Not My Father's Son (16 page)

W
hen I was twenty-eight I had what I have come to describe as a nervous breakdown. I now see that it had been coming for years—wobbly moments of irrationality and panic, which I had chalked up to exhaustion or stress, now can be traced to the path that led me to the eventual Nervy B.

I think about it as that box in my attic. Our parents’ house was a silent one. Partly that was due to not wanting to risk the ire of our father, and so not speaking at all was a safer option. But also we never discussed what we were going through, how it was affecting us. When my dad was absent, sometimes Mum, Tom, and I would give each other warnings over what might ignite his rage, or express anger about the consequence of one of his actions, or indirectly empathize about our plight, but we never actually addressed what was really going on: that we were living with a tyrant, someone who, I believe now, was mentally ill. As our silence grew, so did our denial.

Eventually of course we all escaped him. Tom and I entered adulthood and moved away: Tom at twenty-one to get married, and I, two years later at seventeen, to go to drama school in Glasgow. And Mary Darling started her own independent life soon after. We all stitched together facades that we were all okay. Fine. Normal. Of course we weren’t. You can’t go through sustained cruelty and terror for a large swathe of your life and not talk about it and be okay. It bites you in the arse big time.

Tom and I are six years apart in age. That doesn’t seem to matter now, but when I was ten and he was sixteen it was huge. And when I was fifteen and he was twenty-one and he got away, I was devastated, not so much because I was losing the brother I had shared a bedroom with for so many years, for in truth we didn’t have all that much in common and weren’t that close then, but because I was being left alone and there was no longer any buffer between my father’s rage and me.

Later, when we were older, we’d occasionally broach the topic of our past when drunk with friends and the subjects of parents and childhoods came up. But Tom and I would do so in a sort of jokey way, marveling at the impossible tasks our father would set for us, and the times he had become really enraged, never detailing the violence or the fear he also engendered.

So the box in the attic stayed up there, gathering dust, neglected. Eventually I think we forgot about it completely. But the thing about boxes full of denial and years of unresolved pain and hurt is that eventually . . . they explode.

My box began to burst in 1993. I had been married to my wife for seven years and we had decided to try to have a baby. Suddenly the idea of being a father and what that actually means began to fill my head, and therefore my own experiences with my father flooded my mind. Not vividly and truthfully for a long time, though, for I had packed them away so well that it took a long time for the gates to open and the trickle to turn into a flood.

At first all that happened was that I started to panic. I put it down to the fact that my wife and I were moving into a big new house and the financial demands that suddenly made on me. Then we had a problem with our next-door neighbor, and I thought perhaps that was the cause. The house had a huge garden and I threw myself into its restoration, but many serene moments were ruined when I was hard at work digging or hacking away at brambles and I would feel that my wife was watching me. Suddenly I couldn’t carry on. I became agitated and irritable. I realized that her innocently looking out of the kitchen window, or standing at the top of the lawn, sometimes even bringing me a drink or coming for a chat, triggered the feeling of my father inspecting me. As I weeded the seedbeds in the nursery, or as I cleaned out the tractor shed, I remembered being watched, and my whole body, my
being,
just associated that gaze with the inexorability of being hit. My wife knew my father and we had visited him a few dutiful times over the years, but she had no idea of the scope of his abuse and his power over me. I explained my feelings of discomfort and she was very understanding. She stopped watching me.

Then, around the same time, I began rehearsals to play
Hamlet
. It was to tour England, culminating in a monthlong run at the Donmar Warehouse in London. It was the most amazing and challenging moment of my career thus far. My wife was playing Ophelia, so she would be with me every step of the way. As I got deeper and deeper into my work, I came to understand that Hamlet really didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be absent. He wanted to be back at university with his friends. He is sickened with his mother’s hasty marriage, distraught to be asked by the ghost of his father—a distant man I thought he didn’t particularly connect with—to avenge his death. To add to it, his girlfriend is dumping him and his friends are spying on him. I decided that there was no way Hamlet was mad. He was slipping into the same deep water as me. He was at the start of a nervous breakdown too.

Spending so much time thinking about the concepts of being a father and being a son and trying to interpret the slow trickle of memories and feelings about my own silent childhood soon made it very difficult for me to engage with my friends in the cast. I was also exhausted of course—
Hamlet
is a huge undertaking—but I began to use my fatigue and also the need for solitude to prepare for the performances to cover up what was an actual inability to think about anything else. I pushed my friends, and my wife, far away.

I began to wonder what kind of father I would be. I had seen and read enough about psychology to worry whether I would just
become
my father, and the more I allowed myself to remember what that actually was, the more anxious I became. What had he actually done? He was just a bit strict and prone to losing his temper, wasn’t he? He hit me sometimes, but everyone’s dad hits them, don’t they? He told me I was useless and worthless, but I have proved him wrong, haven’t I? I was okay.

I wasn’t like him. I was kind, I loved kids, I wasn’t an angry person. I was a different man. I would break the cycle.

Thinking back to this time, I truthfully don’t think I remembered any of the actual details of my father’s abuse. I was still in denial, along with my mother and Tom. Fear and silence will ensure that.

But as the months went by, I was becoming more and more ill-tempered, irrational, and unable to communicate. The play was incredibly emotional and exhausting of course, but I knew it wasn’t just that. My wife and I were still trying for a child, but I was secretly becoming more and more relieved each month when we hadn’t been successful. Ironically, my career was taking off in a way I could never have imagined. I began rehearsals to play the Emcee in
Cabaret
during the day, whilst performing
Hamlet
at night. It was creatively amazing, but I was feeling more unhappy, anxious, and out of control than I ever had in my life. Here I was, the bright new London theatre star, playing Hamlet alongside his wife’s Ophelia, about to start a family. I had everything going for me, and I felt I had no control over anything.

I began to stop eating. I was pretty thin as it was, from doing the play, but I began to get perverse pleasure from eating as little as I could throughout the day. I even began to be fascinated by people noticing and worrying about my weight. Of course these are classic symptoms of an eating disorder, using food and your relationship to it as a smokescreen to avoid dealing with what really is the problem, but also feeling that by depriving your body you are at least in control of
something
in your life.

I cried a lot during this time. Deciding what to wear in the morning would set me off. Of course my wife was becoming more and more anxious, and annoyed, by the way I was seemingly unable to enjoy what should have been a blissful time for us both. When
Cabaret
began, I was with a new group of people who didn’t know me, and that helped. But at home I was an utter mess. I remember one evening when a group of my very close friends came to see the show, and we went for dinner after. They were shocked at my weight of course. I sat at the end of the table not talking to anyone, picking at a salad. I had forgotten how to be me. Like Hamlet, I wanted to be absent.

I wasn’t yet able to recall details from my childhood. Instead, it was as if I were reliving the pain and the sadness I had felt as a child. I was doing this in an environment and at a time of my life that had no correlation to such pain, or to the behavior it manifested in me. I couldn’t understand why I was so sad. I just knew I needed to be away and to have some time on my own to sort myself out. I finally told my wife I didn’t think I was ready to have a child. Understandably she was distraught and angry. I understood, but I couldn’t verbalize sufficiently or logically why I had changed my mind. I began to wonder if I even wanted to stay in my marriage. I was unfit to be a father. I was unfit to be a husband.

By the time
Cabaret
ended in the spring of 1994, I was a zombie. I went to work, but I spent most days in bed if I had no appointments. I was in a deep depression. I knew that my depression was due to my past, and my father, but I just didn’t dare to delve any deeper into it because I was afraid I would be utterly unable to function. I needed to get completely away.

I was offered a film in Ireland, and I leapt at the chance. Suddenly I was away from London, away from my crumbling marriage, living in an old abbey in the middle of County Kilkenny, with yet another bunch of people who knew nothing about me. This gave me the ability to have time to myself to think and to
sort myself out.
That was the phrase I kept hearing, kept repeating to myself
. You have to sort yourself out, Alan. By such and such a date you need to have sorted yourself out.

The movie was
Circle of Friends,
and became a very happy respite from my funk. But I didn’t sort myself out. I thought a lot. I wrote down a lot. I tried to figure things out and work out what I wanted. I felt so much pressure to pretend I was getting better, but I wasn’t. The best thing was I got some rest, the desire to eat again, and the realization that it was going to take more than a couple of months away making a film to sort myself out.

When I got back to London I moved out of my marital home and took a little flat in Primrose Hill. I stopped working. Now I would really
sort myself out.
It was a miserable little place I moved to, and I think that was intentional. I wanted no distractions. I wanted it just to be me with my memories, and of course now, finally, the box in my attic exploded.

A
s soon as we left the Imperial War Museum, we went to lunch. We ate at the National Film Theatre café, and I recalled all the times I had eaten there during my time living and working in London. One evening, shortly after my run of
Hamlet
had concluded, when I was very deep in my descent into despair, I introduced the movie of Richard Burton’s Broadway version of
Hamlet
. It’s never good to see another version of something you’ve just finished, I realized that night. You either say the lines along with whoever is playing your part and are taken back into a black hole of your own interpretation and miss what you are watching entirely; or, as I did that night, you become rather irritable with the seemingly obvious and myriad flaws that you are witnessing! For me, never had there been so much irony as when Mr. Burton said to the players, “Speak the speech, I pray you, . . . trippingly on the tongue!”

I also thought of the times I had spent working at the Royal National Theatre next door, and of late-night drunken walks along the banks of the Thames with a man I now realized had been the latest in a line of lovers I had engaged with because I was drawn to their anger and I wanted to fix them.

Just as when I was a little boy dealing with my father, I thought it must be my fault my lovers were so angry. Now, of course, I can see that it was stupid, irrational, and self-abusive to think so, but it was still a hard habit to kick.

My reverie was broken with some extraordinary news. Elizabeth showed me an e-mail from the Burma Star Association, a veterans’ organization they had contacted. It told me that they had found someone who remembered my grandfather.

“‘David Murray is a veteran of the Battle of Kohima, where he fought with Thomas Darling,’” I read aloud from the e-mail. “‘He’s happy to meet with you and tell you what he remembers about him.’”

For the umpteenth time that week I was sideswiped. I never imagined that there would be anyone alive who remembered my granddad. The thought had never occurred to me.

But there was, and that very afternoon we set off for Bristol to meet David, who was now eighty-nine. Not only had this man known Tommy Darling, he had fought alongside him as his superior.

A few hours later we arrived in a very pleasant gated community overlooking the Bristol Sound. David was a spry old man with a twinkle in his eye. He was wearing a navy blue Cameron Highlanders sweatshirt, and evidence of his army days was everywhere around his apartment. Photographs, both of his days in service and of battalion reunions, decorated the walls. He was obviously a soldier through and through. I wondered how he would take to the line of questions I wanted to ask him, and particularly in reference to my granddad’s mental health. First, though, he had another surprise for me . . .