My father – Arthur Thomas Gilbert Johnstone – had, like my mother, died in March, but that was back in 1976. His age at the time – only sixty-eight – seems very young to me now. After a minor ‘warning’, as they were often described then, and a second more major heart attack from which he was still convalescing, he succumbed to a third while resting in the dining room of the family home. He had just carried my mother’s vacuum cleaner – a heavy, ancient model – upstairs for her, trying to spare her the effort. We think he must have felt ill again and, not wanting to worry Bea, had sat down to catch his breath. He died alone in his favourite chair.
My wife and I had no telephone in the spartan farm cottage we lived in at the time. By chance, that very evening I had gone down to the call box at the edge of the village to ring my brother. I was given the news then.
Walking back up the farm track to our cottage, my mind was full of competing memories and regrets. I was just a few hundred yards from the front door where I had waved my father off after a family visit only a couple of months before, not knowing then that the next time I would see him would be in an intensive care ward – and that this would be the last time I would see him alive.
The previous Christmas, my parents, with a couple of aunts in tow, had come up to Fife for a day out. After lunch, Gilbert and I repaired to the kitchen to do the washing up while my wife played the lady of the house and chatted with the other visitors. Maybe it was the domesticity of the moment; maybe it was because we were the only males in the company that day; but in our bit of craic over the soapsuds and dishtowel, I felt we had crossed a line. A line that was largely of my own creation, but one that I was at last beginning to see as both unnecessary and artificial. The line between our parental and our adult relationships was beginning to give.
‘This is the start of something new,’ I’d thought to myself. It was. But I could never have imagined the form it would take.
* * *
In the autumn of that year, around six months after my father’s death, both of us brothers, together with our wives, were summoned to the family home. My mother had something important she wanted to talk to us about. She had been dropping hints – some more veiled than others – that there was some vital family business we had to discuss. This had been going on almost from the day my father had died.
Of course, my brother and I had put our heads together, puzzling over Bea’s behaviour. We had never been a family for holding such meetings and this summons was unprecedented. As the hints firmed up into a specific date when we were all to gather, our speculation had similarly firmed up.
‘What the hell could this be about?’ we asked each other. ‘Do you think it could be something good or some more bad news?’
‘Should we expect it to affect us – or is it just going to be something about Mum?’ my brother wondered.
‘God knows!’ was my only response.
Try as we might, we failed to come up with any suggestion of what could be behind this summons.
As a family we had never been prone to soul bearing discussions or any sort of group conferring. Putting things out of our minds was always our way of it. As with many other families of the period, we were distinctly ‘hodden doon’. In this, my parents’ behaviour was typical of their generation. There was always a certain emotional aloofness, an unwillingness to dig any deeper than the surface in our interactions. Like the family Richard Gwyn writes about in his memoir The Vagabond’s Breakfast we ‘endured a collective adherence to a code of non-disclosure.’ This sense of propriety was both a throwback to an earlier part of the century and, I believe, a consequence of shared endurance in wartime. It seemed we all had to subscribe to an unwritten agreement to keep hidden anything that might provoke or disturb. Show us a carpet and we would sweep our worries under it.
But our worries began to surface when Bea launched into what felt almost like a prepared speech. Saying how difficult the whole thing was for her, she went on to explain that she had promised Gilbert she would do this. Whatever ‘this’ was.
‘That doesn’t make it any easier to do,’ she said, addressing my brother and me, ‘but there’s something you both need to know.’ Agog, we perched on the edge of our Parker Knolls.
Perhaps it would’ve been clearer if Bea had started with the more easy to grasp aspects of her revelation, easing us into the surprising, unforeseen and downright astonishing information about our father’s life that was about to follow. But no, instead she opted to open with the bombshell.
‘I have to tell you that you have a half-sister,’ she informed us. ‘She’s your father’s daughter, living in London. And I want you boys to get in touch with her right away.’ The information failed to sink in at first, but Bea continued.
‘What we never mentioned to you before,’ she went on, almost casually, ‘is that your dad was married before he and I met. He was divorced just after the War. Your half-sister – Catherine Mary Johnstone – is the daughter of that marriage.’
Eager to get her task over, our mother went on to fill us in on the background to this first marriage – about which we also knew nothing – and the birth of our half-sister, Gilbert’s daughter, whose existence we had never so much as suspected.
And then came the remark Bea was most emphatic about, ‘You owe it to your dad to meet her. You must meet her – for his sake.’
And thus, in a heartbeat, our father’s family had increased by one. Our ‘four of a family’ – one of Dad’s stock phrases – had evaporated like early morning mist. My mother had changed status – she was now a second wife. And so had I – I was no longer my father’s first-born. My brother was now his third child. Another sibling had been parachuted into our lives. Gilbert had three children. Not the two we had always accepted, always believed in.
Like some strange generational game of musical chairs, the funeral march had barely ceased and we had all risen from our seats to move round the family circle and sit down again, but in a different place from the one we’d been in before. The shape of the ring had altered, elongated. An unknown and unguessed at figure was seated on the margin, long abandoned and ignored. And in amongst the familiar chairs we all knew, there was another – strange and unfamiliar – placed almost at the centre of the group. Its occupant was holding out a hand to us. An eager hand, we were told. But were we ready to grasp it?
I have little recollection of the details of that gathering. Just of feeling stunned – even a bit annoyed. Dad’s early death had been a hard blow to us all and here was our nuclear family turned on its head. Here was a secret he had kept from us for no reason apparent at the time. And it was all too late to ask for any explanation. The man it most concerned was gone. And to me it almost felt as if my trust in him had gone too.
* * *
Much has been written, filmed and broadcast about the expected joy of finding so-called ‘long-lost’ family members. My own initial feeling at this sudden revelation was largely one of resentment. While today I get on well with my father’s daughter, whom I very much regard as my sister, it has been a troubled relationship for all sorts of reasons. But none of these, I must be clear, were connected with Catherine herself. And none to the subsequent discovery of a second half-sister.
Despite the numerous ups and downs of adolescence in the ’60s, and of three strong-minded and argumentative males in the one family, there had never been any breakdown in our relationships. Despite our father’s job, which could take him away on business for the best part of a week at a time, effectively rendering my mother a single parent on a regular basis, we had always been a tight-knit family. The paucity of relatives close by and the lack of close family friends had made us so. And now, at one fell swoop, that unity was disrupted, challenged, denied. And denied at the most sensitive of times – right after the death of a parent.
There had been no discernible hint of any sort that such a disclosure might be made one day, that such a secret even existed. Not that anything can prepare you to receive such a piece of news. Far from being delighted to discover that I had a half-sister, I was stunned. We all were. Shocked, even. But emphatically not – as the popular media would have one assume – dying to rush off and meet her. We needed time to take it all in. Time to adjust.
It was at this point that the moral blackmail kicked in. Our mother was insistent that we had to meet Catherine, that we must do it ‘for Dad’s sake’. It had been his dying wish that all of his children get together.
‘All of his children!’ my brother and I thought. ‘And we’d always believed it was just the two of us!’
Despite this, however, we did agree to meet Catherine. If only once. We would see how it went.
‘But,’ we told Bea, ‘we need time to come to terms with this.’ Above all, we realised, she mustn’t rush us.
And so the back story came out. My father – despite his total silence on the matter – had indeed been married before. Long before. Before he moved to Scotland. Before the War even.
‘He never got on well with his first wife,’ my mother said, ‘and she deserted him. Ran off with someone else while he was serving his country in the Air Force. Can you believe it?’ Her tone suggesting that this was something she would never have done.
* * *
It sometimes feels as if I never knew my father. This revelation only served to heighten that nagging sensation. Obviously I knew him when I was a child and a youth, though his work related absences made him less of a presence than my mother. But the crucial point is that I never knew him man to man in that maturing of the father–son relationship I envy in many of my friends. Throughout our life together, he was always ‘my father’, I was always ‘his son’. Despite instances when he was very much supportive of me, going many an extra mile on my behalf, we never got beyond the parent–child demographic. His often authoritarian manner and his insistence on being obeyed without question made it almost impossible to discuss anything with him. Indeed, he would characterise any attempts at discussion, however reasoned, as dissent, batting them down with his stock response of, ‘I’ll not have any arguments.’
My father and I were much further apart in ages than many of my peers were with either of their parents, and Gilbert’s work meant he was away from home on a regular, if infrequent, basis. But I have little doubt that this lack of adult interaction was more down to me than to him. I was all of twenty-five when my father died, and I had been married for almost four years. But it is easy in retrospect to see just how immature I was. The beginning for me of more adult attitudes only began with Gilbert’s death. What saddens me most about this is that I feel we were on the verge of a more equal relationship when he suffered the heart attack that killed him.
A short time before that, when I had just started my first teaching job, Gilbert had taken me out for a pint to celebrate. In his own way he was trying to kick-start grown-up interaction. But that gesture was his sole attempt at moving us to adult getting-on. All I remember is the sensation of being uncomfortable with the whole situation. Only just grown out of the hippie identity of my student days, I was still thirled to the ‘hip versus straight’ view of lifestyle. And I was very much a self-appointed member of the former category. Inclined to see myself as some sort of challenger of societal norms, I had even carried this attitude over into my nascent career. After all, my main driving force during teacher training had been the recently published Teaching as a Subversive Activity, and I had looked more to A S Neill and R D Laing than to my course tutors for guidance.
We had gone, on my father’s suggestion, to a local suburban lounge bar on the edge of the Braid Hills, rather than to any of the more ‘alternative’ hostelries in the back streets of the city centre which I favoured. It was a doubly unfamiliar set-up. We had never done this in the past. And Gilbert had never been a pub type anyway.
‘What am I doing in a ‘straight’ pub with an old man in his sixties?’ I wondered, sipping uneasily at my tankard of gassy Export.
Perhaps if there hadn’t been such a difference in our ages this feeling would never have arisen; or perhaps if the War hadn’t separated our experiences so much we would have found more in common, and found it more readily. But who can say?
We had got on well with each other most of the time when I was a boy. During the school holidays, I would often ‘chum’ my father on his business rounds. A commercial traveller all his life, he had worked for various pharmaceutical companies since settling in Edinburgh before I was born. By the time I was old enough to accompany him, he had built up an impressive range of contacts and his rounds would take us to numerous parts of Edinburgh that I had never visited on family occasions.
The Royal Infirmary, the ‘Sick Kids’ – as the children’s hospital is still known – the Western General or the Princess Margaret Rose Hospital were all regular calls, as were the numerous pharmacists, druggists, manufacturing chemists and capsule makers dotted around the city. But however intriguing the area or impressive the building, however fascinating the comings and goings of the building’s personnel, I would rapidly get bored and be eager to move on to the next stop. As soon as Dad reappeared, shaking hands with a customer and striding across the car park – sample case in one hand, briefcase in the other – I would wonder what fascinating establishment we were headed for next.
Getting older, these trips had taken on a different complexion. I became my father’s driver. Always eager to learn, I had begun pestering him for driving lessons before I even reached the legal age of seventeen. But as soon as I did, Gilbert took on the task of my tuition.
The first lesson was a disaster narrowly averted. But averted only by my father’s steady nerves and quick reactions. Having selected a quiet, wide and empty side street in an area not too close to home, Gilbert moved me over to the driver’s seat and ran me through the rudiments of the controls. Being an opinionated and cock-sure teenager, of course I thought I already knew these backwards. I was nonetheless made to practice clutch control, gear changing, checking the rear-view mirror, indicating and easing off the handbrake all in a methodical manner – and, more importantly, all stationary.
Then came the moment for the first move. Gilbert ran me through it, going over the points above, expecting me to edge the car forward, perhaps hesitantly, perhaps haltingly. Instead – forgetting in an instant all he had talked me through – I jerked my foot off the clutch, and the car shot forward, slewed across to the other side of the street, narrowly missing a pedestrian on the pavement, and came to a halt just short of a lamppost as my father pulled furiously on the handbrake and the engine stalled. I don’t recall whether I was given a dressing down on the spot or whether this was kept until we got home, but Gilbert must have been determined to teach me as he continued with the lessons until I was proficient enough to give him a few days off behind the wheel and drive him to his more distant business calls.
I got my first car a couple of years after passing my test. Bought for £50, it was a beat-up old mini-van with the registration number 127 JOG – which doubled as a group chant my friends would use when they had to bump start the jalopy for me, an all too frequent occurrence. Gilbert was very helpful to me in buying this vehicle – and its replacement. I had ignored his advice and, within weeks of acquiring the van, had driven down south to the rather ponderously named Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music. Held in a Somerset valley near Shepton Mallet, the approach roads featured steep inclines and long halts in the sun while the traffic inched towards the site. Those, and the combined payload of three friends and a girlfriend, meant that almost inevitably the radiator overheated and blew. My friends and I parked the mini-van on a verge and footed it the remaining mile or so to the festival. A weekend of musical and other highs ensued. But, the show over, I got the blues for real when I discovered the car had been stolen while I was grooving to the progressive sounds on stage. My girlfriend and I had to return ignominiously by train, me fuming to myself that my father had been proved right.
Gilbert also helped me find a back street garage for cheap repairs to the successor mini-van. Although he must have sighed inwardly at my many juvenile prangs, he seemed not at all abashed when the van’s stoved-in bonnet was replaced with a glaringly bright red fibreglass replica. Nor was he put out when I later bought a retired Morris postie van, its number plate mounted on the roof of the cab. Not so my mother. She insisted I parked round the corner from the family home in case the neighbours disapproved – or worse, thought the position of the number plate marked the van out as a commercial vehicle.
It was down to me to reciprocate my father’s kindnesses with consideration. But I confess I didn’t. Dad was there to help me, was the attitude I took – every bit as juvenile as those prangs. I even once dumped a clapped-out Dormobile on him and left him to arrange for it to be repaired and auctioned. This on the dubious grounds that he was the one who had checked it over for me before I bought it and so must, a priori, be responsible for it now it had failed. The fact that I was about to start work as a teacher was my justification for not having time to see to this – and Dad was retired, I pointed out. Having reached my quarter century, and being about to start my first professional job, did not seem to have added to my maturity.
There was little sign of my father and me nudging towards a more adult relationship. The vast difference in our experiences of life must have contributed to this. I doubt whether the generation gap has ever been wider than between those generations on either side of the Second World War.
While I hesitate to use such a term, there is one that I feel is at least relevant to this dichotomy. ‘Survivor’s guilt’ is a commonly recognised phenomenon associated with the outcome of a disaster, the aftermath of a conflict or, in its worst-case scenario, with surviving massacre or genocide. It appears it is well-nigh impossible, having come unscathed out of some terrible experience, ever to escape the sensation that the survivor does not deserve still to be living. That such a one has no right to survive when others – and others often perceived as betters – have not made it through. What I would liken to this, though plainly not of the same order, is that sense of guilt at having been born into a generation lucky enough never to have had the challenges to which the previous two generations were subject. Never were those of my generation – at least in the UK – called up to war. Never were they subject to the relentless losses of war. Never were they forced to confront their own fears and inadequacies the way my parents’ and grandparents’ generations were. We missed it – through luck, or better judgement, or just simple chance. This was something about which it was easy to be smug, even superior, in my hippie youth. We were all going to create this new world where these conflicts of past times would not arise. That was the old way. We were the new.
I have long abandoned such naïve notions. But, as I grow older, I am almost surprised to find myself subject to an increasing sense of discomfiture – something at least akin to survivor’s guilt – about my generation’s avoidance of the War. I have grown into an increased understanding of its cost, both personal and communal. I am better able to appreciate the terror and fear to which my parents’ generation were subject. Not in a ‘shock, horror’ way or even a ‘pity for lost youth’ manner, but through the growth of a deeper and stronger sense of empathy which I can say was absent or, at best, dormant in my younger years. I will never be able fully to appreciate what previous generations went through and yet I now find myself more able to grasp the actuality of it and to empathise with their wartime experiences.
This is something that has crept up on me unexpectedly. The writing of this memoir has added to it. As has the reading and research, the exploration of family photographs and the examination of documents that preceded it. But it is more than that. It is a sensation tied up with the regret I feel at not knowing my father better – at not working at knowing him. The regret that the secrets he – and my mother – kept from me, prevented me from knowing him as I would like to have done. The regret – common to many, I am sure – that I was not then who I am now.
Someone else who has identified this phenomenon is Richard Gwyn. In talking about the War as the ‘essential divide’, he sees it as a specific marker of the 1950s, a kind of blemish on a generation, one which is extended by the increased father/son age gap consequent on time spent in the forces. Like Gwyn, I experienced this same wide age gap. My father was all of forty-three when I was born, putting him in his sixties during my fractious late teenage phase. Although the War would have been a barrier between us come what may, had we been separated by fewer years it is conceivable that we’d have felt less alien to each other, less antipathetic to each other’s lifestyles.
Twenty-five – my age at my father’s death – is young, very young, and an age at which one has far too many notions about oneself. Gilbert was always an affable and garrulous man – a ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ sort of chap, as he’d have been described then – who got on well with everyone. Despite not finding it in himself to be tolerant of my youthful notions and conceits, he would almost certainly have got on with me, given time. No, I was the one who struggled to see this side of him, only to get an all too brief hint of it before it was taken away.
* * *
My father, we discovered later, had married his first wife in 1939. The couple had moved to a remote village in the west of the Lake District not long before the start of the War. Their daughter had been born there in 1940. The family had stayed on in their village home after hostilities broke out, but eventually Gilbert had left to join the RAF. In his absence, his first wife had taken over his job of selling veterinary supplies to farmers. This meant she had a car and a petrol allowance – a rare and fortunate privilege in wartime. But it was one that may well have led to the encounter which precipitated the break-up. However it happened, their relationship proved just one of so many ill-founded marriages that did not survive the separations and temptations of wartime.
Gilbert’s young wife was stuck in an out-of-the-way village, missing the social life she had enjoyed before her marriage. On a visit to relatives in Manchester she had met an American officer and, like so many other wives left at home, must have seen him as providing an opportunity for some relief to her boredom, of bringing some fun back into her secluded life. We will never know exactly what happened, but the background is there in numerous accounts by those in similar circumstances.
None other than Barbara Cartland has described these situations. Soon to become famous as a romantic novelist, she served as a wartime marriage guidance counsellor. Things would have started harmlessly, she suggests, with women looking for ‘a little change from the monotony’ of daily life and missing a man ‘to appreciate them.’ My father’s first wife was a former research chemist from Manchester, so being isolated in a remote Lake District village must have made her feel even more cut-off and solitary. As Cartland goes on to say of women in these circumstances, ‘she is lonely, he smiles at her, she smiles back and it’s an introduction.’ It would just have been ‘rotten luck’ that she was already married. They meant no harm – but, before long, things would have changed, developed. And that’s how it must have happened with Gilbert’s first wife. From these beginnings, she had gone on, almost inevitably, to fall in love with this man.
By the time the War was nearing an end, she had come to the conclusion that her marriage had been a mistake. Still serving in the forces, but by this time back in England, my father had received a lawyer’s letter out of the blue. His wife wanted a divorce. He was devastated. Quickly arranging for compassionate leave, he had made a hurried visit to try to persuade her to change her mind. But she was adamant. Their marriage was at an end.
Having fallen for her American serviceman, Gilbert’s now estranged wife planned to follow this man across the Atlantic when the War ended. It was only later that she discovered he had lied to her – he was already married. Her hopes were shattered. But she was still emphatic that her marriage was over. The romance had shown her a way out of her isolated life, reminded her of what she had given up in leaving the city. There was to be no turning back. She wanted to make a fresh start.
She had a brother in Canada. Using a recent small legacy, she decided to start a new life there. Taking her daughter with her, they moved first to Ottawa, but after spending some time in Canada, the two of them settled in Texas. At some point my father and his first wife had got divorced – or, as they said in the idiom of the time, Gilbert had ‘given her a divorce.’
* * *
But my half-sister Catherine had grown up curious about her father and harbouring happy memories of him from her infancy. She had visited Britain several times on holiday and had eventually come back to the country for a job in London. This was in the late ’60s, almost a decade before Gilbert’s demise.
At this point in the story our mother came out with another revelation, one that seemed even more incomprehensible than the original surprise announcement. Catherine had – Bea went on to say – been in touch with our father for nigh on ten years, almost since her arrival on these shores. A further bombshell. A further secret kept from us.
‘Why on earth,’ I demanded of Bea, ‘didn’t Dad tell us about this himself? Or at least, why didn’t he tell us when we got a bit older? He could’ve expected us to have had a bit more understanding by then.’
‘For God’s sake! We’re both in our twenties now,’ my brother pointed out. ‘We could… we should have been told!’
Never mind how resentful we were feeling, both of us felt we would have been much less so had we been taken into our parents’ confidence, if not from the start, at least once Gilbert’s renewed relationship with his daughter had settled down and become permanent.
But there was so much more to this than was apparent from the bare facts. It was – our mother confessed – on her strict insistence that our father had never revealed to us either his first marriage or his daughter’s existence.
‘You see,’ Bea said, ‘when we got engaged, almost no-one knew that I was marrying a divorced man. I only told your grandma, my sister and my best friend – your Auntie Joan – that Gilbert had been married before.’
It seemed that, to her, the shame of our father being seen as a ‘second-hand man’ – a term she claimed was current at the time – had been something she could never bring herself to face. One of my mother’s many received opinions, here being cited as justification. It was not so much a lie that had been told at the time, as an omission of the facts. Yes, our old friend of recent coinage – being ‘economical with the truth.’
Of course, the original decision on this secrecy may not have been my mother’s. It is plausible that it might have been foisted on her by her family. Even if she did acquiesce herself, the concealment might have been instigated by my grandmother, or even by Bea’s siblings, perhaps even referring back to their ever-upright father’s stance of abhorrence at divorce in doing so. An element of moral blackmail is even conceivable, an insistence that a dead father’s opinions be honoured – and my grandfather had only died a few years before my parents became engaged. There would have been no reason to acknowledge my father’s divorced status for their wedding to take place in church as they planned. The Church of Scotland has no restrictions on divorcees remarrying.
It is true that divorce was much rarer in ’50s Britain and was viewed as something, if not to be ashamed of, at least as something to keep quiet about. The period was characterised by an almost feverish desire to ‘get back to normal’, one which included a rejection of ‘wartime morality’. Establishment figures from Parliament to the judiciary were vocal in this campaign, none more so than Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, who insisted that every single divorce made for ‘an area of poison and a centre of infection’ in the life of the nation. Despite his having no authority in the Church of Scotland, he was a respected voice of the establishment nonetheless. In such an atmosphere, it is at least easy to understand the power of the stigma and to sense the origin of the secret, even if not to understand its maintenance over the years.
But it seemed to me at the time – in my self-professed ‘liberated’ mind-set – that it was this accumulation of secrets that made the situation even more objectionable. That the insistence on the part of my mother on secrecy being maintained ad infinitum was going too far. She further revealed that Gilbert had pleaded with her to agree to his bringing all three of his offspring together. That she had flatly refused to countenance this, from fear of the concealment of his divorce getting out, I found too just much to bear.
‘How could she have done this to Dad?’ I asked myself. ‘How could she have thwarted his dearest wishes, and all to save face?’
‘The deception might just have been understandable in the early ’50s,’ I told Bea later, ‘but it doesn’t bear consideration in this day and age.’
* * *
In the short period between my father’s leaving hospital to convalesce from his major heart attack and his death a week or so later, I had phoned home numerous times to see how he was doing. I also attempted to fix up a day when I could get down from Fife to visit him. Each time I phoned, my mother always told me that, despite what he might say himself, he was still very weak and was not yet up to seeing visitors.
‘Just give it another few days,’ she had said, ‘Maybe after the weekend Dad’ll be up to a visit.’
And, of course, we all thought we had plenty of time.
But I cannot get rid of the nagging doubt that perhaps – just perhaps – my mother had another motive in keeping me from visiting then.
Was she selflessly protecting Gilbert from the stress of having to tell us about his daughter, to reveal what they had both so long concealed? He may well have planned to do that, since he’d have had me there together with my brother, who was still living in the family home at the time. He may even have told my mother that he was going to do so and she may have been trying to postpone this until he was stronger. Or was it perhaps stress to herself that Bea was worried about? Was she frightened that, should Gilbert speak up about his past, the secrets she had insisted were kept from us would come out? Was she scared that this would rapidly put them beyond her control? That they would show her up in a poor light, sow the seeds of resentment at such a worrying time? Or, to take a more charitable view, did she just need time to think through how she would respond?
A combination of both, I think.
In the end I put off – or was put off, I can’t say which – for too long. Gilbert died before I got down to see him back home one last time.
Arriving at the house some hours after his death, I found my father wrapped in a sheet and laid out on the lounge carpet where he had been placed by a kindly neighbour, a friend from my parents’ church. Turning back a corner of the sheet, I bent to kiss his forehead. It was as cold as the atmosphere in the unheated room, never used except on special occasions. It is an image I can never forget, and one that was startlingly brought back to me through a visual misapprehension in our own home many years later.
Trace
It was a recognition of shape. The long body bag
of our duvet rolled loosely on the floor and lying to me,
as your chrysalis of sheet had done in a different room,
late in the day you ceased being my father.
Deceitful, it caught my breath and threw it back
two deaths ago, to eyes that would not cry, as fingers
shaking, folded back the neat hemmed edge of cotton
to your chin, unshaven, your face, sunk cheeked and empty
as I felt looking at the husk of you, the mirror misted over
and obscure. But now I want to find you there again, unroll
this quilt, spool back to what we should have shared
with time and patience, pick the stitching out.
My father, you were rolled into that sheet before
my hand had eased its grip. I cannot feel
your fingers in my palm but only absence, the impress
of a word in pencil someone accidentally erased.
I had visited my father many times while he was in hospital following his second heart attack. I had said all those loving things that my upbringing and the mores of the time impeded my saying, except in extremis. So, while I have many regrets about my relationship with my father, I have no regrets that I didn’t bid farewell to him in the way I’d have liked to, in the way he deserved.