by Alan Cumming
Later, when we had washed the dishes and removed the table things from around him, my mother suggested we drive to Dundee to see the new film everyone had been talking about, Jaws. I couldn’t believe my ears. I could count the number of times we had gone to the cinema as a family, or at least a part family, on the fingers of one hand. I ran upstairs to get changed in a state of ecstasy. Everything was changing this night. The idea that we would be going off to do something as luxurious and rare as driving all the way to Dundee in the snow to see a movie was exciting enough, but to do so as our father lay snoring in the darkness of the kitchen unaware was simply beautiful. And that my mother was so calm and sure in her actions made it all the more sweet.
Tom asked if he could cycle to Monikie to see his girlfriend instead of coming with us. Mum agreed. It seemed anything was possible tonight!
We set off in the car, and after we’d wound along the crispy moonlit country roads for a few minutes, Mum spoke up.
“Alan, what would you think about you and me and Tommy living on our own?”
I felt as if the heavens had opened and there was light and warmth and goodness pouring into the car. I felt God. It was almost too much. This afternoon everything had been normal. The snow had allowed some brief respite, but now it was as if the whole world had changed. I wanted to cry, I wanted to laugh, I wanted to leap across the seat and shower my mother with kisses. But I was paralyzed. My mouth was dry and I could barely hear myself say . . .
“Away from Dad, you mean?”
I just wanted to be sure.
“Yes, away from Dad. Just you and me and Tommy living together. Would you like that?”
“Yes,” I said, a tear plopping down my cheek. “I would like that.”
Suddenly, the car hit a patch of ice and we were spinning madly out of control, forever it seemed. I thought we were both going to die. The God I had glimpsed moments ago turned out to be not so benevolent. He was the same old God, the one that quashed your dreams and kept you in line. He was the angry, vengeful man of a God and my Mum had dared to cross him.
By the time the car had stopped we were facing the way we had come, and my side of the car was leaning into a ditch. The engine was off and I could only hear our panicked breathing and my heart beating wildly in my little bony chest. After a few moments, Mum asked if I was okay and I whispered that I was. She started the engine, and we went on our way again, but quietly and meekly now, all triumph and elation gone.
The matter was never spoken of again.
Years later at drama school I learned of the Moirae, the goddesses who controlled everyone’s fate, and the dangers of crossing them by trying to step away from the destined path we are given.
We called them Moira instead of Moirae, and our History of Drama teacher indulged us, hoping I suppose that humor would better aid our memories come exam time.
“Cumming,” he said, one rainy Glasgow afternoon, “do you understand this concept? Do you know what it feels like to overstep your Moira?”
At once I was back in that car on that icy road, spinning to potential death just seconds from having heard the offer of freedom.
“Oh yes,” I replied. “I understand.”
TUESDAY 25TH MAY 2010
By 6 A.M. I was staring out my hotel room window at the old Dundee docks. I was so tired, but my mind wouldn’t let me sleep. In a few short hours I would see my mother.
I was worried she’d sense something was wrong. I felt as though there was a sign above my head declaring “MAN IN TROUBLE.” I had so many questions that I wanted to, yet couldn’t, ask, and certainly not in front of a TV crew. And after all, today’s discoveries and revelations were not going to be about me, or my real father. I had to try and put everything about that to one side and appear my normal self. I had to act.
No matter what is going on in my real life, I know how to block it out when I am working. Whether I have had good news, bad news, am feeling hungover, joyful, sick, it’s all part of the job description of an actor to know how to neutralize it all and become whatever the character needs to feel. Today was no different: I would become what the audience would expect—cheeky chappie Alan Cumming having tea with his mum and looking through old family photos and mementoes. It shouldn’t require much of me. Yet looking out at the water as the sun began to slowly slide along its surface, I didn’t know if I was up to it.
I went to the gym and hoped the endorphins would cancel out the buzzing in my head for a while. I met the crew for breakfast and pretty soon we were off, filming in the car as I drove along the coast road towards my mum’s.
I talked of my mum as I drove, captured by the camera being pointed at me from the passenger seat. I spoke of how much I admire her, how she has rolled with the punches through the changes in my life, and how much she has grown as a person over the years. I also spoke of how she still has the ability to surprise me. Considering the events of the past few days, that was an understatement.
When we arrived at Mary Darling’s house, Elizabeth, the director, and the soundman hurried over to put a microphone on her, and also shield her from seeing me so that our reunion on camera would be utterly spontaneous.
I could see my mum trying to peep over their shoulders to see me. She was brimming with excitement, I could tell. I bet she hadn’t slept much the night before either, albeit for different reasons.
Soon, after we had hugged on her doorstep, we went into her living room and began to set up what would be the major part of the discussion: just what my mum knew about her father.
As the crew set up some lights, and Mum and Elizabeth conferred about what she was going to say and show me, I began to scour the walls and shelves of her lounge for all the pictures of my family. There we were, Tom and me as kids, in our swimming trunks in the garden at Panmure, on a jetty after a boat trip. Then later, college, weddings, holidays. My father was nowhere to be seen of course. My mother left him when I was twenty and away at drama school in Glasgow. She had worked hard to be financially independent of him, and then, just when I thought they had reached an amiable situation of leading entirely separate lives under the same roof, she called me up and announced she would be living at a different address from then on. For so many years I had longed for my parents to separate, but when I heard the news I was sideswiped, stunned and strangely upset. It was as though all the pent-up sadness of watching two people in such an unhappy union came flooding out of me. I hadn’t realized just how much I wanted their relationship to work, I guess. I longed for a proper Mum and Dad with a normal relationship. And now it was clear that this would never happen.
Looking around at these images spanning my entire life, it was not difficult to believe that I had a different father. A weird calm descended upon me and I just knew.
“So, Mum, what do you remember of your father?” I asked her.
She was a little nervous and very cautious as she spoke. It made me love her even more. She spoke of how little she knew of the man, just that he had been in the military, a Cameron Highlander. He was stationed in Inverness where he met my granny.
Tommy Darling was twenty in 1937 when he married. Mary Darling was born a year later, and her three brothers followed in quick succession. But despite having a growing family, Tommy Darling’s visits home grew less and less frequent. In the talks we’d had about him in the months preceding, I had asked my mother why she thought he had come back home so little and she said that it was common during the war for a soldier’s leave to be canceled or postponed. That made sense, I suppose, but surely a gap of five years was a little extreme?
I asked Mum where her father had gone after the war. “Well he went to several places. He was in France and Burma,” she replied.
“What did he do?” I asked. I didn’t even know this most basic piece of information about him.
He was a biker, a courier who carried information amongst battalions on the battlefield. Mum then showed me a pewter mug that he had. It was one of the few things she owned tha
t had belonged to Tommy Darling. According to the inscription, he’d won the cup at a services motorbike trial, in 1939.
“So he’s a biker?” I joked. A picture of Tommy Darling was beginning to form in my mind, and he was certainly challenging my preconceptions.
She also had his Certificate of Service and I read it aloud.
“An excellent type. Honest, sober . . .” I looked up at Mum. “That’s unusual for our family!”
“I beg your pardon!” she quipped right back.
Mum then very proudly showed me a medal he had received for bravery in the field. I had seen it as a child, but knew nothing about when or why Tommy Darling had been recognized in this way.
We talked about the circumstances of his death. In 1950 he had taken a job with the Malayan police force, and less than a year later he was dead. Mary Darling was thirteen, and she had not seen her father since she was eight. When I gently asked her the circumstances of his death, my mother quietly described the story as it had been shared with her. He had been cleaning a gun. There was still a bullet in the chamber. He had shot himself accidentally.
This was news to me. I had always remembered he had been shot accidentally on a shooting range, a stray bullet making him a victim of that particularly oxymoronic phrase “friendly fire.” I suppose my boyish imagination must have just made that up.
The plot was definitely thickening.
As the interview wound up I smiled at her and gave her a kiss. I knew Mum had been anxious but she had done a really good job. Now, as she scampered through to the kitchen to begin serving the lunch she’d prepared for me and the crew, I took a moment to reflect on how similar our situations were right now—both of us on the brink of finding out the truth about our fathers. I had a flash of having to tell her what my father had revealed and how her face would crumble as I did so, but I put that thought away for now.
“Alan! Will you pour these people a glass of wine instead of just sitting there!” my mum admonished me. My reverie was broken and I snapped back into my role as dutiful son.
The next step in my investigation was to delve further into Tommy Darling’s military life, and so just a couple of hours later I was at the National Library of Scotland, a beautiful building just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. I had actually filmed there the year before for a documentary I had made about the Scottish sense of humor, and had been very happy to discover via one of its ancient tomes that we Scots were the first to ever catalog the word fuck! Now here I was again, with Tommy Darling’s military records and documents spread out in front of me, poring over them with a military historian.
The first thing that struck me was why my grandfather had chosen to join the Cameron Highlanders and not a battalion closer to his home. I learned that the Highlanders had a great reputation for being a very loyal, closely knit group of soldiers. Thinking back to the fact that my granddad had been an orphan, I thought perhaps he was looking for a family in the military. A lump formed at the back of my throat.
Wow. This was going to be harder than I thought. Pouring my attention into discovering the life of my grandfather as a way of temporarily avoiding my own past was not going to work, especially if everything I learned I could relate to how I was feeling and my experiences. I also began to see why perhaps my grandfather was such an absent father. His experience of family was so limited, maybe it was something he could never quite understand.
Tommy Darling was stationed in Inverness and worked as a cook in the barracks there. His military records painted the picture of a model soldier.
Indeed, the only negative in any of his records from this time was that one night he had been stopped by a military policeman and fined for riding his motorbike with insufficient light on his registration plate.
I looked at the wedding photographs of Tommy Darling and my granny, recognizing my great-auntie Ina as a bridesmaid, and began to build a picture of the young, newly married cook, soon to be a father for the first time, full of hope for the future, building the family he never had.
Then, suddenly, everything changed.
In 1939 war broke out, and Tommy Darling extended his time in the army and volunteered as a dispatch rider for the Royal Army Ordinance Corp. Suddenly I remembered the initials RAOC that were on that pewter mug. I showed it to the historian, who examined it and told me that Tommy Darling had been given that mug for winning a trial, or a test of a motorcyclist’s ability to travel cross-country under the kind of conditions that would exist in war. And pretty soon he would be experiencing war for real, as in 1940 the Cameron Highlanders were shipped off to France and into the front lines of World War II.
As I looked through photographs and accounts of the Allied efforts, I learned exactly what a dispatch rider would actually have done in battle. I also began to see that Tommy Darling was a bit of a daredevil. In the space of a few hours I had found out that he’d left the comfort of the battalion depot kitchens (and his family) to serve his country in the most treacherous conditions imaginable—tearing through the mud of the French countryside delivering crucial messages from military HQ to the troops on the front lines. Suddenly he had gone from a man in a uniform on my wall in New York, to a swashbuckling daredevil.
In 1940 the Germans had utterly overpowered the Allied troops and forced them into retreat, and the massive evacuation from Dunkirk in Normandy was being hastily planned. I discovered that the Cameron Highlanders were stationed forty miles south of Dunkirk and being used in a last-ditch effort to halt the German onslaught and enable the evacuation to proceed. Tommy Darling was riding his dispatch bike between battalion HQ in Violaine and La Bassée, where the Camerons were trying to stop a three-hundred-strong tank division from crossing the canal and reaching Dunkirk. It was during this time that he won the Military Medal that my mum had shown me. The historian showed me the citation for it in Tommy’s regimental records:
Lance Corporal Darling showed the greatest courage and disregard for his personal safety in getting messages through to the forward Companies.
I wanted to know more. Tommy Darling was becoming real to me, and I felt a bond forming that was hard to describe. It was a concern for a man I had never met. But that was all there was.
Sensing my desire for more, the historian piped up, “This is a gallantry award of which you should feel very proud.”
But then something else was revealed that connected with me even more. The Military Medal Tommy Darling had been awarded was such a high honor that he had been invited to Buckingham Palace in 1941 to receive it. Sixty-eight years later, I, his grandson, had also been to Buckingham Place to pick up a medal. I was awarded the OBE (Officer of the British Empire) in the Queen’s Honors List of 2009 for “services to film, theatre and the arts and to activism for equal rights for the gay and lesbian community,” a tad less heroic and gallant than my grandfather’s, but an honor nonetheless.
My mum, my brother, and my husband all came to the palace that day with me. I remember Mary Darling bubbling with excitement and pride like a little girl in a fairy tale, a feathery fascinator perched on her head as she sat between Tom and Grant in the front row and waited for me to appear to collect my medal. How incredible that none of us had the slightest inkling that Tommy Darling had preceded us all there by nearly seven decades.
The crew went off to get some shots of the Edinburgh landscape and I went back to the hotel in Edinburgh’s New Town alone. It was one of those boutique hotels formed by several townhouses being knocked together, and I was in the attic suite. As I ran my bath I flipped up the windows and took in the view stretching out to the Firth of Forth, enjoying the breeze wafting up from the coast. I was exhausted, and I looked it. It was when I had moments on my own that I worried that the toll of all this was too much to bear.
I closed my eyes and listened to the hum of traffic heading up towards Haymarket station or down to Stockbridge. I couldn’t get the image of a photograph on my mother’s wall out of my head. It was from when we lived in Dunkeld. The pic
ture was of me, Mum, and Tom. I’m just a baby; I’m standing, but a baby still. And Tom and I look like friends. Not siblings.
THEN
I am at peace. I am twelve years old, my jeans are around my ankles, and I’ve just made a big discovery.
I am lying on my back on a grassy clearing that juts out over a gully in the forest, the burn below tinkling its way to the North Sea. I come here every night now after we’ve had our tea. This is partly to escape the silence of my parents’ house, but mostly to avoid my father, and newly to enjoy what I have come to learn my penis can do. What it’s for, it seems.
If I turn my head towards the burn and press that ear into the grass, I can hear the birds tweeting and maybe a distant cow or sheep out of the other. It’s a still spring night, brisk and hopeful. I know if I lie here for too long I might fall asleep and then wake up cold, flakes on my tummy where now I feel wet warmth. I open my eyes.
There is a man standing looking at me. He is on the path at the top of the hill, the one that runs along the edge of the forest before it drops off to the gully floor. He is not near enough to be physically threatening, but he has obviously just watched me ejaculate, and I know this man. He’s one of the estate’s forestry workers and he works for my dad. I see him every day as I walk up through the sawmill yard on my way to catch the school bus. When he sees that I see him he immediately pulls back onto the path out of sight and is gone. My heart is suddenly racing and my cheeks are flushed once more. I can feel something rising up inside me. I am instinctively resisting but it is fighting very hard for control of me. It is shame.
What have I done wrong? I ask myself. I know that boys do this. I know it’s inevitable and natural. I just hadn’t realized how good it would feel. So why do I feel anxious for doing what is right? Why should I feel bad because this man saw me? Why? Because he might tell my dad, and like so many others before it, this new happiness will be stamped on.