Father's Day, updated

 

(Daddy is the one standing at the back)

Along with most of my friends, any Father's Day wishes from me now have to be for the memory rather than to a living father. And of course, for some of the minority of my friends whose fathers are alive, their  wishes and love may be given but without knowing if they have been received, because dementia has taken their father away already in great part. 

But in our case, it is a very long time indeed since we were able to say 'Happy Father's Day' in person. My father, and I'm going to call him Daddy from now on, died nearly half a century ago, in November 1977. He died of lung cancer at the age of 59, and we six siblings ranged in age from 11 to 19 when he died.

We loved him happily and comfortably and do still. And we knew that he loved us, although as someone who was born during the First World War, he may never have actually said that to us. But there was plenty of evidence and we were not in any doubt. So here is a pen picture of someone who has been dead for nearly three-quarters of my life, but, like Cro, is as alive in memory as anyone around me. Even if he never lived to see mobile phones, Elvis Costello or Prime Minister Thatcher.

He was, like many of us Mayo Gillards, "built like a fireplug", short and sturdy, with very long blacksmithy arms, a big black-curly-haired head, and the deepest voice you have ever heard. He was quietly-spoken and unaggressive, but somehow I feel people would have instinctively not messed with him if they had, lets say, public interactions with him. He was also, and I have photographic evidence of this, a very smart dancer and when younger he filled a double-breasted suit very well (with appropriately let-down arms, I suppose). He was an inch shorter than our quite statuesque mother, and had a shoe size about two sizes smaller, but he could waltz backwards without looking where he was heading and never once did he tread on her size eights. I enclose photographic evidence of the suit at least. 

He was a factory manager/foreman in a tyre factory in Leeds, working five and a half days a week as people did then, and I have a clear memory of his daily routine as he went off in the works van or car. Up early and porridge for breakfast (I suspect with salt, though sibs may remember better). Took his 'bait' of sandwiches made from the remains of Sunday's brisket, wrapped up in a Mother's Pride wrapper, and as he went out the door called 'banaclat' to us as we dazedly tried to get ready for school. I had no idea this was gaelic/Irish until many years later. 

Daddy was a countryman and you could see the joys that linked him back to home. He played the fiddle, and gave us all our start with the music, for which I feel such gratitude for the lifetime's pleasure it has provided. But I think his main motive was just to give us a chance to not let that music die. He had other countryman skills: he could weave baskets and I think we still have maybe one or two; he taught me how to scythe and we used to harvest the hay each year for our donkey; and finally - sadly - he had been the person who cut hair in his hamlet of Rathreedane (because everyone had to have a special skill or two), so I never saw a paid barber till about the age of 15, and I am familiar with the cold ticklishness of the hand-clippers with which our cuts were accomplished.

He was, despite gruff voice and very stubbly chin, an affectionate father for the time. I remember him saying all the scary threats of "I'll jump into yer mouth and look out!" or "I'll put ye in the cupboard and the pookies will get ye"  to which we would squeal as fitted our age. And when you 'acted the goat' you were called some Irish deprecation, like 'bolovaughn' or 'omathaughn'.

I would have loved to have known him when he and I and my siblings were older. He only saw our first butting-ups against parental authority and it would have been lovely to come out the other side of that and talk as adults on our return from our new lives. But he missed his first grandchild by ten years, and I miss him still. Though I have to realistically say that it would have been a very great miracle if he was still alive now at the age of 108. But 75 would have been nice, to see all his children out into their own lives, and to spend some years not heading out with his bait every morning but sitting with Mammy and enjoying life. 

So Happy Father's Day Daddy. And thank you.