121. Mop and Pop
I think that our children’s changing attitudes towards us, their parents, has kind of crept up over the past three or four years. Our four kids, now all in their fifties, have clearly discussed the condition of their aged parents and decided that we should be considered to be on the final runway to oblivion – or whatever happens next! We should not be taken seriously anymore.
Clearly, we don’t agree. Yes, our bodies are starting to show the wear and tear of over eight decades of providing a vehicle in the physical universe for the thing that is us. Yes, our short-term memories are pretty pathetic, but we can both still hold a coherent conversation. We still have attitudes and opinions reinforced by the many years we have been on this lovely blue/green orb. These viewpoints are often in conflict with the fake-news-fueled ideas that have permeated our otherwise normally intelligent middle-aged “infants.”
Twenty years ago or less, they would have listened respectfully to what we had to say and generally agreed with us. Now they shake their heads sadly and wonder how we could be so out of touch with reality. We just smile and appreciate their caring for their geriatric old codgers, while we firmly maintain our opinions formed over many years are still valid and hold our tongues!
I started this blog with the intention of examining my attitude towards my own parents. However, I realized that it would only be fair to first position both Hero and myself in respect of being the allegedly fading elders (as perceived by four very self-determined, successful men and women in the prime of their lives) before examining my feelings towards Mop and Pop.
In the later years of WWII, a strong and exciting new culture permeated the ancient island of Britain. It was the then-refreshing and seemingly dynamic culture brought from across the Atlantic, as the American forces established themselves on our sceptered isle of Great Britain. Along with Coke and chewing gum came a new kind of language. It was English but it was different. It was brash, in your face and somehow enticing. It was then I decided to replace “Dad” with “Pop.” To his credit, my father shrugged and used the new acknowledgment “OK,” but then he looked at me sternly and said, “That’s fine but what are you going to call your mother?”
From absolutely nowhere came my instant reply, “Mop,” and so it was from then on!
As a child born in 1936, observing the world of WWII until we left the country in 1946, my parents assumed an almost mythical status as they both joined MI6. British Military intelligence. Mop worked in the censorship department assessing letters and ensuring that no secret information was being conveyed. Pop went on clandestine missions and refused to say a word about what he did. I had aunts and uncles in the armed services, but Pop remained a man of mystery. Not that I saw much of him. He was often away. I was looked after by a nanny, who had been Pop’s nanny before me.
Mop was always quiet and withdrawn for much of the time. I once found her in floods of tears when I was about seven years old. She made light of it, but I sensed that something was deeply wrong. She never confided in me; only years later did I realize that Pop was the reason for her upset. Meanwhile in those early years, I hero-worshipped Pop. He seemed to be endlessly talented, tinkering with all kinds of inventions that he believed would make him a fortune one day. He could play any musical instrument by ear, ranging from piano, guitar to drums.
He bought a miniature train set (Trix Trains) and set up the railway lines on the lid of the grand piano in the sitting room. One unforgettable day the trains were running around on the track when he sat down at the piano and played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” It has remained one of my favorite melodies ever since then. In later years he added painting and poetry to his repertoire.
On the downside, whatever toys he bought or built himself I could never touch. I could only watch him play with them. This ranged from a model plane that was powered by compressed air, various other model planes, a bomb he built by stuffing gun powder into a tennis ball with touching bare wires inside it, linked to the nearest power source. He bound the ball with layer after layer of black tape, finally putting it inside an old steel tank in the garden. This was one toy I had no ambition to touch. When he switched on the electricity, the damn thing blew the tank about forty feet in the air. It was quite spectacular!
One thing he briefly let me play with was a pedal car that he had to which he had attached a canvas roof. Unfortunately, I rode into a rose bush and ripped the canvas. He took it away and I never saw it again. He also built a building set with miniature bricks and a kind of cement mix, cross beams, and tiny roofing tiles. I was given the rare honor of building a wall, but he decided I was too clumsy and I never got to touch it again.
We had very little meat in wartime Britain. Pop would shoot rabbits whenever he could. One day we were close to a royal estate when he shot a guinea fowl that fell inside the fence of the estate. He grimaced and turned to me and spoke quietly: “If I go into that estate to fetch the bird and they find I’ve been shooting, they could execute me under wartime rules for being armed on Royal land … so I want you to go in and get the bird.”
Madness. One terrified little boy crawling through the fence grabbing the bird and rushing back to safety, I think he may have said, “Well done,” but I doubt it. We ate well that night and I did feel quite proud of my achievement. Another time we were walking on some parkland. Pop had shot at and missed a couple of partridges. I nagged him to let me have a go at shooting something. He reluctantly gave in and pointed to a crow high above us in the sky.
“OK, try that!” I lifted the .22 rifle, pointed at the crow and pulled the trigger. Pop chuckled as I handed the gun back to him but the next moment a mass of black feathers and the remains of the crow fell at our feet. It really pissed him off! Later when we were stuck in a tiny village outside St. Moritz in Switzerland, Pop would go trout fishing daily as we couldn’t get much money out of the UK after the War. He was a superb fisherman and we ate trout and spaghetti virtually every day. The Swiss did not allow barbs on the fishhooks but did allow live bait like worms and grasshoppers. My job was to find the wriggly or jumping bait. I nagged Pop to let me try fishing until in exasperation he handed me the rod. I cast the line and two minutes later I had a decent-sized fish on the line. Pop snared it with his net and grumbled, “Beginner’s luck.”
Pop could be very funny. At social events he was often the life and soul of the party, while Mop sat quietly in the background. He was always exploring new ideas and expounding his own theories about almost anything, especially about space and other planets. He had his own ideas about life and death but if Mop or I questioned him on any of his theories he would argue his point of view endlessly until either one of us gave up exhausted. Mop was actually highly intelligent but was so browbeaten by Pop that she never reached her full potential.
As I grew up, left home, and did my own thing, I began to realize that Pop was actually very jealous of me. He had been born into a wealthy family and had grown up with expectations of never having to work. As part of the culture of the time, he was taught that it was enough to be an English Gentleman and he was not obliged to do anything – that is until my grandfather ran away to Kenya with an actress. To his credit, Pop’s answer was to run away from school and make his own way in life. That is until he met Mop, who was a minor heiress from South Africa, whom he married, and he promptly retired. In fairness, once he had managed to spend all of Mop’s money, he did settle into finding ways of making money in Cape Town, ranging from selling Ammoniated Tooth Powder, real estate, then buying a fishing trawler in Namibia with the last of the money. The latter did provide a tough but good living for some years.
My admiration of Pop as a talented eccentric steadily diminished as I found that he was a compulsive womanizer and treated Mop appallingly. His jealousy of me seemed to have been based on my leaving home at eighteen and doing many of the things he would have liked to have done, had he had a more normal upbringing. In his nineties, he became a bitter and angry old man and the last vestiges of my admiration for him had long since disappeared. Hopefully, my kids don’t see me in the same light; but I do understand how the laws of cause and effect change between parents and children as the years go by.
Ironically, the one thing that Pop and I would have undoubtedly agreed upon is ExoTech, had he lived to hear about it. It would have appealed to his once-fertile mind which for so long had sought some earth-shattering new development – for which ExoTech certainly fits the bill!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.