Very occasionally, someone will mention my dad. “You know”, I usually say, “since the day he died, there hasn’t been a single day” – and here I pause for comic effect – “that I’ve missed him”.

Sometimes – again not often thankfully – I dream about him. I wake with gritted teeth. And I comfort myself by remembering that he’s dead.

Firstly I must be clear; he wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t an abuser, at least in the most egregious sense. No, he was an imbecile. A weak, pathetic, unpleasant, vulgar little man; an embarrassment.

I’ve thought about writing this piece for a long time. I’ve always decided against it until now but I’ve finally come to the view that he deserves to be remembered, if he’s remembered at all, for what he was.

His name was Frank Gibbon. For many years he lived in Linden Grove, in Hartlepool. He was born in 1920 in Shildon, County Durham. He was a marine engineer, then eventually a draughtsman at Steetley Magnesite, also in Hartlepool.

It occurred to me recently that I’m roughly the same age that he was when I embarked on my degree course, as a mature student. I’m pleased to say that I’m very different from my father at that age. I don’t think I could be described as coarse, uncouth or inarticulate. I don’t spend every evening slouched in an armchair, drinking the cheapest whisky I can find at the local off licence until I’m semi-comatose. I don’t sneer “nig pig” when a black face appears on a television screen or blurt comically stupid opinions every five minutes in a cheap Scotch stupor. I don’t radiate a scent of stale body odour blended with alcohol fumes and Brylcreem. And I can read a book with my mouth closed.

I’d like to recount some defining memories of my father.

My bedroom was directly above the living room where he spent every late evening on his own after my mum had retired to bed, slurping and gulping his cheap paint stripper whisky, staring at a television set and slumped on an armchair or settee like a huge, malodorous slug. For four days of the week I’d have to get up early the following morning, to travel to Teesside Poly. He’d have the TV on far too loud; I think because he was drunk. I think that if you like to experience the world through a fog of alcohol, it helps to have the volume up.

Time after time I’d ask him to turn it down. Please. And sometimes he did, but he’d always just turn it up again. Very often I’d be lying there trying to sleep until the TV was emitting the persistent BEEEEEEP that indicated that the network had closed down for the night. Sometimes this was accompanied by the muffled sound of snoring radiating upward through my bedroom floor. So I’d go down to wake the worthless slob.

I’d nudge or shake him and as he recovered consciousness with his characteristic brain-dead, intoxicated, wide-eyed moron stare, he’d slur “whhwutsh…yu..phlblmm”. He was trying to say “what’s your problem?” For some reason this was his go-to response to being stirred from self-induced unconsciousness. His other one was “EH?”.

He’d sleep during the day too, quite often. He’d curl up sideways on our settee like Andy Capp with his greasy, Brylcreemed head on one of the cushions. I didn’t like to sit there afterwards, the settee tended to smell for a while.

As I type this I can feel that same contempt, that same loathing I felt in my twenties.

During the week of my finals in 1989, I asked if he could please – please – knock off the late night loud TV sessions, just for a few days. Just until I’d got through my exams.

Of course not. Fortunately we had a caravan parked on the drive so I went to sleep in there until my exams were over, to escape my anti-social parent. As I carried my books and a sleeping bag out there I heard him shout “PATHETIC IDIOT”, behind me.

It’s fair to say that he was unsanitary. Washing his hands after taking a pee wasn’t really something he did, neither was flushing. If a girlfriend was visiting and I heard his trademark loud urinating splash I’d wait until he emerged from there and go and flush it for him – so that in the event that she wanted to use the loo herself, she wouldn’t be confronted by a toilet bowl full of my unlovely father’s piss. My father wasn’t quite toilet-trained.

He was categorically a racist. He didn’t even deny it; actually he was proud of it. He used the word “nigger” occasionally but he was particularly fond of a term I think he’d invented himself and was quite pleased with, “nig pig”. It was often slurred at the TV. In the 1980s, when South Africa was prominent in the news and current affairs, he’d sometimes remind us that he supported Apartheid. If you ever bothered to take him to task for his remarks about people of colour he’d sometimes ask “what do you think they think about you?”.

Despite this, hilariously, he always liked Shirley Bassey. He even claimed to be a fan of Cleo Laine. If she ever appeared on TV he’d mutter something in a sort of knowing tone, as though he were a jazz aficionado. He knew nothing about music and he couldn’t have named one of her records.

I was twelve or thirteen when I came to suspect my father was an alcoholic. To be fair he didn’t drink nearly so heavily when I was younger than that. But there was an odd moment when I was sitting on the floor in a front room with a newspaper, during a school holiday. He’d just come home from work. He sneaked into the room, furtively grabbed a small bottle of vodka from a cupboard in there then took a generous, noisy, bulge-eyed gulp from it. There was an urgency, as though he was reaching for emergency medication. He only noticed I was there as he was screwing the cap back on.

As his drinking became worse in his late fifties, naturally my mum would complain about it from time to time. She didn’t get angry about it often – perhaps she should have – but when she did, sometimes she’d threaten him with “I’ll tell Billy what you’re like”. His oldest son had moved out years before persistent slovenly inebriation had become my father’s preferred lifestyle.

At this, my pathetic father would whimper and beg. You might think that he’d offer an empty promise to mend his ways – but no, that was the one thing he couldn’t face. The prospect of life as a moderate drinker was too much to bear. He didn’t want to change, he’d plead, his voice quivering like a distressed spaniel. He liked himself the way he was.

Occasionally I’d complain about it myself. He’d explain that it was a hobby. “You’ve got your hobbies, I’ve got mine”, he’d tell me.

He certainly pursued his hobby enthusiastically. I have seen him crawling on the carpet on all fours like a dog in front of guests in our living room.

He was a Freemason. He attended a lodge a few miles out of town, at Castle Eden. In the early ’80s I’d often drive him there, then bring him home a few hours later. To be fair, most of the time I picked him up from there he wasn’t completely off his face. Just occasionally.

Sometimes I was called upon to give some of his Freemason pals a lift home as well. On one of these occasions he was paralytic when I picked them up. His pals were laughing at the state he was in, all the way back. Laughing at him. But he didn’t notice. He was slurring lurid remarks about “our lass”, by which he meant my mother. She would have gone ballistic if she could have heard him refer to her in those terms.

On this one occasion I actually dropped him off at home before any of the other passengers, just to get him out of the car. He was too drunk to notice. I just left him staggering on the pavement in his dinner suit with his eyes rolling in his head and his mouth gaping. I wasn’t sure he’d be able to find his own front door, and I didn’t care either.

He was comically ignorant; genuinely an idiot. He knew a few words of French, and he assumed that they would help him to make himself understood with people from any foreign country. I saw him trying to communicate with a Spanish man at a camp site in Spain using this novel method. We were due to leave the next day. “Matin, je departez”, he said – a turn of phrase even a Frenchman would have struggled with. I saw him attempt the same method with people from Yugoslavia in 1978. I suppose his logic must have been: they’re foreign – French is a foreign language – so naturally they understand illiterate French better than English. Genius.

Then again, his English wasn’t brilliant, to be fair. Once while watching a TV play, during a bit of onscreen dialogue he sneered “nobody talks like that”. The two characters were having an articulate conversation. Eloquent, thoughtful, but not extraordinary. Perfectly normal. But so far above his level of understanding and experience that it was alien to him.

On a long drive some time in the mid ’70s, my mum, who was driving, suggested a different route than the one she’d planned, possibly to avoid heavy traffic. “The trouble is, it’s a comm promise”, my dad replied. “And nobody likes a comm promise”. He must have read the same words in one of his books and thought he’d have a go at delivering the same line himself. The trouble was, he didn’t know how to pronounce “compromise”. He probably didn’t know what it meant, either.

Frank liked to read. He did an odd thing often with his tongue when he was reading. He’d stick it out and park it between his lower gum and bottom lip so that it bulged out of his open mouth. He often did this in other moments of concentration, as well.

For a while he had an odd habit of responding to confrontational questions like “Why can’t you get it yourself?” with “There’s no answer to that”.

He seemed to think it was a mic-drop moment, an argument winner. Thinking about it now, maybe he read that one somewhere as well and thought it sounded clever. I generally responded with “Exactly”. Sometimes he’d come back with “EH?”. Usually he’d just look confused.

He had no idea how ridiculous, how gross he was. I went on holiday with my parents every year until I was 17, an inmate of the caravan that was to be my refuge twelve years later. I’d come to hate that by then. In 1977, we went to Spain somewhere. Some time in the afternoon on the first day as I was walking to the beach, I saw him loitering near another caravan, trying to join a conversation with two other British campers, men in their 30s.

He was standing with them with a beer glass in his hand and a look of childlike, open-mouthed glee on his face, interrupting them with inane remarks he must have thought to be witty every few seconds. They were steadfastly ignoring him, carefully avoiding looking at him, refusing to acknowledge his presence. Desperately hoping the gawping, beer-soaked moron who had waddled up to them would just go away. The unsettling thing was that he seemed to have no idea that he was unwelcome.

One day in the mid ’70s, for some reason a neighbour’s son asked to talk to my dad – I think he was interested in a work placement at Steetley, his place of work. I wasn’t actually present at this meeting of course, but as my dad showed him out half an hour later, as a parting shot I heard him claim about his employers: “They work for me! I don’t work for them!”.

Absolutely ridiculous. I highly doubt the lad gained anything useful from this meeting, not counting the realisation that my dad was a moron as well as inarticulate.

I loved my dad as a child. I’m embarrassed to admit that. But even then, even before he entered the alcoholic degenerate phase of his life, he could be an unpleasant little man. He was arguably a waste of the oxygen he consumed every day even then.

Sometimes he’d drive me to school on his way to work. One morning, two other children from the same school who lived nearby came with us.

I’d made a model aircraft – an Airfix Bristol Beaufighter. I was taking it to show my friends. But just as we arrived outside the school, Daddy braked a little too hard. I was sitting in the back; one of the little plastic propeller blades collided with the back of the front passenger seat, bending it backwards. I must have overreacted a little and annoyed Daddy because in one sudden movement he turned, grabbed hold of my model aircraft in his right hand, and crushed it. The other two kids looked mortified. Frightened. They didn’t say anything, and neither did I.

As she comforted me ten minutes later, my teacher, a kind middle-aged lady called Mrs Exelby, gently asked what had happened. I wouldn’t tell her, of course. I was too ashamed of my dad.

On Sundays, he liked to take my little brother and me for a drive round the docks. I think it was a convenient way for my mum to get us out of the house while she cooked. I would have been about ten years old at this time, I think. And my dad had a nasty little game he liked to play.

There was an area of rough ground there with a little cliff edge overlooking rocks and sand, maybe ten feet below. He liked to drive up to it at speed up and brake at what seemed like the last moment. I hated this. It genuinely scared me. He knew this, and he loved it. He’d speed up along the road leading to the rough ground, to make the experience as frightening as possible. I’d plead with him not to do it, but he thought it was funny to frighten me out of my wits. I can still hear his coarse, vulgar staccato laugh, his “EH-EH-EH-EH-EH“. Even so – I don’t think it was malicious. He wasn’t cruel. Just a dickhead.

Drinking wasn’t my dad’s only hobby. Like many people I occasionally developed a spot, a facial pimple, in my early teens. If my dad happened to notice it, he’d pounce on it like a magpie on something shiny. He loved to squeeze other people’s spots. It was no use asking him to leave me alone. He’d stand over me, right in my face with a look of intense, gurning fascination, his grubby thumbnails digging into my skin.

One Good Friday in the early ‘70s, my mum put fish in front of me at the dinner table. I hated fish and to be fair my mum already knew this. I was happy to eat the vegetables, but I wasn’t going to touch the fish. My dad wasn’t having this. He took hold of the back of my head by my hair and aggressively forced me to start eating it. When I started to retch over the plate, my mum made him desist.

I learned quite early on never to allow my father to prepare food for me. Watching him make a sandwich was a disgusting experience; he’d stop every now and then to suck his fingers and thumbs. So was watching him eat, I hated sitting at the same table during a meal. One time at the dinner table, while the rest of the family were eating, he removed his false teeth to pick at a bit of food that had got stuck there.

If he wanted to say something while he was eating, he wouldn’t usually stand on ceremony. He’d just give the rest of us a view of the contents of his mouth while we tried to work out what he was saying.

He was a gluttonous little man. When he prepared food for himself, usually it was a “fry up”, an assortment of leftovers assembled in a frying pan with plenty of grease. He’d put a huge pile of this crap in front of himself then shovel it into his face noisily, like an animal at a trough. He’d sometimes go into a strange bulge-eyed fascination with the food in front of him when he was drunk, which of course was very often.

On Christmas Day he’d insist on being left alone in the kitchen to do the washing up after lunch, because he wanted to pick at leftovers from other people’s plates.

After he was made redundant at the age of 60 he basically did nothing all day except drink, eat, watch TV or read one of his books. But late in the evening while slumped in his armchair he’d sometimes address my mum – who worked for a living as well as doing all the housework – with a sort of wide-eyed, helpless look and slur “What’s for supper?”.

On holiday in 1977, we visited friends in Dieppe on the evening before we were due to return to England. The caravan was parked near the sea front and we returned to it late that night, with a gift from our hosts: a large garlic sausage.

We had to be up early the following morning, to catch the channel ferry. But as you might have guessed, my dad didn’t want to take his sausage back to England with us. He’d already consumed a large dinner but he wanted to push it into his flabby face at his earliest possible opportunity. My mum pleaded with him to go to bed, but of course he wouldn’t. He sat in the corner with the light on, avidly, noisily chomping and slurping his fingers and thumbs over a plate while we tried to sleep.

Frank was quite keen on DIY and I have to admit, he was actually quite capable in some respects. He managed to make a respectable built-in wardrobe from sheets of plywood, for example. But he could be comically careless as well, slapdash. I saw him fit a radiator to a wall at an angle of about 20 degrees from level. He’d have been happy to leave it like that if my mum hadn’t made him rectify it.

One time in the late ’80s we heard a loud canine yelp coming from the kitchen. My dad had been doing some electrical work in there, and he’d left a live, exposed mains cable lying on the floor. We found our border collie Charlie lying on his side, stunned. Fortunately, he recovered.

I saw him attempt to remove a three pin plug from a wall socket with a dinner knife, once. While seated at a nearby table, he casually slid the blade between the plug and the socket and tried to lever it out. There was a loud bang, a blue flash, some smoke. The knife was ruined. It had a bone handle. Not conductive, so he survived. Whether that’s a good thing or not I’ll leave for the reader to think about.

I think that he was insecure. One evening in the mid ’70s, my mum, who was a teacher, had invited a male colleague to our house go through some notes – as I recall, to prepare for a conference or presentation. My dad didn’t actually complain about this, I heard no argument. But while our visitor was here, poor Frank was noticeably uncomfortable. I went into the front room where they were meeting to fetch something, and as I left the room and closed the door behind me, my father, who’d been quietly pacing up and down the hall, grabbed me by the arm and, with an expression of nervous anxiety etched on his unpleasant face asked me “just talking?”.

On a holiday in Spain when I was about 12, we were staying in an apartment. My mum was changing in an adjoining room and she’d left the door open.

I’m sure readers will appreciate that I had no interest whatever in a view of my own mother in her bra and knickers, but my dad must have felt differently. “Eileen”, he gravely intoned, “he can see you!”. Unsurprisingly my mum was highly unimpressed by his observation and she told him what to do with it in no uncertain terms. It makes my toes curl to remember it now. Creepy little man.

Once a year before she retired my mum would go away for a weekend, to a teacher’s conference. I hated this because without her moderating influence, my deadbeat father would max out on his trademark slovenly drunkenness. He’d be off his face, sneering moronic remarks or unconscious in his Andy Capp foetal position on the settee pretty much the whole time.

On one of these evenings, he insisted on having the room with the TV to himself. He’d found something risqué on TV and my younger brother and I weren’t allowed to be present. I hate to think what he might have been doing in there.

A few years later on one of these weekends in the early ’80s, he waddled into the kitchen while I was washing up. He stood there in the door frame, a vision of abject uselessness. He was silent for a moment. I assumed he was too drunk to form a coherent sentence. Unfortunately that didn’t usually stop him from trying.

He managed “yer just rubbish, aren’t yer son?” with as much vulgar, sneering, slurring menace as he could summon. Which wasn’t a lot; he was about 60 years old at this time. Grossly unfit, overweight, and of course: alcohol-incapacitated. He was about as threatening as a poodle amputee.

The irony of this moment was priceless. I’ve genuinely never personally known anyone who more richly deserved the epithet of “rubbish” than my own father. But it took me by surprise because I hadn’t spoken to him all day. It was unprovoked. Of course – by this time he knew that I loathed him. I had no wish to disguise it. Clearly that was causing the disgusting little man a degree of unresolved resentment.

Nothing was less important to me than my father’s opinion. But he stood there, waiting for a response I couldn’t be bothered to compose. I ignored him completely and after an uncomfortable half minute, having failed to elicit the reaction he wanted, he turned, muttered something he wasn’t brave enough to say out loud under his alcohol breath and slouched back to his slug pit; his comfy chair and his cheap whisky.

His resentment emerged in other ways from time to time. My mother was the authority figure in our house. Even before he was made redundant, little Frank handed over his wages and received pocket money from his wife. He could be like a pathetic, resentful little brother sometimes. He’d occasionally try to stir up trouble by telling sneaky little tales. I remember my mum once telling me not to stay up too late, in his presence. “Oh he will, Eileen! I heard him come to bed at 2 o’clock last night!”. Pitiful.

He was an extraordinarily unsavoury little man. He slept in a string vest; I think he wore it round the clock. He would just put a shirt on over it in the morning. Sometimes if I went to bed in the early hours I’d run into him on the landing upstairs, emerging from the toilet. When this occurred he’d stare at me in a bulge-eyed, gurning panic, crouching and grabbing his genitals to avoid exposing them. It was a comical but grotesque sight.

When he sneezed, he engaged his vocal cords, to make the whole performance as loud, coarse and vulgar as possible.

In my early teens, I kept a diary – a personal journal where I recorded my most private thoughts. It was a red, leather-bound notebook with a lock.

I entered my bedroom one afternoon in 1974 to find my dad trying to get into it. He’d taken it down from my bookshelf and was rummaging through my bedside table, looking for the key. Naturally I was angry, but it was just a joke to him.

I thought that the most effective way to get him to stop doing this was to get my mum to intervene. I did, and she admonished him for it. To her credit, she was more than slightly disgusted.

Naively I expected him to desist after that. A day or two later I left the house but had forgotten something and returned a few minutes later. Sure enough, I found the greasy little creep in my bedroom, standing on the bed, grubbing around for the key on a high shelf. Of course I’d taken it with me. It didn’t leave my sight after that and I found a better hiding place for the diary. The thought of my imbecile father poring through my private thoughts, sitting there gawping at my diary with his tongue bulging out of his face as he tried to process the long words was just too much.

If I bought something and brought it into the house, I usually tried to sneak it in so he wouldn’t notice because he’d always be nosy about it; he’d always want to get his greasy fingers on whatever it was and have a look. I remember buying a jacket once; he insisted on trying it on. He had grease dripping down his chin from whatever he’d been eating and of course it ended up on my brand new jacket.

One afternoon in 1977 I came home with a single, We Are The Champions by Queen. Unfortunately he noticed it as I came through the door so he asked to have a look. He took the record out of the sleeve. I asked him to be careful with it while he was manhandling it with his grubby fingers. He took offence at this, of course. He looked me in the eye and slammed it back into the sleeve with as much force as he could manage.

He was a graceless, charmless little man. One Christmas, to my slight disappointment, one of my girlfriends bought him a present. He didn’t like it, I wasn’t actually in the room at the time but I heard him sneering his disapproval in a conversation with my mum, shortly after opening it. She tried to shush him in case I overheard. Of course he hadn’t bought my girlfriend anything. In fact, that was the very same Christmas that he didn’t get my mum a Christmas present, either. She couldn’t believe it. He just tried to laugh it off.

Finally, here’s an anecdote you might find amusing. He brought me home from a scout camp one Saturday in 1973. On the way back, we happened upon a rural pub. He pulled into the car park. he parked up, turned to me and said “Wait five minutes, then come in”. Then he strolled into the pub.

So I waited a few minutes and followed him in. I entered the lounge to find him with a drink in hand, trying to make conversation with the barman. He saw me, turned, affected a look of grave concern then said “I don’t think you’re supposed to come in here, son”. The landlord brushed away his concern. He’s fine, don’t worry. Nobody minds.

You might think it was quite nice that he’d wanted me to come into the pub with him instead of waiting in the car. I wouldn’t disagree. But he didn’t want to take responsibility for that himself, so he put it all on me. It makes me laugh to think about it now, and God knows most of my memories of him are more revolting than amusing.

But in its own harmless way, it was typical. He was weak. Inadequate. He didn’t have the courage to ask if anyone minded if he brought his thirteen year-old son into a pub. He made sure I’d take the blame for that myself.

——————

My older brother called with the news that he’d died in 1994. I hadn’t had to live in the same house as him for five years by that time. He’d been in hospital for a while, but I hadn’t really expected it. He was 73.

My girlfriend at the time was sitting with me when the call came. I affected a degree of shock. Certainly I was surprised. But not unpleasantly. Truthfully, I’ve never experienced a moment of sadness over his death.

I knew his passing would be hard on my mum, who would now be alone. But certainly I was pleased that I’d be able to visit her without him being there, now. And he’d never embarrass me again. No girlfriend or partner would ever have to meet him.

And neither would I.

Honestly, the moment his coffin rolled away toward the incinerator was one of the most comforting moments I can remember. It was all I could do to stop myself giving a little theatrical wave.

If you made it this far through my memories of my unsavoury father and you have disgust fatigue, I’m sorry. Imagine what it was like to live them.