Dad

My father died on 22nd April 1998, and yesterday I re-visited the place where my sister and I scattered some of his ashes, the churchyard in the London suburbs where his own father is buried. As with a lot of things these days, I was conscious that it will be more difficult to do this once I have moved.

It's not easy to get to even from where I am living now. You take the train from Liverpool Street station and after about twenty minutes you change onto a branch line for one stop. There is a walk of a mile or so to the church. Once the centre of a small town, it is now surrounded by rows of suburban housing and shopping complexes, a neighbourhood subsumed into Greater London just before the latter peters out into the flat fields of Essex. It is an unexpectedly beautiful and peaceful churchyard for such an unprepossessing area, quiet save for a chorus of birdsong, and green and wild without being unkempt.

I have known that I would want to blog about Dad at some point, and that it would be hard to do. Our relationship was not easy. He was a good man, sensitive, kind, but distant and sometimes authoritarian. A lot of the qualities that I would like to think I possess to some degree, at least on my good days, I have inherited from him: friendliness, integrity, consideration for others, a sense of humour and an ability to laugh at the ridiculous. The other part of the deal is that along with these he passed on worry, perfectionism, a certain judgmentalism, distrust of strong emotions and a lack of confidence.

He was trying hard to hold a tricky marriage together - a more than full-time job - and had no emotional reserves left over. I was a bright, lively but hypersensitive and insecure child, craving affection but sensing rejection even where it did not necessarily exist. Put the two together and it was not good news.

By the time I was a teenager the walls between us were in place. Rows, tears, silences. I was convinced he had no time for or interest in me and withdrew totally and he responded in kind. Or did he withdraw first? Who knows. We were both hurt and neither could help the other. Awful. And since then the automatic emotional tic of anticipating rejection and exclusion and retreating before it happens has been difficult to overcome.

We settled into a polite, friendly but distant relationship when I became an adult. Both of us hated upset and confrontation so we went out of our way to avoid it. There were things I would like to have talked through with him, questions I wanted to ask, but I wasn't able to speak. My defences by then were so strong that I couldn't say the things I needed to say to him and hear the things I needed to hear from him - the real things - even when I knew he was dying.

It wasn't always this way. I was told once that it is worthwhile searching very early childhood memories, that in some way they hold a key, they illustrate a theme that will recur throughout life.

The clearest memory I have is of waiting with my mother at the bus stop to go to visit my grandmother, probably at around three years old. My father had boarded the same bus earlier along the route having come straight from work, and I was literally jumping up and down with the excitement of going on a journey with him. I can remember running ahead of my mother along the aisle of the bus when it arrived and clambering up alongside him on the seat.

I was waiting for my father to arrive, and he did and I was overjoyed and so was he. I have spent a lot of my emotional life trying to recapture the essence of that moment.

I believe that he would want me to heal anything that still needs to be healed, to move on, to love and to live well and to remember him with compassion and affection. I want that too.