It got me thinking about an aspect of my father's life and character too. As well as Graeme's piece, I was also reminded of it when I walked past the new statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in St. Peter's Square, Manchester, and specifically the inscription behind the statue...
Now, this is not because my father was a early-adopter male feminist (he died in 2010 aged 75, so this would have been very unusual for a man of his age, still less believable once you read on....), and the context of the suffragettes' use of the motto was different to his, but nevertheless he adopted it as his own, and it became a lesson that's stuck with me.
During the 1970s my father had two quite separate lives outside the family home. By day he was a lecturer in agriculture, working at Reaseheath College (of The Archers fame, and beyond) for nigh on 40 years. That was what paid the bills. By night and by weekend he was a Special Constable, rising to become a Divisional Commander in that branch of the police. That was his true love.
As most people know, most parts of the British police in the 1970s weren't very enlightened, particularly in their treatment of pretty much any minority group. Like many other towns, Crewe (our home town) had a reasonable size Afro-Caribbean community, members of which were known as 'NWCs' by the local police, a term my father picked up and started using. I won't explain it - it's composed of some very bad words, and I suspect you can have a shrewd guess at them anyway.
So that's how my father referred to black people at home. Even in the mid-70s, we kids knew there was something suspect about it. Then something happened slightly out of the blue. Reaseheath gave some places on residential agriculture courses to a group of Nigerian students. After the language used at home, I expected my father to be somewhat hostile to this development; to teach them if required, but little more.
That wasn't what happened. He wasn't needed to teach them in their first term as things turned out, but he heard that they were struggling to adapt to aspects of life in the UK, pastoral care in those days being a bit less developed than it is now. So in his own time, he took groups of them to a local bank, introduced them to the branch manager, and sat with them while they went through the formalities of opening accounts. "Poor buggers had no idea how to get cash or pay for things" he explained. A simple, if time-consuming deed, that materially improved the lives of those Nigerian students.
And that wasn't a one-off. Whether through his work as a special constable, or mentoring GCSE-age school kids in local secondary schools after retirement, or taking the 'old biddies', as he called them, in his street to the supermarket (he was 74 at the time), he regularly did things for no reward. And while his language and attitudes moderated considerably as he got older, he could still be judgmental of other people's lifestyles and attitudes - in private. The point, however, was though he may have been judgmental, it didn't appear to lessen his humanity; it didn't stop him doing good, to use an old-fashioned expression.
I think we can draw on that. Too much do I sense these days - particularly from the left - a view that if someone holds a particular opinion then there's no hope for them, they're morally bankrupt, they're in the basket of deplorables. Simple courtesies, let alone acts of kindness, become out of the question. That seems a shame, to put it mildly - it's probably a vain and naive hope, but at the start of 2019 it would good to think we could start treating each other with a bit of humanity again, regardless of our views and affiliations. Let's pay a little more attention to people's deeds, and slightly less to their words.
No comments:
Post a Comment