Eulogy for a dad, from a daughter

My father taught me to solder when I was eleven, which I am told is an unusual thing to teach an eleven-year-old girl in 1994, and which he did not appear to have considered.

He also taught me to wire a plug, bleed a radiator, reverse a trailer, and sharpen a knife properly, which he was very serious about and which he re-tested me on periodically until I was about thirty-five.

He did not teach me anything about how he felt. Not one thing. In fifty-one years my father said the word “proud” to me exactly once, at my graduation, in a car park, with his back half-turned, and then he asked whether I had paid for parking.

For a long time I thought those were two separate facts about him — that he taught me practical things, and that he could not say anything. I do not think that any more.

He was teaching me not to need anybody. That was the entire project. He grew up with nothing and he had watched his own mother be dependent on people who were not reliable, and he decided, before I was born, that his daughter was going to be able to fix her own things.

I have never once called a man out to my house. I want that on the record because it was his life’s work.

He was maddening. He could not be told anything. He would not go to the doctor and this contributed to why we are all here today, and I am cross with him about it, and I am going to be cross with him about it for some time.

My brother Wayne says Dad was harder on him than on me, and that is true. I got the patient version. Wayne got the one who inspected the work afterwards.

My daughter is nine. He taught her to solder in April. She was wearing his glasses, which were far too big, and she was completely silent with concentration, and he did not say one encouraging word for forty minutes and she has not stopped talking about it since.

Dad — I paid for the parking. I always paid for the parking.

I know what you meant. Thank you for the trade.

For thirty-six years my father wore the same thing to work: navy trousers, a shirt, and a jacket with his name on it. Selwyn. Stitched on, in red, over the pocket.

He was a bus driver. He drove the 63 and then the 12, and then, for the last nine years, whatever they gave him, because he had stopped minding.

When I was small I thought the jacket meant he was important. Later, at about fourteen, I was embarrassed by it, and I would like to apologise for that now, publicly, because he knew.

Here is what I understand about the jacket at forty-eight.

My father was, in his own house, quite a serious man. Not cold. Quiet. He was not one for a fuss and he did not go in for long conversations about anything.

But on a bus, with his name on his chest, he was a completely different person. He knew people. He knew who got on where, and who had had an operation, and whose son had gone to university. He let people on who could not pay and told nobody. There is a woman here today — she has just told me outside, and I have never met her — who says he waited for her, every Tuesday, for two years, because she was slow on her feet and the driver before him would not.

Two years. Every Tuesday. He never mentioned it at home. Not once.

I have got the jacket. It is in my car and I do not know what I am going to do with it.

My father did not tell us he loved us and he did not tell us about the woman on Tuesdays. He was the same man in both cases, and it took me until this week to work out that those are not two things. They are one thing.

He just did it, and he did not say it, and he assumed we would notice.

We noticed, Dad. It took a while.