There are above my bed two photo-booth portraits. The first is of my Father. Taken in nineteen-sixty-eight, he wears a fleece crewneck and a neat moustache. His eyes are like mine, except for his left pupil which was coloured a faint clouded white – the result of a childhood accident, blindness in one eye. You cannot see this scarring in his photograph – you can only see that his pupils are two very different sizes, the effect of an incredibly thick cosmetic lens with a black ink spot in its middle (interestingly, it was a fountain pen to the eye which caused his blindness. Strange to have black ink again so close, this time balm rather than weapon). His smile is subtly impish, self-conscious, a sort of half-smile, betrayed by a crinkling around the eyes. He is young, as I am young. He is abroad, as I am abroad. We are both, side by side, twenty-four years old.
There is innate in the use of the photo-booth – or any analogue processes – the collapsing of time. There are no tell-tale signs of the contemporary. In time conceived as a story, or a sphere, or as a breath in a song, it becomes guesswork as to who is Father, who is Son, who outlives whom. Side by side, without prior context, you mightn’t be able to tell. Time can be both widened and flattened. A concertina. We both exist in the booth, in the silver suspended on the photographic paper. We might be there, side by side, the same age. He might have taken his turn in the booth first, be waiting outside for his portrait while I sat within.
Due to their amorphous nature, folksongs and ballads are grouped into families. What binds each text to the next may be something as nebulous as a shared thematic, or something as specific as the mention of an historical figure, battle, or township.
There is a family of ballads known variously as The Water is Wide, Waly Waly, or Jamie Douglas [Child Ballad 204, Roud Ballad 87]. The shared thematic amongst these texts is one of longing. In most variants, the text is the lament of one left. The singer, invariably, remains, often on a shore, longing for a departed companion.
It’s a lovely word – companion – and it’s a nice thing to be.
You miss it terribly if you lose it.
(Taken from my Father’s journal, 2006).
The water is wide, I cannot cross o’er
And neither have I wings to fly
I have never spent time on the sea. I have never endured a prolonged voyage. My Father – sixty years my senior – spent months of his youth – cumulatively, perhaps, years – on ocean liners. (I get this habit – this using of dashes – from him, thoughts as fragments on papyrus, or carved on a tablet. I can see his mind at work, it's tangentiality, it's forming. This syntactical eccentricity interests me, as he was known in life for his succinctness: mind on the job, move with a purpose).
When my Father was twenty-four, while sailing to California, he had a love affair with an heiress from Hong Kong. He once asked her to prove her riches, and so she filled a suitcase with cash and gave it to him. I do not know if he kept it, and I do not know how much money was in the case– I want to say Ten Thousand American Dollars, but this seems unrealistic, her having that much cash on hand. I know that the heiress had back-combed hair à la the Ronettes. There is a photograph of her somewhere, its edged worn, her dress of a Hawaiian print. She would be an old woman now, eighty or more.
He arrived in California, where he worked as a cook, a labourer, a ranch-worker on the Mexican border. He collected leather goods. There’s a Mexican belt, somewhere, of brown leather which I wore throughout my teenage years.
I know very little else about my Father as a young man. Only a few fragmented facts. Bits of straw pulled from the tuft, embarrassingly small, threadlike in their feebleness. I know about the Heiress from Hong Kong. I know that after a Beatles concert, he took his friends to an all-night coffee-house, and they thought him charmingly Bohemian. He looks the part, certainly. There is a definite beatnik bend to him – the short crop of hair, the sweater, the pack of unfiltered gitanes which no doubt lay warmly crushed in his jean pocket. I remember that his skin, as an older man, was very golden and very warm (I can feel it now, if I try hard enough).
My Father was an academic by profession, but as a child I mistakenly believed him to be a woodworker. He was a hobbyist carpenter, spent his weekends making dog-houses, tree-houses, wooden toys. I suppose I had learnt early that Jesus was a carpenter. This job stood-out to me, it made sense. An occupation of wood and nails, of material productivity.
At six I wrote a speech for his funeral.:
Daddy was a good man.
At least he was a good builder when he was alive.
God bless him.
We put a hammer and nails on his coffin, and a motorcycle helmet.
Funny to have this in writing, preserved, the words of a grieving little boy.
The great thing about writing of course is that you can record your thoughts before running out of time.
I may be running out of time, so this writing seems a great idea to me.
(There are many empty pages and half-finished sentences in this, his last journal. Looking at it, I’m reminded of his calendar for the year 2006, where in January he had pencilled apply for passport, a passport which wouldn’t have expired until 2016. He was, though, dead within two months.)
Among my Father’s wooden creations, there are three identical dolls, each about the size of a loaf of bread. They are rough, crude puppets in the style of some raw minimalist Pinocchio. Round wooden heads, beady eyes, little smiles. He knew he was terminally ill when he crafted them. He made one for each of his children and called them The Protectors. They are weather-beaten now from two decades in the sun and rain. I know he intended them as talismans, for he named them so.
At nineteen, I wrote:
Strange, wooden friends,
More puppet than God.
Made by one
Very sick.
Ashen hands,
Do you remember the wood you worked?
It is of course a useless question, useful only in its poetry. The hand remembers nothing. The hand is gone. The hand – the same one glimpsed in an accompanying sheet of photo-booth shots, 1968, wears a gold signet ring which I now wear. As it happens, I have always had the distinct feeling that I am protected. This ring is another of his talismans. (There is a theory amongst the more superstitious in my family that my Father’s ghost collects rings. Two wedding bands and a diamond engagement ring have been lost in this manner. I wear my ring – his ring – always. I never remove it. I will not let him claim this small, gold piece of himself.
‘I am truly becoming a spectre,’ Roland Barthes writes of being photographed. (I may be running out of time).
The Father with whom I sit, side by side, is both my equal and my senior. He is both the personification of longing (build me a boat that can carry two) and its antithesis. The concertina of time. Sometimes, sitting in the booth, I feel that I might call to him, that he’s just there, waiting behind the curtain. (Beyond the veil, some say. The thinning of veils).
He’s turned his back and gone away
‘I’ll come for you another day’
Though my days are long, night is longer still.
I am not good at waiting. I rush. I rush my relationships, I rush to get my writing done, I work in quick fevered bursts and grow frustrated when inspiration doesn’t light upon me.
I am no good at rowing a boat – the methodical slowness of the oars’ rotation frustrates me. I’ll let anyone into the parts of myself which many might keep sacred, private. Late at night, recently, I sent a song to a man, saying this is how inside my heart sounds. I’d met him only three times. The song, in fact, was Carolyn Hester – The Texas Songbird – singing The Water is Wide, 1965.
When time opens, when it unfurls, I am alone, as one left on a shore, as one longing. In folk balladry, a happy ending is rare. They are gruesome, these old songs. They are laments. They reflect the brutality of the times in which their verses were first sung. (I am six years old, sitting in a classroom, watching smiling faces thinking these children do not know that they will die).
I cannot cross o’er
I may be running out of time
The second photo-booth photograph above my bed is a self-portrait. I am twenty-four, mind filled with dusty old songs, hands calloused from the neck of my guitar and the grasses I pull to make little wreaths. I am as far away from my birthplace as is possible. Unlike my father, I did not spend months upon an ocean liner. I do not have my Protector with me. I collect other talismans. I wear my signet ring and hope for the best. I send songs to people late at night and hope to never be left upon a shore again. I navigate the truth that one will always be left. It has no undoing, the concertina must fold back, like breath.
The elegiac nature of a ballad is also its beauty.
There is a freedom to gazing seaward at wide water.
I can imagine us side by side, the same age, friends, or brothers.
A photo-booth by the sea. It’s clinical background curtain – veil – traded for a horizon. A small wooden boat rowed by a young man, disappearing across the water.
I can hold tight to wooden talismans and seek the protection they promise.
I could spend a long time here, watching my young father row his boat away.
Beautiful, considered, courageous. Bravo Lachie!
There is a freedom to gazing seaward at wide water … so soulful.