A Lie About My Father Read Online Free PDF

what she wanted, more than anything, was the most routine form of chintzy respectability. Like her mother, she loved flowers and gardening. She had a reverence for learning that sat heavy on my childhood: every spare moment, I was set to work, studying, reading, writing – yet she herself never once read what she thought of as a ‘real book’ in all the years I knew her. She was quiet and secretive, and she had the air about her, even when I was very young, of a woman whose loves and friendships were all in the past, or at a distance. She was fierce about family, even when family let her down. Perhaps most of all when they let her down.
    My mother’s pictures – photographs of her family, of her friends, of herself on days out with fellow workers from the Co-op, all the scraps and images she treasured – were kept in a large, shabby handbag that my father had brought her from Egypt, when he was stationed out there, but there were no photographs of my father before his air force days, when he is always the one at the back of the group, usually with a glass lifted to his mouth and obscuring his face, a man making it all too clear that he wasn’t interested in posing for snapshots. But then, photographs can be misleading. What we remember, when we truly remember, rather than when we recall the memories that are planted in our minds by others, is the only testament that can be trusted; not because it is precise, but because it is our own. A photograph, a family story, the recollections of some old-timer at a wedding or a funeral, recollections of a time when nobody else in the room was even born, are works of art, not facts. I knew, at a fairly young age, that anything my father told me about himself, anything he told me about anything , was to be treated with suspicion. But why was he the exception? Why should anything I was told be treated as definitely true or absolutely false? When they told stories, when they showed pictures, when they reminisced together with a room full of family, all people communicated was their intentions. Whatever was true, was secret.
    My father had no history that he could talk about with others. Nobody reminisced with him about the old days, nobody brought snapshots out of an old box and handed them around so the assembled company could see what he was like as a boy. All he had were his own, unverified stories. His own apocrypha. By the time he was my father, he wasn’t so much a man as a force of nature, something that came out of nowhere, an unpredictable, wild, occasionally absurd creature who could be all smiles and charm one moment, and utterly venomous the next. He was a square-built man of around five eleven, strong, physically ruthless, very quick. Quick with his hands , was the phrase people used when they wanted a euphemism for domestic violence, but my father was almost never actually violent. At some instinctual level he understood that a threat is much more potent than an actual blow: after the first few times, a blow can lose its power, because – as he himself liked to say – people can get used to almost anything. He’d got used to working in a rubber-products factory, standing all day in the heat and stench, at the age of fifteen, and he’d got used to the smell of burning flesh when he worked on the disposal squads during the foot-and-mouth epidemic of the early sixties. He’d got used to a few blows himself, no doubt, over the years, and he could take as good as he gave. He’d come home a few times, when I was a child, with blood on his face and shirt, cuts on his arms, bruises on his knuckles. Yet his injuries never troubled him. ‘It’s a scratch,’ he would say, when my mother tried to get him to go to the hospital; then he’d wash the blood away with warm water and throw his shirt in the dustbin.
    So he rarely hit out. He knew the threat of violence is always stronger than violence itself. It works much the same way horror movies work: if you see the big