My Old Man

by Ted Kessler

  The narrator in my novel says thank you to Mr Holt, for giving up his savings, his privacy, his peace and quiet to move in with the fictional family.

  Now I can thank him again, the real him, and tell him how proud I am of him and how grateful I am for his intelligence, humour and open-mindedness. It was a miracle we ever met him and ridiculous that he threw in his lot with us. Most extraordinary of all, though, is that we made a go of it. We grew to love each other and are still going strong forty years on.

  Nina Stibbe comes from Leicester. Her stepdad appears in

  both her novels, Man at the Helm and Paradise Lodge.

  MY DAD HAS BEEN FAMOUS LONGER THAN I’VE BEEN ALIVE

  Tim Healy by Matthew Healy

  My name is Matthew Timothy Healy. I was born naked in north London in April 1989. I am told it was quite warm – which has been the case for most of my birthdays. I am an adult now, semi-clothed. My father spent those early years of my life working between England and Australia – back-to-back winters that had deprived him of the sun for almost four years. He told me he remembers my birthday being a bright and memorable time, golden-hued. He currently lives in the house in which I spent most of my childhood. In some ways it exists as a shrine to what once was – our family and what has been achieved. It is a feeling that is comforting and unsettling in equal measure.

  My dad, at five foot seven, a baby-turned-milkboy-turned-welder-turned-comic-turned-actor, was born in the early 1950s to parents Malcolm and Sadie, in Birtley, Newcastle upon Tyne. He lived modestly up north, as a youngster and as a young man, with his brother, John, and their dog, Smartie (a dog that would later come to head-butt my dad in a moment of jestful play, resulting in him losing his bottom row of teeth. John once threw my dad over a wall, with the assumption that the drop on the other side was of equal height to that which he’d just hoisted his little brother over. It wasn’t. He landed right on his head and has had to wear glasses ever since).

  He would work between various factories during the day and at night he would pursue his dream of becoming a stand-up comedian. He is a very funny man, my dad, whose charm and passion is articulated through his comedy, and his face exudes a type of warmth that one would expect from a northern English comedic actor. He laughs like Muttley off Wacky Races and whistles inane tunes that have never been heard before, for good reason.

  My dad has been famous longer than I’ve been alive. He was at the height of his fame just before I was born, during Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. My parents being famous was always part of my reality: there are photos of their wedding with a crowd of a thousand people outside looking in, which is what their life has been like. I know nothing different, and it bled into the way I saw myself. My dad was a rags-to-riches character, so as soon as he saw a stem of creativity in me, he knew the importance of nurturing it so that I gained a sense of self. Me being creative was always emotionally, financially endorsed by my dad.

  ‘You’re John Lennon,’ he’d say, from the time I was six. He expected me to be a rock star, not in a superficial sense, but A Rock Star. Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits and Brian Johnson from AC/DC would occasionally come around to our house when I was growing up so it always seemed tangible. Rock stars walked among us. Welders, too. Dad has that dichotomy between being a working-class manual worker and a bohemian actor. I remember watching a Michael Jackson video with some of his welder mates when I was a kid and them saying he was from another planet. I thought, Yeah. My planet.

  My parents always taught me that you get the good with the bad. So, if you want to live in a nice house and have nice holidays, then maybe Hello! might have to come around your nice house or go on your nice holiday to take photos for their magazine. The Daily Mail and the Mirror went in a bit hard on my mum for a while, which was difficult for my dad as he’s not from the tabloid world that comes with being behind the bar at the Rovers Return. He had to deal with a wife who was clinically depressed, being hounded by the tabloids. What does he do to look after his wife? We got through it. And there’s stuff that people don’t know. We found a lot of security in that, knowing that they only knew so much.

  I thought about this a lot when my band was breaking. My mum is on Loose Women. That’s not credible, that’s not cool. My dad is a credible actor but he’s well known too. Am I going to be perceived as an ITV boy-band thing? In the end I had to get over it. You can’t judge musicians by what their parents do. It isn’t going to work.

  There are two things he always said to me, and always after a drink: ‘Be who you want to be.’ And ‘It’s in yer fucking bones, man!’ He empowered me. He acted in awe of me. Not in a sycophantic way, but as if I didn’t need his advice. If I had conviction, it would see me through – and that really rang true. Because I had a middle-class family I could get to twenty years old and still be working it out with the band.

  I didn’t go to university. I worked in a Chinese restaurant, which stressed my mum out. ‘Is this band thing really going to become something?’ she’d ask.

  My dad never questioned it. ‘Leave him alone, man, he’s fucking John Lennon, man.’ He believed in me unquestioningly from the moment I wrote a song called ‘Robbers’ when I was eighteen. He bought us our first van. He converted the garage into a rehearsal space. His overt passion for us is instilled in our band. When our album went platinum all of the band made sure he got a disc. He’s the band’s dad.

  The character he plays in Benidorm, who rides around on roller-skates with a wig on and big boobs, is probably the one he sees the most of himself in. He told me he based it on a combination of Les Dawson and Tommy Cooper, which is my dad incarnate. If people ask me to describe my dad I say, ‘Combine those two. That’s him.’ The slapstick he plays is quite like his real persona. He’s a very, very good actor. It’s not strange to see my dad put on a wig and be someone completely different. When it looks and feels like my dad but there’s something else going on, that’s when it throws me. It’s the subtlety of my dad in the midst of a great performance that can really mess me up. If you’re involved in the physique and the aura and the knowledge of who that person is, when the minutiae of it change it’s quite alarming.

  I steal a lot of lighters, which is something coincidentally I’ve stolen from my dad. We’ve stolen everybody’s lighter we’ve ever come into contact with. Superficially, I think I’m more like my mother. I’m quite erratic. I’m passionate and emotionally driven, whereas my dad is more subdued about those things. I think what I’ve got from my dad is my fear of not being proud of myself. Those are the times I’ve seen him at his lowest, when he regrets something he could’ve done, mainly from a creative perspective. I’ve seen him cut himself up over things that I wouldn’t have imagined he’d find that relevant or important. And then I find myself doing the same over a vocal take, or some small detail in a recording, and that’s when I feel him inside me. That’s when I know who I am.

  Matthew Healy is the singer and guitarist with the 1975.

  BUT I WAS SURPRISED THAT WE GRIEVE ALONE TOO

  Mike Raphael by Amy Raphael

  On the wall in my study I have a framed black-and-white photo of my dad, all black curly hair, discernibly Jewish nose, neatly trimmed beard and sixties polo neck, tenderly wiping my chubby cheeks. I am five, maybe six months old, so it must be the autumn of 1967. In an old black box there are more photos that connect us. A decade later, at my primary-school fair in west London, me wearing a Silver Jubilee badge, Dad standing nearby, his hair and beard bigger. In September 1977, in hospital, holding my newly born half-brother with a look of amusement on my face. Around the same time, me and Dad in a London park, the late-afternoon sun lighting up our curly hair.

  One of the snapshots in the box of memories captures my mum in her twenties, patiently putting shoes on two-year-old me in yet another London park, her long, dark hair partly veiling her easy beauty. There are photos of old boyfriends and university friends; kittens that are long since gone. There are two photos of my dad. In one
he looks uneasy, uptight. In the other his face is relaxed and he is smiling. The first was taken before he was diagnosed, very late in the day, with cancer. The second was taken after treatment. He is in remission. His curls have gone so he looks like a version of himself, but he is content.

  There are no more photos. There was just a year between diagnosis and death. I was sixteen when he started treatment, seventeen when he died. He was forty-seven, the age I am now. It’s thirty years since he was buried at Highgate Cemetery, close to his beloved Karl Marx. I still don’t know if I really did stand alone by his grave, watching as the coffin was lowered and the soil scattered. All I know for sure is that I felt alone. I knew we die alone, but I was surprised that we grieve alone too.

  While studying English at university, I recognised Hamlet’s grief for his father. I saw it again in Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s glorious film about J. M. W. Turner. Tim Spall, in the titular role, visits a young prostitute shortly after his beloved father’s death. As he is sketching her, he suddenly, unexpectedly, howls with grief. It turns out that people don’t always cry at funerals and that grief isn’t always private. Sometimes a small act of kindness releases the grief – here, the prostitute, baffled by Turner’s sexual disinterest in her, kindly asks if he would like a drink.

  I, too, have howled, but internally, a silent tsunami of grief flooding my body. I see, sometimes, the effect on my face. A glimpse of disappointment, of loss, of why the fuck did Dad leave me? Time passes, but it doesn’t numb the rawness or dull the ache. When I got to university, eight months after he’d died, I recklessly drank subsidised pints of snakebite and black. I dyed my big eighties hair black and danced to the Cult and the Sisters of Mercy. I kissed boys whose names I wasn’t interested in. I cried in the dark when someone died in a film, hoping the credits would run till my cheeks were dry. None of my peers, away from home for the first time, most yet to experience loss, knew what to say to me.

  The physical loss isn’t quite the same when you haven’t lived with a person since the age of four, but still I had questions to ask. I still have questions to ask. Yet I am lucky that we had time together. In London parks, camping in the countryside, eating sweets at the cinema.

  These memories are, for me, spun from gold.

  Before I turned ten, Dad took me to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail at the ICA. I didn’t care much for the legend of King Arthur. I don’t suppose I understood too many of the one-liners. But I sat next to my dad, laughing in the dark at the relentless slapstick, feeling like a proper grown-up.

  A few years later, Bob Dylan at Earls Court on Saturday, 17 June 1978 (I still have the programme), his voice like sand and glue, bringing to life songs from my dad’s vinyl collection: ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’, ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’.

  There are other, less specific memories. Swimming on a Saturday morning at the public pool in Swiss Cottage. Going to his squat on Camden Road (now, I think, a petrol station) and being tickled till I could no longer catch my breath. Eating fat handmade burgers at Camden Market years before either of us became vegetarian and decades before it became a tourist hell.

  What else is left? My stepmother gave me some of Dad’s jazz records. I hate jazz. She gave me his watch, but it broke as soon as I got to university. When he was ill, Dad spent time at the Bristol Cancer Help Centre, a holistic place where he got into carrot juice and art. He joked about turning orange and proudly showed me his drawings. Some displayed his political anger: his response to the miners’ strike of 1984 to 1985 was to incorporate ‘coal not dole’ into as many images as possible. After he died, I hung one of his paintings in my bedroom. It was benign enough, abstract even, but somehow I could only see Dad’s personal anger – why me? – and eventually I took it down.

  My half-brother, who was seven when our dad died, says he doesn’t remember him at all. I have to force my memory away from the dark (visiting Dad’s flat after chemo and not being able to see him because he was too sick; going to the oncology ward alone to say goodbye) and towards the light. Whenever I open the black box, it is the second photo I now reach for. The photo where the curls have long gone but Dad is quietly smiling at the world. He is also, I like to think, smiling at me.

  Amy Raphael is a biographer, journalist and writer.

  She lives in Hove with her daughter.

  YOUR ELDEST CHILD GREETS YOU AND SENDS YOU LOVE

  John Niven by John Niven

  WOW. Has it really been twenty years since we last saw each other? Where did that go?

  A minute ago, you were not long retired and I was just starting work in the music business. You turn around and – boof! – two whole decades have gone. Oh well, I guess time flies when you’re dead and all. LOL!

  Actually, that LOL will make zero sense to you. It means ‘Laughing Out Loud’. It’s very irritating and all the kids say it these days. It’s from the Internet.

  Oh, right, you missed the Internet too. Basically, we invented a way for us to have all the telly, all the movies, all your shopping, all your music, all your friends and all the entire historical knowledge of the world on your mobile phone. We mostly use it to settle arguments about football and arrange to meet people for drinks and sex.

  Damn! I just realised you missed mobile phones too, didn’t you? When you popped off in 1993, they were still the size of a house brick attached to a briefcase and only bad guys in films used them, usually to tell the mayor they were about to blow up the city. Everyone has one now. Even wee kids. They’re about the size of a pack of your beloved Regal.

  Actually, the only person in Britain who didn’t know that LOL meant Laughing Out Loud was David Cameron. He thought it meant Lots Of Love. He’s prime minister, too, which gives you some idea of the kind of mess we’re in.

  I kid you not, Dad – the current government make Margaret Thatcher look like Florence Nightingale or the kindly old granddad from the Werther’s Originals advert. Oh – bonus ball – Thatcher died!

  I’ll pause here to let you spend a few thousand years of your eternity laughing.

  Done? Okay. Anyway, what else have you missed? Oh, Tiger. Right after you died, this black kid from America came along. Jesus, Dad, he hit the ball further than we used to go on holiday. He won everything – ten majors by the time he was thirty.

  He’s got fourteen now and it looked like he was going to beat Jack’s record but then he kind of went crazy with the ladies.

  It turned out he was having sex with everything in sight and his wife went tonto and battered him with a golf club and he hasn’t won a major since. I still kind of like him, though Mum’s not a fan.

  Oh, Mum – she’s well. It took her quite a while to get over you going so soon (as it did for all of us) but she’s happy and healthy. She turned seventy a while ago. (I was going to say ‘as you know’ but remembering birthdays was never your greatest strength, was it?)

  How about that? She’s older now than you were when you died. We had a wee party in Irvine. Everybody got drunk and had a grand time. You’d have liked it.

  Not so grand down in Irvine now, though. The high street’s pretty dead – lots of charity shops and pawnshops and the like. This was the other thing we didn’t really figure out about the Internet – it ate everything.

  They made a film of The A-Team recently and I thought, Oh, Dad would have liked to go and see that. (You and Gary loved The A-Team of a Saturday night, didn’t you? I’d have been poncing about with a book, no doubt, mocking the pair of you. Sorry about that, about all the mocking.) But we’d have had a fair old drive – there are no cinemas in Irvine now. The bloody Internet ate all of them too.

  Speaking of my brother Gary, I must now mention the saddest of news. He died four years ago in August. I’ll give you another few thousand years of your eternity to come to terms with that. I’ll just say this – he wasn’t very well after you left and hopefully he’s at peace now.

  It occurs to me, descr
ibing all of this to you, that our lives since you’ve been gone have doubtless been like those of many families across the country for the last twenty years – a patchwork of tragedies and triumphs, of heartbreaks and joy. So, on to the joy now . . .

  The clan continue to prosper. Your daughter Linda, my wee sister (God, there’s another number that shocks you – she was nineteen when you died. You’ve now been gone longer than she even knew you for) had another baby, a wee girl called Aoife. It’s an Irish name – you pronounce it Eefah.

  You can imagine what Mum, Aunt Emily and Aunt Bell are making of this whole spelling vs pronunciation thing.

  I think they’re just going to call her Linda’s New Baby for a while. This means you now have five grandchildren you never got to meet – Robin, Dale, Lila, Orlaith and Aoife. They are all bright, happy children and you would be very proud. Robin, my boy, is seventeen. He’s doing his Highers and is thinking about studying politics and law at university.

  It often makes me think of Papa – your dad – being a blacksmith. From blacksmith to lawyer in four generations – that wouldn’t be bad now, would it?

  I wish you could have stuck around a little longer to see them all born but I guess, with the premature-death rates for Scottish men still being about the highest in Western Europe, I won’t be the only man in his forties wishing his dad was still here to play with his grandchildren today.

  I remember speaking at your funeral and saying something to the effect that, although you had died relatively young at sixty-eight, I wasn’t too sad because I felt lucky to have known you at all. Boy, what did I know? I was only twenty-six and out of my tiny mind with grief.