Dreams and Dads

As part of my screenwriting studies, I have been reading an excellent book called “Break Into Screenwriting” by Ray Frensham. One of the things it suggest you do is re-watch some movies and look at them with a screenwriter’s eye, looking at characters, plot, story, turning points, climaxes etc. One of the movies it referenced was “Field Of Dreams”, which I had never seen. As I’ve said before I’m a pushover for a Kevin Costner film – I don’t fancy him but see him as a kind of goofy big brother that you like – but I remember avoiding this film like the plague. It wasn’t just because it was another one of what seemed at the time to be a slew of baseball-themed movies – c’mon US folks, it’s just glorified rounders *runs and hides* – but also the image of our Kevin on the front cover in his whiter-than-white tee-shirt and those awful high waisted stone-washed jeans that were just a wee bit too tight looking. So it passed me by until I started reading the book. I have to say I’m sorry it took me so long to watch it – it was fantastic and by the end I was in tears, which isn’t easy for a woman who was told my an eye doctor this very week that she hasn’t any! Yes, it was about baseball but most of all it was about dads.
I love films about dads – “Big Fish” is another that makes me sob at the end and don’t get me started on “The Railway Children”. So I thought I’d tell you a wee bit about mine.
Hugh Graham Andrew was born in Dumbarton in 1932. Except he didn’t know that was his name – his father, also called Hugh (a man I sadly never met as he died long before I was born – pretty much all I know about him was that he was shot in the leg in WW1 and because of his shortened leg, he was much in demand by new mothers as he was an ace at walking and rocking crying babies off to sleep) had been sent by my Nana to register the birth with strict instructions NOT to name his new son after himself but with the name she liked. A trip via the pub, or maybe just pure devilment meant that as far as my Dad knew he was called “Graham” until he went to get his birth certificate for National Service in 1950 and thereafter signed himself as “H.Graham” in recognition of his father’s rebellion, intentional or not.
I don’t know much about my Dad’s childhood except that he once fell in the midden (compost and manure heap) on his father’s allotment and was stripped and put into the washhouse boiler before being allowed into the house and that allegedly during a game of identifying makes of cars, he beat the family friend’s wee boy, who despite this lack of knowledge possibly due to his dyslexia would go onto become racing driver Jackie Stewart. I do know that he was very intelligent and academic and had been preparing to go on to university. However, the sudden death of his own father only a couple of years after WW2 meant that Graham had to leave school and become the breadwinner in the household as his much older sister Betty was now married. He became a telegram delivery boy and following his years of National Service (where on R&R he visited Hiroshima and Tokyo in Japan – he always talked of taking me there – and a spell in a real M*A*S*H* hospital when his appendix burst in Korea) moved into office work where he trained in time and motion in terms of efficiency and productivity. It was while doing this at the Singer sewing machine factory in Clydebank he caught the eye of one of the typing pool girls. Things didn’t get off to a good start – when he asked her the name of the wee toy mouse on her typewriter carriage and was offended when she told him it was “Shooey” – a pet name from Hugh. However, they were soon “stepping out”. A solitary man who was an elder of the Kirk he was smitten by the wild younger lassie from Dalmuir who sadly turned out to be too wild for him or anyone. She thought him solid and dependable, the kind of man she should marry, not for love but for respectability and to settle her down and take her off of the spinster shelf. On one occasion, when a co-worker was bitching about how mum’s boyfriend always gave lifts in his car to secretaries and typists who were waiting at bus-stops in the rain, she retorted “Come back and tell me when it’s always the same one!” which of course they never did. I also remember a big fuss being made of him going off to a huge conference in Sweden and was later told that in my excitement to rush to meet him at the airport, the elastic on my new red velvet trouser suit (come on – it was the late 60s!) broke and I tripped with them wound round my little legs.
As well as his troubled marriage, life did not deal my Dad a good hand with his health. He was 35 when I as born (I am the eldest) and became ill not long after the birth of my younger brother. He had several heart attacks and in 1976 was one of the first people to have a triple by-pass operation – a routine operation now but back then it was performed in London by the now well-known surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub. I remember in preparation my Dad had to go on a strict diet and after surgery he was in hospital for 2 weeks then in a convalescent home (like the one in “Alfie”) for a few more. Although he re-trained in electronics and worked on aircraft guidance systems for Ferranti in Edinburgh (and had to sign the Official Secrets Act while doing so) he never fully recovered and he retired in 1981 due to his poor health. He endured both additional operations and my mother’s increasing instability and affairs until they separated in 1982. I went to live with him, shortly followed by my brothers and that year or so was the happiest of my young life, until my parents reconciled although it was only for show – my mother and father never shared a bed again.
It was my Dad who turned me into a geek – I remember him taking my brother and I to see “Star Wars” (he told the youngest we were going to the dentist as he was still too wee then to come with us) and “Jaws” and introducing me to his favourite film “A Matter Of Life And Death”. My birthday treat was always a trip to the cinema. We shared sci-fi books and he always encouraged me to have what he described as a catholic taste in music, although he was keen to point out “not Ave Maria and that shite”(you can take the elder out of the Church of Scotland…). He loved to laugh - doing impressions, phoning up his friends pretending to be Noel Edmonds, singing “Wandrin’ Star” and telling corny and off-colour jokes. When the song “The Oldest Swinger In Town” was out, he once got ready for a night out with my mum in a tight red polo-neck top, mirrored sunglasses and a large gold-ingot chain. He used to say things to us like “boots and saddles” to get us to get ready and always had us clean our shoes properly with spit and polish. Although until the last few years of his life he had jet black if receding hair and a bit of a dodgy comb-over, he only ever once grew a moustache and when it grew in ginger, he kept it just long enough to annoy my mum.
We only ever fell out twice – once when during one of our family walks teenage me had got fed up and sneaked back to a pal’s house to watch “Grease” and on my mum’s insistence he had come up to my room to tell me off and I thought he was going to hit me so I kicked him in the balls (he came in later and apologised and never tried to hit me again); and once when during another brawl instigated by my mother he actually lost it and I had to pull him off her, drag him downstairs and throw him out of the house – his wild eyes and hair and bleeding mouth so much like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” haunts me still. My dad was no saint and once during a conversation when he told me never to bring a black boyfriend home I replied by telling him that if I did ever fall in love with a man with darker skin than mine, I’d choose love over my Dad any day. He later told me that whatever I wanted to do with my life, he would support me and back me up.
Unlike my mum, he welcomed and liked all of my strange goth/ bohemian friends. He would make lunch for my best pal and I when we skipped home for “study periods” and ribbed her mercilessly about her very tall boyfriend – “I thought you were carrying a Xmas tree” he once told her. He would slip me the odd £5 for a night out plus a £10 “so you can always get home” and the first time I came home really drunk on cider and blackcurrant I was appalled to discover that he had waited up for me and when I tried to sneak in he just laughed at my rolling eyes and poked fun at my hangover the next day.
In 1985, his health deteriorated rapidly and he was back in hospital. My mum, with her usual flair for the dramatic, told us all very solemnly that yes, Dad was coming home from the hospital soon but that he was going to die and we had to be prepared to maybe wake up one morning or come home from school and find him dead. On the Tuesday before he was due to come home, I went up to see him and after chatting for a while it was time to go. I kissed and hugged him and promised to come back on Thursday. “No hen, “ he said to me, “I’ll be home on Friday and I’ll see you then. You away out with your pals and enjoy yourself”.
On the Thursday night I returned home after drowning my sorrows with my best mate after my then-boyfriend had “chucked” me to find the house full of relatives. My dad had died of heart failure that evening, when I would have been visiting, had he not told me not to.
I refused to go and visit the body at the undertakers – it wasn’t my Dad anymore – and on the morning of the funeral had come down in jeans, t-shirt and trainers intending to go off on my own into the hills to remember him in my own way. I was browbeaten and bullied into going and sat watching my mother play the grieving widow while a minister we didn’t know (my mother claimed my Dad, who had been an atheist for years had apparently returned to religion) spoke about a man I didn’t recognise. It took all my willpower not to turn around to the crematorium packed with people I had never met and who had as far as I knew never visited my dad and shout, “Who are you bastards? Where were you when he needed you?”
It’s been 26 years and 6 months since my Dad died. I kind of wish that if I built a field, he too would come x