Of Moving Tales Of Boats Part 1 - Dad

I have promised myself for years that I would record the story of how I came to live on a boat. This would have been quite an odd aspiration to my childhood self. I could not stand to be in or on the water and movement other than by train, pram, bicycle or via my own two feet made me feel quite nauseous. As for travelling in the car ... I am sure every journey must have been as huge a challenge for my parents as it was for me. At least I was only bringing up my last meal, not clearing it up. 

My interest in narrowboats began with my experiences on the Summer Storyboat and there is an account of that here. Unfortunately the project folded; oddly not, like so many projects, because it ran out of money, but because it ran out of people who cared enough to keep it going. Artist, author, musician Rob Lewis, tried valiantly to take on the task from his refuge in Wales, but even he could not raise the dead.

In 2003 I walked out of a bad situation and needed to find somewhere to live. My widowed father lived less than five miles away, so I asked for sanctuary for a week or so until I could sort myself out. That week or so became a month or so, but it was soon obvious that I was not going to be able to afford anywhere of my own, specially while I was being driven into debt not only by having to pay child maintenance, but also the “spousal maintenance” that took no account of my ability to pay. Eventually I was summoned for a consultation by the bank manager who had observed I was at the end of my overdraught and had used up every bit of credit available to me to try and keep up with the payments. In those days the bank had been raising my credit limit on an annual basis for many years. How very British to set someone up only to whip out the rug from beneath. 

In April 2011 my father died from the cancer that had plagued him undiagnosed for a while. I had lived with him for eight years by that time and had become his sole carer as his illness progressed. I cannot ever remembering being so exhausted. Even a string of babies didn’t leave me feeling quite as wrecked. I was trying to hold on to my work commitments to bring in some money and look after my Dad. Eventually a nurse was engaged to check in on him when I was at work. In order to make life easier for my brothers and for me he had signed up to a will-writing service some years earlier that offered to undertake all the tasks associated with probate for an extra fee. I was named executor of my father’s estate, but for some reason was expected to sign over the authority to the will-writers before they would do the work for which they’d already been paid. Things became very complicated.  The will-writer decided which estate agent was going to sell the house, my home for the previous eight years. Whilst grieving I had to start clearing Dad’s accumulation of stuff, clean up the place for viewings and work out where and how I was going to live. 

The where and how wasn't easy. Although by this time the maintenance situation had been resolved I was stuck between a rock and the proverbial hard place. My share of my father's estate would not be anything like enough to buy me somewhere to live. I spoke to the estate agent who was selling the house. They couldn't help, because of my low income and poor credit record after the maintenance fiasco, and told me to apply to a housing association or the local council. I couldn't find an association willing to take me and the borough council told me that after probate had been settled I would have too much money to be allowed to have one of their properties! Damned whatever I tried to do, it was all closing in.

Clearing Dad's house was heartbreaking. He had built himself three sheds and a greenhouse in the garden and the sheds were full of the stuff he had acquired at car boot sales with extras of everything just in case they came in handy. It's not that anything was at all out of place or untidy, quite the contrary, but there was just so much of it. Mostly though he had shelves and racks of tools along with labelled jars and trays and drawers of screws, nails and fixings of every type, size and material. Lengths of timber were stored up in the rafters and propping up the walls were workshop and household electrical goods of every kind in front of offcuts of hardboard, chipboard and ply. Why would anyone need seven electric drills? Mostly though, it was the hand tools and the jars I found so upsetting. Many of them I remember from childhood. Along with hoping he would be able to play football with me (I was a complete disappointment on that score) he also seemed to think I might somehow inherit his make-do-and-mend cum do-it-yourself interests. I made slightly more effort with that, but I was a dead loss there as well. Every time I would cry out for help with some simple job that defeated me he would try to get me to do it and all my old adolescent rage would surface even in early middle age. I really should point out though that moving in with him was a wonderful second chance to build a loving relationship we had never mutually experienced before. I cannot begin to express how fortunate I felt about that. How many kids, particularly men, get a second chance at making a relationship with a father?

When I moved in with him at the start of those last eight years together I found a photograph I had never before seen. It was a black and white print of my handsome father as a young man, probably about twenty-seven years old cradling a tiny baby in his arms. He was looking down with such amazement and obvious love that, when I saw that photograph, I cried. I'm in tears thinking about it now. That baby was me and that photograph undid the decades of resentment I had felt about his absence as I grew up. During those final years together we talked about a lot of things. Why had it taken me forty years to learn that his drive to keep three jobs on simultaneously (jobs that would keep him out of the home during all my growing years) was the result of his deeply rooted fear of losing everything and everyone he loved should he lose his income. He had seen his siblings taken into care when his mother left his father. He worked and fought so hard to get his brothers and sisters back home again before he was even old enough to start work legally. It took years, but he did it. That was why some of my earliest memories are of the tenement flat in London with two rooms I was never allowed to enter. One was the lodger's, the other was my Uncle B, dad's youngest brother.