Not in the Flesh

12

The Sunday Times,News Review, 29 October 2006 Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father

The day he went away remains very clearly in my mind and not just because it was the day I lost my father. It was also the day that drew a line between my happy and untroubled childhood and the rest of my life, a precise line coming halfway along. I was twelve and now I'm twenty-three. That's why I'm writing this, because of that halfway mark, and because, wherever he is now and whatever has happened to him, I think he deserves a memorial.

When you are twelve you've reached an age when you can make a fairly accurate assessment of other people's state of mind, of how happy or unhappy they are. My parents were happy together. They showed it. They were “touchers” and demonstrative. When Dad came home from school-he was a teacher in a comprehensive school-he always kissed my mother, and sometimes, if he'd had a specially good day, I suppose, or had that sort of all's-right-with-the-world feeling, he'd put his arms around her and hug her. Or maybe it was just because he loved her. He talked to my sister and me. If that seems obvious it's not really. My friends' dads didn't really talk to them. I'd been in their houses and seen how their dads were kind and pleasant and all that sort of thing but mostly what they said to their kids was “Yes, all right, but not while I'm watching this,” or “I've had a hard day and I just want to relax, right?” My dad seemed to like answering our questions, especially the ones about animals and natural history and evolution. He had a degree in biology and while other people's fathers were crazy about this or that footballer or the Rolling Stones or some politician, his hero was Charles Darwin. At the weekends he took us out and that's why, when I reached that fateful halfway mark, the Natural History and Science Museums were as familiar to me as sports grounds were to some people.

He used to tell us stories too. Not read, tell. And I mean he still did, even though we were ten and twelve. The stories were a long way from his science and evolution and animal behaviour. I suppose you could say they were the Greek myths retold, tales of the whole pantheon of the Greek gods, most of them, as I later found out, from Ovid. But the one I liked best was about the Trojan War, starting with the beauty contest that Paris judged, his winning Helen as his reward and how the war broke out because Helen was Menelaus's wife and he resented her being stolen from him. Ever since then, whenever I hear about that war or the name Homer or Achilles and most of all Helen, I think of my dad and wish he'd never gone away and left us. Or whatever he really did.

We respected each other in our house. My sister Vivien and I had been brought up like that, to understand that Mum and Dad respected our privacy and our right to be listened to and to accord them the same attention. If I have to find faults in my parents, and they had their failings like everyone else, I'd say Mum was a bit too house-proud and fussy and a bit too in the way of “keeping herself to herself,” reserved really to the point of shyness. As for my dad, maybe he did rather stuff us full of knowledge, more perhaps than we could handle, and he was a secretive person. I don't know if that's the right way to put it but what I mean is that he would withdraw himself from the rest of us sometimes, go to the little room that was his study and work at-something. Not at the weekends. Those were ours. At mealtimes he liked us all to engage in conversation-quite intellectual talk, considering our ages. He was there to help us with our homework and did so in the best possible way. But when we went to bed he went to his study and stayed in there till midnight.

I still don't really know what he did. “He's working for a master's degree,” my mother said and then, later, that he was researching for a thesis. We had to accept. So many people we know were somehow involved with academia on one level or another. But every night? Not at the weekends but in the week, two or three hours every night? What I'm going to say now will make me look like a very selfish little girl and my sister another, for Vivien felt the same as I did. Our house was a three-bedroomed end-of-terrace, one bedroom for Mum and Dad, one to be shared by Vivien and me, the third my dad's study. We couldn't see why he needed it. Why couldn't he do whatever it was he did in our living room (sitting room and dining room converted into one) or in his own bedroom? Then I could keep our bedroom and Vivien, as the younger of us, could have the study. We asked, we even nagged a bit, but Dad was adamant, and Mum, of course, backed him up. To do him justice-and I'm always willing to do that-he bore it patiently for a long time until one day he said in his quiet firm way that couldn't be defied, “That's enough, you two. I don't want to hear any more of it. All over, finished, right?”

Vivien argued a bit. I think she'd agree that she whined. Dad meted out the only punishment we ever had. “All right, Vivien, go to the bedroom you so inconveniently have to share with Selina and stay there till I say you can come down.” And that was the end of it. He can't have got as far as submitting his thesis because if he'd been awarded a master's we would have heard about it, no doubt we would all have celebrated it. I mention all this because we never did find out exactly what he did in that study, but we all believed it had something to do with the reason for his departure, though no one else did, not the police who weren't interested anyway or his friends or our grandparents. They all thought what we knew to be impossible, that he'd gone off with another woman.

It was Thursday, June 15, 1995, and his school was to be used as a polling station in the local elections and was therefore closed. It happened to be the day the funeral was to take place of an old friend of my father's and the closing of his school meant that he could attend it, which he very much wanted to do. Mum would have gone with him, but there was no question of that with the two of us arriving home at three-thirty. Mine wasn't the sort of mother who left her daughters, aged ten and twelve, to come home to an empty house.

The funeral was in Lewes in Sussex, which is on the Brighton line. I said I remember the day clearly and I do, that it was a wet morning, exceptionally dark at 8 a.m., and as a result Vivien and I overslept. Mum had to come in twice to get us up and when we finally did we had to rush. Rushing was something she hated in her ordered and organized way, and I remember she was rather testy at breakfast, telling us it was ridiculous to insist on second pieces of toast when we'd already had Weetabix and orange juice. Did we think we were going to be malnourished if for once we went without a slice of brown bread and marmalade? Dad ate nothing. I remember this because it was so unusual. He never ate between meals but he never missed a meal either. He did that morning, just drinking a cup of coffee. Mum said later, when the terror started, that she thought he was too upset about Maurice Davidson's funeral to eat anything.

The boys next door, Martin and Mark Saunders, called for us as they always did and we were bundled off to school. We both kissed Dad, which was something we didn't always do and probably wouldn't have if he hadn't made a point of coming up to each of us in turn while the boys waited and putting his arms around us. To this day I remember the feel of his hands holding my shoulders and his lips on my cheek. That brief precious contact, the last, will be with me forever, and Vivien says it is the same for her, the touch of our beloved father who we were never to see again.

Math for me that morning, followed by music, then PE. A double science period in the afternoon and we had a test. I know I was able to answer most of the questions correctly because of the conversations we'd had at teatime with Dad and our visits to the Natural History Museum. But then it's because of those things that I'm a biologist now. We went home. Not with the boys this time but in a crowd until we reached the corner of our street where the others all went off in different directions. It had been raining most of the day but now it had cleared up and a weak sun was shining between the heavy clouds. Mum was at the gate to meet us as she often was. She said she had come out to see if the rain had stopped, but I think it was really to see us coming.

Dad wasn't expected home until early evening. The children of a male teacher are used to having their father home at teatime if he doesn't work too far away. We missed him. I remember how much I wanted to tell him about my biology test and that I thought I'd done well. Isn't it funny how I remember what we had for tea? Bread and butter and Marmite and homemade scones and a Kit-Kat each. Families don't eat together anymore, or so I'm told, but we did all the time. I suppose we were old-fashioned.

Mobile phones were getting quite common even then, but Dad didn't have one, so my mother wasn't expecting him to call her. Even so, she started getting a bit anxious when it got to half past six. We had the television on because by then she thought there might be something on the news about a hold-up on the Brighton line. There wasn't and it got to seven, to seven-fifteen, to seven-thirty… The rain had begun again and it was coming down in sheets. At eight o'clock Mum phoned Carol Davidson, Maurice's widow in Lewes. She didn't want to, she said it was awful phoning a widow whose husband would never come home again about your husband who was just a bit late home. Little did she know. Carol Davidson was very nice. She just said she appreciated Dad coming “all this way” and they'd had a lovely talk about Maurice and old times. Dad had stayed and had something to eat, but he'd left at about two. She asked Carol if Dad had been all right when he left and Carol said yes, he'd been fine. Of course he'd been upset but that was natural.

That was six hours before and it was then that Mum started getting really worried. She thought he must have had an accident and be in hospital somewhere and it would have to have been a serious accident, he'd have had to be unconscious, otherwise he'd have phoned or got someone else to phone. After another half-hour had gone by she phoned the police. They were very nice and they wanted to know if she'd like to report him as a missing person, go down to the station and fill in a form. But they said it was very soon to do that and the chances were that by the time she had filled in the form he'd be back. The policeman she spoke to gave her the number of two hospitals in the Brighton area and suggested she phone them and enquire, which she did but Dad wasn't in either of them. Once she'd started she wanted to go on and by ten she'd phoned all the hospitals down there that she could find.

There was no question of Vivien and me going to bed. We stayed up with Mum, waiting and hoping and sometimes doing that ridiculous thing of running to the front door and out to the gate to look up and down our street. Viv and I did it four or five times, and then Mum said to stop because it was raining so hard and we came in soaked. She kept saying, “I wish the rain would stop, I wish it would stop,” as if it made things worse, Dad being out in the rain.

Eventually, we went to bed but we couldn't sleep, and we heard Mum go downstairs and walk about and come back up again and go down again. She came into our room in the morning and said we had to go to school, it would turn out that there was some simple explanation for Dad not coming home, but we could tell she didn't believe this, and after a while she said we need not go. It was better for us to be here with her, she needed us here. And then she gave an awful sort of sob as if her heart would break.

She went to the police station at about nine and we went with her. It was true what she'd said, she didn't want to be anywhere without us. She filled in the missing-person form and the policeman who was looking after us said she wasn't to worry as he was sure to be back that day. In fact, he said, the police didn't search seriously if fit healthy men of his age-he was forty-four-went missing. It wasn't like children and young girls or old people. Most men of his age, “the vast majority” he said, came back within seventy-two hours. My mother thanked him and said he was very kind, but even then, at that early stage, she knew my dad hadn't done any of the things other people suggested, gone off with another woman, gone away to start a new life somewhere, been on a binge, wakened in a strange bed, and been afraid to go home. Even then, she was saying he must be dead.

Next week: Selina tries to discover the secrets in the life of her father, Alan Hexham. These extracts are from Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father by Selina Hexham, to be published by Lawrence Busoni Hill in January 2007.