The other great irony is that, towards the end of his illness, Grandad became more and more confused. I’d often sit with him while he’d try to call up people on the TV by using the remote as a telephone. It was an upsetting introduction to an illness we would end up knowing far too much about. Looking back, I wonder how Mum and I would have coped if we’d known what was in store. Sometimes when things are really bad with Dad and I feel myself losing patience, I think about how he looked after Grandad.
Grandad died in the spring of 2000. On the day of his funeral Dad did a reading on behalf of the family while I read ‘If’ – a poem by Rudgard Kipling that Grandad always had hanging in the hallway of his house. It felt like the end of an era with the death of my grandparents and it triggered something in me.
I couldn’t keep lying to Mum and Dad about who I was. I felt I was living two separate lives: one down in London with the occasional boyfriend, and another life up in Blackburn with questions about girls and who I was dating. I felt like a fraud and I hated lying to my parents – it’s something we had never done as a family. I’d meet people in London, other gay men, who’d tell me how they didn’t speak to their families any more and I didn’t want that to happen to me – I didn’t want them going to their graves not knowing who I was.
As I mentioned earlier, I think I always knew I was different from a young age – probably around 8 or 9. Dad, like most men of the time, wouldn’t think anything of calling someone a ‘poof’, ‘shirtlifter’ or ‘queer’. (The irony being that, having worked in showbiz all his life, he probably came across hundreds of gay blokes – and without doubt he wouldn’t have treated them any differently. It was drummed into me that I had to treat everyone the same, no matter who they were or where they came from.)
I remember being in my early teens and Mum and Dad were angry about something. ‘Your dad’s upset because Terry at work said that he thought you were gay,’ she told me. I don’t think I even knew what the word meant at the time but it was ingrained in me that being ‘a poof’ was wrong, not something to shout about.
For months I thought about telling Mum and Dad, but just didn’t know how to do it – I was terrified of the upset I knew it would cause them. At the same time I was stuck in an admin job in London that I hated. When I first got to the city I went to a series of auditions for bands, bringing out the Jarvis Cocker-style persona that I’d secretly created. I didn’t tell anyone, and would traipse around to backstreet studios to audition. I knew I wasn’t as good a singer as my dad but I wanted to give it a go. It was a disaster and I cringe about it now. But, like Dad, my life took an unexpected twist when I saw an advert in the paper: ‘Can you sing and dance? Do you speak German/English/ Italian?’ The auditions were that lunchtime. I was bored out of my mind in the job and knew I had to make a big change. I spoke a bit of German, so thought I’d give it a go, so I left the office and headed over to a hotel in Victoria, where the interview was completely in German. The guy showed a few videos of what we were expected to do and asked me if I thought I could manage that.
‘Yeah, I can give it a try,’ I said.
‘Great. Training starts in six weeks,’ he replied.
Six weeks later I found myself in Mallorca. I was an awful dancer, but I loved it – perhaps Grandad’s death had left me feeling reckless. I knew I had to deal with being gay, so with the safety of living abroad and before I lost my nerve, I took myself off to Palma to finally write Mum and Dad a letter and tell them the truth. I sat in a cafe writing and sobbing so much the waiter started to top up my coffee cup for free. I was terrified they would disown me. Two hours later, I put the letter in an envelope, added the stamps and dropped it in a post box opposite. ‘Fuck! You’ve done it now, Simon,’ I thought.
And then I waited.
About three weeks had passed and I heard nothing. Eventually I called them. Dad answered, chatting away as if nothing had happened. ‘Dad, did you get a letter?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, that. Yeah, we did. It’s your life, Sime. You’ve got to do what makes you happy. It doesn’t bother me.’
I felt a huge relief.
Mum came on the phone and it was a different story. Her first worry was that I would be wearing make-up and women’s clothes, something that Dad and I would laugh about on the phone later. ‘You know she thinks you’re going out in dresses?’ he would tell me. ‘Oh, my god! Seriously?’
Only a few years later did she make peace with me for being gay. ‘I would never have turned you away for being gay. I was just upset because I thought people wouldn’t speak to you and you’d be all alone,’ she told me. But little did she know far bigger things were about to test her.
By the time Dad was 65, Mum had noticed that his memory wasn’t as good as it used to be, although she didn’t mention anything to me at the time. She used to make a joke of it by saying things to Dad like: ‘Either you’re not listening to what I’m saying, you’re ignoring me or you’re losing your memory.’ But no one thought anything of it. I suppose you don’t when life is so hectic – it’s harder to notice small changes when you’re with someone every day. Around the same time, whenever Dad would go to gigs to set up his speakers, Mum began to notice that he would get more and more annoyed with himself. Dad’s short temper wasn’t anything new. Mum was used to his ‘artistic temperament’ – after all, it had been the cause of so many of their fights in their early days together. But this was different, because it was irritability coupled with a lack of confidence in what he was doing.
When Dad stopped gigging altogether it should have signalled that something was seriously amiss. Yet even then we didn’t twig. He would get so stressed beforehand it just wasn’t worth it. I’d get the occasional phone call from Mum in tears because of his unreasonable behaviour, but by this time I was getting fed up and thought it was more of the same. ‘Mum, if it’s that bad, just leave,’ I would tell her. However, as usual, the next minute they’d be best friends again. We had no idea then that the illness was making everything so much more intense.
Despite my irritation, I decided I wanted to surprise Dad with a trip to London. I planned the weekend: we would go to different music clubs, including Ronnie Scott’s, as I knew he would love the live music. It was also another attempt to try and connect with him – I loved him dearly, but we had nothing in common and I was clutching at straws to think of something we would both enjoy.
So, I bought a train ticket for Dad, telling Mum to pack him a bag and not say anything. On the day of the trip I called Dad and he told me he wasn’t coming, that we would have to do it another time. In hindsight, this was almost certainly due to his fear about travelling on public transport alone. A trip to London would have seemed insurmountable when he couldn’t even remember a conversation he’d just had.
Before long, it was Dad’s seventieth birthday. All my aunties and uncles from the Midlands had come up to celebrate with him, and we had a big family meal in a hotel in the Ribble Valley. After we’d all said our goodbyes, Mum, Dad and I sat in the car, ready to drive home, and Dad suddenly went silent, looking down at the steering wheel.
‘You OK, Eddie?’ Mum asked him.
Dad quietly started to cry. ‘I’m OK. I just think that could be the last time I see them all together,’ he said.
‘Aw, don’t be daft!’ said Mum, giving him a hug.
And he turned on the engine and drove home. It was like he knew something was on its way.
Chapter 13
By 2012, my life seemed on track. I was living in South Africa with a guy I loved. It was all about the gym, the beach and my freelance work in content marketing. Mum and Dad seemed happy back in Blackburn, even if Dad was a little forgetful.
My partner and I had moved across the globe to be closer to his mum, who coincidentally also had memory problems. When she came to stay with us in our house, I had my first insight into what it was like living with someone who was confused and forgetful. While Johannes was out at work she would ask me five or six
times an hour what time it was. It didn’t really bother me – she was mild-mannered, calm and distracted, and there weren’t any outbursts. Also, she was kind and always smiling, and would often just wander up the road looking at the flowers in people’s gardens, sometimes sneaking back with a couple of them that she would hide in a drawer. I would keep an eye on things and got used to her little outings. She seemed to love them and always came back smiling and relaxed. One afternoon, however, I was doing some work, but when I checked to see where she was, I couldn’t find her. I walked up the street and there was no sign of her.
I continued to the main road, looking in all the gardens, but still I couldn’t find her. By now I’d gone round to all the neighbours in the street and it was starting to turn to dusk. I was beginning to panic – I’d already driven deep into the woods at the back of the house where the baboons lived and still there was no sign of her. I didn’t dare call up Johannes and tell him I’d lost his mum, especially as it was getting dark. A couple of the neighbours organized a small search party while I drove around. As I turned onto one of the main streets, I saw a car on the opposite side of the road with a little old lady in the passenger seat, waving happily at me. The woman driving told me she’d found her half a mile away, wandering down a dual carriageway in the middle of nowhere. ‘Please don’t tell Johannes,’ said his mum.
‘Don’t worry, it’ll be our secret,’ I said.
He found out a week later when one of the neighbours said to him: ‘So they found your mother then!’
So, I would look at Johannes’s mum and think that Dad must be fine – he wasn’t as bad as her and was always reading, always switched on, always interested.
Then Mum called me.
‘Simon, I think your dad’s memory is really going, it’s bad,’ she said. ‘Well, he is getting old, Mum,’ I replied, just putting it down to his age.
To begin with, I didn’t really pay too much attention to what she was saying as I wasn’t there to witness it. That was until I went back for Christmas. At first, everything seemed normal – Dad was his usual self, Mum was rushing around trying to get everything right for Christmas – we were having our dinner a week early as I had to fly back, but we were still celebrating. I’d bought and wrapped my gifts, deciding to give Dad a book about Nelson Mandela’s speeches. He always loved to read. Like his records, there are literally hundreds of books stashed away in the house. When I was growing up he’d always be reading – primarily history or biographies, he wasn’t a big fan of fiction.
Anyway, I was washing up and Dad came into the kitchen. ‘Who bought that book, Sime?’ he said.
‘The one about Nelson Mandela? I did, Dad.’
‘Oh, it’s brilliant.’
Two minutes later he shouted to me from the lounge. ‘Who bought this book, Sime?’
I stopped what I was doing and thought he was taking the mick. ‘Dad, I bought that book. It’s your Christmas present.’
‘Oh, brilliant! It’s great.’
I carried on washing up and then again, two minutes later, he came back in. ‘Simon, who bought this book?’
By this time I thought he was definitely taking the piss out of me – which he so often did. ‘Dad, are you having a laugh? I bought it for you. For Christmas.’ Over the next hour he must have asked me about ten times who bought the book. That’s when I knew something had seriously changed.
This time I booked an appointment with the doctor. Those few days at home had showed me that Mum was right to be concerned: Dad’s behaviour just wasn’t normal. I went back to South Africa feeling anxious. At the doctor’s, Dad was diagnosed with having high blood pressure and put on a course of statins as well as being told to change his diet. He took the tablets religiously, started eating better and made sure each morning he took himself off for a ‘power walk’ down to the shop to pick up the paper.
In January 2012, Dad’s brother, my Uncle Ernie, died. It was a huge shock, the first one of his siblings to die, and it knocked him sideways. After that he seemed to lose his sense of purpose and started spending hours in the shed at the back of the garden. He rarely played any of his music any more.
We thought that perhaps he was happy spending time by himself, pottering about in the shed, breaking apart old machines and taking the metal to the scrap-metal yard for cash. It wasn’t a huge amount of money but it was something. But his behaviour started to become unreasonable and Mum would often phone up in tears about things he was doing and saying. Things dragged on and by early 2012, despite having regular check-ups with the GP, nothing had been mentioned about Dad’s memory.
When I moved back to the UK from South Africa the first thing I did was to go back home to see Mum and Dad. I had been warned by Mum that the back garden was full of things Dad had collected but was refusing to throw away or take to the scrapyard. I was indeed shocked to find the whole garden full of junk – it was piled up everywhere and you couldn’t move. There were old washing machines, metal tables, office chairs that he’d picked up from skips, old irons, clothes maidens – anything that had a tiny bit of metal on he kept – but nobody was allowed to go near it. If I tried to move or touch anything, he would fly off into a huge rage.
‘Dad, why don’t we take some of this to the skip and get rid of it?’
‘Don’t you touch that! I’m taking that to scrap.’
‘But Dad, half of this is plastic – you’ll never get the metal out of it.’
‘GERROFFFFF!’ And he would snatch what I was holding out of my hand. ‘Touch this again and I’ll break your legs,’ he’d say.
This situation went on for a few months, but the threats got worse and worse so we just left the junk where it was. Dad was still driving at the time and would come back with any bit of scrap that he had picked up. It had become an obsession. Eventually the back garden was so full up with junk, and Mum was so fed up with it, that we had to take the situation into our own hands. I knew it would lead to World War Three on the day, but it just had to be done. There was no space anywhere in the garden – it looked like a rubbish dump.
I booked some time off work and organized a skip so we could just throw the whole lot in. As expected, when the skip arrived, he went berserk. Every time I threw something in he would snatch it from me and put it back. I just had to ignore him and carry on as he called me every name under the sun – it was an utter nightmare and I really thought he was going to punch me.
‘Dad, I’m doing this so you can have more space. This is all junk – anything metal that you want to take to the skip I’ll leave, but anything else we need to get rid of.’
He stormed off. Then about thirty minutes later he came back. ‘Do you need a hand, Sime?’ he asked. And I passed him some old bits of plastic chairs. The skip was overflowing – but finally all the junk had gone – and so had my furiously angry dad; instead there was a nice old man wanting to help.
Around the same time, I came back one weekend to drive Mum and Dad to Ormskirk, where Mum’s old boss, Mr Connor, was celebrating his eightieth birthday. Wherever I was in the room, Dad would keep waving me over, insisting that I talk to different people. Eventually I just ignored him as it was such odd behaviour and I felt embarrassed. I couldn’t speak to anyone without the next minute hearing, ‘Sime, Sime! Come over here!’ It was constant.
The moment came when we all piled into a room to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. I was standing next to Dad, Mr Connor was giving a speech and Dad suddenly started complaining that he couldn’t breathe. He then turned around to the curtain, grabbed it, held it to his mouth and started breathing through it. It was very odd. He then left the room and went to sit in the car. At the time, I thought he was hot because there were too many people there, but looking back it was most definitely a panic attack – probably brought on by the fact that he couldn’t understand who the people at the party were. My poor dad. Gone was the man who loved a crowd and a social occasion, now he didn’t even know who was in the room or why he was there. Things defini
tely weren’t right, but every time he went to the doctor for a check-up, he would come back saying there was nothing wrong with him.
As Dad was deteriorating, Mum decided it would be a good idea to book their usual trip to the South of France to stay in the caravan for a month between May and June. She hoped that a change of scene and some relaxation would bring Dad back to her. But as soon as they arrived in Port Grimaud, Dad began to have problems with his eyes, which he would rub constantly until they were red raw. On the first day, their friends Derek and Pauline turned up at Mum and Dad’s caravan to take them to the supermarket, but Dad refused to go, which was unlike him. He easily became incredibly frustrated. At one point, he was cooking and he ended up throwing a frying pan across the room, narrowly missing Mum. ‘Twat it!’ he’d shout and everything would be all over the floor.
I received a couple of calls from Mum telling me how Dad was refusing to leave the caravan. To me it sounded like he had some kind of depression – his behaviour just wasn’t like him. Of course he could have his moments, but these episodes seemed to be on a different level. In the past, whatever his mood, he always wanted to go out and be around people.
One evening Mum popped round to see an old couple she knew on the campsite for a cup of tea and she ended up bursting into tears about Dad’s behaviour. The old guy walked Mum back to their caravan, but after he’d gone, Dad began accusing her of having an affair with him. His aggression was off the scale, so much so that Mum ended up sleeping in the lounge of the caravan so that if he attacked her, she could escape easily. She called me up that night and it was the first time I heard real terror in her voice – she was frightened of her own husband and said it was like living with a stranger. This was not the holiday they usually had and she swore she would never go with him to Port Grimaud again.
The Songaminute Man Page 14