Fathers and Sons (21 page)

Jack, though, sat in brooding silence. Even today, I don’t think he has quite forgiven me. Whenever the subject comes up, his face sets and he becomes monosyllabic before, usually, leaving the room. I frightened him that day, badly, and he’s still not quite over it. Come to think of it, neither am I. I tend to steer clear of roast beef now.

After my father died I occasionally dreamed he’d survived his heart attack and was recovered. I always woke angrily from
these dreams. In the moments that they still held sway over my consciousness I felt he’d somehow tricked us all, and me in particular, with a cruel joke that he had no business playing on any of us.

Then I’d remember, and the return of reality was almost a comfort, if a cold one. All that pain and grief hadn’t been for nothing, then.

My sister had such dreams too, but she took succour from them.

Strange, that difference.

Considering it now, I think the primal male anger which sometimes runs parallel with other emotions exchanged between fathers and sons tells us something. Their connections are hard-wired in a quite different way to the relationship between fathers and their daughters, or mothers and their children.

Some of these inter-male emotions and responses are nonnegotiable; as specific and almost as physical as a mother’s response to her baby’s hunger cries, stimulating a reflex to produce milk. But how are the connections between fathers and their sons formed? Which ones are intrinsic to the relationship, and which are created by events, past and present?

Now, as my son moves into his adulthood, I feel as if I stand on one of the great fault lines of my life, an elevated ridge between tectonic plates. Ahead lies the future; mostly a smooth, featureless land. But when I turn around I look across a continent sculpted and scarred by the unalterable past.

From here I can see the road that winds through a century of my paternal family history. Jack and I stand in the foreground.
Behind us, in the middle distance, is Christopher, and further away, looking sadly at his son, Geoffrey. Distant but discernible, Henry stands, frozen in his moment of decision more than one hundred years ago. A choice he could neither revise nor revisit.

Henry’s abandonment of his son at Kiln Farm conferred an icy childhood on the boy. In turn, a glacier ground its way inexorably into my father’s life.

Perhaps Geoffrey could have tried harder to block or divert the freezing flow, but fate–and Uncle William–conspired against him.

When my father arrived in Canada he found a way to escape the cold past. That was thanks to my mother and the warmth of her family life there. Emotionally defrosted, Christopher did everything he could to reinvent himself and become a loving father to his children.

He wasn’t entirely successful. The suppressed rage that found an outlet in my beatings took a long time to subside. And my father never regained the self-belief that had been extinguished by his father’s lack of affection.

But he did enough. He did enough. His children grew up secure in their father’s love, and that was a huge achievement, a true reversal of fortune.

I have often wondered how the consequences that flowed from the fateful decision made by ‘Bulford from Birmingham’ so long ago may have rippled into my life and influenced my behaviour as a father.

Fragments of the past, certainly, have washed up on my shores. But I think that, mostly, they are reactive agents.

For example, my father lacked self-confidence; as a
consequence I have too much of it. That can be dangerous (and overconfidence is not an attractive quality, either). I am certain it was at the root of my catastrophic oversight at a supermarket checkout when I was in my early thirties. I forgot to pay for a stack of items in the front section of my trolley, because my mind was in overdrive planning the rest of a busy busy day. I thought I could handle everything and anything and forgot that the devil lurks in the detail. What a demon sprang out of my oversight! I ended up having to argue my innocence before a judge and jury.

As I have become older, I have had to fashion tools to hack away at the hubris to which I am prone. My marriage has helped me do this; Judy is inclined to pessimism and this has acted as a gentle but constant counterweight to my sometimes overweening optimism.

I loathe corporal punishment, for what I think are obvious reasons. But would I have done so if it wasn’t so morally unfashionable (not to say illegal) today? After all, my father was soundly beaten as a child both at home and at school and those experiences didn’t deter him from enthusiastically taking a cane to me.

But whatever the modish circumstances, I think I would have always hated the idea of visiting such cruelty on my son. Just as Christopher swore to himself that he would show his children love in a way that his father could not, I promised myself, even when I was a boy, that I would never inflict the pain and humiliation of a thrashing on my own son.

It was probably my first genuine resolution.

But the real connective strand that binds together my father,
grandfather and me only became fully clear to me during the writing of this book. It can be expressed in a mantra that I am certain never left my grandfather’s lips, although he followed its dictum faithfully from the moment he was left behind in 1907. It is a creed that allowed him to be reconciled with his family in Canada two decades later.

To understand all is to forgive all.

On the very morning of Geoffrey’s abandonment, William and Thomas and Sarah explained to the frantic boy standing before them the exact nature of the agreement with Henry. From that moment he had not the slightest doubt that he had been pawned by his father, and that the ticket with his name on it could only be redeemed when he was twenty-one. From the very first, he understood the fate that had befallen him and who was responsible for it. And yet he forgave them all.

He understood Henry’s predicament all those years before. And he forgave him for the way he had resolved it. The alternative–to condemn his father for the betrayal, rail at his mother for her submission to it, curse his siblings for their good fortune at his expense–might have been satisfying and more than justified; but ultimately it would have been nihilistic.

Geoffrey wanted to rebuild and reconnect, not destroy.

My father, in his turn, understood the reasons his father had slowly evolved into a man who found it so difficult to demonstrate affection. He knew Geoffrey’s back story well enough; he told it to me enough times, and sympathetically too. But like his father before him, he wanted to salvage what he could from a poor situation. He had no interest in playing the blame game.

The one thing he never really understood was why he’d
been packed off to Denstone, but he chose to write that riddle off and refused to take his father to task about it. Instead, he tried all his life to build bridges with Geoffrey. And he succeeded. They both succeeded in the end. They found a language through which they could, at last, communicate emotionally. Music was the salve and blessing that healed and united Geoffrey and Christopher. I know it was. I saw it with my own eyes, working on them, bringing them closer.

And me?

To understand all is to forgive all.

My father’s extraordinary confessional to his young son on the road from London to Shawbury the morning after he had beaten me so recklessly and severely, was a defining moment in both our lives. I instinctively accepted the explanation for his behaviour, and trusted his sincerity when he promised me it would never be repeated.

I understood and I forgave. He never gave me cause to regret that.

And Jack?

I think it’s time my son spoke for himself.