My Irish father felt a kind of kinship with the black British boxers of the 1980s and 90s. Boxing, like the world of work my father was in, was overseen by self-serving men getting rich off the work of first- and second-generation immigrants
When I think of him in my childhood, my father is an evening man: impatient, loud, sporadically gentle. His days were spent outside, in this period uncertainly so, at the disposal of mostly unscrupulous subcontractors, corrupt and flagrantly benevolent to a gang of favourites of which he was never a member. The little I knew about what he did was put together piecemeal, in private. It was rarely discussed, aside from the odd overheard complaint about poor treatment, docked pay, being cleaned out by this latest bunch of cowboys. On the rare evenings when he returned late, his hair plastered to his head with sweat, his face was a red light meaning “don’t ask”.
Nor did many of his colleagues make appearances at home. The only one I can recall now is Peter, site partner from a time spoken of in more glowing terms – a few years in the late 1970s spent working for a man named Gavin. This might have been a forename or surname, especially with my father’s Irish pronunciation, an accent I’d come to think of as unreliable, its vowels beyond transcription. Through the tangled cross-connections of the Irish in our patches of north London – Enfield, Edmonton, Tottenham – Peter was married to a friend of my mother’s, or at least a fellow traveller from the school gates. I gathered he was possessed of an extraordinary work rate, partly because he was often late on Saturday evenings to pick up his wife and son from our house in between cab fares, his weekend evenings spent on the meter after a six-day concreting job. There were mentions of occasional run-ins with customers – bad luck to them – and something that passed into family myth, and is surely exaggerated in my memory: his falling 30ft to the ground from a scaffolding and walking out of the hospital hours later, affronted by the lost time.
