I’m not sure how aware of his alcohol problem he was by then, but I believe he was at least partly motivated by an impulse familiar to alcohol counsellors, the ‘geographical solution’, where a drinker leaves behind the bad memories and debts of a place where he has outlived his slender welcome, and moves on to pastures new. I imagine my father understood, at some level, that his wife was sick, and his children confused and fearful, because of his drinking and the uncertainty and occasional violence that went with it. By now, he had forgotten the Birmingham fiasco enough to think he could turn over a new leaf elsewhere; perhaps he thought all we needed was a change of scene to become a family again. Perhaps he thought he’d been changed by his brush with death. Perhaps he even believed that this fall would be his last. All the time he’d been talking openly about Canada, my father had been secretly finding out about Corby, an industrial boom town in the East Midlands. He’d heard that men like him, labourers and the unskilled, could get good jobs at Stewart’s and Lloyd’s, the huge steelworks that had grown up around the high-grade iron-ore deposits that ringed this little village in Northamptonshire, making work for thousands and creating, first, a huddle of terraced housing that sat, grey and squat, around the blast furnaces and the tube mills, then, later, when the government realised that this kind of sprawl had to be better represented for the electorate, one of the celebrated New Towns.
