My father and the wolf

On death, memory, and music

This is a piece of memoir about the nature of memory, and music, and death, including death by suicide. Please don’t continue reading if any of those topics are likely to upset you.

---

Me and my father, Brian, in the early 1970s.

My father passed away in 1973. I was four years old: an age when most children, myself included, are susceptible to magical thinking. For a long time, I believed both that I was responsible for his death, and that I had the power to bring him back from that queer and magical place he had travelled to. I stopped speaking when he died, believing that if I stayed silent for long enough—like the sister in Andersen’s ‘Wild Swans’—he would be restored to the ordinary world. And to me. A response that I later discovered was most likely trauma-induced selective mutism, but which—at the time—my carers and my GP first considered a form of grieving, and later an example of my oppositional, defiant, and difficult nature. My refusal to be normal, or make sufficient efforts to fit in: to live in the so-called real world.

Gordon Laite illustration for Andersen’s ‘The wild swans’. A fairy tale in which the youngest sister agrees to stay silent until she finishes making the nettle shirts that will transform her cursed brothers back into their human form.

My memories of that time are fragmentary and fragile. There are many reasons for this: I was very young when he died, not yet five years old. I am aphantasic, which some research suggests leads to poor autobiographical and episodic memory. Additionally, the memories I do have were often strongly contested by my mother and my stepfather. This is partly, though not wholly, because my father took his own life. For complex reasons of their own—including their own feelings of grief, shame, and regret—my mother and my stepfather believed that the best path forward was for all of us to move on by attempting to erase any traces of his existence.

There was no funeral to mark his passing. (Though there was a coronial inquest, at which several of our neighbours, and my mother, gave evidence.) He was cremated and interred in an unmarked plot in a memorial garden, which we never visited. Shortly after he died, my mother, my sister and I took on my stepfather’s surname, and my sister and I were made to pretend—to our friends at school, our teachers, and our parents’ friends and associates—that our stepfather was the only father we’d ever had. His name the only one I’d ever known. A lie I sometimes resisted.

A year after my father’ suicide, when my youngest sister was born, the pressure to pretend that this family—mother, father, and three little girls—was the only one I’d ever had became monumental. Resistance was met with various forms of punishment: I remember my mother feeding a book that I loved to the fire, because I had written my other, prior name inside the front cover. Other punishments were even more difficult to bear, and are impossible to write down.

My mother and stepfather were dishonest about my father’s life, and his death, for a range of complex social and personal reasons. Their dissembling was, perhaps, made easier by three things: first, most of my mother’s family lived on the other side of the world. Second, after my father’s death, my mother and my stepfather moved into an almost entirely new social circle. And third, I suspect that moving on, not talking about my father, may have been widely considered an appropriate and healthy way to cope with my father’s death. Both for my parents, and for us, his two daughters.

My mother’s and stepfather’s attempts to erase or forget my father mostly took the form of lies of omission, but later I suspect they came to believe the stories they told themselves and each other about him. It’s possible, even likely, that their memories were fundamentally altered; various studies have shown that, each time you tell a story, you alter your memory slightly. And that, over time, these altered versions of your memories become your truth.

We know, too, that memory is collaborative. In families, your memory is at least partly collective: an assortment of stories, songs, rituals, and other traditions that everyone agrees are true, or at least acceptable versions of the truth. All families, like mine, have versions of the truth that are shared and uncontested, versions that are open but largely unspoken secrets—skeletons in the closet—and versions that are known only to some and not to others. Stories—memories—that pass away when the last person who remembers them forgets them, or passes away. I am as susceptible to all of these subtle and accretive alterations of memory as anyone else: as you, perhaps.

As an adult, and at a time in my life when my sense of self was radically destabilised, I went looking for the truth about my father. I researched and constructed a family tree. I corresponded with various distant relations—second and third cousins—and applied for and received various official records of his life, and of his death. After much digging I acquired a thick folder full of documents and data, and discovered that while these facts were important and sometimes shocking or revelatory, they didn’t fill the gap in my understanding of who he was.

I knew his height and weight. I knew where he had been born, and when. I knew that he had served in the navy, and on which vessels. I had—I have—a map of the world showing his various travels.

But none of this really revealed him to me. Mostly, I suspect, because the version of him that I wanted to find was not to be found in facts. All that searching—trying to put together pieces of evidence as if they were pieces of a puzzle that would one day form a complete picture—all that yearning, was a too-late and protracted form of grieving. For the father I never really knew, and the childhood—the self—that I never got to experience, or become.

For a long time I had believed that his death marked a schism in my life. That before he passed, I had been safe and happy; and that after he died, everything changed. My memories of my early childhood—however wispy—are organised in this way. There is the before, and there is the after.

Some of the strongest memories I have of that time are associated with music. We had a record player in the house where we lived with my father. There was also a record player in my stepfather’s apartment. I remember loving the buttery, crackling sound that the player made when I dropped the needle onto the beginning of a record. I remember trying to drop the needle as close to the outer rim of the record as possible, in order to sustain that introductory static for as long as possible.

I remember the handful of children’s records I played over and over again: three Disney albums: The Mouse Factory, Burl Ives’ Animal Folk and one of those read-a-long records that came with a small book. At the beginning of the read-a-long recording, the narrator informed listeners that ‘You will know it’s time to turn the page when Tinkerbell rings her little bells like this’. I can still almost hear the particular chime of Tink’s bells.

My strongest memories, however, are of my favourite record: a recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. On one side was a performance of Prokofiev’s Peter and the wolf, and on the other Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker suite.

Here are two memories I have retained—however muddled by time—of listening to that record as a child.

I remember lying on the floor, in a patch of sunlight in my father’s house, listening to Leonard Bernstein narrating (and conducting) Peter and the wolf. I remember the smell of tobacco and freshly-turned earth, and I think I remember the feeling of lying with my upper body on a rug or carpet, and my feet on cool tiles. I remember opening a tin of sweets and taking out one sweet at a time, closing the tin and putting that one sweet under my tongue, then lying back and not sucking, but waiting for it to dissolve. I remember my father coming in and lying on the floor with me. He lay with his head beside mine—his ear against my ear—with our feet pointing in opposite directions. I remember the smell of his body, and the feel of his beard, which was as delicious and unexpected as the butter-fat static of a record before the music begins. I remember taking two sweets out of the little round tin, and putting one under my father’s tongue, and another under my own.

Advertising artwork for ‘Flight Deck’ in Collaroy: the apartment complex where my stepfather lived.

I remember sitting in the bath in my stepfather’s apartment, listening to Peter and the wolf. I remember crying, and watching my tears fall into the bath like rain into a pond. I remember wondering—I think I remember wondering—whether, like Alice, I would cry so long and so heavily that the bath would overflow and fill the apartment, and then the whole floor of the building, and then the whole building. I remember the low, sorrowful oboe music of the duck; I remember feeling that sound in my body: deep in my belly, knotted thickly in my chest. I remember closing my eyes and feeling the coolness of the water, its silky resistance as I paddled out to the middle of the pond.

I also remember the intrusive and terrifying french horns that represented the wolf, and which I strongly, and for many years, associated with my stepfather.

I feared my stepfather, both then and for many, many years aftewards. He was large and loud; he had big hands and a rough, bawdy, physical sense of humour. He was the kind of father who, in an attempt to teach you to swim, threw you into the deep end of the pool and then waited for you to work out how not to drown. One of his favourite jokes was to pretend to crack a raw egg on top of my head. He would show me an egg and then rest a fist on top of my head—pretending it held the egg—then he’d ‘smash’ the egg, and slowly run his spread-out fingers over my hair, down to my neck. It felt as if he had cracked an egg on me, but he had not. It was just pretend. Nevertheless, I would cringe, and cry and run away, and he would laugh or call out in frustration that it was just a joke. Couldn’t I take a joke?

One night, when I was in the bath being the rain, my stepfather came into the bathroom and showed me an egg. He rested the egg on my head and smashed it. The ribbons of very real raw yolk and albumen dribbled down over my face and hair. The raw egg was the texture of snot, thick and loose and sticky on my skin. I was horrified. I screamed at him, wordlessly, and I think I threw something at him. I remember him putting his hand to his head. I remember a little egg: perhaps a little blood. He wrenched me from the tub. I remember standing there naked, dripping water and egg onto the bathmat, wrapping my arms around myself, desperate to die or disappear. Desperate for my real father’s return. It was just a joke, my stepfather yelled, furious and confused by my reaction. Couldn’t I take a joke?

---

My real father is little more than a patchwork of incomplete memories and wishful thinking. The more unhappy and unsafe I became in the years after his death, the more the fantasy of what my life might have been if he had lived grew and sustained me. He became, in my imagination, the perfect father. Patient, kind, creative, gentle, and loving. I kept a photograph I had stolen out of my mother’s bedside table hidden in my bedroom, moving it regularly to new hiding places to escape her raids on my privacy. I looked at it often, seeking similarities in the shape of our faces, in our eyes and hair and noses. I often drew pictures of him and me together. He was always the same: while I changed, and grew.

I wrote my name—the version of my name that tied me to him—on every page of my various childhood diaries. And kept them, too, hidden away. In my imagining, he was the only parent—the only adult—who would have understood me, and liked me, and protected me. Without him, I was—like a fairy-tale girl—cursed to be silent, forgotten, abused, and neglected. For too long, even into adulthood, I held onto the fantasy that he would one day return. That I would one day be saved.

I would have been eight or nine when I first read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A little princess, and mis-interpreted the ending: believing that her father had returned to her—that the report of his death had been a mistake. For this reason, it was for a long time my favourite book. One I kept hidden with my diaries and my photograph of my father. I worked through the little paperback, scratching out Sara Crewe’s name and replacing it with my own.

I was sixteen the year I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, living in a caravan park, and saw my father’s name—his family surname—written on the map where all the current visitors’ and residents’ names were listed. Site 34: Sulway. Funny how that’s the detail I remember. And that his surname—our name—was written on the whiteboard map in thick blue chalk. That the tail of the ‘y’ curled down and around like a cat’s tail. The Sulways stayed at the caravan park for two weeks, and every day during those two weeks I walked past their site and looked for him, walking slowly-but-swiftly enough to make it seem like I was not spying on them.

I was terrified that I might discover that he had been alive all those years, and had never come to find me.

I was too ashamed at who I was—a pregnant teenage girl—to knock on the caravan’s door and introduce myself.

After two weeks they left. I watched them pack up their annexe, hook up their caravan, and drive away, my heart beating wildly in my chest. Last chance, it sang, last chance, last chance.

I think it was probably that day, or the next, that I stopped believing in magic, and made myself live more wholly, and more irrevocably, in the real world. The world in which he had died, and would never, not ever, return.

---

This newsletter is still evolving. For now, the idea is to publish familiar essays across a broad range of themes: life, love, writing, reading, the natural world, folklore and fairy tales, and other catastrophes.

This week’s essay is a short piece of memoir, reflecting on my memories of my father.

If you have constructive feedback to offer, particularly in terms of things you’d like me to write about, or write more about, please let me know by posting in the comments. Also, if you have questions you’d like me to explore or even attempt—in my ever-ambling way—to answer, I’d love to hear them.

Thank you for reading!