8.5.Money

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a full list of instalments so far, see right.

We had a small cremation service for my father attended by close family only, and afterwards lunch in the garden under two awnings as it was a sweltering July day. My mother had bought in quiches, French bread and mounds of strawberries which I had carelessly prepared simply by pulling the green bits out. I didn’t dehull them properly and for once my mother made no comment.

    After the aunts and uncles departed we stayed chatting in the garden. Frog and I planned to drive home overnight as travelling up we’d been caught in a jam on the M25 in Mediterranean heat and it had been almost unbearable.

    A small rainbow appeared in the sky near the sun and we all looked at it in awe.

    ‘It’s called a sundog,’ said Frog, the expert on all things celestial.

    ‘How extraordinary,’ said Amelia. ‘It seems significant, somehow.’

    It did.

A few weeks later, there was a memorial service in the village church for which Frog and I drove up again. My parents had been very sociable and the church was packed with their friends, as well as relatives from far and wide. It was an emotional occasion with music and speeches, laughter and tears. I sat stony faced.

    Afterwards I said to Frog, ‘That was confusing, wasn’t it. I didn’t recognise the person they were all talking about. How come I see him so differently?’

    ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ said Frog. ‘I felt the same.’

I didn’t shed a tear for my father then, but I had shed lots fourteen years earlier when we were seeing Pat. I’d mourned the father I’d loved and admired so much when I was a child.

    The father who read Jo and me extracts from a book called The Witches’ Kitchen. I think it was one from his childhood as it had a drab hard cover like many of the other old books – some dating to Victorian times - that lived on the shelves at home. He read it with relish, and Jo and I would squeal with delighted terror.

    The father who would come up and see us children in bed when he got back from work, and when we asked him excitedly how much he’d earned today, would pull the change from his pocket and count it. That was what fathers did, we knew that. They earned money.

    The father who protected me from crocodiles under the bed.

    The father who loved practical jokes, who had a mustard pot that wasn't a mustard pot, that a green snake would jump out of when you took the lid off.

    The father who taught us what he called the Siamese War Cry:

    'Oh wah, tah nah, Siam.'

    [Try saying that.]

    The father who wore a pale green v-necked jumper for years and years, even when it was full of holes. It made him look so handsome.

    The father who helped me with my maths homework, who was so patient and explained it so simply and clearly.

    The father who’d found me in the dining-room one evening in my early teens crying over my school books because I had so much revision to do before my exams and who’d been both sympathetic and encouraging, probably bringing out the family motto he’d created: ‘All the Fishers are tough’. He would ask us to repeat it and we would chant it back to him. We thought it was a huge joke.

    The father with whom I’d had a special relationship because I was his oldest child, and a girl.

Now my father was the bogeyman, the one who scared me. The one who hadn’t wanted me to go to Australia. The one who’d tried to come between me and Frog, who’d written such long intricate letters which had appeared so reasonable but had cut me to the core. The one who was always so critical. The one I no longer trusted. He still meant money to me, but the love was gone.

    Money had been a problem, I could see that now. Not only had I been terrified of losing my family if I stood my ground, but I hadn’t wanted to be cast adrift in a ruthless world with only the money that Frog and I could earn between us. I needed and wanted his financial help. And my father had perhaps tried to keep it that way.

At one time, probably when I was in my thirties, I’d asked him if I needed to be paying into a pension.

    ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘You’ll be fine.’

    What I took that to mean was that I would be provided for when he and my mother died, but when I discussed the subject with my sister Cass she had a different take.

    ‘What he meant’, she said in her usual confident way, ‘was that women didn’t need to concern themselves with money.’

    Little did he know, I thought, that I was the financial brains of my marriage. Frog was such a spendthrift that he had to run all purchases by me. We had joint accounts and I checked the statements. I gave him the cash he needed. I paid the bills (as he simply tucked them down the back of the sofa). I filled out the tax forms. I did all the financial planning.

    Even though my father wouldn’t have dreamt of inducting me – or any of his daughters - in the ways of handling money, of acquiring capital, of providing for old age, I’d imbibed financial acumen from him. I was proud of that, and proud that I was doing it without him knowing. It was a small victory.

But I hadn’t stood up to him when he gave me the money to buy a house on condition that it was in my name only, that Frog was left out of it. And I hadn’t taken out a private pension. I was still relying on an inheritance.

    Money had come between me and the truth, me and independence, me and an adult relationship with my father.

    I wasn’t proud of that.

    And now it was too late to do anything about it.

    

To be continued