Read Online A Lie About My Father by John Burnside - Free Book Online Page B

people, an improvement, at least, on the ratty tenements on King Street and elsewhere. Every year, there was talk of demolition, but the fact was that most people who lived in the prefabs were happy with what they had, and nobody on the council was stupid enough to move us back into the overcrowded, noisy, unsanitary ruins from which we had just escaped. To my mother, and many like her, the prefabs were a godsend: detached houses, in effect, with their own gardens, in loose clusters at the greener end of the town, with neighbours just close enough to call on for help in emergencies or for a spot of tea and gossip, but not so close that they got to know all your business. That would have been important to her, for during the seven years we lived in the prefabs, my father became more and more of an unknown quantity. For weeks on end, he would come home from work on a Friday night, or on a Saturday afternoon if there was overtime, and he would be tired to the bone, silent and dulled and uneasy, but he would hand over his wages, and there would be enough for the coming week, for cereals and sausages and cheap cuts of meat. Then, without warning, he would disappear, taking his wage packet with him, turning up drunk with ‘friends’ in the small hours of Sunday morning, loud and jovial and edgy, prepared to be loved, and ready to do damage if love was withheld. Or he would slip in quietly while we were playing in the garden, and sit weeping at the kitchen table, drunk and contrite, promising that this was the last, that, from now on, he would be fine. On those days, we would know, when we came indoors, that for a week or more every meal would be split-pea or lentil soup from the supply of dried foods my mother hoarded in the top cupboard for just such a rainy day, and the milk bottles would disappear from the doorstep for a while, replaced by a printed note, in her neat, slightly cramped hand, that said: No milk today, thank you .
    I look back now and see that the move to the prefabs sealed my father’s sense of himself as a failure. For as long as we had been at King Street, on the waiting list, there was a chance of going up in the world, but the simple fact was that, as a casual worker, doing mostly seasonal work, first at the docks, then in the building trade, he would always occupy the bottom of the social pile, just one rung above the unemployed and the unemployable. He was also a drinker, and everybody knew that. People know they cannot depend on a drunk. He could be hired, of course, but he would always be brought in on a seasonal or casual basis, so there were no obligations if anything went wrong. Things usually went wrong, sooner or later. It surprises me, looking back, that my father ever thought his problem with alcohol was a secret. Everybody knew. The child I was could tell, walking along the high street in Cowdenbeath, by the way people behaved towards my mother, combining respect and pity in more or less equal measure, admiring her for the tenacity with which she held her family together, but also pitying, and perhaps even despising a little, this woman whose lack of judgement had not only led her into the mess she was in, but kept her there, hoodwinked, self-deceiving, vainly hoping for something to change.
    My father did not blame himself for his failure, of course. When he had been in the air force, he had been happy; he was always saying he should never have left the RAF, that he’d only come out because of my mother, who didn’t like the idea of having to go and live wherever the MOD might send him, far from her family, maybe in some foreign country – Germany, or Cyprus, say – countries that sounded exciting and exotic to us, but to her would have been a living hell, so far from her own folk, in a place where she would never be able to speak the language. After my father left the RAF, he’d got work at the docks, and there had been some kind of scam going on there, where my father – a seasoned