I held my hands outstretched, catching snowflakes, watching them vanish on my fingertips. My mother went to bed and I pretended to sleep, then I snuck out to the garden and stood under the falling snow. Then we pelted him violently with snowballs, giggling like naughty children. We completed the illusion by giving him my father’s gloves, hat, and umbrella. Unconsciously or not, we built him to represent our absent master: I christened him Dad, and with his big belly, two black stones for eyes, and two slanting twigs for stern eyebrows, the resemblance was uncanny. It snowed heavily in London that December, and the whole of our garden was buried beneath a crisp thick white carpet.
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I remember one winter he was in America on a business trip for a month.įor thirty days, my mother and I had free rein of the house and garden without his watchful eye. There were moments of happiness usually when my father was away from home. The result was a childhood and adolescence dominated by hysteria and physical violence: threats, tears, and breaking glass. If assessed by a psychiatrist today, my father would, I suspect, be diagnosed with a personality disorder-an illness that went untreated for the duration of his life. I asked my mother why my father was always so angry with me, and she gave a despairing shrug and said, “How should I know? Your father’s completely mad.” When she said he was mad, she wasn’t joking. I was never sure what I had done to trigger this anger, or if I deserved it. A rag doll discarded by an angry toddler. I’d be tossed to the floor, landing in a crumpled heap. Then the whipping would be over, as abruptly as it had begun. The belt would be pulled off and whistle in the air before it struck, each successive blow knocking me sideways, burning my flesh. But his hand would grab hold of me, drag me out to meet my fate. I’d breathe in the feathery air, praying the bricks would swallow me up and I would disappear. I’d dive and slide under the bed, against the wall. The house shook as he shouted, chasing me upstairs into my room.
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An innocuous remark or a dissenting voice would trigger his anger and set off a series of explosions from which there was no refuge. My father’s unpredictable and arbitrary rages made any situation, no matter how benign, into a potential minefield. But I suspect it originated in my relationship with my father, around whom I was never safe. This anxiety seemed to predate my existence and exist independently of me. In my case, I grew up feeling edgy, afraid anxious. Who knows what indignities we suffered, what torments and abuses, in this land before memory? Our character was formed without our even knowing it. This is frightening, for obvious reasons.
As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it, “There is no such thing as a baby.” The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with others-we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces namely, our parents. We are born with a brain half-formed-more like a muddy lump of clay than a divine Olympian. But thanks to increasing research into the development of the brain, we know this is not the case. We like to think of ourselves as emerging from this primordial fog with our characters fully formed, like Aphrodite rising perfect from the sea foam. As human beings, in our earliest years we reside in a land before memory. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.
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