My Father In Memory

For a brief time during the period when my parents had moved to Kilmarnock by mistake my father fancied himself a blues harp player, a sort of Ayrshire Sonny Boy Williamson. My father could be capricious in his ways. He’d once admonished me with some vehemence for taping over his Art Blakey Jazz Messenger’s cassette with blues music but now he was steeped Mississippi Delta-deep in the stuff.

My mother has had to put up with much in her life, an emotionally abusive father and a husband who was as unpredictable as the Scottish weather. One minute he was working the next he was blacklisted for leading wildcat strikes. One minute he was sitting watching Emmerdale Farm the next he was in a boxroom at the end of the hall trying desperately to bend a note on his Hohner. The sound was like a cat being squeezed through a rusty mangle.

The marriage vows do not state ‘Love, honour and put up with blues-harp practising seemingly until death doth you part’ but what is a wife to do?

It was the same, only quieter, when he took up cigar smoking. For a long time, he was leader-aff of the homeless families division at Waltham Forest Council and hingin’ aboot wi’ the trendies. Wee, exiguous feminist wimmin wi’ round specs who listened constantly to Janis Ian albums and blokes made entirely of corduroy. My da was in his element and to facilitate further his Viva Zapata look (I still have his ID card on which he is depicted with full bushy moustache, dark glasses and long hair. He looked like a cross between a Weather Report bass player and the outside left of the Brazilian World Cup winning team) he took to smoking slim panatellas.

There he’d be scrunched up in his usual tense way, legs wrapped like coils sooking away at this broon stub that was obviously making him sick. Done more for comic effect than economy (though his thrifty parents would have approved of the latter) he’d insert a pin at the sooky end to allow him to puff right down to the very nub. Not the super-cool look he may have been aiming for.

He gave this up as a bad job after a while and took to wearing cowboy boots.