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The Face Pressed Against a Window
A Memoir
Tim Waterstone
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The Face Pressed Against a Window
A Memoir
Tim Waterstone
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About This Book
Chosen as one of the Daily Mail 's Memoirs of the Year Tim Waterstone is one of Britain's most successful businessmen, having built the Waterstone's empire that started with one small bookshop in 1982. In this charming and evocative memoir, he recalls the childhood experiences that led him to become an entrepreneur and outlines the business philosophy that allowed Waterstone's to dominate the bookselling business throughout the country.Tim explores his formative years in a small town in rural England at the end of the Second World War, and the troubled relationship he had with his father, before moving on to the epiphany he had while studying at Cambridge, which set him on the road to Waterstone's and gave birth to the creative strategy that made him a high street name.Candid and moving, The Face Pressed Against a Window charts the life of one of our most celebrated business leaders.
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PART ONE
Where the Children of My Childhood Played
CHAPTER 1
It was the winter of 1942, mid-war, and the country was tired and bombed and scruffy. I was three years old, and a few months earlier my family had moved into our house in Crowborough, in East Sussex.
Finally, after almost two years of itinerant wandering, we had settled down. My father had been enlisted in the Royal Army Service Corps in the early months of the war, and my mother had spent the years since then driving with us all around the country, following his postings.
All of that was such an extraordinary thing to do, and for some reason my mother never seemed to want to talk about it in later years. But what happened was that on the outbreak of the war she moved all of us out of our rented house in Glasgow, packed us into our small car â our luggage, Nanny, my sister Wendy, my brother David, the dog and me (a very small baby, of course) â and set off for England. Her one purpose was to follow my father. At that time he was being moved around continually from one Royal Army Service Corps camp to another. In later years, I asked my older sister why she thought our mother had done that. Wendy said that my mother was convinced that my father would never have been able to cope with army life unless he knew that she was always close by to support him.
So off we went, bridges burnt, now without a home to return to. The five of us, plus the dog, followed my father from camp to camp, up and down the country, from Scotland down to Yeovil, then up to Wales, up again to Lancashire, then down to Reading, across to Kent, back again to Yeovil, month after month after month, one bed-and-breakfast room followed by another. I knew nothing of it, if course, but it must have been an appallingly uncomfortable and prolonged experience. It led eventually to my mother suffering a breakdown, and it came to a halt only when my father was withdrawn from the Corps and posted as a technical instructor at a staff college in Kent, where he remained until the end of the war.
Shortly after my father was appointed to the staff college, he came home on leave, to see the new house. Excited at the prospect of his homecoming, I drew some pictures to give to him.
And so one day my mother called for me and there he was, in his uniform, standing in the hall. My father. Except, of course, he was a complete stranger to me.
I had expected that he would reach down to pick me up, but he made no move to do that. So I handed him my pictures, probably sullenly, as they would have been appalling, and even at that age I would have known it, as I have never been able to draw.
And then I did something that may well have served to change the character of the rest of my childhood, and perhaps thus to shape in part my life.
âGo away,â I said. âGo away. We were happy without you! Go away.â
He stood there, quite still, staring at me, appalled. So was my mother. So was my sister, aged eleven. So was my brother, aged eight. So, no doubt, was the dog.
I seem to have eradicated from my memory what happened next. I think my mother may have hit me. And who could blame her? In any case, she must have understood the root of this catastrophic insult to my father. With him away for all that time, I had from babyhood frequently slept in my motherâs bed. But now, each time he came home, this stranger, this big uniformed man, would no doubt be with her there, in my place.
My father remained with us then for perhaps ten days, before his leave was over. He spent much of this time in the tool shed, with the door shut behind him. He told us he was making a present for my brother Davidâs birthday. This turned out to be a sort of wheeled toboggan. It capsized the moment David tried it out on a run down the rough lane that bordered our house, and then each and every time thereafter.
It was a disaster for my father, really. He told us he had been looking forward to making this toboggan for David for weeks, and now it had failed. It was a shame, but this was when I first saw the weakness in him, and it was a shock. My father, in his early forties, took his disappointment like a child: pouting, on the edge of tears, his bottom lip quivering, shouting at my mother, and, most infantile of all, stamping his foot when she tried to turn the situation into a joke. I saw Nanny stare at him when he did this, and then grimace as she turned away.
I think Nanny was not so much shaken by his anger, as contemptuous of his childishness. She had lived with our family since well before the war, no more than a young girl when she joined us, and was perhaps used to this kind of performance from him. But it was new to me, and it both puzzled and frightened me. Men were supposed to be strong and affectionate and gentle and protective. They were like that in stories. Fathers didnât shout and pout and sulk and quiver their bottom lips over such an inconsequential matter as this.
A few days later his leave was almost over. He was due to return to his barracks the next day. I was in my pyjamas and was just about to go upstairs to bed. I saw him sitting in his chair, reading a newspaper, waiting to be called to his supper.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, a wave of affection for him came over me. I knew I had done wrong in what I had said to him when he had first arrived. My mother had been angry with me, and I understood why. I wanted to make up for it. He was my father. I went over and stood in front of him, reaching out my arms to him. But he shrunk back into his chair and pushed me off with both hands, roughly so. âMen donât kiss,â he said.
I pulled back, appalled. All I had wanted was for him to reach out to me, and perhaps touch my hands for a moment. I was three years old. That was all I wanted. As young as I was, the snub â the spurning, coarse, insulting rejection of it â hurt. It hurt. And his action seemed to set into being the future pattern of our relationship. For he never once attempted a physically affectionate gesture towards me. Hard to believe no doubt, but true. Not once. I saw other children laughing with their fathers, ragging with them, being picked up, swung about, hugged, pushed on swings, kicking a football, carried on shoulders. I wanted that for us, too. But not once in all the years of my childhood did he as much as touch me. Nor did he express affection for me in any other manner. Not once did he give me praise. Nor, if it comes to that, did he do so in my adulthood. Not once.
I will never understand why all this happened. One can construct reasons, and see if they can be made to fit, but none really suffice. Perhaps my arrival in the world, way too long after my siblings, had been to him an unplanned disaster, worried about money as he was throughout his married life. Maybe there had been a simple mismatch of personality. Maybe he resented the affection that my mother so openly lavished on me. Maybe it was my rejection of him in that appalling incident I had created in our hall.
Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe there is no one clear reason at all. But what I do know, and my siblings knew too, is that this was more than just emotional reticence in him, because in his other relationships within the family â with my mother, my sister, my brother â he was fully emotional. Actually, he was emotional with the three of them to the point of being positively needy. Unhappy, unfulfilled and bullied in his work, as we all in the family bore daily witness to, he was devoid of self-confidence, devoid of interests and intellectual curiosity, and allowed himself to be destroyed by perceived social snubs. In all this he clung to my mother with a desperation that in its vulnerability, in its incompetence, was painful to witness. He clung to my sister, who was at times openly irritated by it. He clung to my brother, though my father was frightened of him.
My mother knew it was her role to hold my father up in his life, and she did so, and, always, always, she held him close. She knew his weakness, she knew his emptiness, and she knew that he was her responsibility, and she never let him down. Well â except perhaps one should say this â she seldom engaged with his awful relationship with me, but sometimes, just sometimes, very quietly, her hands on mine, she would apologise to me for it. But in the final analysis there was no doubt that she knew what the essential role of her life had to be â she was the guardian and the protector and the shield of my father, her husband, from a world with which he was most ill equipped to deal.
So, whatever the reasons for it, he and I spent all those years of ours in mutual, numbed dislike. His weapon of choice â the weapon that no child can weather or combat â was sarcasm. Endless, witless, brutal sarcasm. Worst, devastatingly worst, when it was shouted at me. And it generally was.
I think now that my presence in the house gave him a punchbag on which he could release his dissatisfactions around his own life. Even as a child of ten or eleven, frightened of him as I was, I knew that I was the stronger and the more resilient of the two of us. I knew that he was weak, and that I wasnât. His treatment of me simply confirmed his weakness. Better to let him bully his way on. I was strong. He was weak.
But there was at least one occasion when his attack on me led me to get up and escape. I was ten. He had started it at the breakfast table â a mocking, merciless rant at me â and I suddenly, impulsively, pushed my plate aside and got up from my chair and fled. I ran out to the garage, seized my bike and rode away as fast as I could, up the lane, through the high street, past the riding stables, past the barber, past the fishmonger, past everything until I was out into the country. I pedalled for miles and miles, through Lewes, nineteen miles away, and on and on still. Reaching the South Downs village of Alfriston, I deliberately put myself in danger by going absolutely full pelt down a precipitous and winding hill, almost with the intent to have a crash and damage myself. And then, resting by the roadside, finally beginning to calm down, I rode the twenty miles or so home to Crowborough.
It was nearly dark when I got there, and I sat down on a bench on the village green, uncertain what to do next. A few minutes later my mother drew up in her car, smiled at me, shook her head ruefully, and made no further comment other than to suggest that I follow her home. I learnt later that she had been driving around for several hours trying to find me.
And so the pattern of my childhood years wound its way on. By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I had become much more capable of withstanding the buffeting of his attack. By the time I was eighteen, and on the point of leaving home, it had become little more than a distraction, an echo from the past, a painful experience that was there, and it had happened, but something that I could now put aside and forget about. And that is what I did. I put it aside, and resolved to forget about it. But if my resolution superficially succeeded, what had been done had been done.
For the truth is that my father had damaged me, and the damage had stuck. Itâs still there. Recently, one of my brotherâs daughters sent me a photograph of my father, which she had found amongst my brotherâs papers when she was tidying them up after his death. I looked at my fatherâs face, staring into the camera, and that shock of fear â sharp, sudden fear â hit me all over again. Exactly the fear I had of him in my childhood.
All this had happened, and it was cruel, and it was relentless. And I can recognise the legacies of it in the way I have led my life. One legacy, and it is absurdly trivial, is that I cannot to this day watch a Fred Astaire film without wanting to turn away from it, because Astaire looks so like him. But a second legacy, and this one is anything but trivial, is that I believe that without the trauma of that relationship I would never have broken out and fought the battles that I did fight to create and succeed with Waterstoneâs. That wasnât just for me. It was for my father too. Waterstoneâs was a statement of personal confidence and drive and tenacity, a statement that great things can be achieved, a statement that vision matters, that leadership matters, that culture matters, that books matter.
Waterstoneâs was me having the last word on him. It was proof of my worth. I needed Waterstoneâs. Why else would I have named it after me? Actually â it was named after my father too, if you like. I was hurling bottles at my childhood, which I could neither forgive nor forget. That was why Waterstoneâs won. Waterstoneâs, pure and simple, was aimed at my father. Well, thatâs what a therapist told me a few years ago. And he was right.
*
There was an interesting incident when I was in my thirties. My father called me, and suggested that we might meet that day for a family picnic. I hadnât seen him for some years, and I donât think he had telephoned me before ever â and I mean ever â except for those several times over the last years of his life, my mother dead, he remarried, that he had once more run out of money, and needed from me what we both allowed the other to refer to as âa small loanâ. Though I have to say that on some occasions they were anything but that as far as I was concerned, such were the sums he sometimes requested out of my already uncomfortably stretched family net income. But, whatever, I would then supply the money, I hope graciously, or at least apparently so. And I should mention in passing that none of these loans was ever repaid, and when my father died I found that I alone of his children had been omitted from his willâŚ
But the call on this occasion was not a request for money. Not at all. It seemed to be, and I am sure it was, a reaching out to me. An attempt to build something between us at last.
So we had the picnic, me with my then wife Claire and our two baby daughters, he with his pleasant second wife, an Australian widow. We sat beside each other on the rug. In time, Claire took the children off to play. My father and I talked. Yes â talked. And â yes â he was trying to reach out to me. He really was. And I was quickly aware that his wife, whom I hardly knew, was doing all that she could that afternoon to aid and encourage and prompt him in that. And, looking back now, I applaud her for it.
He couldnât have known that he was so near to the day of his death. The aneurism that killed him instantaneously those very few days later could not have been foretold. But he was doing just that â he was reaching out to me. And that afternoon I tried to reach out to him. And that was the last time that I saw him alive. And so he never saw Waterstoneâs brought into life, for that lay five or six years ahead, and I wish he had.
It was, of course, all way, way too late. Just those very few days later my father lay on the mortuary slab. He was seventy-seven, but in death looked much older.
I sat on the chair beside the slab, and gazed at him. His eyelids had been pulled down like blinds, and they now clung close to the outline of his eyeballs, too close, accentuating them, and unattractively so. The covering lay loose on his body and I leant across him to straighten it, and tidy him.
We were alone, but for a porter down at the far end of the room, sitting on a plastic chair, reading a tabloid newspaper. He seemed to be oblivious to us, or tactfully pretending to be.
I took my fatherâs hand, and held it for a moment. But it felt wrong, and contrived, and I didnât welcome the intimacy of it, so I let the hand go, and just stared at him. He was dead. He was gone. I was free of him.
It may seem uncomfortably offhand for me to say this, but the truth was that he had never loved me, and I had never loved him. I would have liked to have loved my father, and perhaps he would have liked to have loved me too, his son. Who knows? But in the ghastly, enforced companionship of this mortuary slab it was we two who were alone together. He was lying there alone with me, of all people. And that is how I remember that scene, and how I felt as I sat there with him.
The porter yawned, stretched, dropped his paper on to his chair, and made his way over to us.
âAll well, sir?â he said. He looked down at my father and seemed to be struggling to find something to say. âNice-looking old gentleman,â he murmured at last. âVery nice-looking.â
He wasnât actually, not in the least, but it was a pleasant little compliment. My father was always a carefully groomed man. He would have appreciated it.
CHAPTER 2
Iremember the day so clearly. It was my third birthday, and we were moving our possessions into the house in Crowborough, which my mother had bought, as I learnt in later years, for three thousand, five hundred pounds.
It was the summer of 1942. Petrol was severely rationed, but private motoring had not yet been banned, so we could still use our car. We arrived at our new house in our Vauxhall. This was only five years old, but had run up a huge mileage, as my mother drove us all around the country, following my fatherâs Royal Army Service Corps postings.
I caught the excitement of my brother and sister when they ran down the path to the front door of our new home, and then the scrabbling around as my mother looked for the key. I tried to keep up with Wendy and David as they ran up and down the stairs to explore the empty rooms, and then raced out into the garden.
The house was one of a group of nine built just a few years earlier by a local developer. They were all of them differe...