My father hugged like a gorilla. It was just something you had to get used to – he felt it was his prerogative. As you felt your shoulders dislocate, your ribs creak and the breath flee your lungs, all you could do was pray. By the time I hit my early 40s, I would swear at him, stamp on his feet and, occasionally, knee him in the nuts. Still he wouldn’t loosen his grip.
He was significantly gentler on the girls, but each boy, each grandson – he had six – knew what was coming when they ventured too close to him. Well, five of the six. For number four was my son, Noah, who would avoid hugging anyone and didn’t like to be touched. Noah got the gorilla treatment, anyway, despite all and sundry screaming at my father to let him go.
Stu, as all his grandchildren called him, didn’t “get” autism. For him, not to hug Noah would have been a denial of his faith and a physical impossibility. He had a genetic predisposition, inherited from his own father, to squeeze the life out of children as a show of love, while uttering a mystical Yiddish phrase, which translated as: “I wish I had a dozen!”
I knew my father loved me because he suffocated me weekly for 44 years, but I have no recollection of him ever saying it. When I was horribly bullied as a 12-year-old, and he found out who the culprits were, he confronted them at a school open evening, and squashed them with profanity as diverse and eclectic as Shakespeare. One by one, in the following days, the bullies all apologised.
Of course, none of this was related first-hand by him; nothing ever was. All news, good and bad, echoed through the intercom of my mother. “Y’father’s disappointed! Y’father’s angry! I think Y’father would really like you to … Y’father’s proud of you. Y’father’s feels guilty. Y’father regrets …” He would often call me a berk and sardonically label me a wanker.
He was charming, warm, hilarious; loved by most he met, a man’s man with hollow legs, who ordered three fingers of Scotch at the bar.
On Christmas Day, the year I was 15, we played golf with his best friend and son. As we strolled down the fairway, out came a bottle of Bell’s and Tanqueray gin. That remains one of my fondest memories of Stu, as for a large part of my late 20s and 30s there was often rancour between us, as he tried to do what he thought was best for me, and I protested in the only way I knew – by acquiescing resentfully. We’d known each other for three decades, but didn’t know each other at all.
I suppose it was during my late 20s, before I had children, that I began to properly assess my father’s role in my life, so that I could psychologically prepare to do the job in a different way. I wanted to add the stuff that I had always felt was missing – openness and the verbal expressions of love, while keeping, of course, the gorilla hug. How could I not?
My daughter, Eloise, who arrived first, was doted on, read to, kissed and cuddled, taken to ballet, Brownies and netball games, congratulated on school reports, photographed constantly and gorilla hugged by Stu. I planned to guide her gently, but let her make her own decisions. Highlight the creative, but let her follow her dreams.
Then, just over three years later, Noah arrived. He was very late to sit up, crawl and walk, and when the diagnosis arrived before his third birthday, I had to rapidly rethink my role. As he got older, his difference shone through. As he approached eight, the age after which we were told speech was unlikely to develop, it became clear that our beautiful, mute boy required a very different version of fatherhood. He needed someone to be his advocate, a custodian of his life and world – and that is what I became.
I found, to my surprise, that I experienced no trauma in accepting this. The love was the same, if not deeper. It was unconditional, without expectations. There was no fear of hearing harsh words from him, of being ignored through angst or deep-seated resentments. I was overwhelmed by his beauty and vulnerability, by his lack of self and “couldn’t give a fuck” attitude to life. His audacity made me howl with laughter; his giggling fits made my jaw ache. His rage made me cry, but he was authentic and, beneath the veneer of autism, I recognised a boy that reminded me of me.
Noah was eight when my mother died suddenly, at home. It had been Noah’s custom when we visited to raid the cupboards for Smarties and then climb into my parents’ bed to eat them. After she died, he never entered their bedroom again.
My father was bereft, as were we all. They had been together since they were 15. I tried, along with my sisters, to look after him. He had never lived by himself but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, share his grief. He wasn’t like most of the men of his generation. He was a brilliant cook, very domesticated, more so than my mother had been – so there were no worries about him starving or smelling.
If I’m honest, with my mother gone – the filter through which all our substantive communication had passed – I hoped that we would develop a deeper understanding. It didn’t happen. Stu remarried within 18 months, just after he was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. He did not see Noah at all during the last six months of his life, while his eight other grandchildren all made the regular pilgrimage. My son’s behaviour, at its least predictable, was deemed … what? Subversive? A cause for unnecessary anxiety? A terminal cancer accelerant?
I fumed quietly, said nothing and let the gathering resentments dissolve the sharper edges of my impending grief. The one person I expected to embrace my son was my father, Noah’s grandfather; to understand that his crazy beauty was therapy, a tonic – that Noah was the only person who would never treat him as if he had cancer.
When Stu had confronted my bullies over 30 years before, I was full of pride to have a father who could do that for a son. But impending death does not adhere to the fictional trope of heartfelt truths and confessions (at least not in my secular Jewish family). So I took the bullet of rejection for my son, said Kaddish [a hymn of praise to God] for my father and reflected on how much easier it is being one than the other.
• Shtum, by Jem Lester, is published by Orion for £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call the Guardian Bookshop on 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
