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As I love them, so my dad loved me

By Leah Hardy- The Guardian - Saturday 9 May 2009

For years, Leah Hardy could not forgive her obsessive, overbearing father for the cruel way he treated her mother. But tragedy would give her a fresh insight into the man she once despised.

I adored my father when I was small. He was, to me, an impossibly glamorous figure. A musician, he was dark, green-eyed and handsome. He would travel abroad and bring me thrillingly mad presents. I was the only child in my suburban 70s primary school who owned a genuine Afghan coat, for example. I can still remember how it looked, incongruously pegged up between the anoraks and Peter Pan collars, and how I glowed with pride to wear it. At the fair, he'd stroll up to the shooting gallery, ask me what prize I'd like to win, and I'd just know for certain that my dad would get the right score, and I'd walk away with that tiny doll's-house coffee pot or the giant teddy I yearned for.

But my father was also a very difficult man. These days I think he would probably have been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. He was an obsessive hobbyist and collector, very insensitive, would talk over anyone (you could put the phone down while he was talking, go and make yourself tea and toast and come back and he wouldn't have noticed that you had disappeared) and fell out with everyone.

He was incapable of saying the right thing to anyone, including a sensitive, adolescent daughter. He and my mother, a dancer, had a terrible, miserable marriage. Horribly ill-matched, with nothing in common, they'd married young, had two children - me and my brother, who was three years younger - and spent their marriage having searing arguments. I'd lie in bed, and the sound of their angry words would float through the heating ducts and out through the hot-air vent in my bedroom. I'd hide under the covers, my hands over my ears.

We never had any money. My father gave up his music and instead trained as various things, but jobs never seemed to last long, and money would run out, with nothing for food, nothing for rent and certainly nothing for fun. So their divorce, when I was in my late teens, came as a huge relief.

He moved into my grandfather's house while my mother and brother and I stayed in the family home. Life was happier, calmer and more stable. My mother and I reclaimed the house and painted it from top to bottom. We'd watch what we wanted on TV and peaceably shell peas in the garden. And bigger things happened: my mother went to drama school, finally realising her intellectual, social and artistic potential after years of teaching ballet to talentless toddlers.

I saw less and less of my father. I was angry that he was so difficult - angry he'd been so mean to my mum and embarrassed by his oddness. I didn't let him visit me at university, though I'm sure he was proud that I went (I was the first in his family to do so). I never mentioned him to friends, he never met boyfriends and I never visited him. For decades he was exiled from my life and my career as a journalist. I didn't even invite him to my wedding.

Then, when I was 38, I had a son. My father had already had a heart attack by then, and when I held my tiny son in my arms, I felt suddenly stricken with guilt at the thought that my father wouldn't see his only grandchild, and that I would feel guilty when he died. So I invited him to come and visit.

It wasn't a tender reunion. I still felt angry and embarrassed, and still found his uninterruptible lectures on everything from music to politics tedious and claustrophobic. He brought perfectly nice presents for his grandson - a giant toy gorilla, an annoying laughing ball, a tiny torch - but appeared baffled by him. "What is he saying?" he'd repeat, as Henry tried his best to chat. Or he'd ignore him and switch off CBeebies to put on motor racing at top volume, taking over the sofa and the remote control as if they were his own.

I treated each painfully rationed visit as a chore and a duty and willed them to be over. My husband was heroic, forcing himself to make small talk while I sulked in the kitchen. But Henry did love his grandpa, and seemed to enjoy his visits, and when my daughter Cecily was born - to my father's huge surprise, as I was 41 - he came to see her too. We never talked about the past or our feelings, or even very much about the rest of my father's life. I didn't want to know too much or get too close. The scars of the past had healed, but like scars, remained rigid and inflexible. I was still the teenager cringing at my dad.

Then, one night two years ago, my husband was out and the children were in bed when the doorbell rang. Two police officers were on the doorstep. I froze. I immediately thought of my husband out in his car in the dark. They asked to come in and I sat, curled up on the sofa, unable to think, feel or say anything, willing them to speak and dreading it at the same time. But it wasn't about Chris.

They very gently and with immense kindness told me that my father had been in a car accident and was already dead. A drunk driver had smashed his big car into my dad's tiny, ancient, held-together-by-string-and-hope Nissan, and he hadn't stood a chance. He had died without a single familiar face around him and, worst of all, he had died nearly two days ago, but because his mobile phone and address book had been lost in the wreckage, it had taken this long to find me.

I sat and howled, tears pouring down my face. I was utterly surprised by my grief and shock. I think I always thought that I'd feel very little, but in fact I was poleaxed. I sat in the bath racked with great gulping sobs of grief and loss and, yes, guilt; the very emotion I'd hoped to keep at bay. I had to identify his body, which was awful, yet I wanted to see him, and found the sight of him, with his newly cut snow-white hair, oddly moving and vulnerable.

My husband and I drove to his house in Hertfordshire to decide what to keep and what to leave. He never let us pop in to see him, and when I saw his house I could see why. He lived in a state of neglect bordering on squalor. His bed was held up by stacks of books. The kitchen was coated in a thick layer of grease and dust. I felt totally paralysed. What I needed was time to go through all this random stuff, but my husband, seeing that I was upset, bustled me out again with a few boxes, primarily of photographs and some of his guitars. We had huge rows about this later.

For a long time I could hardly bear to go through the boxes. I gave some photographs of my grandparents to my uncle and left the others untouched. But when I finally steeled myself to open them, nearly two years later, it was hugely emotional. Inside were files with cuttings of every piece of journalism he could find that I'd written during the long years we hadn't spoken, and even a cherished cutting of an award I'd won decades ago. He'd clearly asked his friends to collect them for him, and he'd trawled the internet too.

I felt faintly embarrassed and shy that he'd read so much by and about me. But most heart-stopping of all were the dozens and dozens of photographs of my babyhood and early childhood, often in tattered albums with unbearably poignant inscriptions underneath: "Our darling little girl at just eight months" and "I'm so happy today" beside ones of me smiling toothlessly, and "First steps today". In gloriously 60s Kodachrome, I am frozen in time, held high up in loving arms, grinning against the backdrop of a perfectly blue sky. I am actually crying as I type this.

The sheer volume of pictures was overwhelming, but one thing was unmistakable. It seems that my awkward, infuriating, embarrassing father reached out and showed his love for me in secret or through the lens of the camera. I can really only remember family life as something unhappy and tense, yet there it is, the proof that once we were all happy, and I was the happiest thing in their lives, just as our children are the adored centre of our lives. My dad loved me just as much as I love my children. It seems so obvious, but I don't think I'd ever realized it before. The sense of loss is overwhelming.

Those boxes have helped me understand my father in many other ways, too. He had hundreds of photographs taken when he was a young entertainer at Butlins in Filey, then playing skiffle in Soho cellars. This was the happiest time of his life. There is no evidence here of the angry, disappointed man I knew as my father, just a smiling kid having fun. It must have been hugely sad and frustrating for him to have seen his dreams of stardom slip from view, to have to work in a watch factory and live in a council flat in a miserable marriage.

Both my parents were unsuited as much to suburban family life as they were to each other. And it was a comfort to find that, in the last decade or so of his life, via the internet, he had rediscovered many of the friends he'd known when he was in his 20s. I found albums full of photographs of him with them, still playing music and displaying an astonishing energy that I didn't realise he was capable of. I imagine that, to each other, they never grew old.

I found it very comforting that he had not been lonely. At his funeral, his friends, many of them extraordinarily kind and fiercely loyal, admitted that my dad never lost his old habits - they'd all fallen out with him, just as everyone used to. But they still loved him. I was so glad to hear that.

Frankly, I still can't face properly sorting out all the old photographs, memorabilia and cuttings. What do you do with the mementos of someone who has died? I can't even bring myself to throw away his old school reports (terrible ones!) or photographs of long-ago weddings of relatives whom I don't know. I am no longer surprised that there are people out there who will do it for you for money.

It occurred to me what a burden we may be putting on our children, who will inherit our vast digital archives. But then again, perhaps it is the best legacy we can leave them. Because, for all the tears I have shed, it is such comfort to see how much I was loved when I was tiny, to reconnect with the father I so loved when I was little, and to forgive and maybe understand the man he was.

most people who are aspergers are going to get bullyed to the point of develouping psycotic disorders. i read this somewhere and i believe it because i had a psycotic breakdown like a few years ago