The Story of My Father

I want to tell you the story of my father.

Even as I begin I am certain of my failure, left with the empty certitude of knowing the narrowness of my understanding, the limitations of my memory. Whatever details of his life I might recount, they are already shaded, coloured by what came after, developed with the chemicals of remembering which produce an accuracy that only further indicts their deficiencies. My father appears to me now as if through the eye of a keyhole, a lingering shadow on a far wall, a one-sided conversation, a past which is obstructed by the stubbornness of my selfishness and childish innocence.

My father was born to John and Margery Cunningham on 5 July 1926. His father a joiner, his mother the daughter of a schoolteacher. They had 11 children, a large but unremarkable family for that time. My father was born at home, in the little two bed house on Iveagh Parade in West Belfast where all the Cunninghams were born, except for the twins, Kate and Anne, who died at the hospital across the road shortly after childbirth.

He was somewhere in the middle of the pack of children, I can’t remember now if he was the fifth or sixth son. Unlike many of his siblings, my father stayed close to his family home, he bought a house on Nansen Street, two streets over from Iveagh Parade, when he married my mother, and they raised 6 children in what was a happy, crowded home. I was the youngest, the spoiled baby of the family.

My earliest memory of my father, perhaps the earliest merely because of the repetition which lent it an eternal quality, was of him writing fastidiously in small leather-bound black notebook. He was sat at the beat-up Formica table, uncomfortably perched between the wall, a stack of newspapers and the remains of his children’s dinners. He was writing slowly, carefully. I wandered over to him and pulled on his dark corduroy trousers. He lifted me easily onto his knee and I remember smelling the pine and tar, the harsh chemicals that leached into all of his clothes. I watched as his black pen drew lines on to a creamy page.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘I’m writing.’ He said.

‘Why?’

‘Because we have to take note of today so we can plan for tomorrow.’ He responded.

Over the years I have memories of asking him again what was in the small notebook. It was valuable to him, kept in the locked drawer of a desk, a singular indication of privacy. He would respond with a similar answer, that he was preparing for the future. My father did not read much, I don’t think I ever saw him read a book, and he never wrote letters, he left that to his wife. We assumed that he was keeping track of household expenses or something.

He worked 6 days a week as a joiner in a furniture factory. On Saturday evenings he did odd jobs for the neighbourhood, often working on Sunday to get a bit of extra money. Though he worked long hours he was home for every meal. He tied my hair ribbons before sending me off to school, he was there as we came home for lunch, drinking a pint of milk everyday. He was always present for tea, though he might have had to go back to work after. He never drank at the pub like other men did, he wasn’t interested in sports, he worked and spent time with family, he had no interest in a life independent of those realities.

We grew up in the shadow of violence. Belfast in the 1970s was a tinderbox of poverty, politics, and thwarted aspiration. Twice, our family was targeted because my father worked in a Protestant owned factory. As children we didn’t care. Life was about school, friends, cousins and visits to the sweet shop. We saw bombs explode and played in the rubble, we didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to be like that.

Nobody had money then, so we never wanted for anything. There was meat once a week on a Sunday, breakfast was a scrape of lard on toast, and when you were hungry you had a cup of tea.

We were just like everyone else, except when we weren’t.

My father and mother called us indoors early, before curfews, they sternly reminded us that we were meant for bigger things, that we would be doctors and lawyers, and get out of the neighbourhood. We were to be above the petty squabbles, childish love affairs, and flag waving that dominated our neighbourhood. There are lots of different kinds of poor, we were just stretched thin. We weren’t in and out of charity homes or passed from relation to relation awaiting a dole cheque or an early release. We would stay in school until we were 14, and maybe longer.

All these small differences made us different. In the matter of a few years all six of us left Nansen Street. We went to university, got jobs, my sister and brother went to Oxford, two others to America, and I went to Coventry at 17 to study literature. We got degrees and left the neighbourhood and left our parents. Travel was expensive, I didn't go home again for 4 years. I was 21, enrolled in a teaching certification course, when I got the call that there was something terribly wrong with Da.

I was to come home immediately.

----

When we gathered in the house again as adults it was 1984. We clustered reverently and nervously around my father’s failing body, anticipating an inevitable but unfathomable event. It was his notebook that he mentioned to me, a few hours before he died.

He was weak, he had lost so much weight. In three months, cancer had removed from his wiry figure whatever hint of excess and health he might have had. He was gray and sunken, which had the effect of making his blue eyes even larger and more prominent. They hadn’t told us about the cancer because they didn’t want to worry us, to draw us back to Belfast, if we didn’t have to.

He whispered to me as I held him close, ‘Liza, my notebook is in the drawer of the desk. Make sure you find it and use it when I’m gone. Have fun with it, it’s meant to be used.’

‘OK Da, that’s OK, let’s not talk about that now.’ I said.

With the sadness that followed his death I forgot briefly about the notebook. We had to deal with arrangements and visitors, money for the luncheon, mourning clothes for growing children, selecting hymns for his funeral mass.

It was a few weeks later before I was alone in the house with my mother, helping her to organise bills and take on the responsibilities my father had always shouldered quietly and with little explanation.

My mother would struggle, she would have to go back to work when she should have been nearing retirement. They had little in savings, there were expenses with the house. We would probably have to sell the house, set my mother up in a smaller flat. There would be no more family Christmases, she would have to move to England and live with Patrick and his wife. It was a worrying time, a period of grief in which we should have been mourning my father, but instead were trying to cover the costs of his medical care and the unpaid bills from his time off work.

When I found the little notebook, the cover was worn, the binding loose and well-worn. I opened it carefully, worried that the sight of his handwriting might make his absence freshly irreversible. Perhaps a little anxious that the pages might reveal terrible secrets, some double life that my father had led, a tarnish on his quiet but good reputation.

They were household accounts for the most part, starting in 1950 when he was a newly married man. He tracked how much they spent, on food, on clothes, on the mortgage. They had £10 saved at the end of their first year of marriage. The next year he noted the birth of his first born, Patrick, a beautiful baby, the next year, a daughter, Bronagh, with bright blue eyes and a dimple. It went on like that for each page, each year, carefully noting the birth of his six children, their triumphs at school, their wins on the football pitch, their lost teeth. Alongside these were sums, simple sums, tracking savings and spending for nearly 30 years.

I thought it was wonderful, a piece of our family’s history. It was only as I paged to the end of the book that I saw the bank information, the account numbers, the transfers, and address. He’d written directions. ‘For each of my children, I have opened a bank account. I want them to use it wisely, share it with others, use it for good things.’

I showed the note to my mother. She had never seen it before, she didn’t know about the bank accounts. We tearfully looked at each other, we knew it was just like my father to have planned ahead, to have never said anything.

I didn’t want to raise her hopes, I knew there had never been much money, but perhaps he had put away enough to help Ma get through the next few months, a few thousand until she could find work or sell the house.

The following Monday morning I dressed carefully before walking to the bank, I presented the account details to a teller, provided proof of my relationship to my father.

She looked at me familiarly, ‘So you are his daughter? He always spoke so well about you, he was so happy you were in England, writing and studying like you’d always done as a girl. I’m sorry for your families loss. He was a handsome man, I knew him from the dance halls.’

That moment with the teller brought about a feeling which I have since experienced many times. A profound depth of sadness, even now, which strikes me when someone knows something about my father that I never knew myself. Someone who saw him from a different angle, his friends from school or a mate from work, who knew him when he was infused with youth, unaffected by worry, and full of ambition. Instead, I can only remember the sternness, the way he’d kept us out of neighbourhood trouble, collected us from school, warned us to do well on exams. The asceticism of a man who never drank, who sent his family to Lourdes or Galway, while never taking a holiday himself.

‘There’s 20,000 in this account.’ she said. ‘And if you’ll give me a moment to check, I think there’s a similar amount in each of these accounts you’ve given me.’

I leaned against the marble counter, pressing its rounded edge into my stomach to remind me to stay upright.

‘Are you quite sure that’s correct?’ I asked.

After a moment of looking over her files she looked up at me, ‘Yes, quite sure, your father has seven accounts at this bank and they each have about £20,000 in them.’

‘Thank you.’ I said, and in a daze walked out of the bank onto a pavement filled with businessmen.

All those years.

All those years he had been saving for us, squirreling away, working overtime, for us. I held on to that little black notebook fiercely, I opened it again just to stare at his handwriting, to try and decipher some hidden explanation for the tenacity manifest in the black ink of that little book.

I sat down on a bench beneath the leafy crown of an elm tree, sitting at a distance from the strolling crowd and wept.