Disappointing, dad

There’s an exercise I do with new students based on a Kelly Osbourne Q&A I lifted from the Guardian Weekend magazine. They have to match her answers to the appropriate question, then give their own responses whilst interviewing me. Whenever we get to the question “What has been your greatest disappointment?” I always reply, “My dad,” which is a bit sad really.
It wasn’t always like that. My dad was a bit like Danny’s dad in Danny the Champion of the World. He could make stuff, fix stuff, invent stuff and solve things. He knew which bit of a motor did what, and he made model Spitfires which really flew. He was big, strong, brainy and not a little athletic. He taught me cricket – at the same time transferring some of his unrealised dreams to me, I am sure – and unfailingly supported each one of my sporting endeavours. He was nearly always on the sidelines, no matter how misty, cold, wet or scorching the day. When, at the age of 10 and in the early throes of whooping cough, I entered the 1500m on sports day, he was there to cheer me on. I had no idea about middle-distance running, so I just ran until I couldn’t feel my legs. I was beaten by Barley Norton, who was about to go to the upper school and looked surprised I should have led for 1420m. My dad carried me from the winning line where I had collapsed melodramatically, and no father could ever have been prouder of a son coming in second. He used to remind me of it during my time as a disappointing teenager.
He also supported my music, no matter how loud it got. He bought me my first guitar, my second, my third and even my fourth. Ok, the last one was never really mine, but he promised it to me in his will, so it was as good as. It was beautiful, a 1971 Fender Telecaster. I played a feted blues jam on it on my 21st birthday and learned how to tinker with the string gauges to make it sing.
But it’s what became of that guitar that most sticks in my craw. It just disappeared one day. I had by then moved out of home, but I noticed its absence like one would notice a sudden change in the smell of a familiar house. I asked my father where my inheritance had gone and he had sold it. He didn’t explain any further but I knew it had undoubtedly been flogged to make an urgent payment on the car he couldn’t afford. Or the computer. Or the extra phone line for that wildly ineffectual company he said he was setting up in what used to be my bedroom. Or, more probably, he had sold it for more vodka.
And really it was downhill all the way from there: the drink driving incident when he nearly died in police custody; the 50th birthday trip to see Dylan at Wembley Arena where he insulted me throughout (dad, not Bob) and then had to be helped to the car by me and a marshal because his legs refused to work; the visits to see him in London once he had moved back in with his father and the two of them would sleep through our knocks on the door and the ringing bell, though this was in a way a relief because by then I found too much time in his presence a gut-wrenching torment.
By the time we found out he had cancer, he was 10 days away from death. After his terminal breath, we cleared out the house now father and son were gone. His mattress stank of putrefaction and under a blanket in one corner of his room lay a heap of empty vodka bottles and some porn. I gave the porn to one of the house clearance guys and we threw the vodka bottles into the skip along with 1001 other relics we had no space for in our own home. What we kept filled the back of a VW Golf. None of it contained any of the essence of the inventor, the fixer, the maker. The man who had picked me up after the greatest race I never won was nowhere to be found. He might as well have died 20 years before.
Still, by the time we’d unwound his catastrophic finances and settled his estate and that of his father, there was a healthy sum which we invested in bricks and mortar first in England and subsequently over here. The house I love so much and in which the grandchildren he never met have so much room to run would not have been possible without my father. That he gave up his paternal role in favour of such an overwhelming dedication to alcohol, that he was ill but sought no treatment, that he worshipped me in no small way but dismissed my constant appeals to recognise his alcoholism – that’s what disappoints me most. Perhaps in the end I am disappointed not with him but with my own failure to save him from himself.