On my father’s 99th birthday…

My father, sister and I in London, 1964. My mother took the photograph.

Today would have been my father’s 99th birthday.

It’s been a particularly momentous time for us both; it took ninety-eight-and-a-half years for his Scottish son to arrive in his home town, to visit the street where he was born, to look at the school and the church he went to, to stand at his parents’ graveside, to get a sense of what family means.

And for his Scottish son to finally get a measure of what he was like as a man.

Big year.  Big, big year.

This is probably the most evocative photograph I have of myself and my father: the memories of that trip to London are still somehow pin sharp to me.  So I thought I’d reproduce here a very short piece I contributed to a British Council anthology, “Identity Papers”, published in 2001 to celebrate the cultural diversity of “Britishness”.  I hope you like it.

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“If you see a German soldier…”

On my mantleshelf, a black-and-white photograph shows a jerkin-clad boy, squatting down, hands cupped, outstretched, feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square. I am beaming: I have never been so close to wildlife before. My little sister stands behind me spearing the ground with her umbrella – was it pink? – and stares at the camera like some stern-faced little goddess. My father is on his knees beside her, her hand in his. He shines at her, a fifty-year old man already, proud of something so tiny and perfect. Huge in the background looms a great black lion: we are obviously oblivious to it.

It was 1964. I remember the sweaty journey from Glasgow to Euston: the dusty fabric of the cramped first class carriage with its tiny ledge by the window; the old couple who sucked humbugs and tutted at noisy children; the joy of moving to second class where my mother found a huge table on which we could spread our crayons and colouring books. We visited my father in his lodgings, and my mother scolded him because all he’d organised to eat was Polish bread and liver sausage and cabanos (my sister and I thought it a feast), and I fell asleep watching Gregory Peck win a sea battle in a Hornblower movie and felt at the centre of his Empire because the next day we were going to see Buckingham Palace. And I never thought my father wasn’t part of that.

My childhood brought “Dad’s Army” and “Hogan’s Heroes”, or “Colditz” and “Manhunt”, in which resourceful heroes outwitted crop-haired villains who wore handsome black uniforms. I went to the cinema every Saturday with my friends and watched “The Longest Day”, “The Great Escape”, “The Battle of the Bulge”, and when we emerged from the gloom we were true British heroes, dancing and singing down the street:

“Holy Mary I am dying

Just one word before I go

If you see a German soldier

Shove a bayonet up his

Hoooo-lll-y Mary I am dying…”

My dad won the Iron Cross. I was fourteen when two suited detectives – perhaps Special Branch, how would I know? – came to the house to interview him and left smiling, shaking his hand. He spoke of his unit, pinned down by two Russian tanks, his comrades killed one by one each night they came marauding, and of how his flame-thrower stopped them. And he spoke of the frostbite and the wounds he received, and hinted at the terrible things he’d seen and done which made him whimper when he fell asleep in his fireside chair. I loved him for telling me.

Being British sloughed off me like snakeskin after that, and I knew why my dreams took place in sleety landscapes of sleek black cobbles and high tenements where there lurked an atmosphere of War having started or having ended, either being much the same. All the Churchillianisms I had grown up with signified nothing, made not one bit of difference.

We are what our fathers make us.

from “Identitiy Papers”, The British Council, 2001, isbn 086355489X

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