It was a Sunday afternoon ten years ago, I was walking with my Mum at a local beauty spot – and I suddenly realised that I was facing one of the most important decisions of my life. Heading towards us were a young family, with a father trying to keep tabs on a small boy, cheerfully wobbling away on what was obviously a very new bike. I had a split second to make up my mind: would I be able to face a world in which other people had dads and I didn’t?
You see, this was not any old Sunday. Mum and I had just returned from our local hospital, where we had made the impossible decision to turn off my Dad’s life support machine and I had sat with him for the ten or so minutes that it took for his precious life to ebb away.
This had not been an expected turn of events, as Dad, a robust 85-year-old had not been ill; the first I had known of him feeling even slightly peaky had been a mere 46 hours earlier. Mum and I assumed it was a stomach bug but matters unfurled from there at a dizzying speed.
A&E was overwhelmed and understaffed in the early hours of Saturday morning and Dad was given no water for hours on end. His heart stopped for ten minutes which led to a critical coma.
I glanced again at the young lad on his bike and thought of the happy, patient long-ago hours my Dad had spent teaching me to ride. And swim. And play tennis. And try (in vain) to understand the point of chess.
Would he want me to enter a dark new phase of paternal purdah on his behalf? Of course not! What a ridiculous notion. My Dad was a cheerful and resolutely forward-facing man and the thought that his cherished only child would be sad at other people’s happiness would have been complete anathema to him. So, there it was: I had been lucky enough to have a fine father until the second half of my thirties and that was going to have to be enough for me.
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A decade on and this philosophy, forged in the heat of sudden grief , holds strong. It has been a bumpy ten years. Yet through the darkness was a steady source of consolation: the memory of his easy joy in small pleasures, reading in the garden, mum’s roast dinners, a glass of whisky: he was a contented man – and I have, mercifully, inherited his genes.
I glance over at a photo of my Dad as I write this and his wry smile comforts me. I owe my career in national newspapers to him – and not for any sort of nepotistic reason. A clever grammar schoolboy whose difficult family circumstances forced him to leave school at 16, Dad held a deep belief in education without being bound by any notion of ‘the establishment’ or a set way of going about things.
He and I were great Arsenal fans, regularly attending matches, and as a teenager my aim was to be a sports journalist (our house was always full of books and newspapers, as both my parents were great readers).
On a family holiday in North America in the summer of 1992, Dad and I watched the American coverage of the Barcelona Olympics and marvelled daily at how jingoistic it was. Eventually Dad said, “You should write an article about this. If you do, I’ll fax it to the Telegraph .” The Telegraph published my piece and invited me in for a meeting, which led to a happy association of several years with the sports desk, before I moved into the arts.
This was the sort of leftfield idea in which Dad, the export director of a food company, specialised.
His ideas (he also brilliantly suggested that I spend my gap year teaching Latin at a school in the newly democratic South Africa) are just one of the myriad things I miss about my Dad. Above all, I miss his warm good humour and dry wit, characteristics that I realised I took for granted until they were snatched away.
Even now, favourite lines of his still ring in my ears and cause me to smile, occasionally at inopportune moments. During a dull and lengthy work Zoom call recently, I started to laugh, recalling his trenchant views on durational school governors’ meetings (one of life’s great joiners-in, Dad immersed himself in the parents’ association of both of my schools and eventually became a much-loved governor of my old primary school). “What’s so funny?” asked a colleague. I hesitated. “My dead father has just told a great joke” didn’t seem the most appropriate riposte.
Of course, I have regrets. Thankfully, these are not time-related, as I spent lots of time with both my parents and could not have done more to help them as they aged. Instead, I mourn the questions I didn’t ask, the answers I will never have. In particular, these concern Dad’s parents, his beloved single Mum, Ada, who died too young, years before I was born, and his absent father Edward, who abandoned the family during the Second World War. Dad also had a younger brother, Alan, who had Down’s syndrome and died as a young man.
When I was eight or so, I took stock of my severe dearth of grandparents and realised that there was one I could not account for. “When did your Dad die?” I asked him. Even now, I can recall the sudden loathing that sprung into the voice of this always affable man. “He might still be alive for all I care,” came the curt reply. The subject was never mentioned again.
Except once. Years later, as an adult, I tried one more time to get Dad to open up this locked-box mystery. “When I was born, did you decide that you would try to be the best Dad possible, in order to do things the opposite way from your Dad?” I asked. He looked at me fondly but quizzically, his clever, over-analytical daughter who thanks to his single-mindedness and determination had had a wonderful education and knew ancient Greek but couldn’t change a lightbulb.
“Of course not. I didn’t think about any of that. I just got on with it.” Of course he did. My Dad was a supreme getter-on with the things that he thought mattered: football, tennis, cinema, theatre, church, socialising, charitable donations, holidays, pub lunches. It was a life extraordinarily well lived and I am immensely privileged to have been able to share it.
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