Bryan Islip's Blog, page 7

Looking for a home.

If my life were to be divided into five parts, I suppose the first would have been everything up to my marriage to Joan in 1955, the second everything from then up to 1970 when I walked out as sales manager of Lily Cups in Liverpool. The third part would be with Sweetheart International from 1970 to 1987 when I found myself 'released' by the company. Parts four and five - the final forty percent - begin here.

These memoirs are labelled 'Me, My Life', but of course my life was always and continues to be touched by others, many others of more or less importance to me, making more or less impact on me. Top of my 'importants' list are or were my two wives, second my children and Dee's children, third our wider family, fourth my friends and after that all others. But yes, this is about me, not about all or any of them. After all neither I nor anyone else has a possibility to access a second party's innermost thoughts and deeds, nor to understand the how and why of events of importance, in turn, to them. It's no different when that second party is family. So I must leave them to speak (or more probably not speak) for themselves.

Having said that, it will not hurt at this stage to summarise ... That previous episode left  Delia and myself in 1987 about to take up my new employment at Dolphin Plastics (of was it Dolphin Packaging? I can't remember) of Poole in Dorset, and about to move from Hillhead on the Solent into a new rental in Sopley, a hamlet lying within the heart of the adjacent New Forest. At that stage I had just moved Joan into her new and quite luxurious nursing home, South Winds, near Southampton. My eldest, Kairen, and husband Roger already had three of their ultimately four children and were still living in north London - still are in fact. Roger was and is in construction management, Kairen beginning the studies which would lead to a degree and eventually her doctorate in psychology. Julie and husband Geoffrey had two of their ultimately three boys and lived in the Midlands, where they owned and ran a snooker club. Robert was travelling 'below the horizon out of sight' all over the country, (and Ireland), surfacing from time to time in hospitals and/or in need of funds. We met in such places and would continue to meet often over the next few years. Stuart had met and was living in Poole with the young and lovely Lorraine, his future wife, from where he was small boat fishing for a living having given up his itinerant life on the big crabber, Kingfisher. Dee's eldest, Max, had met with Tracey and lived in Dorset, shortly to move on to Tracey's native turf in a Manchester suburb. Rudi, our youngest, who had been with us in Hillhead, decided not to migrate with us to the New Forest, preferring to stay in the Fareham / Gosport orbit where I think he had already met his future first partner, Nina. Only two of these five original 'partnerships' were to survive intact, with Robert an inevitable, invisible question mark.

And myself? Battered but unbowed I think you could say. My much lower level new job was interesting enough as it combined selling (packaging) with packaging design and development. It represented a total change of business life-  which is probably just what I needed after the hiatus of the preceding years. I and my new colleagues were encouraged by the boss / owner, Harry Evans, to return to our homes each day, no matter how far the distance to and from our last customer appointment. Four hundred mile daily return trips were not uncommon. Harry detested hotel expenses almost as much as those entitled 'customer entertaining'. In the general office at Dolphin there was a chart on the wall where salesmen's movements, forward and current day, were recorded for all to see. Harry was a self-made, now wealthy man; a genuine obsessive and a genuine eccentric given to working all hours. That may well have been the reason why he lived alone, his wife having deserted, I believe. One day in his office he confided in me that his visiting housekeeper always left an unlit open coal fire in his living room for him. In front of it would be two armchairs, between them an occasional table complete with malt whisky decanter and two glasses. He said he would come home, set a match to the fire, sit down in one of the chairs, take a swig of the hard stuff  and ask himself a question out aloud. Any question; perhaps, he continued, how was your day, Harry? He would then move to the other chair, pour himself out another dram and answer himself at length, again out aloud whilst gazing into the flickering coals. And so on ... A conversation with myself, he said, which is a good way to leave no unanswered questions or unmade decisions about the business and allows me to sleep well; (that and presumably the whisky!)

I had a great deal of respect if not exactly a liking for Harry Evans. His finance chief had instructions to leave one piece of paper on his desk with just one number on it. With this one number, set against previous, he knew instantly the financial health of his business. That number? Exactly how many tonnes and kilos of formed plastic had left the factory yesterday on route to  customers.

Harry Evans was for me the perfect example of rags to riches on the back of a simple good idea forcibly implemented. He had been some kind of junior ship's officer sailing out of Liverpool when he saw in a pub how a metal suit of armour, part of the decor, attracted much attention. Knowing precisely zero about mould making and thermoforming, he spent a few hundreds on having made some silver plastic shells in the form of miniature, lightweight knights in armour, then selling them at vast profit around all the pubs within reach. To his astonishment his shining knights went viral, He bought a simple thermoformer to make them himself. Soon after that he was into plastic trays for such as sandwiches, convenience meals, multi-packaging of food product etc etc. If it could be thermoformed from pvc or. later on, any other plastic, Harry was your man. Soon he couldn't keep up with just garage production so he obtained finance for a 'proper factory'. The rest, as they say, was history. Dolphin when I worked there had a value nearer eight figures of pounds sterling than seven. Shortly after I left he sold out to a massive American packaging conglomerate. I believe he then took to his magnificent yacht, his intent being to sail the world. Good for him, although I have to say he seemed to me never the happiest of men, and definitely one of the loneliest.

But my presence at Dolphin lasted little more than a year. As I saw and felt it, I had dropped from the premiership of packaging to the next division down or even the one below that. I am sure Harry saw me as a catalyst for expansion and promotion but was unprepared for it when I began to instigate uninvited changes in procedures, technologies etcetera. He called me into his offices one morning. We had a good chat starting with, Bryan, I don't know where you're going - and I don't know where you think you're taking me. I left on good terms with a generous settlement that included the company's (now my own) motor car. We shook hands, wishing each other well. To tell the truth we had a good deal in common. It had proven of no real long term use to either of us.

Driving home to the New Forest and Dee I felt nothing but exhilaration; that sense of freedom renewed! I was fifty six. For the next twenty four years and counting I would work for nobody but myself. I think the mixture of joy, adventure and, yes, fear transmitted itself to Dee as we walked our pair of hungarian vizslas that afternoon, hour after hour through the New Forest. It was a lovely day. Shafts of pure sunlight made a multicoloured patchwork of the forest floor. I recall us eating our sandwiches sitting on the bank of a brook,alternately talking quietly and listening to the birdsong when out from under the bankside vegetation emerged a metre long snake, a quite wonderfully marked creature making his or her sinuous progress through the shallow, crystal clear water. We didn't know if he or more likely she was an adder and therefore dangerous or a grass snake and therefore just a harmless thing of exquisite beauty. Either way we bade him or her farewell and went upon our way. This was his or her home. We needed to find our own.

On our own

1987 had begun for us with New Year's Eve  in a Gosport jazz club. We were with our friends, all of us smokers. (Dee had been a non-smoker until we met, after which she said she got tired of being offered a smoke, so opted for the quiet life!) As midnight counted down our ashtrays overflowed with a veritable Vesuvius of fag ends, the air was thick with smoke and the taste of old tobacco was on the lips of everyone you kissed.  I announced that I would never smoke another cigarette, a pretty bold claim after thirty years of up to fifty a day. Dee at once said she would give up, too. All the others laughed heartily. For a week of intense virtual silence not to say murderous intent we began to relax. Neither of us wanted to be the one to break down. The urge to light up a cigarette and inhale its smoke took a long time to die but die it did, and has never come back to life.

Back to the  May of that year ...  In the immediate aftermath of my sacking Dee and I embarked on a long planned holiday with our friends Ray and Audrey Gaskell. Fortunately I had the use of my company Granada until the month end. We sailed from Portsmouth to Le Havre and drove down past Limoges to the house we had rented in the Dordogne valley. Apart from the clash of interests and disinterests between us and out friends which became more obvious as the fortnight progressed it was heavenly. Long walks through lush woodlands (Dee and I) local sightseeing trips (all four of us), tiny restaurants in tiny villages, balmy weather ... wonderful. But Dee and I were early risers, Ray and Audrey much more stay abed. One of our early morning walks resulted in this poem ...


JUST SOME CHERRIES
Waking early we looked on that Dordogne day.then dressed, quietly let ourselves out.taking the narrow road that curved downhillthrough bursting early summer woods.  dense green branches often meeting over our heads.It is quiet; we talk quietly as we go.When you talk to each other not at each other there’s no need for other than quietness.
This seems a bigger place than Hampshire.As you walk, the hill lasts longer.Distance across to the next hillside is greater.Trees are crowded together more closely.Light is lighter; shadows darker hiding more. The rainstorm when it overtakes is bigger, too,but we walk on, not bothered by the size Nor by the drum-intensity of its warm drops.
I can feel the penetration of that place and timeInto senses obfuscated by thirty years of 
fifty noxious cigarettes each passing day,by loud noises in small rooms only some of it music,by seldom being challenged naturally by things natural(other than the slight panic of the passing of the years;)by the senseless cycle of earning and paying.By unnaturalness between all the caught-up people.
Finally at the bottom of this valley on the outskirts of a village still sleepingwalking by an ivy covered wall of stoneoverhung by the branches of a cherry tree.Swollen fruit hangs tempting in front of our eyes.Bunches of cherries droop, still rain-globulated, butter into high-lit blue-red into magenta, cerise,framed by shining leaves of that life-green,tight-smooth the cherries are to my fingers.I taste the free rain, bite to the stoneand the eye-closing sweetness of this valley spurts Into every corner of my mouth,floods over all of me and all my memory.
I remember looking and drinking in the beauty and the comfort of her happy, rained-on face,In her straight eyes, reflection of this shared awakening.In her hand, too, were just some cherries.

That holiday took the sting out of the forced dislocation from my employer of seventeen turbulent years, the company I had been instrumental in conceiving and growing from nothing to a dominant and profitable something. But on our return of course I had to wake up to reality. One summer evening I drove 'my' large car back to the company, left the keys with a less than interested security man, returned home in the little Honda we'd bought from Dee's mother. At age 53 I was for the second time without the use of a high end company car since the age of 24. .

I called the City lawyer to whom I'd been introduced a year since, apologised for ignoring the man's original advice, outlined my situation. He said I had two choices; either sue the company in Civil Court for wrongful dismissal or take the company to an Industrial Tribunal. The former would take much longer, cost much more and would be a big gamble - win and the sky's the limit, lose and all you have is the cost! The Tribunal would happen much more quickly. If I won, which I almost certainly would, he averred, I would get a maximum of £10,000, of which between a third and a half would belong to him, my lawyer, even if he stayed locally with us to avoid hotel costs. This would be a very much reduced fee, he added, and I believed him. He also said something of such importance I can remember it now, even if I've forgotten the man's name! The biggest issue in front of you, he told me, is to forget about some kind of revenge on your ex-employer, much as you might want to. You have to put behind you the past and get into your future without carrying negative baggage. Sweetheart International will shrug its shoulders and move on, just a mark on your c.v., and this guy Gasparini ceases for you to exist. Easier advice said than done of course, but it didn't take long for me to see the sense of it after the Tribunal was all done and dusted, having duly awarded me the maximum compensation. Industrial  Tribunals consist of a lawyer, a businessman and a union man. Surely even Gasparini would have been shamed by their written verdict after three full days. This success I owed to my lawyer and many of my colleagues who gave evidence on my behalf - the ones who had by then left the company of course!

After buying the little Honda the next thing I bought was an Amstrad personal computer. I just had a gut feel that, when I had re-learned to type and worked hard to polish up my grasp of basic computer technology  this machine would become the window to my next world of gainful work. And so it would prove. I had learned to type thirty three years ago when I was in the R.A.F. and had learned basic computing on a course at IBM's Hursley HQ. Brush up time.

Without real conviction I applied for several director level jobs as advertised in The Telegraph and was short listed for two of them, one on the Isle of Wight and the other in Essex. I suited neither and neither suited me. I then embarked on the usual networking, offering my consultancy services far and wide. This was the point at which I discovered where my potential money earning value might really be. Managing directors and sales directors were ten a penny - and you had better be around your mid-thirties, whereas I was fifty three - but my interest in and talent for packaging design linked with production technology and foods marketing was something saleable in the right industrial markets. Over the years I had developed many packaging product ideas and would go on to register several patents in my own name. I secured my first independent consultancy brief from United Biscuits and enjoyed designing a pack for 'biscuit finger choc dips'. Quickly, another brief hove into view, this time from Geest Industries for a special kind of salad pack. Both briefs required me to produce concept samples ... fortunately I knew a man in Bristol. I was on my way, but my progress was interrupted by a call from one Harry Evans, owner of Dolphin Packaging in Poole. I had previously neither met nor heard of Harry or Dolphin but over a very liquid dinner I was asked if I would like to join their key account sales team, headed up by his brother. The salary was fair, the expenses reasonable including a company car (!) and the work interesting. The lure of a renewed steady income proved to be too much. After discussion with Dee I said yes. Mistake! It's much easier and happier to move up the ladder than down it.

As I drove home to Hillhead late that night I could feel the car moving around under the force of one of the most violent storms imaginable. In the morning it was chaos. Fallen trees everywhere, the nearby yacht haven like a boat breaker's yard, serious damage to many houses though not to the one we rented. Dee and I took the dogs out on a long walk, discussing everything as we went. Dolphin Packaging was forty miles away. Why not move closer? One of the several advantages of renting is your relative freedom of movement. Chloe and Seth looked up at us, tails wagging as if in total agreement. With all six of our children off on their own we only had the dogs and ourselves to consider - plus of course the weekend trips for me to visit with Joan. Her Hayling Island nursing home had by then closed down and I had found her a really good place between Portsmouth and Southampton. Dee and I found ourselves a beautiful rental - one that accepted dogs - in the little village of Sopley right in the heart of the New Forest. Yet another chapter begun ...

End games

It is well nigh impossible to put into words the true life and soul - the spirit - of the industrial sales unit which I had, over fifteen years built up at Sweetheart International plc. By 1986 I still had Ted Pool and Alex Mattewson, my original field salesmen recruited in 1972 and now managers, together with the fifteen others who had been selected, (indoctrinated!) and trained by the three of us. I cannot think of any member of that sales and marketing unit ever leaving us of their own accord, presumably because we were that phenomenon called a team where the sum is far greater than all of its parts. Certainly none of the succession of Wall Street and City of London owners of the company ever understood it / us! All they understood was our sales results and our sales results were almost always outstanding as a platform on which to grow the company's profits. I had a sign on my desk - that quotation from Henry Shapiro on first meeting me: 'The only thing that happens inside a company is cost. All profit comes from the outside as part of a client's order and payment.' Should sales have fallen down no doubt I would long since have been made to walk the plank like so many of my managing, technical and financial Boardroom colleagues. I was very proud of that sales team and always did my best to shield them from the harsh winds that from time to time inevitably blew around the company. As if in return, whether or not they knew it, my team and the company itself protected me from the harsh winds that had been blowing around my domestic life.

Yet I felt quite sure that the latest owners of the company, certainly Roberto Gasparini, the youngish, hawkish Italo-American they had put in charge, would seek and eventually find a way to, as it were, break up the happy business home. Reluctantly I had to prepare myself for the softest possible landing! And of course for my subsequent take-off, for what on earth could possibly happen to me in the afterlife? I talked over the situation with my friend and leading customer Mike Jacobs of Raines Dairies, who introduced me to his friend, one of the brightest guys I have had the pleasure of meeting. Funny, I can see his face and hear his voice but cannot for the life of me recall his name. He was a young City lawyer, Jewish, well versed in employment and dis-employment law and practice. This man listened in silence to my story and my suspicions. Then, this is how this sort of thing goes, he said; the Gasparini fellow will call you into his office one Friday afternoon and tell you to clear your desk forthwith because you're fired. But when you're invited in, DO NOT GO. Go home at once, call me, and do not re-enter those offices without me in attendance!  One of the biggest mistakes I have made happened when, one Friday afternoon almost a year later Gasparini sent for me; cocksure of myself as always, I went in without calling my lawyer friend! Game, set and match, Gasparini. But more later on that.

In the last episode I told of my involuntary visit to the QE Hospital in Portsmouth after my eldest son Robert had turned up in a lot more than his now customary disarray.  Remember, this was a strong, good looking young man, six foot three inches tall and extremely strong. I don't know how much of his ravings that day were the result of the psychosis and how much of it was down to his cannabis addiction, but I do know he had his mother in huge distress and Delia in mortal terror and myself in great physical pain with several broken ribs! I called the doctor, both to me and to Robert. Visibly shaken after attempting to talk to my son, the doctor took me to one side and told me he would be sectioning him, A vehicle would be arriving momentarily to take him to St James' mental hospital in nearby Southsea. I told him the vehicle would not be necessary. I would take him myself. Doctor shook his head, said, well Bryan, on your own head be it. But if you do get him to go with you, after St James you must go directly on to have your chest x-rayed at the QE hospital. I was in great pain for many days, unable to lie down in bed, only driving my car with difficulty. 

Surprisingly Robert agreed to go with me without fuss and bade a relatively calm farewell to Joan and Dee. On the way to the mental hospital he entered into one of his quieter, more rational interludes. We were almost there when he said something so shattering that I have never forgotten it: I will never be able to have a family of my own, Dad, will I? I had to stop the car, filled with released emotion. I cannot write more about this moment, nor about Bob's commital, nor about the great pit of depression into which I fell whilst driving away, having left my beautiful young man in St James' mental hospital. But I will say this; having that day had the first of many subsequent opportunities to talk with psychiatrists about the condition called schizophrenia, and knowing how much cannabis Robert had been smoking, whenever I hear somebody telling me that cannabis is harmless and should be legalised the old red mist really does come down. I long to invite them into one of the secure mental wards where I have spent so much time with my son, stinking wards filled with drug induced zombies, repressed violence crackling in the air. And I will say this; my first wife had multipleschlerosis and my second wife lymphomatic cancer and my son schizophrenia, and if I myself had to choose between the three of them which one not to have it would definitely be schizophrenia.

That incident was the final nail in the coffin of any kind of 'normal' lifestyle for me, at that juncture in my life. All change. Although as I have said Dee got on well with Joan, and all the boys got on well with each other, the tensions I have just described were too much for Dee. She wanted out and I totally understood. Eventually I found her a rented place in the little village of Titchfield. But that meant I had the same old dilemma. On the one hand I could give up my job and become a nurse / housekeeper, living off the State, on the other hand I would need to sell the Hayling house, find Joan the best possible nursing home to help pay for it and rejoin Dee in Titchfield. Rudi was the only boy still living at home and of course I still had the two dogs. They would all continue to live with us in that rented house, a family much reduced in so many ways.

This, without doubt, was the darkest hour of my life since my parents split and I found my ten year old self motherless in a strange boarding school. Having said that, Hayling had not been without its lighter side. We all had had a good life there and there were always the laughs. I recall once driving home to Hayling and seeing Rudi roadside trying to hitch a lift. Of course I stopped to let him in, which he managed to do with some difficulty by laying back the passenger seat so that his shiny Mohican haircut would not be bent over on the Ford Granada's roof! I asked him, why, oh why do you have your hair like that? His answer so astonished me as to preclude all further questions. Because I can't dance, he said. He might at that time have been telling the truth, 'though we hadn't been long living in our new Titchfield rental when the young fellow started earning part of his living dancing topless in a Portsmouth nightclub!

The next of what would become a series of increasingly attractive rentals took us all to Osbourn View Road in Hillhead, not far along the Solent shore from Lee on Solent. This was a spacious, rather lovely house and garden. By then our lives - human and canine - had begun to take on a new and happier shape, for Joan was being very well cared for in her Hayling nursing home, Dee had found a lovely walk with the dogs down the river to the sea and my sales team were producing the usual good numbers. I went over to see Joan at least once a week at weekends. She seemed relaxed and happy apart from her inevitable enquiries after Bob. I would take her in her wheelchair down to the bottom of the nursing home garden and park ourselves close by the sea, comparing notes about the rest of our family - and times recent as well as our good times long past. Then, on the way back to my new home I would call on Robert in St James' hospital. He seemed slower, duller but was still pleased to see me whilst still talking oftentimes without total rationality. The psychiatrist in charge said he was taking his medication and soon could be released from hospital. But, the leading doctor warned, he would be best off living apart from the family and only then if he continued voluntarily to take his medication. If he didn't, said the psychiatrist, Robert would be in and out of institutions for the rest of his life. When he did come out I found him a flat in downtown Southsea. At first he seemed quite settled. That was just as well, for Delia continued to be very frightened whenever my son hove into sight.Sometimes I would take him to see his mother in Hayling Island but these meetings were quite frankly disturbing for all of us. Joan was and would always be convinced he just had a different form of her own illness.

As I said, one Friday in May 1986 I was called in to my boss and the axe fell. In all truth, although I have written harsh words about the ownership and Roberto Gasparini  - and I will stick by them here - I cannot really blame the powers that were for getting rid of a long serving and successful sales director now seen as a bit of a lame duck, domestically speaking.

I spent the ensuing weekend fielding well meaning phone calls from customers and almost, but not quite all of my colleagues. Virtually all of my team would be following me out of the door over the next months, some voluntarily and some not. End of an era. As I say I had many messages of support but the one I remember the most came from my Dee; You can do more with your life than sell plastic cups, Bryan, she said. But could I really?

When Monday came I woke up to find myself is a strange kind of limbo. I could barely get my head around being, for the first time in my life, out of work and out from under the safety of the umberella that one's employment provides. I took a long solo walk along the beach. I stopped, looked over the water to the Isle of Wight, breathing in the salt air. The sea was calm and the early day sun was shining. All of a sudden I came to realise the true meaning of that word we all use, so often so recklessly; freedom. Wonderful, but freedom, I mean personal freedom is also frightening when first it is encountered.

Hayling Island

I'll not forget showing Delia into our home and introducing her to Joan. I left the two of them together with a cup of tea and took a walk down to the beach, my mind in a turmoil. I knew if this didn't work, for any reason or for no reason, for either or both of them, I would be looking for a nursing home for Joan. She was now permanently wheelchair bound, suffering considerable pain. There was no way I could keep on looking after her myself or expecting my sons to do so, neither could I carry on paying for outside support of the kind she needed. I had asked my fellow director Peter Viggars M.P. about state finance for this but the answer came back zero. My leaving work and becoming a state supported unemployed carer wasn't an option. I knew I could never be a good enough housekeeper / nurse and my job was the therapy I needed. Add to that the fact was, we would definitely lose our home anyway without my income.

If either Joan or Dee said 'no' I would probably be saying goodbye to Dee, my personal lifeline through these hardest of hard years. I would be on my own.

I need not have worried. The two of them formed a fair to good relationship from the start, a relationship that varied from functional to great to hilarious over the following two years. Delia moved into her own bedroom at 45 Raynes Road to live there alongside whichever of our sons were not, on and off, away at the fishing. My two daughters were married with distant homes and families of their own. It was time to look at the next part of my plan - i.e. sell the house and buy another one.


Joan, Delia and I sat down together and looked at possible locations having first decided to move away from Lee and the Gosport / Lee-on Solent peninsula. A fresh start for us all beckoned yet we must contrive to live within commuting distance of my office. Somewhere nice and detached with four bedrooms - and close by the sea - that was the order of the day. Several times we took the car across to the Isle of Wight on house exploratory jaunts. Twice we came close to making an offer there, but on each occasion something negative emerged re the properties in question - negative enough to make the three miles long, expensive ferry boat ride from Portsmouth to Ryde on the Island tip the balance. We forgot about the Isle of Wight. Finally we found what we sought, a pleasant postwar detached, a stones throw from the sea front on Hayling Island, which is not an island but a peninsula by Langstone Harbour, and a twenty to thirty minute commute from the office. Our offer was accepted.

By 1985 Joan and I had lived in 45 Raynes Road Lee-on-Solent for fifteen years. We and our family had grown up there, my career had, in all the circumstances, flourished from there. To us and our two* dogs it was home.  I had not anticipated my reaction when that 'for sale' sign went up. I have never been one to fall in love with bricks and mortar but I did feel the odd lump in my throat. The house didn't take too long to sell, and for a price some  six times that of our original purchase. But it was that good old property owning delusion, for my salary had advanced by about the same percentage and so had accumulated inflation and bank debt.. On the other hand of course the Hayling Island house we were buying was about the same price as the one we were selling. After paying off mortgage and bank and funding the deposit on Hayling there was not that much left but at least I could relish my new, debt-free situation, even though having to live with monthly mortgage repayments much more than they had been.

All four of our boys - my Robert and Stuart and Delia's Max and Rudi got on well together. Hayling being a holiday town with much nightclub life, young folk pubs and the teenage girls suited them all too well! My oldest, Bob and Dee's youngest, Rudi, became especially friendly in spite of - or perhaps because of  Robert's incipient mental illness. And Max and Stuart, being closest together in age, were similarly friendly. Perhaps too much so. They were often accompanied by Stuart's friend Fraser on their Saturday (and all other) nights out. Picking fights seemed to be part of the fun. Why do you have to do that? I asked of one of my bruised warriors; because he looked at me and this girl, came the incomprehensible  response. A quite bewildering rota of girlfriends arrived at the house. I rarely knew quite whose was which if you see what I mean! The boys would sometimes go out sea fishing together - rod and line, not commercial, for by now Robert's late unlamented oyster dredger was long in the boat knacker's yard, R.I.P Kerry Jane. Dear old Culash had been sold and little Limanda had been wrecked by Dee's two rapscallions. We were now boatless so they had to borrow their fishing boat. One day they arrived home with the biggest lobster any of us had ever seen. It weighed in at some fifteen pounds, was older than all three of the boys combined and seemed not at all pleased to have become entangled in Stuart's fishing line. Of course we had no cooking vessel large enough to accommodate such a gigantic crustacean. One of them had a brainwave; we can boil (yes, that's how you cook lobsters) her (yes, all the big ones are female) in the top loader washing machine! Wonderful. The washing machine broke down and 'she' tasted like reinforced cardboard.

One thing I did share with all four of our male offpring to a greater or lesser extent was arachnaphobia. I had loathed and detested spiders since one had tickled my eleven year old bum whilst I was sitting on the toilet. One day Max announced that he had discovered a wasp nest in the attic. Quite what he was doing up there I don't know, but I have not seen my long unused golf clubs from that day to this! Anyway all five of us climbed the ladder to devise a plan for the good riddance of our unwanted boarders. Suddenly Stu shouted oh, no!! It was the biggest house spider I ever saw. We fought each other to tumble out and down the ladder, much to Joan's hilarity. She had been  watching the pantomime from her wheelchair at the bottom of the stairs. She always had been partial to that kind of banana skin joke and she didn't mind spiders. Just as well. On our first night as a married couple we had stayed in an hotel en route for London. Ready and waiting, nude on the bed and posing like some imagined Greek warrior whilst Joan divested herself of her going-away outfit, I glanced up. Directly above me was a spider on the ceiling. I moved off that bed like lightning, imploring my lady to catch the xxxxxxx thing and get rid of it. If you lose it, I said through clenched teeth, we're getting out of here. She looked at me in pity, said; don't be daft; it lives here, Bryan. It won't do you any harm. Nevertheless she did catch it and pop it out of the window. It took me several or more minutes to rediscover my amorous intent.

Hayling Island could and would have worked for us all had it not been for twenty three years old Robert's mental condition. For weeks or months he would take off for goodness knows where, funded by us of course, then arrive home often dishevelled not to say evil-smelling and unwashed, once riding a stolen motorcycle. For years we had been turning a blind eye to his mental abberation. It was Julie's husband, Rob, with his background in military medicine, who forced me to acknowledge that my beloved eldest son was suffering advanced schizophrenia. On another occasion Bob was found by alarmed policemen sleeping in a one man tent on the green just outside Buckingham Palace! Bob had a close affinity to his disabled mother and she to him. To the end of her days Joan was convinced that his schizophrenia was linked to her multipleschlerosis. But his general behaviour and his convictions about other world voice messages were getting more and more alarming. He was physically very strong indeed. One day I found myself in a hospital A&E department with several broken ribs, the result of a single one of his punches. He had never threatened Dee but she was becoming more and more terrified, never sure of when he might appear and what he might do next.

The situation was impossible. Time for more change.




* I'm not sure if I mentioned it earlier but Stuart's show-ring success with his dog Seth had inspired Julie to want a vizsla for herself! Hence our dear old Chloe, a lovely young lady animal although never a match in the show ring for her older mate. Lightning may strike twice but how very, very rarely!. In spite of our best efforts to avoid it, Chloe became pregnant to Seth and oftentimes reluctant mother to five lovely, incontinent, sandy coloured bundles of hungry energy.

What are we, who am I?

When in 1970 I needed to undergo a three day physical and mental selection procedure for sales director (manager at first) of Sweetheart International I was required to visit one Dr Ralph Arnold, a diminutive, somewhat eccentric psychologist and a leading figure in his profession. For some three hours in the morning and two more in the afternoon he sat opposite me in his London office as I underwent test after test. Example: write your signature on this paper fifty times. He clicked his stopwatch. Having done so he passed me a fresh sheet of paper with the instruction; you are right handed, now do another fifty with your left hand. Stop watch on. And so on and on and on. No explanations, no apparent rhyme or reason. Sometimes the same 'test' repeated hours later. When I met my new boss, managing director Alan Watchman and co-directors Don for production and Richard for finance I learned that we had all gone through the same somewhat harrowing selection procedures.

Months later, after we had set up the factory in Gosport and our offices in Fareham Dr Arnold came down to see us all at work. Apart from the fact that the pocket dynamo did his level best to seduce my secretary I remember that visit very well. I learned that the main purpose of his assessment was to ascertain whether we, as a team, could act as a team or whether there would likely be destructive clashes of personality. He produced a square paper divided vertically and horizontally - 'my introversion / extroversion register', he told me; Your tests are collated and result in a dot on this grid; if your dot falls at the bottom left hand corner you are an extreme introvert, top right hand corner and you are an extreme extrovert. If you are beyond this square in one way or the other you are dangerously unstable, even psychopathic. Where, he asked, do you think you are, Bryan? Now, I had always thought of myself as a thinker, an introvert, somewhat inclined to being reserved, but nevertheless I felt a salesperson should always lean towards extroversion so I put myself low down in the upper right hand quartile but near the centreof the page. He grinned. Yes, almost everyone wants to be there - it's the fear of abnormality. He put a dot near the top right. You are an almost extreme extrovert. All top sales people are somewhere up there and all of you think you're introverts, wherever you put your own dot! No, I won't tell you where your colleagues are except to say that the group of you do have the potential to operate as a team. A load of  bollocks? I don't know but what I do know is that within three years I was the only one of that carefully selected team of four still employed by the company!

Anyway it's now 1985 and for me the roof is threatening to fall in. To the outside world I am a successful, director of a profitable company which has, since its green grass beginnings fifteen years ago, wrested market leadership from all its entrenched opposition and which is now a major employer in its locality. Almost everything about Sweetheart International Ltd bears my personal thumb print. I have gained the respect both of the trade and the town. But what of me, myself, a forty one years old chain smoking, pub-going, speechifying family man - albeit with some unusual qualities, methods and habits at work and at home. In precise order I love my wife and family, Delia and her family, our boats, our dogs, nights in new cities with my team, the Highlands of Scotland, the folk in my sales office and of course England and St George. There are a few things I don't like, principally my crazy new world-travelling boss Roberto Gasparini and Margaret Thatcher, still busily closing down the heavy industries that had made our nation rich and powerful in favour of her and her husband's money-shuffling pals in The City of London.

So that's my best shot at a 1985 self-appraisal. You may recall my much, much earlier blog about how at school all we fifth formers were required to write and then have delivered 'in public' an essay - its subject, 'Myself as others see me'. I assure you this is not an easy thing to write and even less easy to hear being read out! I suppose it can never be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth because we all look in the mirror darkly, do we not? Nevertheless I tried my damnedest then and have done so again right here.

But as I say I am, in 1985, probably heading for a terminal clash with new managing director Gasparini and whoever the hell might own Sweetheart International this week, and I have a wife with advanced, untreatable multischlerosis and a son beset by rapidly escalating schizophrenia - plus of course plenty of bank borrowings. What happens, I ask myself, should be fired or relinquish my job? On the other hand I have a real and present saving grace - a secret or not so secret second family in Delia and sons. Looking back from the present I know Dee was the rock to which I clung throughout the wild waters of my life in the eighties. Had I been stronger or a more decent man I would or should have let her go and been swept away to God knows where.

I devise a plan that needs merely one of those legendary 'one mighty bounds'. First I would talk through my plan with Joan and, if she concurred, I would ask our children whether or not they can accept such a situation. The solution? I would attempt to persuade Dee to come live with us at Lee-on-Solent where she could look after my wife and our joint families. If everyone agrees and when things have settled down I will sell our house, releasing its capital and wiping out my bank borrowings before raising a mortgage with a minimum deposit on another home for us all. So very simple! But that is merely step one. Step two, I shall resign my position with Sweetheart before they fire me, for I detest and will not tolerate for long, (or they will not continue to tolerate me for much longer), the way they want to run the company. After that I'll use my trade contacts as a base from which to build my own packaging design and logistics consultancy. Step three is just a background shadow as yet, disclosed to nobody; but I shall create an opportunity to go back thirty years and begin again: I shall at long last write fiction. I think I can write stuff worth reading and I still yearn secretly to do so - hopefully for money. Oh so simple; I told you I was an optimist!

Slightly revising my plan I met our first born, Kairen, in London where she lived with husband Roger and, by that time, the first two of her children. I laid my cards on the table. I'm not sure if she said go for it, with or without great enthusiasm but she said she understood and thought it might work. Next I spoke with Joan in our living room. I need not have worried. She was always at heart the pragmatist and of course she knew me, warts and all, better than anyone in the world, even myself. Her longstanding inability to be the wife and housewife was never her fault, whereas my having taken a mistress was, if you like, my weakness. Whether she said yes or no to the plan I would abide by her decision, I told her, and meant it. That would be that. We would continue as best we were able and she, Joan, would always be my wife. There were tears but by then tears were not new to us, for as I have recorded here her life had been really and truly unkind to her, to me and to our family. Eventually she agreed to give it a go but first wanted to meet with Delia. So, before speaking with the other three of my grown up children I  sat down with Dee in a Lee-on-Solent Cafe, thoroughly expecting to have my plan rejected - killed at birth. After all, in spite of our longstanding relationship what attractive, sensible young woman would exchange her independence, her job as a legal secretary and the life she had made for herself and her boys for a man ten years older than her, a man carrying so much baggage and with with so much of doubt about his future? She heard me out in silence then looked me straight in the eyes When can I meet with Joan? she asked quietly, adding, on my own, please.

Home life and money

I guess I was never very good at that old 'money in versus money out' equation when it came to our family finances. I suppose I had the feeling of a true born optimist that my earnings would simply continue to grow as they had in the past. And besides, the bank always seemed anxious to lend me whatever I needed. (I still possess their gold credit card with its £10,000 limit, and unbelievably it is still fully active!) . So what the hell, no worries? Well, just a few. Having invested in Robert's hugely loss-making oyster dredger, MFV Kerry Jane. (Funny that- Kerry Jane does rhyme with money drain.) there was always the danger factor that comes with a commercial fishing enterprise. And of course there was the need to pay for Joan's around the clock care whenever I was required to be abroad on business and her day care when I was at work. But as to the latter it is at the same time fair and unfair to say that Stuart, our youngest and the last one left full time at home, took on board overmuch of the burden, never knowing quite what would await him when coming home from school. On one occasion, sadly it was his mother's blood.

There were quite a few capital costs at that time, for whatever Robert wanted Robert had to have according to Joan - and agreed to by myself in the false hope of a 'cure' as well as in the interests of the quiet life. We financed him not just to that fishing boat, its moorings and equipment, but to a motorcycle and then a car, both written off in very short order, and even a caravan when our eldest son decided to leave home and live with his rather lovely girlfriend. He promptly parked that caravan by the empty swimming pool at the bottom of our garden where we turned our usual blind eye to the intrusion and the happy couple's ongoing need for  provisions. Nevertheless that adventure ended when Joan told me with considerable relief and some pride that Robert and his lassie were now into self-sufficiency, for had they not started to grow tomatoes in our empty swimming pool? Yes, you've probably guessed it. For tomato plants please read 'weed'!

I do not think that my wife Joan loved Robert any more than she loved our other three. She loved, even if to a so-often restrained extreme Karen and Julie and Stuart as well. But a mother will always incline to devote an unfair portion of her time and attention to the weakest of her brood. Looking back with dispassion - and no pride at all - I realise, whether we knew it or not then, that we were in a way trying to 'buy off' Robert's incipient mental illness. In spite of his obvious intelligence his needs seemed always to be greater than those of the others, just as his mind was in regions where neither we, his parents nor they, his siblings could ever go. And the others always seemed better able than Bob to cope with things. At any rate by the mid-eighties Kairen and Julie were both married ladies with homes and children of their own. Even Stuart, who by then was often getting himself into scrapes, always seemed quite capable of getting himself out of them.

However, in spite of all, I can say in truth that family life in 45 Raynes Road, Lee-on-Solent was not by any means all doom and gloom. Quite the opposite. For instance by the mid seventies the swimming pool was in good order. I can see the children and their friends disporting themselves with much splashing and screaming down there at the bottom of the garden, Stuart climbing on to the next door neighbours' garage roof in order to dive bomb the others. I can see the henhouse I built out of old pallets and the half dozen chickens at home it it; the morning gathering of fresh eggs was a joy for all of us. And I can see Julie's pet buck rabbit, a surprisingly active creature that I had to secretly dispatch early one morning before anyone else had got up. Why? Because he was not content with playing out his sexual fantasies on the legs of anyone coming into range, but also he had fallen deeply in love with one of our chickens. That poor bird had consequently lost all of its back feathers, a great worry for the girls, even more so when I had to announce that their furry friend had escaped and had probably gone to live happily with his bunny cousins over on the Browndown wild land.

Then there was that Christmastide when Joan's parents came down from York to stay with us and I myself volunteered to cook the Christmas Day lunch. Before the usual main course of turkey and as a really special treat I started the meal with Robert's Kerry Jane-caught oysters, 'angels-on-horseback' style. By the time The Queen put in her customary TV appearance there seemed to be something pretty noxious in the air. By early evening everyone seemed unduly tired, clutching tummies, needing to retire early. And then all that long, long Christmas night one could hear the flushing of the toilets and inadequately choked back moans and groans. Never again will most if not all (except me) eat an oyster, and never again would I fail to cleanse these or any other shellfish for days at a time in buckets of water thickened with oat flakes.

If my father and/or my stepmother Julia ever ventured out of Hastings along the south coast to see us at Lee-on-Solent I cannot remember it but Joan's mother, Triphena, and her father, Ted, came south to stay on holiday with us a few times. Ted was a real character. Nobody in the family knew quite where he had come from or how or why but to judge by his accent it had to be somewhere in East Anglia. He had met Triphena when, in her early twenties, she was 'in service' at a grand house within deepest Yorkshire. The feeling was that he had been something to do with horses and the countryside. He was always studying the racing form and visiting the local bookie's and whenever we took him out on a country drive there seemed little he didn't know about the wildife, especially the parts of it that you can eat. Perhaps he had run away from a gypsy encampment having offended Romany law? we asked each other. But his wife Triphena was a genuinely strong and silent Yorkshire classic who, like her daughter, my wife, was not without an often macabre sense of humour. It was never easy for that lady bringing up four children in a three bedroom council house, virtually single handed, children who all developed into upstanding property-owning citizens. In order so to do the lady used to be out of the house at or before 06.00 cleaning the local school for miniscule pay. As I recall, at home she hardly ever seemed to sit down - but what a brilliant cook was she!

And then there was the boat(s) and fishing the salty waters of The Solent. Of course the girls had no interest in those things but myself and the boys sometimes, weather obviously permitting, took Joan out with us, launching off the Lee on Solent slipway close by Raynes Road and lifting Joan and her wheelchair aboard. But even that form of recreation faded and died as my wife's condition deteriorated, as the boys took themselves off and as I was 'encouraged' by the dear old HSBC to reduce my accumulated borrowings. Looking back on them, those times remind me of a game of musical chairs. At some point the music has to stop and in 1985 so it did.

Dee, my friend and lover since the early 70's and her boys, Max and Rudi, now in their late teens, were more of a solution for me than a problem. A kind of haven of normality. And now, in 1985, they became the solution. Read on, if you will  ...

Golden lobsters

In the late '70s and the 1980's I held monthly sales meetings. All the individuals in my sales and marketing* team were required to write up on the whiteboard their own territorial sales results for the previous month and year to date. I did the same myself because I had the overall responsibility for all sales including our very important key accounts. This results exposure could be at the same time both a painful experience and a heavy incentive. Nobody wants to self-proclaim him/herself to the rest of the team as its weakest link. I also took the opportunity to provide a necessary update on the company's technical and financial fortunes.  The monthly meetings were held in head office or hotels locally to Gosport or in hotels all around the UK. I reasoned that the cost of them, including travel, meals and hotel expenses would be similar wherever we assembled, whether it be in London, Edinburgh, Belfast, Cardiff, or any other easy to reach point in the UK - and sometimes outside it, in Europe.

Motivation ; now there's a word to cover a multitude of business costs as well as massive business benefits. My sales meetings were unashamedly motivational. A chance for one of the finest industrial sales teams in the UK to become re-fired in the company's interests and, frankly, to have some fun, entirely necessary in my opinion for guys working on their own if they were ever to be a proper team working to peak efficiency. As we all know a true team always exceeds in performance the sum total of its parts. Although I would never have admitted it, my model was the high-living, high flying Spitfire and Hurricane pilots of the Battle of Britain. A poor comparison I know, but people who take it to the required limit are never going to be the ones sitting at home of an evening reading a newspaper. So when the very serious business of the meeting had been concluded we would relax over dinner and whatever else the evening and/or the night might bring. I know for a fact that none of us will forget those sales meetings because whenever I meet with my ex-colleagues they invariably come into the conversation. Amongst my personal favourite memories was the one in Amsterdam's Kraznapolski Hotel. Late in the evening Peter Bright, who played and had brought along his trumpet, led a crocodile of us across the city centre, marching to an oft-repeated Colonel Bogey. 'Bollocks, and the same to you', we sang ... No doubt the good Dutch people crossed the streets to avoid these madmen and no doubt the bars to which we adjourned were grateful for our largesse, even tolerating our harmless musical self-entertainment. Some amongst our number did not get much in the way of sleep; but nobody, ever, was late for breakfast and all were expected to play their full part in the following day's business proceedings.

Just as in major key those boy pilots at Biggin Hill in '41 would come back to base much the worse for wear but still take off at crack of dawn to meet the enemy on high, perhaps to live another day, perhaps to die.

I said nobody (would be late), but I'm now thinking to refute my own statement, for our sales office manager, Mike Medland, after a heavy night did once turned up very late for the next day's sales meeting. After that meeting we were to embark by private coach which would be taking us all to visit our sister company in Holland. I was furious with Mike, who was a very good friend, one of my very first appointments in fact. I remember how I had asked him in the very early days to join  myself and Ted Pool to entertain Albert Sherman, the venerable and highly respected Express Dairies head buyer, to a light lunch in Fareham's Red Lion hotel. Mr Sherman was not noted for his sense of humour, nor for taking fools lightly, so the lunch had been pretty restrained until, all of a sudden Mike, who up until then had been silent, whether as a nervous reaction or as the result of too much wine leaned over the table and uttered the immortal words; night porter, send up another woman; this one's split. I thought, in despair, well there goes the biggest dairy account in the UK but to my astonishment Mike's risky out of the blue joke broke all the ice. I cannot claim it influenced everything or anything but we were very soon 'in' at Express. Anyway after Mike Medland's late arrival to that sales meeting I invited him into my office and instructed him to give me one good reason why he should be allowed to come along with us to Holland. Because I've got the ferry boat tickets, was his response. Of course I had to forgive him. That excursion is quite another story, featuring crates of brown ale being emptied before we even got to Harwich for the boat crossing and Roger Berry distinguishing himself at the hotel in Groenlo with his favourite bar-room stunt whereby he finished his drink then ate a part of the glass. Yes, bit into it, crunched it up and swallowed the shards. No illusion, I promise you. Along with a handful of others I saw him doing it - and later, on more than one occasion. By the by, I understand Roger is now managing director of a substantial company,and good luck to him; he was one of the brightest and the best.

Then there was the meeting in Edinburgh's Great Northern Hotel, the meeting where one of our number registered a particularly poor result on the whiteboard which I promptly marked with a scribbled asterisk and a stern, silent look all around. This was at a time when, for various reasons to do with yet another change in ownership and its new found ridiculous policies, the company's production was continually falling short of sales / customer needs. Morale amongst the team was correspondingly low. Then, why have you given Mark's figures the golden lobster? enquired Alex Matthewson, to some general hilarity. Indeed my asterisk did look somewhat like a lobster and yes, I had used the yellow marker pen. Because lobsters can cut off your balls, I responded. So he who props up the monthly table will from now on get the golden lobster. Of course nobody wanted one of these mythical accolades. Avoiding getting one of them got to be quite a sales incentive all by itself. In 1987 after I was fired I took the company to an Industrial Tribunal. One of the 'witnesses' for the company - one who had not been invited to attend any of  my sales meetings - told the tribunal how I had made a special award of a gold lobster to the very worst performer in sales and marketing. Much all around hilarity. Even the three judges had to laugh at the sheer improbability of the statement. And as you will see later on, I was awarded maximum damages.

There is a fine line between business expenses that are, to quote H.M. Revenue, 'wholly and necessarily incurred in the execution of the claimant's duties', (well, something like that) and expenses that are primarily incurred for one's private satisfaction. It's all about the difference between what is customer entertainment, what is self-entertainment and what is business subsistence. Having signed off my managing directors' and many dozens of other employees' expenses for some seventeen years I reckoned I could spot the differences! As for my own expense claims, they were never challenged even though my annual expenses often exceeded my annual salary. So looking back, were they always 'wholly and necessarily' incurred? No, sometimes only in part . So were they ever pure, unadulterated fiction? No again. Looking back I am convinced that I actually under-recovered the money I took out of my own bank account in the interests of the business. And furthermore I am convinced this was nobody's fault but my own.

There are many more than fifty shades of grey in this whole area of business expenses, simply because at a certain level or in certain areas in the business the claimant really is expected to be involved in the life of the company to the detriment of everything else, even his domestic life. His/her time thus belongs to the business quite possibly to an unhealthy extent. Whether the business then or now can ever return or ever repay such devotion is a matter of considerable doubt, as time here will tell. And by the way both sales and profits continued to proper throughout those early and middle 80's.

Golden lobsters played their part, no doubt.



*Industrial sales, that is, face to face promotional contact with a buyer, and industrial marketing, that is all the non-person to buyer ground between advertising, public relations, brand awareness etc - what's the difference? I accept that now, in the age of the internet, the pound spent on marketing has more value than that spent on selling but back then sales, sales influence on the product line and the maintenance of good relationships with a company's individual customers had by far the greater bearing on the 'money-in' numbers.

Anyone for libel?

Meanwhile, back int he ranch house ... by 1982 Sweetheart International had made a good, profitable recovery from the country's financial trials and tribulations. In fact all was going swimmingly apart from the seemingly constant changes in ownership and its directorate.

As I have previously written, Sir Julian Salmon had years ago sold out his initial fifty percent to Malcolm Bates, a prime City of London predator specialising in buying and 'turning around' small and medium sized privately owned companies like ours using cash-laden industrial pension fund money so to do. I parenthesised - and now italicise turning around because all too often the only beneficiary turned out to be the sleight of hand turning arounder! Those other two stakeholders, namely the company's customers and its employees, were always of minimal interest, so often emerging the worse for such 'buyouts'. Bates's second in command was one Alan Mathewman, who gave me a copy of his just published book aptly entitled The Genghis Khan Way of Business (or similar). He it was who dropped me like the proverbial hot brick after I said no to his attempts to parachute me as managing director into a struggling Yorkshire paint company. A refusal that may be difficult to comprehend in these job-hopping days, I know. Insufficiency of personal ambition? Perhaps, but I had my very disabled wife and my very able Delia to consider. Besides, having spent ten high pressure years building a manufacturing business from a green field start, and by now being the only surviving founder director, (apart from Henry Shapiro in the USA), I had developed a certain love for and a great deal of pride in 'my' company and its growing assembly of employees, most notably those in sales and marketing. Finally, in spite of all its problems my family and I had settled well into life in Lee-on-Solent. I didn't fancy exchanging it for a life in industrial Yorkshire, even though Joan was still very much my Yorkshire lass.

Nevertheless, having turned down that head-hunter approach (amongst others) I knew I had to forget about any ambition of becoming what my friend Ted Pool sarcastically asked' Bryan, what the hell you want to be; Chief Executive of the Western World or something? Nevertheless, to paraphrase Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, I have sometimes wondered whether; 'I could have been a contender'. Probably not.

My original MD, Alan Watchman, had been fired by Bates and replaced by Lionel Klackan, ex of Lyons Maid, the ice cream company. I asked the visiting Americans why they had not put me in charge, for I was generally seen as deputy to the incumbent managing director. Mort Gilden gave me a response, at first enigmatic; We wanted someone to come behind you turning off the lights, Bryan. The implication being that I had been coming up with bright ideas and that mysterious element called leadership but that I was not good enough at controlling the costs arising. Totally unjustified of course! Anyway I got on very well with Lionel, an extremely clever man even if one never emotionally attached to the company and one who never did move domestically to the Gosport area, preferring his veritable mansion on St George's Hill, Weybridge. Perhaps he sensed that the occupants of this Sweetheart International seat would always have a limited shelf-life. Certainly I saw whole succession of manufacturing and financial directors come and go as well as these bosses. I will though, say this; having worked in close quarters with everybody inside and connected to the company since its inception, the original directorate, had it been allowed to stay together, would have resulted in a much bigger and better and more profitable company than the one I finally left - or who finally left me - in 1987. As sizeable and profitable as it was at that time.

This all-too-destructive hire and fire philosophy succeeded in implanting in me serious doubts about my nation's Thatcher-inspired industrial destruction in favour of her soon to be de-regulated City of London. How, I wondered, could anyone, greengrocer's daughter or not, fail to see that the only long term source of my country's financial wellbeing lay - past, present and future - in the invention and manufacturing of things? Instead she handed over the keys of the nation's treasury to the sharp-suited 'City of London' and then spent the rest of her tortured life (and ours to date) wondering why they wanted to rob us blind with perfect impunity. This was the beginning of my slowly hardening conviction that both Westminster and The City were (and very much still are) in urgent need of radical reform.

Anyway it was now Lionel's turn to be parachuted out of Sweetheart International. The man coming in as MD was one Mike Townsend, previously head buyer of one of our larger customers, Express Dairies. This appointment made zero sense to me or,  I suspect, to anyone else bar Mr Bates and Mr Townsend. I'm not going to dwell on this. Mike was a perfectly good man but one without the necessary abilities to lead and direct the operations of a company now well into eight figures of sales and seven figures of profit, a company that had built itself a beautiful new factory in Gosport together with extensive new offices and warehousing. Mike had never been anywhere this close to the industrial pit-face. Suffice to say that when the City powers-to-be decided his time was up they made a special journey to his hospital bedside in order to 'let him go'. He was suffering an agony of spinal pain at the time. Nice people!

By the mid-eighties the Wall Street vultures were circling over everything in sight, even over the Shapiro brothers' mighty Maryland Cup Corporation, by then a publicly owned U.S. Corporation and still the owner of half of Sweetheart International. One had a distinct sense that the roof was about to fall in on fifteen years and all the fears and tears of our Gosport endeavour. Although I do not remember feeling it too much at the time, looking back I must have been under a great deal of stress. In spite of my high earnings my bank account was for ever in the red and Joan's condition was deteriorating steadily, now requiring round the clock care. That placed a great strain on the rest of the family - both those still (on and off) at home and those now living their own family lives away from Gosport. To add to the generally surrounding unease Bates sold out to another and even bloodier financial entity headed by one Bill Fieldhouse with his deputy - then our brand new MD, the accursed Roberto Gasparini, a man of nil morality and a business intelligence straight out of Harvard and Pampers. He/they should have stayed in baby nappies and kept out of my bloody sight.

One day I asked to meet Chairman Fieldhouse and went up to the City so to do. That was a lunch which might have been orchestrated by Salvador Dali. My host started off on a long and rambling yarn about how he, as a teenager in backstreet Manchester, used to see his mother unlocking the front room door whenever visitors appeared. The room had one of those picture rails running all around, on it rows of ceramic plates. Mother, why put t' plates on t' picture rail, asked Bill, verbalising what the guests were thinking, he told me. Because it gives folk summut t' think about, responded mother. Bewildered but unbowed  I moved on to the reason for my request for the meeting but his answers were so vague, so arrogant, so uncaring and so convoluted that I might as well have been addressing him in the secure ward of a mental hospital. Nevertheless he can't have been as stupid as he had sounded for when we returned to his elegant offices I could not help noticing the four original Lowry paintings of the industrial north, each of them with their scurrying stick figures, I knew, worth six figures and up.

In 1985 Maryland Cup Corp, together with all we little fishes, was bought out in the States first by the bog roll company, Fort Howard, and all too soon after that Fort Howard itself together with its eccentric founder, Paul Schirl fell to a pair of financial whizz kids operating under the wing of that thrice accursed merchant bank, Morgan Stanley. In the next episode I'll tell you about this, and about The Last Supper - one that all present will never forget.

Anyone for libel?

Family affairs

I closed the previous episode with an  account of how, one Saturday afternoon in, I think, 1982, I instantly recognised my mother's unintroduced voice on the telephone - having last heard it in 1944 when I was aged just ten! I have tried to keep these memoirs as closely as possible to their chronological order but here I'm going to fast forward for a moment to 1993, when mother lay dying in a Milton Keynes hospital and I was returning from another trip to the USA. I remember that flight, one of those 'redeyes' from Chicago that discharge you into a mostly deserted, often rainy Heathrow with most of the UK happy to be still fast asleep. I remember it because, with all the aircraft lights turned low and sounds only of  the drone of engines and sleeping people, I wrote my very first little verse since leaving school. This is it ... so far as I know seen until now only by mother and the other folk in her hospital ward ...



To my mother
So many fine things, fine mornings.Long evenings, beauty, new thingsAnd the many kinds of earthly loveThat through our trials live onNow and forever in the stars aboveAnd never from my memory truly gone.
With my loveYour son, Bryan21 April 1993.

My beautiful mother Marie was the daughter of General of the Salvation Army, Albert Osborn  and Captain of the Salvation Army, Evalina. Their pictures from Wikipedia are below; probably taken around 1915 ... I think Evalina was my grandmother but cannot be quite certain for the General had three wives, (consecutively!) outliving them all. Albert and Evalina's daughter Marie had six or seven siblings. I don't know just how many. My father Eddie Islip had also been born into a strongly Salvationist family although these, my paternal grandparents, were unpaid Salvationists. In 1932 my sister Shirley was born to Marie and Eddie, followed by myself in 1934 and then my sisters Tina and Maureen.(Father told me that although I, Shirley and Maureen were 'his', my sister Tina was not his.) I retain two versions of my parents life together before and during WW2; the version with which I grew up through my teens as told by father and the version as told in female confidence mainly to my wives Joan and Dee by my mother. We would all like to re-write parts of our history, would we not? (Please note I'm trying my best not so to do right here!) According to father my mother was a bit of a spendthrift, well addicted to a fast social life and men in general. According to mother my father was a tyrant and a bully, partial to masochistic sex, the result of being brought up alongside his two sisters by a subserviant mother and a father who frequently made him stand for hours, for the most minor of offences in the corner of the room facing the walls. However, it seems that father as a young man was presented by grandfather Islip (who had made large profits through building works in WW1) with his own building business, which unfortunately went into liquidation in the late 30's. According to father, his partner had defaulted and defected with all the loot. At any rate, father was not forgiven for losing the money.

When grandfather Islip lay on his Hastings deathbed (lung cancer) his doctor summoned all three of the children. The last will and testament was read out. My aunties Kay and Peggy were to split the estate between them and father got - nothing! He had, I was told my grandfather declared, already had - and had wasted his share! Afterwards the doctor urged the three of them to say their goodbyes then go wait in the living room. Ten minutes later doctor brought them back. Grandfather was dead. Very soon afterwards grandmother Islip also left this mortal coil. But looking back it does seem odd to me that their three children, brought up in such a strongly moralistic tradition, each had to suffer at least one divorce.And I do mean suffer. Divorce must rank as one of the most painful of self-inflicted wounds.

Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. Probably my very first memory at five years of age, all the family sitting around the radio in our Chigwell, (northern suburbs of London) house. I hear still the sad and sonorous voice of Prime Minister Chamberlain: ... No such response has been received and therefore this country is at war with Germany ...  This sounds like a lot of guns and jolly good fun, I thought.

By that time father had used his masonic contacts to secure a position as a quantity surveyor in Whitehall's 'Ministry '(of War, as it became). He was therefore exempt from military service, being required to help manage the building of wartime airfields and encampments. One of his sites was Burtonwood in Lancashire and it was to this area, in Walton-le-Dale, that the family migrated soon after the outbreak of the war proper. I don't think mother appreciated the move away from the bright lights of London town. At any rate her relationship with father soon descended into that well-remembered emotionally disturbing shouting v silence match. Eventually mother embarked on an affair with one Walter Smith, a plumber and sergeant in the platoon of Home Guards commanded by father. I remember this man very well, for after doing some work in our attic he curried favour with this particular nine year old by presenting him with the most beautiful object I had ever seen: the egg of a starling in the purest of azure blue. The beginning of a lifelong interest in wild birds (and their eggs as a boy, before birds nesting was made illegal.)

Late in 1944 came the split. Mother went off with Mr Smith, taking Tina and Maureen with her by rule of the courts which had allocated my elder sister Shirley and myself to father. So this bewildered duo were entrained, unaccompanied, to London. My final memory for the following forty odd years of a beautiful mother who I adored and who loved me was of her waving and weeping on the platform as the train pulled away from Preston railway station. Father had a house in Pimlico opposite the famous / infamous Dolphin Square on the banks of the river Thames, but Shirley and I were at once sent off to our respective prep (boarding) schools in Abingdon, Berkshire. I have no idea whether father had already begun his own love affair with one of the Ministry typists, Julia Wicksteed. I suspect that was the case. In any event Julia became my stepmother. Regrettably I could never find it in myself to do very much more than tolerate her presence, especially throughout my troubled teens. She died in the 90's (in her seventies) in a Hastings Nursing Home.

I am not about to allocate blame for this chaotic dissolution of a family but I most surely can advocate the state of lifetime monogamy ... In my own, deeply held view the sins of the fathers etc should never be visited upon their progeny, whatever happens outside of their marriage. Perhaps these views - yes, very much unpopular according to latter day lore - can at least in part be attributed to my paternal grandfather. According to father the family only discovered after his death that their father had for many years supported a second, secret, family throughout most of his adult life. Yet grandmother and grandfather lived and died together - it seems to me quite responsibly and even happily -well  into their eighties. How about your own conduct? you may well be thinking. I can only respond that I honoured and would always have honoured my marriage vows, come what may, 'til death did part either myself or my wife.

As I say, in or around 1982 mother made a truly shocking contact with me and mine. I arranged to go to see her. To my (and father's) amazement it turned out that she had been living, albeit in very reduced circumstance within half a mile of father's sea-front apartment - where he had been living for some twenty years with his second wife, Julia. I tried, perhaps half heartedly, to bring about a rapprochement between my parents but that didn't work. You do try to stay away from fire once you have suffered a burning, do you not? But I am glad that my children had the chance of a contact, even if only a scanty one, with their grandmother - and ditto with a grandfather who could find it in himself to give them so little of his time as they grew into adulthood.

The games of life.

Probably through the Pot Black TV series and the exploits of the so-called Ginger Magician (young Steve Davis), in the late seventies, I'd become interested in playing and watching the game of snooker. With a couple of work colleagues I joined the 147 snooker club in downtown Gosport. Then Stuart told me he'd like to learn how to play the game so I enrolled him into the club's Saturday morning instruction course. Hearing about this, our twenty years old daughter Julie, home again after a lengthy stay with Joan's people in York, decided to make a personal stand against sexism. She wanted to learn to play snooker as well! In vain I told her that snooker clubs were not necessarily a suitable world for attractive young ladies, so one Saturday morning in 1979 there she was, alongside Stu, under instruction in front of a crowd of more than interested club members. She loved the attention and furthermore displayed a degree of natural ability to actually play the game - play it better than Stuart, I might add.

From there on Julie got herself into snooker big time. She became ultra focussed on it, constantly playing matches against good male amateurs and other top ladies in social clubs, political clubs and working men's clubs all around the country. Having said that, I remember that many of the working men's clubs and Conservative clubs in those days (maybe still today) had rules prohibiting a woman from playing on their snooker tables - and in some cases even from entering theclub's door! Notwithstanding that, in common with a handful of other young women our Julie 'turned pro' and acquired a manager. I think it would have been in 1980 or 81 when her big opportunity arrived. She was to partner Tony Meo, one of the top male players in a doubles match against world champion Steve Davis and the then world ladies champion, whose name I cannot right now bring to mind. The match was televised live on ITV from a large sports hall in Clacton just prior to that year's football Cup Final. Joan and I went to watch. Julie looked so beautiful in her black and white man's type evening suit and frilly shirt and how proud we were to see her pot the first ever televised snooker ball by a female. (But then of course Steve took over and cleared the table, as was his wont in those days.) After the match Joan and I were introduced to Barry Hearn, well known sports promoter and Steve Davis's manager and friend. The first woman able to play and win against these top men, he pronounced, will be an overnight millionaire.
 
I could understand that, especially as snooker's massive TV audiences were at least fifty percent female. There seemed no physical reason why a female exponent of the game should not emerge but the fact is that it didn't happen then and hasn't happened to this very day. My own theory is that the ladies just do not have the necessary focus - that mysterious winning drive / mind-set - to apply themselves either on the table or for the necessarily boring hours and hours and hours of daily practice. Perhaps it is that Mother Nature equips we males to hunt and compete and fight and equips the female of our species to attract, procreate and defend. If that's sexist (whatever sexist is) I'm sorry, but if you have a better explanation please do let me know. Please - no guff about 'opportunity'. We all - of both genders - have the opportunity to do with our lives what we will, then to try again and again even when our ultimate failure becomes depressingly obvious or our goal gets to seem ridiculously irrelevant.

Julie went on to marry an ex-Royal Navy guy, a highly rated snooker amateur; a bright enough guy but one always on the lookout for money making schemes requiring little actual work input! They managed to buy a snooker club in Nottingham but sold that in favour of buying another one in the East Anglian town of  Swaffham, providing us in the meantime with two more grandsons to add, by then, to Kairen and Roger's three girls and a boy. Fortunately Kairen's marriage was as happy and solid as Julie's was the exact opposite.

Back at home, Stu and his lovely vizsla Seth continued to provide Joan and I with a much needed antidote to her slowly degrading MS. Although she was permanently wheelchair bound we managed to take boy and dog to major dog shows all over the country: Leeds, Peterborough, Builth Wells, Bath, Birmingham and even as far north as Edinburgh spring to mind. Oh, and Crufts of course, at Earls Court in London and then the NEC in Birmingham. But perhaps my own favourite memory is of Stu/Seth coming reserve best in show at Southampton. I still have the clipping from Dog World ... This combination of Russetmantle Seth and his young handler has to be seen to be believed, it reads. When Stu eventually left home to go commercial fishing down in Cornwall I had to show the dog myself at what turned out to be his final Crufts. What a let down! Seth moped around the ring, unresponsive and disinterested. End of that chapter.

I want to end this particular blog with a record, as near verbatim as I can manage, of a telephone conversation that took place one Saturday afternoon in our house at 45 Raynes Road, Lee-on-Solent.  I picked up the ringing telephone ... before I could say anything came the voice of a female; Hello Bryan. Hello, mother, I responded. I hadn't had to think, for I had somehow at once recognised the voice of my mother, Marie, last seen and heard from when I was eleven years old.

Yes, this is the unadorned truth, like all else in these memoirs of mine There are some truths in my life that I shall never write about, but the ones I do write about are indeed the truth as best I recall them! More about mother (and father) later.

p.s. Apropos the latter, someone asked me why  I do these blogs, after all the life of a non-celebrity is of truly minimal interest. I referred them to Ernest Hemingway's response when a budding young author asked him for his advice. Hemingway said, simply; So you are a writer? So write!