A life in the Falklands
What would life have been like in those desolate islands?
Larissa MacFarquhar has a fascinating history of the last fifty-something years of the Falkland Islands in the New Yorker. MacFarquahar is like an itinerant storyteller from ancient times, weaving the threads of stories that are not her own. One of those stories could have been mine.
When I was eleven, my mother and father were having one of those cruel, not-in-front-of-the-children arguments that foreshadowed the divorce creeping up to change all of our lives forever.
My father worked in a meat factory owned by Southern Ships Stores, the main importer of meat and fish from the Falkland Islands. They offered him a job in Port Stanley, the capital of the Falklands.
“Go!” said Mother.
“I will!” said Father, “and I’ll take Bill with me.”
When I was born, my mother and father never agreed on a name for me. To my mother, I was Kevin. To my father, I was always Bill.
My father left our lives soon after that argument on the balcony but he never made it to the Falklands. That turned out to be fortune of the best kind since we would have made it there just in time for the arrival of the Argentinian invaders in 1982.
After the divorce, Dad became a Saturday Father and he took me on days out every weekend, usually up to London where he would drop me off at the Science Museum or at the big hill in Greenwich Park with my skateboard. He’d tell me which pub to find him in when I was done.
Sometimes we just spent the afternoon in the Conservative Club in Sidcup or in the Cray Valley Working Man’s Club – whichever had the cheapest beer – and he’d buy me a half-pint of lager and tell me dodgy stories from his fabulated past.
Were those stories real or were they fiction? Who knows?
Perhaps Dad really did apprentice with Arsenal before his dodgy knees gave out. Maybe he played for England Schoolboys against West Berlin. Maybe his South London gang really did have razor blades sewn into their collars. Bricks through rival gangs’ café windows? Loosening the wheel nuts on their rivals’ cars? Chef on the QE2? Maybe some of these stories were true.
I have a whole bookful of similar stories that I tell my own children about my adventure-filled past but mine are all true. I should write them down someday.
Southern Ships Stores went bankrupt in 1980 and my dad was out of work for a while. I had always assumed that this was part of Mrs Thatcher’s wonderful plan for the British economy but I now understand it to be another chapter in the history of the Falklands. If SSS had hung on for another few years they could have had a share of the prosperity that Larissa describes in her article. Maybe Dad and I could have shared in it too. Alas! SSS died too soon.
What would life have been like for me if Ken and Bill had gone down to those desolate islands?
In one of Fortune’s more playful tricks, I made my own voyage Down South on HMS Southampton in 1984 to protect the Falkland Islands from further Argentinian shenanigans. On my visit to Port Stanley, we called the locals ”Bennies” because they reminded us of the simple-minded handyman in the TV drama, Crossroads.
If my dad had taken me down to the Falklands, would I have been a Benny drinking my life away in Penguin Ale in a pub in Port Stanley?
Would I have been one of those sheep farmers waiting to greet the Marines when they yomped into Goose Green to win back the Falklands for Her Majesty?
Would I have watched HMS Southampton sail into San Carlos Water from those cold, barren shores?
Though they did not take me to that lonely life in the South Atlantic, the streams of fate had other plans for me. The ripples from the divorce rocked my boat for years after the initial splash. I was in constant trouble through all of my school years and I fled my blended family at the first opportunity with just twenty quid from my dad and a St Christopher from my mum to go join the Grey Funnel Line. I signed on the dotted line just after my sixteenth birthday, a couple of weeks after the Argentinians invaded.
What stories would I have, had I stayed?
Today is the anniversary of my father’s death. Rest in peace, Dad.
A tiny request. It’s so very hard to get noticed when you start out as a writer on Substack. Please consider sharing this essay so that others will see it.
Maybe even add a little note of your own.
So young Ragged! Amazing. 1984. I don’t think I’d ventured a couple of miles by then. I was 18.
you had a skateboard???