From The Sunday Times April 26, 2009
My dad, the perfect mum
When my father wrote his autobiography two years ago, he dedicated it to me, my brother Jim and sister Fay, describing us as Miracles of Life. But really he was the miracle – as writer, as visionary, as a man and, above all, as a father. Or do I mean father and mother combined? He became both and more.
He was widowed suddenly: my mother fell ill while on a family holiday in Spain and died of pneumonia within a few days. Until then it had been the kind of holiday in which the biggest excitement was Daddy falling off the pedalo. We buried her in the Protestant cemetery in Alicante and made our way home to Shepperton, a modest house in a London suburb chosen by our parents as a peaceful place to raise a family. The year was 1964, he was a writer in his thirties, alone with three small children – Jim, 9, Fay, 7, and me, 5.
Few of my parents’ friends thought he would manage, for it was extremely rare at the time to find single fathers bringing up children on their own. But my father was determined to do it. He felt that as long as the surviving parent was loving and remained close to the children, they would thrive. He was right. We not only thrived; we had the most idyllic childhood I can imagine.
He had already survived a great deal in his life – interned by the Japanese in a prisoner-of-war camp between the ages of 12 and 14, an experience that inspired his great novel Empire of the Sun, he had witnessed appalling acts of cruelty and brutality and yet come through unscathed. After the death of his young wife the same survival instinct seemed to kick in.
His job meant he could work from home and be with us all the time. He was determined to do everything himself: there was no question of a nanny, even if he’d had the money to pay one. He took us to and from school, cooked our meals – sausages and mashed potato, generally – ironed our school ties, supervised our homework. He put us before everything – including his work. If we wanted to watch Blue Peter, he watched with us and the typing-out of a short story would have to wait.
He later said: “Some fathers make good mothers and I hope I was one of them, though most of the women who know me would say that I made a very slatternly mother . . . too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. In short, the kind of mother of whom the social services deeply disapprove.” He has described alcohol as “a close friend and confidant in the early days”. This sounds shocking now but the truth is, as children, we did not really notice his drinking.
We lived in what we came to think of as a very happy nest – there was a sense of warm chaos that was hugely liberating. He did not care about bourgeois concerns such as keeping the house tidy – as he once said: “You can do all the housework in five minutes if you don’t make a fetish of it.” He later speculated that the compulsive cleaning of a family home “might be an attempt to erase those repressed emotions that threaten to break through into the daylight” and certainly I remember finding the grander homes of some of my school chums eerily silent and stultifying in their neatness compared with our wonderful home, where old plastic flippers discarded from a beach holiday were used as doorstops.
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rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6168386.ece