Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Oily type and crepe soles
My elder brother was separated from me by the vast chasm of the Second World War and by the even vaster abyss of years. My father did not treat him well. He became an apprentice printer with the local paper. We shared a bedroom for a while. He was no teddy boy but wanted to be one and his winklepickers and crepe soled shoes could be seen lined up on under a table on the bedroom floor. Metal type often coated with oil lay on the table and I , at the age of eight, was as intrigued by the type as by the shoes.
For my brother, the indignities of adolescence and an unloving father were supplemented by pirea which led to the early loss of his teeth. He appeared to put up with this with a silent determination and to wish to flee our family as soon as he could. He often, in the early evening, put his head around the door of the room where we were sitting and mumbled "going out". He eventually found a girl in the Brighton dance halls and they got married. He moved out with the marriage.
After his stint at the local paper, he got a job with the Polish language daily. He never learnt Polish but was able to immediately spot an error in the text of the typesetting. With the ageing of the exile community and the increasing anglicisation of the second and third generations the demand for the paper fell; this was before the second great wave of Poles. The company had to "let him go". He worked for a while stacking shelves in a supermarket, and the indignity of such a skilled worker being ordered about by some acned upstart must have been immense. His first wife had left him, and his second wife, a nurse, is now in the advanced stages of a degenerative disease.
It's a long time since I have seen my brother. I often wear a pair of crepe soled shoes that are a facsimile of the ones that lay under the bedroom table.
