My final blog (for now) on my Dad and his influence on my life, here looking at fleeting holidays and his all too brief retirement.
Because of my Father’s work ethic and commitments outside the home, we didn't see a lot of him apart from on holidays. These were always within the confines of the British Isles, and overwhelmingly in Northern Ireland. We did visit Butlins in Mosney when I was a baby (winning the “Bonnie Baby Competition” I’ll have you know) but the onset of the Troubles put paid to any further jaunts into the “Free State”.
We did take one holiday with him to the Isle of Man and another to my mum’s sister May in London, but most holidays with my Dad involved driving somewhere. Because he didn’t have a car when we were younger (the first car he had after I was born was one he “won” in a works raffle at Christmas, drove home, parked in in the back driveway and it never moved again under its own motive power), my Dad usually hired a car for his holidays, whether that involved day trips to Cookstown and elsewhere, or the occasional longer break to a borrowed caravan in Millisle or a Hotel in Portrush.
That stopped after one time when he hired a Volkswagen Beetle and was driving it home and had an accident which involved him rolling the car and ending up taking out a telegraph pole. He was prosecuted for dangerous driving, although later it transpired that what he claimed had happened, ie. that the steering lock had come on when he swerved suddenly to avoid something in the road, was a problem with that particular model. One of the results of the accident is that one day when my brother and I were playing in the garden, a Roads Service truck arrived and delivered the damaged telegraph pole, which sat along the side hedge until it was removed by bonfire builders a month or two later. However, my Dad’s prosecution meant that while he retained his license he could no longer hire cars, and he had to buy one. The first was a small green Mini, and that carried us on our first holiday across to Scotland, including one week in various Bed and Breakfasts across the Lowlands followed by a week in Butlins in Ayr. This was repeated the following year in a large Maxi, which was so big that my Dad decided that, instead of using B&Bs we would use campsites, with Sam and I sleeping in a tent he had been given by a workmate (after all I was a Scout and he by that stage was a Cub), while he and Mum would sleep in the car with the front bench seat folded down. This proved a dismal failure, because, first the “tent” turned out to be only a flysheet with no interior compartment, and my Mum wasn’t impressed by her sleeping quarters, so we resumed using B&Bs. I won a talent competition in Ayr that year singing a rugby song which I had learned from my older brothers, where in my naivety I did not understand the double entendres, but my audience clearly did. As well as njoying my brief moment in the spotlight, Ilearned two things on those holidays. First, that Lorne/square sausage for breakfast is a genuine delicacy, and secondly, from the evenings watching Mum and Dad on the dancefloor at Butlins, they were really very good dancers. My Mum had always enjoyed the occasional night out for a dinner dance with Dad, but I suppose I had never until that point I thought that the main attraction was the dinner!
We did return to Scotland a few years later but by that point Butlins was getting to be a little tatty and my brother and I had outgrown its limited attractions. Most of our remaining holidays together were spent in borrowed caravans in Portrush or Millisle. For two years in a row we went to Portrush and it poured for almost the entire time. For the second of those my Dad was driving an old Opel Kadette with a cavernous boot, and a cracked distributor cap, which meant that in order to get away on day trips we had to push the car half way round the caravan site to get it started. This meant that we spent an inordinate amount of time inside the caravan itself, playing gin rummy, draughts (which my Dad was quite good at) and, when we were feeling particularly suicidal, Monopoly. These games sessions with my Dad in a cold caravan on a rainy day were pretty close to my idea of hell on earth, and put me off caravan holidays for life. No disrespect to my younger brother, but he is a compulsive cheat at games, while my Dad was a bad loser and a worse winner. More than one game ended up with cards or board being flung into the air, and my mother throwing herself between Sam and my Dad. My last holiday with them was a similar diabolical experience in Millisle, in 1981, when I was rescued by my oldest brother, who swapped me for their two children, Heather and Paul. I am not sure that my niece and nephew have forgiven me to this day.
I think that was also the last year that Sam holidayed with them, and after that my Mum and Dad went on a couple of holidays on their own, to exotic locations like Scarborough and Jersey. On these occasions I was entrusted with looking after the house, and I managed this without burning it down or flooding it... although on one occasion one of the house fuses blew, and because they were the old ceramic ones with fuse wires, in the absence of replacement fuse wires, I managed to “fix” it with a piece of tinfoil, meaning to replace it before they got back. Two years later, after I had moved out, my Dad found this “fix” when changing another fuse, blaming my brother... I didn’t own up.
Sally and I had been living with my Mum and Dad for some time until the previous June, on moving to Belfast for me to candidate for ministry. 2 houses we had planned to buy both fell through at the last minute, and so, having planned to be with them for a few weeks, we actually ended up there for 9 months, with my younger brother also moving home after Christmas while I was on a theatre tour in the US, an experience we all found a little claustrophobic. Indeed the day we finally got the keys for our wee terraced house in Victoria Drive happened to be the day of an uncle’s funeral, and the cremation was no sooner over than he had me bundled into the car to get all our belongings loaded into his car and trailer and deposited in the new house.
So after my Mum died, it was just my Dad and Sam at home for some time, a domestic relationship which was not ideal. He was already at official retirement age but a combination of his work ethic and loneliness meant that he put off retirement even further, continuing to work at pilot engineering until well after his 70th birthday. But an older man cannot possibly continue to work safely at the type of work he was doing, or put in the hours that he traditionally worked, as the foreman, usually being the one to open up and lock up.
So eventually he retired, but sadly his health took a fairly rapid downturn within a year or two, and in December 1999, he took a nasty flu that had floored half the family after my nephew Paul’s wedding. The following year he was then hospitalised with a heart attack and stroke. This affected not only his physical health but also his confidence, meaning that he felt unable to return to live at home. He moved into Palmerston House, a residential home in East Belfast which was run by Newtownabbey Methodist Mission at that point. As a member of Sydenham Methodist Church’s Youth Fellowship, and later as a student minister I had often conducted Sunday evening services for the residents, and did so again during his time there, first for an initial respite period, and subsequently, at his own insistence, as a permanent resident. We all appreciated the care he received in Palmerston over the next 18 months, but he went rapidly downhill because of a combination of vascular dementia and depression. Palmerston House was subsequently demolished and rebuilt as a purpose built dementia care facility, which is now managed by Abbeyfield Wesley, which is the organisation that Sally now works for. As part of her role she was involved in developing an award winning dementia friendly garden, and as she did so I thought how much my Dad would have enjoyed that project, although the presence of a caravan and boardgames in the garden may have brought back traumatic memories for the rest of the family.
And so we come back to the place I began over a week ago, with his death on the 8th October 2002. By that stage we were all sad that he was gone but he was a shadow of the vigorous man he had been a few short years before, and a combination of his physical limitations, the effects of dementia and depression had meant that he was increasingly angry and aggressive, indeed had he not died we would probably have been forced to move him from Palmerston. But he and we were spared that.
So as I come to the end of this series of reflections on my Dad’s life what stands out for me? Well, yesterday I signed off with three relatively trivial learnings from his work practices, but there are other things that I have learned, or inherited from him.
First, like my oldest brother, I look more like my Mum, but inherited a tendency to Type 2 diabetes, which I then exacerbated through an irregular and stressful lifestyle, and consuming his level of calories without doing anything like his level of hard work. So whereas he developed it in his fifties, and showed a remarkable level of self-discipline in controlling it by diet alone for around 15 years, I developed it in my mid thirties.
I have also, together with all my brothers, inherited his willingness to be a thorn in the flesh of those with whom I believe are leading others in the wrong direction, which can be a positive and a negative thing. I have also, unfortunately, inherited his, at times, volcanic, though thankfully short-lived, temper, although I would like to think that I am more self-aware than he was, and I have learned to say sorry, a word I never heard from him.
I have inherited his love of reading, though with the exception of Shane which I had to read at school I have never read a cowboy book in my life. I also think that there is a fair level of genetic component to any intelligence I have, and that the same untapped potential lay within both my parents, which is why I have never taken the privilege of a grammar school and university education for granted. Indeed that, allied with my Dad’s work ethic and competitive nature meant that for a long time I strove to at least master whatever subject or task was before me, if not, somewhat unattractively, seek to prove that I was one of the smartest people in the room... Some of that was a reverse snobbery about my working class background, but when I came across subjects where people had a headstart on me because of their schooling, or where I didn’t have a natural aptitude (eg. French at school) it was a big shock to my system and took a lot of getting over... It also contributed to me working myself not only into diabetes, but ultimately anxiety and depression, but thankfully I have (with the onset of middle age), grown up a bit. I am not quite so driven as I once was, and I enjoy being in the company of people who are much smarter than me, talking and demonstrating competencies I couldn’t begin to comprehend.
I did inherit his unwillingness to let a practical problem beat him, and whilst I don’t have his metalworking skills, on more than one occasion I have employed “temporary fixes” that I think he would have been proud of... including plumbing solutions that have utilised some of his old hose clips, a drawing pin and a 2p piece, or fixing a bicycle pannier with a keyring. The key, however, as per the previously mentioned “tinfoil fuse repair” is to remember that they are only temporary fixes and get a professional to fix it properly!
I certainly didn’t inherit his theological or political viewpoints; I learned early on that those were not to be questioned, even when he came out with something that would be seen as sectarian or racist, and indeed he could be seen as an archetype of old-style Ulster Protestantism, founded on untested certainties. But growing up in his shadow meant that despite wandering far from that intensely conservative, if not reactionary mindset, I understand and will never demonise it. But like my Dad I have no time for those who seek to use churches or other organisations for selfish, or sectarian ends.
Every day of life ended in the same way for my Dad, he went down on his knees beside his bed to pray. I never heard him pray openly in his life, but this daily discipline was something deeply important to him. He then read a chapter of the Psalms (from the King James Version of course) and a chapter of a cowboy book. My oldest brother talked to him about this combination at one point and my Dad said that for him the Psalms and most cowboy books came from the same place: a belief that there was right and wrong, good and bad and that God was on the side of the good guys in the white hats, even when they had to use violence to bring the bad guys in the black hats to book. That’s a fairly clear, if somewhat uncomfortable, reading of the Psalms (and the myth of redemptive violence in cowboy books/films) for a wishy washy liberal like me. I think that the world is a lot more complex than that, and the Psalms are an expression of some of that complexity. My Dad was certainly a complicated man... but at the end of the day, I think he was one of the good guys, white hat or not...
The first of the photos on this blog is of my Dad with a certain Bonnie Baby at Butlins in Mosney in 1966, the second is of him and his friend Sammy Downey at a caravan in Ballywhiskin the following year. The third is my Mum and Dad with my Aunt Sylvia, my Dad's sister at the final holiday I spent with them in Millisle in 1981, while the fourth is of my Mum and Dad with me on my graduation from Edinburgh University on 12th July 1989. The final one is the last photo I have of my Dad, shortly after the birth of our youngest son Ciaran in the Royal Jubilee Maternity Hospital, with Owain looking lovingly at his young brother, Sally's Mum Kathleen, beaming with pride, and my Dad, just looking like my Dad... I wish the boys had got to know him better... I wish I had got to know him better.
Shalom
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Love, Kathleen