What do Characters Bring to the Party?

When Linda and I were courting, we had a small teddy bear called Harold, who was a sort of substitute child, and very much our mascot. He accompanied us almost everywhere, including on foreign holidays, and to Ipswich Town matches, where he sported a little blue and white scarf. One year for my birthday, Linda’s sister Margaret sent me a larger teddy bear, dressed in a leather jacket, goggles and flying helmet (the bear, not Margaret), who was apparently Harold’s Uncle Ginger.

Between Margaret, Linda and myself, we invented a back-story for Uncle Ginger, as an RAF veteran of No. 43 Squadron, ‘The Fighting Cocks’. Uncle Ginger’s wartime career included a lot of bailing out of his crate as it plummeted into the North Sea or the English Channel. He had a circle of friends, fellow-veterans of The Fighting Cocks, with whom he had various adventures as old geezers in Civvy Street. On one occasion, they had a narrow-boat holiday on the Bedford Levels, and each member of the squadron brought as provisions a bottle of whisky and a packet of cream crackers, so that was their diet for the week.

There are many literary Uncle Gingers, larger than life, candid to the point of offensiveness, but likeable nevertheless. Here is a little list of those who come to mind immediately:

·         Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb, a loose cannon intelligence spook, continually overeating, burping and farting, while maintaining a fatherly eye on the misfits under his command;

·         Aunt Dahlia in PG Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster stories;

·         The immortal Horace Rumpole of the Bailey, John Mortimer’s brilliant creation;

·         Mrs Bradley, the Home Office sleuth in Gladys Mitchell’s quirky crime novels, portrayed on television with great brio by the late Dame Diana Rigg;

·         Sebastian Dangerfield, JP Donleavy’s Ginger Man (the Ginger bit is purely coincidence);

·         John Dickson Carr’s amateur detective Dr Fell;

·         Compton Mackenzie’s Donald Mc Donald of Ben Nevis, Monarch of the Glen, mentioned in a previous blog;

·         Heaven knows how many Dickens characters, but most notably Mister Micawber and Aunt Betsy Trotwood from David Copperfield.

In my life I have known a few Uncle Gingers, characters held in considerable affection despite notable eccentricities. One such was Bill Adams. After my MSc, I managed to hook a two-year job in the Medical Computing and Statistics Unit in Edinburgh Medical School, from October 1979 to September 1981. Bill was one of my colleagues there. He must have been in his fifties then, a great bear of a Scotsman with a full beard, a bit like a Scottish Brian Blessed. He would bring his dog to work with him, and smoke a pipe loaded with what smelt like a burning heathrug. He shared an office with two other people, but because of the pipe, they seemed always to have reasons for being elsewhere, at meetings or using a particular computer terminal in an office across the road. The dog sat peacefully beside his master’s desk, tolerating the pipe-smoke and hero-worshipping Bill.

Bill was robust and frank in his conversation, and other colleagues sometimes wondered what he actually brought to the party. He didn’t publish much, then as now a common measure of a university researcher’s productivity. It was said that the head of the unit, Walter Lutz, was loyal to him because Bill had weighed in on Walter’s side in some long-past administrative dispute in the medical school.

Bill was extremely well-read and erudite, despite his robust turn of phrase. I remember him rather neatly summing up Evelyn Waugh as an author: ‘A great writer but a bastard.’ He could consume the most terrifying amounts of alcohol without the slightest change in his manner, speech or movements. I can remember going for a quick pint with him and his dog after work, and making my way home through the Edinburgh streets in a shell-shocked condition three hours later, with the wall continually jumping out and hitting me on the arm.

Much closer to home are three specific characters. One is my oldest brother John, aka Father Jack (you would understand the nickname if you met him). John is a statistical scientist of some brilliance, whose career should have been crowned with very high office, and would have been if he had shown less honesty and more diplomacy. He has a great capacity for practical jokes and clever insights. As a child, you couldn’t believe in Santa Claus with John as your brother, as he had pointed out the Christmas presents on top of the wardrobe on December 15^th. He was a senior trade union officer and was known for his practical jokes, telephoning the union’s office and pretending to be the principal of the University or the president of the union, expertly mimicking accents and habits of speech. This led to some embarrassment when on occasion the real principal or president would phone up and be told, ‘Come off it John, what do you want, now?’

Another, as you might imagine from previous blogs is my dad, but I will save anecdotes about him for a future blog. Instead, I should say that my mum was quite a character herself. To my lifelong regret, I was always bickering with her, despite us being similar types.

She could have a sharp sense of humour. On the occasion of a family get-together one Christmas about thirty years ago, one of the Duffy family reunions that didn’t end in a fight, we were sitting around after a pleasant Boxing Day dinner and idly thinking about the wine that we were still guzzling. Somebody mentioned the fact that Gewurtztraminer was well-established as smelling of lychees, and a red wine whose name I can’t remember was credited with smelling and tasting like black forest gateau. Someone remarked on the flowery descriptions of the taste and smell of wines given by a wine buff often seen on the television. I don’t recall her name, but she had hair like a burst sofa, and looked and sounded as if one day as a child she had put her finger in a live light bulb socket and had never fully recovered from the experience. One of us was trying to remember her description of the bouquet with which the particular white wine on the table was credited, and our Aged Parent suggested, ‘Underpants drying on a radiator?’

Mum had a complete inability to keep to herself whatever judgements or opinions were on her mind, and she could be hilariously snide at times. On one occasion, she and my sister-in-law Elaine decided to look around the show house of a newly built housing scheme, just to pass the time. The show house was pleasant enough and included a large, stand-alone upstairs bathroom and toilet, an ensuite in the master bedroom and a small downstairs toilet. On the way out, my mum remarked to the curator of the place, ‘This would be a handy house to have the diarrhoea in.’