My Selective Memories of My Dad.

My Father died 30 years ago this week. I was thinking about him today and thought I should really try to sit down and write something in his memory but I wasn't sure I would know where to start.

I was 9 years old when he passed. I don't remember that much about him except that he had white hair and his face felt like sandpaper when he hugged you. He also smoked cigars, drank McEwan's Export and wore a flat cap like almost all Scottish-Irish men of his generation.

He was a radio operator in World War 2 but never saw action, instead he spent the war intercepting German radio transmissions on the Isle of Man. The story goes that he was based out of Glasgow but there was a sergeant he hated so much that he requested a transfer, he expected to be shipped off to North Africa, instead he was shipped off to Douglas. That would be the furthest he would ever travel from Glasgow outside of a silver jubilee trip him and my Mum took to Ireland in the 1970's. He was not a travelling man.

He had a law degree but became a teacher instead. I'd like to think there was some kind of moral choice involved in this where he thought that being a teacher was more important than being a lawyer but I think it is more likely he just lacked the confidence for law and the fact that there were very few Catholic Lawyers in Scotland at the time. If you didn't know the funny hand-shakes you couldn't join the club.

He worked his way up from teacher to headmaster then to head of a teacher training college in Glasgow. Along with my Mum, my Aunt, and a good number of my Brothers and Sisters, he formed what my English teacher once called "The McGrath teaching mafia" throughout Catholic schools in the West of Scotland. My English teacher learned how to be a teacher under my Dad.

When he got sick, they amputated his big toe first. I was told that he had caught his toe under the accelerator in the car. Maybe he did but I remember thinking "Why would he be driving without any shoes on?". I had no reason to doubt him. After that there were a lot of hushed discussions going around the kitchen table but no-one ever really told me what was happening.

I used to get dressed for school beside the heater hidden behind the clothes horse in the kitchen. I remember being there listening to my parents in shock when they heard on the radio that John Lennon got shot. Little did I know 8 months later my Dad would be dead too.

They made up a bed in the living room for him, an old pull down sofa that had previously been reserved for visitors. I played around that bad while the cancer ate away at him but he never once told me he was feeling too sick and to leave him in peace. He would fall asleep and I would play in the hallway outside the door.

Pretty soon he got too ill and was taken to a hospice. I didn't know the difference between a hospice and a hospital so I thought there was a chance he would still get better. He used to sit in a chair facing a big window and I would go and visit him on Sundays. He seemed to be shrinking and aging rapidly but I still didn't know what it meant.

On the day he passed away I came downstairs and saw my two sisters crying and cradling the telephone receiver between them. When I asked what was wrong they just said Dad had taken a turn for the worst. A few hours later my Mum came home and told me he'd died, I didn't understand it and asked her if it was okay if I could go out and play football.

I went over to my friend Davy's house, his Mum answered the door and asked "How's your Dad doing?".

"Oh, he died this morning" I said. She gasped and put her hand over her mouth because she knew him from Church. I just asked if Davy wanted to come out and play football. We played football all day then I went home.

I remember all of that day very clearly but I don't remember much about the funeral at all. I was at the mass but I never went to the graveside. My Uncle John took care of me and we spent some time in the shopping center where he bought me a radio controlled car that I had my eye on for a while.

He died right after school had started, I'd been back from summer holidays for a week and then had another week off for the funeral. When I went back to school everyone knew because it was Catholic school and they all went to the same church. Some kids said sorry but others teased me about my Dad being dead. I remember being upset but I don't think any of us knew what it meant.

Nothing seemed real. Surely he was coming back. I think I asked my Mum when we were going to visit Dad in the hospital again. It was only a few months later when we were on a weekend trip to St Andrews that the enormity of it hit me. I was walking down the street and just suddenly burst into uncontrollable tears. It completely came out of nowhere and it shocked the hell out of me and scared the hell out of my Mum.

Fast forward 16 years and I am working at the BBC World Service as a technical operator listening to short-wave radio broadcasts from around the world. History is repeating itself.

I am sitting in my bedsit in Reading, England. It's 3 o'clock in the morning on August 16th and I am totally shitfaced on wine. I have written some drunken gibberish about how much I miss my Dad and how my character might have been completely different if he'd been around to guide me through my teenage years.

I still have the stuff I wrote that night but I am not going to share it verbatim, I will however say that it is mostly self-pitying drunken crap. One thing that stands out is the idea that somehow life could have been very different.

I now think this is mostly unlikely, sure my younger years were pretty directionless and full of drink, drugs and unemployment, but having my Dad around would have probably just added to the resentment that is inherent in all kids that age. I'd already lost the Catholic faith by then (or it lost me) and I am sure that his old school Irish ways would have probably annoyed me.

My Mum did a good job raising me without him and a lot of the stuff I wrote that night undermines the credit she deserves.

Fast forward again to 2006 and Mum is being buried alongside him in Eastfield Cemetery, 2 months short of 25 years to the day he died. I realize I am looking at his gravestone for only the second time in my life. I saw it once a few years after he died then all the photos of him came down in our house I never saw it again until we buried Mum.

It says "Harry McGrath B.L" on it.

I ask my brother what "B.L." means and he says "Bachelor of Laws". Up to that point I had completely forgotten about the law degree and it struck me just how few memories of my Dad I actually have.

I remember one time when Me and him went out to buy morning rolls in the town of Crail in the East Neuk of Fife. We had this favorite place called "Fife Ness" that was about 3 or 4 miles out of town and we would drive there and comb the beach for stones and bits of pottery whilst we waited for the rest of the family to wake up.

This time we were out there and it was pissing rain and the car broke down. There was nothing out there except the beach and an old World War 2 airfield. We walked home in the cold wet and I think that might have been the only time I ever heard the old man curse.

And that's about it. I don't think it was because he was an unfeeling man but I don't really remember anything else. I have seen photos of me and him together and I have vague memories of the photos being taken but my brain does not allow me to remember what I was feeling or thinking at the time.

It's almost like his death was so traumatic that there were two childhoods, B.D and A.D, "Before Death" and "After Dad". Now I am a Dad myself and I wish I remembered more to try and pass something on to my daughter but I'm content with the idea that he was just a good person who raised a big family that have all done very well and who still get along together (most of the time). That is testament enough in this day and age.

Thanks Dad.

The good old days when the only thing that stopped you from getting stomped by an elephant was a poxy wee wooden fence.