I have often wondered, as I have seen friends and other family members lose a parent, what that must feel like. Not that I have ever been in a hurry to find out, because who is? That would be weird to the point of macabre. Nonetheless, losing a parent or two is simply unavoidable, unless they outlive us. I have seen that at very close quarters I wouldn't wish it on anyone. When we speak joyously of the Circle of Life, and all the positive attributes we associate with that phrase, it is easy to forget, at least for a while that it is a circle, not a continuum. That every birth begins a journey that is finite, and that we leave this Earth and take with us exactly that with which we entered.
When we were kids, Dad was just Dad in the way it probably is for most people. As a child life should feel secure, and for my sister, brother and I it did. At a young age you don’t think to question the constants in your life, they just are. So until I was twelve I was just a kid, raised in a modestly sized town in the North of England. I went to school, played with friends, visited family at the weekend and for holidays. It was ordinary, normal … except it really wasn’t.
Dad had been brought up in Southern England by a schoolteacher father and a very proper Mum. They lived comfortably in a home my Grandfather built before World War II, and both he and Grandma lived there almost until their deaths raising five kids along the way. My Dad was somewhere in the middle. He was born in 1934, started primary school as war broke out and secondary school as it finished. That part of England was home to many squadrons of the Royal Airforce and a very large railway junction. My father’s childhood was marked by warplanes overhead, regular bombing of the surrounding area, and the Battle of Britain in the skies. Yet despite all of that, a fairly slow-paced lifestyle in a quiet market town.
He did his National Service, two years in the Royal Airforce, and I don’t think he ever went back to Kent other than for visits, after that. He made his way to Huddersfield, an industrial town in the North where he met and married my Mum. He was twenty four, she was eighteen. I was born some seven months later and yes, I did the math!
What was happening in England at that time shaped my childhood, and took it out of the norm. Dad and Mum met because they were both involved in politics. The UK was, at the very end of the fifties, shaking off the austerity and rationing of the war years. Young people were excited about a peace that was theirs for the taking. While the Iron Curtain had come down across Europe, the ideas of equality, sharing and a brighter future for working people permeated that border and Mum and Dad were trying to play their part. Indeed, my earliest memory is being carried by Dad in the middle of a crowd of people marching across a heathland. They were singing “The USA are gie’n subs away, but we dinna want Polaris.” I was told later that those events were the anti-nuclear submarine protests in Scotland in around 1962/3. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was in full swing, and Mum and Dad were in the thick of it. Full words are here.
Throughout the sixties and early seventies Dad worked a variety of semi-skilled jobs, and until Mum had too many kids (three), she worked too, in the textile mills that dotted the town. Having parents so involved in politics, and Left Wing politics especially, meant that life was rarely dull. Neither of them have ever waivered from that early commitment to equality for all. Dad took those beliefs to his grave this week. Mum will too when her time is done … as will I. Sure we learn to live in a world that lets people down, and a certain level of cynicism might develop over time, but beliefs … no, they never have changed. My Mum and Dad should be proud of that, and I think they are and were.
Dad wasn’t, however, an easy man to really get to know. It wasn’t just him. With the shining exception of his youngest sister, none of his family are open about emotions and feelings. The times in my childhood that I felt closest to him were the Saturday mornings when he took me on his newspaper delivery round. He was the local guy who circulated a national newspaper called The Morning Star. This was a daily newspaper printed, back when printing newspapers was a thing, and published by The Communist Party of Great Britain. It is now an online operation owned by its readers.
However, Dad did his round, distributed papers, collected money and sometimes I tagged along. Huddersfield was, at that time, a mixed community with a very large population both from the Caribbean and from India and Pakistan. In the homes of the Caribbean immigrants we were usually offered rum, yeah, even the ten-year-old, and in the homes of people from the Indian sub-continent it was rare that food wasn’t offered and gratefully accepted. I preferred that to the rum. They were not just happy occasions that helped me understand that people who looked different from me were, in fact, not that much different at all, but that Dad was more relaxed than at any other time. He was well-known and respected in those homes. He earned the respect, and he also enjoyed it.
It wasn’t to last. This man, Dad, despite his commitment to progressive ideals, wasn’t quite as good at staying married to Mum. Divorce wasn’t as common then and I was some kind of minor celebrity for a day, when I broke the news at school that we, Mum and the kids, were going to live in Sheffield.
I was twelve and for all of our family another chapter was beginning.
I regret that Dad wasn’t that good at expressing feelings. I never doubted that he loved us, but he had a very hard time showing that. We visited, quite a lot in the early days, but the visits tapered off and our new family, including a shiny new Step-dad, moved two hundred miles south when new Dad was offered a different job. Ironically, we moved to the very town Dad was born and raised in. We left one very large extended family on Mum’s side, to the buxom of my Dad’s large family. I wish we could have taken a few with us … It wasn’t easy for Mum, for a long time, but never once did I hear her complain.
Over the years that followed, my contact with Dad was sporadic. When I was eighteen I went to live with him and his new family for a few months because I was attending college. It wasn’t a happy experience. Dad was still Dad, as friendly as he had always been, but it was difficult to settle into this strange new life, and he was never there when difficulties arose. He didn’t support me, his son, when I argued bitterly with his wife, and he didn’t support her either. That disappointed me more than anything. She was his wife until the day he died. She is now his widow, grieving her loss. My heart goes out to her and dammit he should have put me in my place. The rights and wrongs of the arguments no longer matter. She was his wife! I guess some people just don’t do confrontations very well. I understand that better now than I did as a teenager.
Things improved after that. Visits were short and occasional, but at least birthday and Christmas cards were exchanged, usually with a phone call. By the time I married and had boys of my own, Dad had moved to France. We made sure he met the boys, that they knew who their Grandad was, and that contact was kept up. It would irritate me that I knew he visited his brothers, but wouldn’t drop by to see me or my sister. We were all fairly local. I just took the view that he didn’t know how. People are strange. We are, as a species, an optimistic bunch. We tend to think that love conquers all, despite all the evidence that it all too often doesn’t. That doesn’t mean the love isn’t there, simply that expressing it is easier for some than it appears to be for others.
I last saw Dad in July. My wife and I took our youngest daughter to visit my parents (Mum and Step-dad, I know, as they say on Facebook … it’s complicated). He came to visit and he wasn’t well. He contracted Parkinsons a few years ago, and his formerly active life has slowed greatly. However, he was in good spirits, his memories were intact and we had a very good visit. I knew it would probably be the last time I would see him, but I wasn’t expecting him to deteriorate quite so quickly. None of us were. I was very happy to share those few hours with him, his wife and daughter.
Dad was loved. His second marriage lasted over forty years and he raised two children. I spent an hour on the phone with one of them today. She is devastated, and my warmest sympathies are for her, her brother and their Mum. For me, after all these years, I feel more like a part of the extended family than a son, but somewhere buried pretty deep is the inescapable fact that your Dad is your Dad, and life just became a little emptier now he is no longer here.
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This is a small part of the story of the man who was my father. As it should be, this is about him and me, but I am not going to leave it there without a few words about another man.
For the last forty five years I have had a Dad. Indeed, I still do and I hope I will for many years to come. The man who married my Mum is an amazing guy. No words of mine could ever express the depth of feeling I have for him. I would not be the man I am without his unconditional love, tough when it needed to be, but gentle almost always. I know it isn’t easy to raise three children of a previous marriage, but he has made it look like the most natural thing in the world.
Thanks Dad.