CHAPTER 5

DAD

So, he’d married his girl. They’d had three (varying markedly in degrees of loveliness) children and bought a lovely house with a front and back garden – the back garden even had a little gate.

But now he found himself throwing a handful of soil on top of a wooden box that contained all of his hopes and dreams. Fuck.

In retrospect it was clear he was beginning to fall to bits when he asked me to tell Jim that Mum had died. His was a gradual decline at first. After Mum died, he bought a family tent and we went off to explore Scotland.

We packed up the old Morris Marina Coupe with everything we’d need for our three-week adventure. That meant the tent, the gas stove, the biggest water container in the world, and some bedding. Oh, and all the clothes we thought we’d need which, in my case, was my purple Y-fronts and my Spider-Man T-shirt.

We got as far as Grantham.

The clutch had gone. It took the fine people at the garage two days to fix it. In the meantime, Dad had decided that, even though we were only 30 miles from Corby, we would stay in a bed and breakfast.

The woman who ran it looked exactly the way landladies are supposed to look: permed hair, horn-rimmed glasses, an Embassy King Size dangling from the corner of her mouth and her arms folded across her ample bosom.

‘Where’s your mother?’ she asked, clearly a complete stranger to tact.

‘She’s dead,’ I said. And then by way of explanation, ‘She died of cancer last week.’

She told us what a terrible shame that was. She asked about Dad. I wondered if she was going to apply for the now vacant post of my mum.

‘He looks really old,’ she said, in such a way that meant that he shouldn’t.

‘Yeah, but he’s a really fast runner.’ I thought that this was a top asset for a potential husband. Jim told me to shut up.

The car was fixed and Dad never did marry the landlady.

The weather was great to begin with. But when we got to Fort Augustus, just near the banks of Loch Ness, the weather turned decidedly Scottish and I first noticed that Dad was becoming more and more conspicuous by his various absences.

‘I’m just going into town,’ was a euphemism for ‘I’m going to the pub.’

He’d leave Jim and me to our own devices. Already he was giving Jim more responsibility than he was able to cope with. Already Jim and I had nearly managed to kill ourselves without Dad noticing a few times.

One night Dad went ‘into town’ again. Town was about two miles away. The rain was pissing down. He didn’t have a waterproof anything. He vanished for about four hours. Jim read me Jabberwocky (The Monty Python book of the film) while he was gone using the camping gas light. Dad returned at about one in the morning, pissed and soaking. He’d never done that before.

We had a whistle stop tour of Wick and John O’Groats and Thurso and Scrabster – seeing all the folk that we’d visited with Mum just two years before. Jim and I were made to feel really special. ‘You poor boys,’ appeared to be the general theme. We were festooned with hugs and cuddles, soft words and love.

Dad’s vague, life-threatening neglect continued.

Scrabster was a small fishing town on the northern tip of Scotland. It had the most fantastic rock pools you have ever seen, with crabs and shrimps and starfish and anemonies. The rock pools were inaccessible to most sensible folk. They were situated on top of the various rocky stacks and stumps that marched out into the North Sea. With the tide out, these rocky outcrops stood as high as 15 feet out of the frothing waters below.

Those of you with weak hearts, high blood pressure or questionable continence should look away now.

Jim and I saw these outcrops as stepping-stones. Neither of us took much notice of the fact that we couldn’t swim as we jumped from pillar of rock to pillar of rock. We scraped our feet against the jagged edges and the barnacles as we sought the ultimate rock pool. God, it was worth it!

There, on top of one of the largest rocks, was a pool that looked like it had been designed purely for my delight. The water was warm, about six feet deep and teaming with wildlife. It was wide enough for us to launch ourselves across, giving us the sensation of swimming but without having to wave our arms and legs about. It was fantastic.

We looked back at the danger of the rocks below and the fact that we couldn’t swim. We couldn’t blame it on the twilight, or that we couldn’t see the wider picture. We concluded that we must both be fucking stupid. We didn’t tell Dad about that adventure either.

The world had taken on a kind of surreal quality as we drove around the Scottish Highlands without a care in the world.

For my dad, returning to work meant more misery. He had been in charge of his section of the tube works at the steel works. He had been told that he should take off all the time he needed to look after his wife and two boys. He was told that his job was safe.

When he got back, he was handed a brush and was told that sweeping the warehouse was now his job. I imagine he was less than delighted at his new position.

Having not been at school for most of the year, I found I was behind in most subjects. It was English that upset me the most. I had been one of the top in my year. I now found myself in the bottom 25%.

While I flunked out at school, Dad fell further and further into himself. He spent more and more time in the pub. He passed more and more financial responsibilities onto Jim. Jim was in charge of the groceries. Jim was in charge of clothes shopping.

Over that first year without Mum, a few things were rapidly becoming apparent: it was no one’s responsibility to do the housework. It was no one’s responsibility to do the garden. My clothes and shoes weren’t being replaced. There was no toothpaste. Or soap. Or shampoo. Or food.

Added to this, Dad was now drinking at home. He kept his bottle of Bell’s whisky under the kitchen sink. One day Dad had drunk his first bottle of Bell’s and was about to start on his second. Jim and I were more than a little alarmed at this. So we decided to challenge him and told him he wasn’t allowed to have it.

‘Right then,’ he said, while taking off the suit jacket he wore all the time. This was Glaswegian non-verbal communication for, ‘If you even try to take that whisky off me, I’ll tear your leg off and hit you over the head with the wet end.’

We were both aware of Dad’s crazy history. We quickly assessed that taking him on, even in his inebriated state, would not be wise. Being somewhat averse to being dismembered, we negotiated with Dad to try to work out an amicable resolution to this tricky situation. He told us he wouldn’t drink all the whisky if we had a drink with him.

Cue two Tupperware beakers.

Jim and I glugged down the vast majority of that bottle of Bell’s. I think I had a pink beaker and Jim’s was blue. I remember lying there on the sofa, 12 years old and pissed out of my face, with the room spinning around me. I might have been thinking that this hadn’t been the best solution to this particular problem. I might well have been thinking that Martians had landed in the garden.

These were the dark times. Dad wasn’t all bad. Really.

Things gradually got worse for Dad and for us. Quite remarkably he managed to keep his job. The house that he and Mum had invested a lot of time and money into gradually deteriorated around us.

Dad smoked his roll-ups and the living room reflected that. The ceiling yellowed. The wallpaper on the walls began to look like something found in some fusty programme about how the Victorians used to live. The cats, Ginger and Suzie (Jim later claimed her name was spelled Siouxie – as in Siouxie and the Banshees, to demonstrate just how cool he was), started to live a slightly lawless existence. They would shit and piss really where they fancied and also bring in their latest kills, including mice and sundry garden birds. The house was dotted with their little corpses – and their smells.

Ginger was notorious for being insane. Anyone – anything that approached her was liable to lose blood. This psychotic creature was happily stinking up the house without any comeback or punishment.

The house was smelly and dirty. I was smelly and dirty. We were all smelly and dirty.

Dad told us and anyone who was willing to listen that it was his boys that kept him going. When we were alone in the house and he’d had a few whiskies, he told us that once we were grown up and away from the house he would kill himself. No pressure there then.

I got to the point where it all got a bit much for me. I finally cracked and told Dad that I needed him around. I didn’t want to be alone night after night in my smelly house, in my smelly and ill-fitting clothes. I asked him time after time not to go out, to just stay at home with me for once. ‘I’ll be back at half eleven,’ he’d say, gently and not unkindly.

Getting pissed all the time is not without its risks. No, I don’t mean liver disease. Falling. He fell more than a few times, sustaining fairly serious injuries and knocking himself unconscious. One night, Dad arrived home startlingly pissed. I lay in bed as I heard him bounce around the kitchen, dropping glasses and plates as he prepared a little something just before bed. Finally, I heard him make his way, falteringly, up the stairs.

Quite close to the top, he missed his step. Had he been sober he’d have just stumbled. However, he wasn’t sober and so he fell all the way down the stairs. There is a sound that only flesh and bones bouncing off stairs can make. He made that sound. When he reached the bottom, there was a moment of silence. It probably lasted no more than five seconds. It was in that time, though, that my thoughts began.

Die, you cunt. Just die.

I felt a lurch of disappointment when he started to groan. It was a gargling, moaning groan. It sounded vaguely like he was calling for Jim. Just fucking die.

I lay in bed, not moving, my breathing shallow in case someone could hear me.

Die!

After 20 minutes of this almost inhuman noise, Jim finally heard him. He rushed downstairs to find Dad’s small and twisted form. Jim phoned the ambulance and Dad was duly rescued.

I got up the following morning and feigned my surprise at Dad being in hospital. ‘Really? What happened?’

Dad had found himself very close to death that night. He had managed to break his neck. That said, he only had minimal injuries to his spinal cord, which meant he never felt his fingers properly again.

He was delivered back from hospital a couple of days later. He improved over the following weeks and was soon able to go back upstairs to sleep. Before we knew it, he was well enough to get back to the pub and the off-licence. Finally, he returned to work.

I became angrier and angrier. At school I must have been a teacher’s nightmare. I’d stopped doing homework. I was also getting into more and more fights at school – venting my anger and frustration on a variety of unsuspecting victims.

Although I appeared to have a number of crunch times, one of my biggest occurred one sunny day in the summer of 1979. I’d walked home from school as usual, but was still fizzing from anger over something and nothing. I was about 50 yards from home when I saw Anthony Hutchison. Hutch.

Hutch was a bit of a nutter. He was completely lawless and, because of this was one of the hardest guys in our year. He was also one of the fastest runners. ‘Hutch, you’re a wanker!’ I shouted. Bravely, I ran away.

He caught me about ten yards from my house. In retrospect, he probably wishes he hadn’t. Hutch caught me and I exploded with anger. Mum dying, Dad drinking, me being smelly and not having any food in the house – it all made me furious and he got the lot. I don’t think he hit me once.

He was quite a mess when he finally extricated himself and ran away. Word got round pretty quickly that ‘Chris Young has beaten up Hutch.’ So now I was weird, smelly, and a nutter. Folk began to keep their distance.

Had he been paying attention, Dad would have been proud. Had he been paying attention, Dad would have noticed that there were days and nights when I just didn’t come home. The thing about rebelling or acting out is that it’s all a bit meaningless if no one notices.

In 1980, the shit really hit the fan. Word was out that the quality of the iron ore in Corby was not great. As a result, it would be cheaper to have it dragged out of the ground elsewhere. This meant that a huge part of the steelworks was due to close. The men of Corby went on strike.

The sons of the strikers marched with them as they chanted, ‘No steel closure! We want the right to work!’ Some of my friends got to appear on local radio and TV. It was all very exciting. It was also dazzlingly shit.

We had even less food than we’d had before. Men in suits would come to our door and we’d refuse to answer. If we saw them, we’d pretend to live elsewhere. Once, they managed to get in and they put a pre-payment metre on the TV. 50 pence would get you two hours of quality viewing.

This added insult to injury. As if life wasn’t fucking hard enough, the telly would go off half way through The Sweeny, Trumpton, Match of the Day, and / or Coronation Street.

The main problem at the time, though, was lack of food. I remember the excitement I felt when one day the Salvation Army came round with a small, yet significant, box of food. It included tins of beans and meat, but best of all a small box of Kellogg’s cornflakes. Imagine how my joy turned to dismay when I realised we didn’t have any milk. No matter, I had them dry. I was past caring.

To this day I still think someone’s posh if they’ve got Kellogg’s cornflakes in their cupboard.

Apart from this box of food and my friend’s parents, there was another reason I didn’t die of starvation during these hard times. Our local fish and chip shop gave away batter bits for free. I still drool at the memory of the crunchy, greasy fare drowned in salt and vinegar. My problem was that I was still the son of my mother. As such, I couldn’t get this free stuff every day. My pride wouldn’t allow it. I’d rather go hungry.

In that same year – 1981 – Dad’s mum died. I was in the bath and I heard Dad shouting for me to come downstairs. These days he was only really assertive when there was someone else around – so when he demanded that I came down the stairs ‘now’ I guessed that he had a family member with him. I obediently played along with his game and duly made coffee for him and Uncle Jimmy as they told me of the demise of their loving mother.

Uncle Jimmy finally made his excuses and left, leaving me with Dad. He was distraught. Inconsolable. I thought about his shite parenting, how he’d become self-absorbed over these short and terribly long four years.

My mate, Kev came round. I told dad I was going out. Dad became frantic.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Out,’ I said, not terribly gently. ‘It’s okay, I’ll be back at 11.30.’

At that moment I really hated him. I hated the way he’d fucked everything up. I hated the way he only cared about himself and his suffering. I hated the way he’d turned his back on me. And now? Fuck, I hated the way this situation – my world – had made me react to his pain. I was punishing him in the way he’d punished me.

‘It’s okay, I’ll be back at 11.30.’

His words.

At that moment, I hated myself too. You reap what you sow.

In 1981, Dad accepted a redundancy package from the works. For 16 years of his life, they gave him approximately £10,000. You could buy an awful lot of whisky in 1981 for £10,000.

Jim kept his head down and managed to get the A levels required to enable him to escape to the University of Surrey in sunny Guildford. In that same year, I spoke to Mr Haig, our sixth form tutor, about my academic future. He told me that the best thing I could do was leave school and get a job.

The fucking steelworks had just closed. Unemployment was running at about 25%! Great advice, Mr Haig.

My mates, who had the same discussions with Mr Haig, were advised to knuckle down and concentrate on their work, and that everything would be okay. Interestingly, I was the only one out of this bunch to procure a degree. Bitter? Me? Too fucking right.

This left me at home with Dad. I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. I knew that if I left home, Dad was likely to fulfil his suicidal ambition. Jim was keen to reinforce that and told me regularly that I couldn’t leave home. In 1982, Dad took some of his well-earned drinking money and paid for a holiday to the Costa-del-Sol with me and Louise. On a coach.

I think the holiday lasted ten days – two full days of which were travelling on this ‘luxury’ coach. At the time there was no such thing as a luxury coach. A coach became luxury purely by virtue of the fact that it had the word ‘luxury’ written on the window at the back.

I remember devouring peaches the size of my head as we left sunny Spain. Imagine the joy I felt when we were told that there was no running water on the bus. My hands and face attracted flies from all over Europe for the rest of the journey.

Dad promised he wouldn’t get drunk. Then he promised he wouldn’t get drunk all the time. Then he said he had had a bet with one of his friends back in Corby that he couldn’t get drunk on Spanish vodka (If there is such a thing). That was it really. He was shitfaced for the rest of the holiday.

After a year of living alone with Dad, my wits could take it no longer and I moved out. We were all terribly concerned about Dad on a day-to-day basis. Would he drink too much? Of course he bloody would! Would he eat properly? Did he ever?

Dad remained on his liquid diet until he died in November 1990.

I moved around a bit until I went to college at the North East London Polytechnic. Here, I was roughly 80 miles from home. As such, I regularly visited Dad on the Corby Flier (my name for it), a coach that travelled twice a day from Marylebone to Corby. I told him it was so I could pinch his meals on wheels. He’d started getting these because of the pressure he’d received from Stuart. He never ate them. I’d eat the jam roly-poly and custard. Other than that, I left well alone.

One lovely summer’s day, I came home unannounced from college, asking Dad if he had anything to eat. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s some meatloaf in the oven.’

Knowing Dad’s history and his somewhat laissez-faire approach to sophisticated dining, I asked, ‘How long has it been in there?’

‘Oh, I just made it yesterday.’

That was good enough for me. I was a student and a man in my early twenties. I seemed to be in an almost permanent state of hunger. I cut a bit off. I think I might have had it in a sandwich. It was a bit bland – but hey, it was food.

I knew Dad would be unlikely to put this nutritional product in the fridge, so I thought I’d do that for him. I picked up the meatloaf from the baking tray to put it onto a plate. I’ve got to say I wasn’t overly happy when I saw the happy family of maggots, who had been hanging out in meatloaf city, just maggoting about on the plate.

Mental note to self – make Dad a meatloaf sandwich. I threw the nasty product away. It was clear though that Dad’s voyage of self-destruction was continuing, albeit in a sad and passive way.

Over time, thoughts of Dad’s threats to top himself became a bit of a distant memory. Until one day.

As usual I arrived home, unannounced. As usual I came in the front door. Unusually, there was a smell of gas circulating the house. I walked into the kitchen to find Dad sitting on the floor. He’d turned on all the gas rings on the cooker without lighting them and, not surprisingly, the room was full of gas. In his left hand was a box of Swan Vesta matches. In his right was a Swan Vesta match, which he was striking repeatedly against the sandpaper on the side. He was crying his heart out. ‘I’ll take those, I think,’ I said as I took the nasty, dangerous, sparky things from his hands.

There it was. His one and only suicide attempt – thwarted by me arriving home unannounced. Fuck. It would have been an impressive exit.

We talked about it at some length. Jim and I had left home. The cats had both died. Mum was still dead. Dad had just had enough. This was the one and only time where he’d plucked up the courage to do it, albeit in a drunken stupor, and I’d fucked it up for him. I didn’t talk to Jim or Stuart about it. It just didn’t seem right.

And that’s the way it was. Dad gradually deteriorated through poor diet, smoking, lack of exercise, and his old mate, whisky. We all visited him through guilt, concern, and curiosity. How was he still alive?

In the summer of 1990, all of Dad’s Christmases came at once. He had been blessed with lung cancer. The GP told him that, although it was essentially inoperable, he could lengthen Dad’s life with a whole variety of potions and radioactive therapies. I think his exact words were ‘Bugger that.’ He did ask the doctor if he could carry on drinking and smoking though. He was told that that would have little impact on his remaining months.

I was living in Scotland now. I came down by train every second weekend to see how he was doing. It’s funny, when I received the diagnosis I raced down to Corby expecting Dad to look somehow different. Nope – he was the same old, skinny, bald 68-year-old man.

We talked a little about his life. We talked a bit about Mum, the cats, Jim, and Dad’s cancer. I’d get him a whisky. I’d make him a snack. All gentle and quiet stuff. No wailing, no gnashing of teeth. ‘It’s funny,’ I said to him one day. ‘You’re the one who’s dying, but it’s the rest of us who are falling to bits.’

It was true. Here we all were, approaching this inevitable day. I felt I was racing backwards and forwards from Scotland. I didn’t know whether to love him or hate him. After all he’d put me through. But he was still my dad.

Louise and Stuart appeared to be on the scene almost continuously. Was there a feeling of guilt because of their absence at the time of Mum dying and the aftermath? Who knows? Jim, as was his way, dealt with his grief quietly and privately.

At this point I had already met and married Poppy. In October, we found out that Poppy was pregnant. She was reluctant to tell folk because it was still early days. That said, we agreed that Dad should be the first person I should tell. So I did. About one month before he died, I told Dad that he was going to have a grandchild. He was really happy – but sad that he’d never get to meet them. He never had the audacity to offer me any words of wisdom about parenting. Just as bloody well.

That day finally arrived. I got a phone call one Friday morning from Keith, Louise’s husband. Dad had died that morning. Seemingly it had been a peaceful affair and he hadn’t been in too much pain at the end.

When I spoke to Louise afterwards, she told me that she’d continuously pumped him full of Oramorph – a morphine based medicine. She was worried that it had been this, and not the cancer, that had taken him. We agreed that he was on his way anyway and if she did something to accelerate it, albeit unwittingly, it was probably for the best.

I remember that day quite well. I didn’t collapse in a wailing lump of tears. I didn’t scream about how unfair life was. I went to work. I worked in a day centre for people with physical disabilities in Prestonpans, a mining town not far from Edinburgh. I got the 129 bus there from Edinburgh and I went swimming with a bunch of folk with a variety of disabilities at a pool in Tranent – another mining town. All very surreal. All very quiet.

I told my managers about Dad. They asked me what the hell I was doing there, and to come back to work when I was ready. It was all very lovely.

I arrived in Corby on the following day. It was fucking odd to visit the house and to find Dad just not there. I spoke with Louise, who was still reeling from the death.

On the Monday, Jim and Stuart and I went to visit Dad at the funeral parlour. Interestingly, lying there in the casket, Dad reminded me of a shuttlecock. Some joker had dressed him in a white robe thing that I never remembered him wearing to the pub. His little bald head, decorated with the scars from a fall off an escalator, poked out the top.

The day of his funeral arrived. My memory of this auspicious day is sketchy. This was due to my good friend Derek, who I’d known since I was five. Every time I opened my mouth, he poured Southern Comfort into it.

The graveside is where things first started happening for me. There was a host of folk from Dad’s side of the family who I’d never laid eyes on before. There was a minister who I’d never laid eyes on before. And there was a piper, who I’d never laid eyes on before, playing A Scottish Soldier.

That did it. I wailed. I cried uncontrollably. I was crying for Mum, for my cats, for Dad, for my home now gone, for my childhood, for my fucking life. Stuart, Jim, Louise, Poppy and Derek had no idea what to do with me. One of Dad’s sisters grabbed hold of me and held my ribs together as I completely lost control. I have no idea how long I cried for.

When I woke up the next morning I was struck with the stark realisation. I was 25, I had a child on the way and I was an orphan without a home. I felt so very alone.