The Dead Dad Diaries

I’m listening to Fauré’s Requiem. I’m not sure why. It’s one of those Sundays. Fresh figs, Fauré, Fellini with my friend F. Finally posting something here.

I dismissed Fauré when it came to choosing the music for Dad’s funeral. It was a strange task, like making a mix tape for someone you love while knowing they’ll never listen to it. Trying to juggle “what would he have wanted?” with “but does it really matter now anyway.?”

Dad loved music and had pretty eclectic taste. But in the end, I chose things I also liked. Britten’s Fifth Sea Interlude from Peter Grimes (suggested by C, and I now can’t listen to it without weeping); Haec Dies by Tallis, sung by the choir of his old college; Baby It’s Cold Outside (it was!) sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong; and the Habanera from Carmen, sung by Maria Callas. The latter is such a wonderful piece of music and I feel it captured something about Dad in a way that In Paradisum wouldn’t have done.

As well as Britten and Bizet, Dad loved D.H. Lawrence. In fact he taught a course on Lawrence and Conrad for years (I read the last lines of The Nigger of the Narcissus* at the funeral). Once when I was little I asked him why he had no male friends (not quite true) and he said: “because I’m like D.H. Lawrence: I prefer women.” He also tried to suggest that he had chosen my name because it was that of Lawrence’s mother, but we both knew that it was really my mother’s choice and had very little to do with DHL. I recently read an article in the Guardian by Geoff Dyer about buying one of Lawrence’s letters. (Btw, I inherited Dyer’s book about not writing a book about Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, from Dad and enjoyed it immensely). It’s an interesting piece on several levels, but what struck me was when Dyer quotes Frieda (DHL’s wife) describing a quality in her late husband: “I called it love, but it was something else – Bejahung in German, ‘saying yes’.'”

Without knowing there was a German word for it, I’d always thought of Dad as a “saying yes” sort of person. A very dear friend of his and mine (who is German, as it happens) used the phrase joie de vivre in relation to him. That stuck in my head too. How else to describe it? A lack of self-pity combined with a ready sense of humour. An ability to take pleasure in the small things in life that stayed with him till the end and made being with him a pleasure in itself. And always that affirmation: neither pushing nor detracting. Just … yes.

Writing this blog has been enlightening, challenging, comforting … I’m not sure if this is the end or a bend in the river. For now, I’m just going with the flow.

* From The Nigger of the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad:

A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone for ever; and I never met one of them again. But at times the spring-flood of memory sets with force up the dark River of the Nine Bends. Then on the waters of the forlorn stream drifts a ship—a shadowy ship manned by a crew of Shades. They pass and make a sign, in a shadowy hail. Haven’t we, together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives? Good-bye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale.

… to go until I am out of this house for good. And I will be away for at least two of those days, so lots to do.

Material status report: two lovely men came and emptied the rest of the attic and the garage. You wouldn’t believe how much stuff there was, but they worked very hard and got it done really fast. I thought there was nothing much that I wanted to keep from those places, but they turned up some interesting finds.

Bronze bust of Dad which Granny commissioned. What to do with?

Great-grandpa's (Gilbert Marshall Prior) case. Contained papers belonging to Dad and ancient condoms.

"Mum, these are rubbish. Can we have the Wii back now?" "But they're Grandpa Roger's lovely toys!"

Dad's trunk

Trunk label: "From Oxshott to Liphook", where Dad went to Highfield prep school age 8.

Emotional status report: a mixture of satisfaction that I have got this far, with the end very much in sight, and some sadness and twinges of anxiety that I will lose touch with Dad once I don’t have the connection of the house and its contents any more. I know I won’t really though. Excited about further adventures and a new start, which will begin with the same boat and car journey Dad and I took when he drove me to university. Same car too.

Out for supper, we raised a glass of a very nice Primitivo to Dad. A moment later, I was lost in thought. First I was thinking how I wished I was more like Dad, and then I thought if I was more like Dad in the way I wanted to be, I wouldn’t have had that thought in the first place. That is, he was very accepting of the status quo and if he ever wished he or his circumstances were different, he didn’t let on.

He often used to quote his old Classics master at Eton (David Simpson?) who apparently was fond of saying: “Things are as they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why therefore should we wish to be deceived?” The first sentence might be a deliberate quotation from Agamemnon (ll. 67 – 68). But maybe that is just the sort of thing that tragedians always say and Classics teachers say because they have read a lot of (Athenian) tragedy. Or all of it, since there isn’t a lot.

Anyway, this saying, which may or may not have been David Simpson who may or may not have been quoting Aeschylus, captures something about who Dad was and how he approached the world. Honest and sanguine, curious and realistic without being cynical. It wasn’t fatalism — a quality he hated; he was just willing to grapple with the world as it was rather than sit around wishing it were otherwise. He almost never complained in the sense of saying he wished for the impossible. He had mastered a profound — and profoundly engaged — kind of acceptance without a minute of meditation or reading a single book about Buddhism.

But what’s funny is that while he had this amazing attitude to the larger vicissitudes of life — for example, being wrongly diagnosed with three different kinds of cancer on three separate occasions — sometimes the little things really irritated him. I mean REALLY.

A few years ago, he had a heart attack and spent a week in hospital, on an NHS ward. The food was disgusting, the other inmates sometimes disruptive and generally NQOCD. But Dad was cheerful and stoical throughout, reading the Guardian I brought him and munching Rich Tea biscuits with diabetic jam. Instead of moaning about the comforts that had been taken away from them, he took enormous pleasure in them as they were gradually restored: when I brought him home and we ate a home-cooked supper in front of a DVD, he was in heaven.

But a couple of days later, I went out for an evening and came home to find him in a right state. “Where is the tin?” “What tin?” “The Fairy tin!” “Oh you mean the one that was finished?” When I’d come back to the house while he was in hospital, I had undertaken a massive cleaning operation which involved doing several loads of laundry. I had found a near-empty Fairy washing power tin in the cupboard, used the contents, thrown it out, and replaced it with a full cardboard box of the same product. What I didn’t know was that Dad would buy the boxes and empty them into that tin, which he’d had for a long time. For some reason, he preferred to scoop his detergent out of a metal container. And now that it was gone, with a cardboard substitute in its place, he was very annoyed with me. Usually mild-mannered and laidback, he was also capable of getting very angry very quickly and he was so confident and authoritative that his anger had an irresistible force.

After the stress of the preceding ten days, I’d had enough. I burst into tears and fled to my room. A few minutes later, Dad came upstairs and knocked on the door. “I’m sorry, darling.” As quickly as it had come, the anger was gone. And I would much rather have him here now, being irritable, than this quiet freedom to throw things out. But if I were more like him, I wouldn’t have that thought, would I?

In the summer of 1989, Dad and I went on a two week holiday to Turkey. I was 11, he was 54.

We shared a small, basic room in a rather faded hotel. There were frequent power cuts in the town, including one on the night of our arrival. Possibly as a result of being plunged into near-total darkness in a strange place, I had my first ever attack of existential angst that night. We sat on the balcony, under the abundant stars, and I confronted the fact that I was going to die. I asked Dad if he was afraid. He said no.

He had almost no adult company during the entire two weeks, while I made one friend who barely spoke a word of English (my Turkish, obviously, didn’t extend beyond politely ordering a Coke).

There was no sandy beach, just a strip of pebbles backed up against a concrete wall. Swimming happened off the end of a rusty jetty. There was not much to do but sit on the pebbles and swim, and I became quite ill with sunstroke. A cooling ice cream made me even sicker (did I mention those power cuts?).

On the last night of the holiday, Dad and I had a blazing row while strolling through the town and he hit me (not hard, and I believe I may have hit him first).

It was undoubtedly the best holiday we ever had.

I was at that prepubescent sweet spot: although capable of brattiness, there was no one in the world I would rather be with than my dad, and yet I was old enough and swotty enough to carry on a decent conversation. It was the last time we shared a room, until we went to San Francisco together more than twenty years later. We were very happy swimming and reading, reading and swimming. A couple of times, we chartered a boat for a day. It was a traditional wooden fishing boat called the Mavi Boncuk and it belonged to a lovely Turkish man. He didn’t speak a lot of English but he soon found a new favourite word: “‘mazin.’” No doubt he picked this up from Dad, who was easily and frequently amazed.

At least once we shared the boat with a very friendly young couple from Jersey, Andrew and Helen. We went to little bays only reachable by boat and swam. We rolled down the Turkish flag and went to the Greek island of Simi for the afternoon. The Turk and Andrew fished.

When we weren’t on the boat and I wasn’t ill, I played happily with my Turkish friend. The only English she knew was the lyrics to the Madonna song “Like a Prayer” but this proved surprisingly sufficient.

Now, it seems ‘mazin’ to me that Dad didn’t go mad with only an 11 year-old for company. But barring the last night fracas, proof if proof were needed that two weeks was long enough, I don’t recall any signs of madness. ‘

Years later, I was in L.A. and on the phone to Dad, who was at home in Belfast. I had recently seen the film Love, Actually, and was complaining about Hugh Grant’s opening voiceover, which I found sentimental. In it, he says the people who made phone calls from the planes that were going down on 9-11 all called people to say “I love you.” “Oh yes,” said Dad. “Dreadful.” It took me a moment to realise that he wasn’t talking about Richard Curtis’ script: he actually meant the people saying “I love you.” Taken aback, I asked him what he would say to me if one of us was on a plane that was going down. He didn’t think for long. “I’d say, ‘Remember what a wonderful holiday we had in Turkey?’”

July 1990: even without blurriness, no foundation necessary

As I was having crucial and excruciating eyebrow topiary the other day, I realized that I missed The Chronicles. I put them on hiatus six months ago to focus on The Dead Dad Diaries. But it turns out hair keeps growing during times of grief. It is still necessary to wear clothes most of the time and even to buy them occasionally. Even a tear-filled eye can alight on a Sunday style supplement and be disappointed and incensed by some of the unoriginal, sexist copy therein (oh bite me back, hand that doesn’t feed me).

One blog is about my dad, my memories of him and how I’m dealing with his death. The other blog is my take on retail, fashion, beauty, and more or less whatever takes my fancy or gets my goat. A memory while putting on makeup recently made me consider how the twain might meet in this post.

When I was 11 or 12 and had just moved in with Dad, I was big into Hi! Magazine, then a set text for the tween market (though I don’t think the word tween had been invented). Hi!, like most such media outlets, was cheerfully engaged in encouraging its young readers to buy as much stuff as possible. I gobbled up articles on “makeup bag essentials” and “your perfect daytime face” which instructed me to cleanse, tone, and moisturise, then apply foundation, concealer, blusher, powder, eyeshadow, mascara etc.

My makeup collection started with an ancient lipstick and powder compact handed down from my mum. But Hi! convinced me that this wasn’t nearly enough. I needed foundation and concealer to even out my (already perfect) skin tone and hide my (non-existent) blemishes.  I was 12 and fortunate in having very good skin even for my age. I can say that now. I’ve always been lucky with my skin, have never done much to it, and am still mostly using the same moisturiser I started on when I was, well, about 12 (Simple). But I haven’t got through 20 years entirely unscathed. My 32 year-old face is helped by a splurge of tinted moisturiser (Laura Mercier is the best, but expensive), but I almost never use foundation even now. And yet at the age when I needed it least, I was convinced I had to have it, because Hi! said so and a magazine is more trustworthy than a mirror.

There was no way my modest pocket money was going to stretch to the full complement of “essentials.” So I put the case to Dad, explaining why he really needed to buy me all this slap and backing up my arguments with the printed evidence. Poor man! Recognising that he was no makeup expert and yet questioning whether my peachy cheeks needed embellishment, he asked the secretaries at work whether they thought a 12 year-old needed foundation. Probably not, they ventured.

But Da-a-ad …

I got the makeup but was too lazy and clueless to use it much. Now when I see 12, 13, 14 year-old girls dolled up to look ten years older, I think about how much of wisdom in life — in style, writing, cooking, many things — is shedding the unnecessary or unhelpful and learning that less is more. And I think about Dad, and how well he rose to the many challenges of having a pre-teen daughter, all the new things he had to learn because of me. Also how he took me seriously and let me make silly mistakes and find things out on my own, knowing that if he tried to tell me I wouldn’t listen anyway.

That was the good kind of foundation.