I would say my father did not prepare me well for patriarchy; himself confronted, on his marriage with my mother, with a mother-in-law who was the living embodiment of peasant matriarchy, he had no choice but to capitulate, and did so. Further, I was the child of his mid-forties, when he was just the age to be knocked sideways by the arrival of a baby daughter. I was born in , the week that Dunkirk fell. I think neither of my parents was immune to the symbolism of this, of bringing a little girl-child into the world at a time when the Nazi invasion of England seemed imminent, into the midst of death and approaching dark.
Perhaps I seemed particularly vulnerable and precious and that helps to explain the over-protectiveness they felt about me, later on. Be that as it may, no child, however inauspicious the circumstances, could have been made more welcome. His turn of phrase went straight to my heart, an organ which has inherited much of his Highland sentimentality. His siblings, who never left the native village, were weird beyond belief. To that native village he competently removed himself ten years ago.
Just his luck, when he returned, that all was as it had been before and he could, in a manner of speaking, take up his life where it left off when he moved south seventy years ago. He went south; and made a career; and married an Englishwoman; and lived in London; and fathered children, in an enormous parenthesis of which he retains only sunny memories. My father lives now in his granite house filled with the souvenirs of a long and, I think, happy life. He has a curious, quite unEnglish, ability to live life in, as it were, the third person , to see his life objectively, as a not unfortunate one, and to live up to that notion.
Those granite townships on the edge of the steel-grey North Sea forge a flinty sense of self. He laughs easily, cries easily, and to his example I attribute my conviction that tears, in a man, are a sign of inner strength. He is still capable of surprising me. He recently prepared an electric bed for my boyfriend, which is the sort of thing a doting father in a Scots ballad might have done had the technology been available at the time.
Mark noticed how the bed throbbed when he put his hand on it and disconnected every plug in sight. He is an enthusiastic handyman, with a special fascination for electricity, whose work my mother once described as combining the theory of Heath Robinson with the practice of Mr Pooter. All the same, the Freudian overtones are inescapable. He is a man of immense, nay, imposing physical presence, yet I tend to remember him in undignified circumstances. One of my first memories is how I bust his nose.
