Fathers and Sons (11 page)

‘That’s a big if, Chris…but do you really think so?’

I came out from behind the door. ‘What’s a jenny callerp?’

My mother turned to me. ‘What are you doing, Mr Spy? It’s nothing. Nothing at all. Anyway, your father’s too old to be called up now.’

As the Soviet/US standoff worsened, my parents tried to explain to my sister and me a little about Russians and rockets and atom bombs. It was all way above my head, but Elizabeth burst into tears and sobbed, ‘Are we all going to die, then?’

Suddenly, after a week or so, the enervating atmosphere evaporated. Everyone was smiling again and saying that Mr Kennedy had saved the world.

A year later he was gunned down, and when I grew up I was increasingly puzzled that my personal memories of the day he died should be so vivid. I was only seven. Lots of people my age have no recall of it at all.

Now I believe it is because another trauma occurred almost immediately afterwards; a personal one so shocking to me that it fixed this period in my childhood in my mind for ever.

The first time my father thrashed me.

I suppose I must have been smacked a few times by both my parents up to this point, but I can’t really remember it. I do have an image of my grandmother rapping me over the knuckles with a walking stick for saying I was ‘sick of this damn weather’–swearing of any kind was not tolerated at
Kiln Farm–but it didn’t really hurt, and neither was it meant to; very much a token tap.

So the shock of being beaten with a cane–a long bamboo stick, part of a big bundle kept in the garden shed for supporting runner beans in summer–was total.

I wish I could remember exactly what I did wrong that prompted the first thrashing, but that particular mental home video stubbornly refuses to roll. The tape only starts after my infraction, with my father pointing a finger at me. His hand is trembling with rage and his face is dark.

‘Wait here.’

So I stand calmly in the living room, obediently waiting while he goes out into the garden. I am not particularly frightened. I am familiar with my father’s occasional outbursts of temper and hearing his baritone crack as he bellows at full volume, but the worst that has ever happened is to be sent to my room for a couple of hours, or early to bed. This last punishment, involving as it does missed children’s television, is certainly enough to produce tears of protest and grovelling appeals for mercy.

Today, I hear the shed door grating open. There is a stiff point where the wood tries to jam against the garden path and it always makes the same groaning rasp as it is forced open. The unmistakable sound will soon come to have a Pavlovian effect on me, producing a weakness in the knees, a spasm in the belly and a suddenly dry mouth. This first day, it’s just our shed door being opened.

My father is back, holding one of the garden canes I help him plant in his vegetable patch every spring. I like to pretend
the triangles and cross-lashings are wigwams, and when they are complete I lurk beneath them, waiting to ambush the Lone Ranger as he rides past. I can’t imagine why he has brought one into the house.

‘Turn around.’

I obey, wondering what’s going on. There is a painting on the wall in front of me, of an autumnal Canadian lake with blue-grey rocks rising from the still, clear water. Perhaps I am going to have to count them, or–

The back of my legs have caught fire. I hear the dry cracking of burning wood. There it is again, and now my buttocks are burning too. Another sharp crack and my back is alight. Too shocked and consumed by agony to move at first, I find I cannot breathe either. My lungs have stopped working.

I manage to stumble into a half-turn in time to see my father bringing his stick whistling through the air in a sideways arc meant to connect with my shoulder blades, but instead it meets with the muscle of my upper arm. I collapse to my knees in agony, eyes wide, mouth open as I desperately try to suck in air.

My father steps back, breathing heavily. It occurs to me that this is why I cannot; he is using up all the air in the room.

‘Right. Next time, do as you’re told.’

As he walks out of the room again, I at last manage to drag in a juddering, shuddering gasp, but when I try to breathe out, a most surprising and disconcerting thing happens. I make a noise just like the whistle on our kitchen kettle when it boils.

And so I continue to kneel there awhile, screaming.

A new regime had begun. I quickly discerned that the beatings I was now intermittently subjected to were rarely a result of especially bad behaviour. I could tell that they stemmed from a loss of control on my father’s part. He had always been prone to losing his temper and shouting at my sister and me when we were naughty, but that no longer seemed enough for him, as far as I was concerned. He did not hit Elizabeth.

I must have known that the thrashings were excessive because, tellingly, I didn’t mention them to anyone. I never confided anything about it to anyone at Rush Green Junior School, which I walked to each morning. I realised after several playground conversations about parental discipline that although many of my friends were also physically chastised, my own beatings were of a different order. The ultimate sanction in other homes seemed to be a ritual whack across the palm with a ruler or belt, or the application of a slipper to the bottom. One boy said his father kept a stick in a cupboard and would occasionally brandish it in heated moments, but had never actually struck any of his children with it.

I cannot remember how frequent the thrashings were. They must have been staggered because I can distinctly recall periods where I decided they must have stopped for good. Then I would do something to enrage my father and my heart would falter as once again I stood alone in a room, listening to the distant shed door grind open.

My mother was torn. She had sworn to love, honour and obey her husband and he had a dominant ‘I know best’ attitude to disciplining his son. I don’t think she was fully aware
how hard I was being hit; I have a dim memory of my father downplaying it in a row with her about it.

When I discussed it with her recently, she told me that the issue became an increasingly serious one in her marriage. She was very unhappy about the situation, but the canings usually took place when she was not in the house–often on a Saturday–and, for some reason I still don’t fully understand, I didn’t tell her what had happened when she arrived home. I think that, at a fundamental level, I felt ashamed of myself. And as my father didn’t actually draw blood or break bones, I just wanted to forget the experiences as quickly as possible and pushed them to the back of my mind. It was some time before matters came to a head.

And, of course, corporal punishment in schools was de rigueur in the 1960s. Later I would be caned several times at my grammar school–for the most trivial of reasons; I once received three strokes for throwing a paper dart in an English class–and got short shrift from my parents when I informed them. Until recently, troublesome youths were routinely birched by order of the magistrates; the culture was quite astonishingly different just a few decades ago.

Because my father continued being a loving, indulgent parent in the sunny periods between the beatings, I was confused. As quickly as an hour after a caning he would be speaking gently to me and even offering contrite apologies.

I also think I dimly discerned that these rages, so painful for me when they erupted, had little or nothing to do with my behaviour. I knew the punishments were completely disproportionate to the crimes. And today, I am certain they were the
last reflex stirrings of the abiding resentment my father felt about his own childhood. I was quite literally his whipping boy, for a time. His anger went very deep and occasionally it would consume him completely. That doesn’t justify what he did to me over a two or three year period, but I have to reconcile his basic decency and gentleness as a father with these grotesque outpourings of violent anger.

Significantly, he never struck my sister, let alone my mother.

It was a strictly father–son thing.

I was nearly ten and had bumped into my mother at the shops as I walked home from school. I persuaded her to buy a packet of Rolos for us all to share after supper that evening.

Back home watching
Blue Peter
, I called to her in the kitchen.

‘Mum, can I have one of those Rolos?’

‘No. After supper.’

‘Go on. Just one…’

‘Oh, all right. They’re in my raincoat pocket. Just one, though.’

‘Promise.’

Fifteen minutes later, as Valerie Singleton told us the programme’s cat was getting over the flu, I was looking in horror at the ripped paper on the carpet in front of me. There was just one Rolo left.

I stuffed it back into my mother’s pocket with the wrappings and hoped for the best. Maybe I could blame it on Elizabeth.

Later, after we’d all eaten, my mother went to get the sweets. She came back with the solitary survivor, looking more amused than cross.

‘OK, who ate all of these?’

My sister had only arrived home a couple of minutes before the meal so I couldn’t pin it on her. I was about to confess when I glanced at my father. His face had gone the sinister shade of dark red I knew so well, and I panicked.

‘Not me. Honestly, Mum…Dad. Not me.’

‘Come on, Richard, it couldn’t have been anyone el–’

But my father interrupted her.

‘I will not have you lying. I will not have it. You get one more chance. Did you eat all of them?’

I thought of the one remaining chocolate.

‘Well…not exactly. I left–’

‘Go to your room and wait.’

My mother grimaced. ‘Chris, no. It’s only a few sweets, for heaven’s sake. We can…’

But her husband had already left the room. I walked silently up the stairs and waited in my bedroom, listening to the grinding of the shed door and trying to breathe normally.

My father came in with the cane.

‘Wait, Dad, I was only–’

‘Take off your shirt.’

‘What?’

‘Now.’

This was new. I reluctantly pulled it over my head and at once the beating began. But after the first agonising strokes, delivered randomly across my chest and waist, something
deep inside me revolted. I rushed at my father, kicking and punching him and trying to grab the bamboo. He thrust me off easily and a bizarre chase ensued, with me hopping round the room and over my bed, the cane whistling through the air behind me and occasionally making stinging contact.

Finally my father–not the fittest of men–gave up, completely out of breath. He hurled his stick at me and stormed out. I threw it back at him and collapsed on my bed, shocked and in tremendous pain.

The noise of the encounter must have filled the house. As did the colossal row which now took place between my parents. Elizabeth crept into my room. ‘Mum says she’s going to call the police.’

The row stopped suddenly and a few moments later my mother appeared in front of me.

‘Put the light on, darling. I want to look at you.’

I realised I had been sitting in the growing dark and switched on my bedside lamp, its shade askew after the exciting events of a few minutes before.

My mother stared at my upper body.

‘It’s all right. It’s all going to be all right. I’ll just go and fetch some Green Ointment from the bathroom. Stay there.’

Green Ointment was the Savlon of its day and our family swore by it. My mother came back and dabbed it along the multiple weals on my arms and body, and on the fingers that had been bruised trying to snatch away my father’s stick.

‘Wait here, my love. I’ll be back with some hot chocolate in a minute.’

She went back downstairs again and this time the only
voice I could hear was hers, a low, endless monotone which for some reason my father did not interrupt. I fell asleep before the hot chocolate arrived.

Next morning was a Friday: PE day for my class. There was no question of my being allowed to go to school. Although none of my injuries were serious, the marks left by the bamboo were livid and there could be no explaining them away. The police would be informed.

My father was silent at breakfast. My mother did the talking.

‘Your father is extremely ashamed of himself. He will be apologising to you later, but I am going to tell you something first. He has promised me faithfully never to hit you again. He knows what will happen if he breaks this promise. I don’t believe he will, otherwise we wouldn’t all be sitting here now.’

My father cleared his throat and looked at me for the first time. ‘I have to go to Shrewsbury this morning, to pick up an American car. It’s one of the new Ford Mustangs. The company are lending it to Prince Philip. I thought I’d stop off at Shawbury on the way. Would you like to come?’

An hour later we were belting up the M1 in a green-striped Lotus Cortina. It seemed as if my father’s total loss of control the night before had shriven his soul because without moving his eyes from the road ahead he began to make the humblest apology I have ever been offered. I instinctively believed he was truly sincere, not just in his anguished regrets, but also in his passionate promises never to hit me again.

I was right to trust my judgement. He never beat me again, or threatened to. As we swept towards Kiln Farm, my father tried to explain how he thought his rages were something to do with his boyhood. He wasn’t making excuses, he said, there were none to make. And after the apologies and promises, his conversation increasingly became more with himself than with me. I was not yet ten, but I detected, for the first time, the childhood source of his sporadic rages. It was an explanation that made sense even then, long before I traced the thread of betrayal and rejection running between the generations that preceded me.

Looking back after all these years, I see my father’s violent outbreaks towards me as a kind of descent into madness. Other children have it harder; there are far worse forms of abuse than being caned. Thanks to my mother’s stand and his own nascent if belated insight, my father finally fixed the last part of him broken by his childhood. I long ago forgave him my involuntary part in the process.