All the McGough boys had been good footballers, Frank had been on Everton’s books and if it hadn’t been for the war, Andy and Ted might have turned professional, so I must have been something of a disappointment to my dad, who had represented Liverpool as a schoolboy. He was pleased, though, when I made the school cricket team and in a poem called ‘The Railings’ I describe him standing outside the school sports field at Manor Road, Crosby, one Saturday afternoon watching me playing against Wallasey Grammar School. I remember seeing him there and wishing that he would come in and sit with the other fathers outside the pavilion. But he was too shy, and I suppose because he worked on the docks he felt like an outsider, and assumed that the other dads would be posh and snooty.
Third ball, a wicket, and three more followed.
When we came in at the end of the innings
the other dads applauded and joined us for tea.
Of course, you’d gone by then. Later
you said you’d found yourself there by accident.
Just passing. Spotted me through the railings.
The image of railings also serves to illustrate a feeling of separateness, how some men of his generation found it difficult to express themselves emotionally, and when writing the poem I visualised myself as a teenager in need of a fatherly hug. Like many poems it is honest but not necessarily true. Certainly he felt out of place in college halls and libraries where p’s and q’s had to be watched, but now I wonder if it was the teenage me that put up the railings and not him. I notice with my youngest son, Matt, sixteen at the time of writing, that when I try to give him a big hug he withers a little, embarrassed by this sudden burst of paternal bonding. My grown-up sons lift me off my feet every time we see each other, great bear-hugs. Perhaps it’s an adolescent boy thing.
I have never written poems, though, about my mother and this has puzzled me. Was writing about my father, who died before we’d had a chance really to know each other, a way of finding out more about him? Was I bringing into focus a figure who was important and loved, but nevertheless on the touchline, looking in? Perhaps the poems arose out of a sense of guilt, that I never quite became the son he had imagined. He was proud of the fact that I made it to university, for hadn’t he worked hard enough all his life to get me there? (Holidays had meant a day out somewhere, usually the beach at New Brighton or Southport, but we never stayed overnight. For him, a week off work meant the chance to give another bedroom a new coat of paint.) But I remained a puzzle to him and had he lived long enough to see me have a book published or appear on Top of the Pops he might have said to his mates, ‘Our Roger, a real chip off the old block.’ Well, perhaps not, but my subsequent career might have explained some of those traits and characteristics that irked and confused him:
The inability to hammer in a nail straight
The inability to mend a puncture
The nose stuck in a book when it’s a nice day outside
The head in the clouds
The four-eyes, the self-obsession, the nervous tic
The verge of tears, the dandification
The lack of interest in motor-cars, boxing
The lack, in fact, of manliness.
My mother, though, was at the centre of my little universe and in some ways, of course, still is. It is on a Sunday that it usually happens, I’m in my room, not working but procrastinating, when I want to ring her. A sudden urge to telephone and tell her something trivial, about the kids, perhaps, or about what Hilary and I are planning for Easter. Nothing important, just chat. But she is long gone, my mother, and the number I pretend to ring, WATerloo 6017, no longer exists. At university on a dull Sunday such as this, part out of duty, part homesickness I would go to the telephone box outside the Junior Common Room and build a leaning tower of pennies on top of the black metal box, before lifting the handset, warm and heavy still with conversation, and ring home. It was invariably she who answered, although occasionally it would be my sister, barely able to hide her disappointment that I wasn’t Robby or Bill or whoever, ringing to retrieve her weekend. My father felt uneasy about them (telephones, that is, not the boyfriends, although he was never too keen on them either). And when I wrote letters home from university, ‘Dear Mum and Dad’, I knew she would be reading them. The occasional letter from him, written in neat capitals, I treasured because I understood the effort that he’d put into it, but the majority, signed off with ‘Look after yourself, lots of love, mum and dad’, were from her. Hugo Williams has written that his poems are short pieces of writing that he posts in the hope that one day a reply will be waiting for him in a blue envelope, propped up on the mantelpiece. I suspect that because I communicated effortlessly with my mother during her lifetime there is nothing left unsaid. She lived long enough to see my first books published and to keep a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings about the Scaffold, and I hope that she has received all the poems written after her death (with the possible exception of the sequence ‘Holiday on Death Row’, which would have embarrassed her. For as she used to say: ‘There’s no need for that sort of language, Roger. It’s not clever.’).
The sixties began for me with incense, flowers and candles. In the parlour the heavy curtains are drawn, even though it is a hot Thursday morning in July, and the dancing flames are reflected in the brass fittings and on the polished oak. Outside, the queue of men waiting to pay their last respects runs halfway down the street. Silent and ill-at-ease in heavy three-piece suits and ties, they melt and wipe their brows with dazzling white handkerchiefs. Inside, like railings made out of wax, a row of candles is melting. Everything is melting: my mother, my sister. The smell of incense, wax and severed lilies is overpowering. I am melting into my father.
Requiescat in pace.