On becoming your dad

I have become my dad which I suppose is not that surprising really.

It is less the physical appearance although that is clearly there it is instead all those little ways that creep up on you and take you back four decades.

So I caught myself sitting in an armchair recently talking to one of my son’s and all the speech rhythms, along with the words I used and even the hand movements were dad.

He retained his hair longer than I ever did and unlike him I am useless at making and repairing things but the rest could be him.

He was a calm gentle man who always put the five of us first even down to the nightly winter task of putting a hot water bottle  into each of our beds and today whenever our kids are sleeping over I will do the same, even given that the eldest is in his 30s and the youngest just 21.

And it made me reflect on just how much we carry forward from the lives of our parents and pass on to our own children.

Now dad was born in 1906 and mum in 1920 which pitched their formative years in the first half of the last century and some at least of those experiences flowed into how they brought us up.

Our Christmases blended the growing consumerism of the late 1950s with older traditions which with just a little tweeking could even have come out of the novels of Dickens.

Of course much of it was down to that simple fact that so much of everyday life was still the same.

The coal, the milk and the papers were delivered to the door,  Sidney the knife sharperner made a regular appearance with his hand operated machine which he pushed around the streets and Sundays remained the day you endured with little to do and little on the television to watch.

That said there are clear differences between me and my dad.

I never shared his politics which were grounded on a belief in Empire and property or for that matter his preference for plain food which “was not mixed about.”

Instead I very early adopted  mother’s politics coloured as they were by the mass unemployment and Means Testing of the 1930s.

For her class politics remained at the bedrock of how she voted and how she saw the world.

But then mum died when I was 25 while I had my dad until 1994 which perhaps has something to do with that simple fact that I grew more like him with the passage of time.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson