Back Then

I never believed my Dad until he died. Even then, I had to go back in time and verify his fairy tales. I loved him. Still do. But the stories he told me were irrelevant to the space I occupied. His outpourings were outlandish, and they just did not belong in my world. I could not comprehend the world of lack that he spoke so fondly of.

My Dad was the best man I ever knew. But he had these oddball moments and in those moments he was a bizarre parody of himself. He’d have this wistful expression and I knew what was coming even before he looked that way. He’d compose himself inhaling a deep breath as he stepped up onto his soapbox.

When I were a lad…

As if there were only three TV channels and no functionality to pause, let alone rewind. His pink face would take on a moon like quality as he recounted dysfunctional moments that he seemed to miss. That was part of the problem. I just could not get my head around missing things that weren’t ever there.

“There’d be a pig that appeared on the box. You know how Granddad had a pig farm? Dad! Dad! There’s a pig! He’d not hear, so you’d shout louder and when he did come to the door of the living room, the pig would disappear, with the split second guile of a magician.”

As if.

Then there were Saturday mornings and having to choose whether you were a Tiswazser or a Saturday Morning Swap Shopper. Excitement over celebs, the Phantom Flan Flinger and the Dying Fly. The talk at school was of the latest episode of a series, be it Doctor Who or The Young Ones. There was no variety. Everyone was put in crowded queues. How sad.

He talked about his first ever home computer and how it had the processing power of half a carrot. Reminisced over the screeching sound of a modem, mimicked it in an approximation of a tortured chicken breathing helium, as he loaded a game that wasn’t much more than a handful of pixels jerking across a snowy screen.

The entire landscape was bleak and barren. A shared landline and telephone books that given a bit of work, he could rip in two to impress his friends. But get into trouble with his parents because they relied upon that tome to look up numbers before spinning the dial on a phone that he’d had a toy of as a kid. A brightly painted clown thing on wheels that he dragged around with him everywhere for what was probably a Summer but felt like half a lifetime.

Meeting friends required planning ahead, but it seemed to happen a lot. They’d just sort of hang out all day, but I never got what they actually did. They’d ride their BMXs, like BMXs were a big deal. Dad said they were, but again, I never got why. They’d launch themselves down big hills and see who got the most air and also who got the most impressive injuries. They had these strange words, like they were a lost tribe or something. The tarzy was named after Tarzan and was an unravelling rope, usually blue, that swung out over a body of water. Getting wet was part of the fun. Then there was kerbsy which was a two player game that entailed throwing a football at the opposite kerb of a road and catching it as it came back at you. The excitement was increased by the occasional passing car. Some slowed and waited for a shot, others sped up in an attempt to ruin the flow of the game. 

They had knives back then, but never stabbed each other. Instead they whittled and regularly nicked themselves, but could never tell their parents how they’d received their injuries, as none of them were allowed to have knives, even if they were small and pathetic blades in a pen knife style.

My Dad told me he was ever so lucky to have been born when he did. That he saw more firsts than he could shake a fist at. One thing we always agreed upon was the music. As I grew up, he played music from every decade and talked to me about subcultures and waves and movements. That there was an underlying vibrance to music and the related fashions, that was revived over and over as another group of kids reacted to what they called The Establishment. Expression was experimental, but also confident, and this was the context to the tracks that my Dad played for me.

He mourned the demise of the album. He called this playlist an artform. Artists guiding the listener through a musical journey. He told me there was no journey these days. That people sat at a table and consumed a buffet that had so little cultural flavour to it.

My Dad told me so much. I wish that I had been listening to the walking, talking history lesson that he was. I wish I’d closed my eyes and imagined the times he was describing to me. But I was scared. I didn’t want to think about how it would be to have no smartphone, let alone an internet. 

No texts? I would literally be lost without texts, even before I went to my Maps app. He made shopping sound like a fun ritual. Mostly it was browsing, which I got more. But around markets, clothes stores and record shops. Out there in a world that was somehow more friendly than it is now.

“You have to remember that all towns and cities were chock full of really good shops,” he’d tell me.

Those times were always really good. But when I did try to imagine them, they were washed out to a point where the colour had almost completely faded. Dead times. And dead boring.

And then suddenly, my Dad was dead and I found myself thinking about him back in those times. It felt to me that that was where he’d been taken. Taken from me to live again in the times that he had so loved. He was younger then. More like me, even in that alien environment.

I missed him from the moment he was gone. There was no pause. I felt the loss entirely. The space he vacated was too big and too important for me not to experience it in its entirety. An emptiness. A lack that I would never completely fill. But I had an idea as to how I could at least partially fill it.

And so I went back. I had to cheat, and I know my old man would find that ever so funny. All that time I was with the horse’s mouth, and I had to resort to the window that had no soul. I opened my phone and I searched for my Dad in that space that he called The Dead Place. At one point, I typed a search asking how long the search engine had been in existence; just over twenty five years. My Dad had lived in a time when you really couldn’t find the answer in the space of a few seconds. You’d had to ask others, or go to a library. You had to trust in others, but also think critically. A strange and conflicted time. Far less easy.

Acquiring knowledge was hard work back then. But people still did it. They did it because it was worth it. Knowledge and understanding had far more worth back then.

I thought about that, and I allowed my imagination to gambol across the landscape of the seventies, eighties and nineties. This was a new age for me. An age of thinking. I tried to fathom how people could live well, if they didn’t have the answers to everything at their fingertips, and yet they had done just fine. Better than fine, if my Dad was to believed. 

As I thought more and more about these times, I believed. 

Now I deigned to close my eyes. I played Bowie and Duran Duran and Depeche Mode. The Prodigy smashed the place up with a post punk cacophony. Then I brought it down with some Nick Drake, before drifting on to Radiohead. Once there I listened to their albums and marvelled at their invention and reinvention.

This soundtrack transported me back as I used what little I recalled, and began to rebuild my Dad’s past. This was my memorial to him. The context of him. This was a journey he’d taken me on, but now I was doing it for real. For myself as much as for him. 

Then I saw what it all meant. These were my roots. Our roots. I was discovering layer after layer of meaning and in doing so, I had a growing desire to share what I now knew. One day, I would regale my children with these stories. But they could only make sense of these tales if I made them real. If I lived them. If I immersed myself in every aspect of a past that had made our present and our futures possible.

I still miss my Dad, but I give thanks for him every day. What he gave me far outweighs any notion I may have of loss. He lives on in a growing landscape of culture that I never knew existed. I am more in the moment for my forays into a past that conveys simplicity and a single-minded purpose.

I know what a floppy disc is now and not only it’s importance, but how cool it was at the time. I also know why someone might need a pencil or pen for a cassette tape. I am a historian, but my interest is not in dead cities. It is in the living and how it is that we got to be living the way we do now. I started this quest of mine to recapture something of my dear Dad, but the treasure he left buried for me has given me far, far more than that.