I cry in films. I don't mean a discreet eye-watering but lip-biting, painful weeping. I cried during The Lion King, Lost in Space, Free Willy, probably in Toy Story and certainly in Doctor Dolittle. My children are used to this but it still worries them-they remain dry-eyed and stoical through the most heart-wrenching movie moments. After years of practice I can mostly cry semi-silently. Occasionally, though, my control goes and a low-key lamentation escapes, rolling across a quiet part of the film. At this a dozen, small, screen-lit faces turn towards me and my son digs me in the ribs and hisses "D-a-a-a-d!"
Outside of the cinema my children cry at life's normal reverses, after falling, losing a pet or when their best friend switches sides. My wife cries too, sometimes for causes which are mysterious. Even when I understand the reason, I haven't got the hang of crying with her in sympathy. I just cry in cartoons.
It started with The Lion King. A young lion has been banished from his homeland after the death of his father. In exile he has grown strong and in one scene agonises about returning home to take up his father's mantle. As he wrestles with the problem, his father appears to him as a ghost. Old lion and young discuss what the young lion should do. At the moment the father turned to leave, I was hit with a wave of grief so hard and heavy that it could only be cried away.
The pattern remains the same-what gets me by the throat is the relationship between father and the son. It is always about estrangement or misunderstanding, about the distance which grows between the two. You might think that my father must be dead, but no, he is an alive, albeit frail, 77 year old. We are closer now than we have been for a long time and I have told him I love him. He is not a stranger to me, yet somehow I do not know him. My grief is about loss, the impossibility of recovering a world of childhood connectedness and therefore about being alone.
Recently, I fractured my shoulder and had to spend weeks in a sling. I could barely lift my arm and had to wash with a flannel. Flannels are, as far as I am concerned, one of the many works of the devil used by my mother with gusto in the 1950s. But there I was, a grown man wiping away sweat with the hated object and thinking of my father. We are linked by a smell. In my childhood we only had weekly baths and in between bath nights, when condensation ran down the walls, we used the flannel. We all smelt more then, or rather we smelt differently. The smell of my armpit is the smell of a man's sweat. The smell of my father.
This is the father that I have lost, the man that, as a boy, I held, cuddled and fought. I remember him not in conversation or through episodes, but in primary memory, as a sensual physical being. He was a man who smelt of wood shavings, of wet concrete, of newly cut steel. He was a dad who made things, had a workshop, knocked down walls, built a conservatory and with whom I was a boy. This is the dad who is gone, the one who wrestled me on the carpet, whose big strong brown arms I watched laying bricks or fixing the car. The dad who was doing and being.
For a long time I misunderstood my feeling of loss. When I looked back from the near distance of adolescence I remembered him as a character in the long, dreary wrangle my parents called family life. I remembered him as "dad-the-difficult" or "dad-the-angry" in the endless saga of bettering ourselves. At some point dad the doer became dad the parent and it was this awkward, oversensitive, domineering man that I fled from. So, in my first cycle of thinking about this, in my adolescence, I did nothing but blame him: he was the bullying patriarch who wilfully made a gap between us. Second time around I could see myself as a difficult adolescent, destined to rebel, to be sure of his own rightness and desperate to prove how clever I was. I could just about see, or pay lip service to, the idea that they did the best they could, he and my mother. But I couldn't see any more than that.
Part of this looking back in anger was the feeling that it all could have been avoided. Could he not have protected me? Did he not know our relationship would change from a sensuous thing of making and doing into the battleground of "personality"? Why did he let me run head on into the wall? He saw the wall, he knew about fathers and sons, surely? He need not have abandoned me. Or at least he should have given us the chance to say goodbye to each other. But when? When would have been the right moment? I know, of course, that there was no "moment" when I lost physical-dad; he just faded away until we no longer wrestled on the carpet and he started to complain that I was borrowing his razor. But a fictional moment in the darkness of the cinema sharpens this until it triggers my tears. I am sad about a real loss, about a transition to early adulthood that creeps up on us all, about being robbed of the sweet, mucking-about mess of childhood.
I am small again, sitting by my father in a smoke-filled cinema and feeling the warmth of his arm. I am happy and safe with his strong male presence, pleased with the texture of his suit and the feel of his overcoat after the rain. I look up and see the grey jet of cigarette smoke which has escaped his lips to join the smoke of many others above us. I see the fingers of projector light dancing in the fog, I sense his comforting bulk. We are watching a cartoon. He does not cry.
