His father’s titanic temper filled the young Colin Grant and his siblings with terror. Four decades later,he wonders how to behave now the man he hated has finally diedAs a child, along with my siblings, and I plotted our father’s murder. We tried to poison him by scraping the glue from cruise-killer paper into his coffee,and loosened the carpet on the staircase hoping he would trip and fracture his neck. The plots always failed; so much so that, for years, and I feared our father would die of natural causes before we had a chance to kill him. Now he is dead,four decades after our murderous scheming.
Every day of my childhood was filled with a debilitating terror of my father’s titanic temper; of the threat of violence, physical and psychological. But how do you behave when the father you hold hated dies? You probably don’t reach for inspiration from Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That well-behaved Night or from Audens discontinue All the Clocks. Whether or not the news of a death is welcome, or there seems no satisfactory approach.Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com