The day I lost my Dad

If you’re looking for donor conceived stuff in this entry then you’ll be sorely disappointed. I want this post to concentrate entirely on the man I called Dad; the man who was and still is my Dad. No-one will ever replace him. We might not share DNA but he instilled in me the knowledge of what’s right and what’s wrong; what it takes to be a good person; he showed me how a parent could and should display unconditional love; life with him showed how a family unit should be. And life without him enabled (what could only be described as) absolutely misery for myself and siblings during our most formative years. It would probably be fair to say that losing dad also made us lose our mum as well.

Take any normal day in your life. I’m confident that most of them are unforgettable – that’ll be because they are rather uneventful. That’s how this day started out, in April ’88 to be almost-precise about it. It was a probably a weekend but frankly, the day started out so normally that I can’t say that for sure. Maybe it was Easter holidays and thus a weekday? Anyway, who cares…let’s get on with the reminiscing!

A friend of the family was selling a bike and seeing that it was my younger brothers’ birthday only a couple of months away, my parents agreed to buy him that bike. Barry would be four years old that July. So we were all hurried out of the house and into the car – a Hillman Hunter! – which my Dad had purchased probably a year previous from a neighbour. I think he paid about £25 for it! If I recall the car was a non-runner but my Dad and neighbour took most of engine apart to get it going again. You can imagine me running up to my Dad, the car rolled out of the garage with its wheels chocked-up, bonnet open, engine parts scattered across the ground, and my Dad and our neighbour leaning into the engine, scratching their heads in a Stan and Ollie fashion saying “I dunno, let’s take this bit off here and try it again”. If only I was allowed to take a look – curious as I was to understand how things work! But as the saying goes, curiosity killed the cat, and my Dad had just taken this glass dome thing off of something on the engine and if I didn’t move away immediately I was likely to die from the impending explosion. This from the man I once remember filling the car up with cigarette in his mouth! Anyway, I moved pretty quickly but looked on in both anticipation but also with a nervous stare as the neighbour jumped into the drivers seat and cranked the ignition. Barely watching, we were all greeted with the sound of a 70’s car engine coming alive once more! My Dad and neighbour presented astonished but ecstatic faces! We were a car-owning family again. Yay!

Ok, I digressed a bit there; it’s funny how little bits of memories and details come back to you when writing these things. So with that, back to that so-far unremarkable day I was telling you about…

The trusty Hillman got us down the road tp the friends-of-friends house to pick up the bike. I don’t remember too much but I do recall being rather bored whilst my parents chatted and had what felt like 6 rounds of tea.

Eventually(!) the niceties completed and we loaded the trusty Hillman up with the five of us and one cool BMX for Barry. We drove up the the old London Road, to the mini roundabout – the one The Barge public house on – and turned left onto Clay Hill Road.

We didn’t get very far, about 50ft (20m) at most until we hit the left curb – it was almost as if my dad hadn’t turned the wheel back straight ahead after turning at the roundabout (subsequent “visits” along that road would suggest he probably did). Looking at my dad in shock I saw him with his head turned left and tilted back. His eyes were wide open and looking directly at me. That’s my last memory of him – an unresponsive and fixed look directly at me; when it’s said that someone is “dead behind the eyes”, that’s the look my dad had at that instant.

As horrific as that sounds, the worse is yet to come: the car started to career right, cutting across the road against oncoming traffic and then coming to a dead stop as it hit the corner of an old-people’s bungalow. Now, seatbelts weren’t mandatory back and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t wearing one (I can’t even be sure of the car had any fitted) but that’s an academic debate right now; I was fine, but Barry – who had been standing up in the middle of the back seat when all this had started – took on the momentum of the car is was abruptly halted, propelled forward and hitting the interior mirror. Any faster and he would likely have continued through the windscreen.

Since that incident I’ve never had child locks enabled on the rear doors of any car I’ve owned. I just remember being in sheer panic, banging and pounding on the window trying to escape; if anything were to ever happen to me whilst driving I just could not ever wish to pass that feeling of entrapment and lack of control onto anyone.

Eventually, someone came to the rescue and let my sister and I out. Everything is all a little jumbled and blank but I remember being pretty swiftly ushered into the good Samaritan’s car and being driving at high speed to the hospital. Then my mind goes blank until my nan & grandad arrived later, and my guess is that it was a good few hours later – I’ve no idea. Once they arrived I do remember waiting with them at the hospital for quite a while longer; all that time I recall hoping it would be to find out that my dad was fine. I don’t think the magnitude of what happened to Barry had even registered at this point.

Eventually nan & grandad drove myself and sister home. They sat us down and delivered the news about dad. I remember the set-up being pretty immediate and also so very final – such news of this kind probably is for most people and is probably really difficult to deliver as well – especially to two young children. It feels selfish thinking about it now but I have no idea how my 7-year-old sister took the news – I can only assume her reaction was the same as mine but neither do I remember being told (or asking) about my brother; the news of my dad was all I cared about and that news led to be balling my eyes out at the realisation of the loss I had just received in my life.

I consoled myself by asking my grandparents if I could go up to my room. Up there was my trusty Commodore VIC20. I fired it up; I distinctly remember – even now – how I was going to use it from that moment on as my place of solace in life. No one was going to understand how I was feeling and I guess I reasoned that myself and the computer being at one with one another would be a way to deal (or not deal) with feelings and emotions: the computer was just so….binary. It was the perfect companion I felt I needed to help me get over my loss. I guess that day was to become my driving force to one day be a programmer. I did it for you, Dad.