In preparation for Dad’s arrival at Castle Buckles, I moved all my stuff out of the flat where I had my studio and set up a new workspace in one of the adjoining barns. The physical effort this entailed was nothing compared to the mental trauma of sorting through a lifetime of accumulated crap. I started to make trips with carloads of crap to charity shops and the recycling dump, and each time I marvelled at how easy it was to part with that crap after so many years of careful hoarding. Then Dad’s crap arrived.
It turned up in Norfolk a week before he did, and it filled one medium-sized farm shed. I knew he was planning to finish writing his autobiography while he was with us, so I made it my priority to turn the living-room space in the flat into a study where he could work. With his permission I sanded down and re-varnished the beaten-up writing desk he’d ‘liberated’ 30 years earlier from his office at the Telegraph, I put up shelves and filled them with his books and hung up his old pictures. ‘I’m an amazing son,’ I thought.
He’s going to love this and we’re going to have a moving and cathartic time together.
Once the flat was in order, I went back into the shed and continued searching through the rest of Dad’s boxes, looking out for anything else he might need when he arrived. But unless he was planning on reading back letters from old girlfriends, checking menus from every restaurant he’d ever visited or taking one last look at his expenses claims, there was nothing there that anyone would ever be needing again.
It crossed my mind that in the course of looking through all this stuff I might come across evidence of outrageous secrets or scandals from Dad’s life that would redefine our relationship, but no. The letters were polite, the people in the photographs were fully clothed and everything seemed boringly above board. Instead, it was the more mundane souvenirs of Dad’s life that proved the most unsettling.
A couple of boxes contained bulging manilla envelopes into which Dad had begun to sort documents and souvenirs he considered particularly significant. I picked out one labelled ‘FINANCIAL CRISIS’ and found it stuffed with letters to bank managers, school bursars and friends. It told the story of Dad’s struggles to stay afloat throughout the Eighties and on into the Nineties as school fees sank him deeper into debt. It was some dank Death of a Salesman shit.
I pulled out a letter from the end of the Eighties explaining that, due to modernisation at the Sunday Telegraph, my dad was to be let go. Looking at the date, I recalled that I’d been with Joe Cornish and Louis Theroux doing David Bowie impressions in New York at the time, having flown over on a ticket Dad wangled with his travel-editor connections. I’d phoned home one evening and he’d told me the news. ‘I’m afraid it’s the end of an era, old boy,’ he’d said, ‘so make the most of it out there.’
Then a letter from a few years later when I would have been at art school. Dad was still trying anything he could to keep my brother David at Haileybury, and he and Mum were sleeping in separate rooms, barely speaking to each other. The letter was from his former employers at the Telegraph, refusing to wipe out a debt from a previous loan. I think if I got a similar letter, I’d burn it, but Dad had kept it safe.
22nd February 1991
Dear Nigel,
I have read your fairly chilling letter of 20th February.
When I organised an ex gratia payment of £8,200 upon your retirement in May two years ago, there were those who counselled that this be used to diminish your debt to the company. I resisted them, and it would seem I was wrong to do so.
The arguments that you deploy about not being very well paid, etc., were the arguments that you put to the previous management in the letter you sent to [Mr Madeupname] seeking the loan. Since the loan was forthcoming, it could be said that it worked once; but I think it a bit optimistic to expect that it can be rehearsed again to wipe out the debt, most particularly in the light of the very considerable enhancements that were made to your salary in the years that you served the Sunday Telegraph under new management.
Looking at the figures you quote in your letter, I think a bank manager would say that you are seeking to achieve a lifestyle which is beyond your means. That you are paying for private education is laudable in so far as we all wish to do the best by our children, but frankly it would seem folly looking at your figures.
To that extent, you are asking the Daily Telegraph to expunge the debt currently standing at £14,500 in order to maintain a standard of living which you cannot afford.
I do believe that the company has behaved honourably and generously towards you since this loan was first advanced, and this was extended to what amounted as a gift upon your retirement.
While I sympathise greatly with your dire financial position, I cannot recommend to the Telegraph that they write off debt for a loan which was extended in good faith and on very favourable terms.
Yours sincerely,
Jimmy Namachangé, Executive Editor
Further down the stack of correspondence were copies of letters Dad had sent to wealthy friends and acquaintances asking if they might lend him some money and outlining elaborate schemes for repaying them. One of the people he had written to in 1991 was David Cornwell, a friend from his university days at Oxford, better known as the spy thriller author John le Carré.
Hardback copies of all Le Carré’s novels had made the journey to Norfolk along with all of Dad’s other books, and just the day before I had spent the afternoon arranging them on the shelves for him beside everything ever written by Winston Churchill, Patrick O’Brian and John Buchan. Apart from the odd Western, the only TV show I ever remember my dad liking when we were young was the 1982 adaptation of Le Carré’s Smiley’s People, starring old Ben Kenobi himself, Sir Alec Guinness. That Dad was able to call Le Carré a friend was a source of tremendous pride to him, and to unbalance that friendship with a request to borrow £40,000 surely scooped him out. The letter begins:
At the age of almost 67, I am ashamed to be writing to you like this. I know well enough that I have no right whatever to be asking for your help, but I have honestly, and lately desperately, tried every other conceivable way of raising the very large amount of money that I want, and so far none has worked. Now, I have run out of time and cannot think even of any other hope.
It was a long letter, underneath which Dad had filed Le Carré’s reply – a kind, well-worded refusal. I winced and stuffed the envelopes back in the box where I’d found them.
When I was little I thought Dad was just the absolute best guy around: clever, handsome, funny and successful. I loved travelling with him and seeing him charm hotel managers, flight attendants and heads of tourism who fell over themselves to do his bidding. In those days, no problem was too big for Dad to solve and no opportunity to make our lives more exciting was missed.
Sure, he could go too far sometimes. We once stayed at a resort in Barbados that Dad was writing about for his travel column, and one evening we were taken to an open-air reggae concert by a local PR person. I’m fairly certain it was Mum and Dad’s first open-air reggae concert and it made a considerable impression on six-year-old Buckles. I wish I could report that it was the night my passion for music was awakened, but I was just confused by how different we looked to all the locals and how gut-quakingly loud the music was. Seeing the look of alarm on his young son’s face, Dad leaned close to the PR person and asked in a loud, posh voice if the concert could be turned down. The PR person laughed before realising my dad was serious. Even at six, I had a sense that this was not cool. (I just emailed my mum to fact-check this recollection and she confirms, it was not cool.)
Once I was at boarding school, I started to get depressed whenever I knew Dad had to travel. I worried he might never come back. One of many low points during my first term as a boarder was when Mum and Dad came to pick me up for a ‘leave out’ (one of two weekends a term when you could stay out overnight), only for us to drive to Heathrow, where Dad had to catch a flight to New York.
‘Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)’ by Christopher Cross was playing on the radio as we approached the terminal and the chorus ‘When you get caught between the moon and New York City …’ – which may just have been a euphemism for severe delays – struck me instead as a sign that Dad’s plane was going to crash. I knew it wasn’t a rational thought so I stayed quiet, but I couldn’t shake it. As I did my best not to cry, Dad reached back from the front passenger seat, found my hand and gave it a series of soft squeezes. Thereafter Dad used the language of squeezes whenever he had anything emotional to communicate. As we got older and the emotions got more complicated, the squeezes became more expressive.
When Dad looked round the flat in Norfolk and took in the preparations we’d made for his arrival, I got a shoulder squeeze that, even in his weakened state, bordered on painful.
My brother had driven him up that day, and while Dad pottered about his new digs, Uncle Dave and I went out to unload the last of his possessions from the car. There, on the top of the pile of bags, cooking implements and bedding, was the black briefcase, still tightly locked.
‘Where do you want this, Daddy?’ I asked back in the flat.
‘Somewhere safe, old boy. Somewhere out of the way,’ he replied, but before I had the chance to quiz him further our dog Rosie boinged into the room, followed closely by my daughter, then aged six, whereupon I was treated to a rare sight: an unforced beaming smile from Dad.
RAMBLE
Pa was never much of a smiler, especially in photos. Even when he was young and handsome he was more likely to smoulder than smile. Perhaps that had something to do with my determination to smile in press photographs as much as possible. Though it’s an unreasonable prejudice, I can’t help thinking that when comedians smoulder it’s vain. If you want people to think you’re mysterious and sexy, be a rock star. But some people just don’t suit a smile. When Dad smiled in photographs he usually ended up looking as though he was trying not to cry.
For the next couple of months the black briefcase sat on top of a tall filing cabinet in the corner of my office, as it had in Dad’s study back in Earl’s Court when I first encountered it 35 years previously. I gave it a shake before I stuck it up there and heard something small and heavy bumping about. It didn’t sound like porn, but the urge to establish the exact contents of the black briefcase was quickly superseded by more prosaic concerns.
Dad had been given between three and twelve months to live and it was agreed that there was little to be gained from any aggressive treatment for his cancer. Soon after he arrived in Norfolk, we met with the local GP, who explained that if he took his various pills when he was supposed to, Dad was unlikely to be in any significant pain and the main challenge would be keeping his energy levels up. To that end, a nutritionist at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital encouraged him to load up on noodles, butter, cheese and other foods that for most people might be considered naughty.
That was bad news for me. I’m not fond of dairy products, and cheese makes me especially sad. In the months that followed I found cleaning up after toilet accidents infinitely preferable to preparing cheesy noodles, cheesy scrambled eggs, cheesy liver and other cheese nightmares for Dad, which, more often than not, he didn’t even eat.
The nutritionist also arranged for a regular supply of smoothie supplement drinks and stressed the importance of consuming at least one a day. They came in a wide range of foul flavours and only ever acted on Dad as a powerful emetic. Between the smoothies and the cheese, one of us was gagging most of the time.
We got to know our local district nurses, who came over every week to check on Dad and drain the fluid building up in his lung bags. They used a plastic beaker with a tube and a needle on the end, and on their first visit the younger and more nervous-looking of the nurses got to push the needle into Dad’s chest. She was rewarded with a hair-raising yelp that left her ashen. ‘Have you done this before?’ spluttered Dad.
‘I’m sure she knows what she’s doing,’ I offered, smiling at the pale nurse, who replied, ‘Actually, this is my first time with the chest drain.’
‘Jeeesus Christ!’ was Dad’s response. It was hard to know where best to direct my sympathy.
RAMBLE
Dad had a tendency to make loud noises long before he got ill. When he would come and stay with us, I often heard him cry out at night. I’d check on him and he seemed fine, but the noises would persist. Anguished cries that suggested he was either dreaming about the war or bank managers.
During his last year, his weakened lungs made his voice thin and high, but his arsenal of howls, moans and groans expanded and was no longer confined to the night.
Whenever a new nurse or carer attended to him, they’d leave looking shaken after enduring what sounded like the cries of a Game of Thrones torture victim. However, Dad himself confirmed that despite the yowling, he wasn’t in much pain. From then on, the nurses would sometimes refer to him as ‘The Prince of Wails’.
By the end of summer 2015 Dad was averaging two or three minutes to make the trip down the six-metre corridor between the living room and the dead room – I mean bedroom. His legs, which just a few years before had popped with hiking muscles, were now papery and wasted, and as he shuffled along with his bathrobe, cane and tufts of white hair sticking up from his skinny head, he looked like Yoda but pale pink and with all the Force used up.
For most of the time that Dad was living with us I was working on another failed pilot. It was one that got quite close to becoming an actual TV show, so the pressure was on to deliver several scripts. In practice, that meant I’d spend several hours a day staring at my computer, not writing scripts and feeling that I ought to be making the most of the time I had left with Dad.
Before he moved in, I’d imagined conversations filled with tender reminiscences, confessions and closure. ‘Hey, Daddy, do you remember that holiday to Greece when I was 12 and Clare trod on a sea urchin and you told us we should pee in a bucket and pour it on her foot to make the spines come out?’ We’d laugh with gratitude for all the good fortune we’d enjoyed over the years, then Dad would say, ‘Come closer, Adam …’ I’d lean in and he’d say haltingly, ‘I’m … I’m sorry I didn’t smile more,’ or ‘I wish we hadn’t sent you away to boarding school. We did it for the best reasons, but I would have liked to have spent more time with you when you were still so young,’ or ‘I just wanted you to know that I thought the three-star review you got for BUG in Edinburgh that time was very unfair – they were reviewing it as if it were a one-man show when it was clearly a presentation of other people’s work with some of your own very funny material mixed in, but people often find it hard to properly appreciate things that aren’t easily categorised.’
Any version of that scenario, even one that wasn’t entirely based on things I wanted to hear, was overwhelmed by the unsatisfactory routines and role reversals we’d unwittingly signed on for. Thing is, you’re unlikely to strike up a heart-to-heart chat with your son for the first time while he’s standing over you until you’ve finished your smoothie, getting annoyed when you don’t take your pills or hoisting your nappy on before bed. Also you’re more or less deaf. And you’ve got cancer. In the end we were just two uptight men who found it easier to be on our own.
One morning when script deadline stress levels were peaking, I went and looked in on Dad to ask what he wanted for breakfast. As soon as he mentioned eggs I made for the kitchen. I was keen to avoid the usual lengthy instructions about how best to prepare cheesy scrambled eggs so I could get the job done quickly and return to work on the failed pilot, but a second after I’d left the room he called after me, ‘Wait! I haven’t finished!’
There was no need to finish, I told him. I knew what he was after. ‘Yes, but sometimes you say that and what you get me isn’t quite right.’
‘When have I got you something that wasn’t quite right?’ I asked, heart beginning to flutter with exasperation.
‘Well, I don’t keep a record. The other day, for example, you got me some scrambled eggs, but you put it on toast, which I didn’t ask for.’
‘I gave you toast because I thought you might like it, but I thought if you didn’t like it you could just leave it, which you did. You know, Daddy, you asked me to tell you if there were ways to make things easier for me while you’re here and this is one of them. I just need you to be concise, that’s all.’
‘You get very touchy,’ he said.
It wasn’t even 9 a.m. and already I was fizzing with nervous stress like Ray Liotta running errands at the end of Good-fellas, but with fewer amphetamines and more self-loathing.
I needed to calm down, so as soon as I’d delivered the eggs (without toast), I went out for a walk with Rosie and we had a therapeutic chat. ‘I’m fucking this up, aren’t I, Rosie?’
‘Go on,’ said Rosie.
‘This is my last chance to spend some time with Daddy and get to know him a little better, and instead I’m just getting annoyed with him for not behaving exactly the way I want him to. And in the meantime I’m fucking up this pilot, too.’
‘How does that make you feel?’ said Rosie.
‘Bad. I feel bad. I’m a bad person doing a bad job, but you know what? I’m going to try harder and make sure the time Dad has left is beautiful and cathartic and meaningful.’
‘For him, or you?’ said Rosie, a bit annoyingly.
My phone buzzed. An email from Dad. It said:
I’m sorry. I forgot to ask you earlier, if you do go to Sainsbury’s today could you pick up the following:
1, repeat 1, bottle of lemon cordial. Stuff in fridge seems to have been there always.
3 big and best navel oranges
Fresh noodles
Canada Dry
Steak pie
Later that afternoon I presented Dad with a steak pie lunch and a new positive attitude. ‘You got the wrong steak pie,’ he said after the first bite.
RAMBLE
SHIT DAD USED TO SAY
‘A man with a beard is trying to hide something.’ (Said throughout the Seventies, but he stopped saying it when I grew my beard in 2005.)
‘Oh Five Two Six.’ (Said when answering our phone in Earl’s Court.)
‘We’re gone!’ (Said when trying to get everyone out of the house and into car at the start of a family trip.)
‘You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their shoes.’ (Said when I would complain about how hard it was to polish my leather Clarks shoes using a brush – ‘Why can’t I just use the scuff coat?’)
‘Life is a vale of tears.’ (Dad was definitely a glass-half-empty guy. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best, was his philosophy.)
‘The people who care don’t matter and the people who matter don’t care.’ (We’ve covered this one.)
‘Life itself is unfair.’ (Said whenever any of us complained that something was unfair.)
‘They should be put in a leaky boat and sent out to the middle of the North Atlantic.’ (Said about people Dad didn’t like on TV, including Noel Edmonds, Jan Leeming, Barbara Dickson, Bruce Forsyth, Petula Clark, Keith Chegwin, Esther Rantzen, Terry Wogan, Barbara Woodhouse (the Thatcher-style dog trainer) and Jimmy Savile.)
‘You little basket!’ (Said if I did something naughty when I was little.)
‘It’s all good copy.’ (Said whenever something bad happened.)
‘Almost certainly.’ (Said whenever I asked if he could help me with something.)