SAD ECHOES OF JEREMY’S OWN FRACTURED FAMILY
AS HE goes through the trauma of his family splitting up, Jeremy Paxman may be experiencing sad echoes of his childhood.
On his own admission, the home he grew up in was pretty dysfunctional, and his parents’ marriage fell apart when his father, Keith, walked out to start a new life (and family) in Australia.
In the personal memoir he published four months ago, Paxman let rip at a father with whom he could never
get on. ‘My feelings [for him] ranged from resentment to passionate hatred,’ he wrote. He confessed to still being troubled in his late 60s by what had gone on all those years ago.
Keith Paxman was a brute of a dad — and there is no suggestion that Jeremy was, or is, in any way like him as a father. But as a role model, Keith was a disaster. A bluff chap who propped up the golf-club bar, a monocle in his eye to match the brass buttons on his blazer, he had been a naval officer and expected instant obedience.
‘The merest suggestion of insubordi- nation would send him into a fury, during which he would grab the nearest hard object with which to beat whoever had provoked him,’ Jeremy recalled. ‘ I was thrashed with sticks, shoes, cricket stumps, cricket bats or the flat of his hand.’
Keith clearly couldn’t stand the precocious Jeremy, his eldest son. All they seem to have had in common was their embarrassment at each other — Jeremy that his father was, as he saw it, a mere salesman, Keith that his son was, as he once voiced it in public to his gin-swilling cronies, ‘one of those homosexual communists from the BBC’. It seems Keith couldn’t settle to a Britain that, in the postwar years, didn’t live up to his expectations and dreams, and for which his wife Joan, three sons and a daughter were insufficient compensation.
‘He was by no stretch of the imagination a family man,’ says Paxman Jr. In 1974 Keith left home and never came back.
Jeremy was 24 and working as a trainee at the BBC. Of his own feelings when this happened he has said nothing, but he eventually came to see his father as ‘a damaged man’. We are left to wonder if the damage stopped there.