Resemblances - My father and Churchill

Especially when Churchill was a youngish man, he looked like my father. My father also looked like Peter Ustinov, and had the same kind of voice. But the Churchill thing is the strangest - they also had exactly the same handwriting. I saw Churchill's writing in the War Cabinet Rooms and could hardly believe the close resemblance.

Sometimes they dredge up a new old pic of Churchill and I have the odd feeling I am looking at my father - or even my brother. There is the same moody intelligence, an abstracted look. I know him so well I almost am the same person - that's how I felt about my father, sometimes.

My father could make you believe he was an amazing, wonderful man, and he traded on this ability, without actually being in any way amazing or wonderful, but he was competent and intelligent, a professional engineer. It was a pity he wanted so much to be more than that, and messed up in business, losing all his money. That was not his only problem. He also like to charm women and to have their admiration. He liked making them laugh. Women of his own class tended to see through him and find him lacking in substance - and he hated their low opinion, so he always went for women of a lower social strata. He used to say he hated "school marms" (educated middle-class women) and refused to come to Parents' evenings. My mother used to ask me with an imploring face if she had to go? I said she had to. The "school marms" intimidated her and she had no idea what to ask them. I advised her to "ask Jackie's mum what she asks". But really, the other mums mostly gave her that excluded feeling too.

A man not unlike my father 

I read something recently about Churchill's relationship with his brother - he tended to bask in the public gaze himself, and not wish his brother to gain the limelight at all. I suppose as children they were in competition for limited parental attention, and that formed Churchill's personality. It must have been very strange to know that your mother is the King's mistress. All the rejection that Churchill suffered in his childhood later came out as depression. But he had a very brave, buoyant personality.

Like Churchill, my father went to boarding school at the age of 7, and was part of that system. He didn't look back at his schooldays with much affection. You wonder if it was emotionally damaging. The only things it gave him were a sense of superiority and the door to Cambridge University. He used to mention Cambridge a lot - but he said , when my mother criticised him for showing off, that going to Cambridge is something worth showing off about.!!

Dead Dad envy

This is quite funny, in a bleak way. When I was sixteen my father fell in love with another woman, and left my mother, me and my three brothers to go and live with her and her daughter. My father adopted the daughter and she became his favourite child (in fact he pretended that she was his only child, and why not?) After a lifetime of resenting this stepsister I suddenly decided that she'd probably had quite a hard time with her mother and my dad not always being the easiest of parents (very irresponsible) and I friended her on Facebook.

As my father died two months ago she is writing a lot on her wall about how much she misses him. Hey. We missed him too. We missed him a long time ago for a more heart-breaking reason. She is annoying me again with her "I was daddy's girl" thing. I was too!! God, yes.

So I put a picture of our original family up on Facebook. She will probably just laugh at my demented outfit (but it was the fashion!)

Here is my original family, from my first life, when there were six of us and we lived by the river in Walton. After I was sixteen we had to leave this place and my second life began.

Dad was himself

Dad was himself. Even old, he was naturally inclined to hope for good things. Now confused, he cried when he found he couldn't go home. He could never go home again; he couldn't climb the stairs, two flights; how could he have climbed them a few weeks ago, after his last hospital stay? But he had, on his bandaged feet, on his legs that were losing their skin, he had done it through dogged determination. But a week later, was carried back again to hospital.

He and Sue lived two floors us in a flat where everything fitted together like a nest of oddments, collapsed together in a general impression of browns, smelling of cigarette smoke, the papers on the desk never moving, the books on the shelves never moving, just a small area of kitchen still a workspace, just a small current flowing through the still, dark pool of age.

So Mrs T thinks of her father, about to die, and about packing up her mother's flat - all the bedroom first, then on to the bathroom - chuck - chuck - chuck - she would put the toiletries in the sack - but the clothes go to Help the Aged, where they give her a Gift Aid number.

One morning she has a John Lennon song in her head - "I'm only Sleeping" so seductively beautiful -

"But he was depressed" Mrs T thinks. "He didn't want to get up, or think, or make a plan. He could hardly even finish the song - it just repeated itself and lasted only three minutes."

Sleeping too much was a sign of depression, as surely as sleeping too little. And sleep was a foretaste of death, too much sleep a flirtation with death.

Mrs T has wanted to say these things to her father, agonised on the brink:

"Death is but a sleep and a forgetting". "Our little lives are ended with a sleep."

She had not had the opportunity to say these things. And he would have mocked her anyway because he wasn't ready to "sleep". Mrs T had wanted to help, but everybody has to die by themselves and there is nothing to say, in many cases, nothing at all that will help.

Mrs T carried "I'm Only Sleeping" around in her head and its unhappiness hurt her. She found it on YouTube and then went on to other recordings of John Lennon, and there was the cure; it turned out to be - Early Lennon. "It won't be long Yeah! " "This Boy" "I call Your Name". It was a roughness about his voice that did it - a fierceness to his nature - he sounded like a friend to Mrs T.

My mother and my father

My mother and my father are not well. My mother has Alzheimer's and is now in a Care Home and may starve herself to death - she sometimes eats and drinks and sometimes she doesn't. She just lies with her face to the wall. This is so awful for everyone concerned. The doctor says we won't force her to eat, or put a tube down her throat, just persuade her. He has seen these cases before.

My father is in Scotland. He is dying from the toes upwards - has 3 dead toes and ulcerated legs. I won't go into it but he is likely to die of heart failure. But he is sitting up reading the Times and he is in his right mind.

I have not seen my father for 5 years and I think I should like to take my offspring and go and see him.