My Dear Bessie (47 page)

She began with watercolour and oil copies of painters like Rubens and Pissarro. She travelled to Paris and fell in love with Cézanne, Monet, Matisse and Picasso. She visited London
galleries, attended adult education classes and scouted Charing Cross Road for books with illustrations of her favourite paintings.

She gathered flowers from the garden and strove to capture their beauty in a particular light and painted her own Cubist bullfight in the style of Picasso. She knitted a stair carpet (80,000 knots, eight yards long, two feet wide) that became a character in one of Dad's articles: ‘It has become steadily heavier, more bloated, comfortable-looking. Now it spends all its time rolled up on the divan and is persuaded away for its feed with difficulty, pampered monster of my wife's creation that it is.'

Mother and Dad were both active in the local Labour Party and joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) when it seemed that humanity was preparing to blow the planet into dust and ashes. They took part in the Aldermaston marches and remained active in the peace movement all their lives.

In his early seventies, Dad appeared at the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp with his war medals on his chest, not fully understanding that the protest against cruise missiles was for ladies only. Mother's CND badge, fastened to her knitted hat, was in her bedside drawer when she died.

But Dad was more consciously political than Mother. He was an avid newspaper reader and understood the radical causes of his time through the pages of the
Daily Herald
, the
News Chronicle
, the
Manchester Guardian
and the
New Statesman
.

He threatened not to attend if his sons were baptised, and he insisted that despite success in the eleven-plus examination, we should go to a new comprehensive (Eltham Green) rather than a local grammar school.

This was a controversial decision. Friends argued that our parents were sacrificing us for their principles. Instead Peter and I flourished in an atmosphere of educational experiment where everything seemed possible. We both progressed to study history at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.

As we grew up, we became aware that our parents were unusual, even remarkable. Their energy and almost eccentric disregard for convention posed a formidable challenge – as well as an amazing stimulus – for their friends, their children, their children's friends and eventually their grandchildren. As visitors entered the house they would be greeted with ceaseless questions that drew them into urgent debate about politics, religion, philosophy and the meaning of life.

After promotion, Dad became a keen traveller. Family holidays migrated from the north Kent coast to France, Italy, Yugoslavia and Switzerland. His pre-booked restaurants, trains and hotels were meticulously organised, but on one occasion we arrived at Victoria to find no sign of the agent who was supposed to deliver the tickets. Dad took charge of the party and talked our way from London to Ljubljana on the strength of his reservation for dinner in the restaurant car of the Simplon-Orient Express. At every border wheel-tapping and ticket check we trembled, but Dad's fluent English seemed to outfox the continental inspectors who were unsure what to do with him or us.

On the summit of the Jungfrau, however, it was his turn to be confused when the water failed to boil on his pocket stove. Was there something wrong with the fuel tablet? He didn't understand about altitude.

Mother's art became even more important as we departed for university. She bought a kiln and fired glass on copper. She staged an exhibition of her enamels at Christ Church tower near St Paul's Cathedral in 1969 and sold many of them.

Her tutor remembers her at the pottery studio, ‘pushing, struggling to develop her understanding of clay and its possibilities'. She used the techniques of the coil pot to produce original, large-scale sculptures and sensuous exotic vases. He admired her passionately held ideas, love of debate and strong sense of social justice. Like my father, she could grasp the essential point, often in a single, prescient sentence. Confronted by the Cultural Revolution, Mother remarked: ‘Just wait until Miss Red China wants her lipstick.'

Chris and Bessie at an exhibition of Bessie's art, 1969

After Cambridge, I married Ann, a biologist from York University, and embarked on a career as a teacher, school leader and academic. Our children, Chris and Irena, were born in the 1970s.

Irena inherited her grandfather's love of language and has become a journalist, with her desk in Holborn not far from his last posting as assistant superintendent in charge of London Chief Office in King Edward Street. Dad lived to see her marry Nick, from Mauritius, but not to meet his great grandchildren, Conrad and Marcel.

Peter worked for the Probation Service for thirty years and married Penny (a civil servant) in 1981. He was a Family Court Adviser for a further seven years. In retirement he founded a child contact centre and initiated a campaign to ask that centres should be placed on a statutory basis. He acquired stepchildren, Sara who became a teaching assistant, and Simon who is a recruitment consultant in Perth, Western Australia. His granddaughter Rachel is a medical researcher.

Dad retired in 1974. At first it was a nuisance for my mother to have him home with his 46-year Post Office career behind him. But gradually they developed a new life together. Dad was intensely proud of his wife as the house filled with paintings, tapestry and sculpture, and the lawn was reduced to make space for a great variety of species.

They were vigorous members of the Post Office Art Club, joined the Royal Horticultural Society, attended the Chelsea Flower Show and toured gardens in search of ever more unusual plants. They loved the new National Theatre, especially when Bernard Shaw's plays were performed.

They bought a ground-floor flat in Folkestone to share with brother Wilfred and divided their time between London and Kent. Despite his rude good health, Dad announced that he needed to be near a hospital. After a final trip to Paris with friends, foreign travel was abandoned. Aged seventy, Dad became a vegetarian and hoped to convert his meat-eating friends and family.

He was interviewed in 1986 for the controversial television series
The Hidden War
, about the conflict in Greece after the Germans withdrew. Dad copied some of his war letters for the producer.

When Mother's memory began to fail, Dad took over all household responsibilities. For fifteen years or more he cared for her, maintaining the house and a wide circle of friends, old and new.

His fifty-year old Olympia typewriter kept him in touch with Post Office veterans, fellow survivors of captivity with the Greek communist partisans (with whom he sympathised), his grandchildren and his nephews and nieces, to whom he was devoted.

In hospital with pneumonia, Dad regarded himself as a prisoner and maintained a jail log, ticking off the days to his release. After a cerebral haemorrhage a few years later, he was equally determined to escape, begging me to smuggle him out.

He taught himself to talk, walk and write again but in the end recognised that coping with Mother was beyond him. With the help of relatives, friends and carers, he visited her in the nursing home every day, always taking with him pieces of carefully wrapped chocolate and apple.

If no friend could take him that day, he would go by bus, limping on and off the platform and hobbling down the street. At first he told me that he was not like the vacant and the demented people he met there. Eventually he worried that he was descending towards them.

Bessie died, aged ninety, in 2004; Chris followed, aged ninety-three, in 2007.

As Benedict Cumberbatch and Louise Brealey read their words at the Hay Festival in May 2014, my parents come alive again. They entrance a new audience with their tenderness, intensity and unassuming ordinariness. I worry that I have exposed their love when privacy was important to them but I am also pleased that their writing has won so many new friends. The unwanted attention and celebrity would have embarrassed them. They were both great debunkers. But now, I believe their life and love belong to the ages.

Epilogue

by Irena Barker

Thoroughly utilitarian beings that they were, I would never have imagined my grandparents to be romantic sorts. They were never much into giving each other gifts, expressing their feelings or being anything less than rigid and British.

Certainly in the case of my granddad, there was a strong flavour of puritanical discipline in everything he did. The way he attacked the washing up before the last mouthful was swallowed. The way he forced down dry, tasteless food, chewing mercilessly with his false teeth – because it was ‘only fuel'.

His toilet paper of choice, attached to the wall in a special ceramic dispenser, was of the old-fashioned and uncomfortable ‘tracing paper' sort. Granny probably had the romantic edge, with her youthful smoking habit and love of painting. Her choice of softer, more luxurious paper hung snugly alongside granddad's on a roll. Indeed, this toilet paper scenario and the many other hilarious eccentricities of my grandparents form some of my strongest and longest-lasting memories.

For me, Granddad was defined by the food he served: his firm belief that salad and good quantities of roughage were the key to a long and healthy life was forever represented in his meals, which he prepared with vigour and enthusiasm.

Until only a couple of years before his death, he was ferociously grating carrots on a rusty old grater and filling the house with the stink of grease as he rustled up fried potatoes in a pan, the handle held together with masking tape. He served a unique beetroot soup that tasted of dust and nothing else. Slices of beetroot and festoons of lettuce and watercress made it onto every life-giving platter. I always thought, as an atheist, he feared death, and he seemed to be a pioneer of superfoods way before his time. I can't look at a beetroot now without thinking of him – every mouthful feels like a homage.

But he also succumbed to treats – dates, brazils and halva – and he always sent us on our way with a carrier bag with a twisted nugget of these goodies at the bottom. I remember driving through the Blackwall Tunnel on the way home from visits, trying to make out the contents in the dim light.

Granny preferred chocolate. When she went into a nursing home, Granddad would visit every day, meting out small pieces of Dairy Milk each time, so she did not consume too much at once. As he cared for her in later years I remember the tiny squares of toast and marmite he made her in the mornings. The apples he cut into tiny pieces that would be easier to chew. The endless cups of weak, sweet coffee he would serve. Maybe it kept her from falling asleep in her chair too much.

Despite the puritanical approach, both grandparents were as warm and giving as one could hope. Granny would assault us with alarming hugs and kisses when we turned up on visits.

When my brother and I were very young, Granddad set us up a workshop in his shed, where we could bash away at bits of wood, metal and leather on every visit. It was a highlight of life at the time. ‘The shed', with the strips of leather on rolls, pots of nails and screws and its mysterious musty smell, had an almost magical allure.

Later on, Granddad took to sending us many letters and numerous newspaper cuttings (mostly chopped from the
Guardian
, the institution that educated him).

When I went to live in France for a year, alone, he sent me every episode of Posy Simmonds'
Gemma Bovery
cartoon strip. I still have them curled up in a carrier bag in the wardrobe. He had faith in the postal service to inspire and revive a lonely soul.

When I was in my early twenties, I lodged with Granny and Granddad when I worked in London. I felt guilty every night that an old man in his eighties who was recovering from a major stroke was cooking my tea.

When I came back late in the evening on the train, he would risk being attacked, meeting me in the darkness of Kidbrooke station. He would hobble home with me on his arm (or was it him on my arm?).