Father’s Day
It’s on 20 June this year. Cards and gifts for Dads, and memories of fathers no longer with us; lots of them, sadly, during this grim year.
My father has been dead a long time; already the time since his death is way, way beyond the time we had together. He was very much a 1950s-style father-provider figure, although since I was a late arrival (when he was already in his forties) he was older than the “Dads” of my friends. He died when I was seventeen, after years of being seriously ill. Mine are not memories of a father who played. When well, he was off to work before I was up and by the time he returned, I was already asleep. The man I can picture is the later man in an armchair, or in bed, his right arm typically across his chest and towards the opposite shoulder as he braced himself for the next chest pain.
Old photographs show him as young and dashing with an Errol Flynn-style moustache, slicked-back dark hair, and a mischievous smile. He even had a motorbike and sidecar. My mother once complained that the family photo collection still included several of him with various girlfriends. “Does it matter?” he teased, “you got me!” One definite memory I have is of he and I watching a war movie. As the end credits rolled, he turned to me and said: “I am going to tell you what my father told me. Heroes run in our family.” He laughed. “Don’t forget.”
Other memories are mediated by my mother, the custodian of family anecdotes. Most of my childhood recollections are really just stories my mother told. At the peak of my father’s career when the plan of making enough money to retire early was still firmly in his head, he and my mother decided to buy a small hotel. He would continue working and my mother would run the hotel. Not long after the venture began, they were both sitting downstairs at the end of the day watching television, when there was a loud crash and plaster fell from the ceiling. As the dust cleared, they could see the leg of a double-bed sticking through the ceiling from the guest room above. Then, with another flurry of plaster, the leg was pulled out of the hole and they glimpsed a partially clad, red-faced man. The room had been taken by a young couple earlier that day. “You had best go upstairs and see if he needs any help,” my mother said. Dad gave her a knowing look. “If he can do that,” he said, “he doesn’t need any help from me.”
When I was at boarding school, my father wrote every day. Monday would bring two letters from the weekend, one in the first and another in the second post. I haven’t kept the letters but, as best I can recall, they were full of mundane details of what my sisters were doing, other family news, and enquiries about school. Nothing personal. But they came unfailingly, which made the other boys slightly envious as no one else got so much mail. I mollified their resentment by sharing the fruitcake that came every other week from my mother! I do remember thinking that things must be serious when he wrote saying that he was going into hospital and that he might not be able to write for a couple of days. He died during open-heart surgery.
Much later, when I was home one Christmas, I caught my mother looking at his photograph (his birthday was December 22 and was often overshadowed). Her eyes were glistening. She said that when she went to see him before the operation, he had been very scared and at one point, he had wept. “I don’t think my children will ever know how much I love them,” he said.
I know his lament was intensely personal, symptomatic of a time when the English especially were renowned for their composure; for avoiding public displays of affection. But in other ways, it’s universal, articulating the sense that our internal world of feeling and perception can never be conveyed completely to others, no matter how hard we try. But while my memories of him seem sparse, I can still say, this Father’s Day:
“Dad, if you’re listening, I got the message.”
