What did your dad do?

In my family for someone to say “You’re just like your dad” is not something that is likely to be all that well received. For a whole variety of reasons, we siblings have no wish to be too closely identified with him. Nevertheless, when I am sitting on the old sofa in the kitchen while my wife puts a meal together and I am apparently doing nothing much at all and she says “You look just like your dad,” I do know exactly what she means.

She is referring to my father in the last few years of his life when he would sit at the kitchen table, next to the alcove, near the old bookcase with the Roberts Radio and his box of vegetable seeds on top, saying and doing nothing at all for hours at a time. When she says, “What did your dad do?” I have to take time to think this one through.

In the summer I know that he spent a lot of time at his allotment garden, which he kept neat and weed free in a way that I could never achieve. Evenings were spent with mum watching TV until, around ten he would put a coat on and go to the pub for half an hour. Only ever one drink, unless I was there to persuade him to have a second. I don’t think he had any friends in there to talk to, though there was sometimes a nod to a man of his age who he called “the Welshman”, and that was as far as his social interactions went.

In fact that seems to be about as far as his life went. In the winter his visits to the allotment garden diminished and as far as I can see he did very little at all. When I visited I would take him to a football match but I don’t think this is something that he would have contemplated doing without me.

This is only a slice of my father’s life and there is much more that I could write about, but I sense that I am going to have to approach his story in small pieces. The problem is that when somebody says, “You’re just like your dad”, I can’t help but think of him living a life that had come to an end before its time, and I have no wish to be seen in that way.