My Old Man

by Ted Kessler

  Later, he met my mother, and they married in a jovial, informal wedding – everyone wearing preposterous hats and smiles. My father assumed the guises of the family man: he committed himself to cataclysmic enterprises in DIY, likewise sundry mini-tragedies of gardening; he spray-painted our car avant-garde two-tone shades and produced ambitious cuisine, which his family devoured like happy philistines. He protested mildly when his daughter played the piano, guitar and, worst of all, the violin (badly), when he wanted to sit quietly and leaf through his stacks and stacks of books. He was calm, kind and gentle, and such words recurred in every eulogy after his death – commendation after commendation – from those who said he’d helped them in so many unobtrusive ways.

  When I was a child, he seemed a tall, unknowable figure, a book in his hand, exiled into our garage and leaning against the freezer. If I wanted to consult him on matters of global history or military campaigns of the recent past or the writings of D. H. Lawrence, which he discussed for hours – and then later revealed, to my consternation, that he had never read – I would knock on the garage door and find my father immersed in one more book, always oblivious to the carnage around him. He was like a chain-smoking oracle with eccentric taste in interior design. He knew so many facts, so many histories. His memory was formidable.

  I used to ask him questions about anything and he always answered them. It was a game, all the time I knew him. What would happen if the earth stopped spinning? Why is the sky black at night? My father contemplated the mythical rites of moon worship, pagan cults, forgotten shrines and the druids of England and Wales. He relayed historical events in considered detail, mused liberally on the Ancient Sumerians, the philosophical Greeks, the symbolic nature of Clock Time – and so on . . . He never did anything with this knowledge: he simply didn’t have the urge to churn it into books or convey it to the world. He didn’t much care about those sorts of wider plaudits.

  He was a great and unpredictable traveller, who roamed widely, across the Americas, Scandinavia, Asia and the Middle East. Most of all, he loved the sea. He spent family holidays sailing boats, in the Lake District, on the Norfolk Broads. He taught himself to sail – mostly from books – and he also liked a drink; this combination of factors meant that occasionally he did not exactly sail his boats but more precisely wrecked them against inconvenient land masses that had decided to get in the way. All my earliest memories of my father are related to boats and sailing – his craggy handsome face, silhouetted against a hazy dusk, the first stars rising. Smoke drifting from the inevitable cigarette, as he stares upwards, checking the direction of the wind. The gurgling sound of the boat, moving through water. My father was brought up in landlocked north London, but he cultivated inherited passions and, when I was four, moved our family to Suffolk. A beautiful stark coast of flat mud plains, silver estuaries, seabirds fluttering onto reed beds, lonely windmills. My father spread tidal charts across our kitchen table, along with, to my mother’s unmitigated delight, an obsolete GPS device, a few emergency flares and a broken outboard motor.

  He imbued me with his love of the ocean, as well as a propensity for reading and hoarding books. In his small three-bedroomed house, he amassed an incongruously extensive library. He possessed in general more model trains and aeroplanes and model things and things in general than anyone I have ever met. He was shy and strong-willed at the same time; he specialised in witty, subversive asides, so you perceived that he thought deeply and distinctively about the world. He once told me that he was forced out of a long barrow, at West Kennet, by the ghosts of the departed. He also believed he could move through houses he had once inhabited, actually return to them, in some metaphysical or imaginary sense. He retired to Machynlleth in mid-Wales, or tried to, though his health was poor by then. There he had a small slate house with a view of the River Dyfi glittering beyond the fields, seabirds reeling across the sky. To him, proximity to water, to any ocean, was bliss.

  My father was so ill, and so evidently refusing to be ill, for so many decades, that it was hard to know when to insist, when to cajole him through necessary treatments, when to leave him to his own devices. He liked the serenity of his own company. He protested throughout that he was fine; he joked wryly about the asperities of his state. When I last saw him, he told me his only regret in life was that he had never travelled to Iceland, and he thought he could accept that minor deficit. His final words, ironically, were to insist that he was okay, and that we mustn’t worry. I think by then he knew that it was over, his improbable longevity was drawing to an end; but the habit was so enduring, he couldn’t abandon it.

  When our parents die, when the loss falls hard and heavy upon us, we rebuke our former selves, but perhaps that isn’t entirely fair. Often, after my father’s death, I wished I could go back in time and tell my unwitting former self to stay with him, stay with him – he won’t be here next week and you will miss him so profoundly, it will cause you physical pain. I had many decades to prepare for my father’s death, and yet the completeness of the loss was shocking, all the same. Nothing prepares you for the blank finality of death. A new day dawns, and for a moment, as you emerge from sleep, you are confused, you think your father is still alive. Then, the brutal fact assails you, once again, and you feel as if you have been kicked in the guts. You are tormented by all the further questions you should have asked him – every day something occurs to you. And you are angry, really, about the immutable condition of mortality: that those we love must vanish in the end. Even our determined, kindly, much-loved and loving fathers.

  When I think of my father now, I see him stooping in one doorway or another, a tall figure, six foot four, with thick curly hair that barely greyed. Driving great distances, quietly to dispense love, to me and my small children, his grandchildren, and then to vanish again. Onwards, for ever. Sometimes I think he is not dead at all, he’s on one of his journeys, one more journey, of all the thousands of miles he covered. So you vacillate, between hope, and sorrow, and rough-hewn acceptance. My father died peacefully, and that is a consolation.

  He once told me, after I had rather over-enthusiastically sent him a paperback version of my first book, when he had already loyally read and praised the hardback version, that he wanted me to dedicate the book again, and once more again, for luck. He was right, of course – we should dedicate our small enterprises, always, to our unique, irreplaceable fathers. Adapting the old poets, among them Catullus – atque in perpetuum . . . ave atque vale. So once again – with all my love, dear Father, and for ever – hail and farewell . . .

  Joanna Kavenna is the author of several

  works of fiction and non-fiction.

  FOOTBALL HAS CAUSED MORE ARGUMENTS IN THE STEWART HOUSEHOLD THAN HITLER EVER COULD

  Bob Stewart by Rod Stewart

  During the war years, my dad was too old to serve so he was in the ARP, the Air Raid Precautions enforcers. I remember when I got older him telling me stories about going into children’s hospitals that had been bombed. He had to go over to Highgate Wood and light huge fires with the ARP so that the Germans would think, Ooh, we’ve got a house here, let’s bomb over there . . . It was dangerous work. In later years that’s where I used to play football, which is a strange thought.

  I was a bit of a mistake. As my brother tends to say, a very expensive mistake. My dad had come home one night and gone down the air-raid shelter . . . the Anderson Shelter, and, well . . .

  Before I was born, my siblings – I’ve got two brothers and two sisters – were asked to leave London and go and live in the country, like kids were at that age. All of them said, ‘No, we want to stay with Mum and Dad.’ We were in Highgate, so we didn’t get bombed that much, but we still got bombed.

  My dad was a hero to me because of his work ethic. He was a very proud Scotsman, too, although he only spent the first eighteen years of his life up in Scotland. He had to move down south to find work after a brief spell in the Merchant Navy.

  I loved his football ethic, to
o. It was the same with me: football above everything. He broke his leg on Christmas Eve playing football and had to spend Christmas in hospital. My mum burnt his football boots! Football has caused more arguments in the Stewart household than Hitler ever could.

  He gave me a lot of advice over the years that’s stood me in good stead. When he was getting into his late eighties, he said, ‘The one thing I didn’t want to do was find myself pushing myself out of me chair.’ He’d played football all of his life and his advice to me was ‘Always keep your leg strong.’ And I do. When the muscle that keeps the two parts of the knee apart goes, you’ve got bone on bone smacking together and that’s when it hurts. But if you keep your leg strong, it keeps everything pulled apart and tight. It’s a great bit of advice. Of course, he also gave me the proverbial ‘Keep it in your trousers!’ line.

  He didn’t say much. He wasn’t a man of many words, but he was extremely loving. He was a good dad. I loved him.

  Rod Stewart is a singer and songwriter who has recorded

  hits across five decades.

  I CAUGHT A GLIMPSE OF DAD, GREY-FACED, TEETH GRITTED

  Tam Doyle by Tom Doyle

  In 2013 I wrote a book – about Paul McCartney in the seventies – and I dedicated it to my dad: ‘To Thomas Corrigan Doyle, for fixing the plug onto that first record player and setting me on my way.’ He was quietly chuffed, I reckon, and I didn’t have to explain it to him. He knew exactly what I meant.

  It was 1971, I was four and living with him and my mum and younger brother Brian in Ranelagh Road, Leytonstone. We’d moved there from Dundee – for what turned out to be only nine months, while my dad and his London mate Tony were running a nocturnal office-cleaning-cum-thieving business. Obviously the details are sketchy to me now, but my dad had somehow acquired a plug-less Dansette and for weeks I’d been entranced by it. Knowing this, Tony had given me a pile of singles he’d ‘found in the bins’ (God knows where they’d really come from). I was itching to play them. This urge peaked one day as Dad was trying to paper the hallway of our rented flat. ‘So there’s me,’ he would say, when telling the story in later years, ‘up and down this fucking ladder and you bugging me to get this record player going.’

  Finally, he gave in, sorted the plug, and I was off, blasting out these magical 45s – the Beatles, Free, ‘Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa’. While I was spinning some great rattling single that I was later to discover was ska, there was a knock on our front door. ‘Two lassies standing there,’ Dad would remember. ‘And they say, “Is there a Jamaican party going on?” I swung the door right open and showed them you sitting with that record player and said, “Yeah, sure, there it is.”’

  He was – pretty much – always tolerant and encouraging when it came to my obsession with music. Being honest, I think it baffled him a bit, but he went with it. Sometimes, even as a tiny kid, I must have seemed a bit of a stranger to him: me dreamy-headed, him more hard-boiled. We shared a name (I’m the fourth Thomas Doyle in our family), but we were completely different on many levels and on others very much the same.

  He’d had a rough upbringing at the hands of a harsh mother. Her first husband, my dad’s father, had died during the Second World War and her second had drunk heavily, probably to blot out her witchy tantrums. Growing up, my dad was clearly a smart lad, but his future was already mapped out for him: he was going to work in their grocery shop. There had been glimmers of something more romantic – the maternal side of the family were circus and carnival people and he’d tell me about learning how to perform somersaults off the back of a horse as a kid. But this tantalising possible future as a travelling acrobat was quickly snuffed by reality and the pursuit of cash.

  Looking back, the hard physical violence he suffered at the hands of his mother left him seeking some kind of approval from her, which he never got and which manifested itself in a lifelong drive to make money and prove his worth. Throughout his childhood he saw precious little maternal affection or support. He used to talk about the Catholic family of boys who lived next door and how, if he’d got into a fight with one of them, he’d come crying to his mum and she’d snap at him and tell him to get back out there and ‘batter him’. If he did, he’d then have to fight the elder brother and then the brother above that, until he’d been truly battered himself. As me and my own brother grew up, often fighting wildly with each other, he sometimes treated us in that same tough, physical way. A thump on the ear, a smack on the back of the head.

  At the same time, he was hilarious. You only have to look at pictures of us from the seventies to see what a loose, funny operation our family was. For a time, after he quit the grocery game, he worked as a bus conductor and would gently take the piss out of the old grannies, telling them he was a bit deaf and getting them to shout into his ‘hearing aid’ (a fag packet in his top pocket connected to a bit of string stuck in his ear). Most of the memories of my childhood are of laughing my arse off at his stories.

  Dundee in the seventies was a hellishly tough place, though. In 1976, Dad bought a chip shop on a council estate, next door to a pub. Come chucking-out time on a Friday or Saturday night, the pissed locals would pile in and numerous fights would erupt. ‘It was like the fucking Wild West,’ he’d remember. I was normally home tucked up in bed when all of this was going on, but one night, for whatever reason, I was still there, probably eating my body weight in chips. Some drunk refused to pay for his pie supper and threw it at my dad’s head. I was in the back shop and my mum tried to pull me away as my dad launched himself at this guy. I caught a glimpse of Dad, grey-faced, teeth gritted, whacking this drunk on the head with a heavy Indian club. The bloke kept hitting the wall and coming back at him. ‘It took me three smacks with this club to get the fucker to go down,’ he’d say. ‘Then I realised he was bouncing off the Formica wall.’

  The guy moaned to his mates that my dad had assaulted him. ‘Nah,’ they said, ‘Tam wouldn’t do that. He’s a good lad.’

  He was, but at the same time you wouldn’t mess with him. In later years, he’d lament the fact that he was ‘a bit hard with you and Brian’. But it was true. On two occasions, once with me, once with my brother, we’d run into the back shop moaning that we’d come off worst in a fight. My old man would pull out his air pistol and say, ‘Go on then, get him with this.’ I clearly remember pointing the pistol at a kid who was maybe a hundred yards away, thinking, I’d better hit him or my dad’ll be pissed off with me. (I did shoot the kid, eventually, in the leg, and my proud father denied all knowledge of any air pistol when the guy’s freaked-out parents came in to challenge him over it.) Only now, looking back, do I realise how utterly mental this all was.

  Being a chip-shop owner hardwired my dad into the network of Italians living in Dundee and he really felt he was one of them – learning the language, being ‘adopted’ by an elderly couple called Teresa and Luigi, who basically became his surrogate parents, driving us 1,200 miles from Scotland to Lago Maggiore for a holiday in 1979. There he completely fell in love with Italy: the food, the culture, the music.

  Then, in August 1982, my mum died in horrible circumstances. Dad was forty-one, I was fifteen, my brother twelve. We suffered something close to a collective nervous breakdown and, from here on in, became equals. Three lads sharing a flat on the ninth floor of a tower block. On Friday nights, it was my job to do the washing, in a clattering old twin-tub, and I used to ease some of the pain of this chore by sneaking out on the landing stairs to smoke a joint. One night Dad asked me where I’d been and I told him. ‘Get yer dope oot then,’ he said, and we got stoned together. That night he suffered from comedy short-term-memory lapses – three times he got up to put away the twin-tub that he’d already packed away – and we would both double up laughing about it for years.

  Soon after this, he got together with his second wife, Heather. They made for a much better team than he and my mum ever were and I ended up with two stepbrothers, Jimmy and John. At the time Dad was working as a shop-to-shop
salesman for a bakery and on Saturdays I was his ‘van laddie’, involving many light-fingered escapades, which ensured that I was very well paid for a sixteen-year-old. By then I was playing in four or five bands, buying drum kits and beatboxes and synths from the proceeds of our nefarious activities. He’d act as what he called my ‘unpaid roadie’, driving me to rehearsal rooms and gigs.

  Down the years he always supported me, but worried about me, and often, I think, wondered what I was doing, in his words, ‘fucking around’ with music and then music journalism, when I started working for a magazine aged seventeen. In 1988, I basically ran away to work in London and, being different and the same (and prone to locking horns), I think the 470 miles between us preserved our relationship.

  In the nineties, when the bakery firm he worked for started to go under, he hit a major depression. On my visits back home, I became his vodka-assisted therapist, drinking and talking with him into the early hours. In time, he got back on his feet, and he and Heather bought the bakery’s failing flagship shop for a song and turned it around, before – and he loved this – eventually selling it back to the original owners at an enormous profit.