Once upon a life

Once upon a life: Anthony Horowitz

"When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it's never good news."

Those are the words that quite literally changed my life. I vividly remember writing them. I had published about 15 children's books, but with only a limited amount of success, and was seriously thinking of giving them up altogether. My television career, working on shows such as Robin of Sherwood and Poirot, was in much better shape. Who needed children's books anyway? (This was before Harry Potter.) But there had always been this one idea about a teenage spy that had been nudging at my consciousness, and one afternoon I sat down and wrote the first sentence of what was to be Stormbreaker, the opening novel in the Alex Rider series. Since then the books have sold about 12m copies in more than 30 languages, and the truth is that as I looked at that sentence, sitting in my studio in Crouch End, I knew that I had somehow unlocked something and that this would finally be the breakthrough I had been looking for.But actually the sentence is based on a far earlier memory, and it wasn't a doorbell that rang at three o'clock, it was a telephone. I was 21 years old and living in the north London suburb of Stanmore. I knew at once what the phone call meant. It was the hospital ringing to tell us my father had died.
He had been ill a few years before with a virulent and disabling form of cancer that had necessitated his first serious operation. My father, a fastidious and private man, never really came to terms with the medication, the medical apparatus and the dietary rules that now confronted him. And when the cancer returned, he never acknowledged it. The rule in our family was that you ignored illness, or at least downplayed it, and I often wonder if he might not have survived if he had only recognised what was wrong with him and gone back to the doctor sooner.

Anyway, he'd had a second, major operation that had brought a spark of hope which had quickly faded and we all – which is to say my mother, brother, sister and I – knew that the end wasn't far away.

The phone rang. I woke up and as I lay there I felt… nothing. I was aware I should be crying or burying my head in the pillow or emoting in some way, but I was completely numb. I gazed out of the window at the moonlight (just as Alex crosses to the window to see the police car below) and tried to think about the father I had lost.

Mark Horowitz was a man of many contradictions. He was a solicitor and businessman whose business always remained a mystery to me but which may have been on the outer fringes of the law. Why else would he have once asked me to cross London pretending to be a dispatch rider, delivering £150,000 (half a million in today's currency) to an anonymous man in an office in Mayfair? He was enormously cultured, with a love of classical music and a huge library of 19th-century novels which I later inherited. He was kind and generous with his wealth. At the same time he was remote and could be quite cruel. He never believed for a minute I'd make a success out of writing.

He had gone bankrupt some years before – this was when many investment banks collapsed. At the time we had been living in a quite palatial house in extensive grounds which should have been in the countryside but was actually just off the main Uxbridge Road. We had downgraded to a smaller, very ordinary house called Tall Chys. A chy was supposed to be the poetic name for a chimney, but I've never been able to find it in any dictionary. We'd once had five servants. Now we just had a delightful and infuriating housekeeper called Fitzy – she was the model for Sam Stewart in Foyle's War. My father was still doing deals. He was still a rich man. Or so we thought.

At any event, my mother came into my room, as always keeping her emotions under strict control, and we set off for St Thomas's Hospital. An element of farce entered the proceedings, as my brother, who was driving, decided to take a short cut around Belsize Park and somehow we managed to get lost. It didn't matter very much anyway, as my father had died long before we arrived. A nurse came down the corridor with that look that says it all. And still, like Meursault in L'Etranger (a book I had just finished reading) I couldn't connect with what was going on.

The nurse asked us if we would like to see the body. We all went in. I wish I hadn't. I have written dozens of murders for shows such as Midsomer Murders and Poirot. I have seen plenty of actors with their eyes closed, stretched out on the floors of libraries and sitting rooms. But real death is nothing like that. I will never forget the waxy, utterly lifeless thing that was lying on the bed. It wasn't my father at all. Every cell, every pore of his skin, even his hair was dead. And now, 35 years later, it is hard to get past that memory to the man who lived behind it. I don't want anyone to see me when I'm dead.

Stormbreaker starts with a funeral, and much of Alex's bewilderment and displacement was my own. In the Jewish religion you have to bury the dead as quickly as possible, and that same day I set off with an uncle to buy my father's coffin. Uncle David was a large, bullish man and my other vivid memory is watching him argue vociferously about the price of the coffin with an increasingly irate Eastern European undertaker. "You vont mahogany, you pay for mahogany!"

It was a bitterly cold day for a funeral – this was January, I think. Most of my family is buried in a large cemetery near Bushey, but I don't intend to end up there. It's too bleak. Although he had never been religious, my father had decided to have an orthodox funeral. No women were allowed to attend. I can still see my mother, sister and various aunts, all in black, standing arm in arm as we drove away. I had to read out the Kaddish – the Jewish prayer of death – over the grave, but I had long since abandoned my religion and so I had to have the Hebrew words written out in English phonetics and hidden behind the prayer book.

The first letter came a few days later. It was from a bank. "Dear Mrs Horowitz," it began. "Please may we offer you our most sincere condolences." It then went on to raise the awkward matter that the late Mr Horowitz owed the bank £100,000. The next letter came the day after. By the end of the week we had about a dozen and realised all my father's money had disappeared, that he had even cashed in the life-assurance policies, that effectively my mother owed everything she owned.

In the months that followed, she made a few trips to Switzerland in an attempt to find out what had happened to the money – but she was unsuccessful. I remember a black notebook with strange figures and code names: Archduke and Oscar. They were clues that led nowhere. It seemed my father had taken all his money out of one Swiss bank and deposited it in another – and not being aware how ill he was, had failed to mention where it was. It's quite likely that one of his business connections nipped over to Geneva and stole the lot even while we were in Bushey cemetery. I looked them up on the internet, these names I recall from my childhood. One of them was expelled from the stock exchange for premium stripping (he died in 1998). The other is described by the Economist as "a fugitive financier" and is still hiding, now in a wheelchair, in Spain.
anthony horowitz Photograph: Getty Images

I don't think my father was a bad man, all in all. I still have his books, and when I read them I think of him. But it's his death I remember mainly. His life is much further away.

Once upon a life: Anthony Horowitz

Time travelling

One afternoon I was at my parents’ looking at a large framed photo on their bedroom wall. I knew the picture well. It showed a family group, sitting in the back yard of a house. It had the appearance of a Victorian formal photo: furniture and carpets had been dragged out into the yard to create a tableaux. On household chairs sat a family, the father a paterfamilias in suit, waistcoat and Lech Walesa moustache. They all wear formal clothes, but they don’t look uncomfortable. They are all dead now and I never met any of them, but I can recognise myself in their faces and I can see my children in their children. I know, of course, the many descendants of Jeanette and a grand-daughter of Miriam. For the rest, I have no idea. But one thing I do know is where this photo was taken.
Anticipating a day when my father would no longer be there to tell me who these familiar yet mysterious people are, I carefully made a schema on the back of the picture and marked out who they all were. Sitting proud amid their five children are Rachel and Herschel Pope. The year is about nineteen-fifteen and these two had both immigrated to South Africa from Lithuania as children in the previous century. This was not unusual. For some historical reason most Lithuanian Jews went not to America or England, but to South Africa, leading to a thriving community that eventually provided some of the leading lights of the independence movement. Rachel and Herschel’s five children are, from the left: Jeanette, Eli, Bella, Jack and Miriam. Jeanette is my grandmother.
My grandmother, Jeanette, married and had four boys by the early thirties. She also had a single daughter who died in infancy. My father was her oldest son. They’re all dead now, but he was the last to die. The first to be born, he arrived out in the bush where his parents were running a hospital, and he outlasted all his brothers. It was said this was because his mother fed him on mealy maize porridge for the first years of his life. I’ve read that what you eat in the first year of your life affects how long you will live, so maybe that’s true.
So I was looking at this photo and drawing a little plan on the back and writing in names of everyone and I asked, so where was this house. Because the yard was so easy to overlook, such an anonymous space. And he said, that was the back yard of my grandfather Herschel’s house. Herschel is the one who looks to me like Lech Walesa, the Polish leader of Solidarity back in the day. He’s sitting like a Victorian patriarch, but I think he was actually a bit of a softie. They lived right next to the rugby stadium. Straib Street. My grandfather owned and ran three shops on this street, he said.
I immediately wanted to look up the street on the internet, on Google Maps. I’ve never been to Johannesburg, I’ve never been to South Africa. When I was younger my family often went, but I always missed out, either because I was away travelling or because I was boycotting the regime and my family by association. I was a bit purist. Not only had I never been there, but Johannesburg, the South Africa of my father’s childhood, was to me a historic dream. I knew a lot about it, I’d seen a lot of photos of his family, but I didn’t consider it to still exist. I’d never actually wondered about where he lived as a child, where he grew up, where he’d gone to school.
To me, the world was sundered by the Nazi period, and although my father’s family were luckily safe and far away from the European horrors, I didn’t consider that anything from before the war could have remained just as it was, especially when it pertained to Jews. My father was born in nineteen-twenty. He had his barmitzvah in nineteen thirty-three, just as the Nuremberg laws were being passed. I saw a terrible symmetry in his life. He joined the army as a nineteen year old and served in Africa until late in the war when he was discharged. After the war he came to England just as the Nationalists came to power in South Africa and instituted apartheid. He had been a communist as a youth and I imagined that he was a target for both Nazis and the apartheid regime. I constructed an image of him as a holocaust survivor, not because he’d been there but because he’d been alive and a Jew. As I told myself, there are not many Lithuanian Jews born in nineteen-twenty who are still alive. Not many.
So that day, when he told me the address of his grandfather’s house, it was like a small crack opened in history and let me take a look in. I immediately went and put the address into Google Earth and in the satellite view that popped up in an instant there was the street, with no houses still standing, but right next to it the national rugby stadium. I took the laptop through to dad and showed it to him. Yes, he said, unfazed, we could see the rugby stadium, it loomed over the house and cast it into shadow. Then he looked at the map again for a while. ‘We lived up there,’ he said, jabbing at the screen with his finger to the north of the rugby stadium. I scrolled up and he guided me until we found his street. He pointed to houses, that one, no, that one. Yes. That’s our house.
I was astounded. I’d never considered that the house he grew up in might still be there. It wasn’t that I didn’t think it would be there, rather that it had never entered my head. I know nothing much about that part of his life, although there are quite a few pictures of him and his brothers in a large garden. The Google satellite image showed a typical urban city landscape: plenty of large houses with their own gardens. I was thinking about the house, but Dad was already off around the block. That’s where Ruby did his apprenticeship. Ruby was one of his brothers, a chemist with his own shops. Or was it a chain of shops. What did I know about this family? And that’s my school, over there. I scrolled sideways. And we used to walk up and down this road to visit my grandparents at weekends.
We were suddenly back in nineteen-thirties Johannesburg, a calm ordered world, privileged, but before apartheid. Before the holocaust. Before the war and his move to London and the part of his life that I was part of. We scanned the streets and he pointed out landmarks that he could remember. After a while he tired of taking me for a walk around his childhood town. I realised that Google maps is a time machine, that if they retained each change of satellite imagery we would be able to peel back the years, to travel back to earlier incarnations of towns and cities. Of course, the Johannesburg we looked at that day wasn’t the same Johannesburg he grew up in. The road he walked down to visit the grandparents had turned into as sunken multi-lane carriageway. But it was close enough. I’d done something I never anticipated. I’d seen where my dad grew up with him by my side and it’s something I’ll never forget. I wrote the address of his grandparents house carefully on the back of the picture. Now I can go back there any time.

Lighting a candle for Dad

It's the anniversary of Dad's death, three years to the day. I say 'to the day' but there's some uncertainty about which day is the actual anniversary. The death certificate says 24 December 2007 as that was the day that the police went into Dad's house and found him but it was the evening of the previous day that Dad wasn't answering the phone when my brother called him. In my mind it's always the 23rd.

At lunchtime on the 23rd I located via Google a catholic church near my work and printed a map. Seeing that it was on the way to Shepherd's Bush market, the home of Mr Falafel, I arrange lunch with my friend Karen who first took me to Mr Falafel. On the instant message I explain that we need to stop off at a Catholic church on the way. "You are kidding, right?"

10 minutes later we're outside the Our Lady of Fatima. It looks closed. Karen tries one of the three shut doors. The handle turns but the door doesn't open. I say "Let me try".

We both try all the doors and while I'm deciding what to do next a small shrunken lady with a moustache who I thought was just walking past asks me if I'd like to see the priest. I realise she's something to do with the church and I say no, I'd like to light some candles. She shakes her head and makes her way to the house behind the church. If I'm in need of spiritual guidance I can see a priest but I can't light candles.

The falafel is delicious. I had the falafel wrap with makdoos - a pickled aubergine - with extra hot chilli. It's sour and spicy but I'm talking too much about Dad and it gets cold and I can't finish it.It's just before Christmas and the place is filled with one group of smiling office workers. They all go to pay at the till at the same time while Karen is trying to get our Mr Falafel loyalty cards stamped.

After work that evening I'm due to meet my wife in Highbury for dinner so I find a Catholic church up that way. I look at the map and realise I would have walked past it without noticing on the way to the 277 bus stop from the old Arsenal ground with my friend Cathy, a gooner ticket season holder. This time I call the church and after a short while an Irish sounding man answers. This is more like it I think. I resist the urge to call him Father - he hasn't said he's a priest. He might be an actor or a comedian who's visiting.

I explain why I need to visit the church and he agrees to open the church at 5.45. It can't be any later as he has people coming over that evening. I  imagine him and his friends drinking sherry as they prepare for Our Saviour's birthday.

An hour later I'm outside the church. I'm early. The lights outside the church are on but before I go in I take a picture of the church. As Dad isn't here it feels like I'm doing it so I can show it to him later. Stupid and absurd. Death does strange things to you. I also take a picture of the priest's parking space for no reason except that I find it funny.

I've been watching old episodes of Father Ted on TV in the days leading up to the anniversary. I now realise that it's by way of preparing myself for this moment. I've also thought about what I'd say if the priest asks why I wanted to light candles two days before Christmas. Again the answer's absurd: if Dad we're alive he'd have appreciated it. I don't believe in life after death: people live on only in our memories.

Inside, the church is mostly dark and empty but there's a group of people in one of the side chapels on the other side of a glass door. There's a black man in a long white robe. I don't think he's the man I spoke to but I might be wrong. I find the candles in another chapel and although there's none lit on the stand there's a lit votive candle at the feet of Jesus. I guess that's there to light the others from.

I look in my purse. There's some change including a pound coin and a five pound note. I think I'd imagined putting a few quid in. Then I think don't be so mean and I fold the note to slip it into the slot of the metal tin.

I worry it won't fall down and the priest won't find it when he empties it and he'll think I didn't leave anything. I wrap the five pound note around one of the coins to weigh it down and push it into the slot. If I believed in god then it wouldn't have mattered about the money - he would have known how much I'd left.

I choose five candles: three with red surrounds and two blue. One for each of his children and one for his wife. Do you only light candles for people or can you light them from people? Maybe I'm lighting them for those left behind. For them from him - because  he can't anymore. The lit votive candle has burnt down making it hard to reach the burning wick. I grip the plastic case of my first candle tightly and push the unlit wick towards the flame thinking it'll just reach. Then the candle I'm holding falls out from its plastic sleeve onto the light one immediatly extinguishing the flame. It feels like the chapel has gone dark. I have the splashes of wax on my fingers. I look around the alter and the shelves where the candles sit. There aren't any matches anywhere.

The man in the white robe is walking by the alcove and I say hello. I ask him if he has a light. He doesn't say anything and in the gloom I'm not sure if he's looking at me. He's facing me but I don't know if he's looking at me as his eyes point is different directions - the opposite of cross-eyed but I don't know what it's called.

He says to wait a minute and walks way in the darkness. I wait and think about dad. He doesn't return so I walk up the aisle of the church towards the alter. The man in the robe is there looking behind the candles and shaking his head. He smiles resignedly and I say don't worry I'll ask at the house where I imagine the man who answered the phone, who may be the man who's car is parked in the space marked "PRIEST" is waiting for me as it's now 5.45pm.

There's a sign of the door telling people where to leave parcels if there's no answer. There's a sign that says Father Gerard something or other. I'd forgotten priests have surnames - I never knew the surname of the priest who instructed me for my First Holy Communion. I ring the bell and a man in black answers and we look at each other in recognition. I like him as he doesn't look at me in the way I would have if I was opening my church for someone to light candles two days before Christmas. Pityingly or sensitively. He's not interested in hearing about my troubles. I tell him I extinguished the light and he laughs and says there should be matches there. I tell him I couldn't find them, he says that they're by the light switch. It seems obvious now. We go in the chapel. He turns on the light and hands me the matches and asks me to turn the light off when I'm done. He turns to go and almost as an afterthought points at the metal container with a slot and says "Put your pennies in there." I look at where he's pointing and I want to tell him I put five pounds in there but all I say is that I already have.

I line up the candles, alternating the blue and red casings and light them all with the same match. I imagine them as the five of us and I take some more pictures. I find myself not wanting to leave. I don't believe in god but this is a nice place to think aboutdDad. And if he were alive I think he would have appreciated it even though he would never have admitted it.

Discharge papers

My dad was discharged from the South African Defence Force. He served in East Africa, Abyssinia and the Middle East. He was in Palestine - I've got a picture of him that he sent home on which he's written 'Guarding the Artesian Wells in Palestine'.
He joined the army when he was 19 and left in 1943 'medically unfit'. I've no idea what that meant, though he did have malaria in Africa.
He was already listing himself as a journalist.

Letters from Beaverbrook

My dad worked for Beaverbrook.

A life in ID cards

Passports

You can't be in it until you're in it

CRISTINA: "There's a club. The Dead Dads Club. And you can't be in it until you're in it. You can try to understand, you can sympathize. But until you feel that loss... My dad died when I was nine. George, I'm really sorry you had to join the club."
GEORGE: "I... I don't know how to exist in a world where my dad doesn't."
CRISTINA: "Yeah, that never really changes."


Grey's Anatomy

December 6th, 2009

I wake up and I’m in a very dark room. A phone is ringing. I need to pick it up.
I know this room well, but I cannot work out where the phone is. I’m in that disorientation of sleep which makes it impossible to carry out simple tasks. I try to force myself to understand where things are, how to answer a phone, but I have to make several circuits of the room before I can do this simple task. Are voices easier or harder to hear in pitch darkness?
I’m in my parents’ house, in the sitting room. The phone is next to my father’s chair, beside the grandfather clock. I have been asleep on their sofa, an original G-plan number that I’ve regularly used as a bed for my entire life. It is embracing and comfortable as usual, but now I am off the sofa and standing in the dark, in my underpants, holding the phone.
I’m not sure how long the phone has been ringing. There are others asleep in the flat, my mother and my brother, somewhere in this ocean of inky blackness. It crosses my mind that because I took so long to answer the phone, they may also be awake. This bothers me slightly in the fraction of a second before I speak into the phone, not because I worry that they might have been woken, but because I want to keep this moment to myself. It is my job. I am selfish that way.
I am pleased it is me that gets to answer the phone. I am showing my maturity. I can manage this situation, I am the calm one, the eldest son. I have waited twenty-five years for this moment and I know what the call is about, even before the woman at the other end speaks. Even through my confusion as I stumble around the room I know why the phone is ringing. Somewhere, at the other end of this phone line, there are people who have been awake, who didn’t lie down sometime around midnight and fall into a deep slumber. Their job demands that they remain awake through the night. The people at the other end of the line are guarding my father, watching over him during the night. I imagine the building: most of the hospital is in darkness, people sleep fitfully. Throughout there are pockets of light in which nurses and porters sit quietly at their desks, monitoring alarms and filling out forms. It’s like an aeroplane during the night, I think. My sister is already flying over from Canada and our other brother is on his way from Sweden. I know about these long flights through the dark night, the small pockets of light, the mind left free to drift and churn. It can be a hard journey to make alone. Many years before, when my first child was small, I would break into unexpected sobs in the dark watches of the night, sleepless under my thin airline blanket.
I know exactly where this call is being made from. I had been in the hospital the previous day.
My brother had summoned me back from the coast, a strange urgency entering his voice when I dithered at home — please come now. I caught the bus from the seaside, giving myself two hours to think about things. When we get to the town I’m right at the front of the bus upstairs and I take a picture, looking down at the nondescript scene. Nothing I haven’t seen ten thousand times, this town doesn’t change, but I want a reminder of how it used to be.
This town is never going to be the same again, I think. I get off the bus and phone my brother at the hospital. Please come straight up, he says, pleading rather than polite.
I know this town very well and I cut through streets that still sometimes appear in my dreams. I cross the common grassland and get to the hospital which sits on a ridge overlooking the town. The Kent and Sussex, a strange name for a hospital. We always thought we were purely Kent, but it turned out we lived on the border with Sussex. For a few years as teenagers we drank at a pub called the Sussex where the county border had once run through the building, leaving only a tiny bar, the Kent bar, in Kent.
I know what I’m doing. I’m a man with a mission. In my bag I have a slim book, a Guide to Humanist Funerals. I’ve had it for years, since the day dad phoned me up and told me he’d been to a friend’s funeral and liked it. A Humanist funeral he said. Could you find out how they work. It was the sort of request you can’t turn down. I found the Humanists on the web and ordered a copy of their guide, tucking it away secretively, filled with pride at my selected role, the trusted one. I will know what to do when the time comes, I often thought over the years. And then the time came.
When I get there, my father is a mixture of agitation and semi-concious calm, propped up in bed and breathing with difficulty. His hands are blotchy, he has the skin of an old old man but still a large frame. I’ve visited him many times in hospital over the years, but this time it’s different. My mother tells me, matter of fact, that my sister won’t get here before he dies. She will be here tomorrow, but she won’t make it in time. It’s a way of telling me that she knows and accepts that these are the final hours. These things cannot be said in so many words. I look at her face, it hasn’t changed. Although she is French she has the classic English poise of somebody who has come through the war. Nothing can unsettle her, there is no revelation to be had at this moment.
I can’t ask what he’s dying of, but I assume she knows the details.
My dad groans and grumbles. At one point he opens his eyes and stares straight at me. ‘How long have you been here?’ he asks with his ususal thick skinned belligerence. I hold his hand.
My brother and I are released for a while, we go for a beer in a pub across the road from the hospital. We have one, then another. I’m sure we’d like to have more, to stay here for hours swapping stories and jokes, making each other laugh. But we can’t, we feel responsible. Our mother remains in the hospital. Dad’s dying over there, I want to announce to the bar. It occurs to me that they must get a lot of our kind in here. I know this town so well. This is a pub that I once ran into the front wall of, driving a car without a licence, knocking the window through the wall. We joke about it now, about the landlord who chased me down the road.
We got beer, dad got morphine. After that we left the hospital. I wanted to stay, but nobody encouraged me. I thought you sat vigil for the dying, but not here. My mother is calm and level, she wants us to go back to the house so we do. They’ve been married for fifty years, it’s her call, I won’t interfere. I’ve been waiting for this day for many of those years, since he almost died on the way to work. As he grew older it seemed harder and harder to imagine how he would ever manage to actually die, for although he was ill and getting worse, he remained a big man, solid in his opinions and hearty.
I realise now that I cannot remember my father before his first illness. My mother always claimed that after he was ill he became childlike, that he became easily upset over minor issues. I have no memory of him before that. To me this was his personality. Self-centered but generous. Fractious but sociable.
We drive back down to the house from the hospital. I’ve spent a lot of time in that hospital over the years. When I was a boy my best friend was knocked down by a car and I visited him here regularly as he made a slow recovery. You become familar with your locality, although I haven’t lived here for over twenty years, I know every yard of the roads.
I have no idea what we ate or what we did that last evening but at some point I was left alone in the front room to sleep.
Standing in the darkness after the call I stare at the clock until I can make the time out. It is three twenty. I know and don’t know what this means, but it is time for action and action is always good. I walk through to my mother’s room. I haven’t woken my mother in the night since, once, ill as a child I stumbled vomiting and spinning into her room for help. I reach down and place a hand on her shoulder. She seems very small and insignificant, alone in the bed. I shake her gently. Mum, I say softly. Mum. She starts and opens her eyes. It was the hospital who phoned. I tell her the news, which is non-specific. They say Dad has deteriorated, we should go up to see him now. I know what this means, but I’m not taking it in. I think I believe he will recover, that he’ll be home again soon, as before. Each winter for years he’s told me that this is it, that the season’s illness will be his last. I can’t believe it’s finally come.
I feel a niggling need for urgency, but I am not going to hurry anyone.
I wake my brother. He moves quickly and silently around the house. We are all hushed and calm in the dark house. We get dressed and leave the house, getting into the car. I drive. I marvel at how simple this is, how we move as a single body from place to place, wrapped against the winter cold. It’s Tunbridge Wells, a town with its own mythology, we’re all disgusted here. Dad has lived here for nearly fifty years, but has never become one of us. He has held himself aloof, retaining in part the exiled Lithuanian jew that he was born.
We are at the hospital in moments, driving straight in and parking right outside the entrance to a modern wing. You can park here at four in the morning, something that is nearly impossible during the daytime, even if a loved on is dying on the premises. The doors are not locked, we walk in, bunched, like a group of hit men on a job. We know where he is, down this corridor, around this corner, past the desk, there is a small room on the right with four beds. It’s a strange place, a sort of antechamber to hospital, or home, for people who could go either way. Or for people who aren’t expected to go either way. Earlier, as we had dithered around a death, a woman opposite slumbered sunken so deep and motionless that I wondered whether she had left this world. A family came and talked to her, proving, I imagine, that she still had life in her. They left unceremoniously and she still never moved except maybe to closer to the end. Opposite, a young man took a journey in the other direction, picked up in a jaunty mood by wife and daughter, he was back with the living before nightfall.
Now, in the depths of the night, we were returning to spend more time with him, maybe for his final hours. Deterioration, he word spoke of a final wordless descent into the abyss. But that night as we sweep imperiously past the desk, sure of our right and our destination, a nursing sister detaches herself swiftly from the desk and efficiently heads us off, as if fearing we will get past and discover the situation for ourselves.
‘He has passed.’
We weren’t expecting this although it was what we were expecting. The movie continues with a slight edit. Now we are not one bonded unit. We move around the final corner in fragments. Somebody hangs back, somebody has to go first. I am eager, as ever, to engage, to interrogate the situation. There is no pausing. There he is, propped up as when we left him and looking serene. We look at him for a bit. My memory is hazy, what did we do. I imagine we hugged in our winter coats, then we walked over to him. I remember kissing the top of his head. He was still warm. So it was true, he had only just died. They drew the curtains around us. I took some pictures. I had this idea that you sit with the dead, keeping watch through the night, but my mother wouldn’t let me do that. Come on home she said. She is eager to leave now. After a short while we retreat into the cold night.
When we get home that last morning my mother lies down on the sofa where I had been sleeping. We talk quietly and calmly, as if afraid to summon up any feelings. My brother lies down on dad’s big reclining chair. They go to sleep so I sit in the kitchen, trying to work out what will happen next. I wander around the house and take a lot of photographs, my dad’s chair, his place at the table, pictures of pictures.
At about five o’clock I write a short note on Facebook. ‘My lovely dad died this morning.’ Was that a correct thing to do? I thought about it for a while, but the word had to be passed out, it seemed quite natural. He would have appreciated it, I know.

Bloomsday

My dad wasn't one for sentimental Jewishery and he passed almost his entire life avoiding any contact with manifestaions of the culture he had so specifically left behind. It wasn't that he was in any way ashamed or embarassed by his roots, he wasn't. And, despite being born before the holocaust and being old enough to watch it transpire, he didn't seem to have any fear of exposing his jewishness. He did work for his entire career in a Fleet Street that wasn't particularly friendly to jews and where it was worth keeping your head down, but then most of his colleagues were also jewish, so it was hardly a secret. I think he was just uninterested in most facets of his culture, no doubt regarding them as prosaic and mundane. He would call on a regular basis for gefilte fish from my mother. She swore she had made it once for him and he'd not even bothered to eat it.
He took me to Blooms on the Whitechapel Road, I remember it well, a pilgrimage to the heart of jewish dining. It must have been sometime in the late eighties I would guess, I don't have any real memory of when or why, how we came to be in the east end at the same time. He would have been retired by then with no reason to travel to London, whereas I had moved to the city and was making my way through art college. Come, let's eat at Blooms, he would have said. It's a great Jewish institution. He would have liked the idea of it more than the reality. When I was younger and I visited him at his office, he would offer to take me for any lunch I wanted, but we invariably ended up at Mr Natural, a faux Californian burger joint under the now long dismantled Holborn Viaduct at the bottom of Fleet Street.
Blooms has been gone for fourteen years now. I remember when it closed down: I had a fancy for a while to somehow steal the huge neon sign that stood above the entrance canopy. Of course I didn't in much the same way that I didn't follow through on any of the grandiose plans that I no doubt outlined to my dad during our lunch that day. I can't remember any of it, just that it was a dull and lugubrious place and the waiters were slow ('the rudest in London', it was said). My dad talked about the food he remembered. He never really talked about his youth and he didn't explain how he came to leave all that behind.
Now the premises are a Burger King, non kosher I presume, and the last of jewish Brick Lane is rapidly being expunged. The jews left a long time ago but buildings and businesses take longer to remove.

Dad in London

Dad in London on Flickr

I've never been certain of when this picture was taken and as time passes it becomes less rather than more certain. I can't ask dad anymore and the stories that mum and others tell get more and more contradictory.

In one version it's the day mum and dad met. In another it's the day they went out on their first date. Either way the time difference between the two events (first meeting and first date) can't have been very great.

I remember being told that dad couldn't remember which Tube station they'd agreed to meet at for that first date so he ran from one to the other until he found mum. She was probably late, so the fact that she wasn't at one station wouldn't have ruled it out as being where they were meant to meet. Had dad figured that out about mum already? I think the stations had similar names or variations of the same name but I can't think where that would be now. Maybe it was the exits for different lines of the same name, like Paddington?

If it's true that the picture's from the time of their first meetings then it would be 1956 at the earliest as that's the year they got married on 1 October. That would mean dad was 25. What was I doing then?

How I was born

This is the story of how I came to be born. Of course, with my father in his pomp, it had to encompass drama, a foreign country and newspapers. My dad moved to France on a one
year contract to modernise a Parisian rag and during that stay I was
born. They booked a doctor and a clinic, but when the day came it
seems the doctor had gone off on holiday. The replacement was nowhere to
be found. A heatwave was in full swing. Finally a place is found and
the labour goes ahead. My father was a newspaper man, how could such a story not be in the press.


I was a miracle baby. They'd already adopted my sister after
being told no babies could ever be made, but it came to pass that
technology moved on and a fix was found. He told me this story many
times, proud to have created such a memorable event. I was the first
born, and wasn't even supposed to happen.
Dad is not there for the birth, this is Paris, 1961, but he turns up the next morning to visit mother and baby.
"Where is our baby?" he asked.
"I don't know," says my mother, plaintively. He rings the bell and a nurse appears.
"Nurse," he commands. "We would like to see our baby."
A few minutes later another nurse ("she couldn't have been more than fourteen, tiny") appears at the door holding a baby. She holds him up and the parents study it for a while. They smile. "Very nice, thank you," they say. She disappears again with the baby.
Years later I find this photo, the presentation of the lamb.

Portrait of my Father

Portrait of my Father: Jonathan Lethem | Granta 104: Fathers

The picture floats. Someone took it in the Seventies, but the white backdrop gives no clue. My dad owned that wide-lapel trench coat for fifteen or twenty years, typical thrifty child of the Depression. (He probably tried to give it to me at some point.) The beard’s trim narrows the time frame slightly, that rakish full-goatee. So often in later years he wouldn’t have bothered to shave his jaw to shape it. Put this in the early Seventies. Somehow it floated into my collection of paper trinkets, ferried off to college, then to California for a decade. The only copy. By the time I showed it to my father, last week, he hadn’t seen the photograph for thirty-odd years. He couldn’t be sure of the photographer, guessing at three friends with comically overlapping names – Bobby Ramirez, Bob Brooks, Geoff Brooks. (I remember all three of them, beloved rascals from my parents’ hippie posse.) He settled at last on Geoff Brooks. The picture was never framed, nor mounted in an album, just shifted from file cabinet to cardboard box to file cabinet all this time. A scrap of Scotch tape on the left corner reminds me I had it taped up over a desk in Berkeley. In a family that, after my mother’s death, scattered itself and its memorabilia to far corners of the planet, and reassembles now sporadically and sloppily, the picture’s a survivor. But I’ve lived with it for thirty years, gazed into its eyes as often, strange to say, as I have my father’s living eyes.

And it shows Richard Lethem as I dream him, my idol. His Midwestern kindness, prairie-gazer’s soul, but come to the city, donning the beatnik garb, become the painter and poet and political activist he made himself, a man of the city. When I first knew my parents they were, paradoxically, just the two most exciting adults on the scene, part of a pantheon of artists and activists and students staying up late around the dinner table and often crashing afterwards in the extra rooms of the house. My parents were both the two I had the best access to and the coolest to know, the hub of the wheel. I wasn’t interested in childhood, I wanted to hang out with these guys. The picture shows my dad meeting the eyes of a member of his gang, both of them feeling their oats, knowing they were the leading edge of the world. I wanted him to look at me that way. He often did.

My Dad's Stamp Collection

My dad had a stamp collection. I knew that from when I was little. I used to climb into the huge G-plan wardrobe in their bedroom and leaf through it. I collected stamps myself, but this was a glory in comparison, full of animals and countries that I'd never heard of, moon landings and huge beautiful stamps in their own mini sheets.
I have no idea what role this collection played in dad's life, if collection is even the right word for it. It consists of one album filled with colourful stamps in small sets, lots of animals and flora and fauna, but there are other subjects dotted throughout. It doesn't make much sense and to my adult eyes it looks a bit like an album that someone else has put together to appeal to a lazy collector. I'm probably wrong though. Dad's little brother, Reg, collected butterflies and arranged them in cases - this stamp album is similar.
Alongside this strange album was a big bundle of loose bits and pieces. This to me was always the glory of the collection. Unsorted and unmounted, it seemed to just be the accumulation of someone who could see the beauty and historic value of these stamps, but who never had any interest in doing anything with them. It's clear that as a journalist, dad had access to various sources of stamps and picked them up over the years. The moon landing is much represented: these were the stamps that I fell in love with as a child. But a lot of other stuff found it's way in over the years. The launch of a nuclear powered ship, there's a stamp for that. Independence for the Seychelles, issue a stamp. Postal strike? Fleet St cartoonists design stamps for colleagues who set up their own postal service. Marius collects them.
Then, years ago, he gave the collection to my baby son. A typical act of generosity from him, but also the action of someone who really has no interest whatsoever in the subject any more. Luckily, neither has my son, so I've appropriated the lot for the time being. If he ever takes up stamps, it's his. Until then I no longer have to climb into a cupboard to leaf through this.

Dreaming of Dad

On the last night of my recent family holiday, after a clear sunny day, a huge thunderstorm developed which deluged our tent with water. Throughout the night thunder and lightening crashed around us as I braced myself for emergency evacuation if and when the river we were camping by broke its banks.
During this night I had a long and complex dream that revolved around the wedding party of a couple whose best man I was almost thirty years ago.
It turned out that my father wasn't actually dead. My mother had noticed his arm moving, that was all it took, and he was back with us. Even in the dream I knew this was implausible (we cremated him, I remember doing it), but I went along with it because he was there, large as life, the same as ever. We went to this wedding party which took place partly at a fairground. Dad was not impressed. 'Why are we here?' he asked petulantly, exactly as he would have in life. He didn't really know the couple, so why would he be expected to attend? I looked at him. His trousers were slightly too short, he was dressed as he was in life. The dream went on for hours, or so it seemed.
When I woke up I had to pack the tent in driving rain. There was no time to consider the reason or point of this dream, but it has made me vaguely wish I could have him back for a day or so sometimes.

Last Email

Miss you all.  Wish I was with you. Dad.
Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 12:01 PM

Funny thing about email, you can look back at it. It doesn't go away. I introduced my dad the the internet right at the start. Even then he thought it was too much for him, but he was a user for fifteen years. After I put him on the internet I wrote a column for .net magazine titled 'Don't put your father on the net, Mrs Worthington'. As he got older his communications became more intermittent, but he kept on emailing friends and family till the end.
In an idle moment I looked back to see what was the last email he sent me. A strange experience, because I could so easily imagine that he was about to send me another one (and also because my brother had used his account a bit to email me, and I had to discount those).
So this was his last email, sent four months before he died, in response to an email from me on holiday. Sweet and to the point.

My dad and the tomato plant

One summer a few years ago me and my sister, Suzy, were at dad's. Suzy may have been staying with him at the time, I don't remember. We went to the garden centre to get him some plants for the garden. He wanted flowers so we bought him some flowers that old people like: frilly like an old ladies knickers. I also bought him a tomato plant. We got home and started putting them in the borders. I told him I'd got him a tomato plant as well. Emotionally that's when it kicked off. I don't remember it exactly but it went something like this:
"Why?"
"You get tomatoes off it."
"I don't want it."
"Why not?"
"I wanted flowers. I don't want that."
"You can eat the tomatoes off it."
"I don't want it. Does it have flowers?"
While technically I imagine anything that bears fruit has to have a flower of some description I decided to exaggerate the tomato flower's gorgeousness and told him it had lots of pretty yellow flowers.
It kind of petered out around there, both of us in bad moods. The tomato plant stayed, mostly because I'd put it in the ground and he wouldn't know how to dig it out. Like most of my trips to see my dad in the last few years I left his house sad and not sure if I wanted to go back to see him again. Later that summer my sister told me that the cleaner who used to come in to look after my dad ate the tomatoes for her lunch when she was there. I don't know if dad ever did.

Here's a picture of dad from one of my visits to him that I remember as being happy. Mostly I think because he liked (and I guess approved of) the new-old-somewhat broken Citroen Xantia that I'd bought and it was the first time he'd been in it. I'd had it when I visited him in hospital the year before but he hadn't got to see it. I remember driving up to see him in hospital on a sunny day with the car windows open playing the album A Tom Moulton Mix very loud (especially Eddie Kendricks's Keep on Truckin') and feeling somewhat serene and happy. I guess I was glad he was alive, getting better. Somehow going to see him in hospital felt like a way that we could get on. He liked the fuss the nurses would make of him in hospital. He could be very charming with strangers when he wanted to, asking where they were from, about their name, accent and family. It reminds me of another story that makes me very angry but that's for another time.