Not My Father's Son Page 11

  THEN

  When I was nineteen, my mother finally left my father.

  I was in Glasgow in my final year at drama school, but had been allowed to leave for a term to make my professional theatre debut playing Malcolm in the Tron Theatre’s production of Macbeth. On my twentieth birthday, my mum came down to Glasgow to see me and we had lunch and spent a pleasant afternoon together. Two days later I was surprised to hear her voice when I picked up the phone in my flat.

  “Is everything okay, Mum?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, pet. I’m just calling to tell you that as of the twenty-first of April I will be living at sixteen Brook Street, Monifieth.”

  There was silence on the line. I couldn’t quite process what I’d heard.

  “Um, what?” I managed finally.

  “As of the twenty-first of April I will be residing at sixteen Brook Street, Monifieth,” she repeated. “I’ve bought a wee flat and I get the keys in six weeks.”

  “What about Dad?” I asked, still confused.

  “Oh, he’ll be staying at Panmure.”

  “You’re leaving him?”

  “Well, Alan, you know your father and I have been leading separate lives for some time,” I heard my little mum say.

  Suddenly my legs gave way from under me and I was sitting on the floor crying like a baby. Of course I knew it was a positive thing for everyone concerned, especially my mum, but it really did come as a shock to me. I was terribly upset. Not so much about the actual breakup; more due to the recognition of how much of my youth had been spent vainly wishing for it to happen. The eventual announcement was more a ringing of the bell of grief from my childhood than the clanging of change in my present.

  By this point, relations in the Cumming household were almost cordial. My parents seemed content in their separate lives, there seemed to be little animosity, and I assumed age had, if not withered, tempered my father’s anger and lack of respect for his wife and family. Of course I later realized that this détente was due to a mutual agreement to eventually separate having been reached a couple of years before. At twenty I was deemed sufficiently capable to cope with the shock of having divorced parents.

  A few weeks after my mother told me the news, I went to Panmure for the weekend. I realized this would be the last time I would ever sleep in my childhood home. There was no way I would return there except for a dutiful and cursory visit to see my father from then on. I would never again stay the night. Knowing this, I walked through the rooms and saw them in a new light. I was feeling nostalgic for something that had barely ended, perhaps because for so long I had yearned for it to cease.

  I had already taken most of the things I wanted to keep when I had first moved to Glasgow a couple of years earlier. For me that move was not just for a college semester, it was forever. I would return for visits at Christmas and the occasional weekend, but I was out, never to return for good. My mother, unbeknownst to me, was planning the same escape.

  My mother took me to see her new flat, told me about the purchases she was making. I could see how excited she was for this new stage in her life. I understood.

  My father was present for meals. He went out as usual for the evening, but he was not missed, and there was no malice or offense taken at his absence nor was his manner in any way aggressive or threatening as it had been for so many years. I interpreted this calmness as a good thing. Since I had gone off and begun to live my own life, my father had ceased to be a physical threat to me; he even became quite civil. This change in him allowed me to pack away much of my past in a box that I never wanted to open. For ten years I kept it closed, pretending that my family was no more difficult or trying than anybody else’s. I didn’t begin to forgive my father—far from it. But I began to forget him in a way, as I moved about the business of my future. My father had become not exactly jovial, but over a meal at the kitchen table I could tell him and my mum stories of my new, strange life at college and he would laugh. When he took me to the train station he would shake my hand and a ten- or a twenty-pound note would be passed into my palm and he would tell me to take it and buy myself and my mates a drink.

  That last weekend, which had been so full of my mum’s exhilaration and hope for the future, ended with a silent drive in my father’s car to the train station at Dundee. He had not once mentioned or referenced the fact that Mum was leaving in a mere week or so. He had never voiced to me anything about how things might change. He had said absolutely nothing at all. My mum had spoken in front of him about some of the logistics of her move, but he showed no emotion or even interest. I suppose I felt sorry for him that weekend. I actually worried about him.

  In the darkness of the car that Sunday night I eventually plucked up the courage to say, “Dad, we haven’t talked at all about Mum leaving, and I’m just a bit worried about how you’re going to get on, you know, look after yourself and everything. Don’t you think you might need some help?”

  Nothing. Not a malicious or pissed-off nothing, just nothing.

  “I mean, don’t you think you should maybe get someone to come and help you a bit,” I continued. “To do some cooking and ironing and stuff?”

  “I don’t need anyone to do my cooking and ironing,” came the enigmatic reply.

  Little did I know then that as soon as my mother had packed up her car for the final trip to her new home and wished my father well, his lover—she of the suicide husband and the inappropriate autograph request at my granny’s funeral—would be installed in her place. And so my father was right, he didn’t need anyone to do his cooking or ironing.

  FRIDAY 28TH MAY 2010

  The next morning, when I arrived at the Imperial War Museum, I was introduced to Professor Edgar Jones, a historian and expert on military psychiatry. Of course I assumed that my grandfather must have suffered some psychological damage after such a traumatic experience in France—how could he not?—but the speed at which I was plunged into talking about his mental health made me rather anxious. I was just getting to know him, just scraping away at the picture in my hall and feeling real flesh and blood (and such derring-do!), and now I was being forced to chip away at his mind. In the place that had once housed England’s mentally ill.

  “War changes people,” was Edgar’s opening salvo.

  He had a kind face. I had watched him talk to Elizabeth, the director, as the crew set up the lights, and I sensed that what he had to tell me did not sit easily with him. He was as uncomfortable as I was. They were looking through the medical journals and military documents spread out in front of them, speaking in whispers. Of course this was all so that my shock could be captured on camera, and I knew this. But the need for the secrecy, and the promise of shock, created a palpable sense of foreboding. Another day, another bombshell, I thought to myself.

  The night before I had been happy to spend back at my flat with Grant, and I felt my batteries were a little recharged. On Sunday I would return to Cape Town in South Africa, where I would continue work on a miniseries I was acting in. Then there would be a monthlong gap before I launched into the final piece of the Tommy Darling puzzle. I had said to Grant the night before that it was actually a good thing to have that expanse of time, as no doubt the results of the DNA test, which hopefully we would receive in a few days, would usher in a whole new level of family revelation and discussion. It would be nice to have just one of my familial mysteries to focus on for a while.

  But as much as I longed for the answer, I knew that either way the DNA results would create emotional turbulence on a grand scale. If I was indeed not my father’s son, I would have to confront my mother with the news and find out why she had kept this from me for so long. Then I would perhaps start the process of contacting my real father and new family. If it was not true, and my DNA completely matched Tom’s, I would have to confront my father and once more engage with his warped and cruel mind, and also tell my mother what he had accused her of. Either way it looked like my mum was going to have the biggest shock of all of
us—for she was at the center of both scenarios. I just hoped that what I found out about her father was going to be more uplifting and positive than what I would find out about mine.

  I let all thoughts of the next month go, and concentrated on what Edgar was telling me, which was essentially that there was no way my grandfather could have come through his war experience, and trauma, unscathed.

  He went on to talk about how soldiers suffering from psychiatric problems during the Second World War were given rest, exercise, and occupational therapy, but few were ever treated with what we would today call psychotherapy. Most cases, in fact, went untreated. Even the terms “combat stress” or PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) were relatively recent additions to the lexicon of war, and certainly not in the vocabulary in the 1940s. My grandfather had been fearless in battle, but he also had the weight of all he had seen to come to terms with later.

  But worse was to come: if Tommy Darling had suffered mental trauma from his efforts in France, there would be little time for him to recover—in 1942 he and his fellow Cameron Highlanders were sent to India. There, the Highlanders found themselves tested in entirely new ways. They were trained in jungle warfare.

  The Japanese had entered the war in 1941 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and very quickly developed a reputation for total lack of fear, and of fighting to the death. Edgar now pulled out a map and showed me that by March 1944 the Japanese forces had advanced through Burma and had their sights set firmly on neighboring India, the jewel in the British Empire’s crown. They crossed over the northeastern border and amassed their troops around the mountain town of Kohima with the aim of pushing west to take Delhi. I had a feeling this was not going to end well.

  The Cameron Highlanders were on the front lines of the battle at Kohima, made to push through Japanese forces that had taken positions on a hillside. The Highlanders fought mortar fire, grenades, snipers . . . all with the knowledge that the Japanese took no prisoners. To be caught was to be killed.

  He paused for a moment and I took out the Officer’s Record of Service of Tommy Darling, a book that my mum had given me earlier in the week. I had studied it carefully for any clues.

  In the book I had found that my grandfather had been admitted to a hospital after this battle, on May 18, 1944. Next to the entry were three letters.

  “What does this mean, G.S.W.?” I asked.

  “It’s a general acronym for gunshot wound,” explained Edgar.

  The entry also said “left hand,” “right knee,” and “ankle,” which meant, according to Edgar, that Tommy Darling had most likely been hit by shrapnel. His wounds weren’t clean.

  My stomach lurched a bit. What a horrible image.

  The book Mum had given me also showed us that two weeks after he was wounded in the Battle of Kohima, Tommy Darling was admitted to a hospital in Dehra Dun, northwest of Kohima. Seven months later, in December 1944, he was moved to another hospital in Deolali, almost a thousand miles away, where he stayed for two months before returning to duty.

  Why had he been moved such a huge distance in the middle of his recovery?

  There was a gap in the book, from May 1944 to 1946. I knew that the key to the mystery of Tommy Darling lay in those missing two years.

  “What does that mean?” I asked immediately. Edgar looked at me with his soulful eyes and said, “It’s possible these records may have been deliberately destroyed. We can’t be sure.”

  And so, with Edgar’s urging, I went back to the previous entry. Tommy had left the hospital in Dehra Dun and was transferred to Deolali.

  “And you may have heard of the word ‘doolally,’ which derives from Deolali. We’ve been wondering whether, in fact, he goes to a psychiatric ward within the general hospital at Deolali.”

  Oh, poor, wee doolally Tommy Darling.

  Doolally was a word I used all the time in my childhood. Even now, occasionally I fire it off. If someone was a bit silly, a bit bonkers, they were doolally. I had no idea its provenance was a hospital in India, and I certainly never imagined it would be used to describe my granddad.

  It all started to click into place.

  I could feel poor Edgar’s conundrum—his human reluctance to give me more bad news battling his academic needs to complete the theory, tell me the rest of the story.

  “Two terrible battles, possibly one of the most frightening engagements of the Second World War, followed by severe wounds . . . ,” Edgar let out, slowly.

  And there it was. Tommy Darling, the fearless daredevil of war on two continents, who had seen his fellow soldiers, no, his family, die around him, had slipped through the cracks of sanity and gone under.

  And in the Second World War, that wasn’t acknowledged, or discussed. Suddenly a lightbulb went on for me. “That makes more sense about why they’d destroy those medical records then, doesn’t it?”

  “These records were systematically destroyed after the Second World War if someone had a major psychiatric admission, because of the stigma attached to mental illness.”

  I suddenly felt a rush of animosity towards the military establishment, towards a country that sent its poor young men to war and let their brains become addled only to destroy any record of such damage, thereby heaping shame back onto the very young men who had given and lost so much in the first place. No wonder there is still such stigma today.

  THEN

  When I was twenty-eight I had what I have come to describe as a nervous breakdown. I now see that it had been coming for years—wobbly moments of irrationality and panic, which I had chalked up to exhaustion or stress, now can be traced to the path that led me to the eventual Nervy B.

  I think about it as that box in my attic. Our parents’ house was a silent one. Partly that was due to not wanting to risk the ire of our father, and so not speaking at all was a safer option. But also we never discussed what we were going through, how it was affecting us. When my dad was absent, sometimes Mum, Tom, and I would give each other warnings over what might ignite his rage, or express anger about the consequence of one of his actions, or indirectly empathize about our plight, but we never actually addressed what was really going on: that we were living with a tyrant, someone who, I believe now, was mentally ill. As our silence grew, so did our denial.

  Eventually of course we all escaped him. Tom and I entered adulthood and moved away: Tom at twenty-one to get married, and I, two years later at seventeen, to go to drama school in Glasgow. And Mary Darling started her own independent life soon after. We all stitched together facades that we were all okay. Fine. Normal. Of course we weren’t. You can’t go through sustained cruelty and terror for a large swathe of your life and not talk about it and be okay. It bites you in the arse big time.

  Tom and I are six years apart in age. That doesn’t seem to matter now, but when I was ten and he was sixteen it was huge. And when I was fifteen and he was twenty-one and he got away, I was devastated, not so much because I was losing the brother I had shared a bedroom with for so many years, for in truth we didn’t have all that much in common and weren’t that close then, but because I was being left alone and there was no longer any buffer between my father’s rage and me.

  Later, when we were older, we’d occasionally broach the topic of our past when drunk with friends and the subjects of parents and childhoods came up. But Tom and I would do so in a sort of jokey way, marveling at the impossible tasks our father would set for us, and the times he had become really enraged, never detailing the violence or the fear he also engendered.

  So the box in the attic stayed up there, gathering dust, neglected. Eventually I think we forgot about it completely. But the thing about boxes full of denial and years of unresolved pain and hurt is that eventually . . . they explode.

  My box began to burst in 1993. I had been married to my wife for seven years and we had decided to try to have a baby. Suddenly the idea of being a father and what that actually means began to fill my head, and therefore my own experiences with my father flood
ed my mind. Not vividly and truthfully for a long time, though, for I had packed them away so well that it took a long time for the gates to open and the trickle to turn into a flood.

  At first all that happened was that I started to panic. I put it down to the fact that my wife and I were moving into a big new house and the financial demands that suddenly made on me. Then we had a problem with our next-door neighbor, and I thought perhaps that was the cause. The house had a huge garden and I threw myself into its restoration, but many serene moments were ruined when I was hard at work digging or hacking away at brambles and I would feel that my wife was watching me. Suddenly I couldn’t carry on. I became agitated and irritable. I realized that her innocently looking out of the kitchen window, or standing at the top of the lawn, sometimes even bringing me a drink or coming for a chat, triggered the feeling of my father inspecting me. As I weeded the seedbeds in the nursery, or as I cleaned out the tractor shed, I remembered being watched, and my whole body, my being, just associated that gaze with the inexorability of being hit. My wife knew my father and we had visited him a few dutiful times over the years, but she had no idea of the scope of his abuse and his power over me. I explained my feelings of discomfort and she was very understanding. She stopped watching me.

  Then, around the same time, I began rehearsals to play Hamlet. It was to tour England, culminating in a monthlong run at the Donmar Warehouse in London. It was the most amazing and challenging moment of my career thus far. My wife was playing Ophelia, so she would be with me every step of the way. As I got deeper and deeper into my work, I came to understand that Hamlet really didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be absent. He wanted to be back at university with his friends. He is sickened with his mother’s hasty marriage, distraught to be asked by the ghost of his father—a distant man I thought he didn’t particularly connect with—to avenge his death. To add to it, his girlfriend is dumping him and his friends are spying on him. I decided that there was no way Hamlet was mad. He was slipping into the same deep water as me. He was at the start of a nervous breakdown too.