Happy Birthday Papà!

I wrote this just for my facebook friends on 26th October, my father’s birthday. The entry proved so popular and received so many comments that I though it might be nice to copy it here (without the comments) as a post in my blog for those who don’t use facebook for it does explain my close family connection with Italy.

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Today is my Dad’s birthday. He would have been 104 years old but died a few days before Christmas 1990. I am grateful to my dad for many things but there’s one thing that stands out: he married an Italian lady.

Serving in the Eighth army under Monty in WWII, and at the battle of El Alamein, my father was then transferred to the Italian peninsula. It was here in the closing days of 1945 that he met my mother who was a nurse in the Tyrol. He was immediately infatuated by her with her amazing looks and her long Veronica Lake-like hair. I remember the sketch Harvey did of the mountain refuge restaurant where they would meet. (My dad was a brilliant amateur artist and, if given more time off from work, could have done a lot more in this art). Many years later Harvey and Vera returned to the place; the owners were still the same and it was truly a touching re-union.

My mother, however, had to be ‘captured’ first and Harvey did this by inviting her to London in order for her to improve her English. My mother, Vera, had been a student at Milan University and she also attended the conservatoire where she shared piano lessons with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. (She told me he appeared to her something of a cold fish. I cannot quite agree with this comment; Michelangeli’s interpretation of the slow movement of Ravel’s G major piano concerto has to be one of the most ravishing things ever heard on earth).

Later, because of the war (which turned her from an indoctrinated young fascist to someone utterly disillusioned with things political and never voted for anything again) Vera turned to medicine and social work.

In London Harvey would suggest places to visit for Vera. Respecting her independence of mind, he didn’t accompany her but would turn up ‘by surprise’ at the venues she decided to see. It was clear to her that these meetings were not just coincidental!

It was the love of music that united them and I still have the old 78’s of several pieces including Beethoven’s fifth symphony conducted by Koussevitzky and Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto interpreted by Horowitz. My father had a particular affection for Mozart’s ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusic’. I still have my mum’s 78’s of Chopin’s ballades played by Alfred Cortot, her favourite pianist.

Eventually, a love affair blossomed on both sides, the fruit of which was my mum’s pre-marital pregnancy which resulted in my being born on 8 August 1948. This would have been a scandal in a morally strict Italy, but, fortunately, my mum’s uncle, who was a priest in a Turin parish, managed to arrange a church wedding which took place in April 1948 in Milan. Interestingly, I have never seen my parents’ wedding pictures and when I discovered a 78 rpm recording dated April 1948 of the music played at their wedding – Elgar’s ‘Salut d’amour’ played excruciatingly badly and Franck’s ‘Panis Angelicus’ sung very well – my father told me that the recording was made much later than the actual wedding which had reputedly taken place in 1947!

Of my father’s history before his Mediterranean marriage I know little. I don’t even have a photograph him before that time. His father, who served at Gallipoli in WWI, was a respected councillor for Lewisham borough in South East London, tipped to become mayor, and lived on the Bellingham estate. Dad trained in insurance and was ‘the man from the Pru’. He eventually became self-employed and formed his own company which still bears his name and which was run by my younger brother until his own death in 2013.

My father’s marriage was not without its ups and downs. I remember one particular incident when we lived in Lewisham Park and I must have been about four years old. My father was weeping on the stairs. ‘She’s left me’, he confessed to me. Of course, my mum returned the same day.

Although Harvey had no higher education he was very well informed and I remember my first knowledge about things like the planets and the animal kingdom from him. He also wrote me little stories illustrated by himself which I treasure. Above all, he instilled a love of Italy in me: my first views of Italy, and especially Venice, were through picture postcards he’d collected when in that country. I could hardly believe that a whole city was built on water like that!

My father was a very dapperly dressed man as any effective insurance rep should be. He went particularly for Italian fashions and was one of the first Englishmen to wear those pointed shoes known as ‘winkle-pickers’ and also well-cut suits bought in Milan with silvery-grey textures. Even on our holiday jaunts my father would be most elegantly dressed as this photo, taken at a Welsh border castle (Goodrich), shows.

Of course, his brother would make fun of my dad’s shoes saying ‘how on earth’ can you fit your toes in those?’ to which my father would reply ‘they’re actually very comfortable.’ I would imagine they would have been when compared to the clod-hopping toe-capped outdated footwear most Englishmen wore at that time.

One former part-time job my father shied away from telling me about, but  had to admit he held was when we went past Catford Greyhound stadium and a relative said to me ‘your dad was a bookie there’.  Years later I went to have a meal and see the races at the stadium with my wife. Asking an older bookie there I mentioned Harvey and, sure enough, the bookie remembered him well as a very personable one!

My father’s principal asset, however, was to be immensely practical in all things. In several spheres he was, indeed also a pioneer. At a time when a typical English holiday consisted of a week in Bognor Regis my father would drive us across to Italy in his Ford Consul using maps and itineraries, courtesy of the AA.

Not only was he a brilliant driver (he’d driven tanks during the war and enjoyed telling me that if a tank received a direct hit it was the driver who’d have had the least chance of escaping – hence the pistol supplied to tank drivers to shoot themselves in order to avoid a worse death by being burnt alive) but he was a brilliant DIY person. When we moved from our leasehold Edwardian property to a new freehold Taylor-Bros-built house at the top of Westwood Park SE23 my father and his friend, a Mr Whitehead (who sadly died while still helping my dad) built our bunk beds, cupboards shelves, a conservatory and much else.

My mother would not have survived life in the UK without my dad, she would tell us, for Harvey looked after all the tedious administration and bureaucracy of living in a fifties and sixties Britain. (Indeed, I hoped I would never become a grown-up and face all those ghastly things like paying bills, running bank accounts and the rest of the palaver.)

My father’s marriage did not go well with some of his relatives. I heard from at least one that he had been a different, more amiable person before the continental union. Obviously, I have no evidence to support this claim. What is clear, however, is that, as my mother became dependent upon my father for the practicalities of life, like being driven to her places of work (she was a social worker in the ‘lunatic ring’ surrounding London working in such places as St Ebba’s and West Park hospitals) and sorting out her admin – she never obtained a driving license or ever replaced a fuse, for example – so my father became dependent on her. On one occasion, when my mother had gone to visit some relatives in her country of birth and my father was left alone, he confessed to me that ‘when your mother is away I feel very lost’.

I suppose we are all dependent on each other in a marriage but I also feel that we should also be able to be independent of each other in equal measure. After all, we never know when it’s our turn to cross the rainbow bridge…

My father went from this earth in the best possible way: instead of lingering away for years like, sadly, my wife’s babbo he suffered a sudden heart attack while on a short stay in the Whittington hospital, London.

My mother spent nineteen years without my dad before she died, fittingly, in the country and town of her birth, Milano.

The last words I said to her were that I was glad that she had been my mum and an Italian one at that, and so grateful that she’d unknowingly introduced me to my wife-to-be, Sandra, by gifting me membership to the Italian Institute in Belgrave Square London where Sandra’s dad was secretary-general.

It is something of a deep sadness that we never managed to start our own family although we were certainly willing and able and, indeed, saw all the famous experts of the time, like Dr Steptoe and Dr Winston. On the other hand, we console ourselves with the thought that the world we live in today is going ever more calamitously further in the wrong direction.

My dad could have wedded any English lass (he was ace on the dance floor) but marrying my Italian (subsequently English-naturalised) mum was a stroke of genius on his part for which I shall be eternally grateful. Happy birthday papà! (that’s how we called him).