My father died decades ago but I still find myself thinking about him

I’ve just re-read online a wonderful piece by Matthew Parris that appeared in the Spectator on August 15, 2009. It’s about his father, who had died five years before but lives on, obstinately, in the memory of his son. I won’t attempt to summarise it. Suffice to say that Parris never gets through a day without some facet of his father emerging to lighten the darkness or bring him to the point of tears.

This is how it should be.

I lost my own father when he was just 65 and I was 29. March 27th would have been his 107th birthday. I was living in Germany, working as a journalist, and couldn’t get back in time to say goodbye. I missed his passing by just over an hour.

The truth is, we weren’t that close. We were very different. Dad had lived all his life in and around Belfast, whereas I got out of Northern Ireland at the earliest opportunity. He was also a bit of a disciplinarian and spent as much of his free time as he could playing golf.

He wasn’t a bad man – far from it.  Just different. A man of his time. And I know he wished the best for me.

These days, I wonder if my son will be with me when I go, and what it will mean to him. For memory works both ways.

I remember walking with my son, Jamie, up to the observatory in Greenwich Park, south London, and arriving just as the door shut for the day. I remember losing my glasses in the river in Yellowstone Park and him diving down and finding them for me. And I still smile wryly to think of him reading Tintin as we drove down California’s Pacific Highway, not in the least interested in my descriptions of the landscape. I remember having a hayfever attack on a roadside in Belgium. I couldn’t stop sneezing and he was frightened and didn’t know what to do to help me. Another time, I came last in the Father’s Day race at his school, somewhat hampered by my steel-toed brogues and corduroy trousers. I don’t know which of us was the more embarrassed.

I wonder, though, are these shared memories, or are they mine alone? I’ll have to ask him. He’s married now, with a six-month-old son – our grandson – building the next generation of memories and lending them to me.

I remember my Granny Glenn extremely well. She was from Sligo, with a West of Ireland accent. She baked potato bread and soda farls on a griddle in the kitchen. And I remember my mother’s sisters – Aunt Ina, who wielded one of those croupier’s rods that were used to plot the position of enemy aircraft at a wartime RAF base, and Aunt Nancy, who died aged 87 thinking that I was my father. And I remember with gret fondness one of Dad’s sisters, Aunt Sadie, whose husband left her with two daughters to raise and never came back. I have a picture in my head of Great Uncle Willy, who fought at the Somme and got gassed, and of my Grandad, Granny’s husband, with one tooth and a brown suit, heading out to the bookie’s with a ten-bob note. I remember Uncle Tommy, married to my Aunt Irene, who said God never closed one door but he shut another. And Aunt Nancy’s husband, Uncle Norman, a Commando, who stormed the beaches with Monty and spent a couple of weeks afterwards as his driver. He sold cigarettes for a living and died of lung cancer.

Some memories are real. Others, I’m sure, are false, or overlaid on older texts, handed down like palimpsests. My father’s father died of drink before I was born. He had gangarene and was literally legless. Yet I have a clear image in my head of him being taken from his farm outside Lisburn, which he had been forced to sell, to a terraced house in Belfast, together with his wife and children. They went by jaunting car, driven by my father, who was 14 at the time. He was apprenticed soon after to a master grocer so that he could earn the money to pay the rent. My gran, on his side, was a cold woman, with a moustache, who keep a canary in a cage and always dressed in black. Our cousins, who bought the farm for a lot less than it was worth, were strangers to me throughout my childhood, though when we went to visit they made us ham and eggs and let me sit up on the tractor. My sister says crickets sang in the hearth.

All gone now, like old letters thrown onto the fire. Like their parents and grandparents before them, whose names I don’t even know. The few scraps that my sister and I retain of these lost generations will die with us.

I still think of my father at odd moments. I find myself wondering what he’d have said about the way I lived my life. I’m sure he wouldn’t have approved. More than that, he wouldn’t have understood.

And there was my mother, of course, Molly, who lived on after him for another 28 years and had almost forgotten him when her own time came. Mum died struggling to hold on to the certainties of faith, incanting with her elderly friends gathered round her hospital bed that neither Principalities nor Powers could separate us from the love of God.

Perhaps not. But she and I have been separated for 14 years now and my dad has been gone since all the way back in 1977. For a year or two after Mum died I would sometimes pick up the phone to tell her my news, remembering only as I began to punch in the numbers that she had been disconnected. I don’t do that anymore, and I regret it.

But there you go. There we all go. Back into the discontinuum. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Not a cheerful thought, you might say. The good news is that, even though I’m happier now, and more settled, than at any time in my life (for which all thanks to my American wife, who gave up her life in New York so that I could retire to France), I’m more ready to face the end, when it comes, than I ever thought I would be. And that’s without a religious thought in my head. Thank God for that.