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By Root 381 0

and they worked their hardest to provide a home for me and my brother Stanley, who was born two and a half years after me. Dad was part gypsy. Two branches of the family – the O’Neills and the Callaghans (two women with the names of O’Neill and Callaghan appear as signatures on my birth certificate) – came from Ireland originally and the reason they ended up at the Elephant was because there was a big horse repository there and they came over to sell horses. Dad didn’t follow that line of business, he worked as a porter in London’s Billingsgate fish market – as generations of Micklewhite men had done before him for hundreds of years. He’d get up at four in the morning and spend his next eight hours heaving crates of iced fish about. He didn’t like the job but although he was a very intelligent man, he was completely uneducated and manual labour was the only choice he had. Jobs at Billingsgate were highly prized and it was a real closed shop – you could only get in if a member of your family was already working there. Dad told me once with some pride that when I grew up he could get me a job there with no problem. I didn’t want to tell him it would be over my dead body.

Dad may not have been educated but he was one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever known. He built his own radio from scratch and he read biographies all the time – he was very interested in the lives of real people. He died when I was only twenty-two so I never really got to know him as an adult, but we were very good friends and he was my hero. My mother always used to burst into tears at Christmas just looking at me and she’d say, ‘You are your father, aren’t you?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, I am.’ My whole character is based on him: he was a tough bugger, like me. When I look back at his life, what strikes me is the waste of talent – not just his, but the generations of his family and families like his – on manual unskilled labour. And although I know how much better it is now, that kids like my dad at least get a chance to go to school and have the opportunity to learn, I still feel we’re failing a whole group of people who just don’t fit into the educational mould. I should know – I didn’t either.

Back then, Dad was part of a whole generation of working men who didn’t think anyone or anything could help them; they were just trying to make the best living they could for themselves and their families. I was born right in the middle of the Depression and everyone was just trying to survive. Although Dad read the papers every day, I don’t remember him ever discussing politics and he was certainly not a member of a union or a militant in any sense. In fact he didn’t vote at all. He regarded himself as outside the system completely and although he lived through the founding of the welfare state, and the NHS and the 1944 Education Act – all social policies designed to help the working class – his attitude was still that no one could help him but himself. He was socially disgruntled and a sense of this ran through everything he did. He had a relay wireless subscription, for instance, for which he paid two shillings and sixpence a week, when he could have bought a wireless set for £5. Over the years he probably spent £100 on that relay wireless, but he just couldn’t make the leap of faith and invest in something that would have saved him money.

One of the proudest moments of my life was seeing my daughter Natasha graduate from Manchester University. She was the first member of our family to go to university – and for her children, my grandchildren, it will be a normal thing. Even though he was from a generation that didn’t show a whole lot of emotion, I know my dad would have been so proud. He would have loved every minute.

Years after my father’s death and in another world, I went to the birthday party of the son of my friend Wafic Saïd, the international business tycoon and founder of the Saïd Business School at Oxford University. It was held in a big modern banqueting hall, which just happened once to have been Billingsgate fish market. As I sat there, sipping