FOREWORD

My father never wrote at a desk. He always sat on the sofa and used a felt tip pen to write in longhand on a clipboard surrounded by books, larded with ripped-up paper bookmarks. A desk would have been too formal, too reminiscent of his father the bank manager. He didn’t wear suits or ties either or go in for any of the coded trappings of probity, the Establishment or the past.

He was a man who was happy to be at home in his time. He liked contemporary things, contemporary people and ideas. I never once heard him hanker for yesterday, or ever wax nostalgic. He was a man of his age and worked in the medium that both marked and identified the age – television.

He wrote constantly: scripts, proposals, drafts, letters, chapters of books, the start of journals and for me, postcards. School breakfasts were an expectation of a card from dad. He travelled a lot filming and they’d arrive with pictures of strange cathedrals or exuberant statues and his familiar, timidly excited handwriting that seemed to be fighting its classical pre-war education to become something a little more extempore. The cards were always civilised. He had a passion for museum shops and church porch racks, and his cards were always full of information, facts and observations, wrapped up with pithy, often funny opinions. They were like scenes from a shooting script.

He never wasted time with the ‘Wish you were here, weather’s lovely . . . food’s foreign . . .’ stuff and a small but lasting part of my education came from these postcards. Not least the lesson that anything worth saying can be said both succinctly and elegantly, and that the prime purpose of writing to anyone, be it a letter, an article or a book, is not to show them how clever you are, but to leave them cleverer than they were.

When he finally finished making television programmes he settled down on the sofa with his annotated books and started to write. We’d all encouraged him to embark on a book. He has a charmingly faceto-face style, a turn of phrase that is only a voice away from listening to him; and some memoirs from the pioneering public-service age of broadcasting would have been interesting and a gift for posterity. He’d interviewed Marilyn Monroe, worked with Giacometti and plenty of other interesting people in between. We’d all lived in London during the Sixties.

So it was a surprise when he started writing the story of his childhood. It seemed very previous. When I was a child he told us stories, but they were invariably about his dog, Patch. I had only the haziest idea of his early life or our antecedants beyond my grandparents. I’d never imagined that he really thought it that important. He always seemed to have that self-contained confidence that is the consolation of the only child.

What we didn’t know was that he was, already, incubating the first losses of Alzheimer’s. I write about him in the past tense, though he’s not dead, and I don’t mean to imply that he’s any less alive, or any less my dad, but dementia and the rubbing-out of words, connections and memories are a great and widening moat that separates the him on this side from the man that was on the other.

When I read this book for the first time, he’d already crossed over, and pulled up the drawbridge. It was a huge shock. I’d never heard any of it before. This life that was so vivid, so beautifully remembered and reconstructed. I would never be able to talk to him about it, ask him about this marvellous cast of characters. But as I read it I understood that that was exactly the reason and the rightness for going back. My father was as much a self-made, self-thought-up man as anyone you’ll meet.

The choices we make and the courses we plot are cause and effect of where we started and who we started with. The man my father became and whom I knew wasn’t so much a reaction against the world he was brought up in, but someone who felt that he and his generation had an obligation to change and improve it. I realised there is far less distance between my childhood and my children’s than between mine and my father’s.

There was another pressing reason to write this down. The Alzheimer’s meant that it would all be lost and broken into shards of non-sequitur and nonsense. This book is Daddy committing his memories to the lifeboats, this is what got out, this is what survived and made it safely into print. Women and childhood first.

A.A Gill
London 2005