A restored near-normality. Miraculous.
The balance of power between my parents reverted. As my mother grew stronger, my father grew weaker. Dad was again the ill one, baby and boss, Mum was the organising functionary, the strong one. Slowly but surely, month by month, Dad’s Parkinson’s began to move towards its endgame. His blindness, too, got worse; he saw light and dark shapes, but not much else; he would draw Rosa close to him, and gaze past her face. He still went for his morning walks, and refused a white stick, but a neighbour took my mother to one side and told her they were all afraid of running him over, aware he could no long see cars coming (but Vic’s hearing remained supernaturally acute, perhaps fine-tuned by listening out for subversion in the kitchen). He grew thinner and frailer, and needed more clothes, layering waistcoats and woollens under his tweed jacket, his red zipped tracksuit top now like a second skin as he tried to keep warm in his last summer. And then there was another winter to get through, with no hope, now, of escaping to Portugal, with daylight diminishing too early, and the raw bitter wind that comes howling from Siberia and harrows the low, flat East Anglian land. Every morning, though, Dad got up in the dark and did his exercises, standing on one leg to tie each shoe up, making the effort, the tremendous effort, until he could no longer tie his shoes. Dressed himself up, layer after layer, and fought his way out into the featureless cold, not long after the sun cleared the red-brick bungalows and neutered yew-trees, bent forward like a sprinter, though his step was now tiny, uncertain, delicate, as if a slight breeze might have blown him off course. Mum was cutting up his food and feeding him, now. She told me she had said to him once, knowing that he was getting weaker, and she had cancer, ‘Together we can still do anything.’
She showed love for him. She lived it out. And what do I know of the love between them, that existed when no one else was there, that somehow endured the rage and the fear?
I hope that at last my mother was not frightened, or at least no longer frightened of him. In a way, they both got their wish, at last, though getting their wish involved their death. Vic was looked after like a baby, with no rival sibling to push him away. Aileen had a mate who did not frighten her, as her father had once frightened her in drink, as the healthy Vic sometimes frightened her in temper.
I have not really said how bad things were, though in many other houses things were worse.
Once, in the car—it was an accident, although they were rowing—he pushed my mother hard against the door and ‘broke her teeth’, she said: perhaps it was one tooth. This was in the months before she left. The dentist repaired it, but she had had enough.
This incident is what sticks in my mind from all the scuffles and fights that were like something a child would do in a painful, unmanageable rage. I pity him for having to be violent: no one wants to be violent. When he threw a plateful of food across the table, how desperate must he have felt? How reduced to the rage of a thwarted infant. The fact remains, he was bigger than my mother, and when he was angry, out of control, so I cannot altogether pity him. I suffered from her fear; was afraid with her, and for her. Not so much for myself, once I reached adolescence, because I knew I would go away. I can’t even remember how old I was when he stopped hitting me (but isn’t there something odd about the way people say a child is ‘too old to be hit’? Does it mean ‘best only to hit children when they are too small to hit you back’?) I do remember him knocking off my glasses at the tea-table, when I was a sullen fourteen-year-old, and my brave elder brother standing up for me. We children did stand up for each other.
So much easier for me to love my father, first when I was no longer living at home; secondly when he was no longer (I must believe) hitting my mother; thirdly when he was blind and weak and definitely not hitting anyone at all any more; and finally now he is dead. I am loving the man he would have wanted to be, and might have had a chance to be. It was for us, to support his wife and children, that he gave up the chance to be a photographer and shouldered the crippling weight of the day job, the teaching job that made him a part-time tyrant, a head teacher of the corporal punishment era who obsessively told his family about each caning, bringing the shame of that back home. ‘You’re John’s tyrant, Vic.’ But he didn’t want to be. Probably he should have been an artist, with his thin skin and keen apprehension of beauty.
And in many respects I identify. I too am a Gee, and not always easy to live with. Gees are wonderful in theory, but oppressive and abrasive in practice. Oversensitive perfectionists who can keep working for ever, Gees have to learn the concept of ‘good enough’, ‘getting by’ and ‘leave well alone’. I have to learn them. I am learning still. My father never learned to leave people alone. He wanted more from them; restlessly, urgently, he demanded more than he could be given.