Paul Gorman is…

The Old Man: Philip “Staff” Gorman (April 25, 1903 – June 8, 1980)

AFG, PDG, Margaret Barrett (later Roditi), Billy Craigan, March 2 1940 copy

//My father in uniform on his wedding day, March 2, 1940, north London//

“Bad thing for a young man to lose his father” Charles Cheeryble, Nicholas Nickleby

My father died 35 years ago today.

I was 20 at the time, and witnessed him take his final breath. The narrow world of music and clothes I inhabited was preoccupied with Ian Curtis’s recent suicide; given the fact that my father had been diagnosed with cancer four years previously and spent the last 18 months on earth hospitalised and fighting like a bastard for his life, I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. PiL’s Death Disco was much more my speed.

Philip Denis Gorman was born an Edwardian in Primrose Hill, north London, in the spring of 1903 (the date on his birth certificate which we celebrated annually may or may not have been accurate because the registration forms were completed incorrectly, it seems). His birth is registered to a crowded flat in what is now chi-chi Regents Park Road, then an immigrant enclave. Four of his siblings died in infancy and two were killed (aged 17 and 19) in the Great War.

That left eight brothers and sisters. The Gormans, my brother Michael has written, were “working class London Irish tribal Catholics”. There were a whole bunch of them, mainly chauffeurs and in the motor trade. Life centred on the family home (in Wildwood Grove, Hampstead), my grandmother Mary, known as Maggie, and the saloon of the Hare & Hounds (my Dad christened subsequent locals “Maggie’s Bar”).

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//With me, north London, 1960//

Even by the standards of the extraordinary pace of change in the 20th century, my Dad’s was a remarkable life. At the time of meeting my mother, he was a 37-year-old career soldier who had been stationed for long periods in far-off India, Hong Kong and Singapore. He had also achieved the status of Staff Sergeant which granted him a lifelong nickname: my mother called him “Staff” till the end.

Fifteen years his junior, my mother owned a tea-shop off North End Way by Hampstead Heath when they met. The newly married couple were lucky not have been at home in the flat above it on the night it was destroyed by a German bomb in October 1940. Pausing for the birth of my eldest brother, my Dad was then engaged in the war effort, mainly in North Africa as a Desert Rat, where he fought Rommel’s forces with Monty and the Eighth Army at El Alamein, for which he was decorated.

Life was hard on landing in Civvy Street in 1946. The economic turmoil of the period was mirrored in family life – by 1952 (when, I was later told, he suffered a crisis and refused to rise from his bed for days on end) he and my strong-willed mother had four more children to add to the financial pressure.

They steeled themselves and set to it; by the time I turned up he was a net curtain salesman for Dapley & Co of Smithfield, London EC. He became known to us as The Old Man, part in mocking acknowledgement of the fact that he was much older than the parents of my contemporaries; 56 at my birth, my Dad’s voice summoned another era. It was well-modulated, old London and replete with Cockney and military slang: tea was “char”, money was “faloose”. His favoured phrase for me was: “What’s your game, Tiger?”

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//Flicking a V-sign with my Uncle Pat, Devon, 1964//

That my mother’s voice was unusual was a discovery awaiting me when I first went to school. “Your mum talks funny!” cried the other kids in the days when disability was openly ridiculed. Her cleft palate – for which she had been operated upon painfully in her youth – marked her out, though her strict and economic enunciation imposed a harsh metallic ring which was commanding and did not invite pity. It is said that my Dad once knocked a man out with a single punch at a bus-stop in Finchley. Unwisely, this fellow had cruelly imitated my Mother’s voice in his presence.

My dad was tough; wiry and athletic but actually a gentle man, always a kidder. He didn’t talk about his wartime experiences and his demeanour precluded direct questioning.  I speculate often about his emotional history and wonder if this is why I have spent so many years inquiring into the lives of others.

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//With me and our dog Charlie on holiday in Essex, 1966//

I was blessed to have him as a father, and not just because his life, more than most I know, expressed the randomness of contemporary existence. He survived infancy unlike several siblings. Had he been born a few years earlier he would have been conscripted for action in the First World War and probably perished along with his brothers. He was not at home on the occasion Ye Olde Corner Shoppe was obliterated during the Blitz, and was not among the thousands of his comrades seriously injured and killed at the battles of El Alamein.

He fought his own depression and the widespread post-war malaise, raised a family of six, maintained a marriage through sometimes thick and more often thin over four decades and even enjoyed some of the freedoms of the 1960s and 70s, sun-seeking on holidays abroad, letting his hair grow a little long and singing to tunes on the car radio, particularly to silly ones which recalled the music hall of his youth, such as Lily The Pink by The Scaffold.

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//He loved the sun. On the Algarve, 1974//

These days I derive pleasure from seeing The Old Man in my dreams. The next time I do I’ll take the opportunity to try and obtain some answers to the many questions I have to ask, but I expect this canny, sly-humoured gentleman will smile and say: “What’s your game, Tiger?” And that’s alright by me.

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