I’ve never really got my head around Father’s Day. I have two young kids, aged four and five months, so it should be an unalloyed pleasure. But for me it comes with a lot of baggage. Even the word ‘father’ is jarring. ‘Dad’ sounds better, and ‘daddy’ – when said by my four-year-old son – is sweeter than a Paul McCartney melody. On the other hand, ‘father’ is a word you have to wipe the cobwebs off before using. It’s so formal, I mainly hear it from newsreaders, doctors or Darth Vader. But this year it has dawned on me that what I’m actually struggling with is the kind of dad I want to be, and how my own dad has made me who I am – for good and for ill.
I have only one memory of Father’s Day from my childhood: a family Sunday lunch at a Beefeater restaurant on the outskirts of Croydon. I don’t recall the meal itself, just the sunny car journey on the way there, and the five of us sitting down to eat, each placemat showing a cod-Victorian illustration of another ‘historic’ branch of the steakhouse chain. That one tiny fragment is the sum total of what the day meant to me as a kid.
I’d love to ask Dad about it, but he passed away in 2005 at 57, so for almost half my life I’ve experienced Father’s Day without a father. John Donald Harvey was a rotund man with silvering hair, unfashionable sideburns and a mile-wide smile. He was also a victim of alcoholism, which meant even when he was alive he was often half a dad at most.
Every year when this day wheels around, I can’t avoid thinking about the bad bits. When Dad was drunk he could be a monster: never physically abusive but verbally poisonous. When I was a tiny kid, baddies were supposed to be Megatron or Skeletor, not the lump in the living room glowering at the TV and yelling obscenities while I cowered upstairs until he conked out. Maddeningly, the morning after an episode he’d wake up not remembering one iota of it, and this being pre-smartphone, we couldn’t just play him back the evidence. He was Jekyll and Hyde sponsored by Strongbow. For decades we tiptoed around his Hyde because we deeply loved his Jekyll.
This year it has dawned on me that what I’m actually struggling with is the kind of dad I want to be and how my own dad has made me who I am, writes Jon Harvey
Like so many children with an alcoholic parent, I suffered it as a secret shame, unaware of just how common the syndrome is. I stayed teetotal into my 30s, until I started to believe I might not be doomed to repeat Dad’s fate. (I’m now 46 and the fear still haunts me.) I’m scarred by my childhood, and these days I’m living a strange mirror of it.
I now spend my nights in the living room while the others are upstairs tucked up in bed. But this time alcohol is not the reason. We live in a two-bedroom house and space is at a premium. Mum and baby co-sleep in one room, our four-year-old is in the other. I’m a snorer, so to give everyone some peace, I’ve banished myself to a pull-out chair bed and for over a year the living room has become an ad hoc studio flat. Instead of bellowing expletives into the small hours and keeping the whole house awake, I creep up to the bathroom when I need my bedtime wee. Then I always look in on the others, just to be sure they’re all OK, before heading back down to sleep. That’s got to be a key part of being a dad: doing your best to keep everybody safe.
Clearly my dad failed at that, but even during the worst times I wanted to believe it was worth it for the good times. What drove him to drink? I think he’d crawled inside the bottle to escape his pain, as so many do. In his case it was the loss of his mum, Lilian, who died in childbirth in 1958 when Dad was just 11 years old. I don’t think he ever recovered from that, and long before I was born, in 1980, drink had defined him.
Despite his demons, when he was sober he was Dad. But I find myself asking more keenly than ever, what does that mean? I hold on to his supportiveness, whether that was helping me face down school bullies, giving me the self-belief to become a musician or passing on a taste for chess by playing at just the right level: giving me a chance yet always making it a game.
And the good times with him are some of the most precious memories I have, glinting like crystals on a stone as it catches the sun. They can be the tiniest things – his penchant for ghost stories, his love of black pudding or the time he got a fish hook caught in his thumb and had to drive himself to hospital, blood gushing all over his hand, but still somehow found the heart to make me and my little sister laugh in the car on the way to A&E.
Jon, pictured with his children in April, says the biggest lesson he’s taken on board from his father and being one himself is the importance of being there for his family
In our house I only have three photos of Dad (I won’t share them, for his sake) but, even so, a part of the living room is devoted to him and it captures his character even better than a picture could. It’s the one thing I inherited: his record collection. It’s a portal into his passions, from the Beatles and the Blockheads to Holst and Debussy, via Rowan Atkinson and The Goon Show. He fed me a diet of classic British sitcoms and regaled me with stories of playing drums for Screaming Lord Sutch and even being a warm-up for the Rolling Stones. He never made it as a musician and, instead, ended up trying several careers including estate agent, policeman and (improbably) a publican. But his association with Lord Sutch (who founded the Monster Raving Loony Party) and his eye for a joke must have rubbed off on me. I’ve ended up as a political comedian, and I owe it to Dad.
What my kids will make of my career choice when they grow up I don’t dare to guess. But the biggest lesson I’ve learnt, both from my dad and my growing experience of being one myself, is the pricelessness of being there. Apparently, according to The Centre for Social Justice’s aptly named Lost Boys report, 2.5million children in the UK have no father figure at home, so this can’t be taken for granted. I’m fortunate that my working life is varied and occasionally even a little glamorous, but nothing compares to hanging out with my children, whether it’s watching our four-year-old nail a forehand surprisingly well during his first tennis lesson, or just blowing a raspberry on our baby’s tummy and getting a delighted giggle in return. What trumps all of it is when we break out into a spontaneous family dance in the living room: the four of us bouncing around to the Fab Four, on one of Dad’s old LPs.
I sometimes wonder if it was the right thing to stick by my dad as long as we did, and I’m sure plenty of others wrestle with the same question. But I always end up at the same conclusion. As masochistic as it might sound, for me the happy recollections are so priceless, they were worth the pain. I know that for many kids from broken homes this won’t be true and nor should it be, and in that sense I’m one of the lucky ones. The true hero is my mum, who held the family together so I could have those moments at all.
It may not always match the sacrifices and strains of motherhood, but being an active dad is a huge undertaking. I’ll happily admit I’ve surprised myself with how much I enjoy it, and how that enjoyment is growing every day. I still don’t like the word ‘father’, but I love being one and, hopefully, a whole one, too. If my kids grow up glad that I’m their dad, then that’s enough for me, and I don’t need a day in the calendar to mark it. Still, if I’m being completely honest, I wouldn’t say no to some new socks.
