Finding my father's diary 1

It was winter.

We had been labouring for weeks to make an impression, a good one, on the house. Initially, my father had wanted to sell it. But the prices quoted by real estate agents were low, at least, low enough to surprise us. They must have surprised my father too, for he changed his mind, and decided instead to rent it.

But it wasn’t really the money that changed his mind. He didn’t want to make such a final decision. It would have signalled to himself and to us that he was moving permanently to the nursing home, rather than just paying a visit while he regained the use of his legs.

He even looked out for a housekeeper, someone who could have lived there, at least part of the week, and cooked and cleaned for him. I found an advertisement, and passed it to him, but the woman was reluctant to work just for one person. She wanted a large family to care for, with lots of hungry people who would appreciate her cooking.

There were people who came to clean, as they had done before my mother died, and nurses to help him shower, and to look in to make sure he was all right. There was a woman who organised for him to join others on bus trips, and who kept him in touch with the world. But he was lonely. And the house was too big, and reverting to chaos.

I lived too far away, and could not have lived with him. I hadn’t seen him for eight years before my mother died and we were suddenly, searingly, thrown back together.

And then he had a particularly bad fall, and fractured a vertebra in his lumbar spine. When we got the call, it was from a passerby, a woman who had seen him fall, or at least had seen him lying on the ground next to the rubbish bin that he had just put out. She had helped him back into the house, and had been trying to get hold of me by phone. I had been trying to get hold of him, as we had visited him the day before, and I was worried by his condition, and his loneliness.

I never found out who she was, she didn’t leave any details.

My father had, as well as a broken bone, a swelling as big as an egg on the back of his head. He couldn’t walk. He said, It’s up to you now. It was almost as if he felt relieved that it had happened, because it meant he didn’t have to make a decision. He had never liked making decisions.

We called the ambulance, and they thought, I’m sure, that we had abused him. They treated us with suspicion. I did not look, after all, like the daughter of an eighty-two year old man. The stocky paramedic was brusque with my father, did not speak to me.

Why is the furniture arranged like this? she asked.

Dad can hold onto it, and the walls, as he walks, I said, when I should have let him answer.

Looks pretty dangerous to me, she said, not looking at me. Should have clear pathways for you to walk. No wonder you fall over. Lots to bump into.

But it soon became clear that he had in fact had an accident, and that we had not bashed him around. The two officers took him by each arm and attempted to help him to the ambulance.

His body did not trust their support, even though they were both very strong and obviously capable. He tried to hold onto the brick wall of the house. They told him to let go, and rely on their arms. He couldn’t, I could see that. He believed he would fall. His legs were jelly underneath him, gave him no confidence.

When we got into the car to follow the ambulance, I put on my sunglasses, and said to Craig, It’s very hard to watch your father be carried away like that, so helpless.


Once my father knew he had to go into the nursing home, he instructed me to clear the house, get it ready. There were two lifetimes’ worth of belongings. The only things that had been touched since my mother’s death were her clothes, but only those in one of the large wardrobes in their bedroom. It was something for me to do while we waited for her funeral, and a way, I thought, hoped, to help my father.

The house had four bedrooms, more or less, plus a tiny room that was full of odd things. There was a bread slicer, a desk my father had made, a steam clothes press, suitcases, papers, and a plastic shelving unit on wheels that had onions and oranges in it. The onions were going bad, and the cockroaches had been at them, as well as everything else in the room. The curtains had holes in them and brown stains where they had been crawling all over them, and the desk was full of cockroach droppings and stained all over the plywood backing by them. We had to throw it out it was so ruined.

The suitcases had cockroaches, dead and alive, within them. The bread slicer had ants crawling on and around it, attracted to the particles of food.

I can’t remember now where exactly I found the diary. It may well have on the plastic shelving, or in one of the drawers of the desk. It was an old one, from 1988, and from the Medical Defense Union. It also had cockroach stains on its cover.

That year was the last year of my medical studies. By that stage, everyone seemed exhausted. At least, everyone I spoke with; maybe I was projecting my own feelings upon others. But the relentless studying, tutorials, ward rounds, exams, finally had an end in sight. It was the worst year, the year when I failed three subjects, seemed in constant conflict with my parents, and was told a secret that changed everything.

The diary was the only one of my father’s that I discovered in all of the house. I don’t know if he threw out all of his other diaries, or didn’t bother with them except on occasional years. It was a pocket slimline one, with a week to a page. It had a black cover and gold on the edge of the pages. There was a fabric bookmark attached to the top of the spine.

If you open someone else’s diary, you must be prepared for whatever you read. And you must realise that you are not committing an honorable act. Diaries are best left alone, at least until the owner has gone. I wonder if even then it is wise.

I don’t know what I expected. I’m not sure if I thought about what the consequences might be, to read this personal record. When I flicked through it, there didn’t seem much written in the spaces, so maybe it seemed innocuous. I wanted, I suppose, to find out the secrets that would help me understand my father, and my mother.

There were entries in some days, not others, and he did not write very much.