My Old Man

by Ted Kessler

  At 4 a.m., I closed the blinds and wiped my face. As I walked up the stairs I realised he wasn’t a bad man; he just wasn’t a dad. He wasn’t my dad.

  Terri White is a writer and the editor-in-chief

  of Empire magazine.

  HIS TRUE CALLING WAS TO BE A RINGMASTER IN THE CIRCUS

  Anthony John Martin by Chris Martin

  My dad is a farmer’s son from Devon. He grew up in an era where you couldn’t really do what you wanted to do, you couldn’t follow your true calling. It just wasn’t allowed. It was the fifties, and his parents said, ‘We think you should do this’, and that was that. My dad’s true calling was to be a ringmaster in the circus, but he missed the boat.

  Now he comes on tour with us and that’s the role he plays in life. He’s a bit of an actor, and when he’s backstage he makes everyone feel looked after. He’s part of a team we have who go out into the crowd when we do big shows. Often we keep the first two or three rows empty. My dad goes to the back of the stadium and finds the kids wearing the T-shirts and says to them, ‘Do you want to go and be right at the front?’ He loves that. He loves meeting people, talking to them and connecting.

  The frontman part of me comes from him. He sees the beauty and joy in everybody, no matter who they might seem when you first meet them. We’ve always got on well and he’s always been very supportive, whether it was at sports days or when I was playing concerts. My parents sacrificed a lot to put us into a nice school and they really had to work their arses off. The main thing he gave me was the phrase ‘Never give up.’ As simple as it sounds: ‘Never give up.’ He’d often say it to me. I feel so grateful to my dad for that one simple thing. I use it all the time.

  Chris Martin is the singer with Coldplay.

  AS NEAR TO RESEMBLING A SEXY COMMUNIST SAINT AS SURELY EVER WALKED THIS EARTH

  Bill Burchill by Julie Burchill

  ‘Daddy’s Girl’. It’s such a horrible phrase, conjuring up so much a female can be, which is everything a hard-core feminist like myself despises. Some overgrown ‘princess’ (translation: a witless baby doll well on the way to being a useless Baby Jane, who needs her hand holding to open an envelope) ‘practising’ her ‘female wiles’ on some doting old dullard; in every way relatives can be revolting, this pair are.

  My father – Bill Burchill, of Bristol – and I, on the other hand, fought like cat and dog from the moment my teenage hormones kicked in. Or, rather, I fought Fate like a cat in a bag on its way to a drowning, and my dad raised an eyebrow and took the dog du jour out for a walk whenever I started kicking off. I was, from an early age, convinced there was a plot to keep me away from my beloved London (the Crystal City, Oz, Eldorado, the home of the hallowed Underground map, which I hung above my bed and recited every night as if it would keep me safe) and condemn me to life in my slow-moving, easy-going hometown. I reacted to my redneck, blue-collar roots with vicious indignation – as one who was fighting for her very life, which in a way I was. The life I wanted, full of hard liquor and easy pickings, as opposed to accepting the fancifully named ‘life’ that had been prescribed for me as a working-class girl in the provincial England of the 1970s.

  My father was a highly intelligent and extremely handsome man from a very poor family – his mother had to pawn her wedding ring every Monday and reclaim it every Friday as she had so many children and so little money, and a husband who loved beer more than he loved her – who, despite his God-given gifts, accepted his role in life not just with stoicism but with his own unique brand of modest arrogance: ‘I’m BILL BURCHILL – what more do I need!’ (He never said that, but you could tell he thought it.) He repeatedly refused promotion in the distillery where he worked, believing it to be an overseer’s ruse to curtail his beloved trade-union activity – but he was a born leader of men, and he relished the fact. My favourite photo of him is not a family one, but a snap of him at some sort of work function: he is dressed smartly and has his shiny-shoed feet up on what is obviously a bigwig’s desk. He smiles serenely at the camera while around him his mates, clutching pints, goggle and grin at his cheek, thrilled at his audacity.

  If the class system had not had this nation in a stranglehold since the dawn of time, the ascent of millions of men like my father could have made this country a good deal greater than it was and certainly far better than the sad shell of a nation it is now. But staying put suited my old man. He saw the beauty in everything, especially his adored hometown of Bristol, whereas I saw only a backwater, which threatened to pull me under and kill me. So we were not, to say the least, similar – but I worshipped him nevertheless. I WAS a Daddy’s Girl – that was my dark, shameful secret. It was the love that dared not speak its name, lest I decided all I wanted from life was A Man Just Like Him, and then I would be trapped, a prisoner of a pushchair before I could vote.

  My father worked long, hard hours in the distillery, often on the night shift. My mother loved to sing – she was basically Mariah Carey behind a bacon slicer, with the good looks and temperament of the notorious diva but minus the actual voice. When it was time for my dad to be getting up she’d start in with popular songs featuring his name. Even at the age of thirteen, when I was immersing myself in the glorious filth of Bowie at his bending, blowing, buggering best, I would find myself singing pertinent phrases from the songs as I skulked around my bedroom dreaming of escape. ‘I love him . . . because he’s WONDERFUL/Because he’s just my Bill’ . . . ‘My boy, Bill, he’ll be tall and tough as a tree, will Bill!/Like a tree he’ll grow with his head held high/And his feet planted firm on the ground/And you won’t see nobody dare to try to boss or toss him around!’ And the most annoying of all, to my ever-annoyed teenage ears, Laura Nyro’s masterpiece ‘Wedding Bell Blues’: ‘Bill, I love you so, I always will/I look at you and see the passion eyes of May/Oh, but am I ever gonna see my wedding day – come on and marry me, BILL!’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ I would whine. ‘You’re MARRIED, already!’ Scrambling up the stairs, seeking sleazy sanctuary in the Velvet Underground, sickened by this flagrant display of marital pashing – and at the top of the stairs I would be greeted by my father’s other greatest fan: Prince, an Alsatian dog, who saw it as his vocation in life to generally growl at, often snarl at and occasionally take a chunk out of anyone who dared approach my sleeping dad.

  Mind you, you couldn’t blame him. When they cast Sean Bean to play my old man in a BBC film I wrote about him and his dog, it was surely the first time that an actor (dreamy as Bean was) played a character more physically attractive than himself. But my dad treated the many women who fancied him (and even I, through my appalled hot-parent-hating eyes, could tell who they were) the way he treated the bosses who sought to promote him – with a sort of sarcastic incomprehension. He was only ever interested in my mother, and only ever fancied two famous women, so far as I know: the tennis player Billie Jean King and the actress Billie Whitelaw. My mother, in a moment of almost Wildean wit, once remarked to me as she was savagely ironing, ‘Iss funny with yer dad, innit? People always says how modest ’ee is – but even the women ’ee fancies is called Bill!’’

  He was a factory worker, a car-park attendant and a man as near to resembling a sexy Communist saint as surely ever walked this earth. There wasn’t a bad bone in that man’s body, but I recall that he was as baffled by homosexuality as most men of his era. Whenever Lionel Blair or, indeed, any penis-owning prancer appeared on the TV screen, he would stare in sheer incomprehension for a moment, shake his head more in sorrow than in anger, call out, ‘PRINCE/PATCH/BENITO!’ (my father despised Fascism even more than he despised cats, but thought it would have been cruel and confusing to change our tail-wagging Il Duce’s given name) and promptly leave the house with a creature you could rely upon not to plaster on the PanStik and do the fandango.

  Which makes it all the more strange and beautiful that when I was ten years old, I came home from school one day and my father looked me straight in the face and said sternly, ‘
Bolshoi.’

  I eyed him warily. Of course I knew what the Bolshoi was – I was a ballerina, tutored three evenings a week, a very likely candidate for the Royal Ballet School and had been since I was six and would be until my magnificent tits and towering height put me out of the running at the age of twelve. ‘Bolshoi . . . BALLET?’ I ventured.

  My dad sighed heavily and attached the lead to the dog’s collar. ‘No, Bolshoi ruddy Bristol Rovers!’

  I stared at him, stunned, as he and the dog walked away. ‘We’re going to the . . . Hippodrome? Next week? To see the Bolshoi?’

  He looked back over his shoulder and winked at me. ‘Box. Arm and a leg! Don’t tell yer mother.’

  As I recall, he read the Morning Star, then the Pink ’Un, then took out a pack of cards and played Solitaire as I sat beside him that night in the lushest box the Bristol Hippodrome had to offer, enraptured by the greatest Russian dancers of the second half of the twentieth century. When we got home, my mum was freaking. ‘Bill, thee can’t even see Lionel Blair on the telly for five minutes without taking the dog out! ’Ow did you manage to get through three hours of blokes with their bits out?’

  He winked at me, kissed her on the cheek, put the dog’s lead on and opened the door. ‘Didn’t LOOK, did I!’ We heard his laughter as he walked into his street.

  My father died of mesothelioma at the age of seventy. He had apparently caught it by working with asbestos as a teenager, building the early NHS hospitals – typical stoic show-off, he couldn’t help himself from breaking the glad tidings to my mother and myself three years before he passed over thus: ‘Doctor says I’s a medical miracle. Iss been in there since I was sixteen! ’Ee said ’ee never seen nothin’ like it – a body that tough.’ Then he took the dog out as my mother and I uncharacteristically clung to each other, wailing. Nevertheless, I heard him laugh and speak to the dog sarcastically as they went into his street once more: ‘Women!’

  I moan a lot about nepotism but, as I write this, I realise that I, more than any of the half-witted, well-connected female columnists I bang on about, have benefited from it beyond all others. Because I was the only child of Bill Burchill, of Bristol. I was my father’s daughter.

  Julie Burchill is a writer.

  She lives in Brighton.

  DAVE WAS MORE POPULAR THAN I WAS

  Dave Lynskey by Dorian Lynskey

  A while ago, I interviewed the singer Robert Wyatt and came away thinking, Dave would have loved him. Wyatt is from the same generation as my dad and similar in some indefinable way, although Dave was neither a musical genius nor a committed Communist. Wyatt even smiled in recognition when I told him my name came from Dorian Hawkmoon, a character in Michael Moorcock’s 1960s fantasy novels. (My mum had to put her foot down when Dave wanted my middle name to be Hawkmoon.)

  I get this sensation a lot, this feeling that Dave is a phantom limb, and most keenly when I encounter art or artists. The comic-book exhibition at the British Library. The Guardians of the Galaxy. The vinyl revival. The Black Keys. So many times I wish he was there with me, so many things I know he would have enjoyed.

  When I was young my mum used to ask him, with increasing regularity and intensity, ‘Why do you need all this stuff?’ He was a pathological collector, bad with money, and loath to throw anything away, so my mum’s house remains cluttered with dozens of boxes of books, comics, records and plastic models that she doesn’t know what to do with. To her they’re just baggage, but to him each one was an expression of creativity. Dave wasn’t just a hoarder, he was a voracious enthusiast. Whenever I whined that I was bored, Dave used to say, ‘Only boring people are bored,’ because the world is so full of interesting things.

  Dave (my choice; never ‘Dad’) was born in Brixton in 1946, a quintessential baby boomer. His family moved to Norfolk and he later regretted choosing to study at the University of East Anglia instead of moving away. Under pressure from his possessive mother to stay at home, he missed out on the liberations of campus life. He met my mum at teacher-training college in 1969 and took a series of teaching jobs, ending up at a school in the suburbs of south-east London, where I became ‘Mr Lynskey’s son’.

  I get the impression that he didn’t pull his weight when I was very small. Perhaps he struggled to connect with very small children and their endless quotidian needs and was waiting until I was old enough to share his obsessions – easier for me than for my sister. We started with model aeroplanes, spending hours together in the shed at the bottom of the garden. I still find the brand names exotically evocative: Aurora, Tamiya, Italeri, Revell. And the stern, unmusical German words printed on the tiny pots of paint: Olivgrun, Rotbraun, Dunkelgrau. Later came Star Trek, unnecessarily long war movies, the ghost stories of M. R. James, and Dave’s old 1960s copies of Mad magazine, full of inscrutable in-jokes and bizarrely amusing parodies of films I’d never heard of.

  When I was eleven, Dave came back from visiting his dying father in hospital with a gift of Uncanny X-Men #203 (‘Phoenix Versus the Beyonder!’). That initiated an intense phase of father–son collecting, the two of us driving off to comic-book fairs in central London and the cluttered spare rooms of overweight men wielding photocopied catalogues dense with almost unreadably small type, returning with armfuls of new acquisitions in protective Mylar bags. You can imagine my mum’s delight.

  When, for me, music eclipsed comic books, Dave was even more delighted. As a student, he had hung out at blues clubs and seen Pink Floyd headline at UEA. As a teacher in the seventies, he was obliged by law to like prog rock. He owned a harmonica that he had bought in a club from Rod Stewart, only to find minutes later that it had actually belonged to a furious Long John Baldry. Baldry gallantly let my dad keep the harmonica and stormed off to find thieving Rod. This anecdote might have been the first time I heard the word ‘cunt’.

  So, he was admirably patient when, for a whole year, I played nothing but Pet Shop Boys cassettes on the drive to school. He preferred Genesis. We brokered a compromise over Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night. When he died, I realised that his collection contained all the canonical classics but that he never played them to me because he was more excited about new bands that we could discover together: Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, the Jesus and Mary Chain. He once turned up in his Ford Sierra after midnight to collect me and my friends from the Venue in New Cross without complaint. He just wanted to know if the band had been good.

  At school I was known for having a ‘cool’ dad: a rare creature in the south London suburbs during the 1980s. The usual problem with becoming a teacher’s son is that the other kids don’t like your dad but, to be frank, Dave was more popular than I was. I think he had a rare genius for teaching: an unusual ability to treat children as equals without becoming a soft touch. He asked his pupils to write short stories based on the first page of an H. P. Lovecraft yarn and allowed dyslexic students to speak theirs into a Dictaphone before that was common practice. He used the school’s first video camera to shoot a short film, which he edited to the sound of Holst’s The Planets, and brought the hefty device home during the holidays so that I could make primitive stop-motion movies with my Star Wars figures. He organised school dances and began a quixotic unfinished project to create a school vinyl library of classic albums when everyone else had switched to cassette or CD. He loved to dance. He was the funniest person I knew.

  Dave enjoyed anything I did that was creative or unorthodox. When I performed at a school concert with one of my spirited but incompetent covers bands, he was down the front with a video camera, admiring the audacity if not the results. After leaving school, I shaved my head into a mohawk with a curious, dangling fringe, a dreadful cut-and-shut of my own invention, and dyed it purple. Then I had to return for a prize-giving. Some of the teachers thought I was flicking a V-sign at the school (I suppose I was, a little bit) but Dave had my back.

  This makes Dave sound more fun than he was. He could be surly, impatient and remote, spending his evenings painting model p
lanes in the loft or plugged into his headphones at the far end of the living room. He could be bizarrely combative about things he wasn’t that fussed about, guided by the principle that he needed to teach me how to argue. Given that he clashed with my mum on a daily basis, I already had a pretty good idea how arguments worked. I once had a blazing row with him about his voting Conservative in the 1992 election. After he died, my mum told me that he had in fact voted Green. I still can’t work that one out.

  I’m certain now that he suffered from depression. He was lonely because his university friends lived elsewhere and none of his colleagues or neighbours shared his interests. He seemed to find most people his own age disappointing, with their prosaic talk of jobs and schools and houses. I think his life would have been transformed by the Internet, where he could have found many fellow enthusiasts. Denied that, he bonded with the staff at record shops and comic-book stores and struck up some pen-pal friendships, including Isabel Monteiro from the band Drugstore. She kindly put us on the guest list when Drugstore supported the Jesus and Mary Chain at Shepherd’s Bush Empire – the last concert I ever attended with Dave. My generation gave itself permission to stay young for longer, whereas he was considered eccentric for caring about new music past the age of thirty. Perhaps he was born too early.

  Brought up in a post-war household, where emotions were as dangerous as unexploded bombs – best avoided – he was constitutionally incapable of discussing his fears and insecurities, so that was where all that stuff came in. As long as we were talking about Batman or Quantum Leap or Stephen King, we were fine and I was okay with that – probably too okay. There are too many gaps in my understanding of Dave, too many things I don’t know because I never thought to find out. Like the chalk outline left on the ground after a dead body’s been removed, all the details I have suggest the approximate shape of a life while drawing attention to its absence.