My father is old now, he's in his seventies, and for all of my life he has been deaf. Like many men of his generation, he is a casualty of the war. A cannon blast shattered his eardrums. As I grew up I tried to get a picture of him hurting, crying, being helped to safety, but the emotionally silent man I knew made it hard.
What he gave me were fragments of his past. My brothers told me of a harsh and violent man who doled out clouts and used his belt on them, but I couldn't imagine it. He never hit me, but he never shared any emotion with me either. I saw him cry only once, when my mother had run up bills she couldn't pay on the money he gave her. The memory is clear... he stands at the fireplace clutching the brown envelope in despair. The crack in the emotional deadness of my vision of him. He turns away from the mirror over the fire and his voice changes to a higher pitch as he starts to cry.
John comes in from school hurt because he's been called a queer. He is thirteen now and has a passion for dancing. We talk and end up laughing at the ridiculousness of such an image. He sees physically strong male dancers, he knows that some are gay and some are not, and that this isn't important to him anyway. It's something else he wants. The passion and the freedom to express how he feels with his body. I know that what I say to him now is not as important as how l really am for him. His freedom can so easily be stopped by ridicule or lack of support. He is surrounded by a working class culture of friends and school that still demands the same restricted masculine role. Do I show another model enough to convince him, to give him enough strength?
I have an image of a man who was physically and emotionally tired by the time I came along. Life was regulated and routine drudge. Christmas and summer holidays were the only release, an overindulgence of pleasure to compensate for the usual boredom.
| From the distance of my own fatherhood, I can now see another side to the man. |
A new crisis... Emma is refusing to go into school. Since she started full time it's been a real drain on our emotions, our ability to persuade and to comfort her. She downright refuses to go into school if June takes her, so I take her and she is calm and very bright and cheerful. June feels used and torn in two. She is full of emotions leaving her like this. I feel pulled too. I need to help Emma but June needs a lot of support too. I can't give enough and get annoyed at their demands and my inability to give enough, but I don't have space to clear this until I've bottled it up and sulked my way into an argument.
As a teenager in the sixties, I grew to hate him, both for his treatment of my mother, his meanness and insults towards her, and because he was an embarrassment to my emerging identity. Still with his demob suit and with national health glasses and hearing aid, he refused to acknowledge that the world had changed. He stuck to his pre war image, when he could still hear, when life was simple and he had his physical strength to get his way. He was the working class conservative with his racism and sexism. He became AIf Garnet, and he looked (as my mother told everyone) like Crippen.
Liz keeps getting into uncontrollable fits of laughing and spurting out giggles all day. Everything turns into a joke for her. I get annoyed over a meal with her. She doesn't take me seriously and giggles, setting the others off. I ask her to leave the room. I can hear her giggling outside the door. (Two seven year-old boys sitting behind the driver on the bus giggling... he turns angrily... 'Just like a couple of girls... behave yourselves', I stopped.)
I couldn't be like him. I wanted to feel, to experience and to love and be loved, all emotions thought of as women's, and somehow wrong to want. So like many others during the sixties, I looked elsewhere for an identity.
All this analysis comes later of course, for most of my adult life I shot him out and when I did approach him, his bitterness and critical tongue still hurt. From the distance of my own fatherhood I can now see another side to the man. His hurt and his sacrifice in a war he joined to escape the dole queue. He coped by secretly drinking in his room, but we all knew and left it there.
Emma has started to kiss me as I carry her home. I say 'thank you' and cuddle her and she kisses me again and again. She kisses my hand every few yards as we walk. I don't want to ask her to stop but I wonder why so much affection, so I start a game with her. Every time she kisses me we laugh until the laughing becomes the game. How to describe such a subtle shift in felt emotions of that moment?
But he ruled by fear. Fear of what he might say, how he might react. The house was run for him, his needs, his likes and habits. Everything organised so as not to upset him. We kids were like back stage helpers getting the performance ready, making everything run smoothly for him.
Mark gets annoyed at my criticism of his passion for football. I put all my weight behind them and I know there is lots of my own pain mixed with my 'rational' argument, but I don't back down until days later. I'm calm now.... we make an agreement over how much and when. I know I've hurt him and I push through a real barrier to cuddle him. He is sixteen now and he questions all I say and do. I never expected this, I thought I'd got it all right, politics, philosophy, but it's all up for grabs for him.
I've drawn from my male friends all the aspects that were missing from my father. The model of what it means to be a man has come from many glimpses of other ways of being. I have memories where some men would show kindness vulnerability and concern. A teacher, an elder brother and friends. I learned that men can and do care for each other, and the model was both broken and re-fired.
I'm a father now but I'm also a counsellor and when I counsel other men, it's not the particulars of our lives we share but the huge gaps we try to help fill for each other. We slowly learn to share feelings, to trust each other, to risk touch and hug each other, and hopefully carry this learning back to our other relationships with our children.
There are three other men at the counselling workshop. God l's nervous. I do a demonstration and I client in front of the group. I face each person and tell them I's going to get embarrassed that day. I'm looking for permission from them but I'm also giving them permission to feel inadequate too. The tension eases, the group relaxes and I see smiles and recognition of that scary barrier we have just started to take down. At the end of the day the women cuddle joyfully. I get a bear-hug from an elderly woman half my size. As each man approaches me with a hand outstretched, I ask for a cuddle. Nervousness, relaxing and contact melting the barriers. What a good day!
One hour of sensitivity training a week for my M.A., but feeling just not getting a chance yet. Little contact or warmth, but lots of games to push aside disclosure in such a large group. The other men are very quiet, they laugh, fidget, look down at their shoes and up at whoever is talking, but they don't share their feelings yet.
I'm aware of how much I've left out The longing for affection and warmth and the years of not being touched by either parent because I was 'Too big for that now'. The years of shutting nearly all other men out of my life in response to the challenges of feminism, not wanting to acknowledge how much experience I shared with other men. It's taken me thirty six years to start to trust and share with other men, how I hope I can shorten this for my kids.
Summoned from work by phone, I arrived at my parents' flat in the midday sunshine in time to see him carried downstairs on a stretcher to the waiting ambulance outside. My father had died two hours earlier, in his own armchair with my mother at his side. For once, the condolences which fell from everybody's lips were appropriate: he had 'had a good innings'; he wouldn't have wanted to go in any other way. My father died quickly and peacefully at the age of 93. He suffered from no incapacity save a partial deafness. No man of his age could have been less senile. In the days that followed, grief gave place to thankfulness as I contemplated not just the manner of his death, but the shape of his life too - a life which I found held greater meaning for my own changing sense of being a man than I had expected.
Few occupational categories seem so unambiguous as 'Army officer, retd.' We expect rigidity in the home and a pugnacious stance towards the world - machismo tempered by the habit of command. My father looked the part in some ways. At 5 feet 7 inches he could never have been described as imposing, but he kept an erect carriage to the end, a well-groomed moustache and a dazzling head of carefully trimmed white hair. His thirty-three years in the Royal Engineers were over by the time I was born, but they had left their mark. My father was not given to reminiscence about his Army days, and he would never speak of his baptism of fire on the Western Front during the First World War. But it is clear to me that his success as a soldier (he reached the rank of Colonel) arose not just from his ability, but from his scrupulous playing of everything by the rule-book. He had an exact and over-literal way of discharging responsibilities, both great and small. Years later, his practical advice to me usually reflected the rigid notion that there was one right way of doing anything, to be followed in every particular. Then there was his politics. Like most Army officers of his generation, my father held to a simple patriotism and he was a lifelong Tory voter. For good measure, he was totally uninterested in the arts, and his happiest times had been spent shooting and fishing.
| Never once, he said, had he discussed the experience of fatherhood with even his closest friends... |
Before joining the Army, my father had been brought up in a professional middle-class home in Birmingham around the turn of the century. I never knew my grandfather, but by all accounts he was a mean and humourless man, who had very strict ideas about domestic propriety: when my father was a boy, the kitchen was strictly out of bounds on pain of a beating from his father - presumably because chatting with cook was thought demeaning to his role as the 'young master'. Forty years later, as a newly married man he still refused to enter the kitchen if there were visitors in the house. He was in short thoroughly conditioned to accept the Victorian separation of spheres (men in the world, women in the home). His upbringing by a distant father and a warm affectionate mother must also have left him with an exaggerated sense of the conventional distinction between parental roles within the family. The qualities which he esteemed most highly in women were always charm, gentleness and nurturing kindness.
No man can have been less prepared for fatherhood. When he married at 44 his experience of children had been practically nil. He was the youngest in his family, and his two older sisters remained spinsters like so many young women of their war-torn generation, so my father had neither younger siblings, nor nephews and nieces. His own first child (my sister) was born at the beginning of the Second world War, and for the first five or six years of her life his times with her were confined to fleeting home visits. Only in his 50s, when I was growing up, did he become at all accustomed to young children around the house. Not surprisingly he seemed to me a strict and sometimes distant authority figure. My father could smile on some of a small boy's enthusiasms (like carpentry), and he offered camaraderie of a kind. But fundamentally I held him in awe. It was he who sent me to my room, or stopped pocket-money, or inflicted a stinging blow on my outstretched palm. Discourtesy towards my mother was stamped on hard. Almost more than punishment, I dreaded his displeasure and his solemn appeals to my tender conscience. I knew that there was a moral line over which my father stood guard, but I didn't know exactly where the line was drawn or when I might be crossing it. So there was something unpredictable about his reprimands which made them the more frightening. And I am certain that this authority weighed more heavily on me than on my sister, because in my father's upper-middle class culture higher standards and greater expectations were set for a son. In keeping with this scale of priorities, more money was also allocated to my education than to my sister's. As a first generation public-school boy himself, my father had no hesitation in 'putting my name down' at birth for one of the more old-fashioned schools, with an expertise in preparing boys for Sandhurst.
That experience was a turning-point for me. Up until the age of 13 I had on the whole enjoyed my experience of a local day-school. Now I was sent away to a total institution which offered me almost nothing outside the lessons of a few gifted teachers. I wasn't beaten or bullied, but I was completely alienated from the hearty culture of the school. The implications were highly uncomfortable. If this school with its grotesque hierarchies, its philistinism and its ridicule of human sensitivity, expressed my father's values, then those values were not for me. But at the time I hardly allowed myself to register what this rejection meant, let alone confront my father. Of course I was afraid of him. Paradoxically too I still needed his protection, valuing the parental home as a refuge from the drabness and loneliness of school. And increasingly I saw him as a vulnerable old man who (like my mother) should be spared a bruising conflict. So I kept my anger within, and at great cost to myself I delayed for far too long an appraisal of what my values were, and how they were drawn from my life experience.
Only in the past five years, around the age of 40, have I really begun to make that appraisal, mostly as a consequence of becoming a husband and father myself. And in the course of exploring an alternative culture of masculinity, I find that I am less and less confident about characterizing my father as an unreformed reactionary of the old school. For in his old age gentler traits of his personality were revealed which can hardly have been new, but which had been overlaid through many decades by the heavy hand of convention. Eventually it became difficult to reconcile my present sense of my father's character with my childhood memories.
| Forty years later, as a married man he still refused to enter the kitchen if there were visitors in the house. |
Three years ago I decided to tell my father about the men's group. To my surprise he was interested. Never once, he said, had he discussed the experience of fatherhood with even his closest friends, but he saw at once how supportive that might be, and how men could gain something from fuller self-disclosure. (What he couldn't understand was how the group managed to get anywhere without 'somebody in charge'.) In fact it was becoming clearer to me what a very emotional person my father was. I don't mean that he voiced his innermost emotions: few men of his generation and class did. But he visibly responded to others with his feelings. When listening to something which gave him joy or sadness, he would sit slightly forward in his armchair, his attention trained on me to overcome his deafness, and often the tears not far from his eyes. The older he got, the more directly and simply he showed his love for me. There was no hint of the constraint so painfully evident in the form of words with which his father had signed letters to his son: 'your affectionate parent'.
Conversation with my father when I was a child was naturally somewhat one-sided: my sense of his authority saw to that. But once I was old enough to talk to him as one adult to another, I encountered someone who seemed almost completely untouched by conventional styles of men's conversation. There was no egotism about him, no competitiveness or desire to score points, no aggression - as if a lifetime in the Army had slaked any appetite he may once have had in that direction. He was never opinionated, and hardly ever judgemental, despite strongly-held beliefs in religion and politics. He showed instead a genuinely other-centred curiosity. His listening was not passive but receptive. His response was likely to be one of compassion for other people's troubles and weaknesses, and a tolerance of their views. By the end I think I loved him for his tenderness more than any other quality.
Then there was his deep-seated modesty, sometimes bordering on the absurd. For as long as I can remember I have been proud that he won the Military Cross during the First World War, but despite numerous attempts I never winkled any explanation out of him other than that 'they dished it out with the rations'. Nor did he look for vicarious fulfilment of his own ambitions in his son: he never reproached me for my total lack of interest in the Army (or my advocacy of CND), or for following pursuits like history (my profession), music and art which owed so much more to my mother than to him.
As for my father's respect for separate spheres, on a long view this turned out to be somewhat inconsistent, to say the least. Domestically he certainly became much more at ease during his long years of retirement, and he spent many hours in my kitchen at the dinner-table (even if he never cooked there or in any other kitchen). But I believe that much more telling was the amount of leisure-time he devoted to visiting the sick. I use that rather dated phrase deliberately, because before the First World War this was deemed to be the women's sphere - one of the principal approved activities for middle-class wives and daughters outside the home. But in this area conventional gender roles meant nothing to my father. A cousin convalescing in a TB clinic, his closest friend unconscious for many months with a terminal illness, numerous housebound acquaintances in the neighbourhood - he visited them all regularly and over long periods. Though we lustily sang 'He who would valiant be' at his funeral, I don't believe he was drawn to military metaphors in his religion: the only Christianity which he thought counted in the end was the daily practice of charity.
It was as a student that I first took the measure of my father's gentle nature. I was embarrassed, particularly when my friends came to the house. It wasn't just that his advanced age (70 when I was 18) seemed to mark me out as an oddity. Looking back, I can see that his softness undermined my non-too-confident attempts to pass muster as a young man like any other. This was in the 196Os, when reappraising masculinity had scarcely begun and there were scant resources available to men at odds with conventional gender constructions. So I didn't understand why I was embarrassed by my father. That came much later then I was in therapy and drawing strength from the men's group. Fortunately it wasn't too late to appreciate my father anew, to enjoy his companionship, and - perhaps - to take some of that tenderness and compassion for my own.
What I didn't grasp, until my father died and I reflected on his life, was his tenacious sense of self. As my own sons remind me, gentleness, affection and sensitivity form part of most people's endowment as young children. We all know what happens to those qualities in most boys. Yet somehow in my father they were not destroyed by a distant father, a hidebound public school, and twenty-five years of life in an Army mess. I don't pretend to understand how he kept true to himself through those experiences, and I doubt if I ever will, since family and friends of his generation are dead and he left no personal papers. But I draw great comfort from his demonstration that conditioning is not all. And in that regard I hope that he and I share more than the same two names.
Les: If we could start with the labels, the boxes that we each fall into; then of course, demolish them: you're a black gay man who was brought up in the West Indies. You came over to England to go to university, then went back to work in Trinidad. Later you returned over here when you split up with your wife. You now live with another man in England. I'm defined as a white heterosexual man who has one foot in gay culture through being a transvestite.
Kirk: The label 'black' makes me feel a bit of an imposter. My father's family are totally white, and though my mother's family certainly has black blood in it, I'm generally not recognised as West Indian - people take me as Jewish or South American. Of course everyone in The West Indies is mixed - in fact the word half-caste is never used - but I was brought up as a white West Indian. One key marker I don't possess is curly hair. Curly hair is generally considered an indication of being black. On the other hand I have found acceptance in black circles in England because I have kept my Caribbean accent, and my interest in Caribbean culture.
So is colour perceived differently in The West Indies compared to here?
Over there 'white' and 'black', to quite a large extent, refer to class rather than to colour or race. I remember incidents where quite dark-skinned people were called 'white' by servants because of a long-standing connection between lightness of skin and high social status. It's a colonial legacy, of course; but it's complicated by the rise of the black identity movement and anomalies such as poor whites, who came out as indentured labourers and didn't make it. In fact the poor whites are often at the very bottom of the social ladder. Though they have no political power and they're not recognised by rich whites, they cling to their white skins as a status symbol. The irony is that their skins are often very rough and raw through exposure to the sun! Now, with the black consciousness movement, more dark-skinned people are getting into high places and you have a black upper class.
On the other hand when Caribbean people come over here they find, firstly, that they are surrounded by a large number of white people, and secondly that quite a few of those people see colour as race. So West Indians over here are often the victims of racism, when before they might have suffered just class discrimination. One is more sweeping and hurtful than the other, I think.
So what was your experience of being fathered in the Caribbean?
My father died 3 months before I was born so I was always close to my mother. I often spent two or three days in friends' families - which is a Caribbean tradition - but then again, I was close to the mothers and rather frightened of the fathers. They always seemed rather distant.
In more general terms, are there any patterns which you feel are characteristic of West Indian fathers - allowing for cultural differences between Islands?
Yes, there are cultural differences, but there are also shared patterns. One of those patterns is the absent father, who may have children by several different women, each time moving on. This began when the black man was deprived of the right to take part in his family and cast in the role of 'stud' by slave culture. The purpose was to increase the number of bodies for exploitation by the slave system.
Isn't there some disagreement about this idea of the black 'single parent family'? I have heard it argued that it's the creation of white racist sociologists, particularly in the U.S.A. during the sixties. Also, I have heard a lot of black men - particularly gays - object to the label 'stud', and argue that it's more of a fantasy in the mind of the white person than anything else.
As far as the single parent family idea goes, I think the problem has more to do with looking at it as a bad thing. In The West Indies, with the extended family, it probably works. The problem comes when the pattern is transferred over here. With fewer grandmothers to act as 'buffers' in the system, and different cultural norms, black families get torn between different values. I found it very hard bringing up my son over here, I wasn't quite sure what was acceptable and not acceptable.
So you see the clash of cultures as quite a problem for West Indians over here?
Yes, it's things like attitudes to discipline. There has been a tradition of victorianism in Caribbean culture. It comes out in the 'churchiness' and the old-fashioned schooling. Again, it's a cultural pattern imposed by colonialism, but it means that Caribbean immigrants may well have come into conflict with some of the 'progressive' attitudes over here. You might hear complaints about falling standards, lack of discipline and so on. Some families over here go into a 'deep freeze condition' where they imagine things are still very traditional 'back home'. My impression is that things have moved on in the Caribbean - many of the islands follow an American model now, rather than a British Victorian pattern.
What about this stereotype of the black man as a 'stud'?
I think it's right to fight against crude labels, but I certainly experienced a sense of many men in the Caribbean trying to live up to a 'peacock' image. To me, as a gay man, I was aware of feeling very out of this prancing and parading for women. I went through a whole crisis of struggling against what I was, insecurity and lack of confidence. In my marriage I wasn't forceful, but I watched incidents like my brother cutting up his wife's bikini because it was too skimpy, or a couple of cases of women being beaten up for wearing mini-skirts. It seems to me a lot of Caribbean men have an exaggerated respect for the mother and grandmother who brought them up, but a deep hostility to the sexually 'showy' woman.
I was reading an interesting study of some parts of Southern Italy, which sounded similar. There the woman is considered to be the owner of the credentials and the secret heritage of the clan, so if she becomes 'loose' she could effectively destroy the whole community. In a sense it's because she's the most powerful figure she has to be 'protected'. The study suggested that the concepts of 'shame' and 'honour' are related to the possession of this 'Mother Goddess' figure.
It sounds quite similar. It's what makes 'your mother' insults so powerful in West Indian culture. To me West Indian men often identify their masculinity by being sexually demonstrative - whereas white men over here are more inclined to use violence, guns, uniform and hard core pornography to assert their identity. There's very little of the cold-blooded torture in Caribbean Male culture, there's anger and self-assertion, but less psychopathic violence. I trace that to a less guilt-ridden attitude towards sex by both men and women. It's healthier I think. Somehow the 'churchiness' I was talking about manages to turn a blind eye to the high rate of illegitimacy in the Islands - though I must say that in the past illegitimacy was a barrier to entry to secondary schools! - But there still seems to me an inner guilt about sex in the white male tradition, something to do with Puritanism, which can lead to complete inhumanity.
So if things are freer sexually in The West Indies, what are the attitudes to gayness?
People laugh more, 'batty man' or 'buller man' they say. It's hurtful, of course, but genuine 'queer-bashing' is rare compared to England. There isn't any openly gay movement like over here, but there is a lively gay underground. Bars open up that become known as popular places for gays; when it becomes widely known you get straight men turning up outside to see who goes in, to laugh, of course. In a way the male image is less anxious. The remark by the novelist, John Hearne that 'Most West Indian males are latent homosexuals' made perfect sense to me, fitting in with the 'peacock' image.
How about yourself as a gay father? How has that been? Does your son know that you're gay?
It may seem strange in a twenty-four year old, but certain remarks make me think he hasn't realised - perhaps it's what might seem strange to many - two men living together - he has seen as a norm since childhood. I've never told my son I'm gay because when I told my wife and we split up, I came to England and I didn't see my son for three years. When I did see him again the 'first flush' of identifying myself had gone and I couldn't so easily 'engineer' an opportunity to speak. Also I'd been worried by stories of sons having terrible problems over discovering their fathers were gay.
So can you describe what your relationship to your son has been like?
Well, I was very close to him when he was young. I was then very conscious that I had become the 'absent' father. So when my wife came over to England with him at the age of eight, I made every effort I could to involve myself in his upbringing. So I'd have him three days a week, and go round to my wife's house early in the morning to allow her to go to work. I'd take my son to school and pick him up and look after him till she returned, and quite often we'd go on shopping expeditions all together. It was easier since my wife and I were separated - if we did silly things we didn't feel responsible for each other. But there were problems with my male partner. He was worried and jealous for a while, feeling cut out, but I insisted I had to repair my relationship with my son, and the two of them have always got on very well. My ways of relating to my son was never really through heavy-handed discipline. I'd rather spend hours debating the rights and wrongs of something I didn't approve of. In fact we still have long discussions and sometimes accuse each other of arrogance. He's said that he was brought up by both of us more as brother and sister than father and mother. I think things were always fairly equal. He says that I've given him a rational approach, that I was always fair - but I think those roles depend more on temperament and character than my being a man. I think, in general, an unorthodox arrangement has helped us to the cultural changes over in England. It seems to me that some West Indian fathers over here get trapped by unfamiliar cultural pressures into something over-rigid and severe on the children. It's the lack of an extended family, or the idea of a particular type of 'responsibility' that comes from a different history and culture. I think these pressures are there and it can be hard to find a role when all sorts of values seem doubtful, or may clash.
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