Chapter 6

To make his point, my father’s fist banged on the table. The words were a blur, but the actions spoke for themselves. I was sitting at the dining table on that Saturday lunchtime on that winter’s day in 1957 when I was ten. I had no idea what it was, but it must have been something I had done.

I had finished my rice pudding, or maybe I hadn’t and that was the problem. My father had not.

He had been working himself into a rage during the whole meal because my mother was not, as he put it, backing him up. I wanted to leave the table. Asking to do so never occurred to me as it was accepted that my mother, father and I would finish a meal together.

My mother carried on eating. It was her way of coping. She rode it. She didn’t, of course, but she kept her composure. The outburst terrified her as much as it did me.

‘Calm down, John.’ ‘John’ had been the only part of his name she had caught when they had been introduced at a cricket club in the 1930s. She had never reconciled herself to his real name being ‘Herbert’.

Down and down the fist pounded. I watched transfixed. Everything around us was normal. The room, the furniture, the view through the French windows into the garden that was my father’s joy. Past the skeletal fruit trees, up to the trellis that separated the grassed area from the vegetables.

Yet there in front of this familiarity was my father enraged as I had never seen him before. In one hand the spoon; the other hand continued its downward path. Bang, bang, bang—splodge. His fist caught the side of the bowl, sending it towards his chest down into his lap and the contents into his face which, now florid, was striated with white. At a distance of several decades, recollection of the sight should be amusing, yet it makes me shudder.

Confused, I fled and remained hovering at the top of the stairs, weeping while my father ranted at my mother below. She held him back from following me.

Something was my fault. I had caused this. I was in the wrong. I must be. Parents didn’t do anything wrong—at least they never had before. I retreated to my bedroom and my Enid Blyton books. Hours later my mother came up and comforted me. My father had calmed down and the incident was never referred to. I resolved to be careful not to cross him in future.

On the 2nd December 1955 everything had changed. I was eight. I knew, in the way a child senses without being able to rationalise, that something had happened.

There had been a car crash. The knock on the door. A policeman. ‘I’m afraid there has been an accident.’ A group of men who worked at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston had a car pool to and from work. An American driving on the wrong side of the road had hit the car in which my father had been a front seat passenger. The accident had not been a serious one and had just sent the car into a ditch. It was a new car and the driver had tried to get it out of the ditch by accelerating. The nearside wheels stayed in the ditch and the car cannoned into a telegraph post. Unrestrained by belt or bag, my father was flung through the windscreen.

His hat saved him from more serious injury. He stuck the part of his nose that had been sliced through back on and held it all the way to the hospital. It was stitched and he was sent home. Apart from this temporary re-arrangement of his facial features, he seemed to have been lucky.

In 1955, there were no routine brain scans. It was a full year before recurrent headaches led to his head being x-rayed and a fractured skull, broken cheekbone and damaged sinuses being diagnosed. He was in and out of hospital for several more years undergoing operations during which his eye was rolled out of its socket to gain access to internal organs. The possibility of brain damage was never mentioned, never considered.

He was awarded £1000 compensation four years later and replaced his pre-war Austin 8 with a gleaming MG Magnette, the latest model: black, befinned and with whitewall tyres.

It was forty years after the accident before the full extent of his injuries was revealed. That year, after I had served lunch to both my parents, he had complained that he had not had anything to eat and had lunged at me with a screwdriver. My back was turned, I saw him reflected in a window and ducked. For years his anger had been brewing. He meant to hurt me. My mother and I arranged a private brain scan and an appointment to have the results analysed.

‘Your father has frontal lobe damage of long standing’, the psychogeriatrist told my mother and me almost as an aside. ‘It almost certainly happened during the car accident.’ The revelation was like a physical impact.

It finally dawned on me that my father had not been the only victim of that crash. I knew what had shaped my life since 1955.

As a child I was aware that there had been a change. I am not sure that I knew my father had changed or that the placid man who had left for work that morning would never return. No one told me he had suffered a personality transformation. I knew about the headaches because he told us he had them. I knew about the temper tantrums because they were directed at me. I just assumed it was my fault and that I could never please my father.

I sensed that if I were not there, my mother would be on the receiving end of his displeasure. He would turn on her in a way I had not seen before, demanding aggressively that she answer for my ‘attitude’ towards him. I saw myself as her ally, but also as the reason why she was in trouble with him. I admired her for siding with me, not him. I felt a special closeness and warmth.

It was not constant, but the fear of incurring an impending rage was omnipresent. I became wary and cautious, confiding my observations to a diary.

‘Daddy was really angry today. Took my boots and went out collecting planeria at the gravel pits with Chris. Played at ‘Swallows and Amazons’ all day. Came back.’

It was not that I thought he didn’t love me. It was just that he loved me more than I thought I deserved. How could he love me when I didn’t shape up?

That he did love me, I knew. And he told me he did. And I loved him. Unconditionally. That faltered, but fundamentally never changed.

Off I went to the cricket matches he was playing in. My mother would be a scorer. I would drift away to the edge of the field or the railway embankment to look at the trains. I wished I could be more interested. I should have been into sport. My father was a sportsman. But I wasn’t. I scribbled some stories; some poems. I would rather have achieved ball skills on the field; wished I could; knew it was a failing in me, but I couldn’t see the point. Still can’t to this day.

Rages would spring from nowhere. ‘Why won’t he play cricket? I’d take him.’ He arranged golf lessons.

‘The boy’s got a natural swing,’ the pro told my father who proudly communicated this to his friends.

Yet hitting a small ball across grass held not much more appeal. The ideas that sprang from the pages of books were what I craved. I found refuge in reading and could get through a Doctor Dolittle and a Rider Haggard in a Sunday morning. Here was excitement and adventure that was for me more real than chasing a ball.

Perhaps, even at that early stage, I considered that being simply competent would never have been acceptable. I did well at school. He was hugely supportive and there were few causes for complaint, but he would look around in other areas. I sensed a resentment simmering never far from the surface.

It is only by looking back, by analysing the minutiae of my father’s life, that I can see how the damage simply escalated, although no one linked it with what had happened. The man who had been placid, jovial, spontaneous, became a driven workaholic.

The high standards he expected of himself were also directed towards me. Achievement had to be followed by a greater achievement. ‘If you are doing a repetitive task, something you are used to, you can disguise the dementia that is building up’, the psychogeriatrist told me later.

There he was with undiagnosed damage and there we were dealing with dementia without ever having heard the word.

It was in that surreal instant of clarity, I knew that I had always been a carer; a protector; not only for my father, but for my mother as well. If you live with something long enough, it becomes the only reality. It never occurred to me to question it. Never considered the reasons why or even the effect it had on me. I had not known anything different. My father had changed my life. My fear of what he might do to my mother had stopped me moving on, kept me near them, watching him and watching out for her. He had taken my freedom, but I didn't, couldn't, resent him for this. And I knew I would do it all again.

It was only when this red-haired, black-robed, statuesque doctor looked over her pince-nez straight at me in her sun-filled consulting room on that brilliant September afternoon in 1995 and said the words ‘brain damage’ that I made the connection.

‘And it will get worse.’

She leaned back in her swivel chair, still looking directly at me. ‘There will come a time when you will need to consider your options.’

Options? Were there any?

It was the first time I realised I may have already considered these. At the time when my contemporaries were moving out, I was building a house large enough to accommodate us all. My parents had had me late in life. My childhood had been full of friends, but I rarely if ever invited them home. I assumed there would be an awkward atmosphere, so avoided precipitating it. I went to see other people, visited them in their homes, did not take the chance of inviting them to mine.

A shame, in retrospect. My mother was a fine cook and would, under different circumstances, have loved to entertain.

That we did not was never an issue. It was a reality; simply a fact.