by Alan Cumming
Spending so much time thinking about the concepts of being a father and being a son and trying to interpret the slow trickle of memories and feelings about my own silent childhood soon made it very difficult for me to engage with my friends in the cast. I was also exhausted of course—Hamlet is a huge undertaking—but I began to use my fatigue and also the need for solitude to prepare for the performances to cover up what was an actual inability to think about anything else. I pushed my friends, and my wife, far away.
I began to wonder what kind of father I would be. I had seen and read enough about psychology to worry whether I would just become my father, and the more I allowed myself to remember what that actually was, the more anxious I became. What had he actually done? He was just a bit strict and prone to losing his temper, wasn’t he? He hit me sometimes, but everyone’s dad hits them, don’t they? He told me I was useless and worthless, but I have proved him wrong, haven’t I? I was okay.
I wasn’t like him. I was kind, I loved kids, I wasn’t an angry person. I was a different man. I would break the cycle.
Thinking back to this time, I truthfully don’t think I remembered any of the actual details of my father’s abuse. I was still in denial, along with my mother and Tom. Fear and silence will ensure that.
But as the months went by, I was becoming more and more ill-tempered, irrational, and unable to communicate. The play was incredibly emotional and exhausting of course, but I knew it wasn’t just that. My wife and I were still trying for a child, but I was secretly becoming more and more relieved each month when we hadn’t been successful. Ironically, my career was taking off in a way I could never have imagined. I began rehearsals to play the Emcee in Cabaret during the day, whilst performing Hamlet at night. It was creatively amazing, but I was feeling more unhappy, anxious, and out of control than I ever had in my life. Here I was, the bright new London theatre star, playing Hamlet alongside his wife’s Ophelia, about to start a family. I had everything going for me, and I felt I had no control over anything.
I began to stop eating. I was pretty thin as it was, from doing the play, but I began to get perverse pleasure from eating as little as I could throughout the day. I even began to be fascinated by people noticing and worrying about my weight. Of course these are classic symptoms of an eating disorder, using food and your relationship to it as a smokescreen to avoid dealing with what really is the problem, but also feeling that by depriving your body you are at least in control of something in your life.
I cried a lot during this time. Deciding what to wear in the morning would set me off. Of course my wife was becoming more and more anxious, and annoyed, by the way I was seemingly unable to enjoy what should have been a blissful time for us both. When Cabaret began, I was with a new group of people who didn’t know me, and that helped. But at home I was an utter mess. I remember one evening when a group of my very close friends came to see the show, and we went for dinner after. They were shocked at my weight of course. I sat at the end of the table not talking to anyone, picking at a salad. I had forgotten how to be me. Like Hamlet, I wanted to be absent.
I wasn’t yet able to recall details from my childhood. Instead, it was as if I were reliving the pain and the sadness I had felt as a child. I was doing this in an environment and at a time of my life that had no correlation to such pain, or to the behavior it manifested in me. I couldn’t understand why I was so sad. I just knew I needed to be away and to have some time on my own to sort myself out. I finally told my wife I didn’t think I was ready to have a child. Understandably she was distraught and angry. I understood, but I couldn’t verbalize sufficiently or logically why I had changed my mind. I began to wonder if I even wanted to stay in my marriage. I was unfit to be a father. I was unfit to be a husband.
By the time Cabaret ended in the spring of 1994, I was a zombie. I went to work, but I spent most days in bed if I had no appointments. I was in a deep depression. I knew that my depression was due to my past, and my father, but I just didn’t dare to delve any deeper into it because I was afraid I would be utterly unable to function. I needed to get completely away.
I was offered a film in Ireland, and I leapt at the chance. Suddenly I was away from London, away from my crumbling marriage, living in an old abbey in the middle of County Kilkenny, with yet another bunch of people who knew nothing about me. This gave me the ability to have time to myself to think and to sort myself out. That was the phrase I kept hearing, kept repeating to myself. You have to sort yourself out, Alan. By such and such a date you need to have sorted yourself out.
The movie was Circle of Friends, and became a very happy respite from my funk. But I didn’t sort myself out. I thought a lot. I wrote down a lot. I tried to figure things out and work out what I wanted. I felt so much pressure to pretend I was getting better, but I wasn’t. The best thing was I got some rest, the desire to eat again, and the realization that it was going to take more than a couple of months away making a film to sort myself out.
When I got back to London I moved out of my marital home and took a little flat in Primrose Hill. I stopped working. Now I would really sort myself out. It was a miserable little place I moved to, and I think that was intentional. I wanted no distractions. I wanted it just to be me with my memories, and of course now, finally, the box in my attic exploded.
FRIDAY 28TH MAY 2010, EARLY AFTERNOON
As soon as we left the Imperial War Museum, we went to lunch. We ate at the National Film Theatre café, and I recalled all the times I had eaten there during my time living and working in London. One evening, shortly after my run of Hamlet had concluded, when I was very deep in my descent into despair, I introduced the movie of Richard Burton’s Broadway version of Hamlet. It’s never good to see another version of something you’ve just finished, I realized that night. You either say the lines along with whoever is playing your part and are taken back into a black hole of your own interpretation and miss what you are watching entirely; or, as I did that night, you become rather irritable with the seemingly obvious and myriad flaws that you are witnessing! For me, never had there been so much irony as when Mr. Burton said to the players, “Speak the speech, I pray you, . . . trippingly on the tongue!”
I also thought of the times I had spent working at the Royal National Theatre next door, and of late-night drunken walks along the banks of the Thames with a man I now realized had been the latest in a line of lovers I had engaged with because I was drawn to their anger and I wanted to fix them.
Just as when I was a little boy dealing with my father, I thought it must be my fault my lovers were so angry. Now, of course, I can see that it was stupid, irrational, and self-abusive to think so, but it was still a hard habit to kick.
My reverie was broken with some extraordinary news. Elizabeth showed me an e-mail from the Burma Star Association, a veterans’ organization they had contacted. It told me that they had found someone who remembered my grandfather.
“‘David Murray is a veteran of the Battle of Kohima, where he fought with Thomas Darling,’” I read aloud from the e-mail. “‘He’s happy to meet with you and tell you what he remembers about him.’”
For the umpteenth time that week I was sideswiped. I never imagined that there would be anyone alive who remembered my granddad. The thought had never occurred to me.
But there was, and that very afternoon we set off for Bristol to meet David, who was now eighty-nine. Not only had this man known Tommy Darling, he had fought alongside him as his superior.
A few hours later we arrived in a very pleasant gated community overlooking the Bristol Sound. David was a spry old man with a twinkle in his eye. He was wearing a navy blue Cameron Highlanders sweatshirt, and evidence of his army days was everywhere around his apartment. Photographs, both of his days in service and of battalion reunions, decorated the walls. He was obviously a soldier through and through. I wondered how he would take to the line of questions I wanted to ask him, and particularly in reference to my granddad’s mental health. Fir
st, though, he had another surprise for me . . .
“He was called Big Tam! He was tall for that time!” said David chirpily.
“He was called Big Tam?” I repeated in wonder.
“Oh yes, Big Tam, Big Tam Darling. Yes!”
His lovely, eager, smiley face beamed back at me. He was clearly enjoying his reminiscences.
“He was looked up to, as a—” I began.
“I looked up to him,” he interrupted. “Oh yes, and every one my age looked up to him. A man like that who had been in battle, who had been decorated for gallantry, and who had the service. Certainly one respected him. Men like him taught us our jobs. They were the backbone of the battalion at that time.”
He paused, looking out the window at the setting sun.
“Nobody ever argued with Tom Darling,” he added respectfully.
David told me of a man who was strong, tough, someone you never talked back to. And yet, despite his imposing stature and experience, he was a kind man too. David regaled me with stories of the jokes my grandfather would play, all the while keeping the men in his command aware that he was their leader. We then began to talk about the Battle of Kohima, which they had fought in together.
David’s tone changed as he remembered the events of that awful night, how the men went up that hill to face the Japanese, single file and nearly silent because of their expert training. Four hundred Highlanders made it up that hill, waiting to strike.
I asked where my grandfather was at the time, leaning on the edge of my seat to take in every single word.
“Well, Tam was with the carrier patrol, and they were with the forward troops. As the darkness fell, the Japanese guns opened up on us, and it was a real war scene.” Despite the inherent horror he was describing, David was almost smiling as he retold this story, clearly in his element and filled with pride at what he had been capable of, all those years ago.
“The Naga huts were blazing, the guns were firing, the smaller arms were popping away, my mortar was thudding away in the background. That night, a thunderstorm broke out, and about half past two in the morning, there was a flash of lightning, a roar of thunder, and out of the ground came two companies of Japanese, shrieking their heads off.
“It was the most unearthly sound I’ve ever heard in my life. Tenno heika banzai! May the emperor live a thousand years!”
It was terrifying. By the end, the Cameron Highlanders had lost a hundred and five of the four hundred men who had silently climbed that hill. One-fourth of the battalion was dead, wounded, or simply missing.
David told me that Tam must have been wounded that night, for it was some time before he saw him again.
“The next time I saw him was in the aid post,” David said. “The rain had started, we had lost a lot of men, we’d bitten off more than we could chew for a wee while. And everyone was a bit . . . realistic about things.”
He paused, and I knew that euphemism was really a description of the deep gloom that must have descended on the battalion.
“And he had been affected, Tam had been affected.” By the look in his eyes I knew he was trying to shield me from the true horror of just how much my grandfather had been affected.
“Do you think that he was having some sort of combat stress? I just sense that he had—”
Before I could continue, something in David’s face changed and he lurched forward in his chair for a second, then caught himself and leaned back.
“I just checked myself from contradicting you,” he began, and I could swear there was a tear in his eye. He took a moment and swallowed.
“Nobody had heard of combat stress . . . in those days, sixty-five years ago now . . .”
“Yes, a long time,” I interrupted nervously.
“It was a different generation, we were different men, this was a different country.”
He looked at me sadly, through his steel-rimmed glasses, no longer the soldier filled with pride recalling his acts of bravery.
“I never thought that I had any combat stress. But when I was first married, my wife woke me up and said, “What are you shouting for Sergeant Barrett for?” And he was my old platoon sergeant, the first name I always shouted.”
He bit his lip and rested his head to one side for a moment.
“And my little daughter came up behind me when I was kneeling down doing something in the house and she said, ‘Boof!’ And she said I turned around and she knew I could’ve killed her.”
I sat in silence. There was no way this man could know the extent of what he had done for me that day. To say that I was thankful, in awe even, didn’t do it justice.
David looked me deep in the eyes.
“He was a good man. He was one of the men that I respected. I did respect your grandfather.”
“Thank you,” I said, fighting back my tears.
THEN
At the top of our house at Panmure there was a room called the “Big Room.” It was where Tom and I did our homework and played games. In the center of the room there was a table where we played Ping-Pong. Once Tom had gone off to live with his wife, it became my hiding place. I would contemplate my future, gazing out at the endless rolling fields of the estate that sloped down to the North Sea. It was also where our deep freeze was, so my mum would make sporadic visits upstairs to get some food item or to deposit a Tupperware container of leftovers. But mostly, that room was my domain.
The Big Room was symbolic of so many things for me. It meant great solace on the nights when I’d go there to hide and avoid my father’s rage, listening to Kate Bush albums and plotting my eventual escape. I remember so vividly when the prospectus of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama arrived and I took the first glimpses at the place that was to become my sanctuary. I studied hard at my schoolwork in that room too, rallying myself to be more focused and intent, with the notion that every minute of study represented an hour or a day of freedom in my not-too-distant future.
One night, my father pierced through the walls of my asylum. It was the night before my music “O” Level exam. I was doing well in the subject, but like any hardworking, anxious student, I was spending the night before a big final test cramming and going over the previous year’s notes to make sure I was completely prepared.
At about 7:30 P.M. my father threw open the door to the Big Room, and stood behind me. My desk was in the window that overlooked the nursery and our field, which was presently bereft of sheep and so had been mowed.
“The field’s been mowed,” my father said in that dark, inevitable way, and I knew this was not going to end well.
I turned round to look at him. Surely he wasn’t going to . . . not tonight of all nights.
“I have my ‘O’ Level music tomorrow,” I said pleadingly.
“Never mind that,” he said, already turning for the door and his bedroom where he would change and then leave for the evening, to drink in the local pub or entertain one of his women.
“Get down to that field and rake up that grass!”
And he was gone.
“I have to study!” I shouted after him. These days my burgeoning teenage manhood made me put up a bit of a, if not fight, then at least protest.
“Get it done,” he thundered. And I knew I had no choice. I would have to forgo my last-minute studying and spend the evening raking an entire field’s worth of grass. It was as if my father had been reading my mind and knew that I had come to view school as my first step towards freedom. It couldn’t have been more of a conscious action on my father’s part. He wanted me to fail.
I did the raking, eventually having to do so by flashlight as the sun went down. I knew the consequences of that field not being cleared by the time I left for school the next morning were inconceivable. I ran for the bus with blistered hands as my father silently inspected me across the sawmill yard. I felt like I might never get away.
That night I got home and he asked me how my exam had gone. I knew I had done well, but I didn’t want to give him that kno
wledge. I didn’t want to let him ever think he was justified. I never did. Instead, I became that much more driven to succeed.
Hanging in one of the cupboards of the Big Room was the uniform my father had kept from his days in the air force: a blue, thick wool, itchy pair of baggy trousers and a short jacket. There was also a long, gray raincoat, which he said he had worn when he first returned to “Civvy Street” or the real world as referred to by the young men in the UK forces. When I left home to go to college, I took these items of my father’s, along with a blue sweater-vest my mum had knitted for him. I didn’t ask if I could have them, for I knew what the answer would be. So I stole them.
I’m still not sure why I did this. It was the early eighties and everyone was wearing baggy, vintage ensembles, but that wasn’t the whole reason. In some way, I suppose the clothes came to represent my relationship with my dad. I needed a piece of him, something more than bad memories and pain. I needed him to know that I could take too, even if it was only things, and not innocence, or childhood. And also they meant it wasn’t over. It wouldn’t be resolved for many years to come.
Over the years I lost or gave away the army ensemble and eventually the gray raincoat, but never the knitted blue sweater-vest. It is upstairs in a closet of my house. I haven’t worn it for decades, but I see it every now and then as I reach for things on the high shelf it sits on. Occasionally I take it down and smell it, imagining I can still feel him, or in some way Panmure and that time of my life. I realized recently that I wore it in the first headshots I had taken when I was starting out as an actor. I think I needed to remind myself that wherever my future might take me, it was important never to forget where I’d come from. That sweater is still a portal to another time, another life, yet it is a part of my happiness today, because it’s a part of me.