Wicked Way with Words

Lecker means delicious in my father’s tongue. Not to be confused with lecture which he often did, especially after my sixteenth birthday when he warned me about so many things.

Do not borrow money—this will lose you friends. He meant lending, actually, and I still confuse this word myself all these years later despite my mistake being corrected again and again. I tried to get round this by giving money instead when a friend of mine was stranded in December for lack of money to purchase a transatlantic flight to visit her much-missed boyfriend at Christmas. I lost her anyway. Generosity seems to be a curse sometimes. 

Do not talk about religion, politics, or money. 

Well, was it my fault when I enthused about my newly discovered yoga class to a dear friend and she warned me against the perils of Eastern religions? She then consulted with her minister and they all prayed for me which made me feel uncomfortable. When I continued to obtain great benefits from yoga such as improved sleep and less self-criticism of my unwieldly body, she disowned me. 

Last I heard, she and her husband became missionaries to Eastern Europe. Maybe I should have lied, but though I have been told I have a wicked way with words, I am not generally good at telling lies though I might withhold a truth if need be.

My father’s advice about avoiding politics was my refuge when Brexit came. I only discussed my opinion if the friend I was speaking with shared theirs and it happened to match. Never in a crowd of people at the office or any public place. 

I was pleased to find that, more often than not, my friends and I were aligned on this question. Of course, as a foreigner I had no chance to officially express my opinion to the British government about whether the UK should leave the European Union or not. Rather like sailing on the Titanic and watching the huge iceberg looming into view.

Disclosing money matters because I was worried about all the credit card debt I discovered after my mother’s sudden death resulted, strangely enough, in me investing in my friend’s new gardening business. This was not a loan, but a gift. I specified that, quite clearly, when handing over what to me was equivalent to a month’s rent for a two-bedroom apartment that I hadn’t managed to move out of yet.

Maybe I should have paid for this agreement to be drawn up in a legal document—gift, not loan, no need to repay—because, of course, we gradually spoke less on the phone and opportunities to meet up began to be postponed. 

Eventually, after being estranged from her and her husband for several years, I received a bankruptcy notice from their legal representative saying that the loan would never be repaid. I gazed up at the ceiling and muttered through clenched teeth, “But it was a gift!”

So, despite my father’s good advice, I still had to learn the hard way at the university of life.

But I digress. Let me start again.

Lecker means delicious in my father’s tongue. A remark like that might imply that I learned German as a child, but this was not the case. On a very long walk with my godparents once, my mittened hands in theirs, crunching through a white world of snow on the way to church, I learned to count to ten and a few phrases, but that was all. 

School only offered French and the teacher rejected my application because I could not contort my mouth to make the sounds required, quashing my dreams of visiting Quebec across the border and maybe someday seeing the Eiffel tower. Not that lack of a language prevents travel, but as a young child, I felt sure that you needed to learn first. One of my numerous strange ideas.

That snowy walk remains vivid in my mind because it was unusual. I think their car, pampered by being parked in a small garage, failed to start so we attended a later Mass than planned, barely arriving in time. The odd thing is I have no idea where my mother was that Sunday and crave to ask her for details but Heaven does not accept WhatsApp calls as yet. 

Were they teaching me German to distract me from worrying because my mother was in hospital due to that nosebleed that would not stop? 

Possibly, but why don’t I remember being worried? That walk shines so bright in memory that I would almost call it idyllic apart from mother being absent. 

Okay, so I may have a wicked way with words but you will have surmised from the story so far that words have a wicked way with me as well, leading me into a digression for the second time in barely more than one page. Third time lucky?

Lecker means delicious in my father’s tongue, as you might well recall.

I watch the cursor blinking on the screen, stare out the window at the milky dawn sky above slate roofs and chimney pots, listen to the back-and-forth clamour of unseen jackdaws.

So, plunging in despite the water being cold and deep. . .

As a child, I soon realised that I lacked a father and was so well aware of that vacancy that I prayed about it.

My mother had not told me yet that my father was dead, judging that too grim a truth or, rather, an untruth. Divorce was not a word I knew yet, either, but did become another lie she told me later. At that time and for over two decades, I kept hoping and praying that he would come back.

I remember praying once that if my father was still alive, a flame on one of the candles on the altar would go out. Another time, I decided that the ultimate proof would be for a frog to hop into the church. Even as a child, I had a vivid imagination. Unsurprisingly, the candle stayed lit and the toad didn’t show.

At a young age, I soon pieced together the conclusion that each my dozens of cousins had a pair of parents, not just one.

When I started kindergarten, I discovered that everyone there also had a father because we had to do a special drawing to take home for Father’s Day. 

Toward the end of the day, we each had to hold up our drawing so everyone could see and then tell the class something father liked. 

Drawing was no problem. I loved to draw since I could first hold a crayon, preferred it to colouring because keeping inside the lines was very difficult. I have found it hard to follow rules many times since then. 

One slightly crooked house with two windows and a door and smoke curling up from the chimney under a shining sun. One mother, one father, two children despite the fact that I was an only child, plus a dog and a cat with a curly tail. I would have added my red wagon but ran out of time. 

Mother and I lived in an apartment and only had two canaries, but never mind. Even when I was still so little that mother could pick me up to sit me on her lap, I knew how important it was to Fit In. 

I listened to all the other kids talk about what their father liked. Football. Baseball. Cars. Sleep. Beer. Racehorses. Some answers were repeated, possibly borrowed because the child speaking had no idea what their father liked. I wanted to give a different answer, though I knew this would be a challenge because teacher was going round the circle and I was going to be last again.

“What a nice drawing,” the teacher said to me. “And what does your father like?”

I was bursting to say what none of the others had said, to say that my father liked my mother.

But with the eyes of all the children and the teacher focused on me, I felt tongue-tied.

He must not have liked her because he was gone. Or maybe he didn’t like me. Or both. 

My desperate gaze landed on a pile of books on the teacher’s desk. 

“My father likes books,” I said, thinking at the time that everyone likes books because I did. I would find out later the truth about that. “He likes to read.”

“Very good, everyone,” the teacher said, bringing both her hands up and folding them under her chin with a big smile to show us how happy she was with us. 

Incidentally, I absolutely adored her and can still remember her face. I had no idea that I would very soon be exiled from kindergarten before summer started. In September, I would be going into first grade, a completely strange classroom with a different teacher and much less time to play. One of the many shocks that life in the modern world delivers to unsuspecting new humans.

I remembered how to breathe because finally everyone was looking at teacher rather than me.

More than twenty years later, in a vast hotel near Windsor, the first week that I spent with my father revealed to me that he preferred newspapers to books as I fetched him The Guardian every morning. 

The shrewd reader might have some doubts at this point.

She had advice from her father at age sixteen, but now she is saying that she spent a “first” week with him in her twenties?

Yes. Quite true.

All during my childhood, my teenage years, and my early twenties, the role he played was not officially fatherly. He was my mother’s boss, the owner of the business, and when I wrote letters to him while he travelled the world for much of the year, I called him uncle. Obvious, with hindsight.

When I began to learn German in high school, completely by coincidence after two years studying Spanish, and attempted to write to him in his native language, he sent every letter back with corrections as if he was a school teacher. I was mortified, being a teenager, though I kept trying, always eager to please.

You might have gathered that my mother, bless her, also had a wicked way with words. She implied to her extended family that I was adopted. That, however, is another story for another time.

But, although I have often been accused of being a chatterbox and over-sharing, it’s not genetic from her side. Being a Pisces, she kept her secrets mostly to herself. I know she was trying to protect me from the stigma of being illegitimate, so I understand. Maybe she didn’t realise that being adopted is socially challenging too.

Growing up fatherless was a struggle and I envy anyone who grew up in a little house with both a mother and a father, a sibling or two, and a dog and a cat.

Nobody’s life is ideal, of course, and each one of us has an individual learning curve to climb. Sometimes I slip back down. Sometimes I achieve a high perch and enjoy the view of the sunset. The next day, I know, will always bring another lesson. Maybe more than one. Often the same lesson again and again until I finally learn it and can move on.