Not My Father's Son (3 page)

My dad’s family had been Cawdor estate farmworkers for as far back as anyone could remember. Cut to the 1980s. Like many privately owned Scottish castles, Cawdor’s lairds were feeling the pinch and so opened their home to the public, thus commencing a stream of postcards, sent to me by various friends who had toured the castle, of
this
portrait . . .

Do you think there might have been a dalliance belowstairs at some point? Perhaps the help gave a little extra? Hello?!

I am startled by the resemblance of this man, John Campbell, the First Lord of Cawdor (painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1778 and hanging in the castle’s drawing room to this day) to myself. I have a postcard of it in my study, and several friends have mistaken it for a still from some period movie I’ve done.

My imagination is pretty vivid and knows no bounds at the best of times, but now it went into overdrive, and I dreamt of future episodes of
Who Do You Think You Are?
revealing that I was in fact the rightful Earl of Cawdor, and then a special follow-up show detailing the difficulties of trading in my jet-setting Hollywood life for one of a Scottish laird dealing with grumpy American tourists and damp banquet halls.

Of course I knew that aside from going to Cawdor and wrenching a chunk of hair off the present earl’s head for a DNA test—something which was
not
in the remit of the rather scholarly methods of
Who Do You Think You Are?
—there would be no way of proving the veracity of my potential claim to minor aristocracy. If some randy laird long ago got a chambermaid up the duff, thereby infusing the Cumming lineage with bluish blood, he would hardly be rushing to the village clerk to have it written in the annals for TV researchers to chance upon centuries later, would he?

No, the real mystery, and the one I was happy to learn that the show was going to focus on, concerned my maternal grandfather, Thomas Darling.

Although my mum, Mary, kept the surname Cumming after her divorce from my father, she is known to me, my brother Tom, and all our friends by her maiden name, Mary Darling. She isn’t Mary, she is Mary Darling. This is mostly because her name so suits her. She
is
a darling.

I had spoken to her several times that week before I arrived in Cannes, as she had been getting more and more excited about the start of filming. It was her father that the show was going to discuss, after all, a man she last saw when she was eight years old, although he hadn’t died until she was thirteen, five years later, in 1951.

This is what I knew: Tommy Darling was from the north of England, an area known as the Borders for its proximity to Scotland, and was orphaned at age two. He had married my granny and had four children—Mary Darling and her three younger brothers: Tommy, Don, and the now deceased Raymond. He was a decorated soldier in the Second World War. But after the war ended Tommy Darling never came home, ever. He joined the Malayan police force and died there in a shooting accident, and was buried in neighboring Singapore.

But
why
had he never returned to his family? And what exactly were the circumstances of this “shooting accident”?

In the run-up to the beginning of filming, my mind raced about the possible outcomes of Tommy Darling’s story, but also about the way a family can have so little knowledge of a relation only one generation away. When little is known and less is spoken about, it’s so easy for glaring inaccuracies to be smoothed over by surmise and assumption. I realized that I had no idea who my granddad was, and neither did my mum or my brother. Mary Darling’s mum, my beloved Granny, had died a few years before, but I never remembered her speaking of him. She had actually remarried after his death, and when her second husband died there was yet more baggage heaped on top of Tommy Darling’s faint shadow.

If Mary Darling was excited, I was agog. I love a surprise, you see. I loved the fact that I would not be told by the production staff where I would be going on this odyssey until the day it actually began, and each day could mean a different country, a different continent even! I had been told only that the first week of the shoot would take place in Europe (pretty vague!) and that I would start in London but would need my passport at some point. I felt like a little boy again, that feeling that I would burst with the waiting and the suspense. And worse, although the show was normally shot in two consecutive weeks, because of my filming schedule the second week and conclusion of the story would not happen for another month. I didn’t know how I was going to manage to contain myself for a whole four weeks! I did know, however, that in two days’ time, on Saturday morning in London, I had an appointment with a doctor to get some required jabs for the second part of the shoot, and after a quick search on the Internet I’d discovered that the countries these inoculations were required for included Singapore, so hey ho, call me Sherlock, I was pretty sure I knew where I was going to end up.

M
emory is so subjective. We all remember in a visceral, emotional way, and so even if we agree on the facts—what was said, what happened where and when—what we take away and store from a moment, what we
feel
about it, can vary radically.

I really wanted to show that it wasn’t all bad in my family. I tried so hard to think of happy times we all had together, times when we had fun, when we laughed. In the interests of balance, I even wanted to be able to describe some instances of kindness and tenderness involving us all. But I just couldn’t.

I spoke to my brother about this. He drew a blank too.

We remember happy times with our mum. Safe, quiet times. But as a whole family? Honestly there is not one memory from our childhoods that is not clouded by fear or humiliation or pain. And that’s not to say that moments of happiness did not exist, it’s just that cumulatively they have been erased by the dominant feelings that color all of our childhood recollections.

I can remember us all in a Chinese restaurant in a nearby town. We hardly ever ate out together so when we did it was a memorable occasion. But there is something nagging too, about my memories of that place, something that jabs at my heart when I think of it. I know that at least once in the few times we went there as a family I must have been hit for some flaw my father perceived, must have tried to hide my tears and humiliation from other diners. We surely had some meals there that were free of his mood swings and his tongue and the back of his hand, but they don’t stand out for me.

I can remember when I was very little in the living room at Panmure, at least four or five years old, playing horsey with my father. I see him balancing me on the foot of his crossed leg as he watched TV, and him bouncing me up and down to my squeals of delight. I remember being genuinely filled with joy in those moments. But as soon as a memory like that settles for too long in my mind, another, darker one forces it to slide to the side.

I see a freezing wintry afternoon in the sawmill yard. I am on the red bike I was given for Christmas and my father has decided that today is the day that I must ride it without training wheels. To this moment, I have never once tried to ride without them. There is ice and snow on the ground and I see my father taking the training wheels off and pushing me down the driveway, too fast. Every time he does so I panic and fall off, and soon he gets frustrated with my failure and pulls my trousers down and slaps me really hard on my bare bum. It is so cold I have no feeling in my toes, and barely in my fingers; it is sore for me to sit down on the seat, I am scared, I am crying, and yet somehow my father thinks I am going to be able to achieve what he has decided I must do. Each time I fall, despite my pleas and promises that I will practice and be able to ride without the training wheels soon, I am bent over his knee, feel the blast of freezing air around my genitals, and then severe, painful slaps to my behind.

I don’t remember how it ended. What I do remember is my mum washing me and getting me ready for bed in front of the living room fire later that night, and her gasping as she saw the ring of blue, black, and purple bruises that had appeared. My father came in to say good-bye before he went out for the night, and my mother admonished him for his handiwork.

“He’s all right,” he said, running a comb through his hair as he looked in the mirror.

“You’ve gone too far, Ali,” my mum replied as he disappeared out the door.

Aside from visits to family, our holidays together were mostly to caravan (or RV) parks in seaside towns in other parts of Scotland. I remember when I was about seven we went to Dunbar on the southeast coast and I got to play on the go-carts.

This is a photo of me, beaming in my shorts and crew cut, looking towards my mother and my father, who most likely took the picture. So it’s not that every second of my childhood was filled with doom. But every second
was
filled with the possibility that in an instant my father’s mood would plunge into irrationality, rage, and ultimately violence. This very feeling, this possibility, is what darkens the part of my mind where my childhood stories live.

It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down.

Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in had to be hidden or suppressed. I’m sad to say that this method works. If you don’t give as much credence or value to whatever it is that you love, it hurts less when it is inevitably taken from you.

I had to pretend I had no joy. It will come as a shock to people who know me now, but being able to express joy was something it took me a long time to be confident enough to do. I’ve certainly made up for it since, and for this, I am proud and grateful.

Like any tyrant, my father was an expert at knowing how to hurt you most effectively and quickly. If Tom or I became too keen on any hobby or person, our father would ensure that they were removed from our lives instantly. Tom was a great soccer player, and played for a local boys’ club. Eventually he began to receive interest from a professional team’s scouts. Immediately our father banned him from attending the soccer club altogether. I had a friend from school who lived in a local village, an arty girl who played the harp and whose parents were doctors. My father became convinced, based upon nothing more than a look in her eyes, that she was a drug addict, and I was never allowed to see her again. Both instances, I realize now, screamed of my father’s insecurities—of me mixing with educated people whom he felt he could not relate to, and of Tom succeeding in a field in which our father himself once had aspirations.

His actual violence towards us rarely lasted beyond one or two really hard whacks, the odd kick. I actually think the prolonged period of tension before landing his blows, as we were systematically inspected, chided, and humiliated, had a far worse effect than the actual hits. This certainly contributed more to our need to shut down, as we all learned early that the best way to cope in that time when his ire was building and his cruelty unfurling was to give nothing away, to try and
become
nothing, the nothing he both thought of us and wanted us to remain.

But looking back from the vantage point of adulthood, I see that there was a definite sea change in my father’s behavior.

I think I was about eight or nine. Something transformed in him. He had always been prone to outbursts of rage, but now a darkness descended upon him that meant the glimmers of light between the outbursts disappeared. It was as though my father was deeply depressed, and now I think perhaps he was. He obviously did not want to be in his marriage, he seemed to be perpetually irritated by the existence of his children, and nothing ever seemed to please him. Indeed, the only signal we got that something did not displease him was his silence, his inertia.

Now began what I remember as a time of constant darkness, silence, and fear. Being around him was like navigating a minefield. We could never relax. We were never safe. He began to go out every night. I remember sitting in the living room with my mum, hearing him getting ready upstairs. Eventually the door would open and his head would appear.