She is still justifiably very angry about it to this day.
Dad was a good man, a saint in her eyes. He had never wronged anyone, he had always put his family first and now here he was lying in a hospital bed unaware that he was dying.
Mum wanted him home. She wanted him home and she wanted him home now. The first night Dad had been admitted to the hospital the man in the next bed had died. As they wheeled away his body one of the porters gestured to Dad, who he thought was asleep, and whispered, ‘He’ll be next.’
This broke Mum’s heart, she could see that for the first time since she had known him, her husband was frightened.
Dad did come home and somehow Mum managed to turn those six to eight weeks into eighteen months, that’s how long Dad lasted with her tender love and care.
The irony of it all was that Mum and Dad never discussed the seriousness of his condition. Mum thinks Dad knew it was terminal but she can’t be certain. She says that the only time he ever alluded to the fact that he might not be around for much longer was when he once told her, ‘If anything happens to either of us, we will always be there for the other in the eyes of our children.’ Still one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.
As much as Mum didn’t discuss the inevitability of his condition with Dad, nor did she discuss it with either my sister or brother and I. As far as we knew Dad was very sick, of that there was little doubt, but we had no idea he was so sick he was going to die.
Dad had been ill for over a year when one evening Mum, who had just finished attending to him, came down to the kitchen which I was currently using as a workshop for my bike. It was a dark night and cold and wet outside so Mum said I could tinker indoors. My bike now upside down, I was busy cleaning the spokes, oiling the chain, and carrying out other vital maintenance when she came in.
‘Oh hi, Mum,’ I said, still focused on what I was doing.
‘Hello luv.’ She sounded down, really down. I looked up to see she was absolutely shattered. Not only that but there was something else wrong. She closed the door behind her, leant against it and looked up towards the ceiling, half as if to plead for some kind of intervention and half to stop the tears, which were now clearly visible welling up in her eyes.
Immediately I began to feel both panic and fear. I had never seen Mum even come close to crying before.
‘What’s up?’ I asked in that kind of uncertain, nervous way a kid asks when he hopes the answer is going to be ‘nothing’.
‘It’s your dad.’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s just so ill, love.’
Well, we knew he was so ill, very very ill, but ill people get better—that’s something we also knew, that’s what had always been the case. Other less fortunate people died but they weren’t ill, they were dying—our dad was not one of those.
‘I know he’s ill, Mum, but he’s going to get better, don’t worry.’ I said.
The tears were now streaming down Mum’s cheeks as if trying to speak on her behalf. There was something she was going to have to tell me, something she had been dreading. She walked over to where I was kneeling down, still next to my bike. She put her hand on my head and started to stroke my hair before whispering.
‘He’s not going to get better luv. He’s never going to get better.’
At this point she completely broke down.
This was the worst moment of my life. Nothing since has come even close to it. When I first heard those words come out of Mum’s mouth, I couldn’t compute what she meant, it had sounded for all the world as if she had said Dad was no longer going to get better and then of course I began to realise that’s exactly what she had said.
Dad was now in that other category of very sick people: he was no longer ill, he was dying.
Life over the next few months or so—up until Dad’s final passing—was much as it had been before, except now we were all much sadder and everything seemed to become much quieter. Dad’s disease and everything that came with it continued to happen but now with more frequency and for longer.
The sooner any human being is spared the indignity of such a living hell the better—I don’t care what anyone says.
In our minds, now that we knew there was no longer hope, it became more and more evident that our dad—once a big, burly, jolly, intelligent man—had long since left us. The frail old gentleman upstairs was little more than a stranger.
In many ways this made things easier, of course the old gentleman was still a welcome guest and to my mum a worthy patient, but our dad, as we knew him, had now very much gone. My sister, brother and I continued to visit the upstairs room to see the old gentleman every day, chatting about what we were up to at school, but we had already laid my real dad to rest. Secretly we had said our goodbyes, our pillows long since dry from the tears.
The old gentleman battled on but the slope was becoming ever steeper. I hope you never have to experience the silent killer, but as cancer grows everything else diminishes. It’s truly awful. We prayed he would be free soon.
The crazy thing is, even when someone is dying, the rest of life has to go on and so it was with us during those last few weeks. We carried on doing the things we were expected to do. You can’t have time off just because your dad’s dying—a bizarre state of affairs. Besides, to be honest, no one outside the immediate family knew Dad was so gravely ill. Mum had asked us to keep it between ourselves. I never told any of my friends and they were never interested enough to ask. Kids don’t care about illness unless it’s their own.
The night Dad died I was cycling home from school. Taking my bike to school instead of the bus was something I had begun to do more recently of late. I had around a quarter of a mile left to go when I came to the last roundabout just before you turned into our road. There was an ambulance coming the other way. Its lights were flashing but there was no siren. I knew it was him.
As the ambulance passed me on my right-hand side, I felt peace more than anything.
There were no tears, just relief. It was over.
*Danny Baker phoned me up on the Sunday morning: ‘Have you heard about Diana?’ ‘No,’ I replied, still half asleep. ‘She’s been killed along with Dodi.’ I immediately jumped out of bed and went downstairs to put the telly on. Fifteen minutes later I was outside the gates of Kensington Palace on my motorbike. When I arrived there was only a single bunch of flowers at the gate, later to become the famous sea of flowers, of course. I don’t know why I went there that morning, I’d never even met Diana. I just felt drawn to go.
Top 10 Favourite Jobs (Other than Showbiz)
10 Windscreen fitter
9 Hi-fi salesman
8 Seafood salesman
7 Golf shop assistant (for about a week)
6 Supermarket assistant (trolley boy)
5 Tarzanagram
4 Private detective
3 Market stallholder
2 Mobile DJ
1 Newsagent
I would begin work as soon as life allowed me to, although ironically it was death that gave me the green light to start work in the first place.
My father’s death when I was thirteen—although obviously devastating for a young