9. Planet of the Dead Dads

... being a look at a poem which combines two themes which seem to crop up very regularly in my poetry, fathers and death.

As you may have noticed if you follow these posts, I seem to write about fathers rather a lot. MCMLXXIII is all about my Dad, and he is very present in East Yorkshire Stinks of Shit. I even filled a whole pamphlet on the subject of fathers a few years back - A Voyage Around My Father Figures and Other Male Role Models (Glass Head Press 2019). Perhaps the only theme in my poetry that crops up as often as fathers is death. Planet of the Dead Dads is is not the only poem that I have written which combines both themes. What would a psychologist make of that? That I miss my Dad? Well, that is true - he died in 2016 and left a Dad shaped hole in my life, but I still enjoyed writing about fathers before then. And death as well.

Here’s a memory that comes to mind even as I write. (I love it when this happens). I was a small boy. I know that I was small, because I was sitting in the outside lavatory in the back yard of my house. We must have got an inside toilet at some point around the dawn of the 1970s, so this means that I was easily under ten years of age. Whilst I was sitting there, for some reason my thoughts turned to the fact that one day I would die. This idea seemed to come more clearly and forcefully than it had ever occurred to me before and I began to cry. I must have started to cry quite loudly too, or maybe it was just the length of time that I had been missing, which brought my dad out to see what the matter was. As soon as he asked me, I felt ashamed. It seemed selfish to be sitting on the toilet wailing about my own mortality, selfish and a bit stupid. So I told a little white lie to hide my shame. - “I’m crying because I was thinking that you and Mam will die one day.”

My Dad was patient, serious and soothing, as he could often be, when big worries sprang to the surface. “Ohh, theres no point in worrying about that. It won’t happen for a long, long time. We have years and years left in us yet.”

I can’t remember what happened next, but it would have involved going back inside the warm house, with the radiogram for during the day and the black and white television with the bulging lens of a screen for teatimes and evenings. With my Mam in her pinny and and my Sister in her dungarees, and the prospect of regular visits to my Grandma, and trips to the seaside in my Uncle John’s car. Life was beautiful, and full of promise, and there were years and years of it left.

Dads are fascinating figures with a wealth of experience, and amazing abilities. My old friend Eddie Smith once pointed out that however firmly you might manage to tighten up a wheel on your bike, your dad could always manage a further twist of the spanner. We were both well into our twenties when he made that observation, but it was still true.

Dads are just men, blessed with the male habit of developing their obsessions into the hobbies that help to define their character. My dad brewed his own beer. This was not an unusual hobby in the seventies. He sterilised his equipment regularly, collected bottles, invested in a tool for putting metal and cork “crown tops” on them. He progressed to winemaking, starting with traditional favourites such as elderberry or bramble wine, and eventually branching out into exotic wines created with fermented weetabix or coffee , which were rather less appealing. He also baked his own bread, which was always wholesome and filling, if a little to dense and weighty.

My mam got involved in the brewing and breadmaking, but there were also plenty of pursuits he occupied himself with alone, or with me, as a fledgeling man, who he nurtured as much as he could to follow in his footsteps. He built ramshackle sheds in the back yard where the outside toilet had once stood, and got me to sort out all his screws, bolts and nails into metal OXO tins. Those tins have since been repurposed, because my collection has directly evolved from my Dad’s is now too big for them. I also have a wealth of other inherited tools, including the ones we used put up shelves with bits of wood purchased from a yard presided over by a strange little bloke we referred to as “Quasimodo”. I even remember constructing a bookcase with Dad, and writing the date on the back. It was March 1980, and I was 18 and starting to have my own ideas about how things should be done, but even now, my DIY has his cobbled together jerry built quality to it.

He also shared his love of science fiction with me; the books of Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham, and Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke’s 2001 a Space Odyssey at the pictures, and and Star Trek on the telly. In later years when Jean Luc Picard took over the continuing mission to boldly go where no one had gone before, and much of the action started to be set on the holodeck of the Enterprise, my dad pined for the old days of Captain Kirk, complaining “Its about time they got down on some planets and had a few adventures”

So imagining him now, on a planet having some Dad like adventures seems perfectly natural to me.

Earlier this year a friend of mine, Paul Brookes brought out a collection entitled These Random Acts of Wildness (Glass Head Press 2023). Many of the poems in it hint at the presence of the dead in our lives, and many deal with everyday things, domestic tasks and household duties. I liked the contrast between the two themes. I wrote Planet of the Dead Dads in response to it, and read it at the launch night.

Perhaps that flavour of the presence of death coupled with the mundane tasks of everyday life in paul’s poetry had awakened the ghost of that small boy deep within me. The one who had thought his morbid thoughts in the outside toilet.

Planet of the Dead Dads

Stranded on the Planet of Dead Dads
My Dad is never coming back to earth
But with the other dead dads he is fine
He nods to them and shares some careful words

He puts up shelves, repairs and oils his bike
He reads newspapers, sighs and puts them down
Makes sandwiches with cheese and currant jam
And thinks his private thoughts in dusty sheds

And one day I will join him in that world
We’ll take forever one day at a time
And deal with it with uncomplaining calm
And hand rolled cigarettes and home brewed beer

My Mother, she is also stranded there
And sometimes Dad will spend some time with her