March 5th 2025 would have been my father, Norman Gabriel Ballinger’s Eleventy-first birthday, which as we all know, would have been a very good age for a hobbit, had he been able to reach it.
He had been rereading The Lord of the Rings just before his hospital admission, and his copy was found on the table by his empty armchair, after he died, with the bookmark halfway through the ‘The Fellowship of the Ring.’
Norman was brought up in Birmingham and even went briefly to the same school that Tolkien had attended. King Edward’s Grammar School in Edgbaston. Both were scholarship boys, but Norman was a pupil twenty-three years after Tolkien, and presumably a whole generation of young and inspirational young teachers had been wiped out in the Great War, between their respective school years, leaving the school sadly depleted of talent.
Ironically, in Norman’s time at King Edwards, a field gun with a cork in the barrel had been placed in the school quadrangle, and Norman remembers that as kids, they played and clambered all over it, but it was only when the army returned to remove it that they found that there was still a live round in the barrel! So very nearly a group of scholars would have joined the school’s fallen teaching staff!
Norman hated his time at King Edwards, describing it as a gloomy old building staffed by elderly teachers in gowns that were green with age. He always said that he preferred his raggedy-arsed playmates from the terraced two-up two-down houses of Aston, and that it was a bitter blow when he passed for the grammar school and joined the ranks of the toffee-nosed grammar school kids, who wore very distinctive red and gold school caps, marking them out as privileged.
He bitterly recalled receiving a detention for not wearing this hated school cap when he was caught by one of the masters pushing a barrowload of coal home after school to help his mother.
Unlike Tolkien who left King Edward’s at the age of nineteen, Norman’s parents received a letter at the end of his second year, stating his progress was not good enough for a scholarship boy and so he was rapidly propelled into adulthood at fourteen years of age, starting his first job at Veritys in Plume St, Aston, standing all day at an assembly bench making overhead fans destined for the Indian Raj.
Whilst a series of factory jobs followed, Norman was able to qualify in electrical engineering by attending night classes at the Central Technical College and finally landed a job at the Post Office Telecommunications section, which not only promised paid holidays and sick leave, but was the first industrial premises that he had worked in that provided toilet paper in its lavatories! Thereafter he spent 42 years working for the post office and doubtlessly revelling in that luxury!
One of the consequences of being ejected from an educational system where he had to touch his cap to greet his teachers, into a factory world, where a penny a week was deducted from your pay to pay for the toilets to be cleaned (the Forward Electrical Company) was that Norman developed a strong sense of social justice and championing of the underdog. He was briefly secretary of the Birmingham branch of the Communist party, until he used to recall wryly, he was almost lynched trying to sell The Daily Worker outside Veritys following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non- Aggression Pact in August 1939! Thereafter, he eschewed party membership and following any prescribed political line preferring to follow his own leftish furrow, still heavily influenced by his Christian upbringing around Aston Church and Dyson Hall.
The main factor however in curbing his political discussions and excursions out of Birmingham with his Cycle Touring Association mates, was that in 1944 he met my mother, as she was calibrating measuring instruments for the Ministry of Supply at Standard Telephones and Cables in Leicester. He was meant to be inspecting her work, but had broken his glasses and couldn’t see a thing. True love was indeed blind, and so after a short engagement marriage followed. And so having spent his childhood, sleeping behind a curtain in the front parlour of the family house in Aston, Norman finally had a bedroom to share with his new bride.
Thereafter, he was committed to trying to make a better life for his wife and two children, dutifully gardening under her supervision, when he would have preferred to be reading, and watching her favourite television programmes rather than rugby and football matches…
When he retired, he pondered the 42 years spent at the post office, he opined ‘I may have got into a bit of a rut!’
To be fair, he really enjoyed the company of his work colleagues, and an admission to hospital near the end of his life had him touring the wards recognising colleagues, reminiscing, and joking and joshing encouragingly.
Norman also had the unerring skill of putting authority figures in a state of unease simply by calling them ‘Sir!’ leaving them unsure whether this deference was real or designed to be prickly. It was always the latter! It came from a man who had schooled me early about ‘Casual Racism’ long before Black Lives matter. A man, whose philosophy about child rearing that the most important gift you can bestow on children is your undivided attention. and a man who also had a quirky way of lifting his hat and saying, ‘Good Morning Dog!’ when he met a canine friend on his walks, leaving the dog looking a little confused!
The scholarship boy who had not made ‘sufficient progress’ may not have joined the ranks of the great and distinguished, but he was a great dad and a role model, and he would have enjoyed an Eleventy-first birthday party, so today we are raising a glass in his memory!
