Today would have been my dad’s birthday. He would have been seventy-seven years old. It’s hard to comprehend that big, strong man from my childhood ever being such an age. And it’s even harder to comprehend that it’s been twenty-three years since all his vibrant strength and happiness was extinguished from the world.
I often think about what Dad, if he was able to drop in for an hour, would make of the world nowadays. How alien would it seem to him? The Internet. Twenty-four-hour television. That roundabout near where we used to live which they’ve replaced with traffic lights.
And, most of all, I wonder what he’d make of his grandson. I know he’d love him dearly, but would he understand him? He probably wouldn’t know how to spell the word autism, let alone come to terms with it. And then there’s the strangest thing of all, that the two people who have played the biggest part in shaping my life are the two people who will never ever meet.
It was a source of regret from the moment he was born that The Boy would never know his granddad. He’d never know what it felt like to be carried on the shoulders of a 5-foot 10-inch giant with a headful of hair gel, surrounded by the potent odour of Old Spice aftershave and Silk Cut cigarettes. And then one day it occurred to me, that although the two of them will never meet in the physical sense, Granddad is still never very far away.
Son, you know how Dad beeps the car horn and then waves at strangers to see if they wave back? That was Granddad’s game. You know when Dad told you that his scar from his tuberculosis jab was where he got shot fighting in the war? Granddad too. The whistling, listening to Frank Sinatra, making you say ‘Thank you’ when you get down from the dinner table, it’s all him. The more I think about it, the more I realize, he’s everywhere, in everything I do.
MY SON’S NOT RAINMAN BLOG
There’s such an urge to start this story with The Boy’s birth, as if the world only began with him and everything that came before was just incidental. But the truth is, this story started way, way before he was even thought of. Before I’d even taken my first step, before anyone in the Williams family had even begun to imagine the horror of one of their offspring upping sticks from the north-west of England to take root down south, in London. Of all places.
It starts with you, Dad.
I don’t have many early memories of him. If I’m honest, he wasn’t around a great deal when we were growing up. My mum’s family ran a catering firm and part of his reward for marrying her was he got to work for them, six days and nights a week, catering for Freemasons’ halls, weddings, funerals and everything in between. The work was nothing if not varied. I used to go along and help out from the age of thirteen for the princely sum of five pounds. One evening would be a banquet at the town hall, the next would be a traditional hot pot dinner for a Working Men’s Club with ladies getting their boobies out and dancing on the stage. I thought it was the best job in the world.
There are certain things that will always evoke memories of Dad: the sight of those small brown wage envelopes you can buy in the pound shop, the same ones that used to magically appear on the mantelpiece behind the carriage clock every Thursday without fail; the sound of a Ford Transit van pulling into a driveway in second gear when it should really be in first but the driver’s too tired to shift gear; the clicking sound of the ignition button on a Calor Gas heater first thing on a cold winter morning. They all meant one thing: Dad’s home.
It sounds like a horrible way to describe someone, but he wasn’t the cleverest of men, I remember that much; although I do recall him telling us proudly that he passed the exam to go to grammar school. Mind you, he also told us that he danced with Sammy Davis Jnr and dated Tina Turner, so you can take that with a pinch of salt. He was, however, a born entertainer, a showman through and through, the boy who never grew up. If ever there had been a demand for a prime-time TV show where someone whistled Johnny Mathis songs while extolling the virtues of brushing your shoes (‘Don’t forget the heel! You can always spot a lazy bastard as they only polish the front’), he’d have made top billing. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the years, it’s that dads-who-never-grow-up make for pretty rubbish husbands.
I was one of four boys. With my dad in the mix, in many ways my poor mum had a fifth child on her hands. And how hurtful it must have been sometimes, when she did everything in terms of bringing us up, to see us get so excited when Dad eventually had a night off. Mr Fun Time was in town.
I remember going on a rare day trip when I was about nine years of age. The whole family went to the Alton Towers theme park. It was so long ago that it was pretty much just a swing and a roundabout in those days. I think the slide might have opened the year after. In fact, it was that long ago that rather than paying at a kiosk (for which you had to wait most of the day) you paid as you drove into the car park. There was a lady sitting in a hut and you’d pull up alongside her and then she’d count the number of heads in the car – four children, two adults, you’d pay the money and then go and park.
I still remember Dad taking the Alton Towers’ exit off the M6 motorway in our faithful Nissan Bluebird, then pulling into a lay-by around six miles away. We’d talked about this moment, like we’d always talked about doing a runner in the Beefeater restaurant when the bill arrived. We never thought he was going to go through with it. But when he reached down beside his driver’s seat and pulled a lever, the noise of the boot unlocking confirmed our worst fears.
You just trust your dad, don’t you? Three of us climbed into the car boot like trusting lambs being led to slaughter. We knew no different. Then Dad placed a blanket over the top of us – ‘just in case of spot-checks, lads’ – closed the boot and drove the remaining six miles to Alton Towers. He pulled up at the hut with the lady inside; she peered inside the car – two adults and one child. Dad dutifully paid, then parked at the far side of the car park.
I remember that moment so clearly, when he opened the boot. I remember my eyes adjusting to the daylight and the sensation of the hallucinations from the four-star petrol fumes wearing off. And I remember his big, grinning face bearing down on us. He had a look on his face like he’d just smuggled his family across the Gaza Strip.
‘Victory for the little man, boys,’ he beamed, ‘victory for the little man.’
I was nineteen years old when that big, brilliant face of his left us forever.
He’d been ill for most of my teenage life; the years of drinking and smoking had taken their toll. First heart disease and then, eventually, cancer. He came home to die, that was his last wish: to ‘put all his affairs in order’ I think is the correct term. All that really meant was confessing to my mum that he’d drunk the vodka in the drinks cabinet and replaced it with water so she wouldn’t know, and to tell the vicar that he ‘didn’t want any of that morbid shit’ at his funeral. And I’d like to tell you that those final days were a profound, life-changing period in which serenity washed over all our lives, just like in the movies. But in truth they were hideous affairs, when the morphine levels never seemed quite right and his indomitable spirit raged and fought against the failing light. Eventually, eventually, in the dead of night, when all was quiet…
Reading this back, it seems a strange way to start a book, to condense a man’s life and death into the first chapter. But my dad had to be the beginning of the story. His sense of humour, his playfulness, they run through my life like the words in a stick of rock. He shaped the father I’ve become. I don’t think as children we ever really know our parents as people – living, breathing people. We just see them as invincible. He was the man who taught me that the real superheroes in this world are often living among us. It was only years later, when I looked back, that I realized he was fallible too. He never thought he was good enough or smart enough.
I don’t have much of a memory for dates and times; birthdays, anniversaries, they merge into one. I couldn’t tell you where I was when John Lennon died or who won the 2002 World Cup. I can, however, tell you the two dates that have irrevocably changed my life. On 16 October 1991, I said goodnight to my dad for the last time. And then 3,825 days later, on 6 April 2002, I said hello to my son for the first time. These are the two people who have shaped my life, who will never, ever meet, linked only by my own fallible memory and a propensity for weight gain that I’m blaming firmly on genetics.
You did all right, Dad. You did all right.