Father's Day memories

BAXTERS Potato and Leek soup. A bag of clementines. Lemon-flavoured water. A packet of meatballs. Those were the good days. If we managed tick off all those, it was pretty much mission accomplished. Father and son went home happy.

Still, 15 months after he died, the sight of those items in a supermarket aisle signpost the walks I had with my dad. Especially the meatballs. I've never known anyone else who liked them.

I wish I was conjuring up memories of sweets and crisps, the Beano, Turnbull's Tornadoes roaring down the Easter Road slope, even McEwan's Export and Bell's whisky, but I can't. Those were pleasures discussed, but rarely shared. We didn't really bond until he was in his late seventies.

Memories of my dad as I was growing up are of a man who was around, but largely absent. When he was in his late thirties, he decided to give up his career as an accountant, and go to university to become a teacher - an ambition the war had denied him. From around the time I was three until the age of nine he was combining studying and doing his teacher training with a job at Crawford's biscuit factory.

He threw himself into teaching with gusto. He crammed a lot into a 20-year career, retiring as head of business studies at a large comprehensive. There were parents' evenings, night school, piles of marking; I can recall only two family holidays - a week in a Blackpool B&B in 1965, and a week in a caravan in Arbroath four years later. Generations of pupils saw more of Dad than I did.

I left home at 17, and made my own way in the world; I ended up, 30 years on, back in my Edinburgh birthplace. And then he and Mum retired here too.

I started taking them shopping every Saturday morning because they didn't own a car. When illness eventually robbed Mum of the will to go, it became just Dad and me - for virtually the first time in our lives.

He was almost blind and nearly deaf, yet we communicated like we never had before; it's surprising the anecdotes that can be fitted around pushing a trolley and unpacking carrier bags. I learned about the war, about the Far East, about love and loss and about the grandparents who had died when I was a toddler. And most of all, about the father I barely knew.

Tomorrow, I might treat myself to a packet of meatballs.

'Compared to friends with distant dads, I'm the luckiest girl in the world'

By Marianne Taylor

MY heart Belongs to Daddy. The ever-astute Cole Porter was on to something with that one. The father-daughter relationship can be a wonderful thing, less complicated, judgemental and slavish than mother love, less frustrated and silent than the father-son bond. For many females of the species - including me - there's no one quite like Daddy.

One of my earliest memories is sitting on my dad's knee at Millport with a pokey hat. I must have been two or three, and as I write this I can still smell the Brylcreem in his neatly-parted dark hair.

Ross Taylor had come to parenthood comparatively late for someone of his generation, and by the time I was born in 1975 he was in his mid-thirties. My brother was three, and the family tell me Dad was tickled pink to have a wee girl.

My dad had had a difficult relationship with his own father, partly due to the interruption of war. Under-confident and sensitive, he had been a loner as a young man and was apparently "saved" by my mum, a warm, outgoing nurse eight years his junior. He was determined to be a hands-on dad - or as hands on as dads were allowed to be in the 1970s.

How fortunate I was. While other dads from our Fife housing estate seemed to spend lots of time in the pub, Ross would be sneaking me into the school tennis courts or walking me the three miles to the ice rink before his 12-hour nightshift in a local trolley factory began. Whatever hobby I wanted to try, he would make it happen. Weekends, if my mum was at work, would be spent with a camping stove on a local beach, on the putting green, or up a hill sharing cheese sandwiches.

I was always a chatterbox and I remember asking him daft questions all day long, all answered with patience and a wry smile.

Dad was a talented musician and passed on to me his deep love of music. As I made my way through the woodwind instruments at school, he would play alongside on the organ, accordion or guitar until this became embarrassing to the stroppy teenager I inevitably grew into. Even then, our shared love of music kept us in touch, and we would often listen to the Beach Boys together, marvelling at the composition and the harmonies.

My teenage relationship with my mum was a spiky, more judgemental affair, as these things often are. Mum and I would have fiery clashes and it was Dad who made the peace and put a comforting arm around both of our shoulders.

Despite our closeness, Dad didn't escape my teenage angst altogether. It came to a head when I got my first proper boyfriend at 16. I didn't understand at the time, of course, that my burgeoning sexuality would be painful for him, that it would simply be hard for him to let me grow up. I recall heated arguments about his "1950s attitudes" and my "human rights". I think I remember him crying. I now shudder at the thought. But we worked it out, and when I won a place at Glasgow University, Dad was bursting with pride, especially since Glasgow was his home town.

When I was 16, Dad had a major heart attack. It left him weak and grey. I later learned that he knew he would probably die soon, though that never crossed my mind. Six weeks after I started uni, six weeks after Dad waved me off with a copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge, signed simply "Best of luck, love Dad", he was gone. Just like that, aged 53, on Armistice Day 1993.

I think about him most days. Sometimes I feel sad and cheated that we didn't get to share an adult relationship. That we didn't get to go to Brian Wilson gigs or climb Munros together. That I didn't get to thank him for taking me ice-skating before doing a 12-hour nightshift.

But mostly I marvel at how bloody lucky I was to have ended up with him as my dad. It's not quantity but quality that counts, and compared to friends with absent or distant fathers, I'm the luckiest girl in the world.

My heart still belongs to Daddy.

'The seeds of my father's atonement were sown in adversity'

By Sean Guthrie

YOU can't choose what you inherit. I'm glad my father has passed on some of his doggedness, his sense of humour, the high price he puts on loyalty - defaults I cleave to when trouble comes knocking. Keep trying. Laughter is the best medicine. Trust your friends and be trusted in turn.

There's no doubt, however, that some of his less commendable traits have found their way down to me, among them his sporadic, maddening inscrutability, a pillar of a film made by my sister Karen as a form of solution to the puzzle that is our father.

A year shy of their 30th wedding anniversary, Dad told Mum that in the course of his 10-year stint as the finance director of a shipping company in Africa he'd established another life with another woman, and it was on a collision course with ours.

According to my aunt Judith, who lived five minutes away, the next thing my father did was phone her and invite her round. Mum was beside herself. In the background of the phone call, all Judith could hear was her big sister wailing. Distraught. Disintegrating, it turned out.

I'd waved goodbye to my father once before - the day he disappeared through the departures gate of Glasgow Airport bound for East Africa and Djibouti, where the Red Sea abuts the Gulf of Aden - and it had broken my then 12-year-old heart. A decade later I waved goodbye to him again, emotionally if not physically. How could you do such a thing to someone you love? I didn't know then and I still don't.

Where most men in such circumstances would accept the gravity of their transgression and move on, Dad acted as though it was the most normal situation in the world. In his eyes, I suppose, he'd made his confession, however belatedly, and was prepared to atone for it. But by pigheadedly insisting on trying to reconcile his dual lives rather than make a choice between them he unwittingly twisted Mum's character like a wet chamois. Her fuse grew shorter than ever, and the only thing that cooled her anger was the arrival of grandchildren.

Eventually, Mum reached the end of her tether and she and Dad separated. The house was sold and Mum bought a new one. Swiftly, she made it a place of warmth and safety near the sea where my nieces and nephew could run free after the drive down from Glasgow. And like a dog that won't take a telling, Dad kept coming round and cajoling Mum into doing his laundry, ironing, all the things she'd agreed to do in the context of a marriage that had long since soured.

Then, one spring day, without warning, the seeds of my father's atonement were sown in tumult. Mum had a stroke which stole her body and independence from her. The next two or three years passed in a blur of hospital stays, house modifications, tussles with the NHS and social services, carers coming and going. All the while Mum's health declined. But this was my father's chance to do the right thing, and boy did he grab it, becoming a rock when all around was restless sea. He moved into the spare room and through such simple acts as answering the phone and keeping Mum chipper, he helped make her final years worth living. Secrets remained, but my father - at long, long last - became more transparent than ever.

'Dad made me promise not to tell Mum. If I scared myself silly, so be it'

By Susan Swarbrick

PREDICTABLY it started off with such high hopes. The newly procured second-hand tent had been pitched in the back garden by my father. Deeply into my Enid Blyton Famous Five phase at the time, the notion of high adventure - albeit only metres from the back door - was a thrilling prospect.

Provisions were gathered (fish paste sandwiches, diluting orange juice, marshmallows) and equipment readied (board games, books, a torch). The family dog Misty, a good-natured, three-legged collie-cross, was cast as Timmy (I was a tomboy just like George in the books).

We were good to go. Until my mother caught sight of the books I was carting into the garden. She plucked the top one from the pile. "Not the ghost stories," she said, sagely. "You know what will happen."

Tales of the supernatural and my active imagination weren't a good combination. Throw in the creepy factor of a night in a tent without parents and it was a recipe for disaster - something my mother knew only too well.

This was a huge blow. Everyone knows you can't have camping without ghost stories. Later, though, when she popped out to run some errands, I managed to coax and cajole my father into giving me the book back.

Dad made me promise not to tell my mum. If I scared myself silly, he said, on my head be it. Deal, I agreed. I was confident. I wouldn't be afraid.

Now I've done many daft things in my life, but reading a book of ghost stories by torchlight in the back garden as a seven-year-old remains firmly on the all-time top 10.

I started to imagine I could hear whispers outside the tent. I caught sight of a ghostly shadow out of the corner of my eye. When the dog farted in her sleep, I jumped clean out of my skin.

By now, I was beyond soothing. I began whimpering at the thought of a legion of dripping ghouls rising from the burn at the bottom of the garden to spirit me away. My heart was thudding louder than any in an Edgar Allan Poe tale. I cowered under the blanket, praying for dawn.

Finally I could take it no more. Crawling swiftly from the tent, I made a bolt for the house. As I stood banging on the door, a fresh wave of fear washed over me. I wet my pants.

The ensuing scene was one of chaos, the upshot of which was a ban placed on all future solo camping trips. Later that day I crept back to the tent to hide the evidence. The board games and some flattened fish paste sandwiches remained, but the book of ghost stories had mysteriously vanished.

It wasn't until years later I saw it again, tucked away behind some dusty tomes on my father's book shelves. It was a pertinent reminder that our parents do know best, but sometimes they also realise we need to learn the hard way.

'He was a gregarious man, the life and soul of the party'

By Russell Leadbetter

ON the ring finger of my right hand is my dad's engagement ring. Etched inside it are my mum's initials and his, above the date - which is, by one of those small quirks of fate, exactly 60 years ago next Saturday. June 27, 1955.

Their engagement lasted just over two years. Frank and Marion were married in August 1957, in Falkirk's Old Parish Church. Eighty-two guests attended the reception.

The other month, my sister and I came across Mum's wedding album and lots of photographs. One photograph in particular stopped us in our tracks. It was taken on their honeymoon in Eastbourne, that idyllic, long-ago August. My God, they both look so young. It's the best photograph I have ever seen of Mum: she looks so poised, and radiant, and happy. They both look happy. Their lives were stretching ahead of them. Just the month before the wedding, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, surveying the booming post-war economy, said: "Most of our people have never had it so good."

Dad died in August 1977, aged just 44. His death hit us very hard. We were a young family. Mum was the same age as dad. Suddenly, she had two teenage children to raise, on her own.

I often wonder what Dad would have been like now, had he been spared. He was a funny, gregarious man, the life and soul of the party. He and Mum spent many Saturday nights in the company of close friends. These nights were uproarious, with Dad and one of his closest friends making the others laugh, constantly. He was quick-witted but was also capable of bone-dry humour when the mood suited him.

He didn't take much of an interest in football - that part of my adolescent upbringing was left to my grandad, my mum's dad. As much as I loved Grandad's company, I often think, looking back, that it would have been nice to have bonded with my dad, sitting on these hard wooden seats in the stand, and sharing a half-time Bovril and pie, as other kids did. But he was a caring dad, the kind who enjoyed his work, even if it did mean countless anti-social shifts at one of the companies that made up the big petro-chemical complex 10 minutes' drive down the road. The complex still lights up the night sky today.

My sister and I would have liked to have spent more time in his company, full stop. She regrets that, for one reason or another, he was never able to teach her how to swim, or ride a bike. He always struck us as a nice, sensible, approachable sort of bloke. Alas, he was gone from us too soon - just a week after the family's first holiday abroad. Forty-four is no age to go. He never got to see his kids grow up, get their first jobs, marry. He would have had fun with his grandchildren. They would have loved him. His grand-daughter has just turned 21.

Frank died close to the time the world learned of the death of Elvis Presley. Whenever I see or hear Elvis' passing being commemorated - even just the briefest mention in a newspaper's anniversaries column - I think, not of him, but my dad.