‘He loved me very deeply – even if it didn’t always show’
Susannah Walker, 52, recalls living with her father, Nick, after her parents’ divorce.
‘Back in 1975, I was unusual enough for having divorced parents. What made my family more extraordinary was that my brother and I didn’t live with my mother, but my father. That decision was his. My father almost always got his own way. He never achieved this by force or cunning. Charm was his weapon, underpinned by a will of steel.
He dominates my early memories: sitting at the desk in the study, playing me the Sesame Street record, reading stories and burying me and my brother Andrew* under grass after mowing the lawn. I was my father’s child. After supper, my brother sat on my mother’s lap and I went to him. So, at age nine, it didn’t seem strange to go and live with my father.
But in the divorce, I not only lost my mother, I lost my father, too. He remarried and my stepmother moved in with her son. My father had his new wife, my brother had a new playmate and I had no one. My father decided that this new family was perfect. The only obstacle was me. Angry and upset, I refused to be told that I was happy. I’d inherited his iron will.
But I didn’t challenge him. I sulked, grumbled and decided that all people were untrustworthy. Although we shared the same house, my father and I were never as close again.
What improved relations, many years later, was the birth of my daughter Katie*, his first grandchild. When she was born, I delighted at his pleasure in her. He would pour tea for Katie’s toy rabbits and knelt to speak to her, treating her as a person to be interested in as well as adored.
This shared love reconnected me to my own childhood, when my father had spent time with me, lying down on the lawn to join in with games and taking my questions as seriously as any adult conversation. Slowly, we found some of our old intimacy.
But we didn’t get long enough. My father saw Katie for three-and-ahalf years before he died, very quickly, from cancer. I miss him and wish he could see her grow up, but even so, that short time was enough. What it revealed, through her, was that he loved me, even if he didn’t always permit himself to show it.’
The Life Of Stuff: A Memoir About The Mess We Leave Behind by Susannah Walker (Doubleday) is out 17 May.