Читать книгу The Fragments of my Father - Sam Mills - Страница 9

My first memory: I am four years old and sitting in our cosy living room with my parents and older brother, John. Our faces are reflected and superimposed onto the TV set as we watch The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. One family sitting in suburbia looking at another version of suburbia. Suburbs were once a place for the poor, for those who overflowed from the cities. Then, as the rural poor migrated to industrial cities, the wealthy middle classes moved out to the fringes. Gradually, suburbia came to be associated with neat gardens, neighbours twitching at curtains, 2.4 children and nine-to-five jobs. In the late seventies, Reginald Perrin satirised the sheer boredom of it all; Reggie seeks to escape it by faking his suicide, leaving his clothes and belongings on a beach to be erased by the waves.

Suburbia was a place my parents had escaped to. My mother, Glesney, had grown up on a council estate in south London, at the Elephant and Castle; my father, Edward, came from a large working-class family in New Malden. My mum had been denied a good education by a chauvinistic father who said that university was a waste of time for a woman; my dad’s education had been meagre, but he managed to get a good job at the local factory. When they’d bought our semi-detached house, the estate agent had looked bewildered and asked: ‘Are you sure you want to buy this place?’ It was a house on a fine street, but inside it was a mess of loose wires, crumbling brickwork and walls painted in those lurid colours that were inexplicably fashionable in the sixties, avocado green and bright orange. The last owner had been an old man whose eccentricity had intensified into madness. His fingerprints were still on the walls, black smudges of wrinkled digits that looked eerie in their muddling of the elderly and the juvenile. There seems something prophetic about them now. My parents were thrilled, however. They had nearly achieved social mobility. The scene we watched together on TV was aspirational, for Perrin’s house showed how our place might look, his middle-class boredom the luxury my parents longed for.

Another memory: I am gazing out of the window and see a man walking up and down naked. His clothes have been discarded, like Perrin’s on the beach, trailing down the hallway. (Or have the two merged together in my mind?) My mother takes me, my older brother and my new baby brother to visit Dad. The place he is staying in is a large, white building, with cranky radiators that gurgle. People are wandering about as though they are in the middle of some imaginary maze, seeking the centre. One woman has the cackling laugh of a fairy-tale witch. My dad has always been a playful parent, indulging me in my favourite game whereby he would grab me by the ankles, swing me like a pendulum and cry, ‘Tick, tock, tick, tock!’ as my long hair brushed his shoes. This new version of my father is sitting in a chair in his green dressing gown. When he finally raises his eyes to look at us, I see sadness fossilised in his pupils.

With my dad missing, the planned transformation of our home failed. The house sighed and slumped its shoulders, the paint peeled, and the fingerprints remained on the walls.

I never asked my mum what had happened to my father. I felt too afraid, and perhaps she felt afraid of how she might frame that story. She looked tired and had a habit of biting her nails to the pink. She had started to take on various cleaning jobs. On one occasion a letter landed on the mat that brought her to tears. The local tax inspector had demanded a meeting, unable to believe that we lived off so little. My brother and I were taken along with her to see him. The man was kind, but he looked shocked when he asked, ‘Don’t you ever go out to dinner?’ and she replied in the negative.

Dad returned home some months later. But he did not go back to work and, a year on, he disappeared again. Once more, he became a mysterious figure in a dressing gown in that strange white institution that seemed to me a place somewhere between a hospital and a school for the anguished.

By now, I had started primary school, which made me conscious that I was different from the other kids. They were dropped off at school by parents who had swish cars; they lived in comfortable houses; their clothes were crisp and their shoes shiny. My shoes had holes in and when I changed out of uniform into my day clothes, they had a whiff of oddity about them. Someone once asked me why I wore clothes from jumble sales. Dressed in a ragged ra-ra skirt of mauve and lemon layers, which clashed with an off-white Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I wasn’t entirely sure how to reply.

The solution arrived with books. My mother had learnt the art of living off very little. She returned from jumble sales with bags bursting with tatty, dog-eared novels which cost a penny each. I read at night in bed and in the garden in the summer days, lying on the overgrown daisy-studded lawn and under the shade of a lilac bush, before breakfast and during breaks at primary school. Everything was wrong in theory. But in practice I was happy. I had Enid Blyton, Anne Digby, E. S. Nesbitt and Roald Dahl. In Matilda, Dahl describes how his heroine escapes from the unhappiness of her childhood through a visit to the local library:

‘The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.’

I couldn’t necessarily look to my parents for wisdom anymore. My father was hidden and my mother, though loving, was preoccupied with trying to keep us fed and not lose the house. My brothers were no help, either. My older brother was distant; my younger brother was still a toddler, though fun to tease.

Books became my glorious escape. Their invented narratives were coherent, where every detail of the plot contributed to a whole and all made sense in the inevitable happy ending. By contrast, the real world was puzzling in its chaos. I was acquiring a sense of how stories were shaped but my own family’s narrative remained a confusion, a tale seemingly without logic.

‘What happened to your dad?’ was a question I was asked in the playground. Not knowing what to say, I made up a story. I was learning from my favourite authors the art of spinning a tale, of how to build anticipation and end with a cliffhanger. As Dickens advised, ‘Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait’. The story of my father was a serialisation that I embellished day by day. It was Worzel Gummidge with a macabre slant; he had been unexpectedly kidnapped by a band of savage tramps who had invaded the bottom of our garden. This had evolved into a hostage crisis. My father was trapped in a garden shed: would he ever return? At one point, I became so engrossed in my story that I forgot it wasn’t real. I was taken to the sick room because I was crying. When I told the nurse my tale, I could see that she was trying not to laugh; she gave me a biscuit, patted me on the head and sent me on my way.

Even if I had known the term for my father’s illness, it would have meant nothing to me. Children survive without science the way ancient societies did – making up stories which explained why sometimes the rain fell and sometimes there was a drought, where the stars came from and why humans were put on earth. When we are children we view our parents as our gods, and so they need grand narratives. To say that my dad was ‘mad’ felt simplistic and would have rendered him too fragile, too human. He needed to be a hero in a tragedy – and importantly, at the mercy of external forces rather than internal ones.

In the playground, I became an observer. The difference in class between me and my classmates had cleaved me from them. The turning-inwards of my energies was becoming habitual; I read books in break-times, or watched the others playing. Most of the games were about love and war – Kiss Chase or some variant on Cowboys and Indians. Or children played at professions, at Doctors and Nurses, or being a spy. Children do not play at being children, they play at being grown-ups; the playground is a dress rehearsal for the future. I watched them with envy. I read James and the Giant Peach, Five Children and It, The Secret Seven and wished the characters might be coaxed from the page into real life friends.

And then, suddenly, my dad was back home again.

It was a plot hole I could not fill. Every time he returned, I was simply glad that he was home, without worrying too much about the whys: why he had gone, why he took pills at night, or why his work suits hung in his wardrobe and gathered dust. I remember going on a family outing by car one day when I was about eight years old. I was sitting in the back with my brothers and I was reading Roald Dahl’s Danny The Champion of the World. My father was driving. I could see his face in the rear-view mirror and he was muttering to himself as though in conversation with a voice; I smiled, recognising that I mirrored his reflection, for I had the voice of Dahl running through my mind, and it was witty, rude, wry, and compassionate. Fiction can sometimes enrich us, leave us feeling full, but just as often a good book can leave us wistful, with a sense of absence. In Danny, the hero does not have a mother but he has an amazing father. His father teaches him how to fish and takes him on secret poaching trips in the middle of the night. At the end of the book, there is a concluding message: ‘A stodgy parent is no fun at all! What a child wants – and DESERVES – is a parent who is SPARKY.’ It was hard not to stare at the picture of Dahl on the back cover, sitting in his Buckinghamshire garden, a tall man with a twinkle in his eye, and imagine that he was the perfect incarnation of paternity.

Back home, I flipped through a tattered dictionary, wishing I could discover a word for my dad’s idiosyncrasies. If I could only find it, I thought, it would be like turning a key in a lock. Despite discovering new words I liked the sound of (peevish, aberration, crasis), nothing enlightened me. The key would not turn.