My mother and father had met when Mum was twenty-one and Dad was twenty-nine. Theirs was a pretty crazy love affair, involving endless breakups and reunions, until eventually they eloped to Barbados and got married.
Their relationship remained one full of love, although in many ways Mum was a product of her parents’ divorce. She had a deep-rooted fear of being left, and that often made her overprotective of Dad.
So for us to go out climbing or sailing involved Dad and me having to sneak out. (Which, of course, we both loved.) I guess it made every outing a mission. And we had masses of those missions in my early years.
But as I got older and could start to plan my own expeditions, however small they were, I felt sad that I didn’t get to do more with my dad, just us two alone. I just know how much he loved our adventures, but he did feel that his loyalty was split between Mum and me.
Dad had never really experienced much intimacy with his own parents growing up.
His father was a hardworking, dedicated, but pretty stern army officer who reached the rank of brigadier. Maybe his rank was gained at the expense of a cozy family life; I know for certain that Dad struggled with his father’s coldness.
As a kid, I was always a little scared of Grandpa Ted. (Almost entirely unfounded, as it happened. Yes, he was stern, but with hindsight, he was a kind, loyal man, loved by many.)
The scariest thing about Grandpa Ted was his big dogs.
On one occasion, when I was age six, one mauled me as I sat on the floor trying to play with it. The dog bit me straight down the center of my face, and my flesh split down my nose and lips.
I was raced to hospital for emergency suturing, where my mother decided the duty nurse was taking too long, so took the matter into her own hands and did the stitches herself.
She did a great job, by the way, and unless you look closely at my face you wouldn’t notice the scars—although my nose does actually look pretty wonky. In fact, the editor of Men’s Journal magazine, when I did the close-up for their cover, asked me laughingly if I had lost a lot of boxing matches when young. But the truth is that ever since the dog attack my nose has always been kind of squiffy.
If Grandpa Ted was very stern with my own father when he was growing up, then Dad’s mother was even sterner still. She had a fierce reputation not only as a great character, but also as someone who did not tolerate foolhardiness—and foolhardiness was my own father’s middle name. So Dad grew up with an equally fierce reaction to this serious, firm upbringing—and became a practical joker from day one.
I remember hearing endless stories, such as him pouring buckets of water over his elder sister and her new boyfriend as he peered down on them from his bedroom window above.
In many ways Dad never really grew up. It is what made him such a wonderful father, gentleman, and friend. And, in turn, I never had the ambition to grow up too fast, either.
I remember once, on a family skiing trip to the Alps, Dad’s practical joking got all of us into a particularly tight spot.
I must have been about age ten at the time, and was quietly excited when Dad spotted a gag that was begging to be played out on the very serious-looking Swiss-German family in the room next door to us.
Each morning their whole family would come downstairs, the mother dressed head to toe in furs, the father in a tight-fitting ski suit and white neck scarf, and their slightly overweight, rather snooty-looking thirteen-year-old son behind, often pulling faces at me.
The hotel had the customary practice of having a breakfast form that you could hang on your door handle the night before if you wanted to eat in your room. Dad thought it would be fun to fill out our form, order 35 boiled eggs, 65 German sausages, and 17 kippers, then hang it on the Swiss-German family’s door.
It was too good a gag to pass up.
We didn’t tell Mum, who would have gone mad, but instead filled out the form with great hilarity, and sneaked out last thing before bed and hung it on their door handle.
At 7:00 A.M. we heard the father angrily sending the order back. So we repeated the gag the next day.
And the next.
Each morning the father got more and more irate, until eventually Mum got wind of what we had been doing and made me go around to apologize. (I don’t know why I had to do the apologizing when the whole thing had been Dad’s idea, but I guess Mum thought I would be less likely to get in trouble, being so small.)
Anyway, I sensed it was a bad idea to go and own up, and sure enough it was.
From that moment onward, despite my apology, I was a marked man as far as their son was concerned.
It all came to a head when I was walking down the corridor on the last evening, after a day’s skiing, and I was just wearing my ski thermal leggings and a T-shirt. The spotty, overweight teenager came out of his room and saw me walking past him in what were effectively ladies’ tights.
He pointed at me, called me a sissy, started to laugh sarcastically, and put his hands on his hips in a very camp fashion. Despite the age and size gap between us, I leapt on him, knocked him to the ground, and hit him as hard as I could.
His father heard the commotion and raced out of his room to find his son with a bloody nose and crying hysterically (and over-dramatically).
That really was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and I was hauled to my parents’ room by the boy’s father and made to explain my behavior to Mum and Dad.
Dad was hiding a wry grin, but Mum was truly horrified, and I was grounded.
So ended another cracking family holiday!