ME & CABBAGE...

 Me & Cabbage…

There was the aroma. No, it was a nasty smell. And my appetite floundered as the scoured saucepan on a rear gas-ring bubbled with dark green. The outer cabbage leaves waved about in boiling, then simmering water, like my father’s wet green socks flapping in a breeze on the Monday washing-line. 

The remnants of the cabbage (not my father’s socks) stuck to the metal pan too, like wisps of lichen dried onto stone and the ‘steel wool’ would be needed for an industrial-scale washing-up session afterwards.

The stink remained. I left my bedroom window open in Shard End, Birmingham to try to extricate the lingering pong. 

The stink of Floss Phillips’ cabbage cooking next door remained too, whatever she was concocting in her kitchen, masking even the stench of frying bacon, fried sausages and fried tomatoes in her house, a smell surely capable of adding weight onto anyone who simply breathed in her fatty fumes. 

Even Floss herself reeked of cabbage. The tight clothing upon her robust figure was tinged with Eau de Cabbage perfume too. Tom, her partially deaf and war-wounded spouse who bred budgerigars in an aviary at the bottom of his garden, seemed to exude some kind of cabbage based after-shave lotion also…  

Sometimes, on my way home from school, walking down the communal path between the two council houses, swept by my mother of course, never Floss or Tom, whose employment was actually a well paid sweeping job at Fisher and Ludlow, the odour was overpowering. My father was always peeved that Tom earned more by sweeping a factory floor than he picked up as an insurance agent, out all hours and attempting to collect folks’ cash…

On my plate, mum’s cabbage looked like something I could model with: a dug-out canoe perhaps, or a model of a racing car, rather than something I was going to be forced to eat, before the custard on my pudding turned to a nauseous, constantly thickening skin. This was known as blackmail. 

PREVENTING MUM FROM REACHING OVER A HEDGE TO FIND CABBAGES...

The pulp smelled awful and looked vile but of course, it was ‘good for me’. And I was made to eat it. Lamb chops meant mint sauce, made from the pleasant smelling plant grown in my father’s back garden and that, with its excess of vinegar, could just about mask the taste of the cabbage. I was, I have to admit, always keen to cut mint from the garden and I could have eaten beef, chicken, turkey, pork, or even liver with mint sauce too if I could only have veiled the taste of that damned bitter, pulped, loathsome dollop of cabbage. Cauliflower was nectar in comparison and sprouts were like marzipan teacake sweets to my palate. 

FALMOUTH 1961. SEAWEED? OR CABBAGES?

Cabbage though was the horror from the pantry… 

As time wore on, I saw cabbage on school dinners too. It was a light green colour however and I thought there was something wrong with it. It tasted awful, certainly but it lacked the pulp of my mother’s cooking. 

However, I constantly begged not to be served custard with my rhubarb, apple pie, or Christmas pudding but to no avail. It was plopped onto my puddings, so that if I didn’t somehow swallow my cabbage with some haste, the skin would form on the custard and cause me considerable fear and nausea. 

HAPPY THAT MY AUNTIE IVY WASN'T PRODUCING CABBAGE FOR DINNER...

My father of course used custard as a lever against me and my lasting memory of cabbage therefore is my father bellowing sternly at me:

“You WILL eat it...”

One day, father, I wouldn’t. 

Strangely, sometimes now, I do…       

MY FATHER, VICTOR RAY: THE LATER YEARS...

 Victor Ray, my father: the later years…

I guess that this is my toughest assignment about my father, for his latter years were marred by physical pain, tragedy, living in a ‘home’ and suffering from dementia. 

However, I have attempted to compartmentalise the period by looking at various facets of his rather unusual later life. There will be sections about his holidays in Swanage and Mawgan Porth, also about the aftermath of my mum’s death, his need for fitness and then his decline, then about his foibles and finally about his death.

In no way am I criticising him or belittling him but the humour which emanated from when he was in his seventies and eighties is certainly worth recording and I hope that anyone reading this will smile, laugh and enjoy the episodes, for I’m sure that he would have wanted that to be the case…

Holidaying in Swanage…

When my kids were younger, my parents and my mother-in-law accompanied us on some caravan holidays in Swanage. Cauldron Barn Caravan Park, Ulwell Caravan Park and another, near the council’s trash tip were used by the family but one incident involving my father at the Ulwell end of the sandy Swanage beach will forever be remembered by us all. 

ULWELL BEACH AREA IN THE BACKGROUND...

The sea at Swanage was not conducive to bodyboarding, let’s say… Indeed, it was a safe bathing experience for young children and even when the tide was out, there were only metres to walk to play around in the small waves. One thing we did was to chuck a small ball, lighter than a tennis ball to each other by skimming it off the water surface, thereby making it fly up and more difficult to catch. I loved that because I could dive about, something I found rather pleasant, hence being a wicketkeeper in a cricket team and also a crazy 5-a-side football goalkeeper at the Aston Villa Leisure Centre in later years. 

JAMIE & ME IN THE SWANAGE SEA...

Standing parallel to the slight swells of waves it was also possible to time a throw so that the ball was diverted by a breaking wave, making a catch even more difficult. We had arrived in Swanage on a Saturday and on the following day, a sunny, warm one, dad and I went into the sea to partake in the activity described above. We were waist-deep in water and threw the ball several times, the sea was very calm but also rather cold and suddenly dad stopped like a statue and looked down, calling me towards him frantically. 

“What? I demanded?” But dad simply pointed desperately downwards in an agitated manner as I approached. It turned out that dad’s metal plate which housed a few false teeth had presumably contracted in the cold water and dropped into the sea. Instead of attempting to recover the plate, dad had stayed put to mark the spot and told me to dive down to find them… Thanks for that.

Try as I did, I failed. The teeth had gone, no doubt proudly worn by a some lucky codfish, or more aptly, a ray… 

Dad was distraught. He had a week to spend in Swanage on holiday without some of his teeth and he was not a happy camper… Mum gave him a crust of toast on the Sunday morning, which totally set dad off on a tirade, which actually set us all off laughing. Dad saw mum’s ‘error’ as thoughtless, whilst we all thought it hilarious and that was one of the few times mum got the better of her husband, albeit inadvertently…

So, we went to the beach that day with dad in a vile mood and although it was windy, we did have a windshield with us, although we had forgotten our mallet, resulting in me strolling across the Ulwell promenade past all the beach huts to where a guy was hiring out windshields to folks and I asked him if I borrow a mallet for a few minutes. He agreed.

THE BEACH HUTS AT SWANAGE.
MUM, JAMIE & ME...

What happened next has become a piece of Ray family folklore, an incident which was so unlikely, even a comedy sketch about it would be berated for being totally impossible…

I walked back along the beach to where we had placed ourselves on the sand and passed a group of dads and kids playing with a frisbee near the shoreline. As I passed, a lad about ten years old picked something up from the sand and exclaimed, “I’ve found some teeth…” With the most impeccable timing, I swiped them from his hand and said, “Thanks for that, they’re my dad’s…”

It was remarkable… The frisbee players looked shocked, I strolled on armed with teeth and mallet, called my dad and as he looked up, said, “Here’s your teeth…” I threw them, he caught them, totally amazed.

He boiled the teeth in a saucepan of water back at the caravan and wore them until the end of the week. He would have the teeth replaced by his dentist back home in Castle Bromwich of course but the timing involved during that ridiculous incident could not have been bettered… 

I WAS OFTEN BURIED AT SWANAGE...

Fitness…    

My father jogged, despite his bad knees, across at the park, the Norman Chamberlain Playing Fields in Shard End. He would stretch, leaning against the back of a lounge chair when you visited and he had a very basic exercise-bike which he used sparingly I believe.

In the week of his 65th birthday in 1985, he played in a football match in Aston Park, for I had assembled a football team to represent the Museum and Art Gallery in a council sponsored league and this was the first outing for some of the Museum’s staff. Dad played as a diminutive central striker against us and, er, scored a perfect hat-trick, a right-footer, a left-footer and a header… Credit to him.

I battled on for my team but we were short of fitness… We were allowed to bring in ‘ringers’ when we played our league games and we eventually won the division, although the organiser apparently absconded with the funds which were supposed to pay for the trophy and medals! We were left with nothing to show but pride for our unbeaten ‘season’, drawing once and winning the rest. I played as a sweeper, for I was clearly one of the few fit footballers in the team… 

When my son Jamie and I played a few times with dad in the late 1990s, he was in his late 70s by then but he still kicked the ball well enough, despite his replaced hip and his dodgy, painful knees. He would knock Jamie over too, something which he relished… Jamie wasn’t impressed by that.

Actually my mate Brian had injured dad’s shoulder in the clavicle area when they tumbled over together tackling one another on one occasion in the 1960s and the pain never really went away. Dad would say to anybody, “I’ve got this bad shoulder you know. Brian did it. Here, feel this…” Unbelievably people did feel his shoulder. He thought that was funny… 

After mum died…

Well, it was a gradual deterioration for my father. 

Drugs were prescribed to calm him but it was tough to know whether he was taking them regularly or simply chucking some or all of them away. He was constantly tearful and apparently hallucinating sometimes. Apparently… One evening he rang me and sounded like he was crazy, so I visited him forthwith. He was conversing with a wall, which he thought was Jamie, so I took him to Heartlands Hospital, where of course mum had died. 

He verbally abused me in the waiting area (no change there…) but when he was finally assessed by a doctor, dad’s countenance changed from nasty and imbecilic to obedient and full of respect for the medical profession, like he was taking the piss… Perhaps he was… When asked to push against the doctor’s hand from a prone position, dad almost shoved the doctor over, then he followed all instructions and displayed such a fine response that the doctor must have wondered why the hell I’d taken him to the hospital in the first place. Loneliness might well have been one cause of his behaviour, linked to the erratic taking of his prescribed tablets.

He had glaucoma too, which I am certain he worsened by his careless use of Falcon hairspray, which likely flew into his eyes as his health worsened and his aim became more erratic. 

However, the kids and I took him on holiday to Mawgan Porth…

Mawgan Porth… 

We took him on holiday after mum had died and we stayed at what was once called the Mawgan Porth Caravan Park, now The Park. 

WENDY, DAD & LUCY AT MAWGAN PORTH...

Dad had been shaken ever since mum had passed away but in some ways I reckon he enjoyed being a pain. However, what occurred on that holiday will remain in the annals of memorability… 

We stayed at the Falcon Inn in St Mawgan on the Friday evening but dad found it tough to remember which room he was supposed to be in, trying a variety of doors before finding his belongings. After the Saturday had been spent settling into our caravan, we all settled down to sleep but I was awoken very early on the Sunday morning by quite a loud noise. Dad had fallen over in attempting to find the loo near one of the two exit doors, having tripped on his bedclothes which had entrapped his lower legs. He had banged his head on the floor and he was motionless. 

I saw that he was alive but unconscious. There was no mobile phone reception in Mawgan Porth at that time and so I ran to the site’s public telephone and rang for an ambulance which arrived really quickly. Dad was taken off to Truro Hospital and I followed later, after sorting the kids out. Lucy and Wendy were adults by then anyway and when I arrived at the hospital, dad was OK, sitting up drinking tea. However, when a telephone rang, it had the same tone as his own at home and he attempted to get off the bed he had been placed upon to answer it, leaving staff to haul him back into place.

He recovered enough to be taken back to Mawgan Porth later in the day…

POST-TRAUMA IN THE CARAVAN FOR DAD...

HE SLEPT FOR A WHILE TOO...

I decided to label his room’s door and also the loo door, in case he needed to pee on the Sunday night but then I got carried away and labelled the mirror, the fridge, the cooker and various other items of furniture too. I don’t know why. It was funny though…

Were the labels useful for dad? Well, er, no… On the Sunday night he left his bed and set off to find the loo door but naturally ignored my labels and he opened one of the exit doors instead which strangely didn’t have any steps down to the ground outside… 

I heard a loud bump and got up hastily to check on him but he’d totally disappeared. It was ridiculous. He’d gone… I looked outside, couldn’t see him in the darkness and I was confused. In the end I went outside and eventually found dad wandering around the site in his red underpants and I escorted him back to the caravan. He was uninjured but when I explained that he had opened an outside door not the loo door, he came out with the immortal statement, “I thought I detected a high drop…” 

I have no idea where he peed to this day…

During the remainder of the week, he tripped over several times but when he got changed to swim in the site’s outside pool one day, Jamie came out with another memorable comment, for dad had attempted to climb down steps into the pool but lost his grip and fell in. It was quite hilarious but the serious faced Jamie scolded him, “Grandad, it says no jumping or diving…”

We had taken a tent for use on the fine Mawgan Porth beach but dad kept climbing into it like some blundering boar and falling over anyone who was already in there but he saved his best two tricks for the Falcon Inn’s garden and when we left the beach on one rainy afternoon. 

TENT BLUNDERING...

My daughter Lucy had been working her summer days at a Wetherspoons joint in Ward End, Birmingham and she so wanted to buy us all a drink, so we went to the Falcon on a sunny late afternoon. Jamie went off to play on the climbing apparatus at one end of the garden, whilst Wendy and dad grabbed a free wooden picnic table. Lucy and I set off to walk towards the pub building and order some drinks but as we approached the doorway, we heard a commotion behind us. Without looking round, Lucy remarked immediately, “That’s granddad…” She was right. He had attempted to sit on the bench which was attached to the wooden table but as he had swung one leg over, he had overbalanced and tumbled backwards onto the grass… 

Wendy had made no attempt to help dad and she was just laughing uncontrollably, whilst some other folks had kindly brought dad to his feet. Wendy just sat there, helpless…

ON THE BEACH...

Later in the week, we had been on the beach for much of the day but the weather had become cloudy, then rainy. I was still bodyboarding in the sea and the kids had upped and left the beach, leaving my dad sitting in the tent, sheltering. I returned to our place and realised that I had to carry just about everything back to the caravan. 

I placed my rain jacket on dad and asked whether he could help me by carrying a folding chair and maybe our football back to the site. He agreed, as the rain teemed and after taking down the tent, we set off towards the dunes.

DAD WITH BROLLY APPROACHING FROM THOSE DUNES...

The slight incline onto the dunes was formed of soft sand and I was laden with stuff, walking slowly beside dad, who, quite suddenly overbalanced forwards and fell flat on his face into the sand, like he’d been shot in no man’s land at the Somme. He was upright one second, then flat as a pancake the next…

It was hilarious, for although the ball had been dropped, he was still holding onto the chair…

My walk back to the caravan, holding dad upright was arduous. I deposited him and what we had carried into the ‘van, then walked up to the empty pool and actually dived in, despite the rules. It was warm and I was alone. It was lovely…  

We would play the card game ‘Whot’ in the caravan during the evenings but if dad had consumed a beer with our evening meal, he would begin to giggle and use unusual words, which he repeated and repeated, laughing in rather a weird manner. The kids of course thought this was hilarious, as when he attempted to sing along to music playing in the car, never quite getting to the beat and guessing at the words of Kool & the Gang’s ‘Get Down On It’ for example. 

His life soon changed of course and very much for the worse…

Falling again…

Dad began to trip over more and more and he was taken home once after falling on the pavement on his way back to the house from the local shops. He had banged his head. He fell too in his side-passage to the back garden, thumping his head against one of the side-walls, blood seemingly everywhere but in truth his sight was becoming severely limited due to the glaucoma problems he continued to battle.

A carer would eventually go in each day and feed dad from meals stacked in his freezer and give him the necessary medication but if I had to guess, dad would be likely not to have swallowed them much of the time…

A house key was placed in a small safe in the side-entry to the house, released by a number code and the carer would let himself in. However, one day, he found dad at the bottom of the stairs, having banged his head on a piece of furniture in the hallway. He was taken to hospital by ambulance but the carer failed to contact me at work. The key to the house hadn’t been returned to the ‘safe’ and when I popped in later that day to check on dad, for I was unable to get a reply from his phone, I couldn’t get into the house. I assumed the worst had happened and so smashed the glass in the upper half of the front door and kind of dive-rolled through the gap. 

Despite my furtive and hesitant search, there was of course no-one there at all, so I checked the carer’s log. He had written about the fall and that dad had been taken to hospital, but which one?

Eventually I managed to locate him at Heartlands Hospital and visited…

FANCY HAT...

He would never return home…

Hospital and assessment care-home…  

Dad recovered from his fall, again having damaged his head but the doctors told me some days later that he would not be allowed to return home because he was unable to recount his full name, his birth date, or his address. He simply repeated numbers instead, apparently… I was mystified. Whenever I had visited him in hospital, he had been reasonably lucid and so I went to him and asked him to tell me his full name: 

“Victor Douglas Ray…” he snapped back.

“When were you born, dad?” 

“4th June 1920…”

“Where do you live?”

“121 Nearmoor Road, Shard End, Birmingham B34 7QF…”

I was aghast. “Why didn’t you tell the doctors what you have just told me?”

“I’ve told them my service number, nothing else…”

OK, so dad thought he was in a WW2 prison camp…

When a male nurse washed round his genitals one morning, he told me later that ‘queer people like that’ shouldn’t be allowed to work in hospitals… 

“Dad, he was a nurse…” I explained…

Falling yet again… 

This time he fell out of his hospital bed, trying to get out and toddle to the loo. As he landed, he punctured a lung and once again I was informed by phone that he’d had a mishap. I didn’t recognise him though because his face had puffed up like Michelin man’s and his voice had become squeaky like that of strangled parrot due to the lung collapse and for all the world it looked like he was going to float to the ceiling like a balloon…

It was hilariously sad…

Assessment…

Worsening and still believing he had been captured by the Germans, he proceeded to harass the carers in a temporary assessment home, by sneakily tripping them and cursing at them when they tried to contain his foibles. 

He was later moved to an institution in Hobmoor Road, where the medication he was given simply accelerated the deterioration in him and his dementia worsened, his remaining hair became long over time and it was a real problem attempting to shave him, virtually impossible to communicate with him but still he lingered, head drooping, eyes wrecked. 

His companions included the widow of ex-Birmingham City and Wales footballer John Watts from the 1950s and a carpenter who galloped round the home like a dressage horse and caressed anything he noticed made from wood. 

Dad could barely see but certainly responded to my daughter Lucy’s voice, who visited him very regularly and also, intriguingly he reacted to the music of Frank Sinatra.

DETERIORATION...

When finally he passed away having been returned to Heartlands Hospital very poorly, I arrived to see him one Sunday afternoon but found him dead in a bed. I alerted a nurse and said: “Thought you might like to know that my father is lying dead in his room…” 

I turned and walked out... 

SHED CONTENTS: WORDS ABOUT WHAT MY FATHER KEPT IN HIS SHED FOR SO MANY YEARS...

 Shed Contents…

DAD & SHED, FAR LEFT...

Jars of rivets and nails and washers,

Bolts and rawl plugs and nuts and screws;

Drawers of rasps and files and bradawls,

Spanners and set-squares and hammers and, er, shoes…

Tins of plugs and switches and brackets,

Hinges and light-fittings and wires and taps;

Bags of shin-guards and golf-balls and wickets,

Footballs and bicycle pumps and bats and, er, maps…

Boxes of chair legs and saws and mallets,

Planes and screwdrivers and rulers and drills;

Stacks of planks and props and doors,

Dusters and brushes and cloths and, er, bills…

Rows of containers and paints and stripper,

Turpentine and spirit and polish and varnish;

Clutters of pipes and metal and bric-a-brac,

Age

And 

Rot

And

Rust

And, er,

Tarnish… 

WHAT LURKED BEHIND THE DOOR?

Pete Ray

My Dad’s shed. 

All human life was there.

THE SHED IN WARD END, BEFORE THE MOVE TO SHARD END...

VICTOR RAY, MY FATHER, PART 4: SOME UNUSUAL INCIDENTS...

Victor Ray, my father, part 4: some unusual incidents:

Contact by telephone...

My father introduced fear and capitulation into my life from a young age. Mum was meek and naïve, whilst dad made all the decisions and I mean ALL of them. Yes, he entertained folks elsewhere and spoke glowingly of his wife and son to others, who in truth were more like possessions. I realised that was true when I collected insurance premiums for him during his vacations. Total strangers would know all about me. 

TIES: COMMONPLACE...

Dad refused to have a telephone installed until he had retired because he reckoned that his policyholders would be ringing him too regularly. Interesting situation, for he was hardly ever at home anyway but due to the fact that there was no line of communication, mum couldn’t be contacted by my dad and more importantly, she of course was ignorant of where he actually was. Clever, I guess…

A RARE 'NATURAL' EXPRESSION BY MY DAD, FAR LEFT.
HE'S NEXT TO CAL & BILL (HIS BROTHER), ALSO THEIR DAUGHTER NORMA & HUSBAND TONY SHORTMAN, WHO BOTH DIED BEFORE THEIR TIME IN BUCKLAND MONACHORUM, DEVON...

Of course though, mum wasn’t able to communicate with her two sisters by telephone until my dad had retired. Also a clever ruse by my father…

A RARE SMILE FROM MY DAD BUT MUM WAS NEVER ABLE TO CHAT TO HER SISTERS IVY, FAR LEFT, OR GHRETA, SECOND FROM LEFT, UNTIL DAD FINALLY HAD A TELEPHONE INSTALLED IN 1985...

Hoarding...

Dad hoarded wood. And nails, screws and tools. He acquired them, stored small items in tins and Brylcream jars which lay on shelves in his shed with rusting lids. He kept locks, handles, hinges and old items of sporting equipment, like footballs, cricket balls, golf-balls found at the local park, cricket stumps and tennis-balls. He used his woodwork bench to make things and after I had had little contact with him during the week when I was a young lad, his Sundays in and around his shed left the seeds of hate for woodworking and metalworking deep within me. 

DAD'S BRICK-BUILT SHED FULL OF HOARDED ITEMS IS ON THE LEFT OF THE PICTURE... 
MORE USE OF A TIE BY ME. IT WAS LIKLEY MY BIRTHDAY AND I'D BEEN TEACHING DURING THE DAY...

He swept his own chimney too. Conversation around the house on chimney-sweeping day was even more at a premium than usual, as mum set about covering furniture with old sheets and removing fireplace ornaments, so that dad could hang one sheet from the mantle shelf. This was held in position by stones and spare bricks. A slit in the sheet allowed the brush-pole to go through, preventing too much soot from drifting into the room and settling. Each rod was screwed on in turn and heaved up and down by dad until, spotted by the watchful me in the garden, the brush appeared and pushed clear of the chimney. Reversing the activity, dad dragged the rods down the dark chimney until the brush reappeared in the fireplace and then mum would begin to clear up, shovelling soot from the grate and vacuuming in a sullen manner, as befitted a wife whose job it was to ‘keep house’. I hated chimney-sweeping day and it was such a thrill when a gas-fire was eventually installed in the house.

ARRIVING AT BULMERSHE COLLEGE IN READING, DRIVEN THERE BY MY FATHER. MUM TOOK THE PHOTO.
BOTH OF US ARE WEARING TIES AGAIN...

Playing football with my father…

Football with me at the local recreation ground was keenly contested by dad. My schoolfriend Brian Kensit joined us on a number of occasions and did well in goals but he was no outfield footballer. If only dad and I were playing, I kept goal like I figured it was meant to be done, by narrowing the angle of the shot for the striker of the ball but dad, ever the ‘winner’ would chip the ball over me. If I stayed nearer to the goal-line, he would come closer himself and fire powerfully at goal with an expression of glaring desperation to score and so I simply couldn’t win. I saved some shots, he missed others of course, including some of his lobbed attempts but his uncanny penchant for scoring goals off the goalkeeper’s right upright was irritating in the extreme…

BRIAN, DAD & ME, ABOUT TO GO & GET MUDDY AT THE PARK...

When it was my turn to be the outfielder, I made most of my shots from eighteen to twenty-five yards from goal and dad simply stood on the goal-line, finding it fairly easy to get across to cover a number of my efforts but I would never take the ball closer to lash a simple goal. I was an idiot. And I learned to be a loser…

He didn’t watch me play Sunday football when I was an adult but he certainly did watch my son Jamie play when he was growing up. Unless I was playing on my own school’s pitch on a Tuesday evening, dad didn’t watch me play when I was a schoolboy either. My mother did though… If I saw dad on some Sundays when I was an adult he might ask how I had got on: “Won 3-1!” 

“Did you score?” 

“One!” 

“Why didn’t you score two?” 

Thanks dad.

Whilst watching young Jamie playing in goals, he would stand close to a goalpost and waft his umbrella at defenders, threateningly and he was asked to move away on more than one occasion. He would bellow for the team, however, in a booming, quite frightening voice…  

My dad and his vehicles…

He parked his car in a council-owned lock-up garage, two or three hundred yards from his house, which he had eventually bought from Birmingham Council with a very low mortgage, arranged by his own assurance company. The garage was a ridiculous thing to rent I always believed because of the walks back home in darkness, whilst carrying so much collected money but he persisted for many years, until he changed the layout of his considerable front garden to enable parking in front of the house. He would carry his keys with one protruding between the forefinger and tall finger of his right hand, in case he was attacked and was forced to punch out… 

DAD'S SECOND CAR, AN AUSTIN 1100, IN CHIPPING NORTON...

He used a locking device on the steering-wheel and had a switch installed, out of sight of the driver, which prevented the car being started. This was a great idea but whenever I was forced to drive his car, I found locating the switch a real case of detection. Once, when his car was in the lock-up garage, someone did break in and manage to roll the car out but of course, failed to start it. Dad’s most intriguing ploy though was to display a rectangular piece of wood upon his steering-wheel, which featured a hand-written message: ‘Do Not Move, No Engine Oil’… People saw dad driving that car around regularly though, yet he reckoned it had been a great deterrent and when I laughed at that, he retorted, “Has my car ever been stolen?” I responded “No, but…” And he interjected, “Well, there you are then…”

I WASN'T JOKING...
I KEPT IT.

He was rather obsessed by his rear-view mirror, too. He spent many moments re-positioning it, altering it, often becoming severely irritated by it. One was never allowed to touch it but when I drove his car, I needed to alter it, being taller than my father and he would cuss me at length. 

I also recall driving his Mini, before I was seventeen years old and using the old runways at Castle Bromwich aerodrome, now Castle Vale Estate. On another occasion, minus ‘L’ plates, he encouraged me to drive the vehicle towards Lea Hall on a quiet Sunday morning, just to get the hang of steering and using the pedals. However, after turning onto Packington Avenue near a police-station, a police-car suddenly appeared behind me. Dad became apoplectic. 

“That’s it, they’ve got us, pull over…” 

I didn’t. 

“No, I’ve done nothing wrong…” I retorted. 

I drove on, navigated a roundabout and continued home without a problem. I received no apology. No surprise there…

THAT FAB MINI ON THE WAY TO A HOLIDAY IN PLYMOUTH...

He would drive to his insurance office on Wednesday mornings and that route included Bromford Road, which houses the Hodge Hill schools and there is a junction along it with Brockhurst Road. From Brockhurst, it had always been a T-junction onto Bromford Road but eventually a mini-roundabout was created there. My father had apparently driven along Bromford Road one day, after he had retired from work but had careered straight across the new roundabout, ignoring it, fortunately without incident, or accident. 

He told us afterwards that someone had spilt a load of white paint on Bromford Road…

DAD'S LAST CAR BEING TOWED AWAY.
IT WAS BADLY CORRODED BENEATH AND DAD WAS UNABLE TO DRIVE BY THEN ANYWAY...

Falling out…

He fell out of a tree. He had retired against his wishes and one day he decided to saw some upper branches from the oak he had originally planted with just one acorn at the bottom of his garden in the 1950s. He fell backwards from the ladder. He had injured his back and was unable to get up unaided but whether he called my mother, or whether she eventually just realised that he hadn’t be seen for a while I’m not sure but she went to look for him, discovered him prone on his back and helped him up to the house. He was not referred to a doctor, he refused any further help from mum and ordered her not to tell me… Mum eventually told her sister Ghreta in a telephone conversation though, who told their older sister Ivy and then finally, the information was relayed to me. His eventual hip replacement surgery was certainly as a result of the fall.

A falling-out occurred in the 1990’s too. Not from a tree this time, however… My son Jamie had played football one Sunday morning, my marriage had already failed and it had been my turn to take Jamie to his game. We were due at my parents’ house to enable Jamie to bathe then we were due to collect my daughters and find somewhere to eat together. Jamie had been awarded the ‘Man of the Match’ award for his goalkeeping heroics. Heroic was his season in truth but the award was generally shared around. 

JAMIE WITH ONE OF HIS MVP AWARDS...

He was about to take a bath and we became involved in a conversation with my dad about Aston Villa’s most recent game, which they had lost. A neighbour had told dad that they needed Simon Grayson in the defence. Dad relayed that to Jamie and me and we cringed somewhat, finding the idea ludicrous. We had seen the match but the neighbour had stopped watching Villa, thus hadn’t witnessed Grayson’s poor form that season when he had featured in the team. Jamie and I disagreed and said so but my father simply scowled: 

“Oh, go and lecture the children at the Museum about it…” 

I was shocked. I picked up Jamie’s muddy togs and took him home. I didn’t visit, or contact mum and dad for several weeks and mum was banned from ringing me. I saw my children but avoided my dad. One day, I took them to see my parents and waited outside for them but dad waddled out to see me. I genuinely thought he was going to apologise to me but instead I heard the scowl again, “Don’t be spiteful to your mother…” I drove off. 

AGILE & WITH GOOD CATCHING HANDS FOR HIS AGE...

A meal was eventually arranged for mum’s birthday in the month of May, we all went to it and it was as though nothing had happened from his point of view. Until he died, dad failed to apologise to me about that incident and although mum remained disgusted with his behaviour, she was still very frightened of him…