Father’s Day

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 24 JUNE 2001

LAST SUNDAY WAS Father’s Day, and I forgot all about it until The Story of Fathers and Sons (SABC3, Sunday, 5pm) reminded me.

It was a documentary celebrating what some goof wearing a back-to-front baseball cap was pleased to call “the mystical, spiritual bond between father and son”. I have always wondered why people mistrust the emotional and the material so much that they feel obliged to reach into the ether to account for the strength of their feelings.

No matter. Much of what was most moving on the show was conveyed without words: the scene in which Dad hugs his son who has just struck out in Little League; Dad kneeling to hug the son who cannot walk; Dad and son standing together in the fine awkwardness of a pair who love each other, but aren’t sure what to say to one another. As is usually the case, when words were used they tended to flatten the experience.

“Love is painful,” said one dad, “because it hurts when the one you love is taken away.” Well, yes.

“I think it’s hard to plant a tree,” said some bearded hippie dad, “and then watch it, uh, walk away from you.”

I could forgive the show much. It is a subject that is especially close to me. I have wanted a son for precisely 22 years now, which is also the length of time that I have wanted a father.

When I was a small boy the wallpaper in my room was decorated, somewhat mysteriously, with recurring patterns of cowboys, locomotives and trout. The cowboys wore chaps and six-shooters, the locomotives billowed soot, the trout leapt high, eyes wide, fishing line trailing from their mouths towards an unseen rod. In order to calm myself after a particularly alarming episode of Squad Cars on the radio or Bonanza on television (the Ponderosa ranch had cowboys and locomotives aplenty, but I was always troubled by the conspicuous absence of trout), I would lie awake in the half-light, counting the figures on the wallpaper. On bad nights I would count a full wall-and-a-half before falling asleep.

One night, after the episode of Bonanza in which Little Joe fell into a fever and was captured by the Apaches, my father came in and sat on the edge of my bed and began talking. He spoke for a long time. His black silhouette blocked my view of the wallpaper.

Then he stood and said: “You may not understand all this now, but one day when you’re grown up you’ll remember these words.” I remember that clearly. What I don’t remember is anything he said before that.

Almost certainly it was some useful life lesson that would have spared me immense inconvenience and discomfort – how to avoid an over-friendly scoutmaster on a scout camp, perhaps, or the truth that only tennis players and newborn infants can wear white socks in public without social disgrace. Perhaps it was his recipe for making the perfect brandy-and-ginger ale, a drink for which he had an unreasonable enthusiasm.

In certain long dark nights of the soul I have come to the conclusion that if I could only remember those words, all the secrets of adulthood would be revealed to me. I have sat staring at the Greater Oxford Dictionary, bitterly musing on the fact that all his words are in there – I just have to arrange them in the correct order.

Some weeks after that particular episode of Bonanza, my father had a stroke, was hospitalised and died. His words, unless one day I suddenly grow up and remember them, are lost forever. Which is not to say that he didn’t leave me illuminating tips to light my way through this long valley.

“Never mix your drinks, when you can get the barman to mix them for you,” was an enduring favourite, sometime after the fourth little tin of ginger ale had been emptied.

On the subject of marriage, his advice was simple: “If you want a happy relationship,” he said, “never, never, never do the washing up.” At that time he was on his third marriage, so he must have known what he was talking about.

I don’t know that his absence in my childhood affected me that much. It simply meant that my mother had to watch a lot more games of schoolboy rugby than she might otherwise have preferred, and that there was no one in the house big and strong enough to prevent me playing music as loud as I liked.

My mother being a good, sweet person with a strength of will incapable of matching my sulks and tantrums, it also meant that I had my own way through adolescence and consequently had nothing against which to rebel. An absence of discipline meant I had to invent my own – a masterstroke of parenting by implication.

People learn many useful things from their fathers. To this day I don’t know how to change the oil in my car or repair a leaking water pipe. I had to teach myself to drop-kick a rugby ball and how to bowl an in-swinger, which is why every so often I still unintentionally produce the mystery delivery that neither swings not goes in.

Instead I contented myself with the stories and memories he shared of his own life as a bouncer and a romancer and a conman and a child of the Great Depression. You learn wisdom not from being told wise things, but from proximity to wisdom. And wisdom is simply another word for living well. I don’t know what my father told me that night, which means I can never decide it was mistaken.

His more useful gift to me is the idea, however false, that there is a truth, and that if I live well enough I may one day find it. Perhaps one day I will even learn how to make the perfect brandy-and-ginger ale.