Nigel 
January 25th,2010
My Dad grew up in a very different culture and society to our own. Like it or not his ways of thinking were affected by how those around him thought and spoke,and by his location in time and space. Can you guess which one he is?
It was the late fifties and we were going on holiday,which was a bad thing. Being there would be okay,but getting there was not.
You see Dad found driving stressful and his job involved a lot of it,often while depressed. When he came to his annual fortnight off he really needed to sleep for a few days and then just potter around locally,but we had to go and stay near his aging parents in Colwyn Bay. Driving alone was bad enough,but taking the family was something else. We would set off early ‘to avoid the traffic’and I hated being dragged out of bed a couple of hours too soon. I would say so loudly. Well,I was barely past being a toddler. At that age you care about as much for your Dad’s tiredness as you do for the starving children in Africa who are metaphorically paraded before you whenever you fail to finish a meal. Meals in those days were nutritious. No supermarkets. No junk food. Mo microwave dinners. It was all freshly cooked from scratch,and sometimes about as appealing to me as getting up early
I was consigned to the back seat and settled down to read –probably Enid Blyton,who did more than any other writer to start me on a lifelong love of reading. It was a long journey driven slowly. There were no speed limits between towns because few roads allowed a car to get over seventy anyway. Overtaking was hazardous.
A long way into the journey,and a long way from its end,I was jerked out of my book by Dad shouting something like,“Damned negroes. They’re everywhere!”
"Nothing wrong with being black. It's getting old I dislike. You know,arthritis and poor eyesight and stuff. Now that's what really matters."Suzy,who lived to 19
I sat up straight,which was the only way to see out of the side windows,and looked. Then I pushed myself higher (no seat belts or child seats then) to stare through front and back windows.
There was no one about.
There was almost no traffic,even by fifties standards.
All around were the empty plots of bulldozered rubble left over from the war. I didn’t know then,but Britain was virtually bankrupt in 1950. There was no spare cash for rebuilding anything that wasn’t strictly necessary. I grew up thinking it was normal for major cities like Bristol,Exeter and Birmingham to have wide-open parts of their centres occupied mainly by block after block of rubble. It felt like fields of knee-high masonry enclosed by a grid of narrow roads and narrower footpaths. It had always been there. It was natural.
And that was the part of Birmingham we were driving through. Fields of rubble as far as my childish eyes could see. Nowhere for the hordes of black men to hide on hearing my Dad’s anger. I was disappointed,never having seen a black man except in pictures. I kept looking. There was not a single pedestrian visible. The paths were empty. In retrospect there was no reason for anyone to be walking through that devastation so early on a Saturday morning.
I demanded to know where all these black men were and Dad made some angry remark I can’t recall. He was of course exhausted,stressed out,and depressed. Mum cautioned me to be quiet,which after questionning her some more I was.
Dad wasn’t racist. He’d travelled the world in his youth,lived and worked with all sorts of people,but he had been brought up in Edwardian times when only men could vote and women were an underclass. British schools had been designed to train boys to cope with the hardships of going abroad to uphold the British Empire and keep those foreigners in check. Black people were thought of as little more than savages.
Of course he was educated and intelligent. He knew that people are just people and that where they came from was largely irrelevant. But he was living in what today we like to call a racist culture. Black people were treated by society as inferior. Those who dared to migrate to Britain for a better job were oddities. We were still a decade away from Enoch Powell’s sad ‘Rivers of Blood’speech warning against what he perceived as the dangers of continued immigration. I understand his point of view,but value our modern multi-cultural society far more.
Dad could not avoid picking up some of the public thinking.
At school we would refer to anyone whose tie was slightly askew as a ‘scruffy Arab’. We picked this phrasing up from our teachers. Okay,so Arabs tended to dress differently from traditional Englishmen. Fair enough. They were a different culture living in a different climate. The trouble was that very few people in Britain had ever met an Arab. They just mimicked the rather pathetic statements made by everyone else. It was only when I was much older that I realised calling someone a ‘scruffy Arab’was insulting to true Arabs. Some of the nicest people I’ve got to know in more recent years have been the children of parents from the Arab countries,or India,or Pakistan,or South America. The first Jew I met was a member of my tutor group in the seventies,but I didn’t know he was Jewish till I met him in Leeds some years later. At school he’d kept quiet,the only Jew in the school.
Am I odd? I find it depressing when people try to rewrite history. They go through old films removing scenes where people smoke. They criticise the actions of the British Empire from their twenty-first century moral pedestal. They are disparaging about the servility of 1930′s housewives. And they damn people like my Dad as ignorant racists.
Sorry guys but Dad was not racist. He was just a man of his time. And severely depressed,which pushed him to saying outrageous things.
You had to be there to understand.
Or at least you have to be willing to put yourself in the heads of people living then.
