My Old Man

by Ted Kessler

  When I was six, my mother met a geography teacher who had aspirations to be a poet. He was called Roger McGough and they fell in love. They had this incredibly intense love affair, which Roger immortalised in Summer with Monika, his first published work. It’s a wonderful piece of pop prose that I would read a lot as a kid. Monika was the name of the boutique my mother owned.

  Roger came to live with us and I liked him. I remember the day he moved in. He’d been around quite a lot, which was fine. Then one day she said to me, ‘When Roger comes around tonight I want you to say, “Hi Dad.”’ I was, like, why? ‘Well, Roger’s going to come live with us and it’ll be funny.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s funny. I don’t want to do it.’

  ‘Yeah, you do.’ She basically made me. I obliged, because children do, and I laughed and he laughed, and from that point on I just called him Dad. And he was my dad.

  He was a fun guy. He’d organise happenings underneath the Everyman bistro. He put on poetry nights. He’d write sketches, which Paul McCartney’s brother, Mike, and John Gorman would perform with him. Then they formed their own performing group called the Scaffold and they’d do songs and poetry sketches. It proved to be very popular, so much so that they were signed to Decca Records and managed by Brian Epstein. They had a huge number-one hit for six weeks called ‘Lily the Pink’ in 1968.

  He was a kind man and a good father, too, but my mother would keep him at arm’s length to a degree. Whenever he fought my corner, she’d pull out the old ‘He’s my child, don’t tell me what to do’ card. But it was a happy house and ultimately they married and had two more children, Fin and Tom, born when I was eleven and thirteen respectively. We lived in this massive house that he bought with the ‘Lily The Pink’ money, and we had a nice family life until I hit sixteen and their marriage broke up, unable to withstand him being away touring all the time.

  What killed it was he was offered a poetry fellowship at Loughborough University, which meant he was away for at least one year, living in the halls of residence. This was soon after my youngest brother was born. So they’d had these two young kids, plus me, a teenager who was up for mischief, and I think she just felt abandoned. Roger moved down to London, went out drinking and wrote a lot of bitter-tears poetry about the break-up. He wrote this addendum to Monika, which was brutally sad.

  What’s interesting to me is that I could’ve had a very different life, if my parents had stayed together in Knotty Ash, from the one I’ve actually had. My mother made her own life. She became a fashion designer; she opened a boutique. Then she decided after the marriage to Roger broke up that she wanted to work in television. After ten years she rose up to become one of the top light-entertainment producers: she produced Blind Date, Surprise Surprise and all those Saturday early-evening hits.

  Roger being my stepfather really opened a door for me into pop culture too. I got to stay at Paul McCartney’s house in St John’s Wood as a kid, come to London regularly to things. I got involved in Factory Records because Anthony Wilson was a fan of my dad’s poetry and would come and knock on the door. I was a brash gobshite young kid and he took a shine to me.

  I did see my dad again. You know how when you’re young you have a root around in your parents’ stuff? I was having a root around in my mother’s things when I was about thirteen and I found this box in which was my birth certificate. I was born with the name Nathan Monaghan, which was my father’s family name, and my mother was Thelma Monaghan when I was a kid. And this birth certificate said my dad’s name: Anthony Frederick Monaghan. Wow, I twigged: that’s my dad. It made me very curious so I started asking my mum and she said she didn’t know where he was. I said I’d like to have met him by the time I was twenty-one. It got parked there and wasn’t mentioned again.

  I was in Manchester during the week of my twenty-first birthday and my mum called me, saying I needed to come back to Liverpool. Why? ‘Because your dad is coming to see you.’ I was, like, why is Roger coming to see me? ‘No, it’s Anthony – your real dad.’ She’d been in touch with him because I’d said I wanted to meet him by the time I was twenty-one and I was about to be twenty-one. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t asked me. We hadn’t mentioned it for seven years. So I got his number and called him up. I said something corny, like, ‘Hello, this is a voice from the past.’ We had a nice chat so I told him I’d come back on Sunday afternoon. I’d get the coach back from Manchester because it stopped at a place called the Rocket in Knotty Ash. He said he’d be at the bus stop to meet me at three o’clock.

  I was kind of excited. I wanted to see what he was like because I hadn’t seen him since I was three. What kind of man had he become? I had no fear.

  I got off the bus at the Rocket at three and there was nobody there to meet me. I waited for five minutes, ten minutes. Right, well, I’m not the sort of person to hang around so I took the address of where he was staying and went there. I knocked on the door and this red-haired sixteen-year-old kid appeared. I said, ‘I’m Nathan,’ and he turned out to be my cousin. I asked if my dad was there. He said they’d left ages ago to meet me. So I came in and waited with this kid.

  Around about five, my father and my uncle, who I’d never met, came bowling in and were surprised to see me there. They asked me where I was because they were waiting at the Rocket for me. I said they couldn’t have been because I was there. My dad said, ‘Well, we were in the pub across the road and we kept looking out to see if you were there.’ I felt furious. He hadn’t seen me for eighteen years, yet they couldn’t stay out of the pub for the brief moment we were meant to meet. I like a drink. Meet me, take me to the pub across the road, get on it. Fine by me. Looking out the windows is not good enough for me.

  I stayed on. It wasn’t worth doing my nut over. His four brothers turned up, then all the wives and cousins. This was great: I was going to meet this whole family I never knew of. But my dad took all the men and sat us around the table in the front parlour, making all the women stay in the kitchen. It was meant to be that the men talked first and the women and children talked later. I’m thinking, Woah. That’s not how I was raised. All my friends in Liverpool were politicised and feminists, and I counted myself as one. I wasn’t very comfortable with the man-to-man stuff. It didn’t sit right.

  Eventually I got to meet my uncle Paul’s wife. It was her house, and she was lovely. She said we’d all go out to the social that evening, play bingo and have a great family night out. Amazing. My dad said he wanted to take me out first and have a one-to-one. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘here is a card for your twenty-first from your auntie Catherine. She can’t be here and she’s gutted.’ There was a five-pound note in the card. Very nice.

  We went for a walk and my dad said that it was important I understand that he’d always wanted to see me. He said it was my mum who’d asked him to stay away. He’d kept all the letters they’d sent each other and he showed me the love letters, to prove that it was a genuine marriage. Then he showed me a letter that my mum had sent, saying every time I went to stay with him I had a really bad asthma attack so it was best that I don’t see him any more. That was a lie. Then he pulled up his sleeve and he had my name tattooed on his arm. I felt for him. He’d carried this around his whole life.

  We walked up to a pub and he asked if I could lend him the fiver that my auntie had given me. All right, fine. We had pints. It came to seven thirty and I told him we had to go back to meet everyone, but he wouldn’t leave the boozer. ‘I’ll give you a bit of advice,’ he said. ‘Don’t pay attention to what women tell you to do. Do what you want.’ It’s the worst advice you could ever give anyone.

  He kept me in the pub until closing time. We eventually got back to the house bevvied and my auntie went off massively at him, but also at me. I just thought, This has not been a great day. It freaked me out. Sometimes you just can’t fix what happened in the past, I decided. I thought I was glad that my mum left him and met Roger because, although it wasn’t without its pain, it was also
fabulous in many ways.

  I never spoke to my birth dad again. About five years ago, though, I started thinking about my own daughters. I was estranged from my children’s mother for a while. It was a bad break-up and I went through what my dad went through. It’s incredibly painful when you cherish your children and you are denied seeing them. Their mother and I fixed that in the end. We’re friends again and I have a great relationship with my kids. But I started to have a bit of empathy with my birth father. I thought, He must be an old guy now, in his seventies. I should just find him, tell him he’s got some grandchildren, ask him if he’s okay for money and give him whatever he needs. I looked into it on the Internet and discovered very quickly that he’d died in 2007, at sixty-seven. I felt really gutted. He was gone.

  Recently, I tracked down his death certificate and learnt he died in a nursing home of dementia. I’ve started to think about trying to get in touch with his family to find out more about him and more about his parents. There are so many questions I have that I can’t ask, but I suppose that must be the case for most people when their parents die. I don’t resent my mother leaving him and I’m grateful for the life we had with Roger. Their hard work inspired me greatly, inspired my brothers and sisters too. I have a lovely extended family. But I do think it’s wrong for women to stop the fathers of their children from seeing them simply because it’s not convenient any more. It’s not their dad. It’s the kid’s dad. You don’t get that time again.

  Nathan McGough has been managing bands such as

  Happy Mondays, Shack and White Lies since the 1980s.

  AS OF THIS AFTERNOON, HE

  WAS AT HOME IN THE

  GARDEN

  Allan Edward Burgess by Tim Burgess

  There’s a dadness that all dads share. I debuted in the job only fifteen months ago and my dadisms are on the increase: a son helps you shape your own fatherhood but also lights up the past and casts your own dad in a slightly different view. I remembered shared moments, like me learning to swim in Eccles baths; sitting beside him as he rowed a boat on a lake when I was six; watching Pearson, Coppell and the Greenhoffs taking on the hirsute might of the old first division together; caravan holidays – Skegness once and North Wales the rest of the time. By the 1980s we’d upgraded to camping trips in France.

  The 1970s were not easy for dads – times could be tough and it was all bottled-up emotions, Blue Stratos and driving gloves. Back then paternity leave was unheard of; bonding with your children involved holding them awkwardly while the new mum wrestled with a Vesta curry for tea.

  I saved up and bought a Triumph Dolomite and, although I’d never taken any interest or offered any help while my dad spent time maintaining and cleaning the family car, he and I would spend hours working on my car. I was chief passer of tools and carrier of stuff and he would deftly change the oil, the gearbox or carry out any number of jobs that I’d not know where to start on. He never complained and it’s where we’d swap news, grumble about the female side of the family and I’d learn about his life and he about mine.

  The story of me and my dad contains little drama. I was never chucked out, beaten up, and as of this afternoon, he was at home in the garden. The longer the story goes on, the more I appreciate him for the man he is. He was a keen sportsman and played rugby for Salford and Sedgley Park; he was a season-ticket holder at Manchester United from when he first saw them in 1956 until about six years ago when the actions of the American owners meant he stopped going. He was a draughtsman at ICI, so he’s always had an eye for order and detail, but he was patient with me when I lacked both growing up.

  In 1996 I was invited to Manchester United as one of only 150 guests to a new restaurant that was opening. Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville were fans of my band the Charlatans so I was asked along with a guest. I took my dad and he met some of the legends he’d watched play over the previous thirty years, as well a new lad, David Beckham, who came over to say hi. My dad was never big on special treatment, presents and the like, but that evening I could tell he was glad the band had done so well as to secure him an invitation.

  One of the only jobs I had before I joined the Charlatans was sorting and delivering the post on the site where he worked. He was held in such high esteem I didn’t make a noise about the fact he was my dad for fear I might seem a little less rebellious. But I idolised him for who he was and how people viewed him. My interest in music had been with me from a young age and was all-consuming. In my early teens, though, I harboured some sort of misplaced desire to follow in his footsteps and become a draughtsman. You had to be good at maths, and I wasn’t. I remember taking my borderline-fail exam slip home and went to find my dad. He was sweeping up. I made him a cup of tea and muttered about my grade while he was turned the other way. I thought he might fly off the handle, but he stayed perfectly calm, carried on sweeping the floor and said, ‘Tim, please don’t try to be a draughtsman – I don’t think it’s very you.’ I took that moment to be the green light to keep up my interest in being a singer in a band. I’ve never checked with him, but it was a big moment for me.

  He had his garage, still does. Always a job on the go. Painting stuff, bleeding radiators, mowing, drilling and sawing till it got dark. When I was very small he used to heat up the Meccano steam engine he’d built. It made a whistling noise that we both waited for eagerly, and then the wheels would go round fast and I thought it was the best thing ever. Well, that lived in the garage. I’ve been in there with my boy, Morgan, and can see myself standing there a lifetime ago.

  He made me cry when he read out the eulogy for my granddad. Dad is the eldest son out of three and I’d never seen him so stoic. He made a remarkable speech about dads and how valued his was. It was touching and so emotional. It really gave me a sense of how he felt. The love for my dad is just beyond words – and to see him with my son gives my world the most amazing symmetry.

  So, that’s my dad, no drama, no outbursts, always welcoming of my friends and as solid as a rock for me and my life, which sometimes seemed as if I was lost to the world. Never judging, always there and so easy to idolise. That’s my dad.

  Tim Burgess is the singer with the Charlatans,

  among other things.

  YEARS FROM NOW, A CHAIN

  OF IRRESISTIBLE GENETIC

  CODE WILL SPARK UP

  Michael Segal by Victoria Segal

  There is one thing, more than anything else, I suspect my father wants me to say about him. He would never admit it directly, but he says it about his dad, and I think I can see him watching to make sure I’ve taken note, filed it away for later use. It’s not an original thought – the general consensus is that it’s from Mark Twain – and my father’s version is a paraphrase, but its appeal is clear: ‘When I was young, I used to think my father knew nothing. As I got older, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned.’

  Unless it turns out that he’s been working undercover as a neurosurgeon, I’ve always found it difficult to imagine a situation that would demand those words. More likely I’ll suddenly announce, ‘I’d love to go and see some motor racing’ or ‘The time in my life has come when I must learn about eighteenth-century naval history’ – both of which would doubtless be welcome, if not quite as good. It’s not that I think he knows nothing. He was a hairdresser on a South American cruise ship in the sixties, a job description that, on paper, makes my existence seem faintly improbable. It was a billet that left him with a Polari-enriched vocabulary, a killer collection of bossa-nova records and a rainbow parrot called Robert. I’d quite like to know what happened to Robert, sold on before my parents got married, but any new information on the bird’s whereabouts, while interesting, wouldn’t really warrant the Twain quote.

  When my dad says it about his father, it’s still perplexing to me: my late grandfather knew a lot about pickling and hosiery, but that can’t be what he means. Instead, it comes over as a comforting tidying up, neat myth-making, smoothing away the edges and irritations that came
with his real-life dad: the trail of red and white betting-shop pens, extra salt added to already heavily salted food, a market stall that required a son to run it in the holidays. When your make-up includes the East End plus Eastern Europe, the pull towards sentimentality is strong – not so much the strain that involves weeping tears of gin over adorable urchins, but the one that calls for a wistful far-off gaze, a tremulous pause, biting back emotion as, somewhere, a violin wails.

  My suspicion, then, is that one day I will say it. A few years from now, a chain of irresistible genetic code will spark up and I’ll suddenly look away, and sigh, and say to my children, ‘When I was young, I used to think my father knew nothing. As I got older, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned.’ Sentimental idiot, they’ll think, rolling their eyes, but lost in violins and the distant, reassuring squawk of parrots, I won’t notice.

  Victoria Segal writes about music, television and

  books from London’s filthiest desk.

  THE THINGS WE DO AND

  SAY AS PARENTS HAVE

  CONSEQUENCES

  My father by Shami Chakrabarti

  Children listen to the most unlikely things. There are events we remember from childhood, lessons learned from our parents that were never intended as anything more than passing remarks. It was a moment like this that set me on a journey that ultimately led me to Liberty – and I have my father to thank for it.

  As an eleven-year-old girl watching the TV news in my parents’ north-west London semi, I remember being transfixed by the seemingly endless updates in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. One evening, unnerved by the coverage, I said something about what they should do to ‘this animal’ or ‘monster’, or something along those lines, when he was caught. In my dad’s first and perhaps last Atticus Finch moment, he asked me to consider that no justice system capable of human design or operation can ever be perfect. What would it feel like, I remember him saying, to be the one wrongly convicted person in a thousand or a million walking to the gallows or electric chair or lethal injection? What would it feel like when every due-process appeal was exhausted and when even your own family no longer believed you – yet you went to your death knowing that you hadn’t done the terrible thing for which you were about to be executed?