Where's
Sailor Jack?
John
Uttley
Publication
Date: April 28, 2016
Publisher:
Matador
ISBN:
9781785891724
ASIN:
B00W851QLM
Number
of pages: 324
Book
Description:
A
family saga that takes in three generations of two families and all
the struggles, tribulations and fireworks that you would expect as
well as plenty you wouldn’t. Where’s Sailor Jack is the story of
Bob Swarbrick’s journey from Northern-grammar-school-boy to
business magnate through the break up of his marriage, the arrival of
a new lover and an unhurried, consistent search for meaning in his
life.
Bob
and Richard are grammar school boys ‘done good’. Starting life in
similar working class homes they have progressively climbed the
ladder until they are able to both sit comfortably as champions of
industry, and look back on their achievements and failures with the
keen Northern wit that never left them, even after years of exile
life in the south.
As
they reflect on their lives, loves and business decisions both try to
find an explanation to fit their lives: Bob seeks purpose, Richard
meaning. While soul-searching, the reader is witness to an exemplary
part of British history - from their childhoods in post war Northern
England to the boom years in a prospering South (before survivors
guilt starts to bite in their latter years and they wonder just how
their opportunities would have worked out if they were born a few
decades later).
The
book covers and takes a unique look at romance, religion, business
sense and social mobility but does so with wry tongue in its cheek
whilst looking for a laugh, not a deep and meaningful conversation.
Chapter
One
On
a Sunday soon after his move north-west, Bob was flying high on
Virgin, to LAX, as everyone but he knew Los Angeles airport was
called. His last long-haul flight had been on Atomic Futures’
business in the bulkhead with British Airways. At over six foot and
heavily built, he could make good use of the leg room. In an
unflattering lavatory mirror, he saw receding, greying hair and many
wrinkles above a jaw line a boxer could break a fist on. He’d never
quite understood how his rugged looks had charmed the several-to-many
women along the way. The seating arrangement in Virgin’s best seats
made the cabin look like a beauty salon, but he’d played safe and
eschewed the offer of an on-board facial. The Journey Information on
the monitor told him there was about an hour of the flight to go,
confirmed by something looking like the Grand Canyon out of the
window, though it looked bleak enough to have been the surface of
another planet.
He
was trying not to sleep on the way out, nor to go to bed until at
least ten o’clock Pacific Standard Time. He’d flicked between the
films on the in-flight entertainment system, and found nothing he’d
wanted. He’d then settled down to listen to some music, first
Elvis, then Ray Charles and finally Abba, who’d bounced along
merrily at first until a cold sweat told him that he was the loser
standing small alongside seventies woman. He switched Agnetha off to
pick up the book he’d brought, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which he
immediately put down again. His eyes were tired.
He
reclined the chair to be alone with his musings on his return to
Lancashire. Blackpool was making a good fist of doing itself up,
despite New Labour lousing up the Las Vegas style casino scheme, not
that he’d ever really wanted it. In the evenings, the place was
alive with young ladies joyfully, sometimes even decorously,
celebrating their hen nights with like-minded friends. The folk who
lived in St Chad’s hadn’t changed that much. The young people at
church had the same freshness that he’d once had, full of their
multimedia world and excited about their opportunities, though the
ladder had been pulled up since his day, leaving cows from the Fylde
fields with more chance of going through the eye of a needle than any
ordinary kid entering the kingdom of riches he’d inherited.
Lancashire wasn’t at the centre of things the way it had been back
then, with Blackpool the Mecca for comedians, Liverpool the capital
of music, the mighty Granada television like a second BBC, and the
Manchester Guardian thinking about what the world would do tomorrow.
He saw The Guardian moving to London as an even bigger betrayal than
John Lennon’s sleep-in.
The
summer of 1963 with Freewheelin’ on his turntable and the Mersey
sound on every radio was forever to remain his Archimedean point.
Martin Luther King was dreaming his dream accompanied vibrato by Joan
Baez and civil rights were coming. Bras weren’t being burnt though.
Much later Jane challenged him with why not. He’d answered that
women’s liberation hadn’t come out of nowhere. She’d generously
agreed that it was only fair for apes like him to have had their day
in the sun before the real business got done.
He’d
had a vacation job in Stanley Park and that had given him an affinity
with the old codgers from the Great War who came for the brass band
concerts. Though they were sitting in God’s waiting room, they were
cheerful, talking for hours about space travel and the like but not
of course about their health problems or the trenches. He thought of
his never-liberated Grannie who died at the start of the pivotal
year. She’d make him green jelly with bananas whenever he went
round as a kid and had knitted most of the jumpers he was still
wearing through university after her death. His sister had in her
kitchen the old milking stool from Grannie’s farm-girl days, with
more than a thousand years of history stored in its battered wood.
Like the religion his ancestors had shared, its purpose had been
endorsed by the long passage of time. To lose either would be to lose
his soul. He didn’t want to live so long that his memory of Grannie
dimmed.
He
was off to LA to discuss the possibility of him chairing a solar
technology company, The Northern Solstice Inc., looking to be floated
on AIM, the small companies’ part of the London Stock Exchange.
He’d created a portfolio of non-executive chairmanships since his
nuclear demise; nice work if you can get it, he’d say. He’d had
surprising success given that he was temperamentally stuck somewhere
between public and private sector. On one venture, he’d helped
rescue a telecoms company after the dotcom bubble burst, which he’d
then sold to a trade buyer, a conglomerate chaired by Sir Charles,
for a huge profit, a month before the market fell again. He’d found
that the private sector was about living on your wits rather than on
solid ground.
He
hadn’t much knowledge of solar economics or if it was such a good
environmental thing. He hoped that this opportunity could provide
some atonement for his past environmental sins. As a nuclear man,
he’d never been a denier of the greenhouse effect. He knew how
expensive nuclear had been but could see no better option despite his
lingering doubts on waste disposal, weapons proliferation and
operational balls-up issues. He was as antagonistic towards wind
power as most power engineers and ornithologists were.
The
invitation to LA had come from a woman he’d got to know at Black
and Robertshaw, an accounting firm working out of Bristol whose
corporate finance arm had handled the telecoms sale. They were
advising on the Northern Solstice flotation, acting as Nomad –
shorthand for nominated adviser. Wendy Ballinger was already in LA
and he was to meet her the next day with the acting Chairman and the
CEO.
In
the arrivals hall, the driver arranged by Virgin was holding up his
name. All upper class passengers could have a limo for up to an
hour’s journey. Anaheim was in the band. He was stopping at the
Stonehaven there, near to the Northern Solstice factory in Yorba
Linda as well as close to Disney. Wendy was upmarket and uptown,
staying at the Westin. His mobile beeped a message as he reached his
room. Wendy wanted a word. He was desperate for the lavatory, but
couldn’t prevent himself from ringing her first. As he waited for
her to answer, her face appeared in front of him on the screen in his
brain (not on his phone, that was an early, basic model), almost
elegant, with a distinguished nose. Her blonde hair looked natural
enough but did owe something to a bottle. He found her both friendly
and competent, a pleasure to do business with. She was a while
answering and his internal camera panned slowly downwards. In her
early forties, married without children to an older man, her bosom
was worthy of the name; her long legs went all the way to her not
insubstantial bum. And she was intelligent. He should have thought of
that first.
She
had bad news, disclosed in pure, gentle, Gloucestershire tones that
could have belonged to a sixth former. She’d been at a pre-meeting
with the acting Chairman, a guy called Peter Forster, along with the
CEO, Emil Fares. Forster was a hard-nosed South African who owned
Forster Capital, the largest shareholder. He’d told Wendy that they
didn’t want her to handle the listing as Black and Robertshaw had
no market strength.
Bob
wanted to ask if that meant he’d wasted his time coming out, and if
somebody would be reimbursing his expenses, but realised he’d
better sympathise first. She didn’t need that, believing that her
firm, although not a strong broking house, had done a pretty good
job. “No first division broker would handle such a small
transaction,” she asserted. “And there’s so little time before
the date they want to float that they’d like to take a look at you.
They’ll also want to know if you’ve any other ideas as to who
else could act as Nomad.”
“I’d
have no idea. I wouldn’t want the job now anyway,” he said,
honestly enough as Wendy was a big part of the attraction.
“That’s
up to you, but I’d be grateful for my reputation if you could hear
them out. Perhaps Divinity might do it. They’re pitching hard into
renewables.”
Bob
became more interested. “Fancy that. An old friend of mine from my
nuclear days, Richard Shackleton, told me over a round of golf that
he’d just joined Divinity Partners. He said it was about time the
Godhead had some new blood. Do you know him?”
Wendy
did know Richard, who she called a terrific bloke. “Hey, thee, me
and him could make a great team if they’d have us,” Bob reckoned.
“Can’t we get him to do the broking and you to be the Nomad?”
Wendy doubted Forster would agree to that idea but was happy for Bob
to try it on.
Bob
was already looking forward to Richard joining them and started to
tell Wendy about his daft ideas. “Like me, he doesn’t think
metaphysics should be a dry study of what can and can’t be said,
but a licence to think insanely. According to him, we can’t
actually change anything physical and all events rigidly follow the
laws of nature. But we are free to make whatever we want of what
happens. I remember a flotation meeting with loads of advisers. We
took time out to discuss Schrödinger’s cat, as you do. Richard…”
“As
you and Richard do, you mean. Tell me about that some other time,”
she interrupted. “George Coulson, the CFO, will be in the hotel
lobby at nine o’clock to collect you. We’re meeting in Emil’s
office at nine thirty.”
Having
at last managed to have a pee, he unpacked his case, lining up one
shirt and tie, his suit, a pair of socks and shoes for the morning.
He put pyjamas on the pillow, soap bag and razor in the bathroom,
Saturday and the alarm clock by his bed, before he had had a quick
shower, drenching the bathroom floor. At a quarter past nine PST,
twenty two hours since leaving his London flat, he went to bed.
He
quickly went to sleep, only to wake with a start at about two
o’clock, gasping for breath. The heavy quilt was over his head. He
pulled the quilt halfway down the bed and managed to sleep again. An
hour later he woke again. This time he turned the air conditioning
off. Sleep wouldn’t come. He tried to read for a while, propped up
against the pillows. In the big mirror on the opposite wall, he
caught sight of his gaunt face drained of colour. With a shock, he
realised he was looking at his Dad, Jack Swarbrick, laid out at the
funeral parlour. That Swarbrick big conk was a matter of pride.
Of
course it wasn’t his Dad, but the embodiment of hard-wired
genetics. Wendy’s face, and much prettier conk, had frozen on his
internal screen. He slept through till 6.30am with her in view.
Copyright
© 2015 John Uttley
About
the Author:
John
Uttley was born in Lancashire just as the war was ending. Grammar
school educated there, he read Physics at Oxford before embarking on
a long career with the CEGB and National Grid Group. He was Finance
Director at the time of the miners' strike, the Sizewell Inquiry and
privatisation, receiving an OBE in 1991. Shortly afterwards, he
suffered his fifteen minutes of fame when he publicly gave a dividend
to charity in the middle of the fat cat furore. More recently, he has
taken an external London degree in Divinity while acting as chairman
of numerous smaller companies, both UK and US based. This is his
first novel. He is married to Janet, living just north of London with
three grown children and dog.
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