I do not know how many of you are reading Gamba’s excellent series of pieces on her adolescence and how it has shaped her but if you have not given her site a visit go now and come back here some other time. Her series of articles are amongst the best I’ve read. They are the sort of thing which inspires slavish plagiarism you to try to rise to the standard she sets.
What she has written has prompted me to think back to what were key moments in my own childhood and adolescence. Inevitably that means dealing with my relationship with my father. Those of you who have been around here a while will know that that relationship was a very poor one.
My father’s own background was that he was the eldest of two children born into a sternly disciplinarian family. My Grandfather had through a devotion to study and an inflexible determination escaped (and then disowned) his own lowly Welsh family. He became the Headmaster of a “reform school” (which was a sort of school-cum-prison for young offenders). My Grandmother was the Matron at the school. As you can probably imagine they valued obedience. My father, who had ambitions to go to sea, was sent to school at Brentwood Boys School (a single sex boarding school)Â and HMS Conway, an extraordinary floating seamanship school in an old sailing ship. These two institutions were, remarkably, still more rigorously disciplinarian than his home.
Having gone to sea he rose through the officer ranks and obtained his master’s ticket conferring the rank of “Captain”. Shortly, before I was born he took a further step and joined the ranks of ships’ pilots. From very early on he was delivering orders and expecting them to be complied with. His own upbringing had instilled in him the idea that as head of the family his word was law and his professional life did nothing but reinforce that assumption.
His relationship with my mother was dysfunctional; his work was hard and required him to perform his duties at unpredictable and unsocial hours leaving him short of sleep. These factors aggravated an already brittle temper to the extent that he seemed to spend his time at home barely restraining his rage.
I grew up in the 70s when corporal punishment for errant children was the norm. Parents who suggested that they would never smack their child were dismissed either as liars or incorrigible hippies. Even in that context my father stood out as an enthusiast for never sparing the rod for fear of spoling the child. For my part, I was a willful child which made conflict inevitable.
I should make it clear that I am not suggesting that I finished every day black and blue. In fact he never broke a bone or left a visible bruise.
Sometimes physical punishment was inflicted as part of a disciplinary set-piece. For instance, at age 6 I got the belt because my teacher complained I had untidy writing. These formal beatings were inflicted when he was calm and were no more frequent than once a year.
More commonly he would, in a rage,  engage in a practice that he referred to as “giving you a thick ear”. This was a blow to the head delivered usually as you walked past him. It has left me with an odd tic: I cannot stand having pepole come up and stand behind me when I am working or eating. One of us would receive a think ear each week or so.
Still more common was a sort of aggressive humiliation. One of his favourite techniques was the “what are you?” call and response. He might say, for instance, to my sister at the dinner table:
“You are an idiot. What are you?”
You were then expected to reply that you were an idiot. In a different mood you might be a “waste of space”.
I hated him. I also hated the constant fear that something would set him into a rage and I longed to get away. I discovered early that retreating to my bedroom was the best course: I would avoid him if I could.
I did reasonably well at school and as I grew and came to know more that gave me, unexpectedly, a certain immunity. There were matters where my own knowledge exceeded his and, for a reason that I never quite grasped, this led to the humiliations and the thumpings lessening in frequency.
One day I made a big mistake. I was 17 and a year from leaving school. There had developed at my school a perverse habit of greeting one another by sticking up two fingers. This is the British equivalent of an extended middle finger. It was intended ironically. One Saturday lunchtime I was walking home from town. My father drove past in the opposite direction in his big green Volvo. He sounded the horn and I looked up, “flicked him the Vs” and waved. He was on his way to his club for a drink or two. For some reason it did not occur to me that whilst my school friends would recognise the gesture as a greeting my father might see it differently. I left the house again before my father returned from his drinking and returned at about 6. As I came through the back door of the house I heard him bellow “get in here”. I knew I was in trouble but could not think why. I found him in the kitchen. He grabbed me and shook me and demanded to know whether I had gestured at him. My stomach turned over. I admitted I had and started to try to explain but I knew that I was never going to finish the excuse. He began to punch me. I adopted the boxer’s protective pose; forearms up to protect my face, leaning forward and his punches hit me in the ribs and back. My mother was screaming for him to stop it.
There was nothing inherently unusual about being knocked about. It wasn’t common anymore but it wasn’t exactly unfamiliar. Why then was this a turning point? As he attacked me I found that instead of the usual panic I was thinking very clearly. My first thought was that he was not really hurting me very much. I had grown to a size where, frankly, I could take what he was capable of dishing out. A clear choice presented itself: I could either continue to submit and wait for him to calm down or I could take him on. I cannot pretend that the thought of laying him out was not appealing to me, but it did not happen. What, I asked myself, would happen once I had beaten him? I would have to move out. Where would I go? How could I keep studying and what would happen to my plans to go to university? I weighed my long term escape plans against the short-term satisfaction of giving as good as I got and waited him out.
Some good has come of my fractured relaionship with my father. It has left me with no respect for authority which is often useful in cross-examination as it allows me to ask impertinent questions of high ranking witnesses. It has left me cussed and determined to not to be dismissed or worn down. Perhaps most significantly, I am acclimatised to dread which is again useful at the Bar as the fear associated with having to take on and fight a big case never quite overwhelms me; it just buzzes in the background of my consciousness as my fear of my father always used to.
But I would rather it had been different for myself, my brother and my sisters and sometimes I catch myself wishing I loved him.
