68. Me and My Dad

 

Me and My Dad c.1948

 

My Dad was a maths and science teacher who became a missionary school teacher in Nigeria and later the Southern Sudan. He was invalided out of Africa in 1943 with cerebral malaria and after the war was over went to theological college and trained for the priesthood. The rest of his working life was as an Anglican parish priest firstly in Bath, Somerset, then in Kilburn, London and finally in Malvern, Worcestershire.

To my way of thinking Dad was troubled by his need to keep his faith constantly in mind in the way he lived his daily life, incessantly worried about 'being right with God' and finding divine guidance for every little decision that had to be made. He seemed to me to find it difficult to lighten up and have some fun. In the words of modern business speak and spin doctoring, co-opting a religious vocabulary, he was always 'on mission', always on the lookout to helping others (a great quality) and to 'bearing witness', spreading the word of God (proselytising, which I personally found embarrassing and tiresome).

I read a piece by Diana Wichtel recently in the New Zealand Listener [September 14 2013] about Hugh Laurie the actor. 'Since his run as the irritable and unorthodox Dr House ended,' she writes, 'Hugh Laurie has moved on to play another man caught in a purgatory of his pain in the movie Mr.Pip...'  In his interview with Diana Wichtel, Hugh Laurie talks about his upbringing and the attitudes towards fun that it had imposed:

It comes from a very old sort of Presbyterian instinct that if something is enjoyable it can't be of any value. That pain is the only road to virtue or good work... I've tried very hard to shed that because I know that is mad.

Although my mother was the Presbyterian, my father was 'low church' and more sympathetic in temperament to some of the non-conformist practices of churches like the Methodists than to the elaborate rituals of 'high church' Anglicans. Our childhood Sundays, days without games, were dominated by communion, morning service, Sunday school and evening service. For a boy who just wanted to play cricket or kick a ball around in every spare moment it was hard to concentrate on bible study and being quiet for much of the day.

I found Dad to be very judgemental. How can you be otherwise if you are constantly having to find forgiveness for things - both in yourself and in others? You have to believe in sin to believe in forgiveness of sin. I did find Dad pretty inflexible in his judgements. It was Mum's contention that this mental inflexibility was a product of his cerebral malaria and that before that life threatening illness he had been much better at taking on board new ideas than he was subsequently. And yet he continued to be very alert in other ways, his mental arithmetic games when I was a kid being great fun - yes, he was fun at times back then. But arguing with him? I felt that really was a hopeless cause.

The paternal warmth and sensitivity my siblings found in my Dad was never particularly apparent to me. I think he felt awkward with me and I with him and I enjoyed the company of my Uncles Joe and Geoff a lot more, but that was easy because they weren't in my face about how I lived my life. Dad and I were essentially strangers, something I explored in my poem "The Tennis Racquet" (see blog 53) where the irony is, that in defining who one is in relation to a parent the simplistic alike/unlike binary means that the parent is still the point of reference for the characterisation of yourself. The parent has you either way. Fortunately the reality is far more complex and we are not just the mixed up sum of our parents' genes and predilections, however imprisoned we may feel by them on occasions. We can and do strike out on our own and create our own personae, build our character in interaction with the world as we experience it. However alike or unlike Dad or Mum I may be, it has not been a reference point for me - well, not for years anyway. Whichever traits and values of theirs I have taken on board are now comfortably embedded in who I am and I have learned to live with them and not to look for them to explain (or excuse) my own inadequacies and failings. Mum and Dad did their best, given the context of the times in which they lived, they loved me in their way and they allowed me to break free - you can do a lot worse in parents than that.

And I think, in trying to understand our parents' impact upon us, we underplay the context of their times - their social history and enculturation, their parental models, their expectations of different roles for men and women within the structure of family. Dad's life after all revolved around his work and the fact that his home was his office was something we all had to adjust to. And, OK, if he was distant from family matters much of the time (except when we went on holiday and had to all play at family), who is to say, in the greater scheme of things, that he was wrong to be so. Parishioner problems simply were more important, more immediate, more demanding than our childhood concerns. Dad was a great parish priest who helped people enormously and always went the extra mile for them. That was his vocation and I greatly admired his dedication to it even when I no longer shared the faith that drove it. It was Dad who comforted the mother and daughter on the Loch Fyne steamer when the husband and father had jumped overboard in front of them to drown himself (successfully) and Dad who kept in touch with them afterwards. It was Dad who visited Freddy Mayes over all Freddy's years in different prisons around the country, just as Elizabeth subsequently did up until Freddy's prison death earlier this year. You don't have to accept the beliefs to value the behaviours they generate.  

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For more on my Dad see these blogs:

•   8.  A Place to Stand, a Place to Sit [17 November 2011]
• 16.  Mum and Dad's Golden Wedding [15 December 2011]
• 19.  In London, In Love [27 December 2011]
• 21.  "Why Me?" The History and Mystery of My Bronchiectasis [30 December 2011]
• 24.  Jesus v Lenin; the Unlicensed Tongue of a Teenage Boy [13 January 2012]
• 53.  Adrift on Poetry [24 September 2012]; poem: "The Tennis Racquet".

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