WEARING MY DAD’S CLOTHES HELPS TO KEEP HIS MEMORY ALIVE

LOSING a parent is awful. At any age. It starts with the brutal shock of sudden absence and is followed by a period of bereft sadness, heartache and blunt force melancholy that can become an all-pervading new normal for years afterwards. I’m not so sad any more, but 15 years on from losing my dad, I still think about him every day, often going back to the wretched days after his funeral when I had to clear out his house. Like me, my

father liked his stuff. And he had lots of it. Nothing much of monetary value, but plenty of items that brought tears to my eyes when I started loading it all into cardboard boxes.

Most of the furniture was sold for a song and the majority of his clothes (too small for me — I am taller and a bit thinner than Dad was) bagged up for charity stores, leaving me with just a few choice, very personal pieces — his fountain pen, some beloved tools, a set of handmade, wooden aeroplane models. I also grabbed some random pieces from his vast wardrobe (more than 100 shirts!): a crisp white shirt, a pair of motorbike mittens, a plain brown belt and a paisley scarf. I didn’t know it then, but these items would become my most treasured memories of Dad.

Wearing someone’s old clothes, especially the garments of a person no longer with us, is an especially intimate and emotive gesture. It’s the same every time I put on Dad’s wafflefronted Stephens Brothers, French-cuffed dress shirt to go to a black tie event — I also use his old gold cufflinks and try to tie his velvet bow tie, too — I feel like I am putting on a bit of my past, also. Dad wore this shirt to various formal events and charity bashes in Yorkshire. Five decades on, I do the same in London. It feels right and proper.

When I wear Dad’s salmon pink paisley scarf I swear I can still smell him — Hai Karate aftershave, the faint pong of moth balls, Johnson’s talcum powder, a whiff of Cossack hairspray.

I feel sad again and I think of him. Then I smile and take it off. I know it was the Seventies but salmon pink, Dad? Really?