Men often don't appreciate their fathers until it's too late

The relationship between fathers and sons is unlike any other. It's a shame men are so bad at talking about it, says Bill Borrows

Father and son
It’s very complicated, this father-son business, as men are not given to expressing their innermost thoughts' Credit: Photo: Alamy

Thank you, Fred West.

He chose to kill himself the day my dad died. And so, while everybody else woke up on New Years day 1995 to news that one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers had escaped justice by hanging himself in Winson Green prison, I was in the passenger seat at a service station on the way back from the Lake District with a cup of tea in a Styrofoam cup. Not crying, just in a state of shock.

My dad may have been 75 but, apart from diabetes, had seemingly been in rude health. The news came from the blind side. We had tickets for the game in a fortnight’s time. It will be 20 years ago this New Year's Eve/ New Year's Day and, despite what people might tell you, time is not a great healer.

As I’d been born relatively late in my father’s life (48) I always had the oldest dad at school, but considered that to be a bonus. Not only did he have all the accrued wisdom that age confers (he is still the most well-read and intelligent man I’ve ever met; he ended one argument with the frankly unanswerable, "But then you’ve never read the Quran have you?"*) but by the time I was a teenager he had retired and had all the time in the world for me, time my older sisters had had to share with his work.

At school football matches he was invariably the only dad there. When I needed to double check a reference he was on hand.When I broke up with my first girlfriend he was at home waiting for me and held me in his arms.

The other side of that coin, of course, is that you reconcile yourself to the fact that he is probably going to go earlier than your friends’ dads – but not really. You know it’s going to happen but don’t dwell upon it. And then when it happens you don’t dwell upon that either. You just push it to the back of your mind and get on with life because there’s nothing else you can do.

But then something brings you right back to the last time you saw him – could be a dream, a photograph, a re-run of the Morecambe and Wise Show on TV, the way my own son demands answers to questions such as "Why are rich people rich and poor people poor?", or the way he wrinkles his nose when he is trying to stop his glasses falling off.

This week it was the release of the song "Old Man" by 23-year old singer/songwriter Billy Lockett. A beautiful elegeaic love letter to his father who died of cancer earlier this year:

OLD MAN teach me a thing or two/

I could a learn a lot from/

An OLD MAN telling me what to do/

Can you reverse the clock/

And go back to when you were my age/

The good old days, so come on/

OLD MAN teach me a thing or two/

I could a learn a lot from you

So goes the refrain. Lockett Snr. died at 62, which is not so old really, but that’s hardly the point. "I’m lucky in a way," says his son. "Because I’ve got a way of releasing the issues and turning them into something good that can help me and other people. I started writing it after he was diagnosed two years ago but it took me ages, I was really struggling to write a song that was worthy of what was going on."

Lockett grew up with his father, an artist, from the age of six and he was encouraged to pursue his music rather than get a so-called "proper job".

"He bought me my first piano and drove me to every little pub gig I ever did, all the way until I was doing 1,000 people [venue] tours. It’s great and I’m glad that he was alive long enough to see me start to do well. I’m really lucky about that."

It’s peculiar how Lockett considers himself to be lucky despite the trauma of losing his father, because I also feel lucky and it’s my take that, for whatever reason, it is because we both spent so much quality time with our fathers, fathers who had already lived a full life before we were born. There are many sons, many friends of mine, who have problematic relationships with their fathers.

Some are from so-called broken homes, some are not. Some are ignored completely, some have found themselves in a competition they never asked to enter - resented, a hindrance to the social lives of "baby boomer" fathers who now refuse to grow old.

It’s all very complicated, this father-son business, particularly as men are not usually given to expressing their innermost thoughts and feelings. Like I said, we tend to push it to the back of our minds and get on with life.

Former England captain, Sir Ian Botham has recently revealed that he found it so difficult to deal with his father’s dementia that he had to stop visiting the man he once venerated, but who no longer recognised him, just to preserve his memories. Only a know-nothing would castigate him for that.

Robert Webb, of Mitchell and Webb fame, lost his working-class Lincolnshire accent aged 13 because he couldn’t stand his father. Four years later his mother died and he moved in with him. As he recently told the New Statesman, "The scary tyrant of my childhood turned out to be just this… bloke. A charming, exasperating bloke. And the original real man was a good cook and talked knowledgeably about birds and flowers. This was unhelpful; he was spoiling my new thought system. Real men are sexist, overbearing, unreflecting drunks who treat their wives badly and vote Conservative. Dad was capable of supplying evidence for every part of this grand theory. But puzzlingly, he could also be generous, sensible, bright and funny, and was obviously adored by more or less everyone in our village."

Mothers and their precious sons and fathers and their precious daughters are the clichéd staples of soap opera and drama (and psychoanalysis, of course) but the father and son relationship deserves a little more investigation and attention – and it’s too late when they’ve gone. As Webb put it, "If I could talk to my 18-year-old self right now, I’d say something like this: Mate, I know you lost a beloved parent last year. So did I… I wrote the eulogy and spoke for 15 minutes about everything I loved and admired about him and it was easy. You see, I got to know him better. It took a long time but eventually I heard him. “Boy, son, Rob . . . You’re like me.” and that made the difference. Grief is the echo of love and you’re holding it close to you now with good reason. But don’t forget the real thing is standing in the kitchen, peeling spuds and wondering if you’re all right. Hey, young man, go and ask him about his day."

And that’s the thing about losing your dad. Suddenly you can’t do that.

* I should probably add that he was a lathe operator who became a bookmaker and not a university lecturer.