Grief Repurposed in the Before Times.

Excerpt from I Stood with Harry

On the day your brother was born, your mum screamed from labour pains in the front room, while you and your sister played in the kitchen as your dad sat near the kitchen stove, cuckolded but not yet embittered by it. As your half-brother came through the birth canal, in horseplay, you punched your sister’s vagina, and your father rebuked you, “men don’t hit women there or anywhere.”

When you moved to new digs, your mum found a new lover, Bill Moxon, who was good with his fists, enjoyed his pints and distrusted books. Eventually, Bill moved in with your family as if it was the natural order of things. You, your sister, your dad, your half-brother, Matt, and your mum and Bill lived, ate, and slept in the rented room of a doss house. At night, you heard Bill and your mum fucking while your dad kipped beside you. You were afraid to look and see if your father was awake to witness his humiliation.

When Moxon entered your mum’s life, your dad began to fade from yours. “Without a job, he had nothing to offer your family. Love doesn’t feed a hungry belly. He was a goner and I sensed that he knew it too because he accepted his change in stature. I guess he thought it best that he be sacrificed by us”

Your mother told you and your sister to call your father grandad, so she could continue her affair with Bill. You were eight years old, but knew it was wrong, but you went along with your mum and became a co-conspirator in his demotion in the family. Soon your dad was told he could eat with the family, but he had to sleep upstairs in the unheated attic of the doss. You moved upstairs with him and slept beside your dad on a pissed stained flock mattress. At night by candle stub, your dad read to you and talked to you about socialism and the history of man. You used a coat for a blanket, and when the draft cutting through a thin paned sky made it too cold for you, your dad put his coat on top of you and slept without coverings. "Never you mind lad, there will be tea and fried bread for breakfast."

Just after New Year’s 1931, your dad disappeared. Your mum told you; it was best for everyone your dad was gone. “He was just another mouth to feed and as useless as a bairn.”

You understood your dad was jettisoned to save everyone else. It was horrific, and it forever tainted your relationship with your mother. “It was like throwing an injured passenger off an overcrowded lifeboat because their rations were running low.” 

That you were able to develop into a thoughtful, caring, empathetic person after all you experienced, and were forced to do as a child and teenager to survive is a testament to not only your character, but also mum's love for you. Without it, you would have ended up a misogynist like your half-brother, who told me when I was thirteen that all his sex education and how to treat women came from "gang bangs" as a lad."

Still, those early years fucked you up badly. You were ashamed of so much that had happened and what you believed you had done by casting your dad out of the house, that you learned to lie about your feelings and your war record. You were ashamed of your past and you believed you had not protected your dad from being expelled from the family. Those experiences from your youth developed in you a need to feel that you could protect those you loved from the challenges they faced. It’s why you never abandoned anyone in our family. You fought so desperately to keep Peter alive, mum alive, and me was well. It’s why I could never hold you responsible for the lies you told me throughout your life about your military record. It was immaterial to the concrete efforts you did to preserve my life, the lives of your two other sons and mum.

This an excerpt from my book I Stood with Harry that currently sits in the slush piles of a hundred or so publishers in Britain, Canada and the USA.