My Father, the Accidental Feminist

“I can’t do it! It’s too hard!” I wailed, throwing down my pencil in despair.

“Of course you can do it!”

“No, I can’t! I’m not supposed to be in this class. It’s for the boys.”

“You are cleverer than all the boys, and you know it. They know it too.”

“They said it’s so easy! But it’s not easy!”

“They’re showing off. The boys are louder than you, not smarter. You just need more practice at this. Come on, let’s have another look.”

My dad took his handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to me. I wiped my snotty nose and handed him back the sodden rag. He folded it up and put it back in his pocket. After what seemed like a lifetime (and definitely must have felt like it for him), but was really only about 10 minutes, it suddenly clicked and finally that dreaded 24-hour clock made sense. God, how I hated the 24-hour clock. (In fact, I still do, but I force myself to use it so that it knows it has no power over me.)

And yes, I did say a handkerchief. It’s 14:22 on 22nd June 2023, and my dad still carries a handkerchief around with him daily. Does anybody else have one? I don’t think I’ve ever come across another person who carries a hankie. It’s something I associate with a bygone time. I’m picturing fancy gentlemen from the early 1900s in pinstriped suits with a handkerchief sticking out of their top pocket. Or Victorian ladies waving their handkerchiefs at departing trains and ships. I think they went out of style in about 1960? It certainly seemed very old-fashioned in the 90s, and even more so today.

But then my dad is a rather old-fashioned man. He grew up in British expat communities in Kenya and Zimbabwe. It seems to be universally acknowledged that people who emigrate tend to continue the culture and customs of the old country from the time they left, living somewhat in the past. It definitely sounded like my dad’s family and neighbours were in a kind of early 1900s timewarp.

It was a time and place where children went to boarding school and were caned by their headmaster, and bullying was viewed as character forming, and there was no entertainment except the tennis club an hour’s bike ride away, and everyone would get up at 6am and get dressed before breakfast, and everyone carried a handkerchief. When he moved back to the UK for university in the late 70s, he was a bit of an anachronism.

My dad joined the military, another institution known for its love of historical precedent and timeworn traditions. He married my mum, a nurse. As a friend once joked, “A pilot and a nurse, did they meet during World War 2?” When I was born, my mum quit her hospital to become a stay-at-home mother, a job she would hold until my younger brother finally went to school 10 years later and she went back to nursing. For many years we lived on military bases, being shuffled around every few years along with other families whose dads were in the forces and whose mums were homemakers. All very lovely, all very 1950s. (And yet it was the 90s).

I do remember, as a child, always thinking that my dad was quite old-fashioned compared to other dads. He was always the first one up, awake at the crack of dawn, and fully dressed and sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper before the rest of us had even rolled out of bed. And no T-shirts – never! Even on weekends, he would always be in a proper collared shirt (short-sleeved in summer) and proper shoes. Sports shoes were only for sports, children, or Yanks. (Yes, he still calls Americans Yanks.) Beards were for hippies or the homeless.

I’d say he had some rather conservative viewpoints. Definitely always voted for the Conservative Party. He didn’t really watch TV back then, unless it was sports. Rugby union, golf, or tennis mainly. He likes to read books, mostly autobiographies from old soldiers or explorers, with the occasional non-fiction tome about a historical event. He’s fond of long walks in the countryside with nothing but the sound of nature to entertain him. He enjoys looking at maps and visiting former battlefields. The site of the 1485 Battle of Bosworth was, for him, the highlight of summer 2002. For the rest of us, it was standing in an empty field looking at grass. I consider it one of our all-time worst family trips.

You might be rather surprised, then, to discover that this rather conservative, old-school British man, one who has spent all his life in the male-dominated worlds of the armed forces, the engineering department at university, and, well, an all-male boarding school, is quite the feminist. Not that he’d ever admit to it. In fact, he might be quite horrified to be described as such. And yet, without a doubt, the biggest lesson my father taught me is that girls are absolutely equal to boys, and that women can do anything they want to do.

I think back to that day when I was sitting at the kitchen table in 1997 at approximately 1800 hours, crying over the damn 24-hour clock in my homework from the advanced maths class I’d been put in with 5 boys. My dad not only sat with me and persevered until I had mastered military time, but he made me believe that I was just as smart, just as quick, just as capable as any of the boys in that class. In fact, I was more so, and although I was shy and reserved, he built in me a calm confidence and a quiet power that has carried me throughout my life.

As a child, my dad encouraged each and every one of my interests, whatever they were. Despite the aforementioned mishap with telling the time, I loved maths. My dad put up posters of the multiplication tables in my room, bought me puzzle books and maths worksheets, and always saved the sudokus from the paper for me.

When I became interested in astronomy, he bought glow-in-the-dark stars and arranged them in constellations on my bedroom ceiling. When I developed a love of history, he purchased a set of Horrible Histories books, and would listen as if learning these things for the first time as I recounted all the gruesome and fascinating facts I had read in them. All quite atypical interests for a little girl, perhaps.

My dad taught me to swim, to ride a bike, to climb up trees. I remember him spending whole weekends trying and failing to teach me how to use the monkey bars at the playground. (No upper body strength then, no upper body strength now, sadly.) He gave me tennis racquets and hockey sticks, helped me hone my skills in these sports, and drove me to and from matches and practice sessions.

When I was a teenager and I joined the school’s cadet force, which included such exciting activities as learning how to crawl on the floor in the rain, how to march in a straight line and turn your head, and how to stand still while not fainting under a hot sun, my dad was thrilled. He always encouraged me to be active, to get muddy, to explore. Not once did he tell me that these things were unladylike, or not for girls.

But he also took an interest in all my more “feminine” habits too. He encouraged me to do gymnastics, dance, and netball (a women’s only sport in the UK). He spent a whole Christmas Eve building a Barbie doll house one year. He painted my room pink when I went through that pink phase in my tweens. He took me to Brownies and helped me in my quest to fill my sash with badges. He liked to look at my Textile Design projects, and was just as pleased with my good grades in that course as he was for science or maths.

More importantly, he never made me feel that any of these kinds of things were boring, or silly, or inferior, or girly. They were just likes, pastimes and hobbies the same as any other, and if I liked them then he was interested in them too.

When I got older, and started thinking about the future, he supported all of my ideas. He gave advice, of course, but he never made me feel like I was immature or uninformed. He trusted me completely, and gave me the freedom and support to choose any subjects I wanted to study in my later years of school, and then university. Latin, great! History, great! French, great! Textile Design, great! Every year when the exam results came out in the paper, he would show me how the girls’ school had outperformed the boys’ school. Every. Single. Year.

As I started thinking about careers, he had full belief that I could do anything. And trust me, I cycled through many different job ideas. Yes, he assured me, I could absolutely be a surgeon, or a journalist, or a lawyer, or any other flavour of the month. I could do any of those jobs, easily. I could do anything I wanted, I just had to decide on a path to follow.

When I chose languages for my university degree, he excitedly declared that I could become an interpreter at one of the European Union institutions! Or I could work for the UN! Or I could join the British Secret Services! Oh, I’d have to learn Russian or Arabic? No problem, I’m a languages graduate, I can learn any language I set my mind to! (Even today, my dad insists that I can and should write a novel. “Just take a year off. You can live with us for the year while you write.”) For me these things were unrealistic pipe dreams. For my dad they were fully realistic options. Bless his eternal optimism.

Entering the world of work, I had no fear. I had no imposter syndrome, no inferiority complex, no notion of a glass ceiling. In my first proper job, I was hired as a linguistic specialist in a translation company, and I had to tell a whole bunch of male translators and editors what to do and when.

This didn’t phase me, because my dad had, without really realising, instilled in me the belief that men and women are entirely, unarguably equal. We were all just people. Here I was, a trained and qualified person, doing a job with other trained and qualified people. Gender completely irrelevant. I was confident in my opinions and my judgements and my professional decisions, because the very first man in my life, from a young age, had always listened to me.

On the cusp of thirty, I decided I wanted to quit my job to travel the world while still young. I was expecting horror and disappointment from my dad, a man who’d always had a stable job, a reliable salary, and a wife and family from the age of 25. I anticipated lectures and arguments about having no income for a year, losing my career, maybe even how it would soon be too late to get married and have children. After I broke the news, what did I get from my dad? A Grayl Geopress filter for places where it’s not safe to drink the tap water.

Even after thirty years, people can still surprise you. Another lesson, I guess, from my unusual father. Contrary to what one might have expected, he raised a strong, confident, independent woman, a staunch feminist (check my other writing). The rest of the family teases that I’m becoming more and more like him every year, an accusation I strenuously denied but reluctantly had to admit to after we spent an entire day at the Greenwich Maritime Museum together a few summers ago.

But in the end, I am proud to be like him, even though he’s so weird, and so grateful to have him as my dad. The most important lesson a father can impart is that a daughter is just as good as a son, and with true belief and confidence, you can do anything you want to do.