It's a hot, humid morning in a Spanish holiday house, and four grandchildren (age range 13 to 7) are stretched out on top of their bunks still sunk in the deep, exhausted slumber that comes from rushing around too much the day before. But they're scheduled to rush around again today. They have to get up. And, almost unthinkingly, I go into the boys' bedroom bellowing: "Hands off cocks, pull on socks." Then the girls' room. "Wakey, wakey, rise and shine. Fiend's academy half past nine." And the ghost of my stepfather suddenly gets off his bed and walks too.
Dad died years ago, but the language he talked – a bizarre blend of steam radio catch phrases, homely wisdom, comic cuts and gems from sock-tugging life as a sergeant in India through the second world war – lives irrepressibly on. So here comes that old repertory company of characters from somewhere or other: Toothless Eustace, Sickly Dick, Delicate Dora and Willie Winkle Bottom, not to mention Horrible Horace, Sarah Slap Cabbage, Nutty Slack and the mysterious Fat Girl from Peckham. And here comes the code of his working life. A telephone rings. "Cuthbert's calling." Is breakfast ready? "When it's black it's done." Have you seen the marmalade? "You mean the wiz woz for a wowzer."
Dad always invoked higher authority in a crisis. "What would my titled friends say?" He never said he felt proper poorly. "My tummy thinks my throat's cut." Cleanliness after a hard day's night was imperative. "You could eat your dinner off my feet" – even when, in some gripping encounter, "I fought the monkey in the dusthole and came out without a scratch". Good business meant "the sun shines on the righteous"; after, that is, he'd popped out "to see a man about a dog".
If you crossed him, perhaps you'd been "touched with the do-lally mop". You could be "soft as grease and twice as nasty" – fit only "to go for a walk on the railway lines". But, all in all, "he was a broad man with a narrow back", and getting older inevitably dictated that "nobody wants a fairy now he's 40". (Except, perhaps, my mother, otherwise "my old sweetheart", perennially prepared to hear him "telling the tale of the old iron pot" – or possibly that alternative tale "from days of old when knights were bold and barons held the way").
"One rose never made a summer" for dad. He was Baron Pomme De Terre one minute and Snuffy Miller from Beeston the next. If he put on a suit he was "all dressed up like a dog's dinner". If you let him down it was "off with your head and on with a carrot". But he usually took a balanced view in time. "Let those without sin cast the first stone", which was much better than "running around like a fan-tailed water rabbit". Never go too hard into the fight. "Don't force it, Phoebe." Avoid people with "red hair with jam on" whenever possible. And "mind your own interference", especially if you prolonged an argument, with "your mouth like a parish oven".
You could write a book on the sayings of Dad: indeed, my sister did write them all down. You could equally spend years in the British Museum library trying to sort out the biblical bits, Shakespeare snippets, army adages and memories of Albert Modley, Tommy Handley and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. "You may kiss the royal hand," he'd say in the morning. And you knew the day had its patter and pattern set.
Was that a bad thing? No: it was familiar, warm, and helped the hours roll by. And that routine shaped your own life. "Slow at eating, slow at working," he'd growl as he gobbled his food and headed for the door. We kids had to gobble in turn. "An hour before seven is worth two after 11." We had to get moving too. Now, half a century later, that routine is the order of a Spanish day and the orders you cry are an inheritance that became second nature. He's alive for the bedroom rousing, alive for the burnt toast and jam. He's alive as you scuttle down to the beach. And alive when you turn on the car stereo system and find an ancient George Formby tape filling the slot. I'm leaning on a lamp-post at the corner of the street, sing his great grandchildren. In case a certain little bundle of memories comes passing by.
