[funeral oration] There is much to celebrate in the life of Eric Alexander. How shall we recall him? A man of absolute integrity, an idealist, a shrewd interpreter of politics, a loving husband, a conscientious father, a likeable person with a boyish sense of humour, popular with his colleagues and friends. There are so many good things to say about him.
One day not long ago, before strokes impaired his ability to speak, he paused and suddenly looked pensive. "I've had a long life," he said musingly, "such a long time, and yet it all feels like yesterday." His eyes, milky blue-grey with age and infirmity, clouded over as he looked back across eight and a half momentous decades.
The deprivation and hardship of his early life stimulated him to look for a path to a better world, which he found in the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin. His vision was of a world ruled by humane principles, not cruelty, greed and arrogance, in which there would be shared abundance, and crime and social deviance could be dealt with perfectly adequately by giving the culprits a fatherly talking to (he explained his political beliefs to me when I was just about old enough to understand them).
I remember striding across the Derbyshire Pennines with him on a warm, hazy summer's day as he sang "There's a place, Comrade, for you, in the ranks of the working man."
I also remember visits from Bob Wotton, a fellow socialist and his friend for life. They would sit together in the living room, puffing away at their pipes until the air was blue with smoke, wearing portentous expressions and discussing the last crisis of Capitalism. "They're not going to get out of this one easily," one would say, and the other would nod sagely. He realised, however, that it would be a very long last crisis, and he never expected to live to see the dawn of that promised new era.
As my mother said, the world has never needed idealists as much as it does now, in this trough of history in which we live.
He had a natural affinity for the Russian soul, with its weighty sense of the past, its love of deep, sonorous melodies. He never went to the Soviet Union and was somewhat disconcerted by the impressions that I brought back when I finally visited it. But his beliefs survived the upheavals of 1989, for he was more a man of principle than of ideology. He was always a clever analyst of current affairs, adept at drawing the inner truth out of the distortions and obfuscation that the mass media feed to a hapless public every day.
Sadly, his academic qualifications amounted to a school certificate and a meagre two 'O'-levels acquired in later life. There was never a clearer case of educational deprivation. He was a man with a love of physics and cosmology. He was perfectly capable of getting his mind, untrained though it was, around the complexities of matter in the Universe. Indeed, he had the mental discipline and the imagination to be able to set his sights well beyond the solar system and gain his inspiration from discoveries in outer space.
He was a convinced atheist, who would not allow that people make God in their own image. Instead, he believed in humanism, the power of the human spirit to make a better world. If individual people were bad, violent or greedy, he attributed it to their social environment, not their genes or any other inexorable factor. If we all made a concerted effort to improve the social environment, he felt, then greed and badness would disappear. Thus he had an essential faith in humanity. He also practised what he believed in, and in his last years would stop on his daily walk to exchange a few kind words with the down-and-outs in the shelters on the seaside front. During the Gulf Wars he marched down to the town centre with his placards and demonstrated, alone and unthanked, against the iniquity of human lives wantonly sacrificed to ensure the continuity of oil supplies to rich countries. No one could call him a cynic. In fact, he was very much the model citizen, a man with a conscience whose integrity made him a shining example in this age of feckless amnesia.
I have a small but sharp photographic print of my father taken in 1944. He wears a neat, starched naval rating's uniform. He stands upright, pipe in hand, a stern but relaxed expression on his suntanned face. Very handsome he looks. In the foreground are the ornate cast-iron railings of a balcony, in the background, the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. I sometimes tell acquaintances from Naples that he was imprisoned in that formidable pile of masonry that stands on the waterfront at Santa Lucia, Castel dell'Ovo. The impression of heroic resistance to persecution is somewhat dispelled when I add that he was put there, "in the cooler", by the Military Police for drunk and disorderly conduct. But after all, it was wartime and he was only 19 years old. The only other occasion I can remember when he overdid the drink was 40 years later at his retirement party--not a bad record of sobriety, one must admit. On that occasion, he staggered out of the taxi that brought him home and couldn't find the front door of the house. It had been snowing, and next morning his footprints were in circles all over the front garden.
Much more characteristic was his rumbustious sense of humour and his love of puns. This must have been a devastating weapon in the Italian peninsular campaign. It accompanied him right into old age. Many of his friends and acquaintances remembered that high-pitched cackling laugh--for he was always the first to appreciate his own jokes--usually emitted while the listener was still wincing at the excruciating play on words that it followed. He was the very embodiment of that excellent British propensity not to take oneself too seriously. Young and old people alike appreciated his infectious humour and his enthusiasm for life and good conversation. On a deeper level, he believed wholeheartedly in the healing power of humour.
He took his photography very seriously. At family gatherings he would line everyone up and stand out front fiddling for ages with his camera (usually of Soviet make, and quite unreliable), studying the shot from all angles and gesticulating with his lightmeter. As a result we have albums and albums of pictures of groups of family members looking fed up and at a loose end! But we all took it in good humour, of course.
Many memories come crowding back as I think of him. When I was a child he made all of my bedroom furniture and many of my first toys. They were robust, well-designed pieces of woodwork, fit for a lifetime. He made them in his green garden shed, which always smelled of the Erinmore Mixture that he put in his pipe. When his hammer hit his thumb, or the tenon saw grazed his fingers, his language was remarkably moderate, especially by modern standards. Later, his second vocation as an amateur car mechanic surprised us all, but he was amazingly good at it and enjoyed what he was doing. Paradoxically, although he was slightly clumsy in manual work, he was a light fingered and gifted musician with a superb ear for music. He derived deep pleasure from the very finest classical music, which he listened to with infectious gusto, perhaps hopping from foot to foot and conducting the family stereo, which he made himself from a remarkably complicated electronics kit.
When I was quite small, he made me a sled. One Saturday on a snowy winter afternoon, we took it to the nearest slope but we soon ended up in a ditch full of muddy water. He took it in his stride rather more than I did!
When I was even smaller he took me for long bicycle rides through the Hertfordshire countryside. I sat on a small saddle fixed to the crossbar of his bike. We shared a love of nature that reached its acme in the annual summer holiday trek to the mountains of the Peak District or Snowdonia. Although essentially a city man (he was, after all, a quintessential Londoner), he was spiritually refreshed by close contact with the beauties of nature. With a sunny day and a good panorama of hills and dales shimmering in the heat, he was at peace with himself and the world.
His other formative influence was the sea. Although he was only in the Navy for a few years, it left a permanent impression on him. He saw Canada and the Mediterranean--and the sinking of a U-boat. He experienced life in the crew, even the Italian crew when he was seconded to the convoys. Many years later he would sit in front of the 1953 film of Nicholas Monserrat's peerless book The Cruel Sea, a stern expression on his face, his alert eyes surveying an imaginary horizon for signs of enemy shipping. I never liked his suet dumplings, a relic of his turns of duty as ship's cook. But the impression of the old salt was reinforced by his lurching gait, which made him look as if he has spent his life on a heaving deck. In reality, this was the result of a simple physiological fact--one of his legs was slightly longer than the other. But once a sailor, always a sailor.
As the years wore on he gradually became imprisoned within himself. Macular degeneration curtailed his sight, deafness did for his hearing, and then strokes tragically rendered his conversation a travesty of the thoughts that he sought to express. This long decline was nature's greatest cruelty to a man who deserved nothing of the sort. He remained a good person, with a moderate, kindly nature, throughout.
When he spoke to my mother, there was always a special tenderness in his voice, and very touching it was. However, I do recall that when flowers were delivered to their house on the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary he relished in saying to the delivery man "the first fifty years are the worst!" Even such a loving husband can occasionally enjoy a gentle joke at the expense of his wife.
So now he is finally gone--tempus abire tibi est. But we will carry him with us in our own hearts for the rest of our days. And then there is the impression of his young grandson following him to a kite-flying expedition one afternoon. They were both--quite unconsciously--lurching slightly and flapping their fingers as they walked in that very characteristic way that was his. Now that in its way is a sort of immortality!
