My dad joined the Royal Navy in 1937 when he was eighteen, and left in 1958 because they offered him a desk job but you can’t sail a desk. His life at sea was mysterious to me; perhaps that was because he left the navy when I was little but to my brother, who is seven years older than I am, and my mother, the Royal Navy loomed as huge as that white wave that envelops the crew at the end of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a book that I went back to and back to as a teenager, like I did to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine, to try to work out what the sea was and what it meant to my gentle dad who loved to fish and dig his garden and wear a tie.
He liked fishing in trout streams and ponds and he enjoyed tying fishing flies and he liked picking blackberries but most of all he liked being near the sea, and because Barnsley is about as far away from the sea as you can get he liked going away to the seaside for his holidays. He also liked watching films and TV programmes about the sea but if there was something that wasn’t factually accurate or that he thought portrayed the navy in a bad light he would shake his head and turn the TV off and start reading his Trout & Salmon magazine, the one he subscribed to and which would plop through the letterbox each month like a fish landing.
Once, the day before we went on a seaside holiday, the whole family sat and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, one of his odder films, which is entirely set on the eponymous vessel. My dad had seen the film before and was really enjoying it, sometimes telling us what he thought was about to happen next and sometimes getting it right but not too often. My theory now, many decades on, is that he was just enjoying the motion of the boat on the waves and that he might have enjoyed an artist’s video of waves in a darkened room in a gallery just as much, although he would never have visited a gallery to look at an artist’s video.
As we watched there was a knock at the door. It wasn’t late, but it was late for us, and me and my brother had our pyjamas on. My mother and dad looked at each other, unsure as to what to do. Hard to believe now but in those far-off days not many people had telephones and bad news was often preceded by a knock at the door that, when opened, would reveal a copper with his hat off.
This had happened when my dad’s dad, known as Pappy, died. The knock came quite early in the morning and the copper was silhouetted in the sunlight that came through the glass in the front door. I recall the start of his words ‘Regret to inform you that your father George McMillan…’ and the rest of the sentence, in my memory, dissolved into weeping.
The door was knocked on again. The lifeboat continued to bob. My dad opened the door; I stood behind him and saw a man that the next day on the car journey to the coast my dad would describe as ‘a gentleman of the road’ standing there with a thin dog that looked like it had been dribbled on to the evening. The man said something that I couldn’t catch and my dad nodded and went and got a bowl of water for the dog, which lapped greedily at it. My mam went into the kitchen and came back with some cake wrapped in foil that she gave to the man, who thanked her in a high, scratchy voice, then folded himself and the dog into the late summer evening. ‘Who was that?’ I asked, thinking that it might be somebody my parents knew from church. ‘Just an old sailor down on his luck,’ my dad said, closing the door. ‘How did you know?’ I asked, or my memory says that I asked. ‘I could tell by the way he stood and by the way he spoke,’ my dad said, ‘and then when he walked away I really knew.’
It’s true that, because he’d been at sea for so long, my dad still walked around the house as though he was on deck and for many years after he packed his uniform away in the wardrobe he still stood to attention after he’d finished his breakfast or his dinner.
On a beach, any beach, my dad could sometimes seem a bit distracted, a little abstracted from the noise and ice creams going on around him. He would stand like a statue gazing at the horizon that he had spent so much of his working life scanning. The big battle he was involved in during the Second World War was the one that sunk the German battleship Bismarck, and occasionally he could be persuaded to tell the story, of how they followed and destroyed it, although he told it reluctantly. Somehow the story still floated around untold, especially when we were on holiday and the tide was coming in. I think now that when we were at the seaside and the waves stretched as far back as the 1940s he would be looking at the past that knocked on the door like an old sailor down on his luck. And he would stand there until my mam told him it was time we were going.