My Father and Myself by J.R. Ackerley

to him and could always count on his understanding and sympathy. That this was an excellent and friendly speech I realized when I was older; that I never took advantage of it is the whole point of this book; even at the time, my brother thought that the “old man” (my father was then forty-eight) had behaved “very decently”; but I myself was embarrassed and shocked. I had never associated my father with sex, indeed it was hardly more than a couple of years ago that I had innocently failed to associate him with the production of myself. Deprived of my stork, I was brought to understand, without ever pondering it, that many years ago my parents had come together to create a family; that was all. It was what people married for and they had achieved it. Since then, of course, there had been nothing more for them to do but raise and protect us and work for our good.
    To hear my father now complacently admitting to, even boasting of, extensive sexual misconduct was disconcerting and distasteful. Indeed it had absolutely no reality and I put it aside. My brother and I never discussed it, and for a great many years I did not think of it again or wonder what exactly my father had meant or what he had done. Whatever it was it lay in a remote past, and there it remained. It made no difference whatever to my present view of him, and of my mother, as staid, elderly people who, all passion spent, had fulfilled their lives in the creation of ourselves. Physical love belonged to the young. It did not enter my head even that my father might still be having congress with my mother, let alone with anyone else; all that belonged to the past; they slept now in separate bedrooms; their sexual day was done.

9
    IF SUCH INNOCENCE looks odd in a schoolboy of sixteen (and I don’t know if it does), I shall seem odder still when I say that these somewhat inhuman views I took of my father in his middle age as a sexually abdicated man persisted almost to the day of his death, more than fifteen years later. It must be remembered, however, that our lives together were interrupted by the war, which kept me from home almost continuously for four years; when I returned after the Armistice, adult and enlightened, there were reasons for consigning him, without much thought, to the sexual shelf. One of these was health. But first of all I must describe him as I recall him best, during the ’twenties.
    He was a very large man, tall and heavily built, the heaviness of his frame increasing with age. As a trooper he had been almost perfectly proportioned, I believe, according to Army standards, able to hold sixpences between his thighs, knees, calves and ankles when he stood upright with his legs close together, but the broad shoulders sagged forward more and more in late middle age until he acquired a top-heavy, unwieldy look. Upon these shoulders was set a large head, which may be called grand, with a wide, intelligent forehead, a prominent supraciliary ridge, and the strong features of an elder English statesman. My mother called him “Punch,” but that suggests an exaggeration of feature he did not possess; his nose and chin were both strong but there was nothing nut-crackery about them. His face was fleshy and venous, becoming rather jowly; his complexion ruddy. Thin on top, his greying hair was full at the sides and back; a thick mustache adorned a pleasant mouth in which, most of the time, a Jamaican cigar was tucked. I don’t remember him as a smiling man, though he was a cheerful one; he would laugh and chuckle, but his mien generally was serious and attentive; the smile, if he were pleased or amused, was conveyed more by voice, manner, and small facial movements than by any display of teeth. In one of his eyes, which were wide and blue and greatly magnified by his horn-rimmed spectacles, he had a pronounced cast.
    Strangely enough, considering the condition of his own, my father held decided views, often stated, of