Her background meant that she was used to handling other people’s tragedies. She’d spent time as a juvenile liaison officer, which demanded a particular compassion. So she’d comforted a lot of strangers who had suffered personal catastrophes; she’d been trained for that. But nothing can entirely prepare you for a catastrophe of your own – certainly not one of the magnitude she now confronted. My mum was suddenly a widow, and the responsibilities it thrust upon her – bills to pay, a job to find, two young children to care for alone – were immense. Her treatment was debilitating, sapping the strength from her body as it fought her disease. But however frail and tired she felt, and however scared she became, her first thoughts were always for Becky and me.
(© Author’s collection)
Ask her how she came through it all, and she’ll say that her police background ‘probably helped’. The trouble she saw and the situations she found herself in made her more resolute as a consequence. Then she will add, quite calmly and straightforwardly: ‘And I didn’t want to die. I had two young children to bring up …’
My mum spoke calmly to Becky and me about my dad’s suicide. She told us that he’d been ill … that his death wasn’t anyone’s fault … that she’d be there for us …
At our age we got the gist without comprehending the complications, the maze of it all. There was no formal counselling for us, no pouring your heart out to someone who would sift through and analyse your grief as though it were a handful of sand. Our family doctor made what seemed to Becky and me casual house calls. The doctor pretended to us that he’d simply been ‘passing by’, but of course everything had been prearranged with my mum. Becky always made him a cup of tea. He’d then start to chat to us, working out whether we needed anything more from him.
I didn’t want to go through counselling. My preference was not to speak of my dad’s death. So I didn’t. That was my way of coping. I had no intention of forgetting my dad or pretending he’d never existed. I loved and missed him too much for that. But I did, so badly, want to shut out the horrific circumstances of his passing. I put them somewhere in my mind where I hoped I wouldn’t run into them every day. That, of course, was impossible. For sometimes thinking of him meant also thinking about why he wasn’t with me – on Father’s Day, and on his birthday and my own, which were only 25 days apart.
With my dad gone, I made a resolution to myself.
I would become the man of the house. Adulthood was still more than a decade away for me. My bedroom walls were covered in posters from Gladiators, the TV show I never missed on a Saturday teatime. But I considered it my duty nonetheless to grow up and mature overnight – and get serious about doing so. I owed it to my mum. I owed it to Becky too. I would do whatever was needed around the home. I would look after my sister, being a genuinely protective big brother to her. I would anticipate my mum’s needs as much as I could, making sure I gave her as little to fret about as possible. I’d graft as hard as I could, both in the classroom and on the field. I’d make my mum proud of me. Most of all, if I had to cry, I swore to myself that I’d do it privately, where no one could see or hear me. If I found it necessary to grieve, I’d be quiet about doing so. I’d hide my hurt – just as my dad had done. And that is what I did, telling no one of my intentions. My mum remembers the two of us being in a neighbour’s house very soon after my dad had died. We were standing in front of a window and staring across their garden. I looked up and said sombrely to her: ‘Don’t worry, Mum. We’re going to be all right.’
And so we were …
The wretchedness of losing a parent when you’re so very young isn’t confined to the sorrow alone. What’s also denied to you is the chance to talk to them about their past, all the history that’s wrapped up in photo albums and keepsakes, collected and stored away. In my dad’s case, I’m thinking about those simple, taken-for-granted questions. About his own boyhood and his school days, the house he lived in, the grandpa I never met and the roots of his own extended family, the places my dad saw and also wanted to see, the hopes he had.
As a child, you barely think about any of this in a constructive way. You might throw in an occasional ‘what was it like at school during your day, Dad?’, but you certainly don’t think it’s necessary to sit down there and then and talk about the time before you were born. The long years to come are earmarked for that.
I was lucky in one regard. At Scarborough, during the mid-1970s, my dad met the man who would become his best buddy. His name is Ted Atkinson, and it’s a sign of how much he’s a part of our family that Becky and I call him Uncle Ted. He spoke at my 21st birthday party and then at Becky’s too. Uncle Ted and my dad were born in the same year, only months apart. He’s also an only child. They shared the same sense of mischievous humour and the same generosity of spirit, soon becoming as close as brothers. The two of them could be a hundred feet apart in a crowd, but be able to detect from facial expression alone the mood the other was in and what he was thinking. I know Uncle Ted thought everything of my dad, a hero to him. I know my dad loved and trusted unequivocally Uncle Ted, someone with whom he could be himself – and also someone always prepared to tell him an unvarnished truth or two, their friendship prospering because of it.
Uncle Ted says my dad was a great bunch of blokes, which encapsulates the different sides of him. That hoary term about ‘not suffering fools gladly’ certainly applied to Dad. He abhorred impoliteness, for a start. If someone approached him rudely, butting into a conversation or yanking at his arm to get his attention, he’d unhesitatingly, but very quietly, tell them to ‘piss off’, which was reasonably mild for someone who had a master’s degree in Anglo-Saxon vernacular on the field. But if he saw or heard bad behaviour off it – swearing in front of Becky and me, for example – he’d disarm the offender with an ‘excuse me’ and the sort of stare that could crack sheet-ice. Uncle Ted was always aware, well before it happened, when my dad was getting a bit riled this way. There were certain ‘tells’ in his body language. His head went up, his spine stiffened and he’d puff out his chest.
He was nevertheless much more sensitive and occasionally much more studious than any casual acquaintance – or even some of the people he played with or against – can ever have appreciated. Uncle Ted recalls my dad fretting to the extent of pacing around endlessly in circles over the plight of our kitten, which refused to come down from a tall tree after the dogs scared it. He recalls him being unable to wring the neck of a pheasant, winged during a shoot. He also recalls him refusing to budge from a spot directly in front of the television on the afternoon of Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom, his release after 27 years in jail. He swallowed up every last second of it. ‘Don’t you realise,’ he’d say with feeling to anyone he thought wasn’t paying due attention, ‘that this is a momentous occasion … and the sacrifices Mandela has made are momentous too. You have to watch it.’
My dad walked in the spotlight, a natural performer in the glare of it, but he would have been equally at home with anonymity. Uncle Ted makes his living predominantly as a farmer in the Yorkshire Wolds. When my dad first saw his land he pointed into the far distance and told him: ‘I could peg a tent there and be content for the rest of my life.’ Uncle Ted knows he wasn’t kidding. My dad would gladly have opened the tent flap every morning to find fields ripe with crops or ploughed into brown ridges like strips of corduroy. If two hares were boxing in front of him, so much the better.
He also regularly hobnobbed with celebrity and aristocracy, but hated anything pompous or stuffy. He became pally with John Paul Getty, who took him back to the lounge of his London flat for a drink. The flat was about the size of a South American country and full of Persian rugs and old-master paintings. Getty rang his butler to get my dad a drink. The butler had to walk about a hundred yards to reach them, the sound of his well-shined shoes eventually audible across a long