Bribe

Richard
Bribe
Coffee Plantation, March 3, 2007

Laurie’s writing about her mother triggered thoughts about my family, and I began to use the prompts to retrieve a faraway England I carried around inside. I had been telling Laurie about my checkered career as a student, and this memory arose.

My dad once offered me a bike if I placed in the top ten of my class at the end of the school year. For the previous terms at Humphrey Perkins, I’d regularly come in around thirtieth or thirty-first in a class of thirty-two. The bike seemed a good deal, and I came in third.

It had a bright yellow frame, three Sturmey-Archer gears, straight handle-bars, and lights powered by a little dynamo installed in the wheel hub. It wasn’t exactly the sleek, light-weight, drop-handle-bar, racing bike I’d been dreaming of but I didn’t feel cheated, for it meant I could ride to the surrounding villages and be gone all day.

I never asked my Dad why he offered the bribe, and I don’t remember him doing it again, but I managed to keep my position in class fairly well from then on. Not that it was a stellar feat. My large grammar school had recently morphed into a pseudo-comprehensive, which meant it served the entire range of student abilities from “swots” at the top to “thick-o’s” at the bottom. I was closer to the “thick-o” end of things, in the basement of the C-stream form. The headmaster had told us on one of his rare visits to our classroom that we wouldn’t go to university like those in the A-stream, or get the better clerical jobs of the B-stream, but we could work in shops, thus avoiding D-stream factory work, and the road mending jobs of the E-stream—when they weren’t in prisons or mental institutions.

Yes, headmaster Dunn M.A. really made this cheerful prediction about us in the lower ranks, but as much a force as social class remains in England, I’m thinking more about my dad and why he took such an uncharacteristically direct approach with me. I would have expected him to wonder why I was doing poorly rather than offering the bribe. I assume he’d worked out that all I needed was a carrot of encouragement—that he believed I had the stuff to do well. I think he approached the issue on two fronts: one was to deal with me and the other to suggest to my mother that I should go to school more often than I did.

I was flagging in part because I was hardly ever there. All I had to do was sneeze or say, “I don’t feel too well today,” and my mother would keep me home. She was lonely in the Midlands, having moved down from Lancashire and smacked against the Toon family’s snobbish aloofness to anyone from the north. My father, who had taken over the tailoring business from his father—he’d died of it, but that’s another story—saw customers in the front of our house. My mother wasn’t invited to share the income-producing domain. Of her four children, I was the disobedient but lovable wit, and I took the entitlement for granted, at least in the family. I stayed home so often my form teacher said that if I was going to miss any more days he’d have to report me to the authorities. I didn’t know what the authorities were, but they didn’t sound good, and they have come, ever since, to haunt my life like disagreeable relatives you’ve never met but to whom you feel an obligation. When I told my dad, he took action, wishing to evade the authorities as strenuously as I did. I started to go to school, the bike was dangled, and I was expected to perform.

It wasn’t exactly the ideal form of ambition for your children. My parents would visit the school once a year and hear from my teachers how badly I was doing. They didn’t think my education was their responsibility. If I wasn’t learning anything, it was probably the school’s fault, and what could they do about that? I don’t remember them asking why I didn’t try harder or encouraging me. You weren’t expected to do well but rather as well as you thought you could, and if that wasn’t great, then okay. Nobody need get worked up.

Maybe I’ll talk to my dad about the bribe when I call him this weekend. He’ll say to me in his crackly baratone, “So son, how are you feeling in yourself?” And I’ll say “Fine, fine,” even if I feel like crying in his arms, which I sometimes do, and even if I am wishing now, as I did as a boy, that he’d show he wanted more for me than it was possible for him to imagine, that he wanted all of us in the family to break through the skins of tight control—including the soft pressure of his own evasiveness—and stretch toward the inaccessible.

In my father’s favorite photo of me, I’m six years old, standing on a wooden trestle bridge that spans a small stream. In shorts and a short sleeved shirt, I’m half turned, looking uncertainly back to the camera. My mother always brings out this picture when I come to England, spreading it and the other “snaps,” as she calls them, across the diningroom table. She smiles and asks if I remember when it was taken. I do. I remember the family outing to the damp hillside above the cotton mill town of Bury, in Lancashire, where we were living then. It was a visit to the local beauty spot of Hoakam Hill where, above the town of Ramsbottom, stood Peele Tower, the folly that locals called “Nut and Bolt,” with its squat stone building and thick chimney rising 50 feet. I remember the rickety wooden bridge across the stream and the green moss growing on its rotting planks. I remember my father saying that I mustn’t go near it, as it might collapse or I might slip. And I remember this feeling—the risk of possibly falling or possibly not—being too good an invitation to pass up. And there I am in the photo, caught in the act, doing exactly as I was forbidden and with that look on my face—an expression that says, “Approve of me, please, even as I disobey you, keep me with you no matter what.” My father comes into the room as my mother and I are examining the picture and he says, “I took that. Just look at you. You knew you weren’t supposed to be there. Just look at that expression.” And I do, remembering the burden—on me, on him—of that celebration, of that love. And my father chuckles.

It’s only in this last year that I’ve said to him, “I love you,” longing for him to say it back, and he did. When the conversation ends he always says, “Cheerio, cheerio.”

I think he’s never wanted a big life or been very ambitious, but I might be wrong. He was first in his class in the village of Syston, but his father, Horace the tailor, refused to let him stay on at school and apprenticed him at fourteen to become a sewer and pattern maker at Hart and Levi, the premier tailoring company in Leicester. The war came, and at seventeen my father lied about his age and enlisted. He witnessed American soldiers, having been cut off behind enemy lines, frozen to death while they held their guns in readiness to shoot. He smelled burning flesh in the air around concentration camps, but he didn't offer more than these details. After the war he went to Liverpool to manage a company that manufactured men’s suits, but the business failed and he returned to Syston and the business he dispised, and his mission now was to hold his family tight.

He’s ended up with a son who’s traveled far from the village and is only now trying to distinguish the unexamined father inside him from the unexamined son.