Terry Rogers – My inspiration

Today is the day of my dad’s cremation.  I’m not attending, nor is anyone else.  It’s what they call a Direct Cremation and it’s a strange way to end all the excitement, ambition and adventure.  We get sent his ashes.

The father I loved started to die about 15 years ago for me, at the onset of his Alzheimer’s.  It’s hard to say that and I feel cruel doing so, as I still loved him, but it wasn’t the same.  The dynamic had shifted.  It coincided with the birth of my eldest and knowing my dad it was even more of a loss for Jake (and later Lexi).  Even though parts of his personality remained, I was losing him.  It made me irritable with him, it was hard to separate the illness from the man.  My real frustration is in losing the man who would call me twice weekly minimum, and who’s opinion I looked for more than any other.

He was at the heart of what made life interesting for us as a family. it was just sad how early we began to lose the loving dad and fledgling “grandad”.  He resisted the name at first, wanting to be called “Terry”, but settled in to it when Jake arrived.  His financial status or accomplishment, or sense that he never got to where he wanted to didn’t mean as much to us as his energy and interest in our lives.  Besides, a legacy portfolio of beautiful barn conversions and elegant sustainable homes said different.

I have a lot of admiration for Becky and Lucy, my sisters, for their devotion to him for the last 10 years or so.  Particularly when he became a ghost with flickers of his personality making their way down through, increasingly occasional, functioning synapses.  They were able to revel in it and enjoy it for what it was, but it just made me sad.

Much of who I am today is down to him and my interests were shaped by him.  I really appreciate and miss how much he opened my eyes to music, film, the great outdoors, making stuff, drinking beer (not much persuasion needed), and of course food.

My enjoyment of food and cooking were based on cassoulets, wholemeal-doughed pizzas, ratatouilles and bread and butter puddings with orange rind and Cognac.  Not a set of go-to meals, but examples of the simple food he produced and did so well and regularly.  A lot of my memories of living with him are based around meals and the animated conversations that were a part of it.

There was also a bit of groundwork and even ceremony when preparing for a big meal, in a way that is more common now.  One celebration involved an outing to a French delicatessen in Sloane Square to buy the right goose fat.  I remember it as it was about an hour’s round trip and seemed excessive to me at the time.  It wasn’t the only mini odyssey, but it was memorable for the limited haul.  I’m guessing goose fat wasn’t available at the local supermarket.

Picking up kebabs in Chiswick may not seem much but, when you live in rural Somerset, these things are from space.  When in London a visit to the British Film Institute on the south bank would often involve a trip to Chinatown, before or after a film and sometimes both.  Family holidays would always be centred around dinner time and a place without somewhere to go for tasty food would not be considered a good place.

He’d find the right wine a for meal and pre-meal would be a walk and a trip to a local pub that kept the beer he liked best (at the time) and kept it well.  Sometimes we’d spend a little longer in that pub than we meant and maybe the dinner would end up a little late, but nobody seemed to care.  More often than not, following the kind of conversation that would plot an agreed course to put the world to rights, I would come out feeling as happy as it was possible to feel.

However, his biggest food influence on me was the handwritten notebook that he packed me off to university with.  He’d been working on it without me realising and had put so much care into it.  Recipes, with diagrams (including the best way to cut an onion) on how to make some simple meals – bolognaise sauce, a chilli and an Italian potato and bacon soup with cheesy croutons are the ones I can remember.  The lack of memory is only down to time, the joy it gave me producing tasty fresh food sowed the seed of something I’ve loved doing ever since and my housemates were more than happy.

We started a food business together.  I say we, he did all the work and put in the funds whilst I chipped in and did any task that felt tangible, picking up stuff, researching pitta suppliers, lifting stuff, the odd bit of sign painting and creation of a sauce or two.

We trawled the festival circuit for a couple of years selling recipes based around the theme of pitta’s, the company was called Pitta Patter after all, and we had our good moments.  But Christ it was exhausting.  I was early 20’s and he was early 50’s so guess who had to do the lifting and driving?  Any of the big festivals – Glastonbury, Reading or Phoenix (the one near Stratford-Upon-Avon, not Arizona) demanded 21-hour days for he and I.  I’ve no idea how he did it.  It could be a rollercoaster; I remember our first night at Reading festival when we’d spent a lot of money and taken in about £200.  We were miserable and worried about the wisdom of doing what we had with a menu that could be described as “experimental” at best.  We went to sleep in a pit of despair, then both woke up early deciding to cut our prices.  I don’t think it would have mattered what the prices were, there were cues outside most of the stalls and ours was one of the biggest.

We realised that we could actually make money and used the lure of free entry to festivals and some cash to bring in various friends and family members to help us.  We sold pitta pizza’s and pitta pockets with fried cubes of ginger and turmeric potatoes, with a mixture of toppings and soon had queues of enthusiastic veggies.  Funny thing was, although I was a veggie at the time and he wasn’t, the reason for not including meat was based around food hygiene rules.  Not long after, he became a veggie himself and stayed that way.  I think it was slightly frustrating to him when I then reverted back to eating meat.

He was also frustrated that, just as we were starting to get somewhere, I decided I didn’t want to carry on with it.  I needed some independence.  It wasn’t that we fell out, it was just that I needed to separate from that parent child relationship.  I became more of an equal partner over time, but the final say in creative decisions or when and where we would work was down to him.  My role as the expert on food safety and hygiene (5-star rating and feedback that we were the best kitchen by far at Glastonbury ‘94) was never going to cut it ultimately.  He was disappointed, I could tell, but he didn’t dwell on it and I think he could sense I wanted some freedom.

He had wide and varied cultural tastes and had a real passion for films and music.  From real classic and challenging world cinema, through Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky and Satijit Ray to the French New Wave films of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard or Louis Malle to the (relatively) more recent American greats like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, the education he gave us was amazing if not always well received. At the age of 14 Fanny and Alexander was all very well for the first 90 minutes, and as for Cries and Whispers, well let’s just say it made me feel a little sad.

He never rested with the known and was always finding something fresh.  He worked his way through the Chinese Fifth generation directors and shared this with my sister Becky who was living with him at the time.  He loved the Danish Dogme films and wasn’t put off by challenging or bleak narrative.  It was a real education and one, from experience, it’s hard to convey to your own kids when all entertainment around you leans to making light or making up.

Despite his embrace of international cultures, he was incredibly proud of being English and British, to the point where he could be slightly clouded about this.  Often something could carry a mark of quality by dint of being British and he had a slightly rose-tinted take on the positive mark left by Empire that led to a few arguments.   That said, I think he would be really disappointed in the direction Britain has taken in the last four years or so.

Part of his slightly blinkered pride came from the satisfaction he had as a child when shown the map of the world and the fact that a third of it was shaded the colour of the commonwealth.  Part came from the influence of the major construction projects he was involved with in Jordan, Qatar, Sri Lanka and Algeria, and the status of being a British expat.

During those expat years we didn’t see much of him for some time when he was working oversees,  which effectively left my mother a single mum for long periods.  The lack of time together likely contributing to their later separation.  For us kids this time away was made up for in spades in later years but must have been really tough for my mum.

The strongest impulse, however, seemed to be a pride in anything he felt part of.  He loved sport and the competitive nature of it.  He brought me firmly into that with cricket, rugby and football.  Supporting a team always gave it invisible superpowers and made that team more special than any other.

The season tickets at Charlton that he and I had along with Derek, my uncle, his brother and only sibling, provided us with some lovely times together.  I say lovely, a lot of the conversations had an underlying competitiveness to them.  Something they seemed to thrive on.  On describing this recently to family I was told loud and clear that I’ve inherited a bit of this myself, much to my annoyance.  It was unanimous, so I think I’m going to have to concede this one.  Shit….even my language confirms it.  Thanks dad.

His pride in us as a family was tremendous though, he had an exceptionalist take on us as if everything we did was individual or unique and a source of pride.  He would always bring Derek and his family firmly into that.  Derek, who is sadly no longer alive, also made us feel the same way.  Whilst I found it useful to burst the myth that we were this super-family for my own sanity, it makes you feel great when growing up.

Coming from a background with a father who loved him, but had difficulty showing it, dad always seemed to be looking to make his mark.  He was destined to follow his dad, Jim Rogers, in taking on the family hi-fi business.  Rogers Hi-fi, was a company that Jim started in 1947, selling hi-fi at a price that was accessible to more people, and a real market leader, particularly for speakers.

But despite a brief time at technical college dad decided that this wasn’t for him and started doing a number of manual roles, including the fastest bin round in Croydon.  Something he retained a sense of pride in for as long as I can remember.  His list of jobs and locations were wide and varied and showed a sense of adventure he never lost.

Rogers Hi-Fi was sold by my grandad in the 70’s due to overwhelming competition from the East Asian market that he just couldn’t compete with.  He didn’t do well from it and it was probably just as well dad hadn’t followed this lead.

It frustrated dad that, though my grandad could mass reproduce sound with a clarity that was, at times unrivalled, he didn’t appreciate the emotion in the music as much as the technicality of it.  Grandad listened to his wide collection of classical musical, seemingly with a detachment that was alien to dad.  He spent a lot of his life trying to break through that detachment more generally and get to know his dad on an emotional level and didn’t really succeed.  He was astounded when he heard from Ruth, grandad’s second wife, after his death that she had once walked into a room to find Jim in tears whilst watching a documentary showing mass seal culling.  This sounded like a different man.  We were the beneficiaries of the warmth dad had and couldn’t share with his own father.

Dad listened to music, from Dvorak, Beethoven, Marler, Janaceck, Chopin, Mozart, Verdi, Tallis, Preisner and every end of the “classical” spectrum to folk, blues, country, soul, jazz and everything else in between.  Growing up he’d sit down and talk me through how he experienced Van Morrison’s Astral weeks or Songs of Leonard Cohen, how Bob Dylan went from acoustic to electric under widespread derision, how we’d be going to see Pink Floyd (we didn’t) or Glastonbury Festival (we did).  The main thing I took out from this, apart from a ready-made music collection is to not limit yourself and to give everything a chance.

Along the way my sisters and I introduced him to music and, again, he was always open to the new.  He would also not hold back if he wasn’t keen.  Initially it was crushing, it meant that whoever it was you were listening to was no good.  I’d surreptitiously put on a new CD in the background, or in the car and hold my breath until I saw the seal of approval.  The foot tap.  If I was really lucky his hand would start slapping his leg at the same time, but those were exceptional times.

There is a lot more to write about dad and maybe I’ll stick some more memories down for myself, as who he was will fade with my memory.  I felt it important to say something on the day he was cremated as his life somewhat fizzled out and the person he was needs to be remembered.  I won’t forget what he meant to me, and neither will my sisters as we really felt we had an exceptional dad.

As and when we get beyond this global pandemic, we plan to take those ashes to the part of northern Scotland that we called home when we were living in one of dad’sadventures he taken with mum.  We will then scatter them near Findhorn, the spiritual community he spent the best part of a year at in his late 40’s, when things were getting on top of him.  He made it through, as he always did and came back with new ideas.  We’ll also have a big family meal and tell stories about him.

Even before we take those ashes we will have a party and it will have live music and friends.  And there will be fresh, home cooked food, lots of it.

Miss you dad.  Love you dad.