The Living Years Read online

  What I remember most about Whaley is how big everything was: the pageantry was huge, there were vast spaces to run around in, the parade ground seemed to go on forever. And at the centre of it all was my father. Every ceremony revolved around him, everyone saluted him wherever he went. (I loved saluting, it seemed very grown up: something only men did. I would always be trying to get away from Nanny and my sister because nobody ever saluted them.)

  Walking around the island with my father, I can remember puffing out my chest to be as big as possible, feeling the importance of being by his side.

  * * *

  It was a letter from the Admiralty that changed everything for my father. Instead of bringing the news that he was promoted to the position of Rear Admiral, as he’d hoped, the letter told him instead that he’d be expected to retire from the Navy in two months’ time.

  At the time this letter arrived Dad had been in the Navy for thirty-six years, gained two Mentions-in-Despatches in the Second World War and a Distinguished Service Order earned off the coast of Korea in the early fifties. Suddenly he was out of work. With a wife and two young children to provide for, retirement was out of the question. For the first time in his life, he had to go job-hunting and the signs didn’t look good:

  I was [. . . ] given an official booklet giving advice upon the transition to civilian life. This I read one evening. It was the most depressing thing I have ever read and by the end of it, I needed a couple of stiff whiskies to restore my morale. It appeared that I was virtually valueless to the labour market and must adopt a humble and low profile ready to accept a modest job in the hope of climbing the ladder once more if I was lucky enough to get on the ladder at all.

  In the words of today’s young people it was dead dreary.

  Quite a few rejections followed but then my father applied for a job working on the Blue Steel missile defence system that was being developed by Hawker Siddeley (which later became part of British Aerospace). He was successful, but the job meant moving to the opposite end of the country, Cheshire, where Hawker Siddeley had their headquarters. My father always believed in the right outfit for the occasion and on the day he left for Wilmslow, he did so in his new uniform: a bowler hat, rolled umbrella and pigskin gloves.

  Mum, Nicky and I followed not long after and moved into a Manchester hotel, the Dean Water, while my parents were looking for a house. The hotel used to have dances on a Saturday evening and my sister and I, dressed in our pyjamas, would look over the banisters at the dancers going past in their smart evening gear. It was like a glimpse into another world: very exciting.

  Far Hills, the house that my parents found, was a detached, brick-built 1930s house about four miles from the Hawker Siddeley base. This meant that whenever the black, triangular Vulcan Bombers flew overhead, the whole place shook, which impressed any guests we had staying. I was more impressed by the fact I could use the base’s runway as a go-carting track.

  I had a yellow 30 cc go-cart – very cool – and we would put it in the back of our big red-and-white Austin and drive to the base with it sticking out of the boot. My main memory is of me trying to start the damn thing, but when I did get it going, I went flying.

  Mum would always drive me to the airbase and she’d also drive Dad to work each day. Her style was probably best described as colourful. On one occasion we were late going to the train station and we hurried to the car, which was parked in the garage. Nicky and I in piled into the back and were looking out of the rear window in anticipation when Mum went full throttle straight through the garage wall in front.

  Driving up to visit our relatives in Scotland was also a drama. One year we hired a caravan and Nicky and I went with Mum to collect it the night before. By the time she’d negotiated it back through our narrow gates into the driveway I was already hoping that Dad would take the helm the next morning. We would be manoeuvring out straight on to a main road which, with Mum at the wheel, was the kind of thing that left you afraid for your life.

  Mum’s objection to Dad’s driving was that he did it as though he was steering a ship. He’d leave the garage as if he were leaving the harbour, set sail down the road at a very respectable pace and be totally unaware of fellow motorists flashing him, shaking their fist and trying to overtake. He’d be completely in his own world, which would drive my mother to distraction. Mum, by contrast, didn’t have a problem with speed: we’d hit the motorway and she’d hit the gas, pushing the car to the limit of the maximum speed it could do. It would shake and rattle, and my father would hang on to the loop above his window with white knuckles. He knew that if he attempted to despatch any orders, he would be ejected immediately. Reaching our destination intact was always a relief.

  I particularly enjoyed Scotland and visiting my Great-aunt Jean (from my mother’s side of the family). The Biggars had three farms and bred Galloway cattle and I think it was there that I developed a desire to become a farmer. I loved the lifestyle, the open spaces and especially being around the cows: they felt kind and safe, and hearing them munching their hay in the quiet of the evening was very satisfying.

  Generally, though, there wasn’t much love lost between my parents’ families and siblings. There was an Aunty Rosie who lived in Southsea and was artistic and slightly eccentric – especially when helped along by a glass of wine or two – but we only visited her a couple of times. Strange, given that on Whale Island we’d been so nearby. It didn’t end well between Aunty Rosie and me: Mum rang me one day when I was in my twenties and told me that Auntie Rosie had recently got married. I told Mum to give her my congratulations, as you would, but that didn’t go down too well.

  ‘Not married, darling! Buried!’

  I saw even less of my mother’s brother, Uncle Berners – in fact I only met him once. When his name was mentioned it was always in lowered tones when my parents thought I was out of earshot. This might have been because he’d acted badly and opted out of looking after his mother, my ‘Jean Granny’, as we used to call her. But it might also have been because Uncle Berners, who was the vicar of Eton for many years, changed his name later on in life to something double-barrelled, which really bugged my parents. My father wasn’t very tolerant of pomposity.

  Because of Uncle Berners, Dad ended up paying for the upkeep of both grannies – Jean Granny and his own mother, Granny Malimore – who both lived into their nineties. Granny Malimore (who was called Malimore because that was the name of her house in Farnham) was very bright but not very active. Jean Granny, meanwhile, was very active but not very bright. They’d meet at family occasions and Jean Granny would always find some stairs to rush up and then say things like, ‘Oh, am I going too fast for you, Roberta?’ And Granny Malimore would get her own back by memorizing all kinds of historical facts and embarrassing Jean Granny by asking her questions she couldn’t answer.

  I don’t know how Jean Granny managed to live so long but I think Granny Malimore did it by refrigeration. You’d go to her house in Farnham, breathe out, and see your breath in the air. And her fire would be on. It was one of those little smokeless fires, the size of an acorn. The minute a glow got going and a bit of heat started coming out, she’d jump up, bung on a scuttle-full of coal and nearly extinguish the thing.

  Granny Malimore had a TV – quite rare in those days – which she’d been given by a wealthy cousin from Cape Town. She watched everything but preferred it if you thought that she only ever read The Times. We would go into the room and find her feigning to read the newspaper but if we put our hand on the telly it would always be boiling hot. It probably gave off more heat than the fire.

  Meanwhile, Jean Granny lived in a slightly threadbare ‘residential hotel for the elderly’ called Morris Lodge Hotel in Farnham. Morris Lodge played a big part in our family life. While my father had been away during the Korean War my mother had moved there with my sister and me, and I’m sure it was one of the reasons why she was able to cope. Nicky and I were always under surveillance, usually by some colourful character o
r other. It was run by a Colonel and Mrs Crosse, accompanied by a couple of rather bossy sisters. It’s probably why Fawlty Towers later became a favourite of mine: I felt I could identify.

  Even after we moved to Cheshire we’d often go back to Morris Lodge for holidays. We’d also spend occasional weekends fishing in the Derbyshire hills. I loved being outdoors and even today rivers move me.

  The river at Hartington has a beautiful meander that was always serene and calm, although generally became less so after the Rutherfords and dog had descended. The serious fisherman that used to go there were appalled, not least because my mother had a top-of-the-range Hardy rod but still used a worm for fly-fishing.

  Dad wasn’t a great fisherman at all and I think I caught only two fish in my entire career, but Mum had more of a feel for it. When she was young in South Africa she’d been quite sporty: she’d ride horses and sail in races, and she used to shoot too. But those days were gone by the time I appeared.

  * * *

  Mum was game for anything and would try to loosen Dad up, but there was a stiffness and a formality about my father. He always had a sense of humour – it was very dry and lots of people missed it but it was definitely there – but as far as I was concerned Dad was very reserved, although I always felt loved and secure.

  My father had grown up with my grandpa’s tales of the Boer War but he never told me a single war story, although he clearly had plenty to tell. When war was declared in 1939 his first mission was to sail to Canada with a million pounds of gold bullion, which was being sent from France for safekeeping. In 1940, after France had fallen to Germany, he’d been in charge of seizing two French ships in Plymouth harbour, and in 1941 he’d been on the King George V when it helped sink the Bismarck. But as a child I always sensed that he didn’t want to talk about the war and it didn’t feel appropriate to ask.

  Ours was never an unhappy household but it was serious. I had seen my dad practising yoga, which he’d picked up while he was in the Far East, but he would never kick a ball on the lawn with me and we’d never just chat. From a very young age I was also aware that he had incredibly high standards: I knew that his job on Whale Island had been to decide who passed exams and who failed.

  One image I have of us together doesn’t quite fit: my dad and I used to share baths when I was very little. I would have a plastic submarine – one of those funny things you got in a cornflake packet and put baking soda in to make it go up and down – and I’m sure Dad, watching me play with it, thought it was only a matter of time until I started my own naval career.

  We weren’t really together very much. By the time he came home from work I would often be in bed and then, when I was seven-and-a-half, I was packed off to boarding school. Maybe it was because my father wasn’t a big part of my everyday life that the occasions when we were together felt so important.

  As for my mother, I have no idea what she did all day but, whatever it was, she always seemed to be in a rush – my main memory of Mum is of her rushing into a room, smelling of the cold air she’d brought in from outdoors, dropping something off and rushing back out again.

  Neither of my parents had many friends and, thinking about it now, I can see what a shock it must have been for both of them having to learn to deal with the real world outside the services at quite a late stage in their lives. Not only had my father never owned a house before – as a Captain, he’d always been on the move and wherever he’d hung his cap, that was home – he’d never even paid a bill. Nor had Mum ever needed to cook a meal or worry about domestic chores: Captain’s wives didn’t.

  Perhaps that was why they didn’t quite know how to make a home for Nicky and me. We didn’t really have friends, either: my best friend was our cleaning lady’s son, who I used to play with on the landing at Far Hills.

  While we were on Whale Island, the naval carpenters there had made me a beautiful wooden trunk full of oak bricks, which the cleaning lady’s son and I used to make forts from so that we could then fire things at each other. It was great fun but one day I must have thought he was cheating because I threw a brick at his head. There wasn’t much blood but that was the only time my father ever slippered me.

  It may sound like a lonely life but I didn’t feel lonely. I was quite self-sufficient. I even provided myself with my own pocket money: half-crowns which I would take off my father’s dresser. They were big, chunky things – they looked substantial – and I’d generally spend them on sweets or model kits: planes, not boats, which I thought were a bit dull. Talk about adding insult to injury. It was only when I got to prep school that I realized what I had been missing out on socially. And there was another discovery, too: music.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Now Michael, you’re the son of a naval officer, you must behave like a naval officer and be strong at all times.’

  I’ll never forget my father’s words to me as he left me, aged seven, at my prep school, The Leas in Hoylake, for my first term: he was wearing a smart tweed jacket, cavalry twills, brown suede shoes – and I was terrified.

  Lying awake in my dormitory that night, boys either side whimpering and crying, a cold bath looming in the morning, I remember repeating Dad’s words to myself – ‘You’re the son of a naval officer: be strong, don’t show your feelings and you’ll be all right’ – and sure enough I was. For about three weeks. Then one morning when I was having my milk in the big gym hall it suddenly dawned on me: my parents had left me and I wouldn’t see them for another six weeks. I was trapped. I’d been done.

  With my milk bottle still in my hand, I burst into tears and then howled all the way through the rest of the break. The other boys had got over it all weeks ago, of course, and were no doubt thinking, ‘What’s wrong with Rutherford?’ But I always was a bit slow getting there emotionally.

  * * *

  My father had also been to a prep school. It was in Rochester and, with its ‘chipped desks, cracked inkpots, primitive lavatories, characteristic smell and regimen of porridge, cottage pie, sausage rolls, suet roll and rice pudding’, was typical of its kind. That was in 1914, and things hadn’t changed much by the time I got to The Leas. The only real difference was that Dad had to wear an Eton jacket and white kid gloves for dancing lessons whereas I wore plimsoles – which wasn’t ideal because my partner, Jones Minor, always trod on my feet. He always had a runny nose, too.

  I had only asked my parents for one thing before leaving for The Leas and that was that they’d promise me I wouldn’t have to do dancing lessons. Waltzing my way painfully round the gym a few weeks later I can remember feeling very let down.

  I didn’t feel angry at being sent away but I did feel rather sorry for myself. After my first term at The Leas I’d made up my mind: there was no way I was going back for more. My parents were very clever about the situation, though. They never tried to sell the school to me. I think they knew I would smell a rat. Instead, Mum would say, ‘Now Mikey, we’re already in January, so we don’t count January. You’re coming home in March, so there’s only February. Four weeks!’ And I would think, ‘Oh yeah! What am I worrying about?’

  It’s amazing what the passage of time does and how you can just get used to things. Looking back The Leas really wasn’t so bad: it was a big, four-storey building with creeper on it, grand front doors for the headmaster and lots of wings sticking out. Down an avenue of trees were the science blocks, playing fields and an indoor swimming pool (unheated, typically). There was also a roller-skating area – not exactly a rink – and in the evenings the light from the classrooms lit it up so that for about an hour after the bell went you could still skate. That was almost like freedom.

  The food was generally disgusting – that was one thing that definitely hadn’t changed since 1914 – but there was a fruit hut, which was a bit like a cross between a Nissen hut and a refrigerated greenhouse. Every morning at elevenses we’d go there to choose something to have with our milk and the smell inside was fantastic.

  Fruit was encoura
ged at The Leas and boys coming back from visits home would often bring baskets of oranges, apples and pears. My mother, who was quite eccentric on a food level, as well as on every other level, would send me back with pomegranates and lychees. (Bananas were a whole other story. During the holidays, if she ever saw me about to eat one with a brown bit in it, she’d take one look and say, ‘Oh, darling, that’s off. Give it to Dad.’)

  I was a scout at The Leas, the leader of Squirrel Patrol. We’d have treasure hunts in which we would be sent into Hoylake to collect a list of various odd items against the clock. As I found out one day, this didn’t mean that you were allowed to take the bus. I thought I’d shown great ingenuity but it wasn’t appreciated by the master who beat me with a very hard slipper afterwards.

  Scouts also meant scout camp every summer, which I loved. My father leant me his captain’s cap – an incredibly trusting thing for him to have done – and off we’d go to Wales, miles away from anywhere. We’d walk up Cader Idris and down scree slopes and do all kinds of other outward-bound type things. I thought the scoutmaster, Mr Waring, was great, although looking back now I slightly wonder whether his behaviour would be deemed appropriate these days. He had a lovely old Rolls-Royce with huge fenders and he’d drive round Wales with boys hanging off the sides.