Jesteśmy społecznością, która kocha książki

Above all, I have set out to tell you the things you don’t know about me, in the hope that, one day perhaps, you will feel able to tell someone what they don’t know about you.

Having three children of my own had helped me to reflect on what had taken place. (...) There is a bright light generated by the love I feel for them and the love I witness between them and their mother, and it’s as if it shines in all directions, so there are no dark corners, even reaching back through the shadows of the past, illuminating more clearly than ever the wickedness I was subjected to and helping me to find the strength to have one last go at confronting it.

This is the true inheritance tax of life. Behaviours and habits, ingrained, your own but not your own, a duty on your existence, a tariff to be levied on those who try to love you.

I could keep this secret because I lacked the power to force news of it out of my person. Words to describe it adequately, or plausibly, were beyond me. I didn’t want to tell anyway, not because I was consciously frightened, or even concerned that I’d be disbelieved, more that this new secrecy had gone very deep inside me, taken root so far within my being that to eject it was to risk self-destruction by somehow turning myself inside out and never being able to go back to where I was before. It felt, still feels, like a risk.

Children often enjoy books about good people, preferring villains to see the error of their ways. Only adults like their protagonists cynical, vain and cruel. Kids like nice people, preferably with a sweet tooth, and clumsy bears, and spirited dogs who save drowning children, cats who can’t catch birds, and noble horses. They are open-minded, able to believe even in a miraculous healer of the sick, a feeder of the starving, who cares not for possessions but only for all things bright and beautiful and who would, for the common good, make the ultimate sacrifice.

Old bat' can only mean a woman. It’s derogatory, of course, arriving with us on a journey from the out-of-use term 'fly-by-nights', suggesting witchcraft, or its French equivalent, the Night Swallow (hirondelle de nuit), which implies prostitution. There are no nice terms for a woman out on her own at night.

It’s commonplace to believe that the present day, right now as you read this, represents the sharp end of human progress, which can be measured not just in advances in medical science, long-haul journey times and download speed, but also by honesty in palliative care. There is a reassuring belief that human behaviour is on an improvement continuum.

If the quality of palliative care is improving then a journey back through history ought to reveal an increasing lack of concern for the dying and the dead, until we arrive at period where barely a thought is given to a funeral or any act of remembrance. Yet the one thing that appears to connect all ancient civilisations, regardless of geography or time, is the importance of their tombs, mausoleums and burial grounds.

In my family, when Mum was dying, the stated policy was:

‘Least said, soonest mended.’

Not a motto you’ll see framed on the wall of any funeral parlours.

If you were dying, would you want to know?
(...) Ask yourself the question and share your answer, at the first symptom of something bad, because you may end up in the hands of people who decide for you.

But you will never be forgotten. Because the middle one, the six-year-old, will write about you, he’ll say that he remembers your kindness and your warmth and how much you laughed together when you put him in the bath while he still had his socks on.

Grandchildren can’t comprehend the deep blue love grandparents have for them, and the memories these little people evoke of the generation in between, who were also once small, curious, and alive.

Electroconvulsive Therapy is still used, nowadays under a general anaesthetic. You’re twice as likely to have it as a woman than as a man.

They zapped me, Alan,' she said.
'I know, Gran. I’m sorry.'
'I don’t like it.'
'It’s worked, though, Gran. It’s nice to see you eating,' I said.
She conceded with a sigh and with evident reservations. Then her watery eyes looked up at me like those of a small mammal recently released from a trap, but not yet strong enough to run.

If traumatic events can stunt the emotional development of a child at the age they are when they happen, then perhaps all children of my father’s generation were left with a comic-book view of the horror of the war, living as they did in a post-imperial, Churchill-worshipping, heavily propagandised Home Front reality, with intensive state brainwashing through newspapers and radio broadcasts, and Government-issue wool pulled over their patriotic eyes, all of this sustaining in them a deep and lasting mistrust of anything foreign.

Lots of men hate boys, or so it seems when you’re a boy. We often hate the people who remind us of ourselves and our shortcomings.

Is that why Alice in Wonderland is so popular, because everyone longs to drop down a rabbit hole where they will meet nothing familiar, and no one notices they’ve gone? Didn’t Alice appear to wander off in the first place because her sibling wasn’t interested in her?

If it were November she’d keep a sixpence back for the Christmas pudding and whoever found it in their bowl could hope for good luck in the New Year. It’s a tradition that’s all but died out. Nowadays most puddings are shop bought, the sixpences were melted down in 1980, and people have had to come up with new ideas about how luck is allocated. The more logical theories consider geography, skin pigmentation and gender.

A few years later I was a functioning delinquent, vandalising buses with stolen marker pens. Such behaviour in someone bereaved or abused, I’m told, is more positive than a common alternative, depression leading to suicide. Although shoplifting, vandalism and insolence won’t earn any accolades for an adolescent, they might be evidence of a person making a space for themselves in the world, having been dealt a poor hand.

By the time I graduated I decided again to fake a smile, hide my fear, and be a stand-up comedian.

My answer was that a person who wants the victim to be quiet is on the side of the abuser. Mine wants me to be quiet, and all other abusers would also want me to be quiet, in case their victims take a lead from my speaking up and raise their hands and confide to their friends, and possibly to the police, and realise the shame is not theirs to carry.

I remembered his displeasure a few years before when I’d plastered my bedroom walls with anti-vivisection posters featuring caged animals in experiments, replacing pictures of all the members of Adam and the Ants. As I sat on the bed I’d been abused in as a boy, behind a closed bedroom door, looking up at all these photographs of trapped creatures suffering in silence I failed to identify the roots of my empathy and compassion for them.

Inside there were copies of Reader’s Digest and a couple of little felt-tip drawings I had done for my dad, when I was about ten, on which I had written the mysterious phrase:

I love you well enough to know that you love me.

It seemed to make sense at the time, after Mum had died, that I loved him and he loved me. But I remember struggling to sum up my feelings, and looking back what I wrote was painfully unsure, as if I was saying: 'I know you love me. Even though you don’t say it. If I feel love for you that means you feel it for me too, doesn’t it?'.

The public face of an organisation can mask its private side too, and the dignified public face of a parent affords the same opportunity for a hidden life at home.

Of course all that order appealed to him, those lines and rules and agreed limits and outcomes, an imposed structure of acceptable behaviour at a club where you had to be the right sort of fellow to become a member in the first place. In accountancy, too, his profession, the numbers, the columns, adding up correctly not incorrectly, with restrictions imposed from the outside in the form of rules and laws. Order, order and more order, all complied with, all helping to conceal what lies within him, but at what cost? Where could the pressure be released? Perhaps at home, where there were no outsiders to determine boundaries. But even there he marked out some of his own in whitewash.

He never apologised for anything, he’d just stride away and not mention it again. He slapped happiness out of me, like dust out of a carpet.

Perhaps Granny and I were a threat. He could not fully control us; we were spirited, not compliant, often defiant. So he deployed his capacity for sexual deviancy to subjugate. He didn’t want a fuck, he wanted silence. An unspoken arrangement that would function like a shackle, like a binding inside the head, a bond of repellent horror in a shared experience that would haunt us every day of our remaining lives.

It’s what I wish for everyone with a dad like mine. Amnesia.

But those flat hands. What prompts me to recall them now are wooden table tops. If I’m sitting at a wooden table that hasn’t been polished to a shine, so it has a dry surface, with no oil in it, an absence of moisture, the kind of table that is almost papery to the touch, so you could easily brush crumbs from it, the texture of that unpolished wood, to me, is that of my father’s hands. Arid and sapless, neither hot nor cold, with no clammy dampness or residue, I can imagine him not leaving a fingerprint, even on a cold glass, nothing left behind, no trace that he was ever there. And without the evidence, the mark, the tangible proof, how can you show where he’s been? No prints, no witnesses, case dismissed.

(...) and I didn’t speak up because the padlock in my mind was locked and I did not have the key. I did not have power, I hadn’t taken it, and it was still wielded over me in the form of a lifelong knot of silence.