Arthur William Eaton (19 Nov 1920 - 6 Apr 2017)

In loving memory of Arthur William Eaton who sadly passed away on 6th April 2017.

ARTHUR WILLIAM EATON – CELEBRATION OF A LIFE WELL LIVED.

My dear father was born on the nineteenth of November, 1920 on Hastings Street in Carlton and died on the sixth of April, 2017 after a mercifully short stay at the Queen’s Medical Centre, following his fourth fall in the family home on Cromford Avenue, Carlton.

This might indicate a rather unadventurous topographical circumscription – but anyone who knew Arthur would understand this was far from the case.

He was more than surprised that he had lived until his ninety-sixth year as he told me on the occasion of my twenty-first birthday that he never expected to make it to twenty-one.

His mother, Gertrude, was born in Saint Ann’s and she had been, like so many other Nottingham women, a lace worker, employed in the nit-picking, eye-straining labour of a finisher-off in a factory in Daybrook. She was a kind woman and a devoted neighbour who baked the best bread I’ve ever tasted.

His father, Ernest Edwin Eaton, was, like so many other Nottingham men, an engineer of textile machinery. And, like so many other non-conformist auto-didacts, he was a member of the self-improving Mechanics Institute. From him I inherited his 1910 edition of the complete works of Dickens and bound copies of Customs Of The World – volumes that have entirely influenced my own intellectual journey and continue to shape my writing life. Whenever I see that signature of the three names beginning with the letter ‘E’ in these books I have so much cause to be thankful for his legacy.

As a member of a reserved profession Ernest was fortunately exempted from conscription in the Great War. This fate was not extended to his younger brother, Bernard. He served as a private in the North Staffordshire Rifles and was severely wounded on the Western Front, losing a leg. He remained very close to my father, whom he called ‘Will’.

After leaving school at the age of fourteen my father was apprenticed to the firm where his father worked to follow in his footsteps as a maker of textile machines.
He hated it from the outset. This would not be an appropriate location to evoke the word he would use to characterise the boss of the firm – suffice it to say that old man Caulton must have been a small-town, small-time, big-headed, would-be capitalist, exploiting the intelligence, expertise and goodwill of my grandfather whilst he idled around lathered up for a daily wet shave in the barber’s chair and counting the unshared profits of others’ labour.

The passion that provided an escape in these years of the late 1930s was music.
Arthur was the drummer in the dance-band combo The Rhythm Aces with his older brother, my uncle Bernard, tickling the ivories and a floating population of semi-pro chancers – some of whom, I’m informed by an historian of the city’s jazz scene, were quite probably more than competent. Their regular Saturday night gigs were in local halls but on one occasion they secured a spot at the Palais, presumably while the professional combo was on a fag break. Local History recalls that they also set up on Sunday afternoons at the Arboretum bandstand.

Ironically, the declaration of war was to offer something of a liberation from the tedious and ill-remunerated sweat of Handel Street. The gaffer did his best to prevent Arthur from joining up as the factory was being converted to ‘essential war work’. He managed to escape, however, and left Nottingham for Whale Island to be trained as an Ordnance Artificer – a gunner in lay-person’s terms – in the Senior Service:
apt appellation as in those days he was smoking sixty un-tipped gaspers per day.

His first posting was to the London Docks to assist in the repair of the destroyer
HMS Worcester which had been knocked about a bit in the famous skirmish with the German battle-cruiser Scharnhorst during the notorious Channel Dash. Once the tub was patched up, however, he embarked on a much more dangerous berth.

The Arctic convoys escorted merchant ships carrying necessary supplies to our glorious allies of the Soviet Union. Churchill said this was ‘the worst journey in the world’ and their sailors ‘the bravest men afloat.’ Though my father never gloried in war stories, nothing I have learned about these sub-zero voyages, in which many of his comrades were lost, convinced me that Winnie was exaggerating. When the Worcester was mined in the North Sea and towed back to Yarmouth his life was quite probably saved as he never served in another Arctic convoy.

He remained a member of the V&W Association – this society of convoy veterans was finally and reluctantly wound up earlier this year as so many of the old salts who were lucky enough to have survived had now ‘crossed the bar.’

This period of patriotic service in 1942-3 provided the impetus for a campaign in more recent times. Every five years my dad would be presented with a medal from, first, the grateful communists and, latterly, the Russian Federation whilst our own country refused to memorialise those Arctic vets with a medal of their own. The ante was upped a couple of years ago when the announcement was made that the Russians would present everyone who served in those waters with a special decoration:
The Ushakov Medal, named after Russia’s most lauded admiral. Surprisingly, our government refused to allow British nationals to accept this honour.

So the fight was on to ensure they would receive what their courage and sacrifice so surely deserved. By the time the battle was won my father was too frail and confined to barracks. So Kerri-Anne and myself went down to the Russian Embassy on Kensington Palace Gardens to pick it up on his behalf. The Ushakov Medal remains one of our proudest possessions.

He was on call in Newhaven the time of the D-Day invasion and then, entirely randomly, he got what must have been ‘the best gig in the war’. He was shipped out to Boston on the Queen Mary and thence to Bermuda, the empire’s island outpost in the middle of the Atlantic, as part of a team who would close up the naval dockyard. What luck!

Now he was a Chief Petty Officer and from his stories his main duties seemed to be running the Saturday night tombola games in the mess and marching the Methos to chapel on Sunday morning before turning a blind eye as they broke ranks for the boozer. I never did find out what happened during the week.

Another unintended consequence was that after he was shipped back to New York there was no vessel available to take him back across the pond. So he had a few weeks off in the greatest city in the world. When he finally did get a berth it was certainly not on one of the Queens but on a rusting tub transporting kids who’d been evacuated for the duration. They were marshalled, he told me, by a ridiculous army NCO who forced the poor boys and girls to indulge in physical jerks on deck during a long and rough crossing.

Gone were the days of hanging out in the Union Jack Club and Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Bar.

On return to Portsmouth he was about to be posted to Trincomalee, in what was then Ceylon. At the last minute the news came that atomic bombs had been dropped in Japan and the last of the axis powers had surrendered.

For Arthur Eaton the war was over. Unlike many of his comrades, he had survived.

After demob he lasted less than a week at Caulton’s before telling the boss what he could do with his job. What was he going to do now?

He had met Lilian Maddison at a dance in Saint George’s Church Hall, Netherfield (certainly not Jane Austen’s stately home). When he returned they were wed in March, 1946. This was a mixed marriage: my father came from the top of Carlton Hill, my mother from the bottom.

It took four years for them to get a council house and another four years before I came along. Now he was working in the tool room at Luxfer’s. I never heard him express any qualms about having to settle down post-war – although I do think he rather regretted my mother’s insistence that he should his sell drum kit. All I ever knew of my father’s thwarted musical aspirations was the way he would beat out a rhythm section with his cutlery.

Eight years later the domestic fantasy became reality when they bought an allotment plot off Cavendish Road where they would build their dream home – almost exactly midway between their respective birthplaces. They designed the bungalow together with cousin Jack Tivey, a master builder, in charge of construction, and with my mum as the Clerk of Works, rushing round in her dinner hour from the Gas Showroom to order materials, and my dad working nights and weekends as a bricky’s labourer.

His abiding hobby while I was growing up was the breeding and exhibiting of Norfolk canaries. I would accompany him to Cage and Aviary bird shows in far-flung halls where he would return with winning rosettes. Though how the judges could perceive any possible difference between one yellow bird and another was beyond me. I just wanted to open the cages and set them all free.

Meanwhile he was bettering himself by taking correspondence courses which eventually led to a white collar job as a draughtsman at Ericson’s at Beeston
(later Plessey – which rhymes with ‘right gory and messy’) where his job was to design mechanical telephone systems.
One of his abiding friends from the office told me that in all the years of working together he never heard my father raise his voice or lose his temper. What would be the point?

I knew little of his quotidian labours except that he came up with some kind of invention which would cut down on the use of the precious metal platinum in a signalling operation... or something. Any road up, it apparently saved the enterprise over a million in the first year and his contribution was recognised with an honorarium of... fifteen hundred quid. This is how business works.

He took early retirement at the age of sixty-two, preferring to let younger lads escape the pernicious last-in first-out policy and well aware that computerisation would soon confine the talents of his generation to the dustbin of industrial history. Sic transit Gloria mundi... or any other day of the working week.

Earlier this year he told me something I’d never heard before. After he was laid off he was at a loose end and got an interview for a job in the (believe it or not) Nottinghamshire oil-fields at Eakring. On the way up my mother said: ‘You don’t really want to go back to work, do you?’ Her sense prevailed, he turned the car around and they drove back to Carlton.

All of which inevitably leads to the contentious issue of politics. Against conventional wisdom – almost always fallacious –Arthur became more of a leftie as he grew older. The first time he raised the subject was when he came to see me after my apparent ‘glittering career’ at the university and I’d moved back to a flea-pit in Radford. He was involved a strike and I was a knee-jerk radical, rather surprised when he asked my advice on tactics. Why, I wanted to know, had he not talked about such matters before? His characteristically modest response was that he’d never wanted to influence my thoughts when I was younger but now that I’d found my own way we could talk as equals.

How could a son not respect and admire such a father? I only hope I’m up to the challenge of following in his footsteps to become ever more bolshie the longer I get in the tooth.

Though he never entirely shared his views, one of his closest work-mates was a great character, Harry Ratner, who documented his involvement in the many splits of the Trotskyite Fourth International in his book Memoirs Of A Reluctant Revolutionary. Harry and his wife Olive witnessed my mother’s will but by the time they entered the ultra-leftist Elysium my dad was too frail to attend their resolutely secular funeral celebrations.

If I spend little time on the ensuing decades it is not because they were uneventful but rather because they were happy. Nothing taxes the imagination of a dramatist more than quiet contentment – my profession demands action and conflict. But my parents were very much in love. In the immortal words of his favourite chuckle-maker, Ken Dodd, happiness is ‘the greatest gift that we possess’.

So what follows can only be, for the most part, an inventory of blessings, for which words almost fail me as I run the risk of becoming sentimental. And why not?

In 1985 I was offered a fellowship at a university in Queensland, Australia. I returned the following year with my darling wife and constant companion, Kerri-Anne.
It was certainly not part of her game plan to be dragged to the cold northern hemisphere to snotty Sneinton. Nevertheless, Lilian and Arthur gained a wonderful daughter-in-law and shortly afterwards we were joined by our daughter, Leif, aged ten at the time, who came to love them as they embraced her. Kerri-Anne became a community midwife in the multi-cultural Meadows and, though she would not wish me to say this, gained legendary status by assisting at the delivery of the sons and daughters of Nottingham’s bohemian community. Because of my wife my parents gained an extended family of in-laws, many of whom came to visit and all of whom mourn his loss. That large antipodean mob got to know my small English family to the delight and benefit of both.

In Brisbane on Christmas Eve 1999 Leif gave birth to Linus. Soon after they returned to Nottingham where Leif did her degree at the School of Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University where I was a Visiting Professor. Nothing at all predictable in this outcome but my cup runneth over.

Linus and Arthur formed a particularly close bond. Fortunately, my grandson was over here last Christmas so he will remember the old man when he was still in pretty good shape. He particularly appreciated Arthur’s carvings of birds and cricketers, beautifully whittled up from odd bits of wood he snaffled up from bins. My father was the epitome of what my intellectual mentor Claude Lévi-Strauss would have called, in French, a ‘bricoleur’ – in English perhaps a ‘bodger’.

However, the shadow started to fall a decade ago when my poor mother began to present incipient symptoms of a debilitating illness. As soon as contact was made with their GP I knew he was, to paraphrase Churchill, ‘the worst doctor in the world’. When he finally deigned to undertake a house visit, after the most cursory of glances he gave his cack-handed opinion that she was having ‘panic attacks’ and scrawled out a prescription for anti-depressants. Anyone who ever knew the redoubtable Lilian Eaton would have known that ‘panic’ was not a term that could ever be applied to her – ‘frantic’ maybe... But that’s a condition to be applauded, isn’t it?

It took a good three months before we were able to secure the truthful and obvious diagnosis: Parkinson’s Disease. That malicious idiot has now, apparently, been struck off the medical registry. His surgery premises have, ironically, been bought by the professional funeral company who have always buried members of our extended family. We had a bitter laugh about that outcome.

My father magnificently took on the role of primary carer. After a terrible fall Lilian spent six debilitating months in Ling’s Bar, south of the Trent, receiving competent treatment but all the while knowing she would never come back home. Long daily bus journeys, two there and two back, (bear in mind that West Bridgford, ‘Bread and Lard Island’, is another country for those of us from north of the dividing line of the river) eventually took its toll and dad ended up in the City Hospital with a serious heart complaint. My lovely mother died on April 14th 2008 shortly after their sixtieth wedding anniversary, the only one they’d spent apart.

They remained so closely bonded. As Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly sang in High Society: ‘Love forever true.’

Who would have thought he would cope alone so well and for so long?

Arthur never minded solitude: the old naval rituals of washing, ironing, cooking, even driving until he was ninety-two. When he had to go his bank for me to sign off on one of his trivial financial transactions he insisted I should take bus and meet him there. Why? His answer: Because the President and Vice-President of the USA never travel on Air Force One together. That’s when I took away his keys and locked the Skoda in the garage.

Truth be told – as it always should be – the last couple of years have been a bit of a struggle. Following his first fall when his hip was broken we managed to get him out of a care home and back to Cromford Avenue after only a few weeks. He barely remembered his stay in this facility, though I rather enjoyed attending the sing-alongs and memory-jogging sessions which he refused to attend and I thought the meals weren’t half bad.

Nevertheless, he was back home again, which is exactly what he wanted. Now his sight was rapidly deteriorating so he could no longer watch the late night news, which connected him to the wide world. Then his hearing started to fail, making the switch from television to radio equally problematic. Recently he was increasingly perplexed by the absurdity of global events – who wouldn’t be? His life-long belief as a trade unionist had been that things should continue to get better for the mass of mankind. So he was troubled that everything might be getting worse. Maybe he bowed out at the right time?

He had a meals-on-wheels service delivering proper English food, which he really enjoyed. Carers visited twice a day so he could tell them that he could take care of himself, thank you very much. There was such great support on Cromford Avenue by, most especially, Lucy and Karl. If anyone could ever tell me there are better neighbours I would hesitate to believe them. I soon learned not to come around on Sunday afternoons when Lucy was visiting as this was a personal relationship Arthur valued so much. And if anything went haywire round the house and I threatened to call in a tradie (as they say in Oz) he would tell me that Karl would sort it – which he always did.

But the inability to stay upright in his own home became more frequent – usually well-timed for when I was out of town or out of the country. The final fall came when I was at an anthropological film festival in Bristol. He was taken to the Queen’s Medical Centre with an infection. For the first time in his life he was in state of confusion and experiencing hallucinatory delusions.

This derangement was, naturally, distressing. However frail he had become physically his brain had always remained alert. His failing eyesight had prevented him from filling in Sudoko puzzles but only the week before he still prided in engaging in setting himself mental arithmetic puzzles far beyond my capability.

When I visited him in hospital the following day I asked if he’d remembered these paranoid fantasies and he confessed that he thought they must have been a dream. What a great relief! He wasn’t demented and seemed to be back with us. That was the last serious conversation we had together.

I was then amazed when he then proceeded to tell me an old chestnut about a Jew and a Catholic travelling in a covered wagon across the prairie. Narrow minds might think this politically incorrect, but there was not a sectarian bone in his body nor racist cell in his brain. It’s an old joke, the punch line which involves not only language but hand gestures in the shape of the cross which he capably performed from his hospital bed. You know it: Wallet, Watch, Spectacles, Testicles. Of course I’d heard it before but it still cracked me up.

‘I’m glad I can still make you laugh.’ These are the last words I want to remember.

The next day he had declined massively and all he muttered then was: ‘Go on... You go on.’

He was too far gone to be sent back home – which is where he wanted to die. He was too aware not to go to a rehabilitation centre – with which he could surely not have coped. I was called by the nursing staff to be told they were troubled by his heart beat. By the time the doctor reached him half an hour later he had pulled the sheet over his face and was dead.

Never wanting to be a trouble. Considerate to the last.

It’s truly heart-warming to know that his send-off will be in a new crematorium nearby in Gedling... with a five-star rating no less. Now even crems are ranked like our shows (I’ve never got better than a four!). It’s almost on the site of the pit where my mother’s dad, the grandfather I never knew, was a miner.

A joke in every local household:
Question: Do you like Gedling?
Answer: Don’t know, I’ve never geddled.

Kerri-Anne, myself, Leif and Linus are so comforted that the obsequies are to be conducted by our dear friend, Sally, who knew Arthur.

No regrets. No remorse. Mourning, surely. Sadness, certainly. Loss, forever.
Another humble, mighty hero crossing the bar after a life well-lived and loved by all those whose lives his life touched.

To Know Him Was To Love Him: Just to see him smile made our lives worthwhile.

Good night, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Safe crossing, dear father, dear Arthur.