Telescoped, edited, misremembered, any family’s past seems a catalogue of grief and dispersal. But so many early deaths, and between the lines the other stories of alcoholism and madness and miscarriage and venereal disease and haemorrhages and mining disasters … For my father to be facing death at seventy-five begins to seem, in such a family, not a tragedy of cut-shortness but a miracle of longevity. For him to have stuck it out with his children seems miraculous, too, when the heritage is of neglect—children put on trains with address labels round their necks or pleading with their fathers, ‘at least come home for Christmas.’ And where are all the doctors and businessmen I’d been led to think lay behind us? The talk here is of deck-chair attendants in Blackpool, idlers of the dance-hall or ice-rink, chancers joining the US Gold Rush. I’d have been cheered, once, to discover these departures from stolidity. But not today. It isn’t just (just!) that my father is dying. Where he came from is dying too.
I pick up a photograph, a wonderful sepia set piece, the Blakemores circa 1895, my great-grandmother and her four children posed on a bench, two girls in lace dresses and frills, a besuited boy with a book open in his hand, and a baby in a bonnet. I look at them in their allotted roles—the Eternal Mother (she died within a year), the Proud Beauty (married a womanizer), the Scholar (gassed in the trenches), the Daddy’s Girl (but Daddy remarried), the Baby of the Family (already with his bottle)—and I follow their stares back to the man taking the picture, the Absent Father, who had his story too, grief and nervous breakdown. I think how cruelly far the reality of their lives was from what the camera had chosen or predicted for them that day, and how the photo lost nothing in feeling for my knowing this, and how that must mean art can lie as much as it likes, or needs to, and we forgive it anything so long as it is art. The people captured here are real, and there’s a frisson in knowing that, which you couldn’t get from painting or fiction; but truth does not come into it at all.
I dress and wander into the kitchen, where Pat is, the ‘maid’ as we called her when she arrived in the mid-sixties as an eighteen-year-old, the ‘housekeeper’ as she has become since my parents retired, though ‘live-in’ might be closer to the mark (these days she studies at a local college and has her room in return for occasional cleaning), and ‘companion’ or ‘nurse’ are suddenly looming ahead. She sits on a stool eating toast and peanut butter, young-looking still under her dark hair, the temporary fill-in who has stayed a quarter of a century, whose home this now is. ‘She’s a great girl is Pat, she’s like a daughter to us,’ my father likes to say, who has, however, another daughter, real not surrogate, a son, too. It’s some tribute to Pat, or some reflection of our odd upstairs-downstairs arrangements, that my sister and I have never felt usurped: she’s no one’s servant, but she’s not quite family either, prefers to eat alone, knows when to withdraw, has decided which bits of the house are hers to feel free in—the kitchen, her bedroom—and which are not. Now the portable television she’s watching beside the kitchen sink reports a stabbing in London, and she turns to give me a look—wry, stoic, bereft—that tells me she knows how ill my father is, and that his death when it comes will be as hard for her, who shares his house and loves him, as for me, his faraway son.
I make us tea, she makes us more tea, then I walk down the garden. Over the wall, to the right, is the old house. My father had bought it from the Church of England for 2,500 pounds in 1954, and then spent another 5,000 pounds doing it up, an expense he always resented (if the practice hadn’t been so busy, he’d have done all the work himself, not just mucked in at weekends), but which he made up for thirty years later when he retired and almost single-handedly built a new house in its grounds. The site was the paddock where I used to play solitary games of football—once my field of dreams, now his. Here, outside his dining-room, is where one of my goals used to be; there, down by his rockery, was the other. The trees that ran along one side of the pitch are still here, though lopped to let light in, and the wind is blowing through them as it used to when I was Ray Pointer and Jimmy McIlroy and the rest of the Burnley team. I was all the opposition players, too, and tried to stick one past myself between the metal posts hung with my father’s strawberry nets. It was here I’d come after the final whistle of the 1962 Cup Final, to put right the scoreline: Tottenham Hotspur 3, Burnley 1, the television had said, but that wasn’t how it ended on my pitch. The trees were ecstatic supporters then. Later I lay on my back beneath the trees, and heard the wind in them like a stream, and pretended I was listening to the sadness of passing time, and I knew one day I’d come back and the sadness would be real. Now I am here.
Many retirees die before their great deferred adventures are completed, or even begun. My father’s magnum opus is this house, and he’s lived in it for more than a decade. He drew up the plans himself, handing them over to an architect friend to translate into professional designs. He borrowed a JCB from a local farmer to dig out the foundations. He got hold of the stone and roof slates from a church that was being demolished near his surgery in Earby (when he was seen high up in the roof helping lower slates to the lorry below, rumours began that the doctor was having money troubles now he’d retired and had taken a job as a labourer). He acquired some Canadian pine from a neighbour, transported it to an old mill in Colne where he treated and sawed and planed it to make beams and shelves and doors and pot rails and dados, then brought it home and polyurythaned each item three times. He appointed a builder to begin the work, but also appointed himself foreman and chief helper. He chose the windows—metal, double-glazed, openable both side and top. He himself bought—‘so there’s no mark-up’—the copper pipes, the electrical fittings, the insulation wool, the roof felt, the wash-basins, the carpets, the lino, the pale-blue bath with the scraped side, at a knock-down price.
All those years of helping others with their golf club or pub dining-room extensions—projects quietly resented by my mother because time given to others was time denied to the family; all his long history of odd-jobbing—changing tap washers, fixing the electrics, lying with his ear to a blocked drain and coming up with his arm sleeved in sewer-black mud: all that had been mere practice for his greatest project, this house. Impatient and cheapskate, he was no craftsman. If a way could be found to get by with bits and pieces he already had, then he would find it, and fudge it, and bugger the appearance. Why buy a triangular corner cupboard when you could saw up a rectangular kitchen cabinet and have two ? He was the sort of man who would raid his own skip, in case something useful had been chucked. Most of his tools are old, handed down from his father and grandfather and uncles; here they are, handle upward, in tubs of oil and sand to stop them rusting. I stand in the garage and workshop gazing at these testimonies to a practical man, the pliers and chisels and all the other things he’d picked up over the years (‘How much for cash?’) and could not bear to throw away: crumpled cans of Simoniz, paint tins with a crust-hard quarter-inch in the bottom, hanging saws with their teeth torn out, garden shears open like lobster claws, the drum circle of an extension lead, a knapsack weed-killer spray, a paraffin-wick road lamp, an oil can with its plunger jammed half out. Two tyres stand upright against the wall, a buffer to the front bumper of his car. There’s a vice bolted to the workbench with nothing in its grip. His spanners and screwdrivers dangle in rows, getting bigger as they go. Above them are neat shelves of Senior Service or Golden Virginia tins with ‘three-quarter inch brass screws’ or ‘One-inch galvanized nails’ labelled on the side. Some day all these will be mine.
It took two winters in gloves and blue overalls, two summers in a pair of shorts, before he finished the house. He held a party to celebrate and gave the house a name—Windyridge, the name of the house he’d grown up in, an even apter name here, for a site where the wind never stops. That evening he sat back in his chair while the sun went down and the sky pinkened on the screen of hills from the Trough of Bowland to Upper Wharfedale. Next morning he began work on the garden: the lawn, the orchard, the vegeta
ble plot, the summer house (built from leftovers, and resembling a bus shelter), the rockery, the orchard, the polyhouse. He was especially proud of the ‘geriatric’ flower-beds I’m wandering among now, the earth at waist height, so that he—or more likely my mother—need never bend while weeding.
He’d have liked me to help with his house, to be the apprentice, the plumber’s mate, the Lad at his side. But I was lazy, and living two hundred miles away, and he roped in others instead—my brother-in-law Wynn (an employee of Yorkshire Water, good on the heavy work), my Uncle Ron (who brought to carpentry all his dentistry skills), neighbours, former patients, friends. I feel guilty now for not having been there; I feel guilty for ever having grown up and away. Often enough, at various addresses, he’d helped me. In one flat we’d constructed a door and wooden bridge from the bathroom out to the back garden, which was otherwise reached only by traipsing round through the curmudgeonly downstairs neighbour’s yard: the bridge was made from two old railway sleepers snapped up on the cheap and transported down from Yorkshire, and the neighbour so hated their bulk and ugliness that he pleaded with us to take the bridge down and feel free to use his yard. Help of this sort meant my father storming ahead, and me standing at his side holding tools. So when it came to building his house, I couldn’t reciprocate: I’d looked on but never learned his practical skills.
Besides, I missed the old rectory and selfishly resented him moving from a place I’d assumed would always be there to return to, a childhood I could pick up again if ever I fancied. And I recoiled from the new house precisely because it was new, which meant vulgar. Whenever I came up he would drag me away from whatever I was reading and escort me round his work in progress. I’d try to make approving noises, but below them was a lofty silence: I knew there were better ways for me to employ my time, and—sticking my head back in the nearest book—I probably conveyed the thought that there were better ways for him to employ his. Now, chastened and frightened, I want to tell him I was wrong—that it didn’t matter any more to me that the only book I’d ever seen him reading (abandoned halfway through) was Jaws . I can see him with his head bowed over some faulty electrical appliance or blocked carburettor (‘We’ll soon fettle that’), lost and absorbed and self-transcending. Why had I thought my interests more important, less ephemeral than his? What could I compare with this monument he’d built to himself? What consolation can art be, what comfort are reading and writing, now that grief streams through the trees and this home he made for living in is about to become the house where he will die?
The wind gets up, flapping the plastic sides of the polyhouse. I inhale the sweet air of tomato-and-compost, and see the brown plants shrivelled on the canes, and think of him tying them with green string and the first yellow bell-buds showing. It would have been June then. He would have been well, or would have thought he was well.
In Room 2, Ward 19, I want to shake him. I want to put a bomb under him. I want him to be dead rather than die like this.
‘I know you don’t feel right, Dad, but operations take it out of people, they feel flat afterwards, and you are much stronger than you were three days ago.’
‘I am that.’
‘And the doctors are happy. And once you’re eating properly and in your own home …’
I don’t know whether this blather is for his sake or mine—because it’s the sort of cheeriness he goes in for himself and feels comfortable with; or because I can’t bear to admit he’s dying. I know they have opened him up and closed him again without doing anything other than pass a tube across his stomach. I know this can’t help him regain his appetite or health. I know that if he doesn’t start peeing soon, his kidneys will become infected, then pack up altogether. And I know that he knows all this, knows too much about the body to be deluded. Physician, diagnose thyself: well, he has, and that’s why he’s depressed.
‘And you might not feel like visitors now, but there are lots of friends who want to see you, and in a week you’ll be different.’
He looks at his watch and says: ‘Number One, your five minutes are up. Come in Number Two. Your five minutes are up too, Two. Come in Number Three … No thanks.’
It is the only flash of something like anger, or life. No, of course he wouldn’t want anyone to see him like this. He hates feeling fallible: ‘I may not be right but I’m never wrong’ is the motto on a horrible brass wall-plate he has. He isn’t a vain man, but he is a proud, even bumptious one, a man with a puffed chest who learnt to water-ski in his fifties and thought he could go on forever. To be stalled and stranded like this is bad enough; for others to see him in this condition …
Lunch arrives at eleven-thirty, an omelette and mashed potatoes. He asks for some butter to moisten the food (‘It’s like swallowing holly, or iron spikes’). The television’s on in the background, and there’s a shot of Arthur Scargill from the archives. My father has never liked sharing a name with the miners’ leader; he prefers if anything to be called ‘King Arthur’, the nickname some of his friends use in recognition of a certain tendency to lord it, or more-than-lord-it, over the locals. Now I want to delude him into recovering some of that bullying energy. I’ve seen him angry, in tears, petulant, sorry for himself, but never like this, never down .
My mother leaves us for a moment: ‘Have a last word before the train.’ I offer to lift him from the chair on to the bed, but he doesn’t want to be lifted—‘Soon as I’m up there, I’m bound to have to get down for a piss or shit.’ He asks me only to pull the sheet back, too weak even for this. I hold him close a minute and feel the unfamiliar juttiness of his bones. I hold him a bit longer, not wanting him to see my face. I turn a last time at the door, but he is staring into space in front of him, or at the Thing inside him, not at me. I walk with my mother through the swing doors of Ward 19 and out into the drizzle, the gauze of dampness, which doesn’t move at all, just hangs there helplessly, as if the sky cannot relieve itself or cry.
On Keighley station I recognize the older brother of one of my schoolfriends, or think I do. A young girl is on his arm, while her sister and mother stand just behind. I take a seat on the train opposite them. A low industrial estate goes by, the pens of a sheep auction, bleached grass by a river. Yes, it’s him all right, though behind his thick lenses he shows no sign of recognizing me. The girl is besotted: she leans her head on the shoulder of his brown leather jacket. How old is she? Eighteen? Twenty-two? I can see his wedding ring, and I imagine what he may have gone through over the last weeks or months or years: an angry, rejecting wife, children too maybe. Then I imagine it differently: his cruel northern obduracy and heavy drinking and culture-licensed irresponsibility. I struggle between these two images.
What is his name? At Ermysteds, his brother Brian had been the most powerful figure in our year, clever, subversive, a fighter. Most of us suffered humiliations from him at one time or another: when I was twelve and overweight, I’d been sitting in the art room failing to paint and looked out of the window to find him holding up a piece of paper that said ‘Fat PB’—P. B. being the initials (Philip Blake) the teachers used to distinguish me from R. A. Morrison, the red-haired boy I’d seen crying on my first morning in the playground (crying not because it was a scarily big new school but because he was a poor boy without a uniform). Fat PB became a nickname and taunt for a while. My parents, at whose insistence my sister and I would eat up all the helpings they served us, had let us both get ‘chubby’, their word for fat . They thought I’d grow out of it naturally. Maybe I would have. But I expect I have Brian to thank that I put myself on a diet and lost a stone in six weeks.
Brian was attractive to girls, and the first of us to get on to them. He got me on to them, too, but not literally and rather later than him. At fourteen, he and I double-dated—his of course was the prettier. I remember sitting awkwardly with mine (Janice? Helen? Linda?) under the girder of light in the local Plaza, the six-fifteen performance because she had to be home by nine. In a heat engendered more by classroom
talk than by desire I tried to put my hand on her breasts, what there was of them, before realizing that convention required me to kiss her first, not easy, I discovered, when a girl keeps her face fixed firmly on the big screen straight ahead. After a few more evenings of this, both of us pretending that the struggles in the dark were happening to someone else, which for all the intimacy we achieved they might as well have been, we took to talking through the films instead. We were useless touchers but good talkers, and might have gone out together longer. But one summer weekend when I was away Brian seduced her in an empty barn—or so he claimed, and even she spoke about rough hands and straw in her knickers. It was never the same between her and me after that. But I remained obsessed with Brian—who got all the best girls, or stole the best ones I had, or made me feel mine weren’t worth stealing (‘scrawny’, ‘no tits’, ‘tight as a nun’s bum’) for the rest of my adolescence.
And now here’s his brother, also with a young girl, and I hear him saying: ‘When we get there, you sit next to your mam.’ The girl has the same olive skin and deep-set eyes as he does. Suddenly I realize the time-warp I’m in: this is not the predatory twenty-year-old, Brian’s cocky brother; this is a man in his mid-forties out with his wife (the grey-haired woman opposite) and two teenage daughters. Why is one of those girls, fifteen or so when I look at her more closely, behaving like his lover? Simply because—doting, innocent, old-fashioned—she seems to like her dad? Is the sternness of his wife the jealousy and disapproval of a woman pushed to the side of her own life? Is it still OK for daughters to make up to their dads like this? I follow them as we get off at Leeds, the girl still on his arm, and strain to hear another snatch of conversation, grab another clue. But then they’re gone in the crowd.
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 4