My Old Man

by Ted Kessler

  In our long and winding drunken discussions, as he hit his sixties he’d marvel at the strangeness of the modern world. Once, when he first had cable TV installed, he gave me a demonstration of how it worked, showing off his new toy, flicking up to the ‘naughty channels’ as my toes curled. He stopped at a gay pay-per-view channel. While no homophobe, it boggled his mind. ‘See, there you go, Tommy. For a fiver I can watch some guy getting it up the chuff.’ He laughed, taking a long dramatic lug on his fag. ‘Now, when I was young, homosexuality was illegal.’ He paused and I waited for the inevitable punchline. ‘And you could smoke anywhere you wanted.’

  He dearly loved his cigs and, even when he developed angina, refused to stop smoking. (I once bemoaned this fact to – of all of people – Spike Milligan during an interview and he said my dad was a ‘weak prick’. Childhood Goons fan that Dad was, I decided not tell him.) I’d sometimes have a go at him about his unrelenting thirty-to-forty-a-day habit and he’d take a cool, defiant puff and say, ‘Well . . . you’ve got to die of something.’

  Last November I was in Dundee – dropping my bag off at his place, with an hour to spare between working appointments – when he pulled me into the kitchen. ‘Look, I’m no’ trying to worry you, but I’ve got a pain,’ he said, gesturing to the left side of his chest. I told him it was probably just his angina, since he always refused to use his ‘puffer’. Two months later, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

  A pretty much unrepentant smoker to the last, he took it on the chin. Even at the hospital consultations, his humour remained bulletproof. ‘How are you feeling, Mr Doyle?’ asked one doctor.

  ‘Well,’ Dad deadpanned, ‘I seem to get dizzy any time I open my wallet.’

  Later, when he was admitted to hospital for a course of radiotherapy, we got dirty looks for laughing on the cancer ward.

  Over the winter I moved back to Scotland for nearly three months, and together the whole family nursed him. He died at home, two months after his seventy-third birthday, on Valentine’s Day 2014, as we held a surreal, hysterical (in both senses), sickening and heartbreaking ‘party’ around him that was like a particularly warped Mike Leigh play. His funeral, a week later, was filled with tasteless jokes and soul-stirring operatic arias. We’ve still to decide what to do with his ashes. ‘Put me in an egg timer,’ he’d joked darkly. ‘Keep me working.’

  But I don’t want to dwell on the bad stuff. I want to remember Dad sitting at his coffee table with his smokes and his ‘voddy for the body’, counting out his money from the shop, separating the notes into piles with such fetishistic care that a girl at the bank once asked him if he ironed them. Or standing with his elbow on the mantelpiece, slowly telling some outrageous story. Or arguing with me, his ‘bleeding-heart liberal son’, about some finer political point that he would always defeat me on.

  I want to remember him as the tolerant, fascinated soul that he really was beneath all that working-class bravado and Scottish tough-man exterior. At heart, he was a sentimentalist. When I was four he took me to see Disney’s Pinocchio at the cinema. Years later, he told me that every time he heard ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, he tried hard not to blub. Guess what? Me too.

  Once, we were looking through all of the old family pictures and his eyes started filling up. ‘It just makes you think,’ he said, ‘this was your life.’ Time and time again, he’d say to me and my brother, ‘When I kick the bucket, they won’t put a statue of me up in the city square. You guys are my statue.’ That may be true. But, as much as I was laughing and crying as I wrote it, this story exists as a statue of some kind.

  Tom Doyle lives in north London and has been writing

  about music and other stuff for thirty years.

  HE BLACKENS PAGES EVERY SINGLE DAY OF HIS LIFE

  Leonard Cohen by Adam Cohen

  I’ve had a very normal relationship with my father, with the exception that he’s terribly well known and, so it is said, one of the most important writers in his domain.

  Like all sons, I have found the relationship has added layers to itself over time. There’s only one layer of the relationship that I didn’t have and that’s the rebellion layer. I was either too unaware that I should’ve been experiencing it or he was simply spared it. These days, I find my relationship with him is just looking in a mirror and consulting with him. Hearing the timbre of his voice in my own. Body posture, mannerisms, ethics, morals, linguistics. All the deep imprintings that are there from either socio-genetics or, if you were to be cruel, you could say it was parroting. Whatever the reason, I throw my arms around the lifestyle I was given.

  My father made a remarkable effort – and one that I am much more impressed with now as a family man myself – to remain in his children’s lives despite a less-than-perfect split-up with my mother. I always saw him. He was always around. He always made gigantic efforts. There was even a time when he wasn’t allowed on the property and to circumnavigate that he bought a trailer and put it at the T of where the dirt road of our house connected to the municipal road in the south of France. And we’d walk up the dirt road. A lot was imparted by that. From Los Angeles to the south of France was no small journey. We spent all our holidays with him. Every winter we would go to Montréal and every summer we’d go to Greece.

  There was always laughter. Despite his notoriety for, I quote, ‘having a voice like the bottom of an ashtray’, for being ‘the prince of darkness’, for being famed for his lugubriousness, he is one of the most quick-witted of men, and he’s generous with his humour. The guy is hilarious. I’ve gone into the family business and we get a tremendous amount of laughter out of that. Also, talking about life and women and the journey we’re all on, that brings me so much joy. Hanging out with him is the best, whether it’s over a tuna sandwich or on the front stoop of his house. He doesn’t like to move much, having been a touring man his whole life. He does love being sedentary.

  I’ve learnt a lot from him on that stoop. The main inspiration that his life provides is a dedication to his craft. He has an old-world view of it. It’s not the prevalent notion that exists in new generations of instantaneous success. His whole life has been a demonstration in the opposite. I remember something he told me when I was sixteen and starting to take songwriting seriously. He said there’s a moment when you’re blocked on a song, or on any work, and it’s only when you’re about to quit having put much, much more time than you planned into it that the work begins. That’s when you’ve crossed the threshold of being on the right track. But the nature of my dialogue with him is nearly always instruction. From the manner in which we should greet someone about whom we have reservations, to gender relationships, to the proper dosage of mustard and mayonnaise. We talk about women all the time, too, and, if I may, out of privacy, I’ll keep that princely wisdom to myself. It is a long-running and possibly incomplete transmission.

  We visited him often when he lived in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the nineties. He would periodically come down off the mountain. Whatever residue there was from his studies was always apparent to us. Like a halo. Like a film of something we knew was other-worldly. A calmness, a peace, a clarity. All of which he’s tried to impart to us, not always with great success.

  I love seeing him at work. I’m still tingling with pride that this man’s return to the stage was so triumphant, so reverberant, so ministerial, so sermon-like, so moving. All you have to do is consult a review in any of the papers in any of the countries where he performed. He was referred to as the Sistine Chapel of live music. I mean . . . That seems like hyperbole or inflated praise, but I was moved to tears by the beauty of this man standing on the heap of his work and offering it with such generosity, such precision, such mastery. The Greeks came up with nostalgia, and it’s two words: nostos, which is memory, and algos, which is pain. That’s beautiful. And I experience a premature nostalgia whenever I think about my dad.

  We’ve never really fallen out. We’ve had a series of minor misunderstandings that were correct
ed and actually served to provide better understanding in the long run. When you have someone in your family who is in such demand and whom you derive a sense of identity from because of the nature of your own relationship, then you can start to become covetous of the amount of time spent with the person. There are times when, no question, I wish we’d gotten to spend more time together.

  But the time we have spent together is so valuable. I’ve been to so many great parties and events with him. I remember he was doing a big show in Paris and Sarkozy and Carla Bruni were backstage afterwards. He said to me, ‘Anything that anybody says to me, I want you to answer on my behalf. I want the President of France to know that I’ve brought up fully Francophone children.’ It was a badge of pride for him.

  Now I have my own son and while it’s difficult to say for sure if a seven-year-old resembles his grandfather, certainly a love of languages is there. Judaism, too. Not that it plays a huge role in our life, but just last Friday we were having one of our regular family meals at a Greek restaurant to light the seven candles as a family. To see my son reading Hebrew and being the chairman of prayers at the table . . . I didn’t do that and I know that was something my father regretted. For my son to rectify that and to witness the pride it provides for my father is beautiful.

  You want to know some secrets about Leonard Cohen? Here’s the dirt. He loves George Jones and Hank Williams. He travels with one small suitcase. Many of his impeccable suits are actually threadbare. He’s only about five foot eight despite that giant baritone. He awakens at four in the morning and blackens pages every single day of his life. He cuts his own hair. He will find a patch of sun anywhere and sit in it, like a big cat, following that sliver of sun wherever it goes. Although he no longer smokes, there’s nothing he’d rather do. He makes the best tuna salad I’ve ever had – he seems to have a knack for that. He loves making food for people, in fact. He spends a lot of time in the kitchen. Leonard Cohen’s probably the best-known short-order chef in the world.

  Adam Cohen is a singer and songwriter.

  He lives in Los Angeles.

  I DISCOVERED DAD’S ‘SECRET’ HAD SHAPED HIS CHARACTER

  Charlie Catchpole by Charlie Catchpole

  My lovely gentle dad never once raised his hand to me. Come to think of it, he hardly ever raised his voice. I can recall only one occasion when I saw him really, really angry. I was about eight and Dad had taken the family to look over the house that was to become my childhood home, on a smart little estate of newly built ‘desirable dwellings’ just outside King’s Lynn in Norfolk. Dad was so proud. It was the first house he’d ever bought and seen rise from its foundations. Until then, we’d lived in a succession of shabby rented houses and flats wherever his job in the lower reaches of the civil service took him.

  Now he’d been promoted to manage the local office of what was then the National Assistance Board – later the DHSS. He was in his early forties, he had a decent salary and he wanted to put down roots. (Why this was so important to him, I didn’t discover till some years later.) Anyway, when he opened the front door of the half-completed building, he was astonished to discover a man and a woman sitting on the stairs drinking tea from a Thermos flask. The man jumped to his feet and hastily explained they were passing by, it had started to rain, so they decided to take shelter. ‘Not in my house you don’t!’ shouted Dad.

  Even now, some sixty years later, I can vividly see him snatching the stranger’s flask from his hands and hurling it down on to the scruffy beige raincoat on which the couple had parked their considerable backsides. Hot tea was sprayed everywhere. The strangers legged it, sharpish. Dad slammed the door shut behind them, shouting rude words I’d never heard him utter before.

  My sister and I gawped at each other in amazement. This wasn’t like Dad at all.

  He was fit and sporty then – as a schoolboy he’d been an accomplished boxer and he still played cricket and football. But physical, even verbal, violence simply wasn’t his way. Dad served in the army in the hell-hole that was Burma during the Second World War – he was a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps – and I imagined he must have seen some terrible things. But he never once talked about his wartime experiences. The only oblique reference he ever made was when I discovered a fearsome-looking jack-knife among the spanners and screwdrivers in his toolbox in the garage.

  ‘That was for cutting Japs’ ears off,’ he said matter-of-factly. I assumed he was joking, but I couldn’t be sure. With Dad, you never knew.

  When we were older, my sister – who was always the more perceptive of the two of us – said she felt he was repressed and this was a source of constant frustration to Mum. He came from a generation that didn’t believe in ‘letting it all hang out’. Dad was the very personification of the stiff-upper-lip Englishman. I never saw him shed a tear over anything and I honestly cannot remember him ever hugging me or telling me he loved me. That sort of thing just wasn’t in his make-up. Not that I was particularly bothered. I knew he must love me. Dad wasn’t cold or stand-offish at all. He was a kind and generous man. But he kept himself to himself.

  Mum, on the other hand, was a fiercely spirited woman with a short fuse and a filthy temper. She regularly whacked me – no complaints, I always deserved it – and more than once I remember her sending me to bed early and issuing that classic warning: ‘Just wait till your father gets home!

  It was the emptiest of threats.

  Dad might come up and have a little chat about my misbehaviour, but I knew I had nothing to fear. His placid, plodding nature must have driven Mum mad. I often heard them arguing downstairs – or, rather, I heard her yelling at him. Once, terrifyingly, came the sound of the front door slamming late at night. She’d walked out, in a rage. Many years later, Mum told me she’d become so angry over some long-forgotten trifling matter that she’d thrown a book at him. It caught him above the eye and drew blood. Dad never mentioned it.

  Many years later, I discovered Dad’s ‘secret’, which I realised had shaped his character. He was illegitimate. In those days – he was born in 1911 – to his ‘respectable’ lower-middle-class family, this was a source of great shame. My dad’s mother, I eventually learned from Mum, was ‘in service’ at some grand mansion in the Norfolk countryside.

  As a teenager she’d got pregnant, and her lover – I fancifully imagined it was the master of the house – had eloped with her to London, where Dad was born in the Whitechapel Hospital. The man promptly did a runner. All Dad knew was that his name was Wilson and he was subsequently believed to have died in the First World War. Dad was taken back to Norfolk and raised by his grandmother and a couple of aunts.

  His childhood was not a particularly happy one, but neither was it especially unhappy. However, placed in the care of older women, he missed out on all those precious father-and-son moments, like fishing expeditions and going to football matches. Instead, he threw himself into his studies and earned a place at a well-regarded grammar school in Norwich.

  Money was tight in Dad’s adoptive all-female ‘family’, and I’ve long thought it was this spartan upbringing that informed his socialist beliefs. He always voted Labour, and Harold Wilson – Labour’s first prime minister since the year dot – was his hero. Not surprisingly, Dad was vehemently opposed to public schools, which he saw as bastions of privilege. But his views were tested to the limit when I somehow passed my eleven-plus with distinction and was offered a scholarship as a boarder at a minor public school in Suffolk. There was no argument now. Dad was adamant: if I wanted to go, I should go.

  Bastion of privilege or not, the school offered a better all-round education than I could expect at the distinctly average local grammar. Dave Larter, an England fast bowler of the day, had been a pupil there. Dad was quite impressed by that. And I really did want to go, so I went. In a heartbeat, my dad had sacrificed his long-held political principles for my sake.

  That’s how much he loved me.

  Charlie Catchpole is a Fleet Street journalist an
d

  columnist on the Sunday People.

  IT IS GOOD TO DANCE, IN VERY SHORT SHORTS, IN THE SUMMERTIME

  Barry Wood by Anna Wood

  Some things I’ve learned from my dad.

  Read books. Surround yourself with books. Life will be better, you will be better, everything will be better. Words are yours.

  It is good to dance, in very short shorts, in the summertime, along the beach at Sutton-on-Sea, singing ‘Blame It on the Boogie’.

  It is good to dance, in the kitchen, to ‘Crocodile Rock’. (It may never be as good again as when I was very little and standing on my dad’s feet, holding his hands, while we danced in the kitchen to ‘Crocodile Rock’.)

  Sit at the kitchen table doing the crossword with a loved one, or read out clues while the loved one makes tea. You can do this a few times a week, for years, for decades, and it will always be a good idea.

  Loyalty is a good idea. But don’t put up with wankers. Laugh at them gently, fondly, and then walk away.

  The main thing about living in a detached house is you can play your music louder.

  Read poetry, listen to it, memorise it. Poetry pursues the human like the smitten moon above the weeping, laughing earth. I spit the pips, and feel the drunkenness of things being various. See into the life of things. ‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly. ‘Moon! Moon!’

  Whisky is good. Scotch, usually, with a splash of cold water. It is best late at night (or early in the morning) with friends and conversation.

  And cheese, and crusty bread.

  Good shoes. Cool shoes.

  And jazz. Maybe even opera, one day.

  You’re all right.

  Other people are interesting.

  Kindness is strength.

  Have a good cry if you need one. And a hug.

  Anna Wood writes short stories.

  HE DEALS EXCLUSIVELY IN PERCENTAGES