A Lie About My Father (11 page)

That was the year we got television. Till then, we hadn’t been able to afford it, and my mother had been against it anyhow, preferring the radio that played all the time in her warm kitchen, making an island refuge of the place while she cooked and boiled laundry on the stove, filling the room with steam and the smell of hot starch. She liked to listen to
Sing Something Simple
on a Sunday night, and there were children’s programmes on a Saturday morning, when the same songs were played every week at almost exactly the same times. ‘Tubby the Tuba’. ‘Thumbelina’. ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’. It was more than a preference, this fondness for radio, it was a ritual, a way of connecting back to her mother’s house. I remember my grandmother’s radio, a large, genial-looking thing that sat high on a dresser in the kitchen-cum-parlour where my grandparents lived at the end of their lives, warmed by the fire, making tea and toast on the range, listening to the wireless. My mother’s wireless was tuned to that world, and to the time before she was married. When television arrived, everything changed. She still listened to
Sing Something Simple
in the kitchen, but the main draw was
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
in the living room. On good weeks, my father would give us money to go out to Katie’s van and buy ice creams, while Norman Vaughan guided members from the audience through the latest in a line of bizarre games, or Perry Como slumbered through another performance of ‘Magic Moments’. My mother resisted for a while; then, all of a sudden and with no warning, she converted with a vengeance. She had imposed all kinds of viewing restrictions on us: one hour of television a night, no frivolous programmes (I remember she approved of
Criss Cross Quiz
, for example, but was against
Crackerjack
pretty much on principle), BBC rather than ITV, unless there was a very good reason to switch over. On weekdays, the television came on at eight o’clock, and went off again at ten, no matter what was on. My father didn’t care: all he wanted was the horse racing and the football results on a Saturday. On public holidays, exceptions were made. I remember how strange it felt, the first Christmas we had the box, standing at the foot of our Christmas tree, handing the ornaments and strings of tinsel up to my mother, then turning round and seeing a character in the film that was showing at that moment – June Allyson, say, or Judy Garland – doing exactly the same thing. Outside, it was snowing, and in the film it was snowing too, and because the filmed snow was perfect, bright and clean and perpetual as a mother’s love, our snow was also perfect, and our Christmases were white as they had never been before.

It was television that introduced me to Walter Pidgeon. I remember, on Sunday afternoons, or in the four or five snowlit days of the Christmas holidays, how he would step with such ease into the gap my father left and sit there, in my mind’s eye, smoking his pipe, reading a leather-bound book, doing something with his hands. He was always a little preoccupied, always thinking about something, as if life itself were a tricky, but rather amusing puzzle. Yet whenever anybody needed him, he was there, all attention, good-humoured but serious, ready to offer action or good counsel. He wasn’t perfect: in Fritz Lang’s
Man Hunt
, say, he made a terrible mistake, and what hurt most wasn’t the pickle he got himself into because of it, but the fact that his original error led to the death of the girl who would do anything for him, played by the delectable Joan Bennett, at the hands of George Sanders’ sinister henchmen. That didn’t matter, though. Nothing mattered: not the script, not the lighting, not the cinematography. Pidgeon represented something unparaphraseable for me. Later, it might be Montgomery Clift, or Zbigniew Cybulski, or Yves Montand who played out my fantasy of manhood on the screen, but they were troubled older brothers doing things that I might have done, given the opportunity. Walter Pidgeon was the father I couldn’t find anywhere closer to home, one of those
real
fathers who can do the impossible.

Most importantly, Walter Pidgeon made decisions and stood by them, no matter what. Maybe this was what made him appear so competent. Whenever I saw a Walter Pidgeon film, I wanted to be a better person in a simple, unexceptional way: more thoughtful, more alert, less self-regarding, humbler, yet more self-assured than before. What I saw was a possibility of goodness, something more than ordinary decency. I clung to this possibility, knowing it for the fantasy it was, but needing something to aspire to. I would be walking through a garden, for example, and I would see a tree that had been so very carefully planted that it moved me. Somebody selected that tree, out of all the possible trees he could have chosen, and I would feel that
this
was a Walter Pidgeon decision, because the tree was exactly right for that spot: elegant, slender, not too dominant, it filled the space in a way that no other tree could have done. This sense of things being done right, this sense of the just act, is something a man should get from his father, just as the impression of gentility mixed with a certain wildness of spirit my mother experienced every time she saw a Franchot Tone movie should have come from her husband. No wonder my father felt lonely after the television arrived. He’d bought it on the cheap, I imagine, in some no-questions-asked deal, just to watch the racing and Scotsport, never realising that he was opening a box of dreams for the whole family, dreams that would forever cloud his house with alien possibilities.

CHAPTER 6

Around about my ninth birthday, my father began to fall apart. Something bad had happened at work, and I think he was finding it harder to get taken on for the better jobs. I didn’t know why at the time, but I knew something was wrong, because my parents were arguing more often, not just when my father went on a binge, but even when he was having a sober spell. Much of the problem had to do with money, of course, but it wasn’t just about that. There was my father’s behaviour at the occasional family gathering, for example, when he would embarrass everyone by drinking too much, then sitting around being maudlin, or making big claims about his past, about how he had almost become a professional footballer, or how a woman he’d known in Germany had tried to drown herself when he told her he was leaving for good, to go back to Scotland. Yet what bothered me most, as I remember, was his claim, after a few drinks, that he looked like Robert Mitchum. According to everybody else, he looked nothing like Robert Mitchum, but it wasn’t a serious matter. His drinking, his occasional falls, his disappearing act, when he would walk out of a gathering and not be seen again for hours, were what worried my mother’s family and our neighbours. The Robert Mitchum delusion was, by comparison, a laughing matter.

‘What are you talking about, man,’ my Uncle John would say.

‘It’s true,’ my half-drunk father would protest. Nobody knew where the notion came from: perhaps, during some drunken night at the Woodside, one of his cronies had seen the ghost of something pass across his features and pointed out a resemblance that, the very next moment, would seem ill-founded even to that drunken assembly.

‘Who telt ye that? A blind man?’

My father would sneak a sly look at my mother, then he would say, ‘Well, it was a woman, is the truth of it. With perfectly good eyes and all.’

My uncle would snort derisively. ‘What woman was that, then?’

My father would clam up at this point, or he’d revert to his obsession with Norman Wisdom, the slapstick comedian who composed his favourite song, ‘Don’t Laugh at Me, (’Cause I’m a Fool)’. My father would sing this song at family gatherings, or to passing strangers on his way home from the pub. Norman Wisdom was his hero: as a nine-year-old, Wisdom had been abandoned by his mother; at eleven, he was a runaway, working as a miner, a cabin boy and in various odd jobs, before joining up. In 1946, he entered show business: he was thirty-one, but he quickly became a star as the unfortunate, Chaplinesque Norman Pitkin, a clumsy, sentimental loser in a cockily skewed tweed cap and a crumpled suit and tie that appeared to have a life of its own, especially when a pretty girl was close by. My father loved Wisdom, for reasons I couldn’t fathom at the time; looking back, however, it’s obvious that Pitkin was some kind of alter ego for him: an abandoned child who seemed unlovable, and had to struggle against the odds, Pitkin would overcome the contempt of the boss, the spite of others, the girl’s indifference, and end up winning through by sheer energy and puppyish charm. All the time, he believed in himself, and in the basic goodness of the world around him.

The Pitkin persona was my father’s harmless side – a bit of a fool, a bit of a liar – but it embarrassed me, and it embarrassed my mother even more. Still, it was nothing to what was to come, if he had his way: once the women had been packed off home, the men would adjourn to the pub, or to a hotel, and my father would start, picking on strangers, arguing with the barman, making a spectacle of himself. There were ugly moments with other uncles and older cousins who tried to quiet him down and, once, a scary escapade when my Uncle John, who had been led to believe that my father could drive, allowed him to take over the wheel of his new car. They had both been to the pub and, though my uncle was probably under the limit, he let himself be convinced that my father had learned specialist driving skills in the RAF. The truth was, my father couldn’t drive at all – as my uncle quickly discovered – but he had seemed confident when he got behind the wheel, confident enough to set off at a lick, racing off down a country road, and not coming to a halt till John grabbed the wheel from his control and forced the car on to the verge. When the story came out, everybody’s worst fears about my father were confirmed. The only person who saw the funny side of it all, in retrospect, was Uncle John, a man not easily shaken. He had been in the Black Watch all the way through the war, and he had seen things there that he never talked about, though the presumption was that they were more than a match for a short joyride with my drunken father. The other remarkable thing about John was his seemingly infinite capacity to forgive other men their follies. He was the only member of our extended family who could tolerate my father, in the end. His kindness was hard to spot, behind a gruff, sarcastic exterior, but once you saw through his brilliant disguise, there was no denying it.

When my father came home from one of these adventures that had involved members of her family, my mother would be disgusted with him. Usually she said little, occasionally she would cry. That upset the whole house, but the real upset came when, one night, after we’d been to a wedding, my mother turned round, as we were coming through the door, and said, clearly, so everyone could hear, ‘I should have married George Grant.’

My father froze. For a moment, I thought he would hit her. Then he pursed his lips grimly, his worst thoughts confirmed. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘So you should.’

An explanation of the mysterious George Grant was eventually forthcoming. Or rather, two explanations. My mother’s version was as straightforward as possible: before she married my father, she had known – or worked with – a man named George Grant, but they had never been anything more than friends. Not even that, really, just two people who would exchange pleasantries in passing, people both friendly and insignificant enough to one another to be a sight for sore eyes on a hard day. My father, however, told a different story. According to this version, George Grant and my mother had been
cosy
, going out to the pictures from time to time, even planning to get engaged. For a while, it had been a big romance, and the whole family had wanted their Tessie to marry this good, kindly man. Then, along he came and stole her away, displacing George Grant in her affections for ever. Once the cat was out of the bag, my father enjoyed talking about all this, his one victory in life. He knew he was better than his rival, because he had
won
– had he not? – even if my mother claimed, as she had done that night, and as she was to do from time to time in the coming years, that she wished he hadn’t. For a while, the house was full of George Grant, a ghostly presence, a bargaining chip, a scapegoat, a joke. Then, one day, it occurred to me that he wasn’t as much of a joke as my parents pretended. After all, my mother called my father ‘George’ (the confirmation name he’d taken when he converted to Catholicism), even though his real name – the name I believed his family had given him – was Thomas. I remember realising this around the time of my own confirmation. I had chosen the name George, pretty much without thinking (no; there was a stupid reason behind it: I had been baptised John Paul, and I added the name George because of the Beatles). Then I saw it. We were both, my father and I, haunted by my mother’s first love.

For months afterwards I thought about George Grant. My mother had made light of it all, but she had also been embarrassed, which meant there was something to the story, no matter what she said. Soon, I had convinced myself that she had been in love with George Grant, but some terrible accident of impulse or circumstance had perverted her from her true path, and made her marry my father instead. I spent hours wondering what would have happened if she had married the man she’d really wanted: what I would have been like, had I been their son; whether I would have existed in any identifiable form at all; whether I would have been happier as the different boy I might have been, with somebody else’s blood, in somebody else’s house, following somebody else’s example. For the first time in my life, my mother seemed mysterious to me: a woman with a secret, dignified, even noble, in the sacrifice she had made, and I watched her, furtively, for any sign of regret, or longing. My father, meanwhile, became even more of a shadow on our lives. On the few occasions we saw him during the week, and on the interminable weekends, whether he was in the house, or out somewhere and just about to return at any moment, drunk and vindictive, I could see, all too plainly, that he was an impostor, a phantom, a bulky, uncontainable thing that nobody wanted.