Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

My dad could always make us kids laugh when he put on a Liverpudlian accent, pretending to be one of the Beatles. While Liverpool was only forty odd miles to the south of his hometown of Preston, Lancs, the Liverpool dialect was  slightly  different from the way he grew up speaking. These days they know Liverpudlian as 'scouse', a dialect influenced by the Scandinavian as well as an Irish and Scots influx of workers via the Liverpool seaport. My dad didn't have that terminology; he just called it 'thick'. Thick it is, almost like you've got a cold or something nasty stuck in your throat.  He had left home at seventeen, left England even, escaped to Egypt. Time and distance, and a bit of a determined effort on his part to sound more cosmopolitan had softened the way he spoke, erased his broad north country accent, replaced it with something more elegantly BBC-ish British.  Now, our dad warned in a long-distance phone call, when my sister and I, at ...

Happy Birthday Dad! Gosh, you're looking as handsome as ever. I always did think you looked like a movie star and here you are in this sepia tint print as suave and debonair as David Niven. An officer and a gentleman, immortalized at age 26. Twenty six! Don't be offended if I say you looked older, that's the way it was back then.  It's only these days, with fewer responsibilities on our shoulders, that we try to look like kids for as long as possible.  You left home in England at seventeen, lived in Egypt, danced the night away in Alexandria and told us you tried 'hashish' in an Egyptian bath but didn't feel a thing. We didn't believe you, by the way, you know that right? By the time you enlisted to fight for England in World War II you spoke Arabic, French and Italian fluently. Imagine! A boy from Preston in the North of England teaching himself to speak Arabic. No wonder you served in the North African campaign.  You'd be 102 today, if ...

Edward Good 1915-1992 Weird how things creep up on you. I was thinking about David Bowie, dying at sixty-nine. Sixty-nine seems young when you yourself are sixty-three. Then it hit me that my dad was seventy-six when he died and that it was twenty-four years ago today that I was in a hospital room in Sherman Oaks, California with my brother and sister and our mother, waiting for my dad to die. I’ve written about my dad a fair bit but I still haven ’ t quite hit that day yet, my sister throwing herself on our father ’s  body when they pronounced him dead, my own throat rough and raw with the ache of a   thousand smoked cigarettes. But I did write a short memorial to him a couple of years ago. Swept Away I thought he was God. Or Robert Young on Father Knows Best. Take your pick. Except that in my eyes my father was even more glamorous than Robert Young. I didn't know about God. He and my mother met at the tail end of World War II when he was home on leave in E...