We’ve all got a book in us (they say) and it’s a shame my father’s never quite saw the light of day

My sister (who, she assures me, tunes into this ’ere blog every now and then) might remember this or she might not, but here goes: for pretty much as long as I can remember, or at least for the last 20-odd years of his life, my father was writing ‘my book’ (i.e. and quite obviously ‘his’ book, not mine. Please do try to keep up). He did almost complete it, after a fashion, but it was never published. He did, though, for a while have a publisher, Faber & Faber no less. But, as I say, in the event it wasn’t published — so strictly that should be ‘in the non-event’.

The subject matter of his book was a good one (and remains a good one, and I’m sure it has been covered by other authors although my father never mentioned any): relations and co-operation between the IRA (or its pre-cursors, one of which was the Irish Citizens Army) and the Germans in both — I think — World War I and World War II, given that they had a common enemy: the British. There was a lot of material and my father, always a diligent man, although I think a slow worker, came up with a lot of ‘new facts’. Perhaps his mooted links, whatever they were, to the intelligence services — well mooted by me - proved useful in digging up facts ordinary joes like you and I would have no access to, but he took so long to write the bloody book that he was overtaken by Fate: whoever it was at Faber & Faber who had come to whatever agreement it was my father had struck with the house had long retired be the time he was on the point of presenting the more or less completed work. His successor — as so often happens — reviewed all existing contracts when he took over, and my father’s went out of the window.

My father’s book is in some ways part and parcel to his affair with the woman who became my stepmother after my mother died which began in the mid-1960s. For one or two reasons I don’t think it was his first affair. I do

remember that at one point in early-1960s when we were still living in Berlin, where he was — possibly nominally or possibly not nominally — the BBC’s ‘representative’ (the BBC also had ‘a correspondent’, one Charles Wheeler, a man of liberal persuasions with whom I gather my father, a man of not quite such a liberal inclination, did not get on) he was taking ‘Polish lessons’ from some woman who lived in, I think, Dahlem or Zehlendorf (both rather nice suburbs in the south-west of Berlin).

On the face of it, of course, there is nothing to suggest that taking off of a weekday afternoon to a nice suburban villa to learn Polish is necessarily suspect, but it does beg quite a few questions, not the least of which is why had he decided to learn Polish when he had previously, to my knowledge at least, never shown the slightest interest in the language (and from what I know of Polish - at least ten different and increasingly obscure ways of saying ‘I am’, for example, and the rules of grammar changing according to the time of day, a decidedly eccentric decision).

On the other hand if he was having an affair, did his explanation that he was simply spending several hours in sunny Dahlem learning Polish irregular verbs really wash? Who knows, but that is neither here nor there, although I think it’s more likely than not that he did stray from the marital bed, especially as my Uncle Pat, his younger brother, once informed me that my father had quite an eye for the girls when they were young. Whatever the story, his final affair began in the mid-1960s, and when his BBC posting to Paris ended in 1972 (he had been ‘representative’ there, too), he and his squeeze were soon living together at her flat in Greenwich.

At the time we lived in Henley-on-Thames, 40-odd miles west of London (or rather my family did), but he only came home at weekends, telling my mother that he didn’t like commuting and was spending the night in one of the bedrooms the BBC had at Broadcasting House for newsreaders and announcers who had to be up early (or something — it doesn’t matter what he told his wife, my mother, as it was all bullshit anyway).

In the mid-1970s my stepmother inherited £7,000 from an aunt and bought a small cottage here in St Breward, seven miles north of Bodmin on the edge of Bodmin Moor, and this became a weekend bolthole for my dad and his squeeze, and I think it was here that work on ‘my book’ began in earnest. Writing it was most certainly one of the excuses he gave my mother for taking off west to the edge of Bodmin Moor for days on end, telling her he was staying with ‘a friend’. In my experience women are not daft, certainly not quite as daft as men, and I doubt whether she believed a word of it or his story about spending weeknights in one of the BBC ‘bedrooms’, but there you go, that was the story.

. . .

I was in my mid-twenties in the mid-1970s when my father and his squeeze established their love-nest and I had started my first job on a newspaper (as a reporter on the Lincolnshire Chronicle, based in Lincoln). It might appear

that I was following in my father’s footsteps ‘into journalism’, but that wouldn’t have been true at all. Having persuaded myself several years earlier that ‘I was writer’, I thought — erroneously as I now know — that working for a newspaper might be a good first step in a writing career.

So I applied for several jobs on newspapers in the spring of 1974, first going to the local library and consulting Willings Press Guide, and then sending off speculative letters to various weekly newspapers and publications up and down the country. I was invited for interview only twice. The first interview (in fact it came not as a response to one of my letters but after I answered an ad in the Daily Telegraph) was with a motoring magazine based in Buckinghamshire and the second with the Chronicle.

I didn’t get the first job, and I’m sure it didn’t help when I admitted I didn’t know the first thing about cars but that I had a good friend who did and who often chatted about them with me. That job, I’m sure, went to someone who had more than a passing interest in motoring and was capable of more than just making small talk about cars. My answer to another question — why did I think I was qualified for a career in journalism to which I responded that, well, I already had a typewriter — would have been equally unconvincing.

But I did survive the interview in Lincoln, with a white-bearded man who had a bad stammer. I can’t remember his name now, but he was a member of the family which then owned the Lincolnshire Standard Group (which no longer exists, in time no doubt bought out by a Dutch biscuit company, then an insurance group and finally by a hedge fund which stripped it of all and every asset, before disposing of what remained of the company in a roadside ditch on the way to Louth).

My job on the Chronicle helped form a kind of additional bond with my father even though for most of his life he had hoped his first-born, my older brother, would be the one to follow him into the trade. But by the mid-1970s, given my brother’s growing mental issues, it was clear that wasn’t going to happen. From then on my father took to buttonholing me instead of my brother at odd moments and reading me what he had most recently written in his book and asking for my opinion.

This always made me uncomfortable. For one thing, I couldn’t tell a ‘well-written’ piece of prose from doggerel, but it was also the case that my father was extraordinarily sensitive and even the slightest criticism could upset him greatly. So on these occasion I was obliged to put on a grand performance and tread very carefully, convincing my father that not only did I agree with what he had written and written so well (about a topic of which I knew less than nothing), but that he had pretty much nailed it and I could there and then think of no way in which it might be improved.

I have a sixth sense for bullshit and often ‘knoq’ when people are lying (although obviously not in the strict philosophical sense of ‘knowing’ and equally obviously there will be many times when I am blatantly being lied to but am none the wiser). I am also certain the world can read me like a book and always knows perfectly well when I am telling a whopper, but apparently not. My father, at least, never caught on, though it is likely that, like most people, he chose simply to hear what he wanted to hear and as I was saying all the right things about his book, keeping it as vague as I dared, he didn’t go into it very deeply.

If I do remember correctly, his style was far too tight and succinct, not to say far too dense to be particularly readable. It might have been a good one when compiling a report for whoever wanted a report, but for the kind of thing he did it did not - in my view - work. After he had died, a BBC friend and colleague was asked by my stepmother to ‘finish’ it and as far as I know did so, but by then Faber’s had lost interest. I also seem to remember that he kept missing various deadlines which cannot have helped sustain the publishers’ interest and at one point he told me he was thinking of re-writing the whole book into a novel. Why, I really can’t guess.

But that was my father’s my book.

. . .


I mention it because - perhaps like father, like son - I have similar enterprise on the go, although in several very crucial ways I am going about the whole exercise very differently (and I fully intend to finish it and a lot more such enterprises before I croak). For one thing, remembering how uncomfortable, not to say bored, I felt when my father would spend a good 20 minutes reading me several passages while I tried to feign interest, I have not subjected anyone to anything similar, and I am anyway a firm believer in not showing anything to anyone until you are certain you are done with it and there is no way it can be improved. Would you pull a half-baked cake out of the oven, have someone taste a slice and ask 'well, what do you think of it so far?'

For one thing when we do ‘ask for an honest opinion’ about something or other, we are doing nothing but kidding ourselves and want nothing of the sort. Instead we simply want to be told how ‘good’ whatever it is we have produced. Something unfinished will certainly not be in any way ‘good’, so in just that respect showing anything to anyone is more than pointless.

. . .

My enterprise serves an entirely practical purpose, unlike my father’s: to learn to write, to learn patience and to learn application and discipline. It was conceived last summer when I read Ernest Hemingway’s ‘debut’ novel The Sun Also Rises and wondered why it was hailed — albeit by the publisher and in review excerpts printed on the back copy — as ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’. I was baffled by those claims, so baffled that I immediately re-read the novel to find out exactly what I had missed. I hadn’t read anything. Since then the whole enterprise has burgeoned quite a bit as I came across and incorporated more information about Hemingway and the novel. It is moving along slowly because — well there’s no rush and I want to get it ‘right’.

I have already mentioned in an earlier post what — in my view — a complete nine-bob note (US nine-dollar bill) Hemingway was, and his fame and reputation (which has, admittedly, waned somewhat since he blew his brains out in Idaho) had, as far as I can make out, more to do with a hard-headed publishing house wanting to make money and the literary world wanting a new generation of heroes than any particular gifts he had. But anyway that is what ‘my enterprise’ is all about and I am under a strict and self-imposed instruction not to try to start anything else until the whole thing is done, dusted and complete. I shall post it, in parts as it is already almost 10,000 words long, here in this blog.

I am already convinced that I might well be riding for a fall — after all Hemingway was ‘a Nobel laureate’ don’t you know — but fuck it, time to stick to my guns: I really don’t think the guy could write for toffee, and the acres of literary analysis of his work I have come across is essentially nothing by pseudo, highbrow onanism. Incidentally, The Sun Also Rises was not Hemingway’s debut novel at all: his first novel was a throwaway piece he knocked off in just over a week allegedly to get out of a publishing contract in order to get a better one with another house (Scribner’s).

It was a bald parody of the work of an older friend, the now-forgotten novelist Sherwood Anderson, who had done him many favours, not least introducing him to Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein to help launch him in Paris when he moved there. Anderson was published by Boni & Liveright who had taken up Hemingway and published his first collection of stories, and, so the claim is made, Hemingway knocked off that first novel (The Torrents Of Spring) knowing that in attacking Anderson, Boni & Liveright would refuse to publish it and thus give him grounds for breaking his contract with him. And why did he want to do that? Because he was no big pals with F Scott Fitzgerald who was published by Scribner’s and who championed Hemingway to the house. Anderson was not the first friend and mentor Hemingway shat upon when it eventually suited him — he made a habit of it. A nine-bob note who couldn’t write for toffee is actually being quite nice to the man.

Ah, but there’s me riding for that fall: a ‘Nobel laureate’ don’t you know. Fancy!

PS It’s worth recalling what Peter Cook said when he was informed by some keen young chap at a party that he was ‘writing a novel’.

‘No,’ said Cook, ‘neither am I.’