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Nigel Jenkins, who joins Home Truths for the first time, talks about his feelings on catching up with the age at which his father died ...

He died on December 11, 1971, just six months after his forty-eighth birthday. I, the eldest of his three children, was twenty-two. It’s been a date to remember, but a short while ago another date crept up on me out of time’s ticking shadows, the moment at which, turning forty-eight and a half, I found myself overtaking my old man. If my luck holds for ten or twenty years more, I could be the grey and balding paterfamilias that my youthful old man never made it to be.

The ancient Celts believed that no one truly died, you simply shuffled off into the Celtic underworld, and could return from time to time to mingle with the living. And that, sometimes, is how it seems in our dreams, when the dead come back and wander round inside our heads, insisting by sheer force of presence, and the persuasiveness of a conman, that surely there’s been some absurd mistake, they never died, how could anyone have imagined such a thing? For years after his death my dad would pay nocturnal visits, urging on me all manner of resurrectionist scams, until, seeing through his resourceful yarns, I’d have to take him regretfully by the arm and say ‘Dad, mun, you’re dead, now lie back down, and leave me alone’. Then I’d wake up, and yes Dad would be dead.

But with an afterlife in the memories of the living, the dead rarely leave us alone for long, and as far as most of mine are concerned, they’ve got a key to the house and can wander back in whenever they want. These encounters can take place in various forms – dreams, recollections, family chats or, in dad’s case, a poem. He was a great horseman, so what better, I thought, than to couch the moment of my overtaking him in terms of a horse race, with him on my mother’s black-maned mare and me astride a certain grand if mildly delinquent bay. We were never great talkers, my dad and me, but we managed to communicate least dysfunctionally, I suppose, when we were out together on horseback. And there were some things now, approaching forty-eight and a half, that I wanted to talk to him about – not least my fears that somehow I’d fail to overtake him, and my horse would take a fatal stumble at the starting gate.

I wanted this race to be not so much a reckoning as a reconciliation, a working through and settling of differences – a celebration, finally, in spite of all that had divided us as I floundered towards manhood through my adolescent and what would be his last years. There had indeed been furlongs between us. What about, Dad, the anglicising public school so-called education that brought a happy childhood to such a ragged end, and did its best to turn a boyish Taff into an English toff? What about the foxhunting? What about that penchant for the Tory-voting hang-n-flog-em shires? Against his Brylcreemed mohawk I had raised a revenge of tresses sufficient to thatch an army of Guevaras. Against the alleged music of Sir Harry Lauder I had turned, full-volume, the orgasmitudes of Hendrix. I didn’t want to be a farmer, Dad.

Then, neck and neck, through the months of his heart’s perplexed liberation after the release – for them both – of my parents’ divorce, we found mutual forgiveness for perceived shortcomings, found in each other the boy and the man. Able at last to see our matters of division from the other’s point of view, we could raise our glasses – his a Scotch, mine a Guinness – to the future.

Death, though, had another plan. To the black wart on his wrist that was not a wart, my father took an agricultural knife, sporing cancer before long through the whole of his body. He was dead within months. ‘So young,’ said mourner after head-shaking mourner. It was, I remember feeling, daylight, scorched-earth robbery.

But back to the race, and after twenty-seven years of catching up, the plashy nostrils of my lathered mount are panting down my father’s skeletal neck, and he’ll be lost any second in flying hoof-scoops of earth and grass – unless, unless, yes, c’mon, Dad, gimme your hand, I gotcha: leap! And we’re riding on together in galloping tandem, my dad forever aged forty-eight and a half, and me, perhaps – we’ll see – getting old for the pair of us.

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