And When Did You Last See Your Father? by Blake Morrison

I first encountered Blake Morrison when I heard him speak at the Sydney Writer’s Festival ten years ago on the rarely-deeply-discussed topic of the relationship between fathers and sons. I knew immediately that I was going to relate to his book And When Did You Last See Your Father.

The book is an autobiographical series of vignettes spanning Blake’s life, each of which add a piece to the puzzle depicting his larger-than-life father as seen through the son’s eyes. Interspersed between these snapshots is the background scene of Blake’s aging father’s gradual death due to cancer. In many ways it reminded me of in my relationship with my own father.

Our relationship with our father is the prototype for our relationship with our own masculinity, and with men.

Blake Morrison’s father and mine share only superficial similarities: They are both elderly. Both have a pacemaker. Both had cancer. I recall at the time of my own father’s diagnosis contemplating his mortality and what it would be like to “lose him”, as we so euphemistically like to say. I also wondered what it really felt like for him to have serious health problems. I tried to ask, and he tried to tell me, but I’m still not sure I really understood whether he was scared or not. Scared is just not something us blokes usually talk about.

Both Blake’s father and my own were well-regarded professionals before retirement: his a Doctor and mine an Engineer. And like Blake’s father, my own has a certain emotional detachment which frustrates me and makes it difficult for me to really relate to him as well as I would like. Freely expressing feelings is not something men learn by default in our culture. It’s taken me years to learn to talk about how I feel, and I certainly didn’t learn how to do it from Dad. I’m not sure if it’s that he doesn’t know how to talk about how he feels, or whether he’s so out of touch with his own emotions that he doesn’t even know. Probably a combination of both. Reading the book, and later while watching the movie, I could relate to Blake’s frustration and longing to really connect with his father with both of them seemingly just unable to do it.

Blake’s camping trips with his father reminded me of my early camping trips with mine. My mother would encourage us both to go, as much to get him out of the house as to encourage a little father/son bonding. Dad had this little old white ex-Army canvas tent which we’d huddle together in during storms and tempest on trips up the north coast. Somehow it always seemed to rain when we went camping in that tent, which was rather too small even just with one adult, let alone with the addition of one medium sized adolescent. Nowadays when I go camping, I take a 4-man tent; even if it’s just got me in it.

And then there was the first driving lesson that you do when you’re still too young to actually be learning to drive, but Dad wants you to try anyway. While Blake’s was on a beach, mine was in a farmer’s back paddock adjacent to the Nepean River, at the scout-camp-of-all-time that I will never ever forget. I learned to fang Dad’s lime green Toyota Corona around the paddock while dodging the slow-moving cows and never getting past 2^nd gear. I’ve no idea who chose lime green as the stylish colour of our “family car” in the late 1960’s. And how we fitted 3 kids in the back seat, two adults in the front and all our luggage in that tiny boot and roof rack on family holidays, I’ll never know. You just couldn’t do it these days. Yet somehow it seemed bigger back then. Size is relative, and everything shrank as I grew up.

Blake’s Dad and mine had their similarities, but there were also many big differences. My own father is still very much alive, and with the cancer treated successfully, shows no signs of dying any time soon. Dad’s father lived to 100; I hope we both have that gene too. Blake’s father is portrayed as boisterous and something of a charmer; a ladies man almost. Blake grows up highly suspicious of his father’s obvious affection for “Aunty Beaty”, suspecting an affair and feeling deeply wounded at the perceived affront to his mother. I have a hard time imagining my own father engaging in anything remotely as exciting or morally dubious as an illicit liaison, and the many arguments that I used to hear between my parents were over much more mundane matters. I rather think that this particular flaw and the associated indiscretion wasn’t one he was even capable of.

I have often wondered what sort of man my father would be to me had he not married my mother. Would he still be the same affable, timid, emotionally shutoff mixture of niceness tempered with the occasional angry explosion? Or would he be more like what I expected, and perhaps hoped for in a father, had he not had such a dominant wife telling him what to do and putting him down when he got things wrong all the time. Of course the question is a bit moot given that if he hadn’t married her, I wouldn’t be here to ask it.

I’m glad to say that I’ve had “the talk” with my father that Blake leaves to the very last minute to initiate, by which time his Dad is too ill to talk; and wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. My father has apologized for his failings, and that helped me forgive him for them. We’ve had the breakthrough where we felt we could broach the big questions in life, and even tell each other those 3 magic words every human longs to hear: “I love you”. We still regress back to talking mindless crap when we meet, but at least with a little effort and encouragement we can connect more meaningfully.

It would be nice to feel I could tell my Dad that I loved him spontaneously and old day of the week, but somehow it still feels uncomfortable and so we usually don’t actually say it. What does it mean for a grown man to love his father anyway? Love is a feeling and somehow expressing that feeling still feels uncomfortable. I grew up with two emotionally inexpressive parents, then went to a boy’s high school where you got hammered if you expressed any of the softer emotions, so by the time I was all grown up I didn’t know what I felt towards my father. Anger at his explosive outbursts which taught me to repress my own anger, resentment at his choice of wife to be my mother, boredom at his verbal diarrhea. Frustration that he uses bland words to keep other people at a safe emotional distance and thereby waste the precious time that we have to really connect with each other while we’re here on this earth. And finally, love; yes, love for the man who made my life in all its richness possible.

Spoiler alert: By the end of the book Blake’s father is well and truly dead, and Blake is grief-struck. I found myself overcome with waves of emotion as I read each page. Multiple emotional tsunamis striking as if out of nowhere as the tears flowed freely. Did I simply empathize with the plight of the loss of his father, or was it more than that? I pictured myself in his shoes, and felt his loss. It wasn’t just that his dad was dead; it was that the possibility of that meaningful relationship with him which Blake clearly has yearned for all his life, was now dead too. Blake became a writer, much against his father’s wishes, who hoped he would follow in his own footsteps of becoming a Doctor. My father and I were both Engineers for a time, and although this was a sort of common ground between us, it’s not a profession that encourages emotional expression and I’ve given it up now in the search for a deeper connection with other people generally.

Neither Blake nor his father ever truly felt understood by the other, and we all yearn to be understood and to feel loved; especially by those most close to us like our parents, our children. It took me 6 months to finally get around to reading this book, by which time the movie version was conveniently also available on DVD. When I came to watched it, I could relate deeply and it made my cry just as much as the book. Whether it’s on the printed page or on the big screen, the message is the same. As Margaret Pomerantz of the ABC’s At the Movies, concluded in a rare moment of complete agreement with her co-host David Stratton: “I do think that that father/son thing is quite strong”, “Oh yeah.”, David replied, “I think it is too”.

And when did you last see your father? Click here to buy the book on Amazon.