Sins of the Fathers
Dad: John 'Jack' Budgett, with Ranga Swami [as I remember]
India, circa 1942
The British Army sent my father to Burma during the Second World War - the only time he ever left the British Isles. Among other "faraway places", he saw Gibraltar, Naples, Cape Town, Singapore, Bombay, Madras, Puna and Rangoon. There are vintage photos of Jack in India - wearing baggy shorts and bush hat - enjoying what appears to be the best time of his life. His return to civilian life after six years of service was hard on Jack and the family, but he mellowed with age and died in 1984, still hating the Japanese and bananas.
Jack and the borrowed Bentley
Jack [2nd left] and the Yank despatch rider [right] who swapped his Harley for Jack's Norton
"Don't worry Dot, this is what the wog women look like"
[written by Jack on the back of the photograph he sent home to 'Dot', my mum, Doris]
According to Jack, the beauty of the Indian woman pictured went unseen to him, hidden perhaps, under her dark skin. But Jack would sing in "Hindi", "Tora cheeny, tora chah, Bombay Bibi, boat acha!" [A little sugar, a little tea, a Bombay girl, very nice!] She is pictured with her child and a spinning wheel - symbol and tool of the Mohandas Ghandi inspired Indian non-violent resistance to British rule.
Jack's forearm tattoo [as I remember]
Graham Budgett
The Occidental Tourist in baggy shorts and bush hat
In 1991, on the infamous Kwai Bridge
of the Thai–Burma Railway - wearing baggy shorts and bush hat -
I was stopped by a young Japanese father who asked via sign language for me to
pose in a photograph with his family. We put our arms around each other and
grinned into the camera lens, gladly erasing, but simultaneously commemorating,
a history of past conflict and our fathers' hatred.
Later, I felt bad that I didn't get a shot of us with my own camera
[was this an insult?], but also that I didn't exchange information
with him.
You see, I still long to have that photograph to this day.
Mam and me, c.1956
Uncle Click-Click
Royal Marines Colour Sergeant, Colin Arthur Beck Clifford [1899 - 1963]. Family friend and later my Mum's employer at the Mauldeth Hotel, Kingsway, Manchester.
A day trip to the seaside around 1959. Uncle Click-Click, Dot, Jack and me
Not long after the death of Doris, aged 96 in 2013, a DNA test surprisingly reported that I am one quarter Irish. Shortly thereafter I contacted a 'DNA relative' - a first cousin who I was unaware of. Click-Click was her uncle... and clearly far more than that to me.
A "wood", or crown-green lawn bowl, monogrammed "CC" for Colin Clifford, "Uncle Click-Click"
Sometimes, while my Mum was working at the Mauldeth Hotel, I would play with Uncle Click-Click's crown-green, lawn bowls in the large, plush-carpeted, upper hotel piano parlour. It's still unclear to me whether "Click-Click" was my childish attempt to say "Clifford", or the sound of the beautiful wooden bowls, or "woods", softly colliding with each other, or the smaller target bowl, or "jack", on the royal blue carpet.