Not My Father's Son (13 page)

“I beg your pardon!” she quipped right back.

Mum then very proudly showed me a medal he had received for bravery in the field. I had seen it as a child, but knew nothing about when or why Tommy Darling had been recognized in this way.

We talked about the circumstances of his death. In 1950 he had taken a job with the Malayan police force, and less than a year later he was dead. Mary Darling was thirteen, and she had not seen her father since she was eight. When I gently asked her the circumstances of his death, my mother quietly described the story as it had been shared with her. He had been cleaning a gun. There was still a bullet in the chamber. He had shot himself accidentally.

This was news to me. I had always remembered he had been shot accidentally on a shooting range, a stray bullet making him a victim of that particularly oxymoronic phrase “friendly fire.” I suppose my boyish imagination must have just made that up.

The plot was definitely thickening.

As the interview wound up I smiled at her and gave her a kiss. I knew Mum had been anxious but she had done a really good job. Now, as she scampered through to the kitchen to begin serving the lunch she’d prepared for me and the crew, I took a moment to reflect on how similar our situations were right now—both of us on the brink of finding out the truth about our fathers. I had a flash of having to tell her what my father had revealed and how her face would crumble as I did so, but I put that thought away for now.

“Alan! Will you pour these people a glass of wine instead of just sitting there!” my mum admonished me. My reverie was broken and I snapped back into my role as dutiful son.

The next step in my investigation was to delve further into Tommy Darling’s military life, and so just a couple of hours later I was at the National Library of Scotland, a beautiful building just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. I had actually filmed there the year before for a documentary I had made about the Scottish sense of humor, and had been very happy to discover via one of its ancient tomes that we Scots were the first to ever catalog the word
fuck
! Now here I was again, with Tommy Darling’s military records and documents spread out in front of me, poring over them with a military historian.

The first thing that struck me was why my grandfather had chosen to join the Cameron Highlanders and not a battalion closer to his home. I learned that the Highlanders had a great reputation for being a very loyal, closely knit group of soldiers. Thinking back to the fact that my granddad had been an orphan, I thought perhaps he was looking for a family in the military. A lump formed at the back of my throat.

Wow. This was going to be harder than I thought. Pouring my attention into discovering the life of my grandfather as a way of temporarily avoiding my own past was not going to work, especially if everything I learned I could relate to how I was feeling and my experiences. I also began to see why perhaps my grandfather was such an absent father. His experience of family was so limited, maybe it was something he could never quite understand.

Tommy Darling was stationed in Inverness and worked as a cook in the barracks there. His military records painted the picture of a model soldier.

Indeed, the only negative in any of his records from this time was that one night he had been stopped by a military policeman and fined for riding his motorbike with insufficient light on his registration plate.

I looked at the wedding photographs of Tommy Darling and my granny, recognizing my great-auntie Ina as a bridesmaid, and began to build a picture of the young, newly married cook, soon to be a father for the first time, full of hope for the future, building the family he never had.

Then, suddenly, everything changed.

In 1939 war broke out, and Tommy Darling extended his time in the army and volunteered as a dispatch rider for the Royal Army Ordinance Corp. Suddenly I remembered the initials RAOC that were on that pewter mug. I showed it to the historian, who examined it and told me that Tommy Darling had been given that mug for winning a trial, or a test of a motorcyclist’s ability to travel cross-country under the kind of conditions that would exist in war. And pretty soon he would be experiencing war for real, as in 1940 the Cameron Highlanders were shipped off to France and into the front lines of World War II.

As I looked through photographs and accounts of the Allied efforts, I learned exactly what a dispatch rider would actually have done in battle. I also began to see that Tommy Darling was a bit of a daredevil. In the space of a few hours I had found out that he’d left the comfort of the battalion depot kitchens (and his family) to serve his country in the most treacherous conditions imaginable—tearing through the mud of the French countryside delivering crucial messages from military HQ to the troops on the front lines. Suddenly he had gone from a man in a uniform on my wall in New York, to a swashbuckling daredevil.

In 1940 the Germans had utterly overpowered the Allied troops and forced them into retreat, and the massive evacuation from Dunkirk in Normandy was being hastily planned. I discovered that the Cameron Highlanders were stationed forty miles south of Dunkirk and being used in a last-ditch effort to halt the German onslaught and enable the evacuation to proceed. Tommy Darling was riding his dispatch bike between battalion HQ in Violaine and La Bassée, where the Camerons were trying to stop a three-hundred-strong tank division from crossing the canal and reaching Dunkirk. It was during this time that he won the Military Medal that my mum had shown me. The historian showed me the citation for it in Tommy’s regimental records:

Lance Corporal Darling showed the greatest courage and disregard for his personal safety in getting messages through to the forward Companies.

I wanted to know more. Tommy Darling was becoming real to me, and I felt a bond forming that was hard to describe. It was a concern for a man I had never met. But that was all there was.

Sensing my desire for more, the historian piped up, “This is a gallantry award of which you should feel very proud.”

But then something else was revealed that connected with me even more. The Military Medal Tommy Darling had been awarded was such a high honor that he had been invited to Buckingham Palace in 1941 to receive it. Sixty-eight years later, I, his grandson, had also been to Buckingham Place to pick up a medal. I was awarded the OBE (Officer of the British Empire) in the Queen’s Honors List of 2009 for “
services to film, theatre and the arts and to activism for equal rights for the gay and lesbian community,”
a tad less heroic and gallant than my grandfather’s, but an honor nonetheless.

My mum, my brother, and my husband all came to the palace that day with me. I remember Mary Darling bubbling with excitement and pride like a little girl in a fairy tale, a feathery fascinator perched on her head as she sat between Tom and Grant in the front row and waited for me to appear to collect my medal. How incredible that none of us had the slightest inkling that Tommy Darling had preceded us all there by nearly seven decades.

The crew went off to get some shots of the Edinburgh landscape and I went back to the hotel in Edinburgh’s New Town alone. It was one of those boutique hotels formed by several townhouses being knocked together, and I was in the attic suite. As I ran my bath I flipped up the windows and took in the view stretching out to the Firth of Forth, enjoying the breeze wafting up from the coast. I was exhausted, and I looked it. It was when I had moments on my own that I worried that the toll of all this was too much to bear.

I closed my eyes and listened to the hum of traffic heading up towards Haymarket station or down to Stockbridge. I couldn’t get the image of a photograph on my mother’s wall out of my head. It was from when we lived in Dunkeld. The picture was of me, Mum, and Tom. I’m just a baby; I’m standing, but a baby still. And Tom and I look like friends. Not siblings.

I
am at peace. I am twelve years old, my jeans are around my ankles, and I’ve just made a big discovery.

I am lying on my back on a grassy clearing that juts out over a gully in the forest, the burn below tinkling its way to the North Sea. I come here every night now after we’ve had our tea. This is partly to escape the silence of my parents’ house, but mostly to avoid my father, and newly to enjoy what I have come to learn my penis can do. What it’s for, it seems.

If I turn my head towards the burn and press that ear into the grass, I can hear the birds tweeting and maybe a distant cow or sheep out of the other. It’s a still spring night, brisk and hopeful. I know if I lie here for too long I might fall asleep and then wake up cold, flakes on my tummy where now I feel wet warmth. I open my eyes.

There is a man standing looking at me. He is on the path at the top of the hill, the one that runs along the edge of the forest before it drops off to the gully floor. He is not near enough to be physically threatening, but he has obviously just watched me ejaculate, and I know this man. He’s one of the estate’s forestry workers and he works for my dad. I see him every day as I walk up through the sawmill yard on my way to catch the school bus. When he sees that I see him he immediately pulls back onto the path out of sight and is gone. My heart is suddenly racing and my cheeks are flushed once more. I can feel something rising up inside me. I am instinctively resisting but it is fighting very hard for control of me. It is shame.

What have I done wrong? I ask myself. I know that boys do this. I know it’s inevitable and natural. I just hadn’t realized how good it would feel. So why do I feel anxious for doing what is right? Why should I feel bad because this man saw me? Why? Because he might tell my dad, and like so many others before it, this new happiness will be stamped on.

I lie there for a while in the dusk, then make a decision, little knowing how it will affect every facet of my life and fiber of my being for the rest of my life: I say no to shame. This man was the one in the wrong. He was the voyeur, however accidental.

But I didn’t wish him ill. I would have done the same. I actually even thought my father would be glad to learn that some progress was being made in the faltering journey to my manhood. So I rejected shame.

I went to pull up my jeans but thought against it, and lay back down and looked up at the darkening sky. I closed my eyes.

T
he next morning we were up with the sun and off to the train station. Today was to be mostly a day of travel, first to London’s King Cross, and from there to Lille in France, where we would spend the night, and then I would be taken to the exact spot where Tommy Darling had earned his Military Medal.

Just as the man who was my new father was never far from my thoughts, I also couldn’t keep the images of Tommy Darling from filling my mind on the long, quiet journey southwards. Here I was following his footsteps into war. I was forty-five. He had been twenty-four when he left for France, a father to two children with a third on the way. What can it have felt like to leave them behind and go off into combat, where every day, every time he got on his motorbike, there was a chance he’d never get to see them again?

We had a little layover at King’s Cross and I wandered around the beautiful, newly renovated station. I began to wonder how all this new information was going to change my life, change me.

I thought back to the last time I had felt this shaken, to, in fact, the last time I had any dealings with my father, sixteen years before. Tom and I had traveled up to the estate to speak to him about our childhood. It did not go well. But the ensuing silence and absence of him from our lives because of this confrontation enabled us both to move on. We both felt a freedom from his legacy, and a clarity, that we had never before experienced.

For me, I found myself embracing the childhood I felt I had missed. My flat began to fill with games I had either played as a boy or lusted after. I discovered I loved the color yellow and so I had all my walls painted in a bright shade of it. I saw a large floor lamp in the shape of a daffodil, and I had to have it. I bought action figures from TV shows of my youth and placed them in pride of place on my mantelpiece. I started to collect marbles again.

I realized that I was living my life backwards. I had to be a grown-up when I’d been a little boy, and now I was tending to the little boy inside who’d never had the chance to properly play. I didn’t question it. I went with it. I liked it.

I am referred to often as having a childlike quality, or being pixielike. At first, when these sorts of descriptions began to be attributed to me, I didn’t like them. Childhood for me had such negative connotations that the idea that I was in some way overly connected to that time in my life was a cause for concern, not celebration.
Why
was I so childlike? Was I in some way emotionally retarded, trapped, trying desperately to reconfigure my past before I could move on?

Eventually I began to feel more comfortable with it all. Childlike, I realized, tends to mean open, joyous, maybe a bit mischievous, and I am happy to have all those qualities. Had I not had the childhood I did, would these traits not be so at the forefront of my personality? Who knows? All I know is that I am the product of
all
the experiences I have had, good and bad, and if I am in a happy place in my life (as I truly am), then I can have no regrets about any of the combination of events and circumstances that have led me to the here and now.