Walter Spohr Nash, whose son I have the honour to be, was indisputably a gentleman, in the only sense of the word that matters; a courteous and compassionate man, scrupulous in all his dealings. And though he left school at the age of twelve, first to become an errand boy in a general store, and later to be apprenticed as a marine engine fitter in the yard that consumed fifty years of his life, I will call him a scholar and defend against all sceptics his right to the title. He he was one of learning's irregulars, in his own haphazard and unexpected way massively knowledgeable.

    One of my first discoveries when I was big enough to poke about among shelves and cupboards was a set of Dickens, bound in limp calf-leather, red embossed with gold, and printed on India paper, gilt-edged. Each volume had a fly-leaf plate, declaring it to be a Prize for Latin, awarded to W.S.Nash, Standard II. This was the second form of the old Higher Grade School and there was my father, twelve years old, in the last year of his academic education, winning this sumptuous prize - for Latin. How? To what end? Ours was a brute, bare fact of a town which can have had but little use for Latin. I never heard my father speak it, or even speak of it. His discourses, on a variety of stimulating topics, never, to the best of my recollection, included any observations on ut with the subjunctive, or nouns ("towns, small islands, domus, rus") taking the accusative after ad. When he was obliged to leave school, I suppose to earn his keep in a hard-pressed household, he was trained, by and by, to other, non-literary accomplishments, such as the working of metal to tolerances of one thousandth of an inch; yet the Latinist never quite went out of him, or the Dickensian either. His sentences, when he was moved or in high humour, had a periodic turn, and there were times when his whole demeanour took on a flavour of caricature, and he seemed to have stepped straight out of Pickwick Papers or David Copperfield.

    I remember his wistful if sometimes baffled love of books, and his conviction that reading was the key to worlds beyond the end of the back street. In that conviction he gave me, at the age of four, the greatest, most loving gift I have ever been given. He taught me to read. He came home after a long night shift, took off his overalls, washed, ate his breakfast, and then, when every bone and muscle in his body must surely have been aching for sleep, sat by me on our old, sunken sofa, and letter by letter, phrase by phrase, sense by sense, taught me to read and write. I picture it still. I see his square, capable hands moving over the paper. I feel his patience as he tries to persuade me not to write the letter S backwards. I hear his voice in that moment when the sun, shining on the window, makes a slanting shaft of light, filled with little dancing particles of dust. "Motes", he tells me, as I point at them, "motes"; and I remember the word for ever after, and the moment when I learned it.

    When I was five he took me to our municipal library, to the children's section, and began my literary education proper. It was a good place, that library, a quiet, comely, kindly place, smelling of leather bindings and varnished wood, and it nourished my spirit for several years, until I was of an age to graduate to the adult library. It was in the junior section that I made my first hopeless acquaintance with undeclared love, for one of the librarians, a quiet, comely, kindly lady who smelt gorgeously of scented soap and well-brushed hair. Sometimes I went to the library twice or even three times a week, just to see her, just to draw breath in her immediate vicinity. She improved my reading rate enormously; I got through my books faster and faster, devouring them, in my preferred posture, lying prone, elbows spread, head propped on hands, all the way through  Sherlock Holmes or Dr Doolittle or The White Company, then back to the library for another swooning moment with the unattainable. Do not think I exaggerate, or that an eight-year-old boy cannot be as deep in romantic love as any sentimental troubadour or tired businessman. I may not have known that I was in love with the lady; I do know, in retrospect, that I went through all the sensations of being lovesick.

    With this goddess, and with my schoolteacher, the awesomely ferocious Miss Kirby, I had conversations about books; but it was principally my father who supervised my reading, keen to investigate my choices and question me about the books I brought home from the library. This habit went on for a long time; I think I was on the point of going to college before he abandoned his inquisitory practises, which could be stern. On one occasion, I most poignantly remember, I brought home a "thriller" - a genre he in any case despised - with a bookjacket that was bound to get me into trouble. It showed a guttering candle and a smoking pistol, the scenario, in sum, of this book called Suicide Alibi. My father picked it up with a shudder, as though it were excrement in his hands, and his face took on the long-nosed look which always expressed his disdain for the unworthy. The nose that day was very long and lofty. Rarely had I seen it rise to such an altitude of scorn and distaste. "Suicide alee-bee!", he exclaimed, the old Latinist in him bringing out the old Latin vowels, "Suicide alee-bee!" Not loud, not angry exactly, but in a tone of voice that told me how his son had let him down badly, by wasting the gift of letters on the consumption of trash. He went on to suggest some titles for me to look out, books more appropriate to my age and legitimate interests; and I listened shamefaced, for I always wished to please him, the father who could do no wrong, though it often seemed that I was the son who could do nothing right.

    Yet as I was to discover, he also had his moments of imperfection, his vulnerable hours. There was, for example, that awful noonday when he lost his dentures, the full set, top and bottom. At that time, as I recall, working class folk seemed to graduate to dentures at a quite early age. It was as though teeth were regarded, not as Ivory Castles (in the words of the advertisements for Maclean's Solid Dentifrice), but as slum tenements overdue for demolition. "Gerrem all out", my aunts told my mother, "get y'sel a decent set", and "Thiz nowt to it, quarter to nine I goes in, Town Hall clock were striking the hour as I come out, new teeth an' all". My father had a full set well before he was forty; and I vividly recall the afternoon when he lost them, in the sea off Walney Island, in those dear dead pre-nuclear times of Sunday bathing trips when the whole of Barrow (it seemed) trudged out to the beach, to paddle and play cricket and eat custards and doorstoppers, and read Reynolds News (my parents) or Warwick Deeping (my sisters) or the works of Herbert Hayens (me, at the prompting of my fragrant librarian friend).

    On the day he lost his teeth my father was trying to get his children to hobble briskly down over the shingle and plunge into the water ("Get yourselves in, it's lovely") where he would teach them how to do a duck-dive. We waded in, cautiously,  and stood shivering while he demonstrated the way of it, with a strenuous thrust of the arms, the white legs swinging up into the air, the hero in the one-piece Captain Webb bathing costume disappearing under the murky surface. And then, after an interval of uncertainty, coming up again, aghast and toothless. Somehow in the course of that powerful submersion he had surrendered his teeth, top and bottom set, to the Irish Sea. Neptune had, in effect, mugged him. Repeated dives, and some feeble efforts of our own, served only to stir up clouds of sand and particles of weed. My father went and sat on the shingle, wrapped in a towel, enveloped in gloom. My mother was fretful and annoyed with him "for going swimming in your teeth, you daft thing, whatever were you thinking of?" We ate our doorstoppers in silence (and our father's, which he was obviously unable to manage) and waited for low tide, when we could go and search among the little gullies and rock pools, and enquire of strangers if, by any chance, while enjoying a leisurely stroll on the sands, they had stumbled on a set of false teeth? My sisters were very good at these approaches, which they managed in a ladylike way. They ranged the beach, saying "Beg pardon" and "So sorry to have troubled you", and had no success in their enquiries. At length, someone told them of a little boy who had picked up some dentures - a little boy in a white shirt and grey flannel shorts. We looked around; the beach was full of little boys in white shirts and grey flannel shorts, the pockets of which, normally reserved for bubblegum, old string, cap-bombs, seashells, interesting pebbles and the like, might conceivably have accommodated a full set of heavy-duty 1930s dentures. It was hopeless. We all gave up, dressed up, packed up, and trudged home. There was no clattering of bucket and spade, no singing of "Old Macdonald" or "One Man Went To Mow", or any of the songs that usually accompanied the homeward march: only sober reflection on the consequences of what was, after all, a substantial loss.

    This lugubrious tale has, I am glad to say, a happy ending. That very same evening, even as my older sister, drawing on skills acquired at Mr Melville's Commercial School for Young Ladies, was composing a text for the local paper's Lost & Found column, someone arrived at our front door, with the missing teeth discreetly wrapped in a not very clean handkerchief. I have no idea how this miracle of recovery came about; I only know that it restored my father to his normally cheerful, discursive, pun-chopping self and made it possible to laugh before bedtime. I find myself telling the tale now, as emblematic of an important turn in my perceptual and emotional experience. Until that day on the beach I had loved my father as someone far above me, an omniscient and omnicompetent being; but when I saw him sitting there on the shingle, suffering, defeated, I loved him as an equal, someone vulnerable, like myself, loved him with a warmer, fiercer love, touched with anguish. "Poor dada!" I said.

    That revelation apart, during my boyhood he never really lost, for me, his character of a man who could rise superior to the world and all its provocations. He had his resources. Music helped him a good deal; he was a very competent piano player. Language in all its beauties and freaks he loved; and he liked to sing, uniting the pleasures of words and music. At the time of the Slump, at the beginning of the thirties, when he was unemployed, he and a few friends formed a concert party, optimistically called The Optimists, and earned a little money by putting on musical evenings for audiences in church halls and social clubs. I recall a studio photograph of him, taken at this time. Seated at the piano, dressed in the outfit the optimists had devised for themselves, a glossy affair of spats, braided trousers and satin revers, he looks at the camera with that half-frown of gentle enquiry that so many photographic subjects seemed to wear at that time. It came, doubtless, from having to wait patiently through a long exposure. He has raven-black hair, severely parted, and black eyebrows that join in the middle. There he is, my Dad, gazing out at me from the shadowy depth of a era when hit numbers were such as "Tip-toe through the tulips", and wearing, unmistakably, his long-nosed look.

    He did not care so much for the popular songs of the time, though The Optimists must have played some of them. What he really liked and laughed at - in equal measure - were the songs and ballads of his boyhood before the first world war, old Victorian parlour pieces and Edwardian music-hall numbers. Such items formed a substantial part of the repertoire of the concert party. My father revelled in the buoyant melodies and absurd lyrics of bravura numbers like "The Battle Eve". In this splendid piece the soldiers are hardly able to contain their glee as they wait for dawn and a chance to get up and give the enemy what-for. They sing, in four-part harmony:
 

Away! Away! Away!
Away! Away! Away-eee - !

[piano tremolo - then -]

Away, away at break of day!
Away we go to fight the foe
(to fight the foe, to fight the fo-oe!)
Away, away with hearts so gay,
We'll strive to lay our rivals low -
we'll strive, to - lay - our - ri - vals - low.

    Those words were for my father a source of irrestible comic bathos. Playing them through for us, at home during our Sunday night sing-songs, he would begin to quiver as he approached the word strive, and then break off in wheezy relish of that deliciously gormless vocable - "strive! stri-i-ve! oh God! can you beat it? STRIVE!" - and recover his composure for a moment, only to lose it immediately with rivals - "ri...ri-hi-hi...rivals...ha!...LAY THEM LOW! HA!" involving us all in his fits of manic chuckling. Thus he managed to express at once his pleasure in the piece and his criticism of its absurdity.

    He had a gift for spontaneous parody which he often exercised on those old songs, but he did not encourage us to laugh at every piece of Victoriana. There were things he thought of as "genuine". He had a tender spot, for example, for the song "After the Ball". If one of my sisters chose to sing this, he laid down strict terms, telling her to sing it "straight", with no spoofing, no mockeries of intonation, but with a great tenderness and simplicity that struck to the heart when she reached the lines
 

Many a life is ended,
Could you but see them all,
Many the heart that is broken
After the ball.

It may be that he insisted on respect for this song because my mother loved it; but I suspect that it also expressed, on his own account, a chagrin for the disillusionment of hopeful beginnings that slump into a long struggle to survive. "We poets in our youth begin in gladness", says Wordsworth. My father would have recognised that, and also what follows - "But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness".

    Though no poet himself - there was more in him of the orator - he greatly esteemed the art of poetry and had some passages by heart, as samples of what might be done if a man put his mind to it. It was perhaps not surprising that he had a liking for eighteenth-century cadences. I remember him declaiming some lines from Goldsmith's The Deserted Village:
 

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

He spoke the lines with a resonant, clearly-articulated delivery, then paused to murmur, his head bowed, "That is still true". It was a sort of political statement, coming from a man who normally said little about politics. When he spoke of the "bold peasantry, their country's pride" I am sure he thought of the thousands of his generation, slaughtered in Flanders or, surviving the war, crushed and dispirited by unemployment and the struggle to make shift, hand to mouth. It was characteristic of him to express his political feeling obliquely, in that way. The nearest I ever heard him come to a direct political statement was in his repetition of a verse borrowed from the Bible to express his indignant contempt for the playful rich: "They toil not, neither do they spin".

    There were things about him that I never perceived or fully understood, such was his ability to be at one and the same time companionable and reserved. He was full of secrets and surprises, and never failed to astonish me, from the day when I found his Latin prize to the many occasions thereafter when he would reveal a breadth of reading and observation not commonly noted in marine engine fitters living in terraced houses. There was so much of himself that he kept to himself. His middle name, "Spohr", for example, was a source of embarrassment to him, particularly during the First World War, when patriotic clerks and registrars seized on it as evidence of Hunnish origin. He hated the name, but took pride of a sort in never trying to conceal it. I always believed that he had been named after Louis Spohr, a nineteenth century German composer and conductor; and he let me go on supposing that for many years, until one day he told me, laughing, that "Spohr" was a cousin of his mother's, a Colonel Spohr who had gone to South Africa and become rich. She may have thought that the good Colonel would reward the perpetuation of his name with a lifelong, generous investment in her child. If that were her intention, it was sadly frustrated. My father was poor all his days; but an honest man and a good neighbour; a skilled engineer; a lover of books, a friend to poetry and song; a scholar and a gentleman.