mucking about – words that had gone out of fashion around the same time as the British Empire.
‘They came in through the French windows, bold as brass. Thought nobody was home. Your mother was doing the shopping for your birthday – she’s got a lovely roast – and I was upstairs getting spruced up.’
Getting spruced up. That was another one he was preserving for the archives.
‘They were trying to unplug the video when I walked in. One of them had the cheek to come at me.’ He lightly prodded the thinnest, meanest looking youth with a carpet slipper. ‘Didn’t you, old chum?’
‘My fucking brother’s going to fucking kill you,’ the boy muttered, his voice as harsh in this room where I had been a child as a fart in church. There was a yellow and purple bruise coming up on one of his pimply cheekbones. ‘He’ll kill you, old man. He’s a gangster.’
My dad chuckled with genuine amusement.
‘Had to stick one on him.’ My father threw a beefy right hook into the air. ‘Caught him good. Went out like a bloody light. The other one tried to make a run for it, but I just got him by the scruff of the neck.’
The muscles on my father’s tattooed arms rippled under his short-sleeved shirt as he demonstrated his technique for getting a teenage burglar by the throat. He had my mother’s name in a heart inscribed on one arm, the winged dagger of the Commandos on the other. Both tattoos were blurred with the ages.
‘Got him on the floor. Lucky I was deciding which tie to wear when they appeared. Came in handy, those ties you gave me.’
‘Jesus Christ, Dad, they could have had knives!’ I exploded. ‘The papers are full of have-a-go heroes who get killed for tackling criminals. Why didn’t you just call the law?’
My dad laughed good-naturedly. This wasn’t going to be one of our arguments. He was enjoying himself too much for that.
‘No time, Harry. Came downstairs and there they were. Large as life, in my home. That’s a bit naughty, that is.’
I was angry with him for taking on the two little goons, although I knew he was more than capable of handling them. I also felt the furious relief that comes when you finally find a child who has gone missing. But there was also something else. I was jealous.
What would I have done if I had found these two yobs – or any of the million like them – in my home? Would I have had the sheer guts and the bloody-minded stupidity to take them on? Or would I have run a mile?
Whatever I would have done, I knew I wouldn’t have done it with the manly certainty of my father. I couldn’t have protected my home and my family in quite the same way that he had protected his home and family. I wasn’t like him. But with all my heart, I wanted to be.
The police eventually came, pulling up in a blaze of sirens and twirling blue lights. Pat ran outside to meet them, his eyes wide with wonder.
There were two of them – a fit-looking young cop around my age who regarded my dad’s heroics with a quiet exasperation, and an older, heavier officer who immediately struck up a relationship with my old man.
In truth my father had never been much of a fan of the police – I remember him being stopped for speeding a few times when I was a child, and he was invariably lippy, never deferential, never willing to kiss their arses for a quiet life. Whenever he saw a police car screaming through the streets he was always contemptuous. ‘They’re only going home for their dinner,’ he would say. But now he sipped hot sweet tea with the older cop, a pair of Sunday Express readers together, two stolid real men wondering what the world was coming to as they surveyed the secured yobs at their feet.
‘You can imagine what kind of homes they come from, of course,’ said my dad.
‘The mother’s on benefits,’ guessed the old policeman. ‘The father probably buggered off years ago. If he was ever there. So the state has to pay to bring up these little charmers. Which means you and me.’
‘Too true. And don’t think they’re grateful for being supported by the taxpayer. It’s all rights these days, isn’t it? All rights and no responsibilities.’
‘You see them all over these estates. Women with a bunch of screaming kids and no ring on their fingers.’
‘Amazing, isn’t it? You need a licence to drive a car. You need a licence to own a dog. But anyone can bring a child into the world.’
I went out into the kitchen with my mum and Pat, wondering why all the decent citizens in the world have it in for single mothers. After all, I thought, the single mother is the parent who stayed.
Despite being able to eat a couple of burglars for breakfast, my father wasn’t a violent man. He wasn’t the battle-hardened war veteran of myth and movies. He was the most gentle man I ever met in my life.
It was true that I had seen him explode a few times when I was growing up. There was a sweet shop where my mother worked part-time when I was around Pat’s age, and the creep of a manager wouldn’t let her take a personal call from the hospital when her father, my granddad, was dying of cancer. I watched my dad grab the manager by the throat – the scruff of his neck, he would have called it – and lift him right off the ground. The man thought my father was going to kill him. So did I.
And there were other occasions – a cocky swimming-pool attendant who said the wrong thing when I was wearing a particularly lurid pair of water wings, a motorist who cut him up on our way to the seaside one steaming Bank Holiday Monday. He had dealt with them all the way he dealt with the two pockmarked burglars. But he never lifted a finger to me or my mother.
The war was always there, as undeniable as the jagged little black lumps of shrapnel which spent a lifetime worming their way out of his hard old body. But the real drama of his life – the friends who died before they were old enough to vote, the men he killed, the unimaginable things he saw and did – was over by the time he was out of his teens. Although I always thought of him as a warrior, a Royal Naval Commando with a silver medal on his chest, my dad had been something else for fifty years.
After the war he worked on a stall selling fruit and vegetables for five years. Then he married my mother and managed a greengrocer’s shop directly below the flat where my parents lived, childless for more than a decade, desperately trying for a baby that just wouldn’t be born.
I finally came along, when it must have seemed as though I never would, and from the day we moved out of our little flat above the shop until the day he retired, my father was a produce manager for a chain of supermarkets, travelling to stores across Kent and Essex and East Anglia to make sure the fruit and vegetables on sale were up to his demanding standards.
So he wasn’t a warrior to the world. But he was to me. And he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Quite literally wouldn’t hurt a fly. Perhaps it was because he had seen enough blood and gore to last forever, but if anything flew or crawled or crept from his well-tended garden into our small suburban home, my father would forbid my mother and me from touching it.
He would crouch beside some broken butterfly or wandering ant – or wasp or fly or mouse, no creature was too lowly or too filthy for him to rescue – scoop it up in his hands or a matchbox or a jam jar, and escort it to the back door, gently releasing it back into the wild while my mum and I mocked him and sang the chorus of ‘Born Free’.
But although we laughed at him, my childish heart reeled with admiration.
My father was a strong man who had learned to be gentle, a man who had seen enough of death to fully appreciate life. And I couldn’t compete, I just couldn’t compete.
Pat wouldn’t eat his dinner. Maybe it was the call from his mother. Maybe it was the attempted burglary. But I don’t think so. I think it was just my lousy cooking.
I had started to worry about his diet. Just how much nutrition was there in the takeaway pizzas and microwave meals I fed him on? Not much. The only time he was getting anything that remotely resembled healthy food was