Books
A gentle eccentric
Published 15 March 2004
Swimming With My Father: a memoir
Tim Jeal Faber & Faber, 198pp, £12.99
ISBN 0571221009
Tim Jeal's previous biographies have included lives of David Livingstone and Robert Baden-Powell. Both men were active proponents of militaristic colonialism. In contrast, Jeal's father, the subject of this moving family memoir, was a lifelong pacifist and conscientious objector at the onset of the Second World War. The domestic conflict caused by this unconventional attitude to fighting is at the heart of the book.
Jeal's maternal grandfather, like Baden-Powell, distinguished himself as a soldier during the Boer war. As Jeal's mother never failed to remind him, her family - whose motto was "Fighting for king and country" - was "riddled" with admirals and colonels. So when her husband failed to respond to the call to arms she was deeply ashamed.
Joe Jeal had an intense appreciation of nature. "The purpose of my life," he wrote in a diary, "is to partake of the same beauty as the stars and trees and flowers." His son wistfully describes outings with his father - swimming in Surrey's rivers, wading through its meadows and hugging trees. As a vegetarian and member of a mystical religious sect, the Order of the Cross, he was clearly out of place in 1940s England. He read Kierkegaard and Buddhist tracts, and would lie down in long grass, to the bewilderment of passers-by.
His gentle eccentricity is detailed affectionately, but Jeal's no-nonsense mother, Norah, had little sympathy for her husband's spiritual inclinations. She wanted Jeal to take up boxing: he describes her screaming from the ringside "Hit him, Tim!" as he quailed at the sight of his opponent. At seven, he became embarrassed by his father's eyeball-rolling exercises on the Tube; at eight, taking his "first steps in British manliness", he learnt the word "crank" (although he felt a little guilty, as he admired his father's nonconformity).
As Jeal grew into adulthood his attitude towards his father changed. In one comic episode he recalls how, as a cub reporter, he interviewed the reclusive T S Eliot, whose wife Valerie was a former neighbour. It was only thanks to his father's insistence that he follow up this contact that the interview happened at all, something that Jeal significantly fails to admit when relating the anecdote in later life.
His descriptions of the look on his mother's face when, as a teenager, he raced off to the south of France in a dashing sports car with glamorous (unmarried!) family friends is equally revealing. The unspoken regret for a life not lived brings a poignancy to her story.
Throughout, Jeal's prose is lucid and spare. He chronicles his gradual understanding of his parents with love and respect. Descriptions of his father's struggle with Parkinson's disease and his mother's growing family of stray cats are interspersed with scenes from his childhood. The unfailing consideration he displays towards his parents ensures that the honesty with which he describes their decline is redemptive rather than cruel.
Where, in his earlier books, Jeal memorialised the more traditional British hero, here he brings to life a classic English eccentric. Joe Jeal's humility, gentleness and compassion left his son with an abiding feeling "that I, like the tangled shoots rising from the forest floor, was part of a living entity, far older and mightier than the family of man".
Lilian Pizzichini is the author of Dead Men's Wages (Picador)
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