Editor's note: This episode of Bookclub is available from Sunday 2 November and will be available to listen online or for download.
When I first read Blake Morrison’s memoir, And When Did You Last See your Father?, I felt a strong kinship with the author, because we are only a year apart in age and his evocation of a boy’s life in the 50s and 60s was eerily familiar. Dinky toys, the Rover and Wizard, even Dan Dare’s Eagle, the boys’ books, the gradual dawning of the television age. When he describes days out with his parents in North Yorkshire it reminds me powerfully of my own rural upbringing. The backdrop is different, but the scene is the same. His memoir, however, is not meant to conjure up a childhood idyll. It was begun as a consequence of his father’s diagnosis of untreatable illness and his death not long afterwards, and then became even more than an account of a son’s feelings during those days. Blake took a journey into his own family’s past, and discovered that it took him down some dark byways. So why, and who was it for?
‘It sounds terrible, but I suspect I was writing it for myself first and foremost. The book did serve for me in the year after my father’s death, when I was grief struck, as therapy. When I was writing it, I was in a strange black hole, and I wasn’t thinking of readers.’ That feeling was familiar to a number of our readers, who joined us in the happy surroundings of the Ilkley Literature Festival, not far from Blake’s family home. The working through of grief, however, takes a different turn in this memoir. That’s why the book was a shock to many people when it was published in 1993, because the author is determined not to spare himself in his exploration of the family. In particular, the role of the woman he knew as ‘Aunty Beaty’ (although Blake changed the name, for reasons we can understand). It’s the relationship between her and his father that becomes one of the themes of the story - a mystery, but one in which we can all guess the whole truth. Someone asked the question: how did his mother, and Beaty, feel when he showed them the manuscript?
‘My mother’s reaction was to say, well I’m sorry you have to put Aunty Beaty in, and to tell that story, but if it’s so important to you, you’d better go ahead and tell it. If friends read it and don’t like it, I’ll tell them it’s fiction.’ And that was that. Beaty, on the other hand, was horrified and it took a little while for relations to be restored, although Blake told us that she’d subsequently become closer to her mother than ever before. Strange things happen after a death.
The book is notable for its emotional honesty. His description of being with his father immediately after he died, and deciding not to leave when the undertaker arrived to do his business, is a raw piece of story-telling (as well as being very comical, because of the undertaker’s obvious discomfort) and a number of our readers spoke of how it had taken them into territory we often deliberately avoid. Maybe, Blake, said it was because he was the son of two doctors. Around the kitchen table, he’d hear talk of people’s problems and diseases and he grew up with a matter-of-fact approach to life and death. The book’s honesty is its outstanding characteristic. His father was always the dominating figure - often overbearing, even a bully, as well as a man who loved his wife and children, and always a rather harmless but determined thorn in the side of authority: he enjoyed pulling a fast one with ticket collectors on trains, or the man on the gate at Oulton Park races, or a car park attendant. So it is a book about death that’s more about life.
Its success surprised Blake, because he’d wondered why anyone else would want to read it. A story about the last days of a particular man in a particular family, who was known only to his own circle of friends. Yet the power of the description, and the authenticity of feeling, makes it a book that many have come to treasure.
I do hope you you enjoy hearing Blake Morrison talking about it.
Jim
Jim Naughtie is the presenter Bookclub on BBC Radio 4
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