The hyphen is the Janus mark, precisely that sign which both joins and separates. Undergraduates of my generation learned to produce emptily suggestive sentences like that by reflex, as we moved into French weather in terms of literary theory and criticism. Such formulas are more fertile in the realm of psychology, where this way of thinking started and where perhaps it should have stayed. Families are divided by the things they have in common. That one might actually be true.
The tug-of-war over the hyphen symbolized an enduring tension. Dad wanted cash and David craved honours. Early on in my first year at Cambridge I met someone at a party who recognized my name and asked if I had any odd relatives in North Wales. I couldn’t categorically deny it, though I had never thought of David and family as odd. It turned out that this fellow student had been holidaying with his family in Colwyn Bay and taking a stroll through the town when they were approached by a jovial man who offered to show them round. This was David during his term as mayor of Colwyn Bay, volunteering his services as tour guide. He offered to change into his robes and regalia, complete with chain of office, if they were wanting to take photographs. He kept them in the back of the car, the municipal equivalent of a superhero costume, so they were ready to hand when duty called.
Dad had all the advantages in terms of ceremonial, with galas of pageantry like the State Opening of Parliament handed him on a plate. David had to improvise, and to take his photo opportunities where he could find them.
Neither brother had a healthy style of life, though David reached his physical limits first. He had heart troubles in his early seventies. While he was convalescing after an operation, his wife, Dilys, or the children if they had charge of him, would leave him in the car while they ran errands, with strict instructions not to move. When they returned to the car, he had usually disappeared, but all they had to do was find the nearest pub and then pluck the glass from one hand, ease the cigarillo from between the fingers of the other.
He died in 1992. Naturally we attended the funeral, and I think we were all concerned about how Dad would take the death of his only close relative, not just brother but younger brother. We travelled by train. Dad’s mobility was already poor. I remember we had to change trains at Chester, and that Dad made use of the lift when we transferred between platforms.
At the reception after the funeral, he gravitated towards the room where small children were watching videos. There he became entirely absorbed by the adventures of Pingu, a penguin animated by stop-motion whose tribe all spoke a delightful Scandinavian-inflected gibberish. Dad became convinced this was Welsh, and that he understood every word. Often he made such statements half-seriously, then defended them in a spirit of fun, but play-acting seemed unlikely on such an occasion, and his move away from adult company was slightly worrying in itself.
We ate in the restaurant car on the train back to London. As he took the first sip of his drink, Dad said, ‘This is the first time I’ve enjoyed myself all day.’ As if the whole idea of a family funeral was to put a spring in your step. There were times when his positivity seemed another name for disconnection.
The standard Welsh attitude to death is the subject of a joke I have heard told by Rob Brydon, though I expect versions of it go back to the era of the Mabinogion.
Rhys Pugh is dying. Dying. His little old head lies sunken in the pillow, as if it had been dropped there from a height. Won’t eat, won’t drink, barely remembers to breathe. Day after day his wife, Bronwen, holds his scrawny hand, brushes his scanty hair. Day by day he sinks. Then one day he says, in his little cracked voice, ‘Bron-wen?’
‘Yes, Rhys?’
‘I feel a bit better today. I could eat a bit of sal-mon.’
Well, Bronwen is made up. Delighted. She scampers to the kitchen and gets busy with the pots and pans that have seen so little use of late. Minutes later she brings a bowl, faintly steaming, to Rhys Pugh’s bedside. She raises him from the pillow of his sickness, cradles him tenderly in the crook of her arm. She lowers a spoonful into his mouth. He mumbles it for a few seconds, raking it back and forward with the stiff blade of his saurian tongue. Then a look of bewilderment and distress settles on his superannuated peasant features. ‘Bron-wen?’ he asks with a tremble in his voice.
‘Yes, Rhys?’
‘Bron-wen, I asked for sal-mon. This is not sal-mon. This is tu-na.’
‘Well, the thing is, my love,’ says Bronwen, ‘I was saving the sal-mon for the funeral.’
That’s one account of the national character, by which the Welsh are perfectly at home with death. It’s life that makes them uncomfortable.
Dad wasn’t like that. His way of being Welsh was very different. If there’s a spectrum of Celtic moods then he tended towards its volatile end. Though he saw himself as rock-solid in the consistency of his principles, you could never quite tell how he would react to anything. The mixture of gravitas and unpredictability made him a remarkable courtroom animal, but it was less of a winning formula in the domestic settings of kitchen or sitting-room.
This was something I had to try to anticipate when I realized, in the late 1970s, that I would have to inform Dad that I belonged to the category he hated and feared. Yes, the moment of coming out, cardinal rite of passage in gay life, though of course the term ‘rite of passage’ can cover anything from bar mitzvah to auto-da-fe.
I had already told Sheila (before I called her anything but Mum), not making a very good job of it. Rose-tinted spectacles is the rule when looking back at the past, though pink cataracts might be the more accurate expression, since spectacles can be taken off. Researchers have found ways of correlating people’s wishful impressions with hard data, checking the age at which children learned to walk or talk (as recorded by healthcare authorities) against parental boasts of precociousness, or establishing the true amount given to charity over a given period as opposed to the inflated claims. So if I’m convinced that I played my coming-out scene to my mother in a key of sickly self-pity, then the reality was surely worse. Did I compare my sexual orientation with her road accident of a few years before, as something that had to be dealt with in all its damage rather than wished away? I’m afraid that I did. As the years went by she must have been surprised to realize that my life contained both fun and meaning, intimacy and a moderate level of self-respect, but then so was I.
It was strangely hard, talking to Sheila, to take the robustly defiant party line in the face of a reaction that contained no criticism. An instant response of sorrowing sympathy gave me emotional cues that I wasn’t able to overrule.
Between us, though, we laid to rest the rather tepid fantasy of my heterosexual future, in which I would be an academic living in a big house outside Cambridge with a grand piano and a family. In this wishful prospect the piano seemed more solid than the shadowy children and a wife who was hardly even a shadow. The whole fantasy depended on the proposition that an academic was a sort of vibrant neuter, and professor the apotheosis of eunuch. The family idea derived from my fondness for children, which was real but didn’t ne-cessarily indicate a baby-making fire in my loins. I was on easier terms with people significantly older or younger than me. Until I had learned how to have a sex life, so as to be able to approach men with the possibility of desire and women without the possibility of misunderstanding, it was people more or less my own age who presented the problems.