For the second time this year I have had the pleasure of reading a book written by someone I count as a friend. Knowing the author of a book, particularly when the book is very personal, adds an extra dimension because you can seek and find the person you know in the telling, and enjoy finding your perceptions nuanced and enriched. Nic Ridley’s book “Godfrey’s Ghost – from father to son” is a great deal more, however, than a book to be read by his friends. At one level it is a book for a single reader, his son Christopher. At another it is a book for us all. At one level it is a biography of man who made his career as a playwright and actor, but who also fought in two world wars and who saw both triumph and disaster, personally and financially. At another it is an exploration of the father-son relationship, as well as a relentless self-examination, and even a philosophical odyssey.
Nic Ridley’s father was Arnold Ridley, celebrated as a young man as author of “The Ghost Train”, and in his old age and in the 25 years since his death as Private Godfrey in the hugely successful series “Dad’s Army”. For his son Christopher, Nic wants to separate the man from the actor, and more specifically from the benign, acquiescent, bumbling, geriatric part of Godfrey, which to this day he can see on his television screen almost any week of the year. In telling his father’s story, and in his quest for the true depiction of his character, Nic also turns the microscope quite ruthlessly on himself, not sparing the anger, the selfishness, or the harshness, while not obscuring his tenderness, his deep sense of loyalty towards, and love of, his family, which are also woven into his quest. This book is a fascinating construct, an engrossing story, a moving and intimate examination of family, and will be an enduring record of a man who treated “those two impostors just the same”. And it is quite beautifully written. In this respect, as in so many others, the author is his father’s son.
*****************************************************************************************
I hope Nic won’t mind if I mention here my own father. After he died in 1985, I found a handwritten poem in his desk which I add below because it touches on a part of the relationship between fathers and sons.
At Louth
Visiting here by chance
It comes back to me that forty years ago
We came here, my father and I.
He told me much as we looked
At the spire and the altar
But I was listening to other voices.
We enjoyed our day but, driving back
Over the wolds in that evening of late March,
He must have felt a little sad
The sadness of all fathers,
And I a little impatient,
The impatience of all sons
To be back at their own affairs.
Now, if I could meet him on these steps,
With his smile of greeting,
I could understand so easily what he was getting at
And, two old men,
We should go into the church together.
