hardly have time to take off his Windsor-knotted tie and suit jacket before he was persuaded into the back garden either to face my express bowling or to have his own slow off-breaks swatted into the herbaceous borders. When I bowled myself, I used to start my run-up from the fence at the bottom of the garden, sprint up the path between the Victoria plum trees and the gooseberry bushes and hurl my thunderbolts at him from the edge of the lawn. We had to tie a net behind the stumps to protect the French windows from the balls that were missed by whoever was batting, and also to guard against the destruction of a large Yucca which was my dad’s particular pride. One summer we had to lop a large branch off the flowering cherry, which, growing at silly mid-off, interrupted the flight of my father’s spinners. On beach holidays in England we used to take a full set of stumps, bails, bats and balls to set up on the sand at low tide. I used to judge holidays largely on the basis of the adequacy of the beaches for pitches. One year we even took the full Test Match paraphernalia to southern Brittany and played day after day before groups of puzzled but polite French holidaymakers. When I was about fourteen or fifteen Dad encouraged me to go off by myself in the summer holidays with a copy of the little Playfair Cricket Annual, full of statistical tables, and a satchel with sandwich-spread sandwiches, two Kit-Kats and a bottle of made-up lemon barley water, to watch county cricket matches on the grounds of London and the Home Counties. One day I went as far as Canterbury to watch my hero, the Lancashire fast bowler Brian Statham. I got his autograph on my sandwich wrapper and then lost it on the way home.

  The real highlights were being taken by my father to big sporting events. In 1957 Dad took me to Lord’s to see the West Indies play the MCC. The West Indies side bristled with outrageous talent – Walcott, Worrell, Weekes, Sobers, Hall, Kanhai, Ramadhin and Valentine. The names of the last two had formed the chorus of a calypso sung after the West Indies had defeated England in 1950. I can still remember two of the five verses, ending with the words: ‘With those two little pals of mine, Ramadhin and Valentine’. But the day we went to Lord’s there was not much ‘cricket, lovely cricket’. It was grey with just enough drizzle to keep the players in the pavilion for most of the day. No wonder Caribbean players always bowled so fast and scored runs so quickly: they must have wanted to do as much as possible while they could actually play the game before the traditional English cricketing weather set in once again.

  The weather was better when, four years before that first visit to the headquarters of cricket, I was taken by my father to Wembley Stadium for the Cup Final between Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers. Having been born close by the town, I had always supported Blackpool, a commitment which was set in stone by the fact that the great right-winger Stanley Matthews played for the club. On the Bolton side there was a fine centre forward, Nat Lofthouse (‘the lion of Vienna’), a big, rumbustious, typically English player. Well, typical for the time: he applauded Blackpool’s winning goal, created by the great dribbler, Matthews, who had never before won a cup-winner’s medal. The 4–3 victory, achieved with only two minutes of the match remaining, ensured that I remained a Blackpool fan for years. My enthusiasm even survived a cup defeat by West Ham to which my father took me. The West Ham fans caused me huge embarrassment by singing ‘Bye bye Blackpool’ to the tune about the departing blackbird as their team (with a young Bobby Moore) slaughtered my favourites. Over the years, my enthusiasm for Blackpool, and indeed for football as a game, diminished. Outside Spain, Latin America and occasionally Arsenal, the game did not seem so beautiful any more. There was in particular a problem that English teams seemed to have in passing the ball accurately to one another. But like other politicians (it is usually a harmless bit of gallery-playing) I sometimes pretended to an interest in football which had long since waned. Some politicians know what they are talking about when football is the topic of discussion: Kenneth Clarke is one. Others get into awful trouble when they claim an unlikely and knowledgeable attachment to a team. Tony Blair may or may not have bragged about watching Jackie Milburn playing for Newcastle, even though he was four and living in Australia when Milburn retired; he may well have been misreported as he claims. David Cameron confused
West Ham and Aston Villa, forgetting that he was supposed to support Villa because his uncle was chairman of the club. I have given up any real pretence of knowing about football since two of my grandsons became passionate fans, who if asked could name the manager of Valencia and the striker of Paris Saint-Germain, and even the centrebacks of Aston Villa and West Ham. For most people 1953 was remembered principally not for Stanley Matthews but for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-serving monarch in British history, whose reign is synonymous with the word duty. It marked not only the beginning of Elizabeth’s extraordinary reign but also the invasion of British living rooms by television. I recall sitting in our neighbour’s front room to watch the solemn events in Westminster Abbey. But I am not sure that at that age, given the choice, I would have given pride of place to the abbey over Wembley Stadium.

  My father was a good-looking man; like his own father he was stout and not very tall, but he was not jowly. His life in his middle years was punctuated by regular but fleeting and ineffective diets. There was definitely more talk about losing weight than doing it (why does that sound familiar?) but he did not really stand much chance of becoming slimmer. My mother cooked wonderfully well, taught by her own mother, and believed that she should give us all in large quantities what we liked to eat: pies, roasts, cakes, crumbles, butter, cream. Unusually for the 1950s, she was quite adventurous too, using onions, garlic, pasta and olive oil in the days when bottles of oil had to be bought at the chemist’s. To this ample home cooking he added business lunches: persuading singers and their agents to perform the songs he was publishing invariably seemed to involve taking them to some of the best West End restaurants. Dad knew his way up and down the eateries of Dean Street and Old Compton Street. In later years he must have forgotten that having business accounts at restaurants did not mean that you had avoided payment, an easy mistake into which many fall. Who knows, perhaps it was the quality of the starters in L’Epicure that persuaded the American singer Guy Mitchell to sing one of my father’s publishing hits, ‘She Wears Red Feathers (and a Hula-Hula Skirt)’?

  My father drank enthusiastically – wine, beer, whisky – but he was certainly not an alcoholic. On the other hand, while at work he smoked immoderately. He hardly smoked at home or on holiday, except for the occasional pipe. What he liked most about that was the paraphernalia. His cigarettes were untipped Player’s Medium Cut with a bearded sailor on the packet or tin or occasionally Senior Service in a white packet displaying seagulls, a sailing ship and the phrase ‘The Perfection of Cigarette Luxury’. The words ‘Smoking Kills’ did not appear. He would suck each inhalation of smoke deep into his lungs and let it out in a great whoosh, enough smoke to summon Apaches from miles away. This habit presumably contributed to his early death. My mother rarely smoked. When she did, on social occasions, she liked Du Maurier, in a distinctive orange box with silver markings. Neither of my parents was remotely censorious when I began to smoke myself aged fifteen or sixteen. I smoked pretty well anything bland with a tip, though I once had a crack at Gauloises Disque Bleu at university – encouraged to do so by seeing too many French films. I smoked until I was thirty-eight and gave up more or less for good in 1982. ‘Tagamet for life,’ said my doctor, referring to the most used drug to combat stomach ulcers, ‘or give up smoking.’ My last cigarette stub was cast in a disgraceful bit of vandalism into the Grand Canal in Venice. I then put on two stone in weight but at least I am still alive, fourteen years older as I write than my father was when he died.

  I said I never met anyone who disliked my dad. ‘Oh, Frank! What a lovely man!’ they would say about him. He was great fun – always with a stock of good Jewish jokes picked up from his many friends in the music business – but, more than that, genuinely witty. He did not read much but when he did his chosen writers were American humorists like Runyon, Thurber and Perelman. His favourite one-liners were borrowed from Groucho Marx: Groucho bumping into his hostess when leaving a party early, ‘I’ve had a wonderful evening but this wasn’t it.’ And a regular favourite, ‘Those are my principles and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.’ Dad was kind to the point of excessive generosity. He tipped more than others, made larger contributions to church and office collections, and was always first to raise a hand to stand a round or pay for a meal. Naturally, when he poured whiskies or gins they greatly exceeded a publican’s measure. He behaved like this while (I suspect) always being more strapped for cash than he could or would admit, a point not lost on my mother. His Catholicism mattered to him in a sort of tribal way. It was his heritage; he was a member of the tribe. He was not overt about it, though we did have one rather garish plaster statue of the Virgin Mary on a shelf halfway up the stairs, and there were a couple of crucifixes in bedrooms. He went to mass every Sunday, kept the other observances and was keen that the rest of us did. There was a Rosary Crusade in the 1950s, launched by an Irish-American priest, with the slogan: ‘The Family That Prays Together Stays Together’. We once went to a rally in Wembley Stadium. We would very occasionally say the rosary together, but despite the infrequency of such devotion we did stay happily together. Dad used to say that good works were the best sort of prayers, and he did what he said. He belonged to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, an organization founded in the slums of Paris in the nineteenth century to mobilize voluntary help for the poor and disadvantaged. Most Sunday afternoons he used to visit a local hospital for the mentally ill and handicapped. He made good friends with several of the patients, one in particular who believed that he was a reincarnation of Emperor Napoleon. I used to egg my father on to offer sympathy for the appalling weather in Russia during the winter.

  So my father was a good and kind man, not much of an authoritarian; he only smacked me once, and that was for being rude to my mother. All this is admirable but he was not, in the world’s terms, very successful; indeed I reckon he used to delude himself a little about the success that lay just around the corner. This must have encouraged my mother, perhaps too much, to dream of all the little comforts and social advances that mattered to her. But they never quite materialized: no Rover, no house in Ruislip. We never knew hardship, and enjoyed nice holidays and good (free) education, and there was very little evident tension at home. But there must have been times when my mother was sad and disappointed about expectations dashed and three-quarter promises not fulfilled. In the late 1950s my father changed his business from the publication of music to making jingles for the TV commercials which were paying for the new independent television companies. At first the business went well, but not long after I left university it folded. He was driving up and down to see his entrepreneurial nephew in Manchester in May 1968, looking for a new job, when he crashed and subsequently had the heart attack that killed him. He must have been so unhappy, driving around the country with a car full of business files, and feeling that he had let down the wife and children that he loved so much.

  My father was hugely proud of me. The most unforgiveable thing I have ever done is not to have shown how proud I was of him. My relationship with him in my late teens and early twenties never really shook off the supercilious patronizing of a young smart-arse. There were good days together. He came to see me play cricket for my Oxford college in my last summer at the university, when I bowled out most of the Gentlemen of Oxfordshire almost before he arrived and there was a triumphant lunch afterwards at the Bear Inn at Woodstock. There was nothing really fractious between us, but deep down I reckoned that he was not as successful as I would have liked him to be. I have always worried that I may not have hidden this cold and harsh sentiment sufficiently, let alone prevented it from metastasizing in the first place. If only I could have grown up before he died. I have always been sad that I was never able to establish a loving adult relationship with this dear man. After his death I read through his private business correspondence, the papers in the car, trying to sort out what it was that he had left, and my mother’s financial future. I followed a worrying trail fro
m unpaid bill to rejection letter to financial demand through schemes and dreams that had come crashing down in his last few years. How worried, worried sick, he must have been behind his façade of cheerful enthusiasm. As I read all those letters I cried more than I ever have again in my life.

  My sister Angela was much closer to my father emotionally than I was, even though from about the time I was a sixth-former she worked abroad. She belongs to that last generation of women who should have gone to university, but in those days only 6 per cent of our age group went into higher education and a much smaller percentage of women. From a convent school in Ealing she went to the French Lycée and jobs in Strasbourg and then Rome. She is an excellent linguist with good French and Italian in particular, the sort of person whom bad linguists describe as having a good ear, ignoring the amount of intellectual rigour involved in learning any language well. We grew up with a far less spiky relationship than is so often the case between siblings. She looked after me when I was first at school, teased me a bit and inveigled me into her extraordinary, surreal Goon-ish games of the imagination. She never displayed any annoyance or envy at the extent to which her clever younger brother was cosseted, spoilt and praised. She was also much bolder than me. When we stayed with my mother’s sister, Ina, and her husband, Michael – a childless couple – in Bristol, she was always happier to ride pillion on one of his powerful motorbikes than her slightly nervous brother. She was also the first to climb a tree or go on the more adventurous rides at the fair. Funny and kind, like our father, she is a serious ecumenical Christian who has moved from devout Catholicism to devout Anglicanism, impelled by a pretty fierce intellect and a lot of usually unsatisfactorily answered questions. She married a much older man, a talented painter and potter, who made her very happy, not least because he is the only person I have ever known who quite literally did not have a bad word to say about anyone. He was a sin-free zone, proof if it were needed that original virtue lives alongside original sin.