Dad

Three weeks ago today, I lost my beloved father. A man I never really appreciated enough until I married someone who was all words and no action – the total opposite to dad in every way. Dad was solid, hard-working and honest, the word reliable written through the middle of him like a stick of rock. My wedding day was twenty-four years exactly before the day of my father’s funeral.

I’m sure it took dad a long time to be able to work out what strange creature he had sired.  One who didn’t think sorting out a pension was a priority, who baulked at the idea of a steady job with sick pay in favour of the wild west of careers: the crowded waters of writing commercial fiction.  We didn’t always see eye to eye but never enough to fall out. He must have despaired – albeit quietly – as I made so many mistakes but he never interfered, just let me get on with it all but he never let me down when I asked for help. And because I was divorced when my sons were tiny and they never saw their father again, dad was their role model of a patriarch. A man with a pronounced sense of right and wrong. A man of quiet honour. A knight of good manners and decency.

Dad was generous but he didn’t splash his cash. When my other half once bought me a Mont Blanc pen for Christmas, Dad’s immediate thought was, ‘How much will the bloody refills for that cost you.’  And when I tried to show off my new blue, beautiful Mercedes a couple of years ago with every feature known to man, Dad stared at the gorgeous walnut dashboard and he said in a horrified voice, ‘There’s nowhere for you to play your cassettes!’

I did try and drag him into the 21^st century.  I bought him an iPad for his 80^th birthday and he gave it back to me after he’d spent hours trying to turn it on. He was quite happy in the 20^th century thank you with his cassettes and his LPs and his gadgets from Richer Sounds. Never did he come home from Leeds where he worked without buying a gadget. He had more Walkmans and headphones than Dixons (‘Dixons’ became his nickname). I did convince him to get a mobile so I could pick him up from various hospital visits.  He had one number in the memory – it was mine. He turned it on to ring me and then straight off again when he’d rung so you could never have got him to answer a call. A ten quid phone card lasted him about five years.

One day when I was a teenager I walked in to find this beautiful old typewriter on the table for me. My dad had got it from work because they were giving it away and he knew I’d want it. He carried it to the bus halfway across Leeds, sat it on his knee all the way home and then nearly broke his back carrying it from the motorway because it weighed a ton. There was no fanfare, he’d just got it for me because he could. My jaw dropped when I saw it because it was the best thing in the world, the ultimate in gifts that matched the recipient. I didn’t think he ‘got me’ but that precious memory reminded me over the years that he did. 

He was stupidly independent, didn’t want to put anyone out so he’d not tell me he had a hospital appointment and he’d tell mum not to tell me but as he’d set off for the bus stop mum would ring me and I’d get in the car, race down the road and pretend I was just passing so I could take him. We did this so many times he must have thought I was psychic.

I’d got so used to taking dad to the hospital, sitting and waiting whilst various bits of him were prodded and poked to find out why he didn’t want to eat. He had cameras up and down him, blood tests, scans… results all negative. He never said that he was worried about what they’d find, never gave a cry of relief when they hadn’t found what he was convinced they would. 

The end, when it came, was like a two hour film condensed to a clip. He went in to hospital yet again with a debilitating backache. The medical team found his heart rate twice what it should be working overtime to compensate for other things going wrong. The backache went, the heart rate stayed high. The docs negotiated a maze of treatments trying to sort problem A whilst not inflaming problem B and setting into motion problem C. We went from expecting dad to come home as soon as his heart rate came down, to find that other problems had shown up, to hearing that the palliative team were being lined up to being told, ‘your father is dying’ in a space of a few days. Dad, the docs said, had been living on a knife edge and one condition too many just sent him over the top. Throw in a blood condition that made infection hard to fight off. Ironic that my dad had given blood so generously for so many years and yet at the end his own let him down.

Seeing a 'Do Not Resuscitate' notice at the front of dad's file sent me in a tailspin. It made sense that he wouldn't be. But seeing it there in bold blue brings the reality of the situation to you in all the dimensions there are on the planet. It gave me nightmares imagining my dad having that conversation with the medics, wondering what would be going through his head. I wanted to protect him from that knowledge, take it away, change it.

And you can say what you like about the NHS but based on dad's three weeks in Ward 17 of Barnsley Hospital, I wouldn't hear a word said against it. I've not always had this experience with hospitals and treatment for dad but if there was ever a department that should be held up as a example of how it all should work then this is it.  And it doesn't take much. Doctors who seek you out to inform you how things are going. Proficient consultants not spieling jargon at you but explaining, using rhetoric you can take in.  One consultant leaned over and just squeezed my hand and it said everything - it said 'I understand this man is your father as well as our patient'. A nurse who was going off duty for a few days and pretty much knew that she wouldn't see us again coming to us to say goodbye, telling me that it was a privilege to nurse my father. Tea ladies bringing mum and me a constant stream of drinks, nurses pressing a cup of soup or a meal into our hands. They were kind and kindness is one of the greatest qualities: understated, flies under the radar, gentle and yet so very potent. 

I can’t begin to relay how hard it is to watch someone so mentally strong have moments of delusion and fear, a glimpse into a world that too many people have to inhabit of their parents crumbling from the inside. We were spared that protracted horror. But seeing the textbook breakdown of him, a Benny Hill speeded end – just enough time to say your goodbyes, not enough time to get our heads around it… was the hardest thing of my life.  We didn’t do slush, but a friend of mine told me to make sure I said the ‘I love you’ words, however daft they sounded, and I did and he said them back. He was terrified the attached drips were prolonging the death he’d been told was coming, I was terrified when the drips came down, the monitors switched off, the sticky pads on his chest removed. I made sure I told him that the typewriter was the most wonderful present I’d ever had. When he slipped into semi-unconsciousness, his hands were typing as if he were dreaming about it.

My first thought was to have him at home but I was wrong. Mum and I sat by his bedside from dawn to long past dusk for days and days and days and could monitor how his pain relief was working, rush out for a nurse when the medicines started to fail. The worst part was witnessing his mental anguish, his frowning, banging his forehead and because I know how his brain works, I knew what was going on in there: he’d looked after mum and me since we came into his life and he was going first. That thought was both killing him whilst forcing him to cling on.

We live five minutes away from the hospital. He slipped away very quickly at 4.30 in the morning, we dashed up there but missed his last breath by minutes. I shan’t beat myself up about that because I’m pretty sure dad wouldn’t have wanted us to witness that. So many nurses told us, people slip away when loved ones aren't around, as if they want it that way. I was just glad he wasn't alone, that a lovely young nurse was sitting with him. He didn’t like to put anyone out which is why if he could have planned it, he’d have worked it around Easter, Christmas, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, birthdays… but some things you can’t play to a diary.

I don’t know if it’s ironic that my next book was written like a forerunner of what I was to go through – choosing what clothes for a deceased person to wear, the songs for the funeral, keeping everything as is in the house as if he’d just popped out into town, slippers by the door waiting. Throw in wandering like a zombie around Meadowhall looking for a plain black coat and dress.  In my case whilst every shop I enter trying to keep my eyes dry is blasting out the old Christmas favourites by Slade and Paul bloody McCartney. Never were two worlds so incongruous.  I never thought whilst I was writing it all that I was describing what I'd be living before the words had gone to typeset, that I'd get it so horribly bang on. On 12/11 I was celebrating my parents Diamond Wedding with them, looking forward to Christmas, mum bragging about her card from the queen, popping the cork off a bottle of champers.  On 11/12, I was delivering clothes at the funeral parlour for dad to wear.

Grief, I’ve discovered, distorts time. This three weeks since he passed has felt both like years and hours. It’s like a Funhouse without the ‘Fun’ part. A few steps on sure ground underfoot before the room starts whirling or you fall through a hole. Nothing is solid, my world has changed shape. Triggers to bouts of overwhelming sadness hide behind corners ready to leap out without warning and don't necessarily have any apparent relevance. The finality of it all is the hardest to bear – that I will never see my daddy again, never see him strolling up the road so I can pull in to give him a lift, though my mind has already started playing tricks on me and spotting him, even though the ‘him’ is nothing like him at all, just a man in a flat cap walking where he used to walk. My recent memories are full of painful vignettes, of throwing my arms around a coffin and sobbing into the wood, of rolling a toothbrush around my father’s mouth to moisten it because he was too weak to drink, of hovering over my father's bedside as if he were my child and throwing the rightful order of things out of the window. Of riding in a black limo behind the hearse and thinking how many times I’d seen one on the street and wondering who had died and what their story was. I felt strangely calm until the car turned into the crematorium and I was floored with the impact that  it was us taking centre stage and all those dear old friends that I had seen so many times over the past few years when I’d taken dad to funerals, were lined up to say goodbye to him now. Surreal is the only word that comes near to summing it all up. I keep thinking this can’t have happened. It hurts too much to accept that it has and my brain is doing everything it can to repel the facts. I cannot refer to dad as ‘was’ as opposed to ‘is’; for such a little three-letter word ‘was’ has a dreadful power.

After he died, one of his two best friends George told me a story about dad. George had found him a job on a building site, but dad was better with his head than his hands so he moved into being in charge of bonuses in the wages office. But the building trade was rotten, men were cheated out of their wages left, right and centre. When two men, who had left, came back to collect their bonuses, dad was told  by the managers not to give them and put the money in petty cash instead. But dad was adamant that they'd earned them. He was threatened with the sack if he disobeyed, so he 'sacked himself' and took the men's money with him, kept it in his back pocket in the hope of bumping into these men who he had little hope of tracing. But weeks later, bump into them he did - and he still had their money for them in his pocket. 'That's your dad' said George. And it really was.

Whilst looking through old photos, I came across one of mum and my godmother that I've seen so many times over the years but none of us ever spotted that in the background there was dad carrying me. Someone said to me that it was a sign... that he was there and always would be, in the background caring for me. It's the sort of thing I'd have dismissed as sentimental bollocks. Now, it brings a strange solace because you take your comforts where you can find them and I'm scrabbling around for all I can get my hands on. 

Sadly my godfather Cyril died just three weeks later. Dad was upset about the prospect of losing the other of his best friends and then went on to overtake him. I hope they're together, as they were through their lives.

There is a piece of me missing. I will adjust, regroup, recalibrate… because that’s what people do. But I will not be the same person ever again and I don't know if I'll be harder, stronger or weaker but time will tell. Nor am I sure that I will ever get to the end of missing him. One day I will be able to watch the full Andre Previn/Morecambe and Wise sketch and think fondly of dad splitting his sides at it every single time without experiencing a crippling pang of loss. I hope. All I know for certain at the moment – and it’s a cliché, I’ll give you that, sunshine – is that the world is a little poorer for not having more tolerant, kind people in it like my father with his cassettes and his quiet, innate decency.  He was, quite simply, a gentleman. 

The Process of Writing a Book When You Are Chaos Personified

It is an infuriating business this writing a novel. At least it is for me. I’m not sure Barbara Cartland uttered the amount of effs and jeffs that I’ve just done reading through my typeset 23rd novel which should be pristine, ready to go untouched to the printers… to find some tw*t (insert vowel of choice) fairy has visited it, knackered up line spacings, put a load of duplicate words in one line and created general havoc. It is by far the worst part of the whole process this, and the scariest. When someone on Amazon slags off that ‘this book has not been edited properly’ because they’ve found a spello - trust me, that book has most likely been pored over, printed off in different colours and fonts, read aloud to iron out errors by numerous people… and there’s always one at least little bas… sod that is determined to make it to the final cut.

So here, for your amusement or horror, is the process of book writing laid bare by this individual. A woman who does not plan, a woman who has tried to make sure that every single word must be the right one and in the proper place. The passion for a manuscript comes at a great price - sleep and sanity mainly. My life would have been so much easier if I’d just stayed in admin in the HQ of a big supermarket. Or a trainee accountant. Forty years on and I would still be a trainee… 

Let us begin… 

1. My editor asks me for a synopsis of my next book. I am not a planner. All I can give her is ‘The lead characters are X and Y and they live in Z. They get together at the end.’ She needs more for the art department and the blurb writer so I make something up. The finished story will bear absolutely no resemblance to this synopsis and when I get to see a copy of the cover I will think ‘Who are these people she’s drawn?’

2. I attempt to plan my book this time because I really want to be in the Plan-Gang. I buy myself a nice swanky pad and open it and wait for said plan to show itself. My pen is poised ready to record the dictates of my brain which, appears, has gone on holiday to Majorca - indefinitely. I close said book and put it on the shelf with all the other unused notebooks I’ve bought which are really too nice to use so that’s a bit of a result for a stationery hoarder.

Instead, I take out a fresh block of post-it notes and write some details on them and stick them on a wall. I see the joy in being able to do this and move them around purposefully and I want to employ this process SO much but I can’t make it work for me. The few post-it notes stay on that wall until they either drop off or the dog nicks them to chew on.

3. So instead… I start to type. Chapter 1. I break that sea of white with one word and one number – I’m in. I have no idea where the story is taking me but the lines cue up in my head and I just carry on writing until I realise it is time to feed the dog/cat/me or wee. Occasionally I will have an idea about something which might happen further down the line and I jot it quickly down in a notepad (a cheap one from B & M so I don’t spoil the nice ones). Or, if in the middle of the night, on my arm.

4. I need a title because it has to mean something and the title has to be relevant to the book and blended into it, as surely as sugar is folded into egg-whites to make a meringue. I am always a lot more relaxed when I get the title which either arrives in a blinding flash of inspiration at the beginning or a whirl of panic at the eleventh hour as we are holding up the printing presses. Usually the latter.

5. About a third of the way in I realise I hate the book. I have no idea what is going to happen next and I don’t know my characters well enough to have any opinion of them other than I hate them as well. I don’t know them, I don’t want to know them. They’re all knobheads. I have been here enough times to realise this is not a brick wall but an illusion – it is fog. If I power through it, there will be light on the other side. There always is but in the thick of it, it is scary and I worry that this will be the time when the fog really is a brick wall.

6. At the other side of the fog I am more invested in my characters. I begin to like them a bit now and know what makes them tick. They oblige me by helping me progress the plot. Nice characters. Good characters.

7. I do not edit along the way. I complete the first draft. The first draft might have seven Saturdays in February and Andrew in chapter one has become Darren by chapter seven and Siobhan by chapter twenty-five. Green-eyed Mary might have blue eyes by the end of the book – and possibly brown ones in the middle. I don’t care. I do not edit here.

8. I HAVE COMPLETED THE FIRST DRAFT. TREAT TIME. Another nice notepad perchance to join the many on the shelf. Or a pen that I daren’t take out of the house in case I lose it. But deffo booze will happen at this point.

Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash

9. Second draft. I make a timeline. Easiest way to do this is by running off a calendar that I can write on, pin point on it where my last chapter ends, then I work backwards. Shape is happening. I now only have 4 Saturdays in February.

10. No title yet? I start to twitch a little.

11. Third draft. Continuity. Mary’s eyes are sorted out. I make sure that the features of my characters are set in stone. Darren is Darren at the beginning, middle and end of the book and maintains his brown hair and 5ft 7” frame throughout.

12. My work goes off to my editor. Whilst waiting for her to come back with her comments, my stomach is in spasm hoping she will not say ‘This is absolute crap, start again.’

13. My editor returns the manuscript, tells me to strip out a murder, cut back on Darren and beef up Mary’s story. It feels a mammoth task. I call this the Frankenstein edit because I have to whip out what I have considered all the essential body parts, including the whole spine, but somehow stitch everything up to be more than my original idea of whole. Somehow this happens. The monster begins to breathe.

14. I send it back to my editor sort of assured that we are on the same page (chortle). If we are…. Thunderbirds are go!

15. If that title hasn’t come yet, I am now flapping like a flock of sea eagles. My editor and agent and I bat titles back and forth. I despair. Four hundred suggestions and none of them fit. Some are actually so bad they make me vomit and have bad dreams. We need a title urgently.

16. WE FIND A TITLE. I can sleep. Wine helps and drugs that people take for hay fever but menopausal women take to be knocked out.

17. Having had a couple of weeks away from the manuscript, when I see it again I spot mistakes and plot-holes everywhere. I work on getting these right and anchoring that title deep into the story.

18. I then do more drafts where I enrich the language, deepen the emotion, this is the fun bit. The one where my creativity can flow. I edit the manuscript looking only at the dialogue, then another at the description, then another for something else - my brain is too far gone at this stage to work out exactly what it is that needs polishing. I am like a blind cleaner, on a mission to get it as near perfect as I can.

19. Exciting meetings at Publisher HQ. So much goes on behind the scenes: PR ideas, marketing, sales. We sit around a table and they all excitedly tell me what plans they have for the book, which supermarkets and shops have bought them and how many. We plan and plot world domination. It all feels real and wonderful – and we eat buns and posh stuff from London food shops that I can’t pronounce.

20. The cover comes from the art department and it is always a joy to see it. Except that the artist has usually gone off my initial synopsis, which as we know is full of lies, so a bit of tweaking has had to go on.

21. My work goes off to the copyeditor and comes back with a million notes on it. Mostly pointing out glaring errors that I curse myself for not noticing and basic grammar mistakes I should have grown out of at age twelve, and highlighting awful things that I have written like gentile instead of genteel. She is a marvel. I feel as if she should be writing the book and I should be cleaning toilets. I get back her finished manuscript after she has put it through the washing machine of her brain. Anything to add, she asks? The fool. 

22. …because magic occurs. Something happens to me and turns me into a copyeditor par excellence too now. A bit late in the day, love, says my brain. This is usually panic-driven because I am terrified of overlooking errors so I go into overdrive. I trawl through every word of my manuscript, realising that I have written ‘just’ too many times on one page. I take ALL the ‘justs’ out. I read it again and have to put some ‘justs’ back in. My copyeditor’s hair turns white. She tells me it is okay to have a little natural duplication and working through a thesaurus changing every ‘said’ to a different word is counter-productive because the eye smoothes over many words that are doing a filling in job and don’t need to snag the eye. She’s right. Again. As always.

23. I like to look over the finished clean manuscript with all the mistakes ironed out. Still, you always miss a couple because you are poring over it so intensely. My brain now starts to wake me up at 4am. ‘Oy, Darren can’t be found in the park because in chapter 5 you said it was closed for a month.’ I have no idea how my brain does this but in the background it seems to be constantly scavenging for things to torment me with.

24. I back away from the book, off it goes to be typeset. Whilst I am in limbo I can catch up with some jobs like shaving my legs/moustache, talking to the family, drinking something that isn’t espresso. I try to relax and have a day off but I have lost the ability to know what to do with spare time. I start designing bookmarks/bags/pens. I am the Queen of Merchandise for this reason, because I am now obsessed with my book and the people in it who I love with a passion now (and hope they don’t remember that I once hated them loads). I trawl the internet for promotional goods that will look good with a sunflower/owl/Christmas pudding on them.

25. The typeset version comes back. I need to have an eagle-eye to spot any errors and really have to try not to alter anything that does not need to be altered.

Jesus - what evil bitch has hacked into the computer and added loads of errors that none of us have seen until now. 

I tackle these but must be careful not to overegg the correction pudding. Yes, ‘packed’ would have been a better word that ‘put’, but it’s fine as it is because only one person per million will be reading this thinking, ‘I’d have put “packed” there myself if I’d written that not “put” and because of that I can no longer read this author.’ My stress levels are spiked. I spend half an hour looking at the word ‘was’ and thinking it looks as if it is spelled wrong.

26. By now I am once again so sick of Mary and Darren I wish they’d jump off a cliff. Familiarity breeds contempt.

Photo by Leio McLaren on Unsplash

7. Another proof-reader has also been looking at the manuscript to make sure all is well. She will flag anything suspicious. She always spots something. My panic has now gone into super-panic mode. 

28. The typeset manuscript is prised from my hands. It has to go to be bound into a book. NOW. There is no more time to edit. In the words of Frozen Elsa: ‘LET IT GO’.

29. The book is printed. I see it in all its magnificence and I am thrilled. Another to add to the shelf and I stare at them all and wonder if I really did write all those or am I actually the conduit for a dead spirit who was denied the time on earth and hunted around for a body with a vacant brain to write them for her.

30. The book is sent off to some lucky (I hope) buggers. One can just hope that the first reviews in are nice as they serve as a suit of armour for that first ‘This is terrible. Do not waste your money. And there’s a bit where I would have used the word “packed” instead of “put”‘, which inevitably comes. I only look at the first reviews to make sure the book is hitting the spot. Yeah course.

31. Mrs Outraged writes a review on Amazon telling people how appalling my book is and encourages everyone NOT to buy it. I look at her other reviews. If mine is the only one she has commented on, I presume she is an evil git from my past or an in-law. But no – Mrs Outraged has 500 other reviews to her name and she has hated the books of every other female writer on the planet, which gives me some comfort. Also she has called the Bible far-fetched and thinks the Brontes were talentless. Although she has given her wart remover 5 stars, so she can be pleased by something. Personally, I think she needs a good shag.

32. We wait to see the public reaction to my new book baby. Will it make the top 10 - if it does… perfick. The pressure is always on. If it got to number 5 last time, number 4 would be good. But in this day and age, my chances are the opposite of slim – they’re fat! There are bound to be a load of romanticesyicys books out there, or TikTok has spawned a load of writers. Or someone on the telly/ a royal/model/presenter/reality TV personality famous for bonking on screen has written a book all by herself, no ghost-writer, no help, all her own work, every word, nothing to see here folks. 

Don’t join this profession, people, if you want a job with a level playing field. 

33. I have a busy schedule of meeting readers, signing their books, having pictures taken with them. And it is wonderful to meet the people who have turned you from an unpaid hobbyist into a pro. In this job you are either treated as a queen or a plague victim. Sometimes you can travel five hours to a venue and you are greeted with refreshments, flowers, joy. Sometimes you have to physically become dust before a venue organiser asks, ‘Would you like a drink?’ 

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

34. I return home from far-flung destination exhausted to be greeted by a message on Facebook saying ‘I wish one day you would come to ‘far-flung destination’, I’d love to meet you.’ And an email from my editor asking me for a synopsis for the next book…