This book is a tribute to my dad and a big thank you to him for never giving up on me despite my endless shortcomings, failures, disasters and general inability to live up to the high hopes and aspirations he and my mother had for me, which, as these letters show, over time became slightly more realistic. Initially there were hopes that I would get my house colours at Eton and become an officer in the Coldstream Guards. Ultimately my dad merely hoped that I would avoid ‘being taken away in a Black Maria’ together with my then business associates, the now infamous John Hobbs (the colourful Chelsea antiques dealer to the mega-wealthy) and his brother Carlton. However, it is now twenty years since my dad died and I suspect he would be delighted that, now almost sixty, the same age he was when he wrote me the early letters, I had at least survived thus far and was moderately happy.
As he predicted it is only in later life that I have come to fully appreciate the affection and wisdom imparted by him to me. I am grateful that, despite what he described as my ‘unorthodox lifestyle’, I somehow managed to keep the majority of the letters he sent me, which is somewhat of an achievement in itself. At an early age I was aware that they were something special and not at all like the letters that my friends’ fathers sent to them. In fact, I used to regularly read them out loud, often after a few drinks, to whomever I was with at the time and there were always many laughs, mainly at my expense.
My dad was enormously self-deprecating. He saw himself as a patiently enduring and thoroughly respectable middle-class gentleman, much along the lines of Mr Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody, while I was the disreputable son, Lupin, who was always getting into frightful scrapes. Thus many of the letters start ‘My Dear Lupin’ before launching into a thoroughly bleak assessment of my current situation and future prospects. The early letters were largely of concern and admonishment but, as time went by, a resigned acceptance of the way things were crept in. Despite everything, my father never showed me anything other than affection and tolerance.
I think in later years he almost used writing as a form of therapy to deal with his own ups and downs and this, together with his unique and sometimes devastating perspective on almost anything, made the letters real gems that have clearly stood the test of time. He was a great pricker of ego, self-importance and pomposity.
He was also a total original, as indeed was my dear mother, thus his descriptions and analogies of people, situations and such are both a breath of fresh air and highly entertaining. I clearly remember him summing up Yoko Ono, when she first came on the scene, as being ‘as erotic as a sack of dead ferrets’, while in one of his Sunday Times articles (c.1971), he wrote, ‘At one time a little humdrum adultery could prove a barrier to The Royal Enclosure at Ascot but now something more spectacular is required, such as hijacking a Securicor van or taking too prominent role in a sex education film designed for circulation in the best preparatory schools.’
This little collection of literary snapshots in the form of letters is a celebration both of a long-suffering father’s enduring relationship with his ne’er-do-well son and a humorous insight into the life of a mildly dysfunctional English middle-class family in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.