My father was a writer with odd working habits. He liked to work at night and sleep by day. The clatter of the Remington keys as I drifted to sleep was a perennial childhood memory. In 1964 he was separated from my mother, but even when Phyllis (who became his last wife) moved into the house, his schedule remained unchanged. I was ten.
My father entered the world of letters via the Gate Theatre in Dublin in the 1930s. He wrote plays. Later he switched to novels and made a lot of money. By the 1960s, he was back at the drama again. He wrote a television play, a two-hander. The working title was Shall I Eat You Now? but eventually he settled for Call Me Daddy. The play concerned an unhappy elderly man called Hoffman and the entry into his life of a young woman called Janet. The question of who seduces whom, the cunning male or the conniving female, lay at the heart of the drama. It was a reconfiguration of his autobiography. The play's heroine was obviously Phyllis, as became palpable even to me when my father decreed, as he did around this time, that henceforth she would answer to the name of Jane (an edict with which she was happy).
Call Me Daddy was directed for television by Alvin Rakoff and in 1968 it received an International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences award (an Emmy), for best entertainment programme. My father rewrote the play as a novel called Hoffman, which was then transformed into a feature film starring Peter Sellers. From one 50-minute television play he had made a fortune. He bought a large seafront house in Dalkey, Dublin, and moved there with Jane.
Fifteen years later my stepmother died and my father got Alzheimer's. An official from the Irish chancery courts entered the Dalkey house and took my father's manuscripts away in a trunk for safe-keeping. He went into a nursing home. Ten years later he died. The trunk was returned to me by the chancery court. It was bound with white tape to show it had never been opened since it had been sealed. It went straight into my loft with the tapes uncut.
Over the years I have given hardly any thought to Call Me Daddy, although occasionally I bump into the novel Hoffman in second-hand bookshops. Then, in the second week of March, I got an email. It came from Alvin Rakoff. He had learned I was the executor of my father's estate and among the works listed as being available was a stage version of the original television play he had directed. This was all news to me.
If the stage version was as well written as the television version, he continued, he would put it on at a small theatre he had at his disposal. Did I have it?
I went to my loft with one of my sons. We undid the white tapes and lifted the lid back to reveal a mound of yellowing papers. While my son held the torch I sorted through the contents and found six bulging files with Call Me Daddy written in my father's ragged handwriting on the flaps.
I carried the files to the living room and the phone rang. It was Rakoff. As we talked I pinned the handset between head and shoulder and sorted through the dusty papers. First I found a rehearsal script, and then I found the stage version itself, quite different to the television version. My father had even made a plan of the stage set which he had attached. Eureka!
The next day I took the play to HM prison Maghaberry, where I teach one day a week. As I stood by the photocopier in the education department watching the warm copied pages shooting out, I felt a most unexpected sensation. It was a mixture of envy and resentment. Call Me Daddy had been on television and in the cinema and between hard covers. It had had its time in the sun. Now, surely, it was the son's turn. I write plays. Why wasn't it one of mine that I was copying to send away for consideration?
For the rest of the day these evil thoughts pursued me up and down the prison wings. The next morning, as I wrote the address on the envelope in which the copy would go to Alvin Rakoff, the evil feelings persisted. Maybe I should put one of my own plays in the envelope too, I thought, along with a coy covering letter. Perhaps he might like to consider some of the son's work?
I fetched one of my own plays from the shelves. I opened the envelope ready to drop it in. Then from my imagination flashed the image that was the reverse of this moment. I saw the envelope open and my play along with my father's slithering out. My stomach curdled. Alvin Rakoff would be appalled at my gift, wouldn't he? In his position I would have been disgusted at such a mix of neediness and Oedipal resentment. He had asked for my father's work, not mine. He didn't want mine and trying to muscle in like this was, frankly, shameful.
Shame anticipated can be a marvellous corrective. I put my own play back on the shelf and sealed the envelope. As I drove to the post office, with the envelope in the passenger seat beside me, two lovely thoughts came in quick succession. Not only had I done the right thing and not made a fool of myself, but also I had acquired an incident that I might profitably turn into prose. Here was a little seam to mine.
