Although my mum told me grandfather worked for the Post Office, I found it difficult to imagine him in a postman’s uniform, sack of letters over his shoulder, trudging the streets of Liverpool 8 in the rain, avoiding the puddles with their reflections of terraced brick houses. I could see him working at the sorting office, placing the letters in the correct box for each street in Toxteth, streets with names drawn from the novels of Dickens, or from small towns in Wales. But delivering letters? No, not really.
He was a quiet man was grandfather, and, in my memory, he is forever knocking out the ash from the pipe, cleaning the stem, filling the bowl, lighting the tobacco, then contentedly sitting wreathed in smoke. That ritual of the lighting of the pipe was undertaken with the same quiet care he brought to everything, which may be why the idea of his working at the Post Office did not ring true. It is possible it was something I made up later, though why I would do that is another matter. Which is not to say he was boring. He had a ready line in nonsense songs that he would sing when he came to look after me, and his favourite saying was “I’ll knock your head off and throw it in your face!”. It took me a few years to understand the joke, serious child as I was.
I think he must have retired from the Post Office just after I was born, and so used the freedom this now gave him to concentrate on his passion, the job that was his real calling. This employment was in keeping with the ritual of the pipe, with the quiet contemplation of the slow passage of time while engaged in a task, for my grandfather rebuilt and fixed old clocks.
In the last century clocks were common, real clocks that is, ones that took their power from a tightly-wound (though not too tight I hear my grandfather say) spring, mechanisms that ranged from the bedside alarm clock, set to wake the worker to another day in the factory, to the late Victorian long-case clocks that could still be found for little money. These grandfather clocks must have come from from the houses of the well-to-do, houses that were slowly being given over to bedsits as the local economy changed and the financially secure bought country houses in Cheshire. Naturally I thought they were called grandfather clocks because my grandfather fixed them.
My grandparent’s small house was full of clocks, two large grandfather clocks on the upstairs landing, various mantle clocks on sideboards and cupboards, and an upstairs backroom full of clocks undergoing repair and rebuilding, a room full of tins of gears, small screwdrivers, and the smell of light machine oil.
I have often wondered where he gained this understanding of the mechanisms of clocks, this knowledge that meant he was a local celebrity. He was the man you went to with your late-running alarm, with the old clock your Gran had left you when she passed away, with the pocket watch you thought looked good, but which no longer worked. Did he pick up this knowledge from magazines and books found in second-hand shops, becoming like many in Liverpool a self-taught expert in an obscure discipline? A Scouse autodidact with a love for knowledge? I doubt there was anywhere he could go to learn the trade.
I can imagine him in these bookshops, standing in the dusty interior searching for manuals, part of a secret brotherhood who met to discuss the arcana of gearings and escapements, the twentieth century equivalent of the Medieval Guilds. Craftsmen allied by the love of their craft.
On my trips back home I often visit these second-hand bookshops searching for the out-of-print volume that will help my own work. Standing between the shelves, scanning the books of art and design, the philosophical tracts now forgotten, searching for half-remembered science-fiction classics, I listen as the bookshop owner and customers talk knowledgeably about obscure occult philosophers with all the assurance of Oxford Dons. This desire to find a subject and make that your own comes, I think, from the history of the city. Liverpool has had its problems, with high unemployment. But, rather than allow that to define their lives, people become experts, using their time to explore a subject that fascinates them.
My grandfather had a son, Frank, who inherited his need for self-education, though not in a realm as practical as the mechanics of clocks. Uncle Frank was quiet, reserved, shy. He still lived in the family house, the result, so my dad said, of a love affair that broke his heart. When my parents, my brother, and I, visited on Sundays, because that was what a good Catholic family did after Mass, I would ask to look at the newspaper Uncle Frank had bought. This newspaper was the Sunday Times, at that time the only newspaper with a colour magazine, and with supplements dealing with the Arts. Uncle Frank was an avid reader, with a small library of books kept in the locked cupboard in the front parlour, that room that was only used on special occasions. When I was allowed into the front parlour I would wonder at these books, many with titles beginning with the phrase “Teach Yourself…”, with some on subjects totally unknown, even to my dad. What, for heaven’s sake, was Theosophy?
Uncle Frank was entirely unpractical, despite having been in the Royal Engineers at the end of the war, or maybe because of this, and his exploration of philosophy, science, and politics, was his only passion. He had once worked in a shop selling carpets, and, when that closed, became a taxi-driver, though a taxi-driver who had very little interest in driving people around at night-time, or indeed during much of the day.
When my grandfather died, and shortly after my grandmother, Uncle Frank stayed on in the family house. He sold all the clocks to someone who offered to ‘take them off his hands’ without really thinking. Perhaps all those clocks marking out time in a now-empty house was too much for him. When I moved away to study art I didn’t keep in touch, something I now regret, for I know he followed my progress from Masters to PhD.
I look back at my grandfather, at my uncle, and think about their work. Not about their jobs, not about the thing they did to get money, not about how they fitted into the system of employment that in theory defined them, but never did. I think about what they did that meant something to them, that gave their days contentment, that felt like discovery without someone, or something, controlling their actions and thoughts. And in that I see myself, another Scouse autodidact reading philosophy and making things.
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