Free That's Another Story: The Autobiography by Julie Walters Page A

and its consequences. If a fight or argument were to take place, he would disappear. There was one incident between my brother Kevin and myself, when he was about eighteen and I was thirteen, where I hurled an ashtray at him. I missed Kevin and hit my father on the knuckle. Dad, instead of intervening, simply said, ‘Oh, I’m getting out of here.’ And he left the room. He seemed to have little connection with his sons and, although he was proud, I believe he felt reduced to some extent by their academic achievements. However, it was his sense of humour that was the basis of his survival. When my brother Tommy won a scholarship to Cambridge to study for a PhD, and announced it to my parents, my father was sitting reading the Smethwick Telephone , our local rag, and without looking up he said, ‘I can’t see any adverts for philosophers in the Situations Vacant.’
    He was a slightly built, wiry man with thick, dark curly hair, swept back and tamed by a daily dose of brilliantine. Both of my parents being small, dark eyed and dark haired, they were often, so my mother said, mistaken for brother and sister. Dad always, especially towards the end of his life, looked older than his years, his face hollow-cheeked, weathered and deeply riven with lines. Even when he was smiling, there was a permanent expression of worry etched deep into his face; across his forehead and between his brows were lines of anxiety and bewilderment.
    I was his favourite and was in no doubt whatsoever of his love for me. My love for him, however, felt more like pain; it hurt and was suffused with pity. As a child, I fretted about him and for him. I feared somewhere that he wasn’t up to the task of life. This, I think, was in part because of his physical appearance. His smoking habit, having started in childhood, kept him very thin. When questioned by us as to why he never went into the sea whilst on holiday, he said, ‘Last time I went swimming, everyone thought it was a pair of braces floating in the water.’ In the later years of his life I would say that he was emaciated; his pulse didn’t need to be felt, it could be taken simply by looking at his outstretched arm and counting the twitches in the radial artery that ran the length of it.
    But it was also due in part to the way my mother related to him. She constantly referred to him as ‘your poor father’ while commenting favourably about other, bigger men: ‘Oh, he’s a fine figure of a man.’ She spoke in reverential terms about men in professional positions, with the usual little gasp that would precede statements like ‘He’s a bank manager!’ or ‘He’s a doctor!’ Her breathy, wavery voice, lowered in register, indicated on these occasions the deep respect she felt for such a man in such a position. I don’t think these things were said with any malice towards my father. I think they were born more out of insensitivity, together with frustration about her own position in life and her own lack of self-esteem; but they fuelled the fear and pity that I felt for him and my brothers took much pleasure in whipping up these feelings with merciless teasing.
    One incident has stayed with me. I was about five and there had been a snowstorm with high winds that had brought our garden fence crashing down. I watched, helpless and sobbing, at the kitchen window as it began to grow dark and my dad struggled alone, in the driving snow, with the six-foot-high fence as the wind lifted it and tossed it this way and that, its force sending him staggering under the weight of the big wooden panels. He looked small, David against the Goliath of the elements, and there was no one to help, all three of us having been told that it was dangerous and to stay indoors. I felt wretched watching this pitiful little scene, while my brothers, amused by and seizing on my misery, cranked it up several notches: ‘Oh poor Dad, look, he can’t lift the fence. Ahhh, poor Dad.’ I was conscious of the fact that