Book/My old man: a voyage around our fathers

'Dad epitomises both meanings of the word party – a man who loves to party'Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She and her brother, Maxwell, were adopted by a Scottish couple, Helen and John Kay, and brought up in Bishopbriggs, Glasgow. John worked for the Communist party full-time and stood for MP of Queen's Park in 1982. Jackie Kay decided to concentrate on writing after encouragement from Alasdair Gray. Her first book of poetry, the autobiographical The Adoption Papers, was published in 1991 and won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award.

Our teacher asked us to write a true story about our dads. ‘My dad is a party man. He organises parties,’ I wrote in my English jotter, aged seven. My school pals thought it sounded like a great job. They had visions of a man who blew up balloons for his living and put wee sausages on sticks. And though being the Industrial Organiser of the Communist Party didn’t involve blowing up balloons, except occasionally red ones for the Morning Star bazaar, the ‘party man’ is still really how I think of my dad. He seems so easily to epitomise both meanings of the word party: he is a party man and he loves to party. I can’t think of my father without thinking also of his beliefs and interests, his passion for ideas, his life-long commitment to socialism. But I also can’t imagine him without thinking of his infectious sense of fun, his love of singing and dancing. Of all the men I know, my dad is the most enthusiastic. Women love my dad not just because he’s a great conversationalist, but also because he’s a good listener. (Though he’s also the most self-critical person I know, and will often say the day after meeting some new person, ‘Christ I should have talked less and listened mair!’)

When I was a young girl, my dad stood as the Communist party candidate for Glasgow’s Queen’s Park district. I used to love trailing Glasgow’s South Side on my dad’s election campaigns, those streets around the Citizens’ Theatre – Gorbals Street, Alison Street, Cathcart Road, ‘Vote John Kay’ posters plastered to the green Morris Minor – the car’s registration plate happened to end with the letters KGB. My brother always found the van with the posters and the loudspeaker a bit embarrassing. I liked the excitement and the buzz, the leaflets and the blether, the stopping of complete strangers. I thought my dad was famous. I often listened to him speak at factory gate meetings. ‘Do you get nervous, Dad?’ I asked him. ‘Aye. Of course. If I didnae get nervous, I wouldnae respect the workers.’ (I think of that now when I give poetry readings!) But my favourite thing was going to The Count.

The Count became a place, a concept and an action all rolled into one. It was great getting to stay up late, walking up and down the aisles of the Kelvin Hall double-checking every Communist vote. It is funny now looking back how seriously my dad took The Count when he’d end up getting 300 votes max. At the end, my dad stood on the stage with the other candidates, the likes of the famous Scottish Tory Teddy Taylor, and his name was called: ‘Kay, John Robert – 278’. My dad would give a wee shrug; like it wasn’t quite the number he’d hoped for, but no bad, no bad, ever the optimist. The Count sizzled and there was the bag of chips, the democratic smell of the salt and the vinegar, on the way home.

We often held party socials in our house, which I loved, too, mainly for the sing-songs. My dad would always sing ‘Brush up Your Shakespeare’ performing with an imaginary brush up and down the living room carpet: ‘Brush up your Shakespeare/Start quoting him now. Brush up your Shakespeare/And the women you will wow/ Just declaim a few lines from ‘Othella’/And they’ll think you’re a helluva fella….’ (He still sings that song, though last Christmas we videoed him singing it and he watched it, and said in semi-horror and wonder. ‘Is that what I look like singing that? Christ. I’m an old chancer. Don’t let me sing that again!’)

Every year we’d go on a summer holiday to coincide with the Glasgow Fair, to Mull, Ballantrae or Aviemore. On those long car drives, my brother and I would play the song game with my dad. We’d say a word, any word, and he’d have to think of a song with that word in it. And we never ever managed to catch him out, all the way from Glasgow to Oban, Tobermoray to Dervaig, Lochinver to Torridon. My brother shouted ‘white man’ and my dad burst straight into song: ‘Far away in the hills of Croftamie where the white man fears to tread …’

My dad has an extraordinary memory and a phenomenal general knowledge. He stores songs, old films (even the names of the actors playing the bit parts), operas, classical music, politics, characters in books, anything about James Joyce or Proust. It’s as if the challenge to remember things, in particular and specific detail, is an attempt to make sure the past doesn’t get lost. He’s a huge fund of knowledge, a walking, talking encyclopaedia. My dad was a bright working-class boy from Townhead, Glasgow who won a scholarship to the prestigious Allan Glen’s school. He left school at the age of 14 – something he always regretted – and went to night school and trained as a draughtsman.

I often feel as if I owe everything to my dad. It was he who suggested to my mum that they try adoption when they couldn’t have children. And then having adopted us, he seemed to forget that we were adopted. He never really liked to think about or talk about adoption in the way that my mum did. It was my dad who gave me my love of music, and my first double album – which was Bessie Smith. He played jazz obsessively, humming along to Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie or Art Tatum. He’d listen to the music, his face lifted and rapt in wonder, counting along to the invisible numbers, then – unable to contain himself, he’d be on the floor jitterbugging and dancing around the living room, pointing his fingers down to the left side and then to the right – striding down the living room floor, jumping backwards in three moves.

My father used to go climbing with a group of pals he called the Weekenders, Blondie and Wattie and others. Up the top of Ben Ann, they would recite The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: ‘Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough/A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou/Beside me singing in the Wilderness -/And Wilderness is Paradise enow.’

Not so long ago, a few of the remaining Weekenders went back up Ben Ann, a hidden gem in the middle of the Trossachs, to scatter Wattie’s ashes. They had a sing-song to remember him. I remember climbing Ben Ann with my dad, a few years ago, marvelling at how he could still do it with two plastic hips. We got to the top, and he spread his arms out as if the whole world was his oyster. ‘Look at that! Nothing like it! On top of the world.’

I cannot imagine not having my dad in the world.