Fathers and Sons Read online

  We had no radio in our car and these conversations between my parents often lasted well over an hour. I absorbed many of Kiln Farm’s secrets as I stared, unseeing, at the countryside slowly moving by. My mind’s eye was busy with pictures from the past. I saw a little boy running in panic through the near-deserted farmhouse, calling for his parents. I saw the grief etched on my grandparents’ faces as they buried their little boy, and Geoffrey’s shock and panic when his uncle’s will was read. I saw Denstone’s forbidding face and the dormitories with their straw palliasses where my father had slept. I sailed with him across the Atlantic through icebergs and storms, and felt his humiliation when he was sacked before he’d even started his new job. All these things I learned on the road to Shawbury.

  My father’s openness and affection meant that, by the time I was about seven, I thought I’d worked out how he’d react in most situations involving me and I loved him in an uncomplicated, trusting way. But things weren’t that simple. There was still a lot of unresolved damage caused by the past. Dad had done extraordinarily well in laying many of his ghosts. I wish he were alive today so I could tell him that. But he was still haunted by pernicious phantoms and they were about to make an appearance.

  I think the first hint that my father might have darker dimensions to him came in 1963. I was in hospital recovering from a tonsillectomy. He had hurried over to visit me during his lunch hour, in one of his habitual charcoal suits, bringing presents and telling jokes. After he’d gone a curious nurse wandered over to my bed. ‘Was that your dad, then?’

  When I said yes, she made a little moue. ‘He looks very strict.’

  I was astonished. ‘Perhaps it’s his glasses,’ I managed. ‘Maybe that makes him look a bit strict. But he isn’t at all, honestly.’

  She nodded, unconvinced, and wandered off again.

  I kept puzzling over her remark and, a few weeks later, believed I’d witnessed some powerful defence material to present if I ever saw her again. I saw my father cry for the first time.

  The whole family had settled down in front of our black-and-white television set (we always called it a television set, not the telly or TV) to watch comedian Harry Worth’s weekly show. A big treat for me–Harry came on after my bedtime but I was allowed to stay up and watch him.

  The BBC continuity announcer was introducing the programme when suddenly the screen cut away to a caption that read ‘Newsflash’. I was sitting on my father’s lap and rocked slightly as he sat up straighter. A newsreader appeared, holding a piece of paper. The words he spoke were uttered nearly half a century ago, but I have a clear recollection of most of what he said.

  ‘We are getting reports that President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas, Texas. The President is believed to have been wounded and has been taken to hospital. We will bring you more on this when we can.’ There was a pause and then the screen faded slowly to black.

  Before either of my parents could say a word, the screen brightened again and the newsreader was back, being handed a fresh piece of paper. For a few moments he looked dumbly at it, and then cleared his throat.

  ‘I am very sorry to have to tell you…that President Kennedy is dead.’ I felt my father’s entire body stiffen and my mother gave a little wail. Newscaster and nation stared blankly at each other for a few moments longer until the screen darkened again.

  The trauma that swept around the world was fully represented in our small living room. My parents clung to each other in instant, overwhelming grief. My mother kept whispering: ‘Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh,’ and my father pressed one hand to his eyes, tears dripping through his fingers. My sister and I stared at them in awe, but particularly at my father. These were the first sobs we had ever seen wrung from him.

  Then bathos descended. The opening titles of Harry Worth were blaring out, the man himself performing his trademark sight-gag involving a reflective shop window and a porkpie hat. It was ludicrous, but Harry saved the day in homes like ours because my father managed to gasp: ‘You children stay in here and watch this. Your mother and I are going into the kitchen to talk.’

  Next morning my mother succumbed to a vicious migraine and had to stay in bed. My sister and I dressed in our smartest clothes and my father put on his darkest suit. We took a train into London and joined the long queue outside the American embassy, patiently waiting to sign the hastily arranged book of condolence. When it was full it would be sent to Jackie Kennedy. We seemed to shuffle slowly forward for hours in the cold November wind, but at last we were in a little anteroom and my father was handed a gold fountain pen by a man in a black coat.

  Dad produced the scrap of paper on which he had drafted his message to the newly widowed woman across the Atlantic, and copied it carefully on to the page. Then we went home.

  It was my first experience of the death of an icon. Seventeen years on I was old enough to understand the wave of shock and emotion that swept the world when John Lennon was shot; curiously, another seventeen years later, Princess Diana was killed. Just as with Kennedy and Lennon, millions would remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news she was dead, and the mass grief which followed.

  But at seven, I struggled to comprehend my parents’ distress. They tried to explain but it made no sense. President Kennedy had never been to our house and my mother and father had not met him. Why then did they keep crying in the days after he died?

  As I grew older, I came gradually to understand, and even vicariously to share, something of their emotion. Kennedy was the great post-war visionary of my parents’ generation. To them, he was a hero and the antithesis to the clapped-out politics that had led to two world wars. Now I can see that my father identified with Kennedy. He wore the same style of single-breasted suit, the same narrow sober ties of silver and speckled grey, and white shirts with gleaming cuffs that always protruded a discreet inch or so beyond his jacket’s sleeves. My father was not alone. For once, the glamour of the office of President was matched by the incumbent and many men wanted to be like him.

  Women like my mother adored the First Lady too, and eagerly copied her fashion style. My mother was a dab hand at her Singer sewing machine and skilled at running up her own outfits. Women’s magazines often gave away patterns based on Jackie’s latest look and my mother would go out and buy the material. A couple of evenings later, she would sashay into our living room with a ‘Well, what do you all think?’ and there was Jackie Kennedy’s last party frock on display in Dagenham Road.

  What with my father’s Kennedy-esque power suits and my mother’s copied outfits, sometimes when they when out together, they looked as if they were off to a party on Capitol Hill.

  Jackie not only had the same effortless grace and style as her husband, she was a mother too. Washington’s press corps fell over each other to snatch photo opportunities of the young couple with their small children. The toddlers were even photographed crawling under their father’s desk in the Oval Office. In the new prosperity of the 1960s, it was even possible to forgive the Kennedys their fabulous wealth.

  Shortly before the assassination I remember my father calling me into the room where he was watching the evening news. Kennedy was making his historic speech about putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. ‘Did you hear what he said, Richard?’ my father asked delightedly. ‘He said America is going to land a man on the moon simply because they choose to do it. Imagine that. Just because they choose to. What a country!’

  I have often wondered what my father would have made of JFK’s prodigious womanising, had it been made public knowledge at the time. (This was a president who confided to a startled British prime minister that he suffered crippling headaches if he did not have sex at least once a day.) I think he would have moved swiftly into denial. Certainly in later years, when the subject could no longer be contained, he would brush it aside; nothing could be allowed to tarnish the burnished memory of Kennedy’s Camelot.

  But what really sealed the young president�
��s hold over hearts and minds was his nerveless and adroit handling of the Cuban missile crisis. I have clear memories of this because it was the first time fear had entered our home. My parents began to disappear into the kitchen for whispered conversations, usually after the television news, and one evening I followed them.

  ‘It might mean a general call-up, Mary, even if we get through the next few days…’

  ‘That’s a big if, Chris…but do you really think so?’

  I came out from behind the door. ‘What’s a jenny callerp?’

  My mother turned to me. ‘What are you doing, Mr Spy? It’s nothing. Nothing at all. Anyway, your father’s too old to be called up now.’

  As the Soviet/US standoff worsened, my parents tried to explain to my sister and me a little about Russians and rockets and atom bombs. It was all way above my head, but Elizabeth burst into tears and sobbed, ‘Are we all going to die, then?’

  Suddenly, after a week or so, the enervating atmosphere evaporated. Everyone was smiling again and saying that Mr Kennedy had saved the world.

  A year later he was gunned down, and when I grew up I was increasingly puzzled that my personal memories of the day he died should be so vivid. I was only seven. Lots of people my age have no recall of it at all.

  Now I believe it is because another trauma occurred almost immediately afterwards; a personal one so shocking to me that it fixed this period in my childhood in my mind for ever.

  The first time my father thrashed me.

  I suppose I must have been smacked a few times by both my parents up to this point, but I can’t really remember it. I do have an image of my grandmother rapping me over the knuckles with a walking stick for saying I was ‘sick of this damn weather’–swearing of any kind was not tolerated at Kiln Farm–but it didn’t really hurt, and neither was it meant to; very much a token tap.

  So the shock of being beaten with a cane–a long bamboo stick, part of a big bundle kept in the garden shed for supporting runner beans in summer–was total.

  I wish I could remember exactly what I did wrong that prompted the first thrashing, but that particular mental home video stubbornly refuses to roll. The tape only starts after my infraction, with my father pointing a finger at me. His hand is trembling with rage and his face is dark.

  ‘Wait here.’

  So I stand calmly in the living room, obediently waiting while he goes out into the garden. I am not particularly frightened. I am familiar with my father’s occasional outbursts of temper and hearing his baritone crack as he bellows at full volume, but the worst that has ever happened is to be sent to my room for a couple of hours, or early to bed. This last punishment, involving as it does missed children’s television, is certainly enough to produce tears of protest and grovelling appeals for mercy.

  Today, I hear the shed door grating open. There is a stiff point where the wood tries to jam against the garden path and it always makes the same groaning rasp as it is forced open. The unmistakable sound will soon come to have a Pavlovian effect on me, producing a weakness in the knees, a spasm in the belly and a suddenly dry mouth. This first day, it’s just our shed door being opened.

  My father is back, holding one of the garden canes I help him plant in his vegetable patch every spring. I like to pretend the triangles and cross-lashings are wigwams, and when they are complete I lurk beneath them, waiting to ambush the Lone Ranger as he rides past. I can’t imagine why he has brought one into the house.

  ‘Turn around.’

  I obey, wondering what’s going on. There is a painting on the wall in front of me, of an autumnal Canadian lake with blue-grey rocks rising from the still, clear water. Perhaps I am going to have to count them, or–

  The back of my legs have caught fire. I hear the dry cracking of burning wood. There it is again, and now my buttocks are burning too. Another sharp crack and my back is alight. Too shocked and consumed by agony to move at first, I find I cannot breathe either. My lungs have stopped working.

  I manage to stumble into a half-turn in time to see my father bringing his stick whistling through the air in a sideways arc meant to connect with my shoulder blades, but instead it meets with the muscle of my upper arm. I collapse to my knees in agony, eyes wide, mouth open as I desperately try to suck in air.

  My father steps back, breathing heavily. It occurs to me that this is why I cannot; he is using up all the air in the room.

  ‘Right. Next time, do as you’re told.’

  As he walks out of the room again, I at last manage to drag in a juddering, shuddering gasp, but when I try to breathe out, a most surprising and disconcerting thing happens. I make a noise just like the whistle on our kitchen kettle when it boils.

  And so I continue to kneel there awhile, screaming.

  A new regime had begun. I quickly discerned that the beatings I was now intermittently subjected to were rarely a result of especially bad behaviour. I could tell that they stemmed from a loss of control on my father’s part. He had always been prone to losing his temper and shouting at my sister and me when we were naughty, but that no longer seemed enough for him, as far as I was concerned. He did not hit Elizabeth.

  I must have known that the thrashings were excessive because, tellingly, I didn’t mention them to anyone. I never confided anything about it to anyone at Rush Green Junior School, which I walked to each morning. I realised after several playground conversations about parental discipline that although many of my friends were also physically chastised, my own beatings were of a different order. The ultimate sanction in other homes seemed to be a ritual whack across the palm with a ruler or belt, or the application of a slipper to the bottom. One boy said his father kept a stick in a cupboard and would occasionally brandish it in heated moments, but had never actually struck any of his children with it.

  I cannot remember how frequent the thrashings were. They must have been staggered because I can distinctly recall periods where I decided they must have stopped for good. Then I would do something to enrage my father and my heart would falter as once again I stood alone in a room, listening to the distant shed door grind open.

  My mother was torn. She had sworn to love, honour and obey her husband and he had a dominant ‘I know best’ attitude to disciplining his son. I don’t think she was fully aware how hard I was being hit; I have a dim memory of my father downplaying it in a row with her about it.

  When I discussed it with her recently, she told me that the issue became an increasingly serious one in her marriage. She was very unhappy about the situation, but the canings usually took place when she was not in the house–often on a Saturday–and, for some reason I still don’t fully understand, I didn’t tell her what had happened when she arrived home. I think that, at a fundamental level, I felt ashamed of myself. And as my father didn’t actually draw blood or break bones, I just wanted to forget the experiences as quickly as possible and pushed them to the back of my mind. It was some time before matters came to a head.

  And, of course, corporal punishment in schools was de rigueur in the 1960s. Later I would be caned several times at my grammar school–for the most trivial of reasons; I once received three strokes for throwing a paper dart in an English class–and got short shrift from my parents when I informed them. Until recently, troublesome youths were routinely birched by order of the magistrates; the culture was quite astonishingly different just a few decades ago.

  Because my father continued being a loving, indulgent parent in the sunny periods between the beatings, I was confused. As quickly as an hour after a caning he would be speaking gently to me and even offering contrite apologies.

  I also think I dimly discerned that these rages, so painful for me when they erupted, had little or nothing to do with my behaviour. I knew the punishments were completely disproportionate to the crimes. And today, I am certain they were the last reflex stirrings of the abiding resentment my father felt about his own childhood. I was quite literally his whipping boy, for a time. His anger went very deep an
d occasionally it would consume him completely. That doesn’t justify what he did to me over a two or three year period, but I have to reconcile his basic decency and gentleness as a father with these grotesque outpourings of violent anger.

  Significantly, he never struck my sister, let alone my mother.

  It was a strictly father–son thing.

  I was nearly ten and had bumped into my mother at the shops as I walked home from school. I persuaded her to buy a packet of Rolos for us all to share after supper that evening.

  Back home watching Blue Peter, I called to her in the kitchen.

  ‘Mum, can I have one of those Rolos?’

  ‘No. After supper.’

  ‘Go on. Just one…’

  ‘Oh, all right. They’re in my raincoat pocket. Just one, though.’

  ‘Promise.’

  Fifteen minutes later, as Valerie Singleton told us the programme’s cat was getting over the flu, I was looking in horror at the ripped paper on the carpet in front of me. There was just one Rolo left.

  I stuffed it back into my mother’s pocket with the wrappings and hoped for the best. Maybe I could blame it on Elizabeth.

  Later, after we’d all eaten, my mother went to get the sweets. She came back with the solitary survivor, looking more amused than cross.

  ‘OK, who ate all of these?’

  My sister had only arrived home a couple of minutes before the meal so I couldn’t pin it on her. I was about to confess when I glanced at my father. His face had gone the sinister shade of dark red I knew so well, and I panicked.

  ‘Not me. Honestly, Mum…Dad. Not me.’

  ‘Come on, Richard, it couldn’t have been anyone el–’

  But my father interrupted her.

  ‘I will not have you lying. I will not have it. You get one more chance. Did you eat all of them?’