This Be The Verse

They Fuck You Up, Your Mum And Dad

Why do I write? I don't know. I can remember my childhood well enough without writing it down and my early life wasn't all that different from anybody else's. We didn't bathe in the coal scuttle and hide from the rent collector in a pile of mud. I wasn't sexually abused by a funny uncle or experimented on by National Health doctors. My parents didn't keep pigeons in the bathtub or perform amateur dentistry with the coal tongs. I was not then, nor have I ever been, black. Mine was not an award-winning childhood, nor even a best-selling one; the last episode didn't even rate a cherry. So why would you care?

Surely I'm safe here? You've never met me and you never will. You don't know who Housetrained is, and even if you discovered my real name, what would that tell you? I could walk past you in the street tomorrow and you wouldn't know it. My face might as well be a Guy Fawkes mask; my ABC identity a false beard worn over a mask. So maybe I can tell you the truth?

The ABC effect, as scientists call it, works in your favour too. Because you don't know me, you needn't be embarrassed that I'm telling you all this personal stuff. It's just one more bit of ash from Angela's paperback.

Now I have to come up with the goods before you decide you've been tricked, before you yawn and click on something else. So here it is.

I had a father.

I have recently had to write to my son, who I haven't seen since he was barely able to stand, to explain why fathers, to me, are not good things. To tell him why, in not being one, I have done him a favour. I couldn't tell him everything, of course. I didn't mention how, when my father was dying of cancer, he fell out of bed and I couldn't bear to touch him. But I can tell you: you're part of the ABC Secret Society. You know the special handshake.

You'd think that anybody who'd had a miserable childhood would be determined to be a better parent themselves. Maybe they do indeed wish for that, but it rarely works. Ask any psychiatrist. It's not that they don't want to do better, it's just that they have no example to follow. They've never seen a happy childhood so they don't know what the ingredients are or how happiness is made. Their instincts are distorted, and although they can eventually work the whole thing out by Latin verse and hard sums, instincts are instant and computation takes ages. The results arrive just in time to cause regret, not to prevent the action from happening in the first place.

Now you'll be keen to hear how our father would slice us in two wit' bread knife, as those wacky Monty Python boys put it. Perhaps you'd like to know how my father hit me in the eye and almost blinded me? It happened. The nurses were suspicious and wanted to know more. The story my parents had come up with was that I'd got into a fight in the Woolpack, a notoriously violent pub in the area. It might have been believable if the drinking age had been lowered to twelve. These days I imagine the police would be called as a matter of course, but they didn't involve themselves in 'domestics' in those days. People could pretty well do as they liked as long as it was behind their own front door. It wouldn't have done me the slightest good to tell anybody the truth, and I would have been assaulted later for my trouble, so I kept quiet about it. A familiar story to some, I think.

Physical violence, although a regular occurrence, wasn't the real problem. Our father, hallowed be his name, had no interest whatsoever in children, his own or anybody else's. Come to that, he didn't have any interest in people. I met his sisters for the first time at his funeral. When I asked him once why he had no friends, he informed me that, "grown-ups don't have friends." I met his parents on a few occasions when I was very young and still living in the London area. His mother seemed okay, she asked me if I liked rock and roll; his father had a whiney, complaining voice. Their house was tiny: the two down I can confirm; the two up I assume. That's about all I remember of them. They didn't come to his funeral, although they were still alive at the time.

I'm not being 100% truthful here. I did see his parents again a few times, although I didn't talk to them. They spoke only to my father. In Salisbury I overheard some of their conversation. It was about urinals. My father, who had a working class vocabulary, which in those days would mean he got by on about five thousand words, would occasionally pick up a new word and use it at every opportunity. I presume he'd just heard of urinals. His parents had a working class vocabulary a generation older and probably knew two or three thousand words. For comparison, Shakespeare's plays contain about thirty thousand distinct word forms. My father's father (I never thought of him as my grandfather) claimed to be learning German. In ten years of imaginary study he'd got as far as 'ein, zwei'. I don't know whether he ever learned 'drei'.

This might give you an idea of life with my father. Once he came home with a jar of honey in which was floating a lump of real honeycomb. This was to be a treat for our tea: we would each have a piece of the honeycomb. He thought it would be like the 'honeycomb' (cinder toffee) in the middle of a Crunchie bar, only better. In anybody else that might have been endearing, but even though it must have been evident to my father, once he'd tried a piece, that the stuff was inedible and only there for decoration, he couldn't admit his mistake. We were all, my mother included, forced to eat mouthfuls of wax to show our gratitude. He was very big on gratitude, my father. Nobody ever showed enough of it to satisfy him.

That's why I couldn't be a father. I wouldn't have repeated the honeycomb incident, of course, I know what the stuff is made of, but I am inventive enough to have come up with any number of ideas of my own. I hope my son understands. I am willing to believe that a good father can be a great blessing but I know from experience that a bad one should be avoided at all costs.