An evening Yorkshire Forest walk.

A thought struck me as we ambled towards the light. I would have loved to have done something like this with my Dad. Don’t get me wrong, we occasionally had trips out, but they were pretty rare. Looking back to my childhood I can still count the trips. I remember Dad taking me to see the 125 High Speed Locomotive, back then it looked like a Space Age Rocket rather than a Passenger Train as it passed through Darlington Station. I remember a trip to a Train Museum where I found an old ticket machine that dished out things that looked like raffle tickets. As we walked around the museum he eagerly checked out each steam train while I trailed a few paces behind. There was another trip to see a charity cricket match featuring the sporting legend Fred Truman. That was the trip Dad sent me into the players showers to get Fred’s autograph…. Not sure that’s happening these days…. A few trips to the coast to see a storm, sat in Dad’s banged out car, I’m eating chips while Dad is silently smoking.

The whole family would have an annual trip to Scarborough. Dad would frequently disappear for most of the days to do his thing. I can remember seeing him sat on a bench some distance away from the rest of the family as they tried to stop me from falling off the Donkey Rides on the beach.

That’s it, I can’t remember any other trips with Dad. Definitely no walks through a Forest….

To be completely fair, back then in our northern working class town travel was way less accessible. Few cars, even rarer aircraft tickets…

At home there was similarly limited Dad time. Dad might be briefly pulled away from reading the newspaper to talk, I might get a few words before he buried his head back into the racing and obituary pages. As Dad listened to his radio on an evening I would clearly annoy him with interruptions, you just know when someone wants you to shut up. Volunteering to take him a cup of tea to him while he sat in his Greenhouse might yield me a few minutes being told all about how to grow tomatoes or raspberries. Even when I was sent on a Sunday to the local Pub to tell Dad that his meal was getting cold, I would be lucky to get a brief nod before I was pointed in the direction of the door. On the way home again I trailed a few paces behind while. We just didn’t talk that much. So few chats with Dad.

Those times were so frustrating to me. I would have loved ME TIME with DAD, yet in reality MY DAD TIME felt very distanced. I’m sure it wasn’t the case but it just felt like I was often a nuisance, a bit in the way, an interruption to Dad’s routines.

The end result was I always felt distant from him. He didn’t understand me and I didn’t really know him. I knew he liked trains, liked cricket, he liked fishing, he liked gardening, he liked beer, he smoked, he was in the army. Looking back, I now realise that he wasn’t happy, probably chronically depressed and I still don’t know him. I will never know him.

52 thoughts on “Dad”

  3. By the time you are wise enough to understand, it’s too late. The war left it’s mark even if it was never spoken of. Sometimes I feel I did not know my parents at all. I do remember Freddie Truman though. My dad and brother were dead keen on cricket but they were Surrey men. Peter May was it? And Colin Cowdrey played for Kent. Why do such things get etched into a brain?

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  5. I had a similar experience. My dad spent a lot of time ignoring me. As an only child, I got lots of presents for birthdays & Christmas but, my dad was emotionally distant. He was strict with behavior. I got spanked/switched frequently if I let my personality out. That led me to act out in school, making things worse on me. Being independent was out of the question. We he & my mom split, when I was 12, I was suddenly his “child to be protected” though I was in my early teens. We got along better when I was an adult but, he was messed up inside. He’d been stolen from his mom, by his Grandmother (because she could). He wound up battling his own father for the Grandfather’s affections. He drank heavily over the suicide of a girlfriend and the subsequent investigation from her father. That woman was messed up and, she, in turn, messed him up. Luckily, some years later my stepmom helped him a lot. He passed Aug. 25, 2022. Died in his sleep. I never really understood him.

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      1. Some fathers do let the mother “handle things.” Some fathers don’t know how to be a good parent. There is usually some kind of trauma in the past.

        We both lost out.

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  8. I think that’s a fairly accurate picture of a lot of relationships with parents in those days. I think we try harder to understand and give our kids a better life now. There wasn’t the same analysis of things and life was focused on ‘bringing home the bacon’. My parents separated when I was 5 and I stayed with my Mam, but funnily enough I understood and sympathised with Dad more. I guess he had to make an effort when he wanted to see me.

    Hawklad is lucky to have you for a Dad. And that’s a beautiful photo.

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  9. Expectations have changed dramatically for many parents over the last generation or two. I help my sister with three of her grandbabies, and I am aware that these three get our undivided attention for hours on end–something almost unheard of a generation ago. When I spent time with my grandmother, which was rare and precious to me, it was usually focused on chores–baking, gardening, etc. Now, with these little ones, we sing and dance and read and play games. Hopefully, we are evolving as a society into adults who can actively and intentionally show affection and love from the day a child is born.

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  10. Thanks for sharing your memories. I think it’s good therapy for us to write about our feelings on these matters but not all of us have the courage to do so. I think as I got older and had my own children, my Dad and I became very close. He was a farmer and such a workaholic (non-drinker though) when we were young. We did have some lovely family trips to the seaside. (As you say, not many plane tickets back in the day.) My aunt had a big caravan at the very edge of a beautiful beach and he would drop us there with Mum and head back to work…. then return to pick us up some days later. But I know now he absolutely needed to work as times were hard. You are such a good Dad to Hawklad…

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  12. I think some parents are not aware how much they hurt their kids in not giving them more attention. Probably it does not happen on purpose, they just don’t recognize it. I think they see it more like a job to be done (not meant in a negative way). The dads make the money to create financial security for the family. My dad worked a lot. He said, Sunday mornings are for us, children. Then we HAD to do something with him which was actually also only an appointment in the agenda. However, we actually did not even want that. We were fine on our own. It was even more challenging when we HAD to go vacation with our parents – most of all in the mobile home. Playing happy family. It was stress and pressure. It is sad, how we both experienced the dad time.

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  15. My Dad:
    Got on with his life. Enjoyed DIY, gardening, pottering about to make things alright and acceptable. He did the Football Pools from an armchair and this was the only time I wasn’t able to seek his attention, because if I got in the way of the results he would growl {{{giggles}}}. My Dad never smacked me. He was my friend and ally, we didn’t need to talk. I just loved being in his company or just knowing that he was there.

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  16. So beautiful and bittersweet, Gary. That is beautiful photo and that golden hour light is wonderful. You may not have experienced those too often with your dad but you are creating your own path and memories with Hawklad.

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  17. God gives us the parents we get so that we can become the right parents for our own children. Then, if our children bece ome parents, they have the same opportunity to do things right for the next generation. Some people have the privilege of having great parents, some don’t. But we can all try to make the world a better place when the mantle is passed to us. I focus on that more these days or I’d have gone mad having had parents who thought nothing of throwing their daughter to the wolves to preserve their own well being.

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      1. As I parent, I hazard a guess that as wonderful a parent as his were, there might have been at least one crucial bit lacking in their parenting for him to end up being messed up. Maybe it was being too permissive & not setting limits, or not being persistently clear about right and wrong, I don’t know. But the good thing is that through his parents and his own reflections about his experiences, he has at least some semblance of a life compass and another shot at life.

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  20. This is a moving writing, Gary. I think these experiences lay the foundation for how we show up in our own children’s lives. Sometimes we follow the path laid before us, and other times we work very hard to ensure our children do not feel the way we may have felt. I always hear in your writing the love you have for your son and that he is a true priority in your life. ❤️

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