TASHY DID - A LIFE
Hey kids, grand-kids, and any other nosey people who are reading these pages, this is for you to read now or sometime in the future. It may tell you a little
about how life was 60 or so years ago and rather more about me. Why am I doing it?
In the years after my father's death, way back in 1981, I kept thinking of things I wished I'd talked to him about. After my mother's death, just over
thirteen years later, there was less of a knowledge-vacuum because mother talked more about her past.
Just recently, my daughter and I unearthed my mother's diaries which went back to 1929, when she was just 13 years old. This reminded me of the 1998
incident with my 6 year old and I decided to put down here the story of my life so my children and grandchildren could, if they wished, read about what I had done. I would use my
memory and those diaries to build a picture from 1949 to the present day and add some personal observations.
So, here we go. Each week we will have a new year with preceding weeks being archived. In the first few years, as I will have less to say, probably, I will
add some info about your grandparents and their parents.
1972
This was the year I got married. It was, as I am sure it is for nearly everyone, pretty stressful. But coupled with the wedding preparation came the house
buying. Originally we were getting the keys in February, the owners were having their own place built, but it was delayed and delayed. Eventually they handed us
the key on the weekend before the wedding. We then hired a truck and took all our stuff down that weekend, worked the following week and, fortunately, as April 1
was Easter Saturday, good tip here if you want to save on flowers in the church, we had the Friday off so we went down there and sorted some things out and did some
cleaning.
I had a quiet stag night at work with just a few friends although this was a “is this the last train” type journey home. When I got home, mother opened the
door and greeted me with the words, “This is Mr and Mrs Tigg, they’ve bought you a present, best if you go to bed”, and pushed me up the stairs. I declined her
invitation, went into the front room, it was after midnight by now, greeted Mr and Mrs Tigg, thanked them profusely, maybe a little too profusely, and mother
seemed happier. I think she thought she might open the door and find me naked with a lamppost chained to some part of my anatomy.
My best man was my best friend from my last years at school and he came down from Yorkshire, where he was now living, with his girlfriend who had never been
to London before. On the big day, I apparently had exactly the same carnation buttonhole that the Duke of Edinburgh had worn at someone’s wedding, I can’t remember
whose. I doubt that he wore it as well. The service was at 4.45pm in a church, could be St Margarets Abbey, in Barking and then the reception was held in a place
called Nan’s Pantry, which I noticed recently was still there.
My future wife was desperate to marry in that church but it was not in her parish. As things stood in those days, in order for the wedding to take place in the
abbey, we needed a special licence. Simple you may think. Not so. Firstly, it cost £25 (about £230 in today's money) and secondly I had to swear an oath, I can't remember
what about. Simple you may think. Not so. I had to swear the oath in the offices of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster Abbey. I remember going there but
have no recollection of the swearing ceremony.
We had about 70 guests. Again, in those days, it was traditionally for the bride's family to pay for the wedding. My new wife’s mother didn’t have enough money
to do the traditional thing and so my parents and I split the cost three-ways with her. In today's money the wedding cost, in total, about £11,000. I had saved
quite a bit of money and was averagely wealthy then. That was about to change. My ex-wife contributed an overdraft to our joint finances.
There were some interesting incidents at the wedding, one being my wife's aunt “borrowing” the wedding proofs but luckily I found them in her handbag. I had
taped all the music for the evening and I can't remember what that was either. I don't remember the menu, in fact I'm beginning to wonder if I was there.
All the expenses meant we couldn’t afford a honeymoon so at the end of the night, with tin cans tied on my beautiful car, and lipstick scrawled over the sides,
we set off back to our new home in Alresford.
The next morning my wife got up, not that early, and made some toast at the same time setting fire to the t-towels that our friend had left draped over the
grill when she and her boyfriend had come down on the Friday to help us. After a 10-day break I now had, instead of a 45 minutes journey by tube to work, an hour
and half trip on British Rail Eastern region. They prided themselves on never arriving anywhere on time and that pride was fully justified. At the start, when we
travelled together, it wasn’t so bad but later I hated that journey. Furthermore instead of a season ticket of about £100 per year, I would now be paying £1,000.
However, my staff mortgage was at 2½%.
In May we held a house-warming for about 50 people. As I've said before we never had parties at home. Whether it was my reluctance, mother’s reluctance or the
fact I was frightened asking people in case they said no, I have no idea. I’d probably go for a combination with the latter scoring highly.
My new wife and I continued working together for a while but my boss had another heart attack in August and they decided to transfer our work to the pensions
section and combine Permanent Health, as it had now become, with pensions. In between the switch from Sickness to Health we had been called Income Protection but
one lady in the section had answered the phone and said “IP here”, to which the caller had responded “so do I but I don’t shout about it”. The name changed shortly
after.
I then moved to the pension quotation section and was, once again, given the task of explaining how we did things to far more qualified people. I had still
somehow forgotten to enrol for my actuarial exams and I think by now you really needed a degree so it wasn’t going to happen. I was a bit of a problem really. I
knew how to do the job, did it well, but had no qualifications to do it. And this may be why I have my view on qualifications these days. I have witnessed
qualified people come in and fail miserably to actually do the work. I accept that exams and qualifications can tell you a bit about someone but they are not a
panacea which reveals all about a person’s ability. Later when I was teaching kids who had left school with nothing, and be made to feel useless, I could always
relate to them and was, I hope, able to give them the confidence that they could do things even if they hadn’t got a piece of paper saying they could.
At the end of the year, my wife decided to leave the GRE. I had always been very happy with how I had been treated, the yearly reviews I had and the rises
which tied in with them. She felt she wasn’t being paid enough and , after a bit of a hiatus, she left. Afterwards my new boss, who I also liked, told me that
it was never a good idea for couples to work together and that, had she not left, I was going to get myself into trouble. I had, as a husband, dutifully supported
her complaints but there was a danger, he said, of this ruining the good reputation I had.
1972 was our first married Christmas and we invited both sides of the immediate family to ours. For my side it was quite easy. Despite looking for places to live
in rural Norfolk, my parents had eventually, just days before Christmas, moved into a large bungalow in St Osyth, about 10 miles away. It had been built for them
by a Mr Sibbons and I hope he doesn’t read this. Through my childhood I had been a fan of ‘I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again’. The cast included Bill Oddie, Graeme
Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, who would later make up The Goodies. Oddie and Garden were the main script writers and, as in their later years, they had a certain
fascination for gibbons. Can you see what’s coming? I had been making fun of Mr Sibbons for some time and when it was time for my parents to complete their
purchase, they were still in London so I was sent round to his house to collect the key and hand over the cheque. I knocked on the door, he opened it and I asked,
“Are you Mr Gibbon?”. “Sibbons”, he said. Guess who went bright red? It was a beautiful house and cost them £12,000. The back garden was enormous and the house
today is probably worth well over half a million pounds.
For most of this summer I commuted to cricket. We would go up on a Saturday morning, I would go off and play cricket, leaving my wife with her mother. We
would stay the night there, or we might drive to my parents for Saturday night or, if not, on the Sunday morning. I would play again on the Sunday afternoon,
usually taking my wife with me as she chose not to stay alone with my parents. It was tiring but, hey, we were young.
I had now settled into the routine of married life but my own bubble had been burst. I also had begun to suffer from panic attacks. I now know that this
would be viewed as a form of mental illness but in those days, no one did. However, I can assure you that making fun of someone's totally unreasonable fears is
not a thoughtful response.
These panic attacks took various forms. One was that I would often wake in the night, sweating, feeling my heart pumping and would immediately think I was
dying. On the worst of the occasions I would then leap from the bed and run around the house saying I was dying, sitting down, coming back to bed, and
generally trying to calm down. My wife, at first, tried to calm me, comfort me and this would work. In later times she showed less sympathy, telling me just to
go to sleep. She did not possess large amounts of sympathy or understanding by then. What was even worse was that she felt it was extremely amusing to then
relate these incidents to family, friends and at work.
I was also scared of dying while not panicking. The death of the athlete Lillian Board a few years before had made me worry about some form of stomach cancer.
I had no idea of any symptoms but decided if everything looked normal when I went to the loo, things were OK. I agree it is not the most pleasant of things
but I would, on rare occasions, ask my wife to come and check the stools. I've no idea why as what could she know. However, imagine my horror, humiliation and
embarrassment when, one night as we were having a social drink with 3 office friends, she told them what I asked her to do.
That took away any chance that could now be in love with my wife. Yes, I could love her, yes I could live with her, but by ridiculing me in public,
she had destroyed my feeling that she could possibly be in love with me. My romantic notion is that you could only be in love with someone who is also in
love with you and no one who is love with someone could ridicule them in public. I have tried over the years to understand why she did it. Of course it was
thoughtless, it showed no sense of felling for another human being. Mental illness, and yes that is what I suffered on what I consider a minor scale, is not
to be ridiculed. Maybe, it gave her the chance to make people laugh. Whatever it was those moments were the end of my notion of two people, in love, living
together. What she did was, in my eyes, actually worse than having an affair,
Don’t get me wrong the relationship was still fine but it could no longer be, for me, the perfection that I seek in everything. It is not some compulsive
disorder. If I see a crooked picture I don’t have to change it but that room, that view, cannot be something with which I would be happy. Weird, of course
I am. Aren’t we all, in some way?
My best man was my best friend from my last years at school and he came down from Yorkshire, where he was now living, with his girlfriend who had never been
to London before. On the big day, I apparently had exactly the same carnation buttonhole that the Duke of Edinburgh had worn at someone’s wedding, I can’t remember
whose. I doubt that he wore it as well. The service was at 4.45pm in a church, could be St Margarets Abbey, in Barking and then the reception was held in a place
called Nan’s Pantry, which I noticed recently was still there.
My future wife was desperate to marry in that church but it was not in her parish. As things stood in those days, in order for the wedding to take place in the
abbey, we needed a special licence. Simple you may think. Not so. Firstly, it cost £25 (about £230 in today's money) and secondly I had to swear an oath, I can't remember
what about. Simple you may think. Not so. I had to swear the oath in the offices of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster Abbey. I remember going there but
have no recollection of the swearing ceremony.
We had about 70 guests. Again, in those days, it was traditionally for the bride's family to pay for the wedding. My new wife’s mother didn’t have enough money
to do the traditional thing and so my parents and I split the cost three-ways with her. In today's money the wedding cost, in total, about £11,000. I had saved
quite a bit of money and was averagely wealthy then. That was about to change. My ex-wife contributed an overdraft to our joint finances.
There were some interesting incidents at the wedding, one being my wife's aunt “borrowing” the wedding proofs but luckily I found them in her handbag. I had
taped all the music for the evening and I can't remember what that was either. I don't remember the menu, in fact I'm beginning to wonder if I was there.
All the expenses meant we couldn’t afford a honeymoon so at the end of the night, with tin cans tied on my beautiful car, and lipstick scrawled over the sides,
we set off back to our new home in Alresford.
The next morning my wife got up, not that early, and made some toast at the same time setting fire to the t-towels that our friend had left draped over the
grill when she and her boyfriend had come down on the Friday to help us. After a 10-day break I now had, instead of a 45 minutes journey by tube to work, an hour
and half trip on British Rail Eastern region. They prided themselves on never arriving anywhere on time and that pride was fully justified. At the start, when we
travelled together, it wasn’t so bad but later I hated that journey. Furthermore instead of a season ticket of about £100 per year, I would now be paying £1,000.
However, my staff mortgage was at 2½%.
In May we held a house-warming for about 50 people. As I've said before we never had parties at home. Whether it was my reluctance, mother’s reluctance or the
fact I was frightened asking people in case they said no, I have no idea. I’d probably go for a combination with the latter scoring highly.
My new wife and I continued working together for a while but my boss had another heart attack in August and they decided to transfer our work to the pensions
section and combine Permanent Health, as it had now become, with pensions. In between the switch from Sickness to Health we had been called Income Protection but
one lady in the section had answered the phone and said “IP here”, to which the caller had responded “so do I but I don’t shout about it”. The name changed shortly
after.
I then moved to the pension quotation section and was, once again, given the task of explaining how we did things to far more qualified people. I had still
somehow forgotten to enrol for my actuarial exams and I think by now you really needed a degree so it wasn’t going to happen. I was a bit of a problem really. I
knew how to do the job, did it well, but had no qualifications to do it. And this may be why I have my view on qualifications these days. I have witnessed
qualified people come in and fail miserably to actually do the work. I accept that exams and qualifications can tell you a bit about someone but they are not a
panacea which reveals all about a person’s ability. Later when I was teaching kids who had left school with nothing, and be made to feel useless, I could always
relate to them and was, I hope, able to give them the confidence that they could do things even if they hadn’t got a piece of paper saying they could.
At the end of the year, my wife decided to leave the GRE. I had always been very happy with how I had been treated, the yearly reviews I had and the rises
which tied in with them. She felt she wasn’t being paid enough and , after a bit of a hiatus, she left. Afterwards my new boss, who I also liked, told me that
it was never a good idea for couples to work together and that, had she not left, I was going to get myself into trouble. I had, as a husband, dutifully supported
her complaints but there was a danger, he said, of this ruining the good reputation I had.
1972 was our first married Christmas and we invited both sides of the immediate family to ours. For my side it was quite easy. Despite looking for places to live
in rural Norfolk, my parents had eventually, just days before Christmas, moved into a large bungalow in St Osyth, about 10 miles away. It had been built for them
by a Mr Sibbons and I hope he doesn’t read this. Through my childhood I had been a fan of ‘I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again’. The cast included Bill Oddie, Graeme
Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, who would later make up The Goodies. Oddie and Garden were the main script writers and, as in their later years, they had a certain
fascination for gibbons. Can you see what’s coming? I had been making fun of Mr Sibbons for some time and when it was time for my parents to complete their
purchase, they were still in London so I was sent round to his house to collect the key and hand over the cheque. I knocked on the door, he opened it and I asked,
“Are you Mr Gibbon?”. “Sibbons”, he said. Guess who went bright red? It was a beautiful house and cost them £12,000. The back garden was enormous and the house
today is probably worth well over half a million pounds.
For most of this summer I commuted to cricket. We would go up on a Saturday morning, I would go off and play cricket, leaving my wife with her mother. We
would stay the night there, or we might drive to my parents for Saturday night or, if not, on the Sunday morning. I would play again on the Sunday afternoon,
usually taking my wife with me as she chose not to stay alone with my parents. It was tiring but, hey, we were young.
I had now settled into the routine of married life but my own bubble had been burst. I also had begun to suffer from panic attacks. I now know that this
would be viewed as a form of mental illness but in those days, no one did. However, I can assure you that making fun of someone's totally unreasonable fears is
not a thoughtful response.
These panic attacks took various forms. One was that I would often wake in the night, sweating, feeling my heart pumping and would immediately think I was
dying. On the worst of the occasions I would then leap from the bed and run around the house saying I was dying, sitting down, coming back to bed, and
generally trying to calm down. My wife, at first, tried to calm me, comfort me and this would work. In later times she showed less sympathy, telling me just to
go to sleep. She did not possess large amounts of sympathy or understanding by then. What was even worse was that she felt it was extremely amusing to then
relate these incidents to family, friends and at work.
I was also scared of dying while not panicking. The death of the athlete Lillian Board a few years before had made me worry about some form of stomach cancer.
I had no idea of any symptoms but decided if everything looked normal when I went to the loo, things were OK. I agree it is not the most pleasant of things
but I would, on rare occasions, ask my wife to come and check the stools. I've no idea why as what could she know. However, imagine my horror, humiliation and
embarrassment when, one night as we were having a social drink with 3 office friends, she told them what I asked her to do.
That took away any chance that could now be in love with my wife. Yes, I could love her, yes I could live with her, but by ridiculing me in public,
she had destroyed my feeling that she could possibly be in love with me. My romantic notion is that you could only be in love with someone who is also in
love with you and no one who is love with someone could ridicule them in public. I have tried over the years to understand why she did it. Of course it was
thoughtless, it showed no sense of felling for another human being. Mental illness, and yes that is what I suffered on what I consider a minor scale, is not
to be ridiculed. Maybe, it gave her the chance to make people laugh. Whatever it was those moments were the end of my notion of two people, in love, living
together. What she did was, in my eyes, actually worse than having an affair,
Don’t get me wrong the relationship was still fine but it could no longer be, for me, the perfection that I seek in everything. It is not some compulsive
disorder. If I see a crooked picture I don’t have to change it but that room, that view, cannot be something with which I would be happy. Weird, of course
I am. Aren’t we all, in some way?
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