life is hard

this is my dad on his motorbike. it was taken long before i was born, in north wales, where my mum and dad grew up. in this picture my dad looks happy, but i think even then he suffered from depression. he attributed the depression to when he was a young child and he was sent away when his older brother had tuberculosis. he said the feeling of rejection and worthlessness never left him, even after he was back with his family.

my dad's dad was a policeman. they had a rocky relationship. my grandad hit my dad a lot. i don't think he was violent with his other children. my dad remembered being made to sit in front of a cup of tea all day because he refused to drink it.

my dad's depression became severe as he got older. he tried to take his life on numerous occasions. as a young child i was not aware of this but as i grew older it became clear that what had at the time appeared to be accidents were in fact not. my mum told me of a time, when i was at school, when my dad had taken an overdose and was staggering around the flat. she had screamed at him that she didn't want me to come home and find him like that.

then there was the time when i was staying with my stepmum-to-be and my dad and he smashed up his car. at the time we were told this was an accident but in the light of later events and the type of injuries he had it probably was not. the explaination of it sounded unlikely even to a child. my dad said he shunted into the back of a car in a traffic jam, yet he managed to open an artery in the top of his head and needed 14 stitches.

then there was the time when he cut open his arm which cutting the hedge with a sickle. this might have been slightly believable if there hadn't been 3 cuts in his arm, suggesting several attempts. this was after i had moved in with my dad and stepmum.

then there was the time he took over 50 morphine sulphate tablets and went to a lonely place by the river to die. we got home from school and i instantly knew something was wrong. my dad's car was in the drive and his watch was by the bed together with his wallet and his loose change. there was blood on the edge of the bed (maybe he had tried to cut his wrists?) and there was a note in an envelope addressed to my stepmum on the mantlepiece. i rang my stepmum and she said she would come home. shortly afterwards a man rang saying he had found my father by the river when he was walking his dog. i knew the place as i looked after a horse for some people down there.

i went in the ambulance with my dad. my stepmum followed in her mini. i have a picture of the ambulance crew putting a red rubber tube down my dad's throat but i don't know if i have invented this after watching too many medical dramas - it seems unlikely that a stomach pump would have a tube like a bunsen burner but maybe they did in those days? what was particularly odd about this was that on that day at school we had been sitting our mock exam in english and i had written a story about a man who took an overdose. my friends would not believe me until we got the exam papers back.

then there was the time that my dad smashed his mgb soft-top car into a parked articulated lorry, at speed. this was when i was about 18 and my dad and my stepmum had split up. i was living with my dad in a house he had rented from a friend and my stepmum and younger sister were in a house she had rented from the hospital where she worked. dad had driven over there and smashed the car just up the road from my stepmum's house. he nearly died this time and was in intensive care for ages. he had split an artery in his neck, having just missed decapitating himself, and had to have plastic kneecaps fitted where the engine had crushed his legs. i refused to go and see him. i was so angry that he kept doing this to us. my then boyfriend sat with him and i just sat outside in the waiting room crying.

the police were going to prosecute my dad for reckless driving and then reduced the charge to driving without due care and attention. this seemed like a sick joke. to drive straight at the front end of a parked lorry on the opposite side of the road at 80 miles per hour and leave no skid marks whatsoever requires quite a lot of care and attention. the fire brigade sent my dad a bill for cutting him out of the car which seemed to me in my furious state to be quite apt.

since then i am not aware of any more attempts. eventually my dad and i patched up our relationship, although i have always kept a lot of me in reserve since. it is impossible to trust someone after this sort of thing. when i had my son i decided that it was important that he had a grandad so i put the bitterness behind me as much as i could.

my dad has just had his 80th birthday. he still moans about his knees aching, to which i always reply "serves you right!"