He gave me my most valuable gift – a typewriter
I HAVE teased Jeffrey Archer that he killed my father.
I was at dinner with friends when I got a phone call to say that my father, Jack, had died.
I rushed home, and in keeping with my mother’s stoic sense of humour, she said Dad was watching the TV adaptation of Jeffrey’s book Kane And Abel when he stood up, said ‘F*** this’, and dropped dead.
She said she had no idea whether he wanted to be buried or cremated, but then remembered nine years earlier, before he’d had a triple heart bypass, he’d given a letter of instructions to his secretary.
She located a blue envelope in a filing cabinet marked, in my father’s handwriting, ‘To be opened in the event of my death.’ I slit it open and removed the letter. All it said was: ‘I’ve been paying the gardener on the company payroll for the last 20 years. If I die, burn the books.’
That was typical of his wry sense of humour, which I’ve inherited. Dad was a lovely, kind, warm generous guy, but growing up I don’t think I ever had what I would call a deep conversation with him, and I never really got to know him.
He was the archetypal English gentleman, polite and very reserved. He was immensely proud and supportive of my mum, and joined her in her business when it really took off after the war, but he wasn’t cut out for the rough and tumble of the rag trade – what he loved most was wildlife.
He’d had an unhappy childhood, brought up by three maiden aunts after his mother died in childbirth, and a strict father who pretty much forced him to become a chartered accountant. He made up for it both by escaping into books – he read three to four a week – and by fishing.
He was determined, in his own way, that I should always follow my head. He always read my earliest essays and poems, and for my 17th birthday he gave me the most valuable present of my life: a portable electric typewriter, and a scary battleaxe who came to teach me how to touch-type.
My first real adult moment with my father was when I was 16. I was going on holiday to the Costa Brava with a friend – our first break without parents.
As I said goodbye, my father thrust a packet of Durex into my hand. I mumbled: ‘I haven’t started using these yet.’ He replied: ‘You never know!’
There was no chance of two spotty boys ever needing them!
I had wanted to go to Oxford, but I’d been a bad lad at Charterhouse School and flunked my A-levels. Dad asked me if I was still serious about university, and when I said I was, he put me into a crammer, where Martin Amis was.
When the first film school started up, I asked him if I could go there. He replied supportively: ‘You’ve got to follow your heart. If you don’t you can never be happy.’
I was sad he died before I’d had my first bestseller, but what he did leave me with was so much of my ambition – a determination never to be a person who dies with his dreams still inside him.