The Ghost of Fathers Past

I received an email from a dear friend in London, who happened to mention his fraught relationship with his father (a subject that we had spent many afternoons discussing, throughout the pubs of the East End). It made me think once again of the arid, increasingly violent relationship that I had with my own father. Over the years, it has become clear to me that the difficulties which grew between us with each passing year were because of my homosexuality, which became obvious to him as I stumbled through my childhood - even before it became obvious to myself. He never forgave me for abjuring sport of every kind. He could not bear it that I would rather read a book than kick a ball. He was nonplussed by my passionate interest in Art, and my self-taught knowledge of art history, which he claimed was a waste of time. 

There were practical jokes brought to bear upon me during my childhood, in which the level of spite and passive aggression masked a deeper, Freudian animosity. As a joke, I would be shut in the slug-filled coal cellar, under the kitchen of the small farmhouse we rented in Sussex, until I screamed to be let out. I recall my terror, as a six-year-old, at being tied with my sister's skipping rope and my father carrying me, running, towards the stark white cliff edge at Beachy Head, on the south coast, shouting at me that he was going to throw me off. He only came to a stop mere feet from the edge of the precipice. It was his idea of a joke, but I pissed myself (literally) in terror. It left me with a lifelong horror of heights.

The physical attacks became more pronounced as I became a teenager, and my new gay self was seeking acknowledgement by the rest of the world. At 14, I came out to my mother. Shortly afterwards, my father slapped me around the head in front of all of my peers who were waiting for the school bus. That was a humiliation hard to live down. Once, when debt collectors came to the door, he asked if I had any cash for them. I didn't - but I would have happily given him some if I had. In frustration, he clumped me in the side of the head with his fist. Now that I remember these days, it was always the head which was the target - that repository of talent, and intelligence, and sexuality.

When my father finally abandoned his wife and five children, in the early 1970s, I was relieved. A boulder had lifted from my life. And although it forced me to leave high school in order to help support the family, and we continued to disappear into a spiral of penury which was Dickensian, I never regretted his absence. He had effectively absented himself from my life, emotionally and psychologically, from the time I was a toddler. He was always an aloof stranger to me.

The news of his death affected me less than that of a moth, which bashes itself to oblivion against a light bulb. If I had to salvage a scintilla of gratitude for this man, it would be for the way that his indifference to me has shaped the subject of my art, which has been nourished by his undernourishment. A feast through famine, if you will.