Not My Father's Son (20 page)

They had started in my dreams, dark dispatches dropped into my sleep that I began to realize were nightmares that had actually happened. Soon after, I didn’t need to be asleep. My stomach would knot up and I could see my father’s face coiled in rage as though it was yesterday. I could hear the dull ringing in my ears that was left after he made contact with my head. The sting, the dizziness, the inability to breathe, the humiliation, the shame, the despair that had been recorded in my mind so many years before now played back for the first time.

I had cut myself off from my life. I was now in a cocoon with no responsibilities of work or marriage. I left the little flat mostly to eat or to go to therapy. The rest of the time I was free to just feel, to remember, and mourn. I realized I had never just
stopped
like this in my entire life. Finally now I was ready to go where I needed to go. What started as a trickle soon turned into a flood. I spent days just gazing at the ceiling of my little flat, remembering and reliving pieces of my childhood that I could now fully access. It was truly horrifying, but it was also incredibly liberating because in accessing these horrible memories I was beginning to understand who I really was. Such a huge part of my psyche had been closed off for so long, and now I was embracing the fullness of my life experience for the first time.

It’s hard to express how fragile I felt in those early days. To begin with, I was terrified to tell anyone what I was experiencing. Partly because the memories were so raw and painful that it was difficult to talk about it at all without collapsing, and partly because I had a great fear of not being believed. And then I felt anxious about the prospect of talking about all of this with Tom and Mum. What if they weren’t ready and I was forcing them to confront a morass of pain and shame that they never wanted to revisit? Worse, what if they couldn’t deal with it at all? What if they didn’t believe me?

I needn’t have worried. I talked to Mum first. My domestic situation had obviously changed and she was naturally worried about why. We spoke on the phone one night and I told her what had been happening, how I had begun to remember so many awful things that Dad had done and was now beginning to understand the vastness of how much I had been damaged by him. She couldn’t have been more loving and understanding. She told me she’d always worried that this part of my past was going to come back and haunt me. We spoke as two survivors, now finally able to acknowledge our shared past.

A couple of days later I saw Tom, and over a long dinner we talked quite calmly and precisely about many, many instances of our father’s madness and violence. It was good to do so in such a rational, unemotional way. It made it all real and valid. We walked through the streets of London deep in conversation, both of us feeding each other forgotten nuggets of memory. We expressed to each other for the first time how we had felt in many, many instances of shame and violence we had endured. When we arrived at where Tom was staying, we hugged good night and suddenly we both began weeping uncontrollably, our chests heaving with grief for the two little scared boys we had been for so long.

All that summer
sorting myself out
in Primrose Hill I had been working up to this day. I’d been seeing a therapist for many months, and early on he had told me that a confrontation would be a necessary part of my recovery. Even Mary Darling had said I should. Tom and I both agreed that we needed to do it, but it was easier said than done. We were effectively going back to the place where it had all happened to confront our abuser about incidents and memories that had just recently appeared back in our psyches and were still incredibly raw and painful.

But we were now ready, I hoped. I picked up the papers from the bedside table and read over what I had written. It seemed so weird to see the entire thing encapsulated so neatly. Only two pages of A4, but packed with portent:

Dad

The way you behaved towards us throughout our childhood has had a huge effect on us, and has caused us many problems. You brutalized and terrorized us. We were made to feel useless, unworthy; we lived in constant fear of you. Not just of being hit but also of being constantly shouted at and brought down and tormented.

We were never good enough for you. We could never live up to your expectations. We were made to feel we were not capable of doing anything. You would ask us to do tasks for you that we couldn’t possibly achieve, and then you would chastise us and hit us for not doing them well enough. So consequently we’ve gone through life feeling unhappy and unable to acknowledge our achievements because we still feel unworthy—as being told we are useless is so ingrained in us.

We have made excuses for your behavior all our lives. We were embarrassed because people laughed and didn’t believe us if we told them about the violence, about you stopping us from going to things at the last minute, the way you made us work all the time, and so we started to make up excuses for you, so much so that we all pretended that nothing was really wrong and none of this ever happened, until it exploded out earlier this summer.

But we also felt it was our fault. We were led to believe that the reason you hit us, the reason you went out nearly every night, the reason you had very obvious affairs, the reason Mum was unhappy was all our fault. Because you told us we were useless, and we believed you and took all the blame for ourselves.

But we are not useless.

As children, when we most needed support and encouragement and love, when we were at our most vulnerable and impressionable, we had as a role model a man who hit us and never encouraged us or said a positive thing to us. We felt unloved. You didn’t really like us. Maybe you still don’t.

You had a problem with violence. We would have been taken into the care of the authorities if they had found out about the extent and regularity of your violence. Hitting an eight-year-old boy so hard that he is thrown across a room is not right. You would have been arrested on many occasions. You had no control over your temper. You totally flipped. You had psychopathic tendencies. We lived in constant fear. We were terrified of our own father, the man who should have been protecting us.

You never encouraged us to pursue our own interests so we consequently had to keep them secret. You would stop us from leaving the house to go out. We felt no security in our own decisions and skills.

We want to say all this to you to make you understand how we feel, and how we have been affected by the past. And that not having spoken about it is so wrong and damaging for everyone.

We want you to somehow acknowledge that you remember some of the things we are talking about.

In some way talking about it is acknowledging that it happened. And we are releasing the past, letting it go so we can all move forward and on.

We are giving you back the things you gave us.

I put the papers down. So many thoughts were whirring through my head. Tom and I had both been through a summer of intense examination and analysis of the events of the past, but I was nervous that suddenly springing all this on our father would alienate him and do the exact opposite of what we both intended and needed, which was some sort of acknowledgment of his actions and ownership of the past. I didn’t want to scare him away, but I wanted him to hear the truth too.

But also, I had no choice in the matter. I
had
to do this. I knew it. Tom knew it. Our whole lives had been leading up to this moment. We were going to give back to our father that which was not ours, and what we never should have been given in the first place.

Tom had called him earlier in the week to ask if we could come and see him as we needed to talk about some things, so my father must have grasped that this was not merely a pleasant family trip. The very fact that we were visiting at all was a rarity by this point. I hadn’t seen him for several years. Since I’d moved to London in 1988, the visits out of duty had grown more and more sporadic. When I was married, and my wife and I regularly came to stay with my in-laws who lived a few miles away, I often didn’t even let my father know I was coming. And he certainly never visited me. In fact, I realized in the run-up to this monumental meeting that my father had never once called me on the telephone in my entire adult life. He had spoken to me, sure, after the phone was passed to him by my mother, and once my parents separated, I had called him, but he had never once picked up the phone himself and dialed my number.

I had flown up to Scotland from London the night before, and spent the evening talking and remembering with Tom. We both knew how right this was, how necessary, but it still scared the shit out of us. We’d had a good few drinks to lighten our spirits and gird our loins, and now, here we were, the next day, in his car on our way to Panmure, about to confront our father with our childhood demons.

As we passed through the gates and the big looming sign that read
PRIVATE ESTATE: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
my heart began to pound. Everything seemed to be floating by in slow motion. The head gamekeeper’s house, the cottages where the wife of one of my father’s workers had taught me piano, the little box at the corner that I’d rush to every Saturday morning to collect my comic book. By the time we turned right and could see the sawmill yard, my hands had begun to shake.

“I’m not sure I can do this, Tom,” I said, my breath suddenly shallow, my mouth so dry I could barely swallow. And I was totally serious. I felt completely out of my depth, like the little boy I once was walking down this road into a world that made no sense and that was so out of my control.

“You’re going to be fine. I’m here with you. We’re doing this together,” said Tom.

We pulled up in front of the house and sat for a moment in the car just staring at the gray stone edifice before us. Sometimes when you come back to places from your childhood they seem smaller, less daunting. But this place seemed as bleak and gothic and unwelcoming as it had when we were little boys.

“You okay?” Tom asked.

“I think so,” I whispered.

“Just try and stay calm and not let him get to you.”

“I’m really scared,” I said.

“Remember, he doesn’t control us anymore, Alan.”

I loved my brother so much in that moment.

We got out of the car and rang the doorbell, but then moved back up the drive a bit, as though to protect ourselves from a looming explosion. After a moment our father appeared through the mottled glass of the porch, like a memory coming back into focus. We watched him, hanging back, gauging him. Then he opened the door.

“Aye,” he said. “Are you coming in?”

Tom and I had both decided that we couldn’t enter the house. It would be too unnerving to discuss past incidents that may have occurred in the very room we were sitting in. And also we didn’t want to do this in his territory, be trapped on his home turf.

“We’d actually like to go for a walk, if that’s okay with you,” said Tom.

“Oh aye,” he murmured and disappeared into the house, returning moments later in a jacket, and with a large rough-hewn wooden stick in his hand. His little West Highland terrier scampered up to us, breaking the tension that was beginning to crackle all around.

“You’re wanting to talk about something,” he began, hitting his stick against the side of his work boot as we began to walk up the yard.

“Yes, we are.” I was amazed to hear my voice, quite calm, quite strong. “We want to talk to you about stuff that happened when we were little.”

He said nothing, but cleared his throat noisily and spat into a drain.

Undaunted, I continued. “I don’t know if you know, but I’ve been having a bit of a bad time recently.”

“I hear your marriage has broken up,” he said suddenly and accusingly.

“That’s right,” I said, trying not to let him needle me. “It has.” I put my hand in my pocket to feel the bits of paper for reassurance.

“I’ve been in a bit of a state for most of this year actually. And my marriage fell apart under the strain of . . . of . . . of that.” I was beginning to stumble. This wasn’t good.

“Is it definitely over?” he asked. What was this, concern? No, surely not. That was never in his lexicon. Could it possibly be he was using the failure of my marriage as a smokescreen for what he’d somehow intuited was going to be a condemnation of him? Was he trying to shift the focus? That made sense. He was like an animal now, sizing me up, sniffing my fear.

“Eh, yes.” I felt the weight of my words, their portent, their resignation. “Yes, it’s definitely over. We’re getting a divorce,” I said, careful to cede no weakness with this statement. I had jumped off the cliff now. This was on. Tom glanced over at me, willing me strength.

“Part of the reason that happened is that I had a bit of a breakdown earlier in the year and it made it harder and harder for me to be able to function. And I remembered a lot of things that both Tom and I had suppressed for many, many years. Memories of things that had happened in our childhood, things you did that we don’t think were right . . . and we’ve come today to talk to you about them.”