The Summer House

Walking Dad home.

by

Around fifteen years ago, I took a walk with my father. Dad, who didn’t much care for physical exercise, had recently surprised everyone by announcing he’d always wanted to walk across England—from the Irish Sea to the English Channel. But with his seventieth birthday approaching, he assumed he’d missed his chance. To her eternal credit, my wife made me promise that I would meet Dad in England and do that walk with him. The following summer, my father and I flew from our respective adopted homelands to Manchester, and for ten days followed the Coast-to-Coast Walk—a long-distance footpath that traverses 190 miles of starkly beautiful English countryside. As we walked, we talked. This was interesting because I had never known my father to talk much. In a stiff-upper-lip English way, Dad was a quiet, somewhat solitary man. But there’s something about putting one foot in front of another that loosens the tongue of even the most reticent conversationalist. During our time on the trail, Dad talked more freely than I had ever known him to do before. 

He spoke about all sorts of things. Some were funny, some startling, some sad. He talked about his and my mother’s early life together, when they met at dental school in London having been assigned to dissect the same cadaver (romantic, no?). He talked hilariously about the sordid little flat he shared with three medical students, where if you got drunk you might wake up in a wheelbarrow, completely naked and painted from head to toe with gentian violet. He talked about his decision to take his young family to Australia in the 1970s—the early years of which had been so financially difficult and socially isolating, he never really accepted that Australia hadn’t been a mistake. And the filthy limericks! As we plodded through the surprisingly rugged Lake District, his eye-popping ditties about the Bishop of Buckingham revealed the irreverent young man this soft-spoken English gentleman had once been, a side to him I’d never known. 

Dad also talked about his own father’s sudden death when he, an only child, was just nine years old. During the bleak, disorienting years that followed, his mother packed her lonely, grieving son off to a draconian boarding school on the Isle of Man and commenced her long slide into alcoholism. I was vaguely aware that Dad’s years at that school hadn’t been happy, but beyond explaining his loathing of Latin and institutional foods, it had never occurred to me to wonder what other impact they might have had. As he talked, I began to see why my father might have a hard time expressing emotion. 

"I want to dedicate this Natural World issue of Country Roads to my father—a kind and gentle man whose quiet presence I will miss, and who I loved very much." —James Fox-Smith 

Most walkers on the Coast to Coast Walk go from west to east, putting the prevailing winds (and Atlantic storms) at their backs. The western trailhead, in a coastal town named St. Bees, is an easy train ride from Manchester. Dad had been born and raised in Manchester, so before setting out on our walk he spent a day showing me around. One afternoon he turned the rental car into a quiet street and parked near a house with a large garden around it. It was where he had lived as a child, and although the original house had been rebuilt, the garden looked much as he remembered it. In it stood a little pavilion of the kind that the English would call a “summer house.” With a shingle roof, porthole windows, and a stained-glass transom above the door, it was the whimsical sort of structure from which gin and tonics might have been served during the garden parties of England’s postwar years, and in which the lawn chairs and croquet set would be stored in between. Leaning on the garden wall, Dad gazed at the summer house, then described how, in the months following his father’s death he would sometimes be inconsolable. His mother, unable to deal with her little boy’s grief, would lock him in this summer house until he stopped crying, sometimes for hours. Dad remembered sitting alone on the floor, marking the passage of time in the way sunbeams falling through the stained-glass transom advanced across the floor. As he remembered, a single tear slid down his cheek. It’s the only time I ever saw him cry. 

If you read Country Roads often you’ve probably heard about my father before, since this column usually seems to inevitably turn towards family. Last month my dad died suddenly in Australia, a week before his eighty-fourth birthday. The day the news came, I got a flight and spent two weeks with my mother and siblings, crying, laughing, and remembering while we made arrangements to walk Dad home. As my parents grew older, I thought a lot about how it would feel when the time came to say goodbye. But I had no idea. Does anyone, ever? I suppose there are few experiences more natural than that of burying one’s father, since the responsibility to do so is an inevitable part of growing old. That doesn’t make it easier. So, I want to dedicate this Natural World issue of Country Roads to my father—a kind and gentle man whose quiet presence I will miss, and who I loved very much.