My Father’s Footsteps Lead Nowhere

My father never taught me to shave or to drive a car, so it’s easy to see why I wear a beard and travel by bus. He would have done neither of those things.

The movie tropes of father-son interactions and the motif of practical, paternal care for a son are all rather worn out, but we still trade them as authentic themes; measurements of fatherly success. But, what if your dad was fundamentally broken and his legacy turned out to be a bag of crap, a box of cracked and splintered dysfunctional bits? Is that the kind of inheritance anyone wants?

It has been over 30 years since his death, so you would have thought I could overcome the contradictions and difficulties by my own efforts by now. I’m a late developer, however, and only just escaping the debris field he left behind. The magnitude of the ‘why-did-he-do-that-what-the-fuck-was-he-thinking?’ questions are the main difficulties to confront — he continually slapped the world across its face as if he was locked in a state of total war with it. His recurrent self-sabotage and orthodoxy of the unorthodox make me wonder if he was, in fact, only at war with himself.

I’m exploring the relationship we had all those years ago, but cannot remember very many details. I’m looking for his footprints, as per the original prompt for this essay, dreamed up as a response to a previous Father’s Day — a day that I am meant to be celebrating soon.

I just can’t right now. Don’t ask me for soft-focus recall, the memories that I have all come with hard edges. Memories of shielding myself from his wrath, of being accountable somehow for his failures or, at the least, the world’s failure to understand his needs, his dreams, his broken ambition and the sourness of his day-to-day stress.

His self-sabotage and general misanthropy would have marked him out as having mental health problems if he had made it to the twenty-first century. The truth is, he would not have accepted it because he was the product of a nineteenth century mindset.

He was the youngest son of Victorian parents and grew up in Second World War London. His cherished and respected older brother died in the last days of the war in Italy. Dad named my older brother after him, while also adopting a ridiculous cultural stand against pizza for his entire life. In the mid-century that followed fast after 1945, he held on to the cultural norms of his parents, including the harsh discipline presumably meted out to him as a child.

He only ever spoke of his parents in a disparaging way, a reaction to the low confidence they seemed to have in him. Fatherhood begets fatherhood. There’s nothing like a cold father to chill your own paternal frame. I’d like to think that my difficulty with my upbringing is that I believe it was flawed. Apologists for mid 1970s paternal violence might bleat about it being typical of the times, but a quick slap around the back of the legs was unfortunately normal, not slapping a cowering child around the head repeatedly until they disassociated from reality.

Sons either follow or escape their upbringings. A son’s compliance with what his father wants and how he expresses his needs and wants can be all about acceptance of a fatally-flawed family hierarchy. Breaking away requires more effort and persistence. You can’t justify actions by accepting them as a tradition, as if they were part of a national heritage. With parents and their children, you fight warped rituals by encouraging agency and agency only happens in a way that defines a son as nothing like their father. With dads it’s all or nothing, it seems.

My worst fear was always that I would forget what he was like and inadvertently end up like him.

When I look back at my own timeline, there’s a fault-line expressed in the years after his death. That fault-line is not only a boundary between a clear memory and little memory at all, but also a secondary fracture. I’ve spent the last half of my life not being him, while the first 29 years have been emptied of recollection of who that person I apparently don’t want to be was.

These are the footprints I walk in. His legacy is at best not so much vague and indistinct, but both partly gaseous and somehow pointed. At worst, given the abyss that my memories have sunk into and only seeming to remember a few traumatic moments, I worry what I might find looking for more concrete recollections.

I may have to resort to anemoia, a neologism coined by John Koenig for his project, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. He defines anemoia as:

“nostalgia for a time you’ve never known”.

In that spirit and, as Father’s Day approaches once more, I hope that I have had enough agency to ensure that my children will not have to resort to any soft-focus surrogate memories or anemoia. I committed myself long ago to not walk in my father’s footsteps as far as discipline is concerned. It’s definitely the harder path to travel, but I hope my footsteps are easier to follow.

More from me:

And this little nugget of mumbles. Jeez is that the most ugly poster frame ever, or what?