Gifts

1. Before he became ill, he would play cricket for the company in the playing field on the other side of the canal from our house. I remember him very smart and handsome in his cricket whites. As a child, you want your father to be a champion. When we played rounders on our picnics, he could be counted upon to hit the tennis ball in a great, high arc with his bat.

2. Once, when I went to meet him from work on my bike, he raced me the half mile to our house, running all the way in his suit with a briefcase in his hand. And I remember, too, the time we tried to make a kite from balsa wood and brown wrapping paper. It didn’t fly; the wind didn’t take it as it did, years later, the bought kite that sailed what seemed a mile into the sky until there was no twine left on our spool. Then there was the paper plane he used to make us, much better with its complexly folded nose than our simple darts, in command of its movement, moving dignifiedly through the air.

3. When he came home from business trips overseas, he would bring us gifts, and we would wait as he ate and changed his clothes to be given these gifts, although the rule was we were never to be greedy, and never to show our impatience.

What had he brought us? For mum, perfume from duty free and fabrics, and for us, the children? Black market tapes: a cassette of David Bowie songs called Golden Years, Ultravox’s Vienna, a compilation of songs by the Beatles, but never Roxy Music, which I always asked for. Never Roxy Music, whose name I liked. He brought us Thriller, and the pirates had added creepy sound effects between the tracks, and Wham’s Fantastic!, with a whole other band playing Wham-like tracks on the B side.   

After one trip, he brought us a soft toy. We felt a mixture of appreciation and disappointment. He’d gone to the trouble of finding a soft toy for us; we appreciated the effort. But the toy itself? A mother goose with a bonnet, suitable only to be hung in a pram. A mother goose – but we were children, and we wanted our toys, too, to be children. True, we had a family of sausage dogs, knitted by my grandmother, with a mummy and a daddy, with an older brother and a rapscallion uncle, but its centrepiece was always the ‘youngest’ dog, or at least the smallest one. But a mother goose? At that moment, I felt sorry for him, because he hadn’t understood why this toy was the wrong toy.  Sorry for him, and even tender, for a man who didn’t know what toy to buy, although he wanted to buy us a toy. Was I older than him, who was older than me? Was I wiser than he was in the way of toys? In that moment I was older than my father: yes, that was why I felt tender.

4. Soon, it would happen that the company for which he worked lost their bids, and he no longer went on those foreign trips. They took him from his office and put in him in the new open plan office. We knew from our visits that he had an office of his own, with a secretary just down the hall. He ate in the second of the three canteens – the first was for technicians and secretaries, the next one for engineers and salesmen, and the third for managers. One of his colleagues would reach out to shake hands with us and place a wrapped sweet in our hands – what a treat! But now, our dad had been moved from his own office, with its high ceiling and wide, white walls, into an open-plan office, his desk facing a filing cabinet.

5. On Fridays, he would come home with beer on his breath. He’d been to the office club, and was now jolly, despite the long drive home through traffic. A pint, two pints – he was jolly, and when he came home in the summer, we said to each other, he looks like a film star, with his aviator shades and his shirtsleeves, and his blazer over his shoulder. I would go to open the door for him, the film star who had come home to us.

6. Your face is spicy, my sister would say of his stubble. He rubs his jaw and cheek. Do you think I should grow a beard? And we both say: no!

7. Every year, the Christmas party at the club. One night, as we were coming home down a hill, he let go of my pushchair. I felt something of the same panic when, twenty years later, I was learning to drive, and he wanted me to reverse into the busiest of roads. Curious, this desire for risk, for risking himself and risking others. He would drive too fast, and mum would protest. But he liked to go fast and he liked risk, and I think he liked letting go of that pushchair, even as I, picking up my mum’s worry, panicked as I felt it gather speed.

8. He had a way of smiling at mishaps. When something bad happened – nothing really terrible – he would smile, as if to say, how could it have been any different? what did you expect? I’ve caught it from him, that smile. When my friend fell off his bike, I smiled in that way. It made my friend angry. But by that smile that day I knew I was like my father.

9. Once, on a picnic, when a group of us children were allowed to run around as we pleased, I hurt myself and separated myself from the others, crying. I was away from the playground, and there he was, on the path. We walked together, he holding my hand. How old was I then? 9? 10? Too old to cry at such a light injury, no doubt. But we went along the path, and this time he didn’t smile at my mishap. I appreciated his quietness. Why was he walking alone, away from the other adults? Why did he know what to do, that day, as a father? But he knew.

A few weeks ago, before he died, I read Sarraute’s Childhood, and wrote a few notes on memories I would like to write about one day. Holland Park, I wrote, and underlined those words. Yes, Holland Park – that’s where it had taken place, that’s where I had cried and we had walked, he and I. We came across Holland Park while walking in London, R.M. and I: the Commonweath Institute, the adventure playground; it was as it had been, 25 years before.

How is that time passes? How is it that it passes, time, when everything, all these events seem held simultaneously in my memory? That’s what I thought as we walked, R.M. and I. She was disappointed – you call this a park?, she said in her American accent. She was particularly unimpressed by the Japanese garden: is this it? Is this all there is?

I wondered which was the palimpsest: the day of the picnic, or our new day, with its fresh autumnal air. I wondered at the events which overlay one another in that same space. Today, in deep winter, it is already night at four o’clock, and I have lost hold on time. Who will remember these things when I am gone? But I’m not sure I’m remembering anything. The events seem to remember themselves.