Down to a sunless sea: memories of my dad
I’m going to be releasing a new piece every Thursday for at least 8 weeks. General content note: death, dementia, old age, mental health issues
Friendship: Part 2
My parents split up before I was conceived, but both of them were committed to bringing up their two children. Because my dad was retired, he was the parent who looked after me the most. My mum went out to work, and he provided the childcare for me and my brother.
When I was three, we moved to the small village of Afonwen (which has since become a town). My parents bought a cottage, which they separated into two parts: my mum and my stepdad lived on one side, and my dad lived on the other — much smaller — side. The partition between the two households was a door. I’ve asked them all for more detail about how these arrangements and decisions came about, but no one has any definitive answers. It just seemed sensible to everyone at the time and evolved semi-organically.
My dad fitted a kitchen in his part of the house: a tiny room always filled with homebrew and homemade jam experiments. My brother and I went to his side of the house for weekends and slept in a bunkbed structure that he had set up, two sleeping areas constructed out of wood. I slept in the top bunk, which felt like a treehouse crossed with a cacoon. You reached my bunk by climbing up some slightly spiralled stairs made of different sized planks. My brother is six years older than me, so he liked the bottom bunk because it had a proper bed in it, and there was a TV down there. I was happy in the top bunk with my story tapes and books.
Dad painted all the walls in our room white, and bought a load of felt tip pens. He wrote the words “Everybody’s Wall” in big uneven block letters and marked out spaces for people to create pictures. They were the “reserved” parts of the wall. Everyone who came to the house was encouraged to draw on the walls. In between the reserved spaces was the most interesting part of the walls to me because that was communal art. In those spaces you could add to or adapt each other’s doodles and pictures. Over the years, the walls became a multi-coloured piece of community graffiti.
We didn’t just see my dad at weekends. He looked after us generally when we weren’t at nursery or school. I went to primary school in Caerwys, the town at the top of the hill (at the time it was officially the smallest town in Europe). I would get the village taxi in the morning (later the minibus, due to mild population growth). And in the afternoon my dad would pick me up. Together we would walk down a footpath past beautiful countryside, talking about the world, stopping at my favourite tree, passing the bluebells and snowdrops when they were in season. When we got back to the cottage, he would make me a “ticky snack” that generally involved dried fruit and chunks of cheddar cheese. Once when I was helping him pick damsons from the tree by the garage, we saw a kingfisher fly over the lake.
The door that formed the partition between the parts of the house had a sign on it. When Dad was writing, the sign would be turned to the side that had a ‘Please do not disturb’ sign on it. My dad had added extra phrases around it such as ‘B — — — off!’, ‘Go away!’, ‘Little Porlockians keep out’ and ‘Children from Porlock unwelcome’. These last two I have combined in my memory to make ‘Small Porlockians beware!’ and are a reference to the man from Porlock who interrupted Cooleridge whilst he was halfway through writing Kubla Kahn, causing him to never finish it because he couldn’t remember the ending. I didn’t understand the reference properly until I took A-Level English Literature. Back then it sounded to me like a type of goblin. And I felt quite comfortable being thought of as a goblin.
On the other side of the sign, there was a rectangle of white paper crudely pasted on with copydex. On it was written ‘When this sign is in place, Small Porlockians may enter if they are suitably respectful and Bow 3 Times.’ That was a joke. We didn’t have to bow. We didn’t have to stay out at all really. We knew there was no way that he would turn us away if we had a reason to disturb him.
When the keep out side of the sign was showing, I used to love standing with my back against the door, listening to the sound of him typing. I liked to imagine him as a magician who captured stories using magic machines.
That part of my childhood was full of beauty, wonder and magic, and my dad was at the centre of all of it. It was also the time I fell in love with stories.
When I was eight, my stepdad got a job in Coventry and everything changed. My mum, my stepdad, my (half)sister, my brother and I moved into a house in one part of town, and my dad rented a flat close by. After living with my dad all my life, he was now a bus ride away. There wasn’t room for me and my brother to visit him together, so we alternated weekends until my brother went away to university; then I had him to myself. But this visit wasn’t a door away, and when I wasn’t with him I was in a very different atmosphere to any I’d known before.
On my first night in Coventry, my dad was supposed to stay with us too. But he and my mum had a big argument and he decided to leave. I ran out into the street after him, crying, and he turned and came down to my level. He told me he was sorry and that he loved me but that he had to leave. “I need to make it clear to your mum that we aren’t married and that she can’t speak to me in that way.” He turned away and walked to the end of the street, turning the corner and disappearing. My mum came out and pulled me back into the house.
From that moment, my life changed. I spent most of my time living in a house with thin walls where I felt I wasn’t safe, my mum and my stepdad’s marriage slowly deteriorating in a house full of rage, pain and repressed and over-expressed emotions.
Within these dark years of my life, there is still a big chunk of light. And that was provided by my dad. His house was a sanctuary, as were the holidays he took me on. He also started helping out at my primary school, so he was often close to me even when I wasn’t staying with him.
His new flat was in an ugly concrete building in a run-down area of Coventry. It was small, but he made something beautiful inside it. Like in North Wales, he adapted it, creating different areas, using the space in clever ways. He had messy contraptions rigged up so that he could write or make paintings using wax crayons and ink. The contraptions reminded me of Professor Brainstorm, as did all the pairs of reading glasses he had lying around. His flat generally felt like the kind of flat The Borrowers would make in a shoe box. He painted the doors white, bought some new felt tips, and then Everybody’s Doors began to fill with art.
My dad would often cook toad-in-the-hole or macaroni cheese. In the mornings, I would get into his double bed and watch his black and white TV whilst he made me a cooked breakfast in bed. While I was eating it, he would read to me. He read me the Iliad and the Odyssey. My brother had got into the Lord of the Rings, so he read that to me too. He had never read it before, so we experienced it together for the first time. When I was talking to him the other day, he’d forgotten he’d read me Homer, but he did remember reading me the Lord of the Rings.
I chose not to tell him what was happening in the other house. I didn’t want to bring my darkness into the light he was making.
My dad had his own difficulties during the Coventry years. A local gang of kids singled him out, broke his windows with golf balls and made him feel unsafe. He once told me that the first time he ever felt like an old person was when he went out to try to reason with the kids, and their leader threatened him. He didn’t tell me about that till later when I was an adult. I’m glad we both got the chance to fill each other in.
When my mum and stepdad’s marriage finally self-destructed, my mum, my sister and I moved to Cardiff. My dad moved back in with us as a lodger. He had two rooms of the house. He looked after me and my little sister, becoming a second father to her during some of her dark years, bringing some light into her childhood.
By Cardiff, my dad was an older man. His hearing wasn’t very good anymore, which was useful to him in some ways because he couldn’t hear all the arguments that ripped through that house. He’s adaptable, and possibly too forgiving, so he managed to create an eye in the storm. Again, I didn’t talk to him about the storms — not the one my mum was whipping into her children, and not the systematic bullying I was experiencing in my new secondary school. But again, despite his ignorance of the danger, he still provided a haven. I spent a lot of time with him.
When we moved to Cardiff, I was 11. As I entered my teens, our conversations became about more adult topics like art and politics and belief. He read my writing and consistently gave it unjustified praise. I tried to read his writing, but couldn’t really understand it. We got drunk together. We smoked together. We would go out for meals to La Lupa, the local Italian restaurant, and stay there drinking until it closed. He came to see me in every play I was in.
He believed in me. He still does. He’s always certain that whatever I’m working on is going to make it big. I have long circular conversations with him about whether luck, rather than merit, is more important. He agrees on paper that luck and privilege are more important factors than talent, but when he sees something he thinks is great, he believes it will make it. It’s odd to me that he can have this kind of belief as someone who has spent all his life not having his novels or his poetry published, someone who has had a few brushes with success, but has ultimately not ‘made it’. But as bitter sweet or even annoying as his belief in my work is now, I don’t think I would still be making stuff if it wasn’t for the belief he put into my work then.
His belief in things — like seeing the good in people, making the best of situations, thinking your novel will be published and make enough money to solve all the people he loves problems — is a double edged sword. In Cardiff he definitely had his vision of what was happening in the house distorted by the myths he told himself about how life could be for me and my sister. Even before he became someone with dementia, we would disagree about what happened in that house: he would remember the story he was telling himself, and I would surprise him with the context around it.
When I went away to university, we would speak on the phone for hours. He came to visit regularly, taking my girlfriend and me out for big drunken meals. He came to see every production I was involved in and was the life and soul of the after parties.
“Where’s my dad,” I said once to my girlfriend, who I’d left looking after him.
“Oh God, I’ve lost him,” she said.
I found him in a room with a young man, whose nickname was “Slut Boy”, both of them happily partaking in a Yoda-shaped bong.
I took him back to the main party. It was a busy night, and since the party was celebrating a play I’d written and directed, I felt I had a responsibility to mingle.
Later that evening, I found my girlfriend frantically looking for him again. We ended up searching the university for him for the rest of the night, which was actually quite fun. It was in the early days of our relationship so everything was an adventure. We finally went to the campus visiting room he was staying in, and found him sleeping it off in bed. When we knocked on the door, he woke up and we sat on the edge of his bed and had a night cap. I remember thinking about sitting next to him in bed as a child, and about how I’d never expected him to live to see me be 19.
My girlfriend would go on to become my partner, and we have been together now for 16 years. He believes in her work too, constantly asking if her novel has been published yet, believing it’s so good that it’s just a matter of time before it hits big-time. He keeps suggesting that she’s the modern day equivalent of Virginia Wolf, which isn’t a very apt analogy, apart from the fact that they are both women who write novels.
At university, I took ecstasy and found it a powerful and important experience. In some ways, it opened doors in me that I’d closed during my childhood. I wanted to share the experience with my dad, so I arranged for him to come to visit. I’d already told him about my previous experiences, and sent him some reading materials about the drug. Unfortunately, by the time I was doing this, my dad had a dodgy heart, and so he didn’t take any pills, but he smoked weed and enjoyed the love. My dad has always been someone full of love. I wish the timing had worked out differently though, as I would have loved to take ecstasy with my dad. He would have loved it.
A couple of years after finishing university, my partner and I moved to London. We moved there partly so I could be near my dad during his final years. Since then, I’ve never lived more than 20 minutes away from him.
When he came to London and started renting a flat from my eldest sister, he brought back Everybody’s Wall in his hallway, and it’s been lovely to see a new generation of children get some of the wonder that I had, although fewer adults have contributed to the new walls because it’s a pretty tight hallway to sit in.
His house is still filled with contraptions. Now they’re often designed to help him navigate being less physically able than he was — devices for picking things up or moving things about. A life time of thinking of the world in this way has prepared him well in many ways for finding strategies to mitigate the frustrations and restrictions of aging.
I currently live round the corner from him, and I see him daily unless someone else is seeing him or he is staying with one of my siblings. In some ways, I am now his carer. Certainly I am one of many people who provide him with love and support.
I’ve been friends with him for 36 years, and when I see him now, we are both haunted by memories of when he was a different person. I often want to talk to the dad I used to know. That dad is still there, he’s within the person I know now, and he’s inside my memories and the memories of the people who know him. But he’s not fully there, and he never will be again.
But then I’m a different version of me, and I will never be the people I have been again.
I’m just very glad that we are still good friends.
This is part of a collection of essays that I will be releasing here on medium weekly over the next few months. Click here to read the introduction.
Read part 7 here:
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Thanks to J Adamthwaite who edited these pieces for punctuation/grammar and provided notes and support.
