Chapter 7

Imperceptibly, my father had turned into a ticking bomb. His easygoing bonhomie no longer evident, worrying about his job took over.

Over the years, edginess slipped into paranoia; criticism into rages. Initially verbal, his aggression became physical, directed as much towards himself as to my mother and me. The raised hand and clenched fist were held up to my mother. Occasionally both made contact with me.

Harming himself became a familiar theme, sometimes accompanied by dire warnings about what he would do to us.

Push became shove, which then became karate chop to the back of the neck in his later years if I let him get behind me in a temper. He would storm upstairs to his study, the words ‘dead by morning’ ringing in my ears—an empty threat, but devastating nevertheless. I remained awake until I heard him go to bed. I always locked my door, just in case.

He became obsessed with money that he claimed I owed him, demanding written undertakings that it would be paid. He would create a scenario in which he had been defrauded. At length he wove the skeins into a conspiracy.

By the time we had analysed it all and removed the threats he perceived to his financial independence, he had forgotten the beginning of the chain of thought and the process started again.

On one occasion, he had polyps removed in hospital under general anaesthetic. When he came round, he was convivial, chatty. He told me about the other people in the ward. He was happy to introduce them, although he did not know their names. They were ‘good chaps’. He beamed, delighted to have made friends.

He was alone in a single room.

Transferred to the local cottage hospital for convalescence, he was not the ideal patient. Convinced that he was being held against his will, he demanded to be released. ‘It took two nurses and a hospital visitor to bring him down,’ the ward sister told me over the telephone. He had made a bolt for freedom through a fire exit door while the staff had been occupied with a death a few beds along.

In the background I could hear his voice. ‘You’ve got no right to keep me. I’ll sue. Get my son.’ Avoiding the edge of his hand to the back of my neck as I fastened his seat belt and telling him I was, in fact, his son and not the kidnapper he supposed me to be, I caught a glimpse of a face I recognised entering the hospital through the main door.

‘They told me he had discharged himself and come home.’

One of his erstwhile golfing friends had come to visit him and had followed my car to the house.

‘They seemed a bit "off" with me.’

I had just got my father settled in the sitting room. Convinced the friend had come to receive financial advice, my father took him through the basics of stocks and shares. The golfing friend never returned. There’s nothing like dementia to keep visitors away.

He had always been a competitive motorist and the possibilities posed by his powerful BMW sitting in the garage were not lost on us. He once disappeared for hours and returned minus a door mirror. His account of how someone else’s dreadful driving had caused its loss changed each time he told it. He would sit behind the wheel pushing switches.

‘There’s something wrong’, he would say. ‘Only the headlights work.’ We had hidden his car keys, claiming they were lost. When he located his spare, I loosened the battery connections and he assumed the battery was flat. Then we hid the garage door control unit. My father had become a problem of major proportions.

For years my mother and I had had no idea what to do. The police would regard such events as ‘domestic’ and not for their attention. Whatever happened in the home was a family matter, to be dealt with by the family. In this case, it was lived with. To disclose it would reveal a shameful inability to cope. It became accommodated into our lives. We managed as long as we could, pretending that we could accommodate his increasingly aberrant behaviour.

‘We can’t go on like this.’ My mother was sitting on the sofa regaining her breath. My father had stormed out of the house in a whirlwind of temper, knocking her flying. I picked her up and half carried her to the sitting room. I propped her up on her side with cushions.

‘And it’s not fair on you either, Ian. You should get more from life than him. You shouldn’t have to put up with him.’

‘But isn’t there anything left? Now that you know why he’s like this, don’t you love him at all?’

She shook her head.

‘No, there’s nothing there. Not now. He shouldn’t be here.’

‘But he’s not himself. He’s ill.’

‘And he’s making us ill. He needs to be somewhere else.’

She it was who had told me what my father had been like before the accident. She it was who had found the old photos of us as a family. There I was being a toddler; being on a boat, being cuddled by my father, kicking a ball. Fragments of memory came back to me of his enormous love, times when he would throw me into the air in joy; when we would walk hand in hand; when he would read to me. That he had lashed out at me, I knew. I knew, too, that I had blotted out the memories so successfully that I could deny this even to myself. I can hardly bring them to mind even now. She had told me what a devoted father he had been. I knew that he had been intelligent, articulate and sensitive even after the accident during my formative years. This was the father I wanted to remember; wanted still to have.

Yet it was she who wanted him out. By every empirical standard, she was absolutely right, of course. But I loved him. She did not. That had died. She no longer recognised the man she had loved, the man she had married on the day before war was declared, and whose first meal alone with him was fish and chips on a blacked-out train, putting the bones out of the window. How she missed those days. By the 1990s the demons he had fought were taking him over.

I phoned around. Several homes baulked at the idea of taking him. Eventually I found one with a unit for the Elderly Mentally Infirm that was willing to take him on. I made arrangements, hating myself for doing this.

‘It’s just for a while so that you’ll get better.’ I was in the car driving him west to a place that seemed caring, understanding, able to cope. He looked straight ahead, sullen, resigned, tight-mouthed.

‘Grrr.’ He raised his left arm as though to cuff me. I ducked. The car twitched. It had just been a warning.

‘It’s for the best.’ My mother had been watching Wimbledon on TV when I returned. She chatted brightly. A weight had been lifted. Always the pragmatic one, she had seen the problem and accepted that it had been removed. Not me. I remembered my father’s words to me when I left.

‘I know what you’re doing. I won’t forget this.’

My heart went out to him. I drove straight back to see how he was. He was where I had left him, in a room with a stable door. The top part was open. The bottom was locked. He had not stirred from his chair. He had been given some food. Stains from it were round his mouth and down his lapels. He had wet himself. I talked to him, but he would not respond. He looked me hard in the eye. I was the one who had put him there and there was only hatred for me.

Some time later, I brought him home. Verbally aggressive though he remained, he did not touch my mother again.

Protecting her from him and protecting him from himself became my life. Unable to accept that it was the right thing to do, I had taken him out of the EMI unit. I took charge of both my parents. During the illness that preceded her death, I had to put my father back in a home. In six weeks he lost the ability to speak. Expensively provided for, he sat glumly in his single room. His only contact was with an elderly female resident who thought he was her husband and clutched his hand murmuring with cultivated vowels, ‘Headley, Headley’.

I dreaded the visits, knowing that each time a little more of his personality had died. His body, too, was wasting into emaciation. I discovered that small amounts of food had been put in front of him and removed when he did not eat. A change of Home slowed the decline, but even so this was another waiting room for death. I would not have wished it for myself.

I popped in to visit him there early one evening to find him lying on his bedroom carpet in a pool of urine mixed with blood from a cut on his hand. He was making small movements, trying to get up. I looked down the corridor for help. No one there.

I lifted him up, changed him out of his soaked pyjamas, sponged him down, dressed him, combed his hair, put his teeth in and sat him in a chair. The staff told me he had been put to bed at six o’clock as they were short-staffed. So that he would not fall out, he had been moved to the floor. As I knew he always fell out of the same side of the bed at home, I had it shifted so that side was against the wall. It was something I had told the staff when he came in, but nothing had been done.

I wondered how long he would have laid there if I had not happened to visit him. Whatever restrictions this might place on my mobility, I knew that putting him in a Home in future would have to be an absolutely last resort. And I knew that I would have to visit frequently if I did.

To understand all is to forgive all.

Those few words from the psychogeriatrist in 1995 had lifted the veil. He was a victim. What had happened to him was a tragedy. I knew that my love for him had been tested to breaking. I saw him as damaged, but indomitable.

My father was my responsibility. After my mother’s death he was my only family. I wanted him near me. I wanted to look after him.

I brought him home. I thought I would need help. The employment of a resident carer—a frosty lady who confided to her friends in a letter she left inadvertently on my computer that she had ‘reached the bottom of the heap’—was a terminated after a few weeks.

Two of the four others on the short list that resulted from my small ad in The Lady proved to have criminal convictions. A woman from an agency on a one week contract stayed half an hour—’He won’t do as I say.’ I knew then I would have to be the main carer.

The state is not sympathetic to the elderly mentally infirm. In West Berkshire at the end of the twentieth century there was no Day Care for someone like him. He was allowed to attend the Day Hospital locally on one day a week. This was seen as treatment not as care. When they decided they could do nothing for him, he was ‘discharged’—cured.

Apart from me, there was no one to look after him, except at the weekends when St John’s arranged a few hours respite, ‘caring for carers’ as they put it. It was removed when some of the ladies complained that he was too difficult for them. On weekdays, I employed a series of helpers.

They all fell away. My father could sense disengagement in an instant and reacted with stroppiness and the occasional punch, telling the unwanted visitor to leave. Whatever pains a carer may take to stimulate, entertain and show fellow feeling, there is little appreciation. For most, the job is one of containment only; there is not much satisfaction.

When the Human Rights Act was incorporated into English Law, I quantified my few hours a week of free time in a letter to the local Council. For whatever reason, day care was offered on three days a week. For the first time since long before the diagnosis I had the space to think about where my life was likely to go.

I was on my own. What to do? Something or nothing?

Knowing why I was in this situation was the trigger. I wanted to try to find out who I had been and who I would have been had circumstances been different. I felt I needed to go back to go forward; to feel what I had been like in 1955 before it all changed; to be a child again. I had to take myself to pieces and see what I really wanted. The closest I came—and it was an odd experience—was to find copies of some of the books I had read when I was eight. I managed to track down some examples of storybooks for children published in the early ’50s.

They had the same dustjackets, the same pictures and even smelled the same as the books I recalled from that time. I became lost in the magic of Enid Blyton’s ‘Faraway Tree’. Silky, Moonface and Saucepan Man became real again. I was submerged in the memories and atmosphere that had helped shape me almost half a century before. I recalled myself as a happy only child with a vivid imagination.

I progressed to the Hardy novels of my teenage years and became lost in them again, their powerful passions mirroring the loves of my life; their characters puppets on strings pulled by destiny.

I saw the same person with life somehow ‘on hold’, not free. The relationship that should have happened had not happened. I wished it had.

The answer came before finding a reason. It was clear—or at least let me know what I wanted. I wanted to have my own family.

Children, business, life—all they were all interconnected—inextricably so. My work as a teacher had always been with children.

On a general level, I had fought for their rights. In a personal context, I became very aware of children’s development and shared their joy and that of their parents when they achieved individual and academic success. I changed people’s lives, that was certain. But these were other people’s children. Not mine. That was what I wanted. I wanted to see my own child develop.

I looked at dating agencies. The chance of meeting someone would be a fine thing. Yet to develop a relationship would take years and I was still a carer. My father could not be left alone for a minute. I would have to find someone much younger than me who could have children, unless I accepted the idea of an existing family. I had been with other people’s children all my life in one way or another. I wanted my own.

Besides, marriage for the sake of having a child was doomed. I knew what I had to do; saw what was to be done. I would have a family of my own. As there was no one else in my life , I would have to go it alone. Time was not on my side, so I had better get on with it.