by Ted Kessler
That evening my father’s words captured my imagination and turned my stomach – it makes the hairs on my neck stand up as I write. I duly reconsidered and never looked back. If I went on in adult life to become the bugbear of so many authoritarian men, they have only one of their own number – my dear old dad – to blame.
Decades later, my father read this story in a magazine interview I’d done. I was worried he thought I’d compromised his privacy in some way by recounting it. In fact he said he couldn’t remember the incident at all. He was, until recently, unaware of the great influence he’d had on this central part of my life.
The things we say and do as parents have consequences, for good and ill. Growing up, another father had a huge impact on me – Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird. Working for Liberty, I’ve often thought back to Atticus’s advice to his daughter: ‘No matter what anybody says to you, don’t you let ’em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change.’
So, imagine my excitement at the publishing event of 2015 when Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman was unleashed. Imagine my anguish as our childhood heroine Scout grows up and Atticus grows old and falls from grace. The Atticus of Watchman has either grown cynical or afraid at the pace of progressive change and race equality, or his human-rights values were always locked in a courtroom, like some people’s religion remains in church. The shift in attitude of the older advocate breaks his daughter’s heart – and, no doubt, those of thousands of readers.
Thankfully, Jean Louise had already absorbed the wisdom of the younger Atticus, and it was those early lessons that stuck. But our fathers are human. They disappoint us – whether through a thoughtless snide comment, or the repetition of poisonous ideologies.
Who knows where I might have ended up had my father not challenged my apparent fervour for the death penalty? The moment might have faded from my memory, or I could have found myself fighting alongside those I now seek to stand against.
As it happens, I feel lucky the lesson stuck.
Shami Chakrabarti is director of Liberty,
the civil-liberties advocacy organisation.
WE WERE LIKE BROTHERS
Dave Hawley by Richard Hawley
My dad was four years old when his own dad took him to the cinema to see Zorro. Dad fell asleep during the film, and when he woke up, his dad wasn’t there. He’d been abandoned. Eventually he was reunited with his mother, my grandmother, Audrey, but the experience really fucked him up.
It was the late forties, early fifties, in Sheffield, and my parents were dead poor. Divorce was a social no-no for their kind then, so my dad was farmed out to his cousins, partly in Portsmouth and partly in Bishop Auckland. When he was a teenager he came back to Sheffield and was brought up in Parsons Cross, which was a no-nonsense place.
My dad was into two things above all else: music and motorbikes. He was a biker all his life, until the mid-seventies when he came off one on the way to get some fish and chips, waking up underneath Wicker Arches with a dog licking the blood from his face. My mum said enough was enough after that and he had to knock it on the head.
It was his love of bikes that helped turn him on to rock ’n’ roll. He had a job as a dispatch rider in the fifties. He was in a bikers’ caff in the New Forest when ‘My Baby Left Me’ by Elvis came on the jukebox and that was it. It blew his mind. It’s hard to imagine now when everything is there at the touch of a button, but you had to work hard at an obsession in those days. He told me this story about getting an American pen pal through an offer on the back of a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes pack when he was a teenager. This pen pal sent him Ray Charles’s ‘What I Say’, the original single on Atlantic Records, which made him the coolest guy in England.
He was always way ahead of the curve, musically. There was a record shop that he used to go to in Sheffield called Violet May’s, which was an incredible place. Violet had connections to the Liverpool dockers and she would get all the records that nobody else could get. My dad heard everything first because he’d hang around there obsessively.
He had a damn good shot at being a professional musician himself. He played guitar with Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Slim; he went on tour with Bill Monroe. And he was in a trio called the Lorne Gibson Trio, who nearly made it. He was in bands from when he was really young. He was in a band with my mum and auntie called the Whirlwinds. They were on a talent show on the BBC in Manchester in 1961 and they came second. The winners were the Beatles. He was so close so often.
Music was his all-encompassing passion, but it became a darkness for him. There’s a temptation to get to a certain point in your life and then walk towards your death backwards. I think Dad did a bit of that. ‘What if’ and ‘if only’. It was so much harder to make it as a musician in the early sixties, though he gave it a right good go.
My mum had fallen in love with him when they were doing an audition for some band or other in a cinema in Sheffield. She said he looked like the most dangerous, dirty biker that she’d ever seen. He was wearing a drape, he had a massive quiff and had these filthy jeans on, and then he got up on stage and sang a Gene Vincent song and, bang, she was in love. Exactly what you shouldn’t go for, she said, but she couldn’t help it.
They were fifteen or sixteen when they got together and they got divorced during the steel strikes of the 1980s. There’s that old cliché ‘Money goes out the door and love’s not far behind.’ I don’t think it was actually money that did for them, more the endless stress of working at the steelworks. My dad was a union leader and the stress of it all just raked up the memories of his childhood. He ended up having a massive nervous breakdown. It was bad at the time but eventually it was happily ever after. My mum remarried, they’re still together, and my dad had a partner too, Frida. I think he found some genuine spiritual happiness in that relationship, though he became a bit of a hermit in his later years. He never had any help with his abandonment issues, which I never really understood as a kid. I wish I had. I think it coloured his whole life.
I paint a dark picture of him but our relationship was very close, very deep, unusually so, and he was a truly great dad. We were like brothers. The thing that bonded us was always music. I remember we’d go record shopping together, to Kenny’s Records on the Wicker. It was a rock ’n’ roll-blues-country-rockabilly place. I discovered so much there with him. Dad had over a thousand albums, all these amazing 45s, and that’s what shaped me. Music bonded us, as did politics. Literature, too. In fact, the only thing that I am ashamed of with my dad is this . . .
You get to a point in your teenage years where you stretch the envelope so far that you’re almost baiting your parents. I was in the fifth year, about to go to sixth form, at a working-class school in Sheffield, but it filled me with a sense of curiosity and awe. I was taking in everything to do with music, art, literature. I was a sponge. I was also being a smart-arse, a show-off, and coming home with these books by Kafka, Kerouac, Wilfred Owen, Sartre and so forth, waving them around in front of my parents as if I’d invented reading. I always had a paperback in my pocket.
My dad once asked me what I was reading and I said, ‘Why would you be interested in this? You’re just a thick steelworker.’ I can’t believe to this day that those words came out of my mouth. My granddad was sitting with him at the kitchen table, and that they didn’t give me the good hiding I deserved proves what great men they were. They just said, ‘Oh, aye. We’ll leave it to you, then.’ I carried on like this for a few weeks, baiting my dad with my books, until the day he came back from work on a Friday night and I was sitting on the end of his bed playing my guitar. I had worked out the ending to ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ by Elvis and I was very pleased with myself. My dad, meanwhile, had done a fourteen-hour shift and was taking Mum out for a piss-up. He was getting ready, putting a shirt on in his room as I played the guitar and he said to me, ‘Oh, I meant to show you something. It’s about those books you’ve been reading.’ I knew I’d been a dick and he knew I’d been a dick,
but he hadn’t said anything because he was too cool.
Anyway, he parted his shirts and jackets in their horrible MFI wardrobe and said, ‘Have a look, son, when I’m gone, it might be of interest to you.’ Jacket on, comb and fags in pocket, off he went with my mother for the night.
When they’d gone I looked in the wardrobe. There was every book that I’d come home with and loads more. He’d been there before me. He’d read all those books that I’d rubbed his nose in and so many more. I sat there and I wept. I was so ashamed. I realised what a great man he was for not taking me to task, showing me up. From that point on, my gob was zipped. I just had to learn from the master.
I think very subtly he showed me how to be a man. I lost my virginity when I was fourteen and I had to talk to my dad about it because it freaked me out. All he said was ‘Well, it’s gonna happen, kid.’ That just gave me perspective. He did the same when I was heavily addicted to drugs. I was not in a good place. I was touring a lot but I wasn’t really sure where the fuck I was going and I was already a father, had been since I was twenty-six. It was only when I became thirty that the penny dropped that this was not a good look. I had a thirtieth party in a pub. My dad came and gave me a card. I didn’t open it until the next day with a colossal hangover and then pissed myself laughing because it said, ‘Happy birthday son. 30? I never thought you’d make it to Thursday!’ He was a funny fucker, but he could see what I was doing too. Then I got the call from Jarvis Cocker to play with Pulp that saved my hide.
Dad always had an hour for me, even when he was fucked. He’d work twelve-hour days, then play in bands at night. But he always fitted time in for me. He’d come home and eat the biggest meal you’ve ever seen – one of those Christmas platters that you get, he’d have one every night when he was working, piled high. He’d eat the lot even though he was dead wiry, then he’d go play with bands, come home at one in the morning after a skinful, go to bed, then get up for work at six. Just such a hard man, but also gentle and kind. Hilarious, too.
Even though I surpassed what he achieved musically, he never resented me. We had a great relationship up until the end. The last words he said to me on his death-bed, before he slipped away into a coma, were ‘I love you, son.’ Like a lot of men and women from that generation and that class, and geographically here in Sheffield, they made the best of what they’d been given. They weren’t worried about having two holidays a year, or their bonus, or their new Xbox. They were looking out for each other, hoping that everyone got paid enough every week to put food on their tables. As a community, those steel workers really were a different class. I can’t fault them. I aspire to be them. And my dad was the very pinnacle. He was a first-wave biker Teddy Boy and he played rock ’n’ roll. He taught me to stand up on my own two feet. What’s not to love? I miss him so much.
Richard Hawley is a singer and musician who has
released seven albums under his own name.
He lives in Sheffield with his wife and children.
I DO NOT KNOW THIS
OLD MAN
Goodbye by Lubi Barre
The man staring at me through my iPhone screen is old. His hair is completely grey and close-cropped. He’s lethargic, his eyes heavy, his voice slow. He used to know several languages but now can barely speak his native tongue. A tongue he had passed on to me but that I barely use in my new life.
I say, ‘Father, it’s your daughter Lubna.’
He hardly responds, looking back with low lids at the iPad shoved in his face. My mother goads him to respond and, like a good schoolboy, he says, ‘Hello, how are you doing?’ rehearsed.
I say, ‘Father, it’s Axado,’ and suddenly he bursts into a knowing smile, remembering the special nickname he gave me as a child: Sunday. I say, ‘Father, it’s Axado, look at my baby son, we say hello.’ His smile widens, his soul remembering his love for babies even if his brain can’t comprehend that this one belongs to me.
I do not know this old man. The father I knew and left four years ago was old only in years. His voice was strong, leaving me pleading messages to return his calls as I erased them.
And now I find myself picking up my son, like a prop, and presenting him to his grandfather on a phone screen. They both look at each other, like strangers, unaware they share twenty-five per cent genetically.
I am not sure if they will get the chance to meet. I know for sure that my father can no longer give me advice, does not have the strength to hold his grandson, to make the connections needed. I know that he will not be able to change my son’s diaper when his own needs changing.
I wished it did not take me this long to become responsible, to understand how fixable everything is. I wished I knew the fragility of life before the feel of my son’s new skin.
I say ‘Goodbye, Father,’ and wave my son’s hands for him while his own lies limp. My mother prompts him to answer and he says, like an old man, ‘Goodbye, have a nice day.’
Lubi Barre is a writer living in Hamburg, Germany,
with her husband and two children.
HE WAS THE SORT OF MAN
WHO WORE A TIE TO MOW
THE LAWN
Derek Mulvey by John Mulvey
On the train to work the other day, I read a review of the new novel by an American author, David Gilbert, I hadn’t come across before. The book is called & Sons, and James Wood’s essay focuses on one of Gilbert’s main themes: the ‘emotional reticence’ displayed by men of a certain age. ‘More open, more voluble children must become expert readers of patriarchal gaps and silences,’ writes Wood, ‘in order to make sense of what [Gilbert] finely calls “these heavily redacted men”.’
‘Heavily redacted men’: it’s a resonant phrase. My father was not, I would guess, an exact match for Gilbert’s protagonist, but he was innately discreet, to a degree many of us would now consider pathological. Even the mechanics of writing about him seem absurd, not least because he lived in a world without the Internet, where keyboards were restricted to typing pools, and a computer filled an entire room in the town-hall basement. But it would be the disclosures here, not the technicalities, that he would find most incomprehensible.
We frequently assume that men like my father, born in 1929 and brought up through the war in what I suspect were fairly straitened circumstances, were hiding something. In reality, I think a lot of them merely lacked the specific vocabulary, or the sense of entitlement, to express themselves. To reveal his beliefs – my father took the impartiality of his job in local government so seriously, he wouldn’t even tell my mother how he voted – would be an unimaginable dereliction of duty. To talk about the past – the financial imperatives that meant he had to abandon his part-time studies in law to look after his parents, his fleeting career as a jazz drummer during National Service – would be a betrayal of stoic codes; codes so embedded in his make-up that he had no idea he was following them.
All this redaction must make him seem emotionally constrained, but he wasn’t really like that at all. He was engaged, affectionate and always supportive. He was a figure of fundamental constancy, rooted in the consolations of family, and thinking of him makes me wonder, as I over-intellectualise and over-analyse so much from day to day (and, yes, I’m doing it now), how different an unexamined life might be. We routinely think of people without an accessible hinterland to be either deceitful or boring, perhaps even impoverished. I wonder, instead, if they show us something else – that contentment is possible.
It would be disingenuous to pretend that my father’s life was entirely untroubled. He clearly worried about and brooded over his work; during one of those periodic upheavals of local government, his hair turned white more or less overnight, and most of his eyebrows fell out from what I can only assume now was the stress of the situation. Perhaps, if he could have openly countenanced the actual concept of stress, those who loved him might have been able to help him through it.
But that was not how my dad functioned. He was indulgent to me whenever I w
as sick, and doted on my mother, but for his own part he believed that illness was mostly psychosomatic. As what he would see as a consequence, he never really seemed to be ill. Later on, he evidently decided – keeping his own counsel on the subject, of course – that this would be the best way to deal with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
It’s not easy to chart with much certainty how long my father suffered because, for a good few years, he was so adept at masking it. If he carried on doing the Daily Mail crossword, kept acing the tests set by the doctors, and staunchly refused to acknowledge there was anything wrong with him, then surely he could fend off even the most debilitating of conditions. If he could beat a cold by denying its existence, then maybe he could do the same to Alzheimer’s. He was a quiet and amiable man, happiest on the periphery of social gatherings, and it wasn’t always obvious that he was becoming quieter, a little more placid, a little more detached from what was going on around him.
Gradually, though, the strain of maintaining his dignity in public meant that, alone with my mother, he became overwhelmed by confusion and paranoia while never, in his moments of lucidity, allowing himself to talk about what was happening. He hallucinated people moving around the house. He obsessed over financial minutiae, and became convinced that my mother was involved in nefarious plots against him. He rarely slept, and so my mum, who cared for him twenty-four hours a day, rarely slept either.
