I had lunch with my father last week. A fairly
normal, run-of-the-mill event for most sons or daughters. But in my case there
was a certain pertinence: it was the first time I had ever met him.
It was an encounter which mirrors the recent
storyline of James Nesbitt's character, Adam, in Cold Feet. And here I was,
sitting opposite a man I barely knew. My father, a stranger. Like Adam's
father, he had left when I had barely moved on from washable nappies.
I am 37; he is 67. Meeting him properly for the
first time, a hundred questions stampeded through my mind. Why did he leave?
Why did he never appear to make contact? And how on earth were we to try to
catch up on 37 years - school, university, marriage, careers - in the space of
an hour and a half?
When I walked into the restaurant, I knew
immediately it was him. He looked older than I'd imagined. The only images I'd
had of him were crinkly, yellowing photos from the late 1960s. He was taller
than me and looked annoyingly fit (his passion is horses). His Barbour jacket
was well worn, his shoes spotless. This was my father.
Face-to-face, the questions I had prepared to ask
him evaporated. A cliché, I know, but words truly failed me. Here was a man,
charming, elegant, witty, affluent - and all too human. Not the ogre, the
"callous bastard", I had conjured up in my youthful mind in place of
anything tangible.
He is Irish, and the meeting took place in a
country house hotel in the Irish Midlands. We ordered Guinness and pork chops.
For the first few minutes, we talked about mundane things: the weather, the Six
Nations' results, his upcoming trip to the Cheltenham races.
To anyone observing us, the conversation was
relaxed, informal. We might have been a boss and his younger underling catching
a few pints at lunchtime. But beneath the surface, I wondered if he felt as
terrified, as gripped by a knot in the stomach, as I did. When the food
arrived, I felt nauseous.
The lunch had been arranged after I had telephoned
him out of the blue. I had reached a certain age, was thinking about starting a
family, and was beginning to wonder about my own father. My mother was very
supportive; she knew that it was something I had to do. Dialling that number,
it sounds all too predictable to say that my hands shook, but they did.
Suddenly, after a few rings, there was this voice, smooth, educated. My dad. If
he was surprised at the approach, he didn't show it; instead, the date was
arranged. I put the phone down.
Tentatively over lunch we wandered into unknown
territory. I didn't feel I could stand up in the crowded restaurant and shout:
"Why did you never bother with me?" But both of us knew the
unanswered questions and accusations hung all around us like bad deodorant.
The story begins in London in the mid-Sixties. Like
many of their peers at the time, my mother and father had come to the capital
from the west of Ireland. From what I can gather, the climate at the time was
too alien, too fast and furious, for a relationship bred in rural Ireland to
survive. After a short while, my father returned home, my mother remaining in
London where she worked as a writer and artist, later remarrying an Englishman.
My father also remarried but neither of my parents had any more children.
So I was brought up an only child here, in London
and in Essex. But always at the back of my mind was this distant, anonymous
figure: my real father. The man who was not there when I scored my first rugby
try aged 10, never there to drop me at school for the beginning of term, not
there when I graduated from Oxford, not there when I married my wife, Newby,
the beauty director of a glossy magazine. Never knew that my first novel was in
the top 10 at WH Smith.
I had written to him once while at university. The
reply was (at least to my post-pubescent mind at the time) guarded and a touch
grudging. From then till that phone call, no contact.
So why did I want to meet him now? If you speak to
any son of an absent father (and, God knows, there are enough of them in
Britain today), you will hear the same thing: that there is a void, a desire to
lay claim to a relationship that is crucial in any young man's life.
Over lunch, I found myself examining him like a
laboratory specimen. His hands, the greying hair, the facial features and
mannerisms that, I had been told by family friends, were identical to mine.
If I sound somewhat unemotional about meeting him
for the first time, the truth is that I was. There was no surge of anger or
relief, no need for tears. The very real hurt and longing I felt as a child and
teenager have been diluted with age. I could not recapture something I had
never had, and to try to do so would have been futile, if not self-destructive.
So we talked. And as we did, a whole, unchartered
life opened up before me. A grandfather was a school master at a boys' boarding
school, and he had once been in the "old IRA". It took me a minute to
come to terms with this.
"The IRA?" I spluttered. "Yes, but
it was very different then," my father replied. "This was Ireland in
the 1920s. It was more like a guerrilla war. Everyone was Republican then.î
And so it went on. A cousin high up in the Dublin
literary scene, relatives involved in all aspects of Irish political life. As I
learned about these faceless people, I felt strangely comforted: there was a
family out there, a club of which I was not a member but to which, by birth, I
belonged.
And I found myself, against all expectations,
laughing at the stories. He told me: "Just after your mother and I
separated, I had a big win at the races. Myself and a few friends drove back to
London, drunk as skunks, and I crashed the car into a postbox outside the Ritz,
where we were staying. If it hadn't been for the hotel staff, we'd have been
thrown in jail."
Yes, it was skirting around the issues, but neither
of us objected to that. The closest we came to the Big Question (why no
contact?) was when he said: "I did try to contact you but your mother ...
she was very hurt and didn't encourage it."
We both nodded at each other, before he carried on
a story about a well-known priest having an affair, and the conversation went
back to bar banter and rugby. As we parted in the car park, we didn't shake
hands. We stood rigidly and promised each other to keep in touch. I felt no
desire to hug him. To do so would have seemed jejune at the very least.
But I liked him and I feel better for at least now
knowing him, although in truth I still don't. What I do know is that when I
have children, I could never leave them. Maybe it's a different era, different
mores. Maybe, although we are father and son, we are different people. But
that, perhaps, is a topic for another afternoon of Guinness and pork chops.
By Paul Palmer
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