Read My Father's Fortune for Free Online Page A

his father in this way was the first serious moral challenge of his life, and it sorts oddly with his haphazard approach to some other questions of financial responsibility that he shouldered the burden so completely. He can’t have been earning much yet, and he had, says Phyllis, ‘a pretty tough time’. When I think of how little was required of me at that age – and how unready I should have been to take on the task if it had been – I feel chastened. He and Vi evidently accepted that they couldn’t afford to get married until his circumstances had changed. They had to wait another eleven years.
    I don’t know much about this decade of their lives. I have snaps of them at other people’s weddings, and on the holidays they took every year, at least from 1926 onwards, with his brother George, George’s wife Nelly, and George and Nelly’s schoolboyson Maurice. Llandudno, Penzance, Bournemouth, Llandudno again, in George’s open bull-nosed Morris Cowley, a vast haywain of a vehicle. Here they are, stuck in a ford somewhere, with the bonnet of the Morris up, and Tommy, who has presumably been trying to push the car out, leaning against the back of it, with the water halfway up his trousers. Here he is on a beach somewhere, carrying Vi across the puddles left by the receding tide. Here’s Vi looking romantic on a rock, here she is smiling straight out at the camera from a crowd in front of a cockle stall, here lurking lonely and mysterious in a long dark overcoat and fur collar in front of the misty lattice of the Forth Bridge. I gaze and gaze at the soft images, unable to get enough of them.
    My father’s style has changed somewhat in these pictures. He’s no longer the smart lad he was when he started work and met Vi. He’s taken to tweed jackets and diagonal check sweaters and a pipe, that now archaic emblem of male gravitas. He has a certain steadiness in the look on his face, even when he’s smiling. In this world of holidays, though, his short back-and-sides is always gloriously hatless, and he still seems light on his feet – Fred Astaire, just about to take the pipe out of his mouth and twinkle away with Vi across the dance floor.
    And here they are together. I lift my eyes from the screen as I work and sneak another look at them, hanging on my wall beside the Harrods picture of Vi in working mode. They’re on holiday somewhere, relaxed and smiling, Tommy with pipe and open-necked shirt, Vi in a modest cloche hat of her own. They look so happy.
    *
    On the twelfth of September, 1931, at Edmonton Register Office, after twelve years of waiting, Tommy and Vi finally do become man and wife. The witnesses are Vi’s father and Tommy’s eldest sister Nellie. Tommy is now thirty, and his Rank or Profession is given as Builders’ Commercial Traveller. When he had first made this shift in his career I don’t know, but he has now found the vocation to which he’s going to remain faithful for the rest of his life. Vi, apparently, has no Rank or Profession. One of them evidently told the registrar that she was twenty-six, but after a little recalculation amended this to twenty-seven.
    Tommy must feel he’s doing quite well, because he’s still not free of his family obligations, even when his mother and Mabel move out of Devonshire Road in 1933 to perhaps cheaper rooms just off the Tottenham end of the Seven Sisters Road, a couple of miles further out. Things change a bit when his mother dies in 1935, and Nellie, who lives in Stoke Newington, on the other side of the Seven Sisters Road, shoulders responsibility for Mabel and takes her in. Mabel had obviously given up her job as a bookfolder by this time because she goes back down the Seven Sisters Road each day, rain or shine, to visit her former next-door neighbour in Devonshire Road. And each day returns precisely as the clock strikes five.
    Whether or not Tommy is still helping out