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Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons in Postwar Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Frank Mort
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Extract

He didn't die alone. My mother says she never left him, and at the end I was there—the elder son. She, my mother, prayed she'd find him dead every morning when she went in. But he wasn't. When I heard her talk like that I came. I knew it was different this time, from the small, flat pitch in her voice and because I was experienced. I had seen the signs of death before from other lives and had come to know its timing. So I knew and I came, quickly. My mother opened the door, briskly, as any nurse might do. It was what she had become. The bungalow was familiar, except that there was a faint but persistent smell of stale water, pills, and antiseptic. “He's in there, if you'd like to go in and see him,” she said. I thought he must be lying dead already.

At first I took the signs of his final illness as something other. He looked neglected. His face and hair were disheveled, and I noticed that it was one of the few times I had seen him unshaved. The contrast between his own disorder and the tidy landmarks of the bedroom (hers, not his) surprised me. Afterwards my mother said he had started crying when he heard me come into the house. I had only heard him cry once before, one night when he was drunk and his marriage was in extremis. Then the tears had been showy; now there was the intermittent sobbing of an old man, his body huddled up on the bed with his face turned to the wall.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 3: Masculinity and the Lower Middle Class , July 1999 , pp. 353 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1999

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References

1 In that sense it follows the structures of what Franco Moretti calls the “too late” story, where tears are produced as a result of two mutually opposed facts: that it is clear how the present state of things should be changed and that this change is impossible. Moretti, Franco, “Kindergarten,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London, 1983), pp. 162–79Google Scholar.

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30 Contemporary accountancy textbooks advocated the professionalization of the household budget along such lines. J. M. Pahl and R. E. Pahl noted the use of systems of household accounting among their cohort of managers in Managers and Their Wives: A Study of Career and Family Relationship in the Middle-Class (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 172Google Scholar. The Pahls' study was conducted in the late 1960s among managers and their wives aged 30–50. My father and mother were forty-three and forty-six, respectively, in 1967.

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59 Dickens, Charles, A Child's History of England (London, 1902), pp. 478–79Google Scholar. Later I graduated to more “authentic” accounts of these events of the 1640s, in the form of Wedgwood's, VeronicaTrial and Execution of Charles I (London, 1964)Google Scholar.

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62 See Meek, Margaret, Rosemary Sutcliff (London, 1962), p. 68Google Scholar. Sutcliff's, fiction, besides The Eagle of the Ninth (1954)Google Scholar, during this period included Outcast (1955), The Shield Ring (1956), The Silver Branch (1957), Warrior Scarlet (1958), The Lantern Bearers (1959), Knight's Fee (1960), and The Mark of The Horse Lord (1965), all published in London.

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