Treasure Island

Long John Silver, pieces of eight, Blind Pugh and the Black Spot! My father loved telling the tale of Treasure Island. In later life he’d call out, in his lusty Pirate Voice, in the middle of a conversation, apropos nothing, “I likes the young’uns for the cut of their jib. But I likes the old’uns for their experience!”

And then he’d fall about laughing. You had to be a Long John Silver aficionado to get it.

And then, the thrill of terror I felt, when Dad explained what the Black Spot was. Imagine being handed a big black spot on a ripped and rum stained paper. Billy Bones, your days are numbered, is what it meant. You were marked to be the next to die by foul means. You’d failed to guard the treasure or maybe you’d run off with it.

I can hear my Dad now, singing the pirate song,

“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,”

(chorus shouted) “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

Drink and the devil have done for the rest.”

More yo ho ho-ing. With some parrot squawking noises.

How did Long John manage to scarper around the decks with his wooden leg going bang, bang, bang, I would wonder. It must have been a sad day when the cannon ball tore his leg off at the knee but at least he got his wooden one.

Dad would grasp my shoulder tight, in what he'd call his vice-like grip, and in his Long John Silver voice he would shout in my ear, “Ahh, Jim me lad!” A reference of course to Jim Hawkins, the hero lad of the story. Dad wasn’t the expressive sort but I understood that was just his way of acknowledging my presence in his life. Didn’t Long John Silver have to depend on young Jim to save both their skins? And look what happened! All the pirates were cast adrift and marooned on Treasure Island, except for Long John Silver. He was taken aboard with Jim Hawkins, decent Squire Trelawney and true blue Captain Smollet, the sailor crew, and of course the newly discovered treasure!

My father never mentioned that he’d like to have been a pirate, but often remarked he’d like to be a wild man, like in the Tarzan story, and live in a wood, far from civilisation. Another alter ego was Toad in Toad of Toad Hall. But it was Long John Silver and Treasure Island, his one and only.

Now what did happen to Long John in the end? Well, he managed to steal some of the treasure on board, (and probably the rum), abandon Captain Smollet’s ship, and sail off somewhere- never to be seen again. Free at last!

In the war, (Second one), my father was a paratrooper, dropped from the skies behind enemy lines into the jungles of countries that were then named Burma and Malaya. His job was transmitting the enemy's location by morse code to the War Office in London. He was also in India, where he was almost court martialled (details on that are scanty) - but represented himself in court and got off; in Egypt where serendipitously, he found his elder brother wounded in the army hospital; in Palestine where he was stabbed in the leg through an artery and only just survived, and in Italy.

He never spoke about the war, reminding me of the song from the show Oh What a Lovely War that goes like this:

And when they asked us,

How dangerous it was.

Oh! We'll never tell them,

No, we'll never tell them.

We spent our pay in some cafe.

And fought wild women night and day,

T'was the cushiest job we ever had

Yet in his old age, some horror stories trickled out. The war gave him a life-long love of the Italian language which he continued to study, and a life-long abhorrence of violence and the immorality of war.

Trauma from his abusive father had been followed by the trauma of war. He looked like a skeleton in the pictures of when he was demobbed. He had left for war at age 18 and came back at 24. A man who had experienced more than I can ever imagine. When his wife was dying he said to me, “I’m not afraid. I’ve seen so many dead people.”

My father had quite an appetite for alcoholic beverages, a fervent alcoholic in complete denial. Just before he died he said to me, “I think I could be and alcoholic.” Bit late, I thought to myself.

How was I, a child, to bond with my father who was usually in the pub or drunk? He was perplexed by me and disciplined me as if I was one of his privates. He could be cruel. Yet inside him there was another man who sometimes I saw, who was funny and charming, sentimental, and deeply troubled. Before he died he tried his best, in the ways he knew how, to make it up to me. As an old man he would still put his vice-like grip on my shoulder and he would say, “Ahh, Jim me lad!” And that's how I knew he really did love me.