A shirt for all generations

I’d forgotten about the shirt.

“Where did you find that shirt?” I asked, feeling like I might lose my balance. “That’s my Dad’s shirt”.

“Yeah, I found it in the dress up box” he replied.

Why my fourteen year old son, with his strong sense of “cool”, should be fossicking in his childhood dress up box was unclear. But there he was, wearing my father’s old checked flannelette shirt. 

. . . . . .

My father died twenty years ago today. His big, generous, under-functioning heart finally burst, sending him slumping onto the kitchen floor.  My mother and my sister were there when he fell.  My sister, the only one of my parents’ four children to still live at home, called the ambulance. She was fifteen. Meanwhile Mum crouched beside the man she’d shared her life with for over thirty years and urged him to hold on. The ambulance officers took Dad futilely to the local Accident and Emergency Department, muttering unconvincing, non-committal words of vain hope to my mother and sister. Shortly afterwards, my brothers and I received head-spinning phone calls and we independently began our journeys home.

Life without our father began.  

I miss him, although it’s no longer the acute, furious, wretched sense of loss that it once was. It’s become more of a fond recollection of times shared. And a dull regret for opportunities missed.

Two other brothers. My dad (left) and his brother, circa 1940



Mostly, I regret that I haven’t been able to share my sons with my father. I despair that I never got to hand them to him when they were newborns. I didn’t get to see him rock them awkwardly for the first time or hear him say quietly “Huh. Hello mate”.

I can almost conjure a picture of him wrestling playfully with two young boys before swinging them onto his towering shoulders as they shriek in delighted fear, just as he did with my brothers decades earlier. But it wasn’t to be.

The blazer. First grade premiers 1958

I hate that he never stood on a football sideline and cheered his grandsons on to Under 6 glory. I’m sad that he’ll never know that one of those grandsons recently captained a Junior Varsity team in an international competition on the other side of the world, where we now live. Dad played first grade football sometime last century, well before I was born. His club blazer hangs in the “Heritage Items” department of my wardrobe, right beside the wedding dress he didn’t see me wear. He should have seen me wear it. He should have seen his grandsons play football. He should have at least kicked a football around the backyard with them.

How proud he would have been of their passion for football; how he would have delighted in their interest, their determination, their dedication, their sportsmanship, their resilience. When Kleine Jongen returned from a trip to the UK earlier this year, having watched his beloved Liverpool FC win a Premier League game, I desperately wanted him to be able to phone my Dad, also an ardent Liverpool FC fan, and talk him through play by play (only partially because it would have saved me from needing to hear a play-by-play description of the entire ninety minutes myself).

“Did you see the Liverpool result from yesterday?” he’d ask. “ I was there! Did you see that second goal? Nah, it wasn’t offside. No. Yes. I know. But he did the same in the second round game last year. Mmm, should have been a red card. Maybe. But I think they should have played him up front. Oh well, at least they’re second on the table now”.

And so it would have gone on. And on. And on. Our phone bill would have been astronomical. I wish.

I wish my boys had had the chance to go to the Sydney Cricket Ground with Dad during long hot Australian summers. I wish he’d seen them swaggering to the crease and wielding the willow themselves in their own neighbourhood on countless Saturday mornings. Whenever I hear the excited trill of a cricket commentary, I picture them all sharing a companionable silence in front of the television, slinging occasional sledges at the Poms and chuckling at the combined familial wit and wisdom that they shared. Ned Nederlander would have been there too. He only met my dad a few times, but his comments and stories now make a brilliant contribution to keeping Dad’s memory alive. When we talk about him with the boys, we call him by his first name. He’s Graeme. My mother gets annoyed by that, wants them to call him Poppy, like the other grandchildren do. She thinks it is disrespectful to call their grandfather by his first name. On the contrary, I think it conveys huge respect. Our boys know that their maternal grandfather is a man called Graeme who died too soon. He’s not an unknown old dead bloke with a generic title. He’s a real bloke whose legacy includes a couple of boys who know they would have been adored by him.

Sometimes I find myself wishing that my boys had had to endure their grandfather’s unpredictable musings on politics and current affairs. I would have loved to have seen them gradually realise over the years that his infuriating switching of arguments mid-tirade was a cunning ploy to show them how to understand different viewpoints. It’s a life lesson valued highly by my siblings and me, albeit only now that we are adults. But my boys won’t ever learn that from him.

Nor will they ever learn how it feels to be held as unwilling prisoners in the back of a car on a long road trip with my father behind the steering wheel. They will never know the agony of being forced to listen to him reciting stanza after stanza after stanza of Australian poetry, as we drove for hours along  Australian country roads. Or worse, listen to him singing. Oh, Lord the singing. How many times in my youth did I desperately want to hurl myself from a moving vehicle in order to escape my father’s singing? And how broad would my smile be if I knew he was torturing his grandsons with his automotive baritone renditions today?

Each time I hear Grote Jongen’s articulate diatribes about some obscure topic, I marvel at how debating skills can be handed down from dead grandfather to living grandson with never a moment shared between them. Each time I see Kleine Jongen pick himself up after a disappointment and calmly and resolutely dust himself off, I marvel at how emotional strength can be handed down from dead grandfather to living grandson with never a moment shared between them. Not a single moment.

But earlier this week I was reminded that they share a lot. They share a heritage. Grote Jongen came home from football training, showered, dressed and came downstairs for dinner. He walked casually past me and sat down. I gasped.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Where did you find that shirt? That’s my dad’s shirt”, I smiled nervously.
 
“Yeah. Found it in the dress-up box”, he replied casually.

Thankfully, even though he knew its pedigree he didn’t wear it with a spirit of reverence or solemnity. He wore it with a silly grin on his face and not the slightest bit of sentimentality.
 I was torn between giggling and snivelling. Then, with a flash of emotional perception that defied his years, my boy-man strode towards me and enfolded me in a wordless, spontaneous embrace. For a brief frozen moment, an old checked flannelette shirt with a tattered collar and a rip in one sleeve entwined three generations.

Then he was gone, back to the digital world of a fourteen year old boy, leaving me standing in the kitchen inhaling a heady concoction of childhood memories, maternal pride and gratitude. I realised that my son – Graeme's grandson - is suddenly mature enough, tall enough and broad enough of shoulder to wear an old man’s shirt without looking like he’s playing dress-ups. And it occurred to me that it is indeed a shirt for all generations.