A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  ‘He’s dead,’ I replied.

  This seemed to surprise him, though he was probably just taken aback by my un-American directness. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said, after a moment. ‘How long has it been? If you don’t mind me asking.’

  It was my turn to take a moment. ‘Ten years now,’ I said. ‘Ten years – more or less.’ I had to think, but I didn’t mind sounding vague, hoping that would prompt him to change the subject.

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘She died a long time ago,’ I said. ‘When she was forty-seven.’

  ‘That’s young,’ he remarked. I realised that this subject wasn’t going to go away and I was beginning to feel that Mike was too interested in family history. Or maybe I was beginning to suspect that I wasn’t interested enough. There was silence for a minute, then Mike put the question I’d known was coming. ‘So – what was he like, your dad?’

  Now it was my turn for a long pause. Looking back on the moment, after I had dropped Mike off and driven away, it occurred to me that there was so much I could have said. I could have said that I’d come to believe that, when a man becomes a father, he is – or he ought to be – transformed into something other than the man he had been until that moment. Every life is a more or less secret narrative, but when a man becomes a father, the story is lived, not for, but in the constant awareness of another, or others. However hard you try to avoid it, fatherhood is a narrative, something that is not only told to, but also told by those others. At certain points in my adult life, I have found myself talking, over dinner, about fathers and sons: the hour late, the coffee drunk, the candles burning to smoke, and men around the table reminiscing about the fathers they have lost, one way or another. The ones who died, and the ones who went astray; the weak and the false; the well-meaning and the malicious, and the ones who were never there in the first place, or not in any recognisable form. Regarding my own father, I could have told Mike the truth. I could have talked about the violence, the drinking, the shameful, maudlin theatre of his penitences. I could have told him about the gambling, and the fits of manic destruction. I could have spoken for hours about his cruelty, his pettiness, the way he picked obsessively at everything I did when I was too small and fearful to defend myself. I could have told him that I had buried my father with gratitude and a sense of what he might well have called closure a long time ago: buried him, not only in the cold, wet clay of the defunct steel town where he died, but also in the icy subsoil of my own forgetting. Ten years before, I had returned him to the earth and walked away, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, abandoning his memory to the blear-eyed strangers who hadn’t had time to move on or die before he had his last heart attack, between the bar and the cigarette machine in the Silver Band Club. I could have said that I had buried my father long ago and walked back to the funeral car in the first smirr of afternoon rain, thinking it was all over, that I was moving on. I could have added that, before my father died, I hadn’t seen him in years, but I hadn’t been able to relax, quite, as long as he was still alive. I had always known he was there, decaying in the old house, enduring a half-life tinged with whisky and heart pills, a dull gleam of anger and regret fading into the remaining sticks of battered and burn-scabbed furniture, into the glow from the absurdly large rented television in the corner, into cupboards emptied of everything except leftover dog food from his brief experiment in keeping a Dobermann and tattered packs of duty-free cigarettes his mates brought back from holidays in Torremolinos and Calais. I could have explained that I hadn’t seen him for years because I had walked out on him, in nothing but my shirtsleeves, with no money and nowhere to go, two days after my mother’s funeral. I could have said that, since that day in 1977, I hadn’t sat down with him, other than on the odd family occasion, but I had carried him with me everywhere, an ember of self-loathing in the quick of my mind, caustic and unquenchable. I could have said that, partly because of my father, I had always been – and still was – one of those binge drinkers you meet from time to time, out on a mission to do as much clandestine damage as possible. I could have explained that I carried myself fairly well, that I was responsible, hard-working, possessed of an almost excessive and clumsy affection for my own, 90 per cent of the time; that, in the normal course of affairs, I could take just about any insult or injury. I could have said that, like most men, I tried hard to maintain the front needed for ordinary social existence, all the time longing for one spontaneous, honest expression of vitality, but that I never saw it coming when, after weeks or months or even years of pained and shamefaced pretence, my control would snap – a far-off but resonant crack at the back of my mind – and I would find myself in the midst of a binge that might last for days, only to end miserably in some anonymous room, leaving me drained and ashamed. I could have told him that I on no account wanted to suggest that I’d had an abnormally difficult upbringing and that, even if I had, I had no intention of using it as explanation or excuse for anything. I just wanted to put all that behind me, to take responsibility upon myself alone for how I met present demands.

  I could have said that I knew it was too simple to say that my father injured me, and that I had taken years to recover from that hurt. I knew, of course I knew, that life is always more complicated than our narratives. I could even have said – had I known – that I appreciated the fact that my father himself had been hurt in ways that I cannot begin to imagine, when he was abandoned, one May morning, on a stranger’s doorstep, that he had no doubt spent his whole life looking back, wishing all the time to absolve or accept or expunge that original pain, if not for his own, then at least for his family’s sake. It never occurred to him, I think, to look away, to forget himself: there was always that gap he had to fill, there was always a flaw in a self he could never really trust. I could have said all these things, and then I could have told Mike – a stranger on the road, whom I would never meet again – that, in my own way, I had forgiven my father for what he had done, but that I would never forget it. I thought about it, and I think I was tempted, not to spite this well-meaning, well-raised son, but for my own sake, to put into words something that had been buried for too long, something that needed to be worked out in the saying. Finally, however, and with some misgivings, I abandoned that idea and, as Mike wanted me to do, not just because his head was full of beautiful, simple scripts, but also because he was a certain kind of son, and because Martin was a certain kind of man, I told him a lie about my father.

  FOUNDLINGS

  We are what we imagine.

  N. Scott Momoday

  CHAPTER 1

  My father told lies all his life and, because I knew no better, I repeated them. Lies about everything, great and small, were the very fabric of my world. The web of his invention was so intricate, so full of dead ends and false trails that, a few months before that encounter with Mike, I had only just uncovered the last of his falsehoods, the lie that had probably shamed him most, though it was an invention that, under the circumstances, he could hardly have avoided. It was an invention, an act of the imagination, when he managed to convince others, and so convince himself that, as a child, he had been wanted, if not by his real parents, then by someone. It’s easy to understand why he didn’t want to be a nobody; he didn’t want to be illegitimate – but it was probably just as important to him to feel that he came from somewhere. It mattered, once upon a time, where a person came from, and my father didn’t feel he had the luxury of saying, as I can, that it doesn’t matter where a man was born, or who his ancestors were. Nobility, honesty, guile, imagination, integrity, the ability to appreciate, ease of self-expression – in his time, most people believed that these were handed down by blood. The notion amazes me, now; but I think my father believed, till the day he died, that he was inferior, not only because he was illegitimate (that, he could have lived with), but because he was a nobody from nowhere, a lost child that no one had ever wanted.

  And no one ever did find out where my father came from. He really was
a nobody: a foundling, a throwaway. The lies he told were intended to conceal this fact, and they were so successful that I didn’t know, until after he died, that he’d been left on a doorstep in West Fife in the late spring of 1926, by person or persons unknown. He had gone to considerable lengths to keep this secret; in the end, I only discovered the truth by accident, when I was visiting my Aunt Margaret, seven years after we had buried him. To me it was shocking news that, as soon as I heard it, made perfect sense. For a while, I even managed to convince myself that it explained everything.

  It was the first time I’d visited any of my relatives since I returned to live in Scotland in the mid-nineties. Margaret was my favourite aunt, mostly because she was so close in age and temperament to my mother. I had gone round to her house, more or less unannounced, and she had welcomed me in, a little surprised to see me, but just as hospitable as I remembered her. An hour later, I was asking if she knew anything about my dad’s adopted family, who had supposedly come from High Valleyfield, not far from where she lived. According to my father’s stories, he had been adopted by his biological uncle, a miner and lay preacher, after his real father, a small-time entrepreneur and something of a rogue, had abandoned a girl – a sometime employee in one of his shady business ventures – he had made pregnant. A slight variant was that he was the son of a moderately wealthy industrialist who had paid one of his factory girls to move away when she turned out to be in the family way. Or he was the son of a lay preacher who had strayed. Or he was the son . . .

  It went on, depending on his mood and how much he’d had to drink. All that mattered was that he was somebody’s son. He’d had a father and a mother. For practical, or social reasons, they had given him over to the care of others, but they had at least existed. I had heard all manner of variation on these basic stories over the years, some of them patent contradictions, some elaborately styled; the only consistent details were that his foster-family, usually the Dicks, though sometimes the McGhees, had lived in High Valleyfield, that my father had had a half-sister, much older than himself, possibly by the name of Anne, and that his foster-father was a quiet, upright man, well respected in the pits, and an occasional preacher.

  Aunt Margaret was confused. ‘I’m not sure I understand you, son,’ she said, looking faintly worried, when I enquired about these imaginary half-relatives.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I know my dad was adopted.’ I went on to explain what I knew about his history, including the lay-preacher detail, which made her smile grimly.

  ‘Oh, your father,’ she said. ‘He had some stories in him, right enough.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  I watched as she considered her words carefully. My aunt is a good woman, and she has always been kind to me; she is also a person of particular tact. Like my mother, she moved to Cowdenbeath when she married, and the two sisters had stayed close, supporting one another through the various trials of life until my father moved us all, suddenly, to an East Midlands steel town, in the mid-sixties. During that time, she must have seen – and guessed – much more about what went on in our house than she had ever acknowledged. Now she was an old woman, still bright of eye, still capable of lighting up with a smile whose warmth had always cheered me; but I imagine she was also tired, and perhaps a little fed up with the very mention of her brother-in-law Tommy Dick, or George McGhee, or whatever his name was. He had brought too much pain to her favourite sister, he had embarrassed too many people she cared about, and I think she had heard a little too much nonsense over the years to let this particular deception pass. ‘Your dad wasn’t adopted,’ she said. ‘Or, not in the way you mean.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘He was a foundling child,’ she said. ‘The people who found him did take him in, but only for a little while. I don’t think they were from High Valleyfield, though.’ She fell silent, thinking back to a time just before she was born. ‘Those were hard times,’ she said. ‘It was around the time of the great strike, and people didn’t have much. From what I heard, he was passed about quite a bit. Of course, there weren’t the social services they have now.’ She studied my face, looking for a reaction, before she went on. ‘So, I wouldn’t say he was adopted. When you adopt someone, you make a choice. But nobody chose your father. He wasn’t chosen so much as – passed on.’

  A foundling child. I don’t think I had ever heard that phrase before, outside the world of fairy tales. It becomes confused with changeling, with the bewitched child left for innocents to take in, a cuckoo soul with a nature he cannot change, or even understand, marooned in the human world. I try from time to time to imagine the morning when he was found, wrapped in nothing but a blanket according to the story Aunt Margaret had heard, a thin, squalling child of the General Strike, wrapped in a blanket and left on a doorstep in a West Fife mining town. Nobody I have ever known was there to witness his abandonment, so I can imagine it as I like: as a scene from a fairy tale, perhaps, the unknown baby left at the door of some unsuspecting innocents, who take him in and try, as well as they are able, to bring him up alongside their own children, only to tire of him after a while and pass him on, first to relatives and then, as seems to have been the way of such things, to near strangers. I could imagine it wet and windy, the blanket sodden, the child crying plaintively, weak with hunger and terrified. My father wouldn’t have liked that image, which is why he put so much work into imagining alternatives, some fairly close to the truth, though never as desolate or as cruel as this abandonment must have seemed.

  I could stick to that kind of grainy, wet Thursday morning realism, and I would probably be fairly close to the truth; but what I choose to imagine is a summer’s morning. It would have been sometime in late May or early June, so there is a slim chance that it was one of those days when the sun comes up warm and, in a matter of minutes, burns off the dew on the privet hedges and the little drying greens between the houses. At that hour, it would have been quiet in the coal town: the men on early shifts already gone to work; the children drowsing in their beds; women in their kitchens, boiling great bundles of linen in huge cauldrons, or kneeling at the door to polish the front step and the little bit of linoleum at the threshold. Though early June offers no guarantee of warmth in West Fife, I try to imagine a pleasant day because, in this story, the baby on the doorstep of one of those coal-town houses is my father. He is about to be discovered by one of the many foster-families he will know during his childhood, people with whom he will dwell for a few years before being passed along, in the years when the General Strike was turning into the Great Depression. He will learn the names and faces of each family in turn, and he will try to feel that he belongs to them as much as any child belongs to its given parents; then they will explain, awkwardly and with as much kindness as the occasion allows, that he is going to stay with an aunt, or a cousin, or a neighbour, someone more able to feed him, someone with fewer children of their own. He will move several times between this June morning and the day he signs up for the air force and leaves the coalfields for what he always thought of as the best years of his life, yet the houses he knows, the people, the towns, the self he feels himself to be, will not differ much from one temporary home to the next. The houses are tenements, mostly; the families working-class miners. The General Strike hit them hard, perhaps the hardest of all, and nobody had much to spare. It is possible that my father had been abandoned for some reason connected with the strike, or with the conditions that had preceded it; either way, people had other things to worry about that year. Once they had passed him on, they would soon have forgotten the sad waif in his pitiful blanket. After a while, he would be a boy: big, hungry, awkward, always underfoot. Someone they would rather keep a week as a fortnight.

  Until he joined the air force, my father lived in Cowdenbeath and its environs. I don’t know what the town was like during the thirties and forties, when he was a boy, growing into a young man, but I cannot imagine it was very different from the Cowdenbeath I knew in the fifties and early sixtie
s. The town had been known for its poverty and overcrowded housing conditions early in the century; when I lived there, things had improved, but the overall impression was of an ordinary pit town, with its slag heaps and grey streets. Opposite St Bride’s, the school I attended for six years, the pithead still stood, its wheels turning; even if, by then, the onshore mines were starting to run down. In my father’s day, everything would have been going full tilt, though the miners wouldn’t have seen much of the fruit of their labours. So I’m guessing that my father’s Cowdenbeath was nearly identical to the town where I grew up, only a little darker, a little more crowded, a little smokier. The houses he passed through, as he moved from family to family, would have been dimly lit and almost bare, but there would have been gardens and allotments where people grew essential vegetables to supplement their meagre incomes, or wartime rations. Later, no matter where he lived, my father tended a garden of sorts, but he never grew flowers. I used to think it was a masculine thing, that he thought flowers were sissy; but he probably just remembered those allotments of the Depression, the taste of fresh leeks or new potatoes dug from your own patch of ground. The most obvious sign of his collapse, later in life, was the fact that the last garden he had was overrun with weeds and volunteer bedding plants, and not a potato or a cabbage plant in sight.

  It’s odd, imagining my father as a baby, or a growing boy. The first image I have of him is a wedding photograph: in it he is gawky, but proud of his air force uniform. His prominent teeth suggest that a smile was a calculation for him, a calculation he has failed to get quite right as he looks straight at the camera and gives it all he has. My mother is more natural-looking: pretty, already a little roundish, she is obviously happy. They were married on another June day, twenty-six years after my father had been abandoned and, again, it is easy to imagine a warm summer’s morning, the lilac in bloom in her father’s garden and sparrows brawling in the hedges around St Kenneth’s Church. I try to imagine bells, but all I hear is the crank of the pithead wheel across the street and someone unloading crates of soft drinks in the yard of the nearby pub. Yet here they stand, arm in arm: her waxy-looking bouquet curdling in her hands, while he adopts that smile I never saw in thirty years, boyish and awkward and marred by his buck teeth, yes, but at the same time almost confident, and only a hint in his eyes of what he knew was fear, before he learned to call it love. I have always been puzzled by this picture. Were these my parents? Why did they never look like this, all the time I was growing up? Most of all, did they really have not the least inkling of what was to come? On their wedding day, did they really know nothing at all about one another?