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
Chivalry
When I made a show about my relationship with masculinity, I talked a lot about my mum and my stepdad, but my dad hardly featured at all.
When he did, he was a positive presence and represented an alternative version of masculinity. When you’re trying to condense your history into an hour-long show, you have to leave some bits out. But there’s also something inside me that doesn’t want to deconstruct my dad. I don’t want to mess too much with the positive parts of my childhood.
My mum likes to tell stories about ridiculous things my dad has done. Like the time when he thought it would be funny to write in black marker pen on someone’s perfectly white leather jacket because they were posing with it at the local pub. He thought he was popping their bubble. What he was actually doing was irreversible property damage to an item of clothing that someone loved.
At times in my life, I’ve thought I was popping bubbles too. I have a friend who falls within the narrow band of what people consider attractive. At a friend’s stag night, he was wearing a white t-shirt which showed off his chest muscles beautifully. I poured a pint of coke down it because I wanted to pop his bubble. I thought he would find it funny too. He didn’t. He went to punch me in the face, managed to control his anger, and instead grabbed my glasses and ran out of the pub.
Both these incidents involve drunk men thinking they’re justified; thinking their actions are impish rather than destructive; hiding their jealousy in hijinks. There are lots of kinds of masculinity that men can aspire to, and many of them can be toxic.
At an anarchist coffee shop in a squat in Berlin, I found myself outraged by the commercialism involved in that particular political scene. I picked up a cigarette from a packet someone had left on the table and lit it. My friends stared at me in horror. “All property is theft,” I said, inhaling stolen smoke and feeling like I was making some kind of a point. My friend told me that the packet of cigarettes didn’t belong to the anarchists in the squat but to a person they were paying to do some renovations. I looked over at a man doing physical labour in silence as I smoked his cigarette. Thinking I was teaching middle class hypocrites a lesson, I, a middle class hypocrite, had stolen a working class man’s property.
My dad once got arrested for being drunk and disorderly. Two police officers had come over to him as he was stumbling drunkenly home. He had responded to them asking him if he was alright by calling them fascists. The way he tells it, he had called them fascists in a friendly way, and was really surprised that they had taken offence. That my dad thinks you can call the police fascists and they will take it in a friendly way clearly demonstrates, I think, that he is middle class and white. In that moment, those qualities didn’t help him as much as they usually do. He was eventually released with a fine that his employers paid for him, and wasn’t killed, so those qualities were still helpful. There are lots of structural critiques you can make of the police force, but it’s hard to justify criticising them for trying to help a drunk person find their way home.
If I compare my dad’s masculinity to my stepdad’s, I can definitely say that my dad’s did me less harm. But it isn’t just the harm that men do to other people that creates patriarchal structures: it’s also the privileges enjoyed by men within society. It’s easy to look out at the world and see the things that make it unequal, but it’s harder to look into yourself and find those things there.
My dad says that he grew up lower middle class, he passed the 11 plus to get into grammar school; his further education was provided by the army after the war. He was already politically radical before he went to war, having been introduced to radical ideas by two of his teachers (who were conscientious objectors when he met them, although they would both go on to be important people in the Special Operations Executive) and the war helped him to relate theory to reality, as all classes mixed within the conscripted army. After the war, 1945 happened, and my dad saw a government and a moment that appeared to be on a path towards socialism. His documentary film work meant that he documented mining communities in working class towns within this new context. It also meant that he saw what was done to those communities.
His politics were not just related to capital and class; he had open relationships (again, inspired by his radical teachers) before the “sex positive” times we live in now. He embraced the 60s and read all the feminist and anti-establishment texts. His bookshelves are half filled with political writings, his own notes scribbled in the margins. The other half of his bookcases are filled with fiction. And that fiction is generally the fiction of old white men, his literary heroes including Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway and DH Laurence.
He has lived through a time when the world has changed (and also not changed) around so many issues, and he hasn’t always worked out the contradictions. He is aware of them; they have been some of his big obsessions. In his writing, he has pulled and pulled at them.
He has been a man in many different moments and many different contexts. Whilst he has progressive attitudes in many ways, he has not avoided the influence of time and society. He has always had a tendency to put women on pedestals, to create myths around them and romanticise them. Until he got to the point where age took away his libido, he was an endless flirt.
When I think of the ways I saw romance and women as a teenager, I can see most of these qualities in me. I was generally less of a flirt because I felt ugly and had very low social capital, but give me a few drinks and that part would come out too.
In the first term of university at a party, I went over to a girl I had a crush on and drunkenly announced to her and everyone else in the room she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen, and asked if she would like to go out with me. She politely turned me down, but she remembered the moment, and mentioned it a few times as a moment that was really good for her self-esteem. But I feel really awkward about it and wish she’d forget it. I’m suspicious of my passion in that moment: I didn’t feel that strongly before or after. I feel like I was playing out some kind of script that I now realise may have been cribbed from watching my dad at parties. I wince now, remembering those kinds of moments: the hyperbole, the entitlement, the unconscious emulation of my father. For a while, I really bought into the same contradictions as my dad.
During the first two years or so of my conversation podcast, you can hear me trying to square the circle, trying to work out how to bridge the gap between the sexes before I realised that it isn’t a binary situation; that the gap doesn’t exist; that the questions I was asking were based on false premises.
When I was growing up, my dad was a member of a feminist book club, and he bought me lots of books from their children’s section. His attitude to women has always been different to the main messages being communicated to me by society. He has many close friendships with women. By the time I knew him, the role he played in the houses I grew up in was domestic and caring. He modelled a version of masculinity that was loving and affectionate, unlike the distance and violence that I saw from my stepdad and the boys and men who policed my masculinity at school.
The reason that my parents had stopped being romantically involved before I was conceived was that my dad had left my mum to start a new life with an American woman he had fallen in love with. He would have left with her to go to America, but after a few days, she decided she would prefer to go on her own. He now sees her as a puzzle: the one that got away. I wonder what kind of man and what kind of father he would have been if she hadn’t. Instead of going to America, he returned to the family home, where I would be conceived in one of those complicated moments people have when they’re splitting up.
My dad left his first wife for their lodger, who he had fallen in love with. That lodger was my mother. When I’ve pressed him on what it was about my mum that attracted him to her, the answer I’ve received is “her legs”. He goes back to a specific moment where she was standing on a ladder and he was compelled by her legs. Something in that sexual moment helped him decide to leave his wife (who still had one young child) for a woman twenty years younger than him and call it love. When my dad talks about romantic love, he talks about it like it makes you powerless: when love happens, you have to just go with it — ride it like a wave, wherever it takes you.
The thing about getting older is it makes it harder to disguise things. There were a few years when my dad had lost his charm but still had his libido, when his flirtations were more likely to be read as creepy. You could see it was a script he followed — not a conscious script as such, but the way he had learnt to behave to women when drunk. Saying how beautiful and brilliant they are, being very self-deprecating and making grandiose statements were not gestures received in the same way anymore. Not that my dad would have seen himself as successful with women necessarily, but people generally reacted to him with amusement or affection, or one of the other stances we take socially that don’t hold people accountable. Whilst it was sad for him when he did finally lose interest in the practicalities of romance and sex, I found it a relief.
I think, whilst there are complicated things I have received from him around masculinity, they are vastly outweighed by the good, and most of them I’ve hopefully left in my teens and early twenties. Which is not to say I’ve deprogrammed the toxic elements of my own masculinity. Far from it. And like my dad, I am inconsistent: it’s easier to change your ideas than it is to change your emotions; it’s easy to talk the talk, but changing the way you walk takes time and involves lots of missteps.
My dad calls his doctor the BLD (Beautiful Lady Doctor). He thinks it’s charming, but I don’t. I find it frustrating. She apparently also finds it charming, but then he’s 93, and she’s just retiring, and both of those elements contextualise her response. When my dad was young, there weren’t women doctors. His daughters, granddaughters and great granddaughters have lives he couldn’t have imagined, and he supports and celebrates those lives.
As his physical health has worsened, it’s become clearer and clearer that he is more trapped within the constructs of masculinity than I realised. He hides his weakness from people. He won’t accept a seat on a crowded tube, especially not from a woman. He tries to be the one looking after everyone; he wants to be the one who pays; he tries to carry things that women are carrying, even though they are more able. Because he is my father, he tries to protect me too. In fact, in some ways, this idea of himself that he is living up to isn’t gendered, but even when it isn’t, it also kind of is. He doesn’t know how to ask for help. He has pride in being seen in certain ways, and he will do everything he can to maintain that illusion.
This is just one way to interpret my dad. It’s reductive, and there are other truths and other ways of framing his life.
As I mentioned, there have been many versions of my dad. Maybe one of the oddest moments in his relationship with masculinity happened the year my mum and my step dad separated. It took a while for my mum to find a house for the whole family in Cardiff where she had started working. During that time, my dad moved in with my stepdad in Coventry, coming to live in the home my mum had previously been occupying, taking on the role she’d been playing, although since he was a retired person, it wasn’t as hard for him as it had been for her: he wasn’t doing everything around a full-time job and a two-hour commute. But he slotted into the social role of wife. He did all the housework, looked after the children and cooked all the food. My stepdad continued to do what he had been doing up to that point: going to work, coming home, sitting at the end of the table reading the newspaper and drinking Guinness. My dad would poor him his drinks, serve him his food, and ask him about his day. Both men were aware of the oddness of this set up, but my dad took on the role in a resigned way. I remember being surprised to see that my stepdad was both grateful and embarrassed about this power differential. I’d never seen him acknowledge the inequality when it had been my mum doing all the work.
I talk to my dad about feminism and intersectionality and rejecting the gender binary, and he is theoretically very in favour of these ideas. Yet he is past the point of learning and changing on a personal level now. Over his life, he has changed and grown in many ways. His attitudes have always embraced new ideas; he has challenged and adapted his beliefs. But the time for that is over. We have the conversation, he seriously considers what I’m saying — often he agrees — and then the next day he’ll have forgotten it all when I mention it.
I have been working on myself around these areas for a long time now, and it’s painful to feel a gulf opening up between us. Our relationship has always been based around agreeing on art and on politics, and I feel like he has got off a boat we were both travelling in.
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 6 here:
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Thanks to J Adamthwaite who edited these pieces for punctuation/grammar and provided notes and support.
