Black Country Lad

I've been absent from this site, and from writing anything at all since before Christmas as my Dad died and I've been 'making the arrangements'. My Dad was a Black Country Lad. He never moved from the area. In fact, he hardly moved five miles away from the place he was born. He could never say precisely what it was that kept him here - of course, in my early childhood, I think it might have been that his parents and my Mother's, lived in the Black Country, and family was important. No, it wasn't just that. He was born in a terraced house in Dudley, in October 1927, the first of five children. And for the first year of his marriage, he lived in another of those terraces (until my Mother lifted her hat off the table there to find a mouse underneath it, and then they left... obviously.) They moved to a brand new council house after the war, in Pensnett, and that's where they stayed until my Mother had to go into care following a series of strokes, and my Dad came to live with us. He felt like he'd emigrated just moving to Stourbridge, and was never happy here. Not really. In between, he worked for the NHS, having an office in Falcon House in Dudley, within sight of the place of his birth (by now a car park.)

As a young man, he was a rebel: smoking from the age of eight, refusing to sit the 11+ exam because he would not wear the daft hat the grammar school uniform demanded. He was a boxer, using the name Young Johnny Corbett (I don't know why. I wish I'd asked) but gave up the sport when my Mother complained it would ruin his good looks. He was a tool-setter, a bus driver, and then, after I was born (my parents had been married for eleven years before I was born - happy to be 'by themselves' my Mother always said) he went to night school, thinking he needed to take the responsibility of fatherhood seriously by increasing his earning capacity. He went on to be a Work Study Engineer with Accles & Pollock in Oldbury, and then Management Services with the NHS. What would we call that job now? Something to do with efficiency, something to do with organisation. Either way, it was a job that he didn't much like, and made him learn how to be disliked. I don't suppose anyone, least of all nurses, doctors and paramedics much liked being timed and told to how to be 'more efficient' even if it was by someone as charming as my old Dad.

He retired in 1990, and he and my Mother took loads of holidays. Mostly coach holidays to places like Italy, Monte Carlo and Scotland, and judging from the pictures, they had a fabulous time. And I'm glad they had that. There are pictures, and in every single one of them, my Mother has a cigarette in her hand, and a beautiful view of mountains or the beach behind her. She looks hale and hearty. And my Dad is almost always in the midst of laughing - and I know he's probably telling a terrible joke or making a witty quip of some kind. It's joyous to see that, because in his last year, I don't think he felt much joy.

My Mother died in July 2017, and, although she wasn't my Mom any more (the strokes had taken her from us four years previously, really. She was, literally, half the woman she'd been, her speech was difficult, and swallowing had become less easy. Often she didn't really know who I was, or my sister, or even my Dad) but my Dad had lost his wife, the 'tiny little thing' he married when they were 21. In those difficult four years, my Dad had had a hip replacement, had survived two heart attacks, had endured heart surgery, had managed his ongoing kidney failure, but enough was enough for him on 21st December, 2017.

It's not been long, and his funeral is tomorrow, so I don't suppose it's unusual to still think I need to call him or visit him in the nursing home in Dudley he lived out his final three months. He loved it there, being in Dudley with a view of the college that he'd attended, and the Priory, he said he loved it. They looked after him and I'm thankful. Stourbridge isn't Dudley, and Dudley is the heart of the Black Country, and my Dad was a Black Country Lad. Tomorrow I'll be reading something I've written describing the times we used to go to the Working Men's Club on a Sunday night (Baldwins in Brockmoor, actually) and I used to watch my parents dancing and my Mom used to complain that Dad couldn't turn corners, that he always danced in straight lines. I hope he'd have laughed at that - I hope they both would.