In memorium

My father died on the 26th of December, 1976.

An incident

“This should do it.” My father was responding to my mother’s growing exasperation with the two-year old me constantly getting under her feet in the kitchen.

Dad was a handyman of sorts. There were drawers full of watch parts from watches he’d taken apart but not quite reassembled. If you say to most people, “Do you have any masking tape on you?”, they would say something like, “Of course! Why wouldn’t I carry a roll of masking tape around with me?” Dad, though, would delve into one of his cavernous pockets and produce a roll of masking tape, a penknife, and a screwdriver. If a spot of painting needed to be done, a washer on a tap replaced, or a contraption knocked up to solve an immediate need, he was your man.

On this occasion the contraption in question was a gate between the kitchen and the rest of the flat. Taller than I was, it was impossible for me to reach up and unlatch it. It was a foolproof solution, except….

I watched him build this barrier. It is, I think, the earliest memory I have of him. It must have taken, I suppose, a couple of hours. And when he’d finished I went into the lounge, manhandled a chair that was bigger than me, positioned it, and climbed over the gate.

It was the first and only time I’d seen my father speechless. After that, I believe he returned to his watches

Not well

When my mother phoned me to say “Dad isn’t very well”, I was concerned — a bit. I sort of assumed that he had a bad cold or something, but at the back of my mind I felt disconcerted. The only time I had known him to be “not well” was when he had had prostate cancer several years previously.

A week or so later I was in the area, visiting my girlfriend at the time. She lived a ten minute walk away from my parents, but I wanted to spend the time with Ruth — “the girl with long hair”:

But I called my mother later that evening, once I was back home. She was very upset: dad was so thin (he’d never been thin: not overweight, just very well-built) and weak that she’d had to help him get out of the bath.

I went to see him during the week. He was sitting at home while mum was at work — they ran a business together. I suggested that we go out for a walk and he declined, saying it was raining.

Now I was worried. Whenever my mother had said to us something like, “You’re going out like that? It’s pelting down with rain!”, he would answer: “We’re men. We’re not frightened of a little drop of rain.”

Three weeks later he was admitted to hospital, with a diagnosis of lung cancer.

The hospital

We visited as often as we could. We were told that the illness was terminal. I thought we should tell my father in case there were things he wanted to say, or wanted us to do. But my mother was adamant:

“We mustn’t tell him. He wouldn’t be able to take it.”

I have to say, I found it upsetting seeing him looking pale at first and then yellow as the cancer spread to his liver. I spent quite a large part of my visits sitting in the hospital cafe drinking tea and reading a comic.

Despite mum’s insistence that he “wouldn’t be able to take it”, I felt pretty sure that he knew anyway. I caught him looking at me once, as if wondering whether I’d be able to take over responsibilities when he was no longer with us. I smiled a reassuring smile, and he relaxed.

We were there once when one of these hospital volunteer visitors came round the ward, you know, the kind of people who make jokes about how “You’ll be running a marathon next week, Fred”. He took one look at my dad and the hope dropped from his face. He looked at us, but he had no words. As he went to the next bed, my mother said to me, “He knows.”

Very strangely, my sister all this time showed no emotion whatsoever. She was five years younger than me, so I thought perhaps she hadn’t grasped the situation. I couldn’t understand it.

I stayed over with my mother and sister. It was on a Saturday night that we decided to try and relax by watching the late film on tv. It was a gangster film starring James Cagney, and ended at around 1am. As we were getting ready to go to bed, the phone rang. It was, of course, the hospital.

“We think you should come over now.”

I put the phone down, and then my sister had a meltdown, screaming, “Oh no, not my daddy, not my daddy!”

I think I must have broken every rule in the Highway Code, because we made it to the hospital, usually a 20 to 25 minute journey, in about 7 minutes. We arrived at the ward just in time to see my father being wheeled out to have an emergency tracheotomy to enable him to breathe.

“What are you all doing here?”, he asked.

“We thought we’d come to visit you”, replied my mother. I was too choked to say a thing.

“Oh, right.”, he said. And that was the last conversation we had with him. He died on the operating table as a result of a massive heart attack.

Weeks later, my mother went to see our family doctor. The conversation she reported to me went something like this.

Mum: Didn’t you realise that he had lung cancer?

Dr: Yes.

Mum: So why didn’t you say anything?

Dr: He came to me with a bad cough, so I told him I was going to send him for a chest x-ray. He asked me if I thought it was cancer, and I said ‘yes’. He said to me:

Please don’t tell my wife.

She won’t be able to take it.