My Old Man

by Ted Kessler

  Well, wherever you are, Dad (I still don’t do the God thing), your eldest child greets you and sends you love.

  Although it’s not like today is particularly special because I think of you every day. Every. Single. Day.

  You run through me unceasingly, like blood, like my own thoughts.

  John Niven is a novelist and screenwriter.

  ‘OI, JEMIMA, DO YOU WANT TO GO TO A PARTY?’

  Ian Dury by Jemima Dury

  I have a recurring image that my dad is Norman Stanley Fletcher in Porridge, and I’m Ingrid, his daughter. In my daydream we’re sitting across from one another in Slade prison. I’ve got his full attention during visiting hours because Dad/Fletcher is trying, in spite of incarceration, to wangle a deal. ‘Can you get me some gear?’

  ‘Oh, Dad, what are you like? No, I can’t and you shouldn’t be asking. Oh, bloody hell, all right, then. I’ll try.’ What can I say? Fletcher, my pretend dad, is incorrigible.

  Ian, my real dad, was incorrigible, too. It was almost his job description. How interesting that my subconscious cast him as Fletcher – a witty, unscrupulous petty criminal. And I’m Ingrid, his regular visitor, his invaluable confidante, and his long-suffering partner in crime. In an uncanny twist the Slade is an art school as well as a prison, so my subconscious gets top marks for irony. (Dad actually went to the Royal College of Art but never mind.) I think of Dad and me as these two characters to amuse myself, but if anyone else asks me what our relationship was like then I think of the following anecdote. It’s got all the right nuances and is not unlike the scene above.

  On New Year’s Eve in 1987, when I was eighteen going on nineteen, Dad asked me, ‘Oi, Jemima-if-I-punch-you-in-the-ear’ole, do you want to go to a party?’ I said yes straight away, thinking it might be rather glamorous and theatrical. I needed some excitement because I was having a bleak winter. For twelve months I’d been in Belgium, working as a dancer and experiencing much physical and mental endurance. It was a gruelling job with a theatre company and now I was back at home with my mum, no job, no prospects and no idea what to do with myself. It was time Ingrid paid Fletcher a visit: he certainly knew what to do with a creative void.

  A party sounded like an adventure. I went to Dad’s flat in the daytime so I could enjoy the preamble. I walked all the way from Chiswick to Hammersmith in my vintage dress, black tights, tons of goth make-up and big hair. He was on his own when I got there, which was great – not a girlfriend or ligger in sight. Good, I’d got some visiting hours to myself. That meant I would be on minder duty later when we went out. I loved minder duty. Usually, it was a job for Spider or Strangler but tonight Jemima was on the case. Being the minder involved toughness, strength and balance – toughness to stop him being hassled, strength to stop him falling over because the caliper he wore on his leg could make him unsteady, and balance to stop myself going over with him. I was very good at balance.

  We sat through the afternoon watching TV and that was fine, the lull before the storm. Then, I was like Ingrid doing the chores while Fletch sat on his arse and gave it the verbal. After doing the washing-up and tidying, I made peanut butter and cheese sandwiches for dinner and we ate them followed by some grim chocolate desserts from Safeway. I thought, Hang on a minute, this isn’t right, when Dad stayed put, in a committed way, to watch more TV. By eight o’clock it was starting to feel like a prison common room in there. He had two or three chairs in a semi-circle all facing a huge boxy television on an industrial trolley. It was like recreation time at Wormwood Scrubs.

  So, I sat down again, too, in one of the expensive Practical Styling chairs, the pink one. One of the arms had fallen off and it was very upright so it was an uncomfortable expensive chair. More time passed and no sign of going out. He wasn’t saying if he was having second thoughts but he wasn’t giving off party vibes either. He wasn’t getting dressed up or phoning a cab or reaching for the Chanel No. 5. (In two years’ time it would be Body Shop Dewberry Oil.) By nine o’clock I was feeling depressed. I didn’t want the evening to slip away. I knew it wasn’t out of character for him to change his mind but it was New Year’s Eve, for God’s sake, and I was stuck indoors while people were out there discovering a new drug called Ecstasy and smooching to Chris de Burgh. Eventually we were slumped back as far as you can be in an upright chair and I was resigned to an evening of broadcast entertainment. One of the four channels was bound to come good.

  He was never going to get out of that chair and I felt daft sitting there in brocade and black eyeliner. I’ve always hated the pressure of New Year when you’re supposed to be somewhere really exciting and meaningful at midnight otherwise you’re sad and next year will be cast under a dark shadow. I gave in to it at some point, perhaps around ten o’clock and I must have thought, Oh, fuck it, that’s it, then. The night had promised so much and delivered so little. So there we were, one daughter, who looked like a second-hand-shop turkey, and one forty-five-year-old rocker, who had gone off the boil, sitting in two very camp and uncomfortable chairs in a dilapidated flat staring at the TV. Bearing in mind that those were the days when you thought it was okay to stay in and watch Gary Glitter on New Year’s Eve. So that was what we did.

  After a long silence with very little conversation, he said, ‘Have you got any marijuana?’

  I played it cool. It didn’t occur to me to think he was being blatantly opportunistic and outrageous asking me, his eighteen-year-old daughter, for drugs. Inside, I felt a glow of validation because he was treating me like a Level One grown-up. This was, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the proudest moments of my life so far with Dad. I’d earned my prison stripes. Believe me when I say the mention of drugs was inconsequential, because he smoked all the time. I knew it, and actually I preferred it to his drinking. But the fact that he’d decided to trust me with something so adult, well, that made me cool and in the gang. I’d love to know what he was thinking. Whatever it was, I conveniently came of age all of a sudden. It was like a desperate Fletcher had just asked Ingrid to smuggle a huge lump of dope into the clink inside a Dundee cake. This was the nod I’d been waiting for.

  Now, I was not the pursuer or the purchaser of drugs as a rule. Fags, yes, I had smoked those since I was twelve, but anything else, well, I just wasn’t very interested. How opportune for Dad, then, that on this night I did have a small piece of hash in the front of the dress I was wearing. The dress was silvery-blue and forties style (the sort you don’t bother to wash), with two little pockets at the front near the waist, just the right size to hide and forget about a lump of dope. I’d had it for ages, since the summer, I think, and I was genuinely so nonplussed by it that I had forgotten it was there. It was only when Dad asked me the question that I remembered, and I was so keen to be a gang member that I felt extremely pleased with myself.

  ‘Er, yeah, I have. Here you are.’

  I swear that not one flicker of surprise or wonderment passed over his face when I handed over a bit of black stuff in cling-film. He laid a line of tobacco across two Rizlas and unwrapped my stash, then pulled out a Zippo and lit the hash. There was a fizzing sound and some black smoke, and whatever it was shot up his arm and disintegrated en route. It was only then that he looked up at me in surprise.

  ‘That’s a bit of asphalt, love.’

  He didn’t have to rub it in: I was mortified enough already as my fleeting kudos shot out of the door with the fumes of burning tarmac. He didn’t rub it in because he’d probably been there too many times himself, in Notting Hill or Brixton, where spending twenty quid on a piece of rubber bin lid is not unheard of. Bollocks, I thought, as I remembered dropping the dope in the dark a few months before. I had obviously picked up part of the road and thought nothing of it. There isn’t much more to say after this because he seemed to forget all about it and go back to smiling at the TV.

  On paper, Dad’s logic was completely immoral and suspect. He thought it was okay to lure me round to his flat on false pretences, get me to do lots of li
ttle jobs, build up my hopes and dash them, and then ask me for drugs. That was some interesting parenting. In reality, I barely remember any of that. What stands out for me is the fact that he accepted me as a regular experimenting teenager and didn’t react when I screwed up the whole drugs thing. I know, I know, on paper that looks really bad but I’m so grateful he didn’t bat an eyelid because then I didn’t feel over-stupid and judged. I loved him for that. He never mentioned it again, not to me anyway, although once he got back to his cell he probably regaled Godber with stories of fizzing asphalt for hours. My dad’s faulty logic provided me with many a tale to tell my fellow inmates, too. This episode concluded with Norman Stanley Fletcher and Ingrid settling back into their upright chairs and watching the Glitter Band play them into 1988.

  Jemima Dury is looking after her dad’s estate:

  music, art and writing. She lives in Hastings.

  I PUNCHED HIM DOWN THE STAIRS

  John Hamper by Billy Childish

  I scarcely have a relationship with John, my father. He doesn’t like to talk to me but I occasionally ring him up and the conversation will last for about thirty seconds. He has no interest in me, in how I do in the world and, more unusually, he isn’t curious about his grandchildren. With our history you might think that I wouldn’t talk to him or let him talk to his grandchildren, whereas I’m completely open to the idea. I think it’s probably based upon his shame. My father is a complex, sociopathic narcissist. Not a bad guy, it’s just the way God made him.

  My father left home when I was seven but my mother didn’t divorce him until my early twenties, when I beat him up because he was knocking my mother about. It was after he was released from prison for drug smuggling. He turned violent because she was finally planning to divorce him. I convinced her to do so because the creditors were coming and she was going to lose the house, and everything, and he was still with his girlfriend whom he’d done the drug smuggling with. He’d been violent to my mother in the past when my elder brother had been there and I always said if it happened when I was about I’d sort him out. So I punched him down the stairs.

  It wasn’t a long fight. I was twenty and he must have been getting on for fifty. He was fit for an alcoholic, but I was quite handy and my father is a bigger coward than me – and that is a big coward. The most alarming thing was that my father reverted to a five-year-old and started saying in a child’s voice, ‘I wouldn’t hurt Mummy.’

  About ten years later I made contact with John and we had a semblance of a conversation. I found out I had a younger half-brother. John said to me, ‘Well, I’ve not been a good father, but what can I do about it now? Nothing.’ He sees it as defining. Everything relates back to him. He can say sorry as long as it’s about him saying sorry, but not about actually being sorry. It took me a long time to come to terms with it. What helped was that even as a youngster I never sought my father’s approval. Rather than approval, I like to do what I like to do. In that respect I inherited something from my father because he is very individualistic. Where we differ is that I’m not good at lying. I also seek deep and meaningful relationships, and I can empathise. My father doesn’t do empathy, and if he does, it’s very, very private.

  John’s a very extreme character and entertaining for people who don’t have him as a father. My brother can’t have a relationship with him at all because it’s too painful as he did seek approval. I call my father John and see him as a person. I love my father. I care about him to a degree but I have no expectation that I’ll see him before he dies.

  We were beaten a bit as children. My father’s idea of discipline was to sneak behind us and smash our heads together if I was arguing with my big brother. My brother was twice the size of me and to do that to a two-year-old and a six-year-old is extreme. I’m sure my father didn’t invent this punishment and must have learnt it from his own father. I asked my auntie about how she and John were treated as children. Initially she said there was nothing unusual but I later learnt they were locked in a cellar, my father for two days at a time. Another thing I remember is my father issuing weird threats about the police coming to take me away when I was about three – just strange inappropriate conversations, really, and no love. I’d compensate by trying to get comfort from my mother but she’s not particularly loving. Be warned: if you’re bringing up children and you deprive them of love and kindness, you might end up with someone as crazy as me. (Actually, I’ve based my parenting skills on doing the exact opposite of what my parents did so it’s not exactly a curse.)

  After he left home I felt the absence of him, but I used to dread his return every three weeks to get his laundry done. So did my mother. This dread would settle on the house. He would go to his room and only communicate with us via my mother, conversations she only conducted in a whisper. She still only talks about him in a whisper. This has gone on my entire life and is hugely unpleasant.

  My dad’s an alcoholic and a womaniser. Both my older brother and myself followed in his footsteps. We believed that the way to get on in life was to have a constant supply of pornography, vast reserves of alcohol and a girl in every town. By the time I hit thirty, I realised that my constitution wasn’t as strong as my father’s and I had to give it up.

  My father is a great pretender and quite delusional. Something to understand about John is that he comes across as a Michael Heseltine-type. He was a member of one of the oldest Masonic lodges in Britain, he was friends with some prominent members of the Tory Party, and prior to the drug smuggling, he was down to be a prospective Tory MP. You’d never guess his true background: a terraced house in Gillingham and a merchant seaman father. When he was arrested, I was the only one who had the guts to tell his working-class conservative parents. Everyone was scared they’d drop dead. I rang him when he was on remand at Reading jail. He came on the line and uttered one of my favourite lines of his: ‘They’re treating me like a bloody criminal!’

  I have to say John is stranded in some kind of hell. He hasn’t asked to be like this. As a son, it is a terrible loss for me. But what kind of loss is it for him? I can move past it: I’ve done several years of psychotherapy, I’ve done years of meditation, studied how to find a true meaning of worth and self. Whereas John is just stuck there. John would never have the courage, or opportunity, to do that. I’m lucky.

  John turned eighty-one recently. I do ask myself how I’ll feel when he dies. He’s someone who’s not been part of my life, but I’m sure I’ll be upset and disappointed. Beyond that, what can I say? As a young man I thought my father was violent and that my mother and I were in danger of being murdered by him. I realise now that that was not the case. I wanted to kill him, but I’m very glad I didn’t.

  Billy Childish has released over 150 independent

  LPs, published five novels and more than forty-five

  collections of poetry, but his main job is painting.

  He is artist-in-residence at Chatham Historic

  Dockyard, the town where he also lives.

  I NEEDED TO KNOW HOW TO ACT LIKE A DAUGHTER

  Dave by Terri White

  I always fantasised about being a daddy’s girl. Watching my friends at junior school with their fathers – as they kissed, hugged and cadged lifts to the roller disco off them – I would study their easy interactions intensely, completely enthralled. It was important: I needed to know how to act like a daughter for when my dad came.

  My mum and Dave collided in a rough pub one night: she was fifteen and furiously rebellious, he was twenty-one and promised danger. The day after she turned sixteen they were married – my granddad’s offer of a horse, instead of a wedding, having been rejected. Within months she was pregnant with my brother. I popped out just shy of her nineteenth birthday.

  What nobody disputes is that their marriage was a disaster. Before long my mum was painted with bruises and bearing broken bones. She later told me of the Christmas she couldn’t see the turkey across the table, both eyes blackened and swollen completely shu
t under his fists.

  His rage soon rained down on us all, and when I was two years old we left. After that, he was in our lives only very occasionally, even though he had access, before disappearing for months or years. He lived just six miles away with his new family, but I barely remember him.

  What I do remember is this.

  One of his (our) close relatives is getting married. It’s also my eleventh birthday. I’m wearing a new dress from Tammy Girl and have spent a great deal of time blow-drying my perm. Me and my brother arrive at the local hotel just as everyone’s tucking into their dinner. But there’s been a misunderstanding. We aren’t invited, only to the evening do, you see, and we certainly can’t stay. We’re led outside, into the street, and told to wait there for a few hours. It’s freezing, my Tammy Girl frock offers little warmth, and as we sit on a bench by the roundabout and the sky turns dark, I start to cry. My defiantly dry-faced brother – who’s already my eternal protector at just thirteen – comforts me.

  Soon, contact petered out altogether. ‘They know where I am if they want to see me,’ he’d say, apparently. We did, and I for one didn’t. Until I turned seventeen. Then I became suffocated by the need to find out who this man was. To find out who I was, really. And why I’d never been good enough to be his girl.

  It was teatime on Boxing Day when I knocked on his door. ‘Hello, duck,’ he said, only moderately surprised. I went in, had a cup of tea, we made polite conversation, I left.

  In the preceding years I’d watched Surprise Surprise avidly, imagining our reunion: the tears, the joy, the feeling of coming home. But there was no rush of love, no sense that I was inextricably his. Looking into his eyes – so much like mine – I knew he felt the same.

  The next few years were punctuated by a series of painful stops and starts – each one resulting in rejection and confusion. It finally ended not unlike it began. I was nineteen and leaving for a summer abroad. It was also my birthday. He was coming round to say goodbye after he’d turned me away from his door. ‘I’ll be there at seven,’ he promised. I sat by the window and waited, each set of passing headlights a fresh disappointment. As I started to cry, I remembered a similar scene – I was six or seven, we were supposed to be seeing Santa at the Co-op and I sat at the window for six hours, waiting. He didn’t come then, and he wasn’t going to come now. He would never come.