It's one of the most important jobs yet there is no manual, no
training and no pay. Recrimination is
inevitable; with luck, there may be posthumous recognition.
Like the two-dimensional beings inhabiting the satirical novel Flatland, it is hard to conceive of
alternatives to one's own experience. Thus
I believed my family to be normal; so when I visited friends' homes, it seemed
strange, their fathers eating meat and recounting wartime exploits. Mine was a vegetarian in the days when they
subsisted on eggs and cheese, (during holidays in France waiters were puzzled
when he refused omelettes with jambon)
and a conscientious objector who subsequently participated in the Aldermaston
marches. During return matches, my
friends would be baffled by his obscure puns; he would smile wryly to himself
and wink at me conspiratorially. Consequently, family social interactions
served to sunder, not cement, my friendships.
An intellectual ascetic, my father was a virulent atheist,
despised sport and was bored by gardening. While other fathers watched
football, mowed the lawn or trudged to church, he would be cloistered in his
attic study. Wrapped in a thick coat and tapping away at an Imperial typewriter
or turning the handle of a vast mechanical calculating machine, which made a
rasping noise like tearing paper, his weekend consultancy was funding the cost
of his children’s private education. Occasionally
he embarked on ambitious carpentry projects; in old age he liked to claim he’d
been doing DIY before it was invented. The
results occupied that unfortunate territory between barely functional and
annoyingly inadequate. Drawers stuck, cupboard doors didn't fit. Loathe to offend him, we would be stuck with
these proud botches for years. But some
were successful: when I visited the house decades later, the current occupants
were still using the secondary glazing he'd fashioned in our kitchen. Immediately,
I was transported back recalling the smell of the plastic he melted it to seal
the corners. All his pastimes were lone enterprises, refuges from a
turbulent family. His second family became apparent much later.
As a teenager, my father was abandoned in London when my
grandfather, an avid communist of Jewish extraction, emigrated to the Soviet
Union. His struggle to achieve an
education and build a career in science, culminating in a prestigious academic
position, made him intolerant of indolence or incompetence. I owe my A level successes, at least partly,
to his grudging tutorship, but his disappointment in my mathematical prowess
was equalled only by relief at his superiority being unchallenged. Praise
was unusual and bestowed only in the absence of possible competition. He seemed genuinely impressed when I landed my
first consulting job, which was also my final break with the world of science,
his dominion. Rarely, he acknowledged
his own shortcomings. ‘You're a better father than I was,’ he once volunteered.
But it was not a compliment I felt I deserved, the dissolution of my family was
imminent. He took quiet pride in his own
achievements and once directed me to fetch a cardboard tube from his study and
examine the contents: his admission to the Royal Society. On the occasion of his retirement, a large
bound volume was presented to him. To my
astonishment it contained hundreds of eulogies from former colleagues and
students from all parts of the world effusively thanking him for support and
encouragement.
I have observed how like my father I have become: I am
meticulous, organised, pedantic. In adulthood, I tended towards his
musical taste, a similarity he appeared to resent rather than encourage, trespassing
on his private turf. I developed a taste
for walking and after his death I discovered a rusty canvas rucksack in his
loft which my mother said he had used during lonely treks in the Lake District.
I pass his photograph in my hall every
day. We look similar and people often
assume it's a picture of me.
© David Thompson 2016
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