Snapshot: My easygoing and mischievous dad
This was taken in 1977. It is a picture of my dad, Grahame, and me, in my parents’ garden in Cosby, Leicestershire. I was 19, and my serene expression belies my hectic lifestyle. I was a student nurse, working long hours, and not studying, but partying. I expect I felt exhausted and had come home to rest. I can’t recall who took the photo. We are looking at something in the direction of the house, as is the dog, a beautiful boxer called Suki.
I think the photo shows the warm relationship between my dad and me. He was such an easygoing man, and a bit of a Peter Pan. He was full of mischief and always out to make you laugh. He had no sense of danger, and I think I inherited that. Once, in Scotland, he fell off a cliff. Luckily, he survived. His father died just days before he was born, and the man I always knew as Grandpa had married his mother when Dad was four. I hadn’t any idea until my mother, Eve, showed me a picture of my biological grandfather one day when I was about 13 or so.
I was curious, but no one wanted to talk about it. I’m only just finding out about it all now, by myself, and it has opened up a deeper understanding of my dad. I realise why he loved the company of women, for instance, because he had been brought up by his mother and grandmother for the first, formative years of his life. His grandmother visited us every year when we were children, up until 1967 when she died at a grand old age. He doted on her.
The rest of his family, however, were all rather straitlaced people from Birmingham, and he was definitely the odd one out. I think he worked at it.
My husband had a deep and abiding respect for my dad, and my daughter, like all the grandchildren, absolutely adored him. He would happily play with the kids in the garden rather than sit indoors with the adults.
Towards the end of his life, we visited him and my mum in Cornwall, where they then lived. It was a hot August and I wanted them to take my daughter and me out to places she would enjoy, but my dad was strangely grumpy. He had a painful arm, we thought from driving a van with a faulty gearstick. My daughter was eight at the time and kept calling: “Grandpa, come and look at this.” He wouldn’t respond.
Five months later, he was dead after a brutal and rapid descent from cancer. I think he must have felt ill for years and not said a word.
It is 10 years since my dad died, and I have now been tasked with sorting out all the remaining photographs by my 82-year-old mum. It is photos such as this one that bring back powerful memories, but, to be honest, memories can still creep up on you in the most unexpected way. And bring you right back to when he was here.
Lesley Baxter
Playlist: How ‘difficult’ music changed my life
Electricity by Captain Beefheart
“Singin’ through you to me / Thunder-bolts caught easily / Shouts the truth peacefully / E-LEC-TRI-CITY”
Captain Beefheart, alias Don Van Vliet, who recorded an LP entitled Trout Mask Replica, intrigued me. Initially, I found the record was unlistenable, and it would invite my parents to pitch up in my “space”, a bedroom redolent of a dank cave, either to turn it down, or off – usually the latter.
Dave, soon to be my cousin Mag’s husband, lent me the album, Safe As Milk/Dropout Boogie, the early Captain’s oeuvre, and it featured the track Electricity. I have listened to “difficult” music from that day. Dave was the stimulant, the catalyst, lending me vinyl that he felt I needed to listen to.
Friends would have mainstream rock/soul/funk, which I enjoyed, but I retained an interest in the difficult music that I explored and continued to listen to.
This music has led me down roads of art and literature, and some culs de sac, to reflect on my reason to believe in difference in music and in people. It has informed my politics, my career, my dress sense, and led me to areas that I would not have discovered without that record as the appetiser. The main meal – Trout Mask Replica – has always been harder to digest.
We all need to challenge our beliefs and values, and it can be enabled by going via non-traditional avenues of listening. If your son or daughter listens to music that is not conventional, walk past that bedroom, and growl … “e-l-e-c-t-r-i-c-i-t-y …”
IK White
We love to eat: Dad’s courgettes
Ingredients (serves two)
Knob of butter or olive oil
½ onion, sliced
1 garlic clove crushed or sliced
1 large courgette, peeled and cut in three and then sliced into three lengths
1 tomato, cut into quarters
Natural or Greek yoghurt to serve
Warm a little butter or oil in a frying pan and fry the onion with a pinch of salt until translucent. Add the garlic and fry for a minute. Add the courgette. Fry for five minutes, adding a splash of water if the pan dries out. Add the tomato, cover and cook on the lowest heat for 10-15 minutes until the courgettes are soft and browned on both sides. Poke every now and then to see if they are done and check the seasoning. Make sure to cook off any surplus water so it’s not soupy. Serve warm with yoghurt and Iranian bread or flatbread.
My dad is not the cook in my house. He can cook very well, but he is the child of 1950s Iran, so he does not. The kitchen was the domain of his mother and sisters, chopping herbs, frying onions, slowly braising meat to accommodate three bountiful home-cooked meals a day. Women communally working in tandem, joking and gossiping, stirring multiple steaming pots with ease and fluidity. By the time a child could reach the hob, they could lay out a banquet with honed fluency. Colossal dinners are synonymous with Iran, tables laid with numerous elaborate dishes, guests perched on chairs throughout the room, wedged into a space at the cramped table, or eating with plates balanced on their laps, the room groaning with people eating and talking. As a child, I would watch and eat, joining in the talk when I could.
I recall the paralysing heat of my last trip to Iran, sleeping late to emerge from my bed sweaty and disoriented, my grandma stoically waiting for me before eating lunch. My dad at the hob, Grandma, in her late 80s but still sturdy, beside him, throwing a splash of water into the pan and giving the vegetables a gentle prod. The sing-song patter of Farsi. My dad was always the eater, my mum the cook, frequently ringing my dad’s sisters, Rhubab and Akram, relying on Dad’s haphazard translations for a plethora of stews and rice dishes.
Now that he is mostly retired, I often see Dad cooking courgettes, stirring the onions and checking the liquid in the pan. Half moons of onion, a clove of crushed garlic and blood-red quarters of tomato. The vegetables soften to meltingly tender, bathed in gloriously green olive oil and a smack of garlic, a spoonful a sour yoghurt the ideal bedfellow, courgettes so soft you could eat them with a spoon, an example of the simplicity and economy of Iranian cookery. It is something I have now proudly mastered, a dish I will eat well into old age,, making sure there is just enough water in the pan, giving the courgettes a reassuring poke.
Laura Alabaf
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