My Father's Hands

I had always loved my father's hands. They seemed to be the only part of him I could love in safety.

I could love them in secret and in silence and my mother would never know. I could look at them when she was out of the room, cooking in the kitchen, banging the pots and pans as she worked.

She was an angry woman who had been forced to marry my father when she was only twenty years old because he had made her pregnant. She had never forgiven him, nor those who made them get married. She once confided in me: "There was someone else I liked at the time, more than your father."

My two sisters and I spent most of our childhood in an atmosphere of simmering resentment, which seemed to have an unspoken law:

'Thou shalt not love thy father, nor get to know him, nor have any relationship with him.'

But I disobeyed her and loved him in secret; through his hands.

He was not a tall man, or a heavy man - just 5ft 7in, weighing an unfluctuating 9 stone all his life, except when he died of cancer at the age of sixty-nine.

He was sinewy and lithe, like the greyhounds raced by the working men in our neighbourhood on the racecourse beyond the housing estates. But his hands were large, strong and square, with tapering fingers and smooth horn-hard rounded finger nails.

They were hands that worked in all weathers: night shift, day shift; carrying loads, lifting crates, boxes; working on the cargoes from the huge ships that came and went at Swansea docks.

He worked until his hands were cracked and chapped by cold, wind and rain, filthy from handling cargoes of pig iron or coal; brown and gnarled from the sun in summer.

I was fascinated by those hands and wanted to hold them; examine them; play with them; longing to feel their rough texture and warmth holding mine. But I feared my mother's disapproval, and the impulse always froze before I could reach out to him.

When I was about 7 or 8, I noticed that my hands were like his; I had inherited large, strong hands - unexpected on a thin little girl, and I felt pleased that they were not like my mother's hands - small, plump, soft.

I never sat on my father's lap, or played with him, or went out with him. But once a week, on a Sunday evening, my mother would wash my hair and my father would dry it. I would sit on the floor in front of the open coal fire, between his knees, back to him and facing the blaze, and he would rub my wet hair with a towel that he'd just held to warm in front of the flames.

I would feel the firm, warm weight of his hands through the towel, as my head was jogged gently back and forth by their vigorous rubbing.

Those Sunday evenings were amongst the rare times in my childhood when I felt secure and at ease, my head held in large, strong hands while the long fair hair dried.

By the time my mother was fifty, she had begun to soften a little. Her lifetime's burden of making ends meet was lifted now her daughters had left home. She was a voracious reader, and even wrote poems and stories from time to time. She won prizes for recipes that she sent to women's magazines, and joined a writers' circle at the local library.

Occasionally when I came home on an unexpected visit, I would find the two of them seated together on a sofa, my father holding my mother's small stockinged feet in his hands.

In the mid-sixties they bought a small black and white television set and avidly watched University Challenge every Sunday, taking an almost parental interest in the brilliant youngsters who'd enjoyed the kind of education of which they themselves had been deprived.

The times when my mother shared with me the bitterness of her life became fewer. There were even times when I dared to believe that she was content.

At sixty my father retired from the docks after forty years of working there. There was no retirement ceremony; no lump sum or golden handshake. He went down to the call on a cold Friday morning in December, worked his last day, and became a free man. Free to read his Daily Mirror all morning and his Swansea Evening Post all evening; to call at the bookie's a couple of times a week and to drink his pints and smoke his Woodbine at the Labour Club when his meagre pension ran to it.

The following June 12th was my father's 61st birthday, and my mother rang me a week before and asked if I would club together with her to buy my father a gold wrist watch. 'I know he always wanted one', was her only comment.

We chose him a fine looking gold watch with a black crocodile strap and presented it to him on his birthday.

It was as if my mother, at last, was feeling for him, in his final years, something other than contempt.

The handsome gold wrist watch set between the protuberant bones of his thin wrists, looked incongruous so close to his rough, brown labourer's hands.

One day, not long after receiving the gold watch, he confided in me, giving me one of his rare shy smiles.

"When I look down at the arm of the chair and see a hand with a gold wrist watch on it, I feel a shock; and for a minute it seems as if the hand belongs to someone else."