Chapter Five #2
Our proud, upstanding father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s two years ago, after fifty years in the civil service and local government.
This disease has felled him like an old tree.
His roots are torn out of the soil and his loamy underbelly is exposed, and it is this, even more than the prospect of his early death, that pains me most. He would be distraught if he could see himself.
He cannot explain his thoughts to us and he shouts out in rage, or perhaps despair, when he can’t get out of the house to go to the corner shop for a newspaper, even though his nearest shop is more than an hour’s walk away and it’s the middle of the night.
He often reacts to normal events like a child and when he’s in a bad way he treats everyone, even his beloved Nicola, with suspicion.
I miss my father. I miss him desperately, yet I see him nearly every day.
From the age of twenty-one Dad worked for the Department for International Development, mostly on water and sanitation programs. He met Mum when her charity put on an event about access to water.
Dad was blown away by Mum. Then and now, she had that effect on people.
I still don’t quite know how such a quiet, compliant, typically British sort of a man managed to capture the heart of a rare bird like my mother—a woman for whom the word no was little more than an invitation—but I believe she really did fall in love with him, for a while.
Possibly it was helped by Dad driving her down to Dartmoor for a weekend to show her the thatched cottage in which he’d grown up.
It was in the most chocolate-box village of all chocolate-box villages, and that weekend on the moor was particularly wild and elemental.
Mum was so entranced she decided, in her usual impetuous way, that she wanted to have children with him and buy a house there, under the dramatic and ever-changing sky. She was done with offices!
She was done with offices until I was eleven weeks old, when her board of trustees asked her to come back to work.
At that point, I believe some fairly heavy discussions took place that resulted in Dad resigning from his cherished job so that Mum could continue to commute to London.
The scale of this sacrifice was great for Dad, who’d been a dedicated servant of the state from the moment he’d left university.
But he made it for Mum, staying at home until Maya, who came two years after me, was old enough to go to nursery.
Even then he had to spend the next eight years working in local government to enable Mum to buzz up and down between London and Devon as she pleased.
She had that kind of power over Dad back then.
Mum had begun losing enthusiasm for straight charity work by the time Maya started school and was becoming more and more committed to activism.
I remember her disappearing, often without warning, to go and fight the good fight.
I remember tremendous arguments between her and Dad, who just couldn’t get his head around the kind of things she was doing.
This is not how society works, he would say, which did little more than make Mum laugh.
When I was seven and Maya was five, Mum took us to London on a coach full of angry people and chained the three of us to the railings outside a foreign embassy.
She told us that there were some bad people doing bad things and that we were going to sit there to tell the world it was not OK.
I remember getting thirsty and asking Mum for a drink and her admitting she hadn’t brought enough water, and a panic welling up in me that she seemed unable to understand.
“Why can’t we just go to a shop?” I kept asking.
The fight after that was monumental. Dad banned Mum from taking us on a protest ever again.
In Mum’s defense, she really was remorseful.
She slept in our room that night and made us a beautiful breakfast the next day, with big glasses of Milo—the proper, imported stuff her Malaysian mother had given her as a child, rather than the “rubbish” they sold in Britain—and told us she was sorry.
She cried more in those few days than we’d ever seen her cry.
But she also recognized the power of the photo of us, two young girls chained to railings, that appeared in so many newspapers.
Two years later, when I was nearly nine, she took us to another march in London, telling Dad we were going to a museum.
I remember that vast movement of people, their drums and whistles, our calls, and then cries, for our mother when we realized we were lost. I remember the kind faces of the other placard holders, one sweet man putting Maya on his shoulders so that Mum could find her—but Mum didn’t come.
A police officer eventually noticed the two crying girls, alone in the crowd, and pulled us out.
I have lost many memories of that afternoon, but I know we were moments away from being sent into temporary care.
Dad made it to London from Devon just as we were about to be taken away.
He tried to be calm for us, but I remember the sound of him sobbing into my hair as if it were yesterday.
Dad ended their relationship that night and immediately began a battle for sole custody.
The way Maya remembers it, Mum put up no fight; she just left.
But Maya is incredibly unforgiving of our mother, and she’s unable to remember that Dad gave Mum no choice.
He made it his mission, from that point onward, to exclude her from our lives by every means possible.
I remember Mum turning up at the front door more than once, asking to see us, and Dad telling her to go away.
She was done with conventional family life, I understand that—but I don’t believe she was done with her children.
Perhaps, though, I just can’t allow myself to believe she abandoned us. That’s what Maya says.
Mum took a flat in Exeter to make her commute to London easier, but her heart wasn’t in it, and after six months she moved fully to London, into the Lancaster Gate flat her mother had left her.
On the occasions Dad was given no alternative but to allow Mum access to us, Maya and I had to be driven to London, to the city we both feared, by a father whose attempt at jolly chatter was no match for the resentment in his heart.
So thank God for Nicola Watkins, whom Dad met at the village pub quiz while she was on holiday in Devon.
Nicola had grown up in Manchester and was then living in Wolverhampton.
She and Dad got serious quite quickly, but Dad was tied to Devon, to his girls, so Nicola rented a flat in Bovey Tracey for a year or two before moving in.
We loved her from our first visit to her flat. She had glasses of orange squash and angel cake and welcomed us as if we were old friends. Within six months, Dad stopped paying Jilly-from-down-the-road who’d been picking us up from school, and Nicola started meeting us at the gate instead.
She changed Dad. Slowly but perceptibly, he came back to himself.
After years of resentment and disappointment in his relationship with our mother, he softened.
He started calling Mum by her name rather than “your mother,” and he paid for us to go and see her on the train whenever we asked.
He returned to his beloved civil service, and by the time I graduated from medical school it was possible for them to be there at the ceremony together.
None of that could have happened without Nicola.
But now Dad is slowly fading, miles from the cut and thrust of his life in government affairs, and we have long since passed the limits of our capacity to care for him.
I know what’s happening to him neurologically, systemically, but it is near impossible to match that knowledge with my father—the living, breathing body that houses so many glimmers of Dad, yet often seems not to contain him at all.
Yesterday, Nicola texted me a photo of him reading a paper—or, at least, looking at it, while a finger of winter sun rested on his shoulder from the window.
For a few blissful hours, I basked in the warmth of that illusion; allowed myself to believe he was really reading the words on the page.
Then at 6 p.m. Robin had had to leave the dinner table and drive to Dad’s because Dad had slid off his chair and Nicola couldn’t get him up.
I end the call, thanking Maya for her stern warnings about Stockholm. I write to Yanika’s secretary to cancel our lunch and then go about canceling the flights and insurance. I email Robin, telling him I won’t need that posh hotel room after all.
It is terrifying to me that had it not been for this conversation with my sister, I could have gone off to the conference and found myself in a lecture theater with Johan. Just turned around and seen him sitting two rows back, taking notes.
—
It’s the next day, evening time, and I’m on the sofa watching telly with the kids.
The usual fight over who chooses the program tonight was ended when I finally found a parcel from my mother that a courier had left in a “safe place.” (The safe place turned out, after a long hunt, to be the wheelie bin.) Mum only makes it down here once in a blue moon and she never invites us to stay in London, but she does send Raffy and Maeve sporadic parcels of Malaysian treats, which they love.
Tonight it’s a NIM’s Crispy Choco Tub each, which they would choose over a one-million-pound check any day.
They’re both now watching something awful called Unicorn Power. Maeve is bouncing on the trampette that was recommended to us because of her “constant need to be in motion” and Raffy has made himself a cocoon of cushions, out of which poke his feet, resting in my lap.