Memories of my father...

Today is the 38th anniversary of the death of my father. I hadn't realised. I looked the date up because of something someone said, and there it was. As it happened, I've not been feeling too good today, and I can't help wondering if at some unconscious level I knew the significance of the date. It brings into focus a lot of sadness and things that I miss.

Actually my Dad is hardly one of them. I didn't know him all that well, despite living in the same house for 23 years. I didn't know that his order of priorities was not the same as other fathers I knew. There are two headings under which these things I miss gather - the things I didn't have from my emotionally absent parent, and the things I didn't give the children I never had.

Going back to my childhood, maybe 5 or 6, I remember him going out to football on Saturday afternoons. I used to listen to the results on the radio, and when he came in greet him with how many goals Tottenham Hotspur had scored. I didn't understand that he'd been at the match and knew the score. Nor did I realise till much later that other fathers took their sons with them when they went to the game. Nor did it occur to me at the time that other fathers played football with their sons in the park, and stuff like that.

For my father the priority was his Trade Union, the National Union of Printers, Bookbinders and Paper Workers. Some way behind came his wife, and behind further still, his kids. I can only think of one thing he positively did for me. I was a skinny kid, prone to being bullied. He'd been a professional boxer when the came out of the army after the First World War (he was born in 1896). And he taught me some stuff that enabled me to compete successfully in the school and Air Training Corps championships, and boys who that do that don't get bullied.

I was bright, academically, and could have done well at school, much better than I actually did. But my father gave me no guidance and took no interest. Nothing was expected of me except that I might get an office or shop job when I left school at 16. There was no encouragement with my homework, no reaction to my school reports. When I was at Grammar School he came once to a Speech Day and was totally bored by it.

It was many years later that I discovered he had an earlier family and three other children that he had drifted away from when he lost interest in them in favour of his Trade Union. He last saw them in 1936 and took no interest in their later lives. When I left home there were no phone calls, no letters, nothing.

Looking back, my mother's loyalty to him and care for him in his declining years were nothing short of admirable. His fidelity had been severely in question and even after he retired I don't think she was ever the top priority in his life. At the end of a long and painful illness he died in hospital without my ever feeling the need to visit him, which now I regret. I remember phoning the hospital from work that morning to ask how he was, only to be told he had died. I remember going to my mother's home, and sitting in silence with her and my sisters overwhelmed by her feeling of desolation. And I remember being in the Funeral Director's car behind the hearse on the way to his funeral. Of his funeral itself I have no memory whatever.

So where my father should have been in my life, there is a big empty space.

The reasons I never had children are complex, and seemed good at the time. Now I regret their absence, I regret not being able to be proud of them, or to have played with them and taken part in their education and development. I hope I would have done those things, but the reality must be that I would not have done it very well, having no model to learn from. But maybe I'd have done a better job than he did. And maybe I'd have those children as adults in my life now, able to do things together, share each other's interests and perhaps take my grandkids to Lords or The Oval, or the zoo, or the sea side.

That would be nice. I regret not having the opportunity.