Untrustworthy

The first piece of advice— “always reverse into a park” was hypothetical. I wasn’t yet old enough to drive a car, however I regularly hear his voice in my ear over the 30 or so subsequent years I’ve been driving.

The second was related to the first: never sit with your back to the door. My father had grown up in a tough north London street after the war, in a terrace house at the back of the Arsenal football ground. He didn’t talk much about his childhood and I had a confused view of it pieced together from occasional anecdotes: torn squares of newspaper spiked on a nail in the grim outhouse, that served three families; the pea-souper fogs that blackened your nostrils; the tin bath on the kitchen floor on a Sunday night. The cockroach that crawled out of his school bag on his first day at grammar school.

My brother and I had grown up, by contrast, middle class and trans-national, in the world that briefly opened up for bright working-class children like my dad—and their eventual offspring—in Britain after the Education Act of 1944. A gateway to a world that has narrowed considerably since then. Dad looked at me levelly when I asked him why you should never sit with your back to the door. “In case trouble comes through it”.

And then we moved to New Zealand, where at my intermediate school, everyone wore polo necks.

Skivvies, a new word for my British family, were part of the winter uniform. Golden yellow stretch cotton, with an itchy V neck bottle-green wool jumper: to this day I can’t wear either colour. My mother suggested that she ask my grandmother to knit me a jersey for school: cheaper and much nicer and more personal, she said. I thought it better that Grandma didn’t, though it was hard to explain why. (It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that I came across Australian artist Tracey Moffat’s famous photo of the forlorn child wearing a hand-knitted rugby jersey. I still empathise.)

But compulsory school uniform wasn’t what Dad had in mind. He directed his opprobrium at the sort of man who would choose to wear a polo neck. One winter, when I was in my early 20s, my then-boyfriend bought a grey lambswool jersey with a polo neck, which he wore with stovepipe jeans and a seaman’s jacket. He looked great in it, but I always felt slightly ill-at-ease when he wore the jumper, in case Dad saw, and developed a point of view.

Recently I asked Dad if he’d changed his mind about men wearing polo necks; I have noticed that he has become increasingly tolerant over the years.

“Really?” I asked. ”No exceptions at all?”

He thought hard, and then grudgingly mentioned his long-term badminton partner Frank, who was otherwise quite exemplary.