The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
A new woman
Diana Thomas’s transgender diary
One Sunday afternoon last summer, I went round to my dad’s house to mow the lawn. It was a warm day so I was just wearing jeans and a light cotton shirt.
Dad looked at me as I walked in, gave an appreciative nod, and said, ‘Nice tits.’ ‘Thanks,’ I replied. ‘I think so too.’ And then we both laughed because, paradoxically, this was a real father-and-son moment and I knew exactly what Dad was saying. He’d seen the way I was changing, and he was cool about it.
In recent months, he’d ask me to stand in front of him, give me the once-over and approvingly say, ‘You know, if I saw you in the street, I’d think, that’s an attractive middle-aged woman.’
The fact that we had acted out precisely the same little scene on my previous visit to the house, and the one before that, was neither here nor there. Dad was 86. He was entitled to a little forgetfulness.
I just wish we could recite those lines even one more time. But we can’t, because the loved one suffering from Covid-19, whom I’ve described in recent columns, was my father. He possessed a capacity for stubbornness that mules would envy and he never showed it more than in his refusal to let the bug beat him. We could not be at his bedside, a forcible separation that is the cruellest of all the coronavirus’s curses. Still, we were able to get him messages, to let him know that he was loved, and the medical staff ’s kindness and devotion, despite the terrible risks they were running, were as pure an act of love as this planet has to offer.
But in the end, the virus won. My beloved dad, who was never more of a father to me than in these past few years, died at 3.10 in the morning of 4 April, struck down by Covid-19. And all I can do now is remember him.
Dad always had an air of glamour. As a boy, I was hugely impressed that he had the same grey temples and sideburns as Mister Fantastic, the hero of my Fantastic Four comic books. I greatly looked forward to looking just like him one day, only to discover, to my horror, that my hair remained dark… but half of it fell out.
There was nothing that Dad couldn’t do. He won a scholarship to Oxford where he got a first. During his National Service, he was sent to the Eaton Hall officer training school, and passed out top. At Eton, he had been a good enough athlete to compete against Roger Bannister in a match between the school and Oxford University.
Bannister won, I might add. Dad wasn’t that heroic. But he was a lifelong runner and when, in the early 1980s, he was the British ambassador in Havana, his proudest boast was not that he knew Fidel Castro – though he did, and the revolutionary Communist dictator had even confessed his sneaky admiration for the British Empire to him over a late-night bottle of rum – but that he went jogging with Alberto Juantorena, the winner of two gold medals at the 1976 Olympics.
Dad was artistic, too. He had a natural gift as a draughtsman and, as a teenager, dreamed of becoming a dress designer. In the end, the requirement to get a Proper Job triumphed, he became a diplomat, and his
fashion consciousness was limited to occasional dandy moments. I remember him in the mid-1960s being particularly proud of being the first man to wear a flowery tie to work at the FCO [Foreign & Commonwealth Office].
I doubt there were too many diplomats at the time who were listening to Revolver and Sergeant Pepper, either, or doing yoga every morning while Mahler played in the background. I grew up to the sounds of Lead Belly singing the blues, Sinatra swinging easy and the Beatles, the Mamas and the Papas, and Simon and Garfunkel laying down the foundations for my lifelong love of music.
Part of Dad’s glamour was his limitless stock of stories. There was the one about sailing across the Atlantic on The Queen Mary in the early 1950s. Coming into New York, Dad was leaning on the rails, gazing in awe at the Manhattan skyline when he got into conversation with an affable middle-aged man.
After a while, Dad said, ‘By the way, my name’s David Thomas.’ ‘Hi,’ the man said, shaking his hand, ‘I’m Spencer Tracy.’ My father had just been chatting to one of the greatest Hollywood stars of all time.
While he was in Havana, Dad was twice held at gunpoint: once, at his ambassadorial residence, by a man who wanted revenge on Britain because he had just been dumped by his English girlfriend, and another time in his car, by someone seeking asylum. Twenty years earlier, one night in Moscow, when Dad was working as the overnight duty officer, an asylum seeker slit his own throat, in front of Dad’s eyes, when refused entry into the embassy. But did the greatest of all my father’s stories remain forever untold?
When I was still at university, but spending a lot of time in London, I fell in with a bunch of grizzled investigative reporters. They nicknamed me ‘Son of Spy’ because, they insisted, Dad was one.
He, not surprisingly, denied being a secret agent, but he wasn’t entirely disconnected from the intelligence services. During the 1970s, Dad worked for several years as a senior analyst on the Joint Intelligence Committee, writing briefings for the Queen and Prime Minister. And he had definitely conducted ad hoc espionage operations in Moscow. I know, because I was his Baby Spy accomplice.
On 7 November 1960, the Soviet Union held its annual Revolution Day parade through Red Square. MI6 knew that the Red Army would be displaying its new mobile tactical nuclear missile launchers. But no one in the West had seen them.
Or not, at least, until Dad escaped his KGB minders, joined my mother and I in the crowd and took a number of photographs of me, aged 21 months, standing chubbily by the railings at the side of the square.
I still have a picture with me in focus and the launchers blurred in the background. The frames where the focus was on the launchers were sent straight to Whitehall in the diplomatic bag.
None of this, of course, is what really matters. Yes, Dad was a sportsman. But what I remember is him playing football with me on the Second XV pitch at the London Welsh Rugby Club, just across the road from our home in Kew, when I was a small boy. Or the gloriously sunny Saturday in March 2005 when we travelled to Cardiff – Dad’s father’s hometown – to see Wales win their first Grand Slam in almost 30 years.
Yes, he was artistic. That’s why I once made an Airfix model plane and came down to breakfast the next morning to find that Dad had painted it in perfect camouflage.
And yes, Dad had a stellar Oxford career, but what my sisters and I treasure is the day when he sat in his college room, idly looking out of the window, and spotted a beautiful girl with dark red hair, the colour of copper beech leaves, walking down New College Lane.
After a few days of detective work he discovered that her name was Susan Arrow.
Or ‘Mum’ as we three siblings call her. They remained married till the day he died.
Dad’s greatest achievement was being a lovely man. He was unfailingly kind, generous, supportive and accepting. Bless him, he was actually proud of my transition. I knew that he collected every column I wrote, but then my sister Clare told me that he was planning to have them all copied and bound into little books to give to his friends as Christmas presents.
We three children loved him with all our hearts. The knowledge that he is gone is as utterly devastating as it is entirely incomprehensible. And I can hardly see to type for the tears flooding from my eyes.
Dad was proud of my transition. He collected every column I wrote