A Lie About My Father Read Online Free PDF Page A

even a time before that, when they didn’t exist. As a child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that . . . What kind of world was it, when nobody I knew existed? What did people do? How could anything have been there at all, if I wasn’t there to see it?
    As far as my father is concerned, I know absolutely nothing about who he was, or what he did, before he was my father. I was shown photographs of my mother when she was a young woman: dark-haired, pale, her lipstick too freely applied, she is standing on a beach, or posing with friends in a garden or park, surprisingly slim in her striped jersey and black slacks. To me, this girl was an impossibility. She was nothing like my mother: carefree, even a little wild-looking, she bore no resemblance to the preoccupied woman who kept trying to make something of our condemned home, trailing offcuts and sale items back from the shops, knitting and sewing all the time so we would have decent clothes, scavenging old magazines and notebooks from anywhere she could find them so she could teach me to read and write before I got to school.
    My mother was a maze of contradictions. A dutiful, if not devout Catholic of the simple faith variety so beloved of the clerical trade, she hated Communism which, to her, was politics of any variety. Yet, perhaps because my father wasn’t, and every other male member of her family either was, or had been, associated with the pits, she revered the miners, and she could tell us all about the hardships they had endured, about what they had done in the war, about how the pit bosses had brought in people from all over Scotland to break their will during the General Strike, and how they had stood fast when everyone else had crumbled and given in. She could also tell you how, according to family lore, her father, a devout Catholic, had been picked up by the police, supposedly for drunkenness, and taken to the cells. This was part and parcel of the routine harassment of Catholic men, or ‘the Irish’ as the Protestants called them – and the police in those days were all Protestants in that corner of Scotland. A known Catholic emerged from the pub, none the worse for wear, and was pulled in, to pass the night in a damp cell, his pockets emptied, his belt and shoes removed, all the routine humiliations. My grandfather had endured all this in the steady, stoic manner bred of daily necessity, but when he came to be discharged, the rosary beads he always carried were missing. My mother’s voice brimmed with pride when she told how he finally left the police station that morning, after being threatened with a charge, but kept coming back, day after day, asking for his rosary beads till, one evening, the desk sergeant finally relented.
    ‘They arrested him for being drunk,’ she would say. ‘Your grandfather has never been drunk in his life.’
    This was true. My grandfather could put away as much whisky as anyone, but he would never have been seen out on the street with a drink on him. He always dressed well to go out, in a worn, but clean black suit, a flat cap or bunnet, very polished shoes. He kept a picture of the Virgin Mary in his breast pocket, and his rosary beads in his jacket. He took me aside at a family occasion once – one of the many weddings a man with twelve children was obliged to attend – and offered me a small card, like those collectors’ cards you used to get with cigarettes, or tea. It was a picture of the Virgin.
    ‘Every man should carry a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary with him at all times,’ he told me.
    I stared at the card and nodded.
    ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘It’s for you.’
    I took it.
    ‘Look after her,’ he continued, as I put the card in my blazer pocket. ‘And she will look after you.’
    It was from her parents that my mother’s values came. Like her father, she disliked people who loved money, yet