A storybook life of whimsy and little work
My father would have been 100 this week if he’d lived, born in autumn, his favourite season. Hawthorn bushes on the farm produced scarlet berries among the vicious thorns, the trees in the bush dripped endlessly, and the animals looked miserable as autumn closed in, but he could stay indoors.
People write about their parents, but after a year of trying to produce a book about him I felt confused and complicated. Some people produce breezy memoirs, their parents vivid and full of character, but over time memories of mine have become elusive and contradictory. Am I angry with my father still, or sad? Are my memories fair to him?
I sometimes forget that my mother could be relaxed and charming, say, or the delight of my father singing to me at bedtime when he visited, and his goofy, gentle smile. He had a scar on his face that I can no longer place precisely, shrapnel from World War II, and more in his neck that gave him headaches for decades before it – or most of it – was removed.
He was an old Edwardian with courtly manners when needed. He wore a tweed jacket, brogues, and woollen ties, believed that men were inherently superior to women, conveniently made that way by nature, and that it was natural to appraise women much as one would a horse. Gina Lollobrigida and Anita Ekberg were his ideals, bosomy and inaccessible. He would say they were, ‘‘too rich for his blood’’.
He walked on the outside of me along the street as men no longer do, was afraid to travel in elevators, nervous of crossing city streets, held his teacup daintily. His fingernails were not well manicured unless my exasperated mother, on one of his rare visits, grabbed them and cut them. She was exasperated by his dreaminess, his lack of commitment, his useless affection, the webs of fantasy he wove, and the smell of beer when he visited.
Though she nagged him about smoking he kept up the habit until not long before he died – of lung cancer, as she had angrily predicted.
How do you convey the whimsical nature of someone who never strived for anything, and seemed defeated before his life really began? Once my mother had believed in his fantasies, as I did, ardently, when I was small.
His world was peopled with imaginary heroes who, he hinted strongly, were probably his relations. Captain Starlight, the Australian bushranger, was one of them, maybe his uncle. Maybe another uncle was a teacher in Edinburgh, possibly at its famous medical school. Intense questioning brought only evasion.
He was locked into a storybook of his own making, peopled with glamorous women and heroic men who could have their pick of them.
That storybook did not include unpleasant realities like war, divorce, or the grind of trying to farm a neglected property for his invalid mother and his father, who for all I know was also damaged, certainly unmotivated, by an earlier World War. They didn’t so much farm as subsist, it seems to me now, while my father embellished stories about incidental events on the property that caught his imagination.
Much of his day was spent avoiding doing anything. Saddling up a horse was too epic an undertaking to contemplate. Fences fell over. Luckily it was time for morning tea.
This was in another time, another century, but he would have enjoyed this one, too, because he loved absurdity. Donald Trump would have made him chuckle and say, ‘‘He’s a broth of a boy!’’ The #MeToo movement would have baffled him. He’d have deplored and been puzzled by how some alpha males behave around women, who he treated with delicate, shy formality.
Terrorism would have baffled and saddened him. He hated war: why would anyone want another? I doubt that gay rights and gender issues would have bothered him; he was remarkably unjudgmental and accepting. For that matter, I doubt that anyone actively disliked him, or that he was ever guilty of malice. Maybe this sounds like weakness of character. I guess it was, at times. He drank too much when he got the chance, for sure, but was never nasty.
Home from hospital, with incurable cancer, he embarked on creating a baffling arrangement of tall, cut tree trunks painted brown and white, leading from the farm house to nowhere. It seems to me now to have been an elaborate metaphor for his last journey, his flight path out of here.
There would be no telegram from the Queen.
Much of his day was spent avoiding doing anything. Saddling up a horse was too epic an undertaking to contemplate.