‘Did you know you bent the potato masher?’
‘NO, I DIDN’T. I APOLOGISE PROFUSELY.’
A recurring line of my dad’s is that his dad was dozy and happy-go-lucky and his mum was intelligent and neurotic, and he drew the short straw by ending up dozy and neurotic. ‘I’M GLAD YOU GOT YOUR MUM’S PERSONALITY, NOT MINE,’ he has told me. He’s being unfair to himself here and not wholly accurate, but I can see another combination of Ted and Joyce in him: a thundering lust for life combined with the ability to create obstacles out of nothing in a future that doesn’t exist, a sometimes exhausting ego combined with a generosity that on occasions has run to the self-damaging, a negative outlook underpinned by an essential softness and good nature. No human is just one thing. That said, Ted perhaps came a bit closer than some of us. Towards the end of my granddad’s life my dad asked him if he’d ever done anything horrible. Ted pondered the question for almost a full minute then said there was one thing he had often regretted which he felt was unfair and hurtful, and that was the times during 1936 when he and a gang of his mates would go into the chip shop in Stapleford five minutes before it closed and ask, ‘Have you got any fritters left, missus?’ to the woman serving there, and if she said, ‘Yeah,’ they would shout, ‘Well, you fried too many of them, didn’t you, missus!’ and run away.
Ted could be bawdy, in a fluffy unthreatening sort of way. Pretty much as soon as I reached puberty he started asking me if I was getting any ‘crumpet’. Before my adolescence he often referred to me as ‘KILLER’, which became ‘LADYKILLER’ as I got older. I was sorry to disappoint him by remaining in a long-term committed relationship with the same girl from my late teens to the middle of my twenties. In view of this side of his nature it was somewhat apt that he spent most of his adult life working in a factory that made women’s underwear. My great-granddad, Ted senior, also worked in a women’s underwear factory. The legend is that during the 1930s Ted senior designed the part of a knitting machine that made women’s stockings fit more snugly around the heel then made the mistake of telling his boss, who immediately patented the idea. Apparently the boss was always sure to send Ted senior a turkey every Christmas though, and Ted senior was content with that.
Before his teaching days my dad also worked in a women’s underwear factory for a while. In fact, I am the first of a century of men on Ted’s side of the family never to have worked in a women’s underwear factory. I feel I am somehow letting the side down here, but I’m still not all that old, and publishing is a very uncertain industry to work in during the early part of the twenty-first century, so I suppose there’s still time and anything could happen. When my dad was a kid Ted’s ability to mend the knitting machines that made ladies’ undergarments was so prized that he worked for a time in a Belgian factory which was having trouble with its machines. The Belgians were so impressed with his work that they offered him a permanent position at a far better wage than he’d ever had, but Joyce did not want to move to Belgium because she thought they had weird toilets. ‘WHILE HE WORKED THERE HE LIVED WITH A BELGIAN FAMILY AND WALKED THROUGH A FRENCH WINDOW IN THEIR HOUSE,’ my dad told me. ‘WELL, I SUPPOSE IT WAS A BELGIAN WINDOW. DO YOU KNOW WILLIAM LEE? HE WAS FROM CALVERTON AND HE INVENTED THE FRAMEWORK KNITTING MACHINE. KNITTING HAS ALWAYS BEEN MASSIVE IN NOTTINGHAM. ALL THE HOUSES IN RUDDINGTON USED TO HAVE THREE FLOORS. THAT’S BECAUSE THE TOP FLOOR WAS FOR KNITTING. EVERYONE WAS KNITTING LIKE FOOK. AND THAT’S WHY HOSIERY WAS SO BIG IN NOTTINGHAM, AND WHY YOUR GREAT GRANDDAD AND YOUR GRANDDAD GOT JOBS IN HOSIERY FACTORIES. I DIDN’T KNOW ANY OF THIS UNTIL I WENT TO LEICESTER TO BUY DRUGS AND HAD A STAND-OFF WITH A MOD THERE. WE BECAME MATES FOR A BIT AFTERWARDS. HE WORKED IN HOSIERY.’
When my granddad was away, my dad and Joyce tended to clash without a teddy bear to soften the atmosphere in the house. When my dad’s shoes fell to bits Joyce sent him to school in some of her own. She gave him charcoal tablets to combat what she called his bilious attacks. My dad wasn’t aware that he had bilious attacks and didn’t even know what they were, but she assured him that he did and that they needed to be combated. Meanwhile, a co-worker of Ted’s in Brussels named Kurt became obsessed with Ted and began to follow him everywhere he went. Ted had to gently explain to Kurt that he was married and not on the market. Kurt told Ted he was the most finely dressed man he had ever seen.
Clothes were always important to Ted. If he dressed up, he really dressed up. If he didn’t, he really didn’t. His tendency to look a little dandyish or extremely scruffy and rarely anything in between is one that both I and my dad have inherited. Around the turn of the last decade, when my dad finally had the income to buy the clothes he hankered after, I accompanied him to a tailor in the town of Holt in Norfolk, where he spent so much time trying on suits and asking the proprietor her opinion that three hours later when we finally left she announced that she was going to have to go upstairs to have a lie-down and some ginger nuts. Just before we sat down for our meal the night before our walk to Bog End
