Things My Father Never Told Me

How old was I? Eleven or twelve? I can't recall. What I do remember is that I did something that brought my father to tears - the only time in my whole life I saw him cry.

What I did was not very terrible, and I meant no harm. I'd gone to the National Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, then in Somerset House on the Strand, to look up my family's history. A bit precocious, you may say. But it was so easy in those days. You simply turned up there and pulled the relevant registers off the shelves. My mother was German-born, so Somerset House was no help as far as her own family was concerned. Anyway, it was my father's side of the family I wanted to explore to see what I could find out about my surname.

I looked up my father's birth date. To my surprise he had no entry. Someone else called Sadgrove was listed as having been born that day, but not with Christian names I recognised. I should have drawn the obvious conclusion and kept quiet about what I'd seen, but things aren't always obvious to a boy of that age, and I was not gifted with tact. I went home and blurted it all out to my father. I was dismayed at his reaction. He took a while to tell me the story of how he had changed his given name by deed poll on reaching adulthood. It wasn't the name in itself, rather the memories it conjured up of how he had been relentlessly bullied as a youngster. Whenever he heard himself called by name, it brought back the vilification, cruelty and scorn he'd been subject to in school days - this was how he put it. He didn't go into details. Then he turned away and wept. And I stood there silent and numb, helpless before these sluice-gates of memory and emotion that I'd unwittingly opened up. It was a defining experience of my life.

I revisit that scene often, reliving the pain of unintended disclosure. I've thought about it on this Fathers' Day. I don't mean my own discomfort that afternoon, for it was nothing compared to my father's terrible grief. What I glimpsed for the first time was how abuse - which bullying always is - has effects on victims that last a lifetime. My father had climbed clear of his childhood, had worked hard, made a success of his life, married and had children. And now, without intending to, I'd uncovered what had lain undisturbed for decades. I was shaken by the capacity of historic wounds to haunt, and hurt, an adult man so many years later. And by my own part in it, even though I was the occasion not the cause. How could I begin to understand? I'm not sure I understand it even now more than half a century later.

As I look back to my own childhood on this Fathers' Day, my memories are of how happy it was. My father played a big part in that. He enjoyed the company of children - I saw later on in life how good he was as a grandparent to my own children. As a three year old he was taking me for walks among the silver birch trees of Petts Wood, teaching me to ride my tricycle and pointing out the Southern Electric "green trains" that ran beneath a bridge we had to cross on the way while I peered down between the girders. We played together in the sand pit in the garden. He built a layout for my Hornby clockwork "O" gauge model railway. One Christmas when I was seven, my parents gave me an 18 inch pavement bike. It had only one brake which failed at the top of Muswell Hill. I can feel even now the terror of wheels beneath me sliding out of control and gathering speed. The steep hill plunged down before me like a cliff. "Steer into those trees!" my father yelled, and I could hear the panic in his voice; "steer left and into those trees!" I did, and have always believed that he saved my life that day.

Perhaps I'm right to regard that visit to Somerset House as marking the end of childhood, or at any rate as representing an important rite of passage. For it showed me for the first time that my father was a vulnerable human being who had had a troubled past. It wasn't that up to then our relationship had been unalloyed bliss. Mine had been a middle-class upbringing like most others with its ups and downs, the good times and the not so good, the fallings-out and reconciliations that make up normal family life. But never had the raw humanity of either of my parents been exposed in the way it was that day. I saw a wound that I guessed would never fully heal. And I was not ready for it, not yet.

Psychoanalytic theory teaches us how important the moment is when we realise that our parents are flawed human beings like us. It's a real threshold in our growing up, a necessary step towards adulthood to recognise that for all that they have given us, they are not the omnipotent, infallible beings we believed them to be in our infancy. You would have to ask my own children at what point my own brokenness and fallibility became clear to them, when they learned that I could never be the perfect father, though I could still aspire (and hope) to be the "good-enough parent" they would always need me to be. I knew that I did not love my father any the less for what I had found out, indeed, I believed I would respect him for being candid with me about it. I also knew that he would not love me any the less for discovering it. How did I know? Because, I think, the foundations had been laid by a good-enough father that could bear the burden of what subsequently came to light. And when in adolescence, family relationships became more complicated, the memory of that event proved stabilising and strangely reassuring.

I once wrote a book* that explored stories in Genesis and Exodus about sons who were "lost" for various reasons. Abel, for example, who was murdered by his brother, and Ishmael who was banished to the desert by his father; and Isaac who was nearly offered up as a sacrifice, and Joseph who was exiled to Egypt out of envy, and others. Among the characters who populate these stories are all-too-many broken, wayward, self-serving fathers who paint an unlovely picture of humanity at its most compromised. Immersing myself in those texts got me thinking hard about my own personal history as a father to one man and a son to another. (You'll forgive the non-inclusive language, but biblical masculinities were central to the theme of the book.) The controlling narrative throughout was the parable of the Prodigal Son. Pondering that marvellous story made me ask the questions, in what ways have I been the prodigal "lost" son needing to be welcomed home and forgiven, and how in turn could I be that loving father towards my own children?

On Fathers' Day, I want to give thanks for and honour the memory of my father to whom I owe the gift of being alive, and to whose "good-enough" parenting in the critical years of childhood my adult self owes so much. As for the father I have been in turn for more than forty years now, I pay tribute to my four children whose capacity for understanding and forgiveness is one of the miracles of family life. That loving father in the parable is the inspiration for all of us who are lucky enough to be fathers. And all of us in every relationship in which others look to us for protection, kindness and care. For he shows us what God must be like, the Father who loves his creation and every living thing, who longs to welcome us home; and who when we make the journey back from our far country comes running to meet us.

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The image at the top of this blog is a medieval wall-painting in a church in Budapest that shows God the loving Father listening to his Son's prayer of agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Fathers' Day seemed a good occasion on which to share it.

*Lost Sons: God's long search for humanity, SPCK 2012.