My Dad

Exactly thirty years ago, on 31 August 1996, I left 17 Grange Road.

I have never been back.

That evening I punched my father in the face.

There isn’t really a better way of putting it.

I was twenty-seven. Joanna was twenty-four. We had married in Gdynia Town Hall about two weeks earlier.

My father had refused to come.

Not couldn’t come.

Refused.

Then we came to England and went to the house where I had grown up.

17 Grange Road, Lewes, East Sussex. BN7 something something something. 476751 was the phone number. It’s odd what we remember.

My mother had already left that house. 1977. The Queen’s Jubilee.

Later Pat, my stepmother for fourteen years, had left it too. 1991. The end of the Soviet Union.

My father remained and now there was another woman in the kitchen.

Sylvette.

My father’s third wife, well partner.

Joanna was standing at the sink doing the washing up.

That is still the picture. Not the punch.

Newly married. Twenty-four years old. In England. In her husband’s family home. Washing their dishes.

Sylvette said: “This is not a hotel.”

She had just moved in.

That mattered to me then and it matters to me now.

This wasn’t her home. But she was telling me that I was a guest who had outstayed his welcome in the house where I had grown up.

“This is not a hotel.”

I asked my father whether he agreed.

That was the question.

Dad, do you agree?

Joanna cried at the sink.

This woman who had just arrived in the house was telling his son and his son’s new wife where they stood.

My brother Nick was there too with Sue and their daughter Ellen, who was about three weeks old.

Ellen made noise.

Babies do that.

Sylvette moved the carrycot to the bottom of the stairs.

It was an absurd place to put a three-week-old baby. Almost impressively so. As though somebody had been asked to identify the precise position in the house most likely to produce an accident.

There was food.

Terrible food, as I remember it.

Some French-Vietnamese thing which collapsed like a blancmange and tasted of practically nothing.

I remember this because everything had begun to irritate me.

The food.

The voices.

The pretension.

The way we were discussed while sitting there.

As though Joanna and I were objects under consideration rather than two people in the room.

My father’s son had married a Polish woman.

This required analysis.

What did she want?

What did she expect?

What was she after?

Apparently more than she could possibly deserve.

Sylvette kept saying:

“Vive la Pologne!”

Again and again.

“Vive la Pologne!”

She also told Joanna that the English were racist and that she would be treated using a racial slur I don’t need to repeat here.

A message of solidarity, presumably.

Welcome to England.

Vive la Pologne.

The countries were just weapons.

All of it floating around that kitchen while one young Polish woman stood crying at the sink.

My father could have said no.

He could have said that’s enough.

He could have said this is my son.

He could have said Joanna is his wife and they are welcome here.

He could have said practically anything.

I don’t remember him saying anything. He shrugged. Back against the gas-fired old chip fryer.

That was my father.

Not absent.

There.

Then came the knife.

I don’t remember what immediately preceded it. Memory isn’t CCTV.

But I remember the knife.

Sylvette took it and drove it into the wooden table.

Hard. The blade stuck. The handle vibrated. Twanged.

There was something grotesquely theatrical about it.

Maybe she thought it demonstrated passion.

French spontaneity.

Refusal of English repression.

Cutting through hypocrisy.

I don’t know what she thought.

I know what I saw.

A knife stuck in the middle of the family table.

It frightened me.

And it made me furious.

A knife is not an argument.

It was probably the most truthful object in the room.

There had been a lot of carving done in that house.

People removed. People replaced and new arrangements established.

New stories about why the previous arrangement had failed.

My father remained at the centre of each new version.

I don’t remember the exact route from the knife to the fight.

I remember asking him whether he agreed with her.

Then my father stood up.

And I hit him.

He went down.

Nick pulled me away.

That is mine.

I did it.

I hit my father.

I wish I hadn’t.

But I’m not going to falsify everything around it.

We left.

That night Joanna and I slept at the Shalls’ in Lewes.

Good old Andy.

His mum had been my English teacher at school.

They found us a spare room.

No performance.

No “Vive la Pologne.”

A bed.

Come in.

Stay here.

You’ll be all right tonight.

They were South African immigrants, with Scottish and Lithuanian family history somewhere behind them, teaching the English how to behave like English people.

I remain grateful.

A month or so later, when Joanna and I were back in London, my father sent me a letter.

Typed. Printed and his squiggly signature at the bottom.

I still have it.

He said I was angry. No shit Sherlock, as my kids would say.

That I attacked and then apologised.

That I had “failed to succeed.” I was 27, two years into a PhD at the London School of Economics.

That phrase stayed with me. Failed to succeed.

The language felt strange.

It didn’t sound like my father.

I thought then that Sylvette had written it or dictated much of it.

I still suspect she did.

But that isn’t really the point.

He signed it.

His hand.

Another Harper.

Twenty years later he visited Warsaw to see his grandchildren.

I showed him the letter.

He looked at it.

He said he didn’t remember it. Didn’t remember writing it. Didn’t remember sending it.

Nothing.

I showed him the signature.

His signature.

Still nothing.

He looked almost innocent.

That may be the thing I find hardest.

Not the anger.

Years later he told me about fighting with Guillaume, Sylvette’s son.

Guillaume was by then a grown man and, as far as I know, still living with them. My father described another ugly confrontation. He also told me about Sylvette involving the French police after another domestic altercation in Hyères.

I might even feel a bit sorry for Guillaume if he wasnt such an obvious cunt.

So, when does the father acknowledge?

Not confess.

Acknowledge.

Yes.

I was there.

Yes, that happened.

Yes, you were my son.

Yes, that was your home too.

Yes, Joanna was standing at the sink.

Yes, I could have spoken.

Yes, I signed the letter.

Is that really so much?

Perhaps it is.

Perhaps some people can only continue by not looking backwards.

Perhaps my father genuinely does not remember.

Thirty years.

I have also forgotten things other people probably remember perfectly. And my sons will no doubt remind me. So this isn’t me standing outside the human race pointing at one uniquely terrible father.

It is simpler.

He is my father.

That was my house.

17 Grange Road.

And I never went back.

Thirty years later I don’t need catharsis.

I don’t particularly believe in it.

The anger isn’t going to leave my body because I have arranged the story correctly.

There is no correct arrangement.

There are only some facts I no longer want to decorate.