Finally Mum asked the question mothers nerve themselves to ask: Would this life make me happy? I said that it would, but I couldn’t avoid a vocal wobble and an implication of martyrdom.
The role of martyr was one that I adopted early and relinquished late. I can blame the family dynamic for that, if I put in enough work. Tim was only twenty months old when I was born, and as I grew steadily more eager to grasp he didn’t automatically become more eager to loosen his grip on what he held. Sharing anything was an artificial and imposed piece of behaviour. It wasn’t likely to survive the withdrawal of parental oversight. Sensibly Tim would snatch the disputed object back. In these circumstances, lacking the physical resources to grab and keep what I wanted, I learned to pretend not to want it, to play the role of the sort of self-sacrificing person who gives things up willingly, in the interests of a larger harmony. It was true that I still didn’t get what I wanted but I had the great joy of knowing that Mama (her earliest name) was pleased with me for being such a good boy.
None of this creaking character armour would be in play, luckily, when I confronted Dad with what he least wanted to hear.
It was a big scene in the making, and that was just what I didn’t want made. Dad’s thespian side was strongly developed, mine nipped in the bud for that very reason. To some extent over the years I had observed Dad’s behaviour and learned to modify its excesses. It was sometimes possible to resist the theatricalization that was Dad’s normal response to crisis, to de-dramatize conflict. For instance, if he ordered the three of us out of the house during Christmas lunch after some blow-up at table, a certain amount of de-escalation could be managed as long as we stayed put.
The inventive act was not to push back your chair and throw down your napkin but to peel a tangerine or to reach for the nutcracker, to wait a while and then ask Dad why he was so fond of Kentish cobnuts when they were so fiddly, so hard to get out of their shells.
Breaking off the conversation marooned us in our roles. Refusing the script as he wrote it would guarantee at the least a new configuration of conflict, and might lead to novelties all round.
What I needed to do, on the brink of my rite of passage, was to shape the event so as to bring something small and truthful out of Dad, taking him away from reflexes and set attitudes. I needed to change the character of his performance by restricting its size, as if I was Peter Brook called upon to direct Orson Welles or Donald Wolfit (if anyone remembers that name) in some warhorse of the repertory.
The obvious priority was getting rid of any possibility of an audience. If it was just the two of us there would be more prospect of my being able to damp down his reactions. There was a less selfish aspect, too. Dad wouldn’t have to consider putting on a show of consistency with his previously expressed attitudes, for the benefit of anyone else.
I would need Dad to myself for several days, which by this stage in the evolution of family life wasn’t a natural state of affairs. The tail end of the Christmas holiday in Anglesey offered the obvious opportunity. It wasn’t difficult to persuade my brothers to be reunited with their girlfriends rather than remain fused to the family group. My mother agreed to head back to London early. I don’t remember what pretext we gave for this piece of behaviour, which could legitimately have struck Dad as odd if he had been in a mood to suspect any sort of ambush. Accomplished lying isn’t much of a family characteristic, though it’s hard to be quite sure, since it’s the other sort that gets found out.
I strongly suggested to Mum (she wasn’t ‘Sheila’ then) that she didn’t answer the phone on New Year’s Eve. This was a sensible precaution, since I was trying to release Dad’s rage and sorrow in a controlled explosion, far away from other people. I wanted to minimize the possibility of collateral damage.
Dad’s reflex and survival instinct was not to absorb unwelcome information and emotional disturbance but to re-export it immediately in a new direction. He would start a fight externally in preference to experiencing his own conflicts. How glib that sounds! And psychobabble had barely been invented in those days. But I knew that left to himself, he would pick up the phone, ventilate some anger in Mum’s direction (you let them walk all over you, and this is what happens!) and then feel much better, leaving her struggling to recover the shreds of her poise.
There was already an interpretation of family history in place, available to Dad in times of crisis, according to which he had stuck to principle and refused to ‘buy his sons’ love’, while she had capitulated at every stage and never made a stand against permissiveness. This wasn’t always the way he saw things, but it was the version of events that emerged under stress.
Even at the time I understood that this cover story was a result of pained disappointment not just in his sons but in himself. Not only were we turning out very different from the go-getting brood he had so confidently anticipated, but he had somehow managed to reproduce the atmosphere of his own young manhood, with a father-figure reluctantly obeyed but not much liked. He had wanted to be our friend, and to break the pattern, but had no idea how to realize this new approach to family. Much easier to blame Mum for her tenderness than acknowledge that his own, proudly disguised, had been ignored.
Mum in her moods of frustration sometimes said she felt like ‘kicking hell out of a dwarf’, not in reality revealing an impulse towards discriminatory abuse but conveying that she felt like the final recipient of a long line of tensions passed on in distorted form, and wished she could discharge them in her turn to someone with even less status. When she wasn’t able to be Dad’s comforter and strong support she was likely to be cast in the more oppressive role of scapegoat-in-waiting.
This pattern was available, hallowed by use, and it wasn’t likely that Dad, under great emotional pressure, would fail to blame her in the case of a warping for which mothers are traditionally held responsible. When sons turn out not to be the marrying kind, fathers can play cherchez la femme with a vengeance.
So I recommended to Mum that she phone relatively early in the evening to exchange New Year messages, and not answer the phone after, say, ten o’clock. This was a married couple who spoke on the phone every day when separated, though they had no special ritual for the end of the year. They hadn’t needed one — I imagine this was the first New Year’s Eve they had spent apart since 1947. There’s a risk of overplaying the psychodrama here, and portraying myself as the son who seeks to divide his parents so as to have his mother all to himself (as in accounts of ‘The Psychology of The Homosexual’, orthodox though very passé), but I admit that I didn’t hesitate to impede a ritual communication that was likely to turn nasty under the special circumstances prevailing.
New Year’s Eve is a good time for a family confrontation since there’s never anything worth watching on television, and if you’re very lucky alcoholic bonhomie will carry the day.
The deadline was midnight. I wanted 1977 to be the last year I saw a hypocrite’s face in the mirror, and there were only minutes left of it. I ushered in the new era of frankness by turning off the television and topping up Dad’s wine glass. The era of the ‘whisky sour’ was over — he had been told when diagnosed with his stomach ulcer that he must give up spirits. Then at last it was time for ‘Dad … There’s something I need to tell you.’
That’s the formula for this ceremonial event, though perhaps I should give myself the benefit of the doubt and say that I introduced some slight variation — ‘There’s something you need to know’, or something of the sort. There’s not a lot of room available for improvisation. The coming-out speech is a relatively unvarying form because the event has only two parts, a clearing of the throat to demand attention (hear ye! hear ye!) and then a simple phrase that can’t be taken back (I’m gay). After that, as it seems to the person making the declaration, the fixed points disappear. All clocks return to zero hour and the speakers have new voices issued to them, voices that stray so far from any previous conversation that they might as well be talking in tongues. They might say anything at all.