Isn't it Ironic

Why do I do this?

On another Substack, I am sharing my father’s autobiography. I leave it as he wrote it, unedited, sometimes with a few extra photos than were in the book, but they are his words. I leave them stet.

I ask myself why I do it. It’s complicated. He died 2 years and 2 days ago and I was the only family member with him at the time. Just me and a nurse. I had sent my mother and brother away for a quick shower and refresh as we had all been at his side for over 24 hours and we thought we had plenty of time. Sadly we didn’t and it was only me who watched him go, take his last gasps, croak (now I know why we use that slang), shock back to life, and then go again, with his face finally relaxing and looking quite different. Peaceful. Maybe I feel a little guilty for being the only one there, but I did make a serious effort to make his last hours on the planet as happy as possible, given we knew they were his last hours or days. I knew he was terrified of dying and perhaps hoping there wasn’t a judgment day.

I had a pretty tenuous relationship with my father. He was a very clever man, but in many ways not a nice one, although, people who knew him as an artist, a musician, a maker of instruments, designing our boat and other things he did, thought he was wonderful. I was tempted to put sideline comments in his autobiography, but I don’t feel I have the right, but having said that, after today’s post which I have just published, I felt I had to make some comments somewhere. It just didn’t sit right.

The biography has helped me understand him better, to some degree, but not totally. There are things he did that I may never share, for the sake of other people involved, but I need to keep some truth somewhere.

Truth. Now there’s an oxymoron. I have discovered over the years, how subjective that concept is. I remember arguments with him, where he told me he did his best, although ‘Though doth protest too much’ comes to mind. He complained bitterly to me, that I had called him a bastard. My response was “That was because you were”. I wondered if he had been strapped to a polygraph when he said he had done his best, whether it would have sent those needles flying. But having been a master of yoga, he probably had the ability to control his biorhythm.

Some people who know him well, wonder why I have tributes to him on Substack and Facebook. Part of it is my commitment to being a better father and man than he was, but I also acknowledge that he was a very talented man and his work did make a lot of people happy. I am proud of his work in painting, sculpting, and making musical instruments.

So, in that last post he wrote:

'When I worked at the xxxxx I insisted on paying my female staff the identical salary as the male staff, and when one of my female assistants wanted to come to work in slacks I backed her up. I had quite a long, let's call it a discussion, with the director. The official dress code, he insisted, was for the ladies to wear skirts and pantyhose. No exceptions. I told him: 'Then my department is going to be the exception. I pay my staff for the work they do, not for the way they look.'

‘'Yes but', the director said. I won the argument that time by making him imagine my young attractive assistant working on top of a scaffold in one of the galleries in full view of the public, wearing a miniskirt.’

I wrote a bunch of stuff here a few times and then deleted it again because it sounded mean-spirited. Let’s just say the office wasn’t the only place where he backed her up, which led to him trading in his wife, my mother, for a younger model and left me learning that life was simpler when I was five.

Then there was another quote “I absolutely refuse to wear a necktie, I even made it a condition before accepting the position at the xxxx”

I think he did the Windsor quite well. But it sounded good.

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It was good to eventually understand why as a child he used to measure food out equally at dinner time.

Like many kids, we had to stay at the table forever, until we finished our dinner, even if it was till ten o’clock at night, unless it was something he really liked. I wish I had understood or had the rationale for his behavior explained. I’m not sure if he even consciously remembered the reason himself. But from that same book:

“  By then we had eaten our pet golden pheasant and the two guinea pigs, but we still had the cat. Only pretty soon we had no food left for the cat to eat, nothing at all, and almost nothing for ourselves. So we had to eat her.

            It was even worse for Mum. She was pregnant and needed more food, but she insisted that everyone would have exactly the same amount of food and made Dad use the kitchen scales to make sure he wouldn't give her more than anyone else. She really insisted. Somehow we all survived.”

I have no doubt that the war scarred him indelibly, in ways he wasn’t conscious of, and in some ways he was following in his father’s footsteps. I do have to see some of what he did in that context, but some of the things he did don’t come with that excuse.

This post sounds bitchy, but it just scratches the surface, which is where I will leave it. Many people have personas and there were times when I cringed, and still do today when I am told how lucky I was to have him as my father. I didn’t feel lucky much of the time.

I was torn about writing even this much, but this is my autobiography and I need to balance some of the stories he told with my truth, or it would be rather unbalanced.