"How long will you continue like this?!"
"He doesn't deserve this!" "You can do better!" My mum would always argue with my Dad. I was years old. Very innocent. I knew only what my mum taught me and the little I learnt from school. Sometimes when I got back from school, I would walk in on such arguments. My dad in the kitchen with my mum.
I had not yet been baptised into the world of adult complexities. So I didn't understand.
So yes, I have a father, but I was raised by a single parent - my mum. Occasionally, my dad would totter in, hardly ever around. The scent of alcohol mixed with sweat and other hostile odour would accompany him as he walked past my mum at the door headed straight for the couch.
I was too young to understand anything and never really had many feelings for him.
My dad had fought in the second world war. He was lucky to have returned home alive but unfortunately, there was no more life for him. Life as he knew it had been yanked away. Most of his peers and friends had also enlisted. Many were not as fortunate as him.
So I grew up without him. My mum became my angel. My world. My all. She was a sweet example of the best that a person can be. She worked very hard to provide for me and herself. Often as a child when I would ask about why my dad was never home and why he didn't stay home even when he had come back from the war. My mom answered that he couldn't take care of us.
Once upon a time, now in my adolescent years, I had the chance to sit with my dad. As he years wore on he had become more and sober.
Some said he even had a woman or two in his life now.
One day as I turned 17, I visited him.
Then I heard the flip side of the story. My parents were madly in love. They were friends from the age of 4 when my mums' parents were transferred
into Wintersville. During a church service, my paternal grandfather along with my father as a boy sat beside my mum's parents. That's how they became friends.
My mum was 16 and my dad was 18 when they got married. She was under 18, yes. But these sort of things did happen in those years.
Three years later there was a call for enlistments. My dad being a nationalist enlisted with many of his friends. He promised my mom he'd be back.
He said to me in this revelatory conversation that the picture he had of mum, the perfumed handkerchief she gave to him and the thought of returning to her warm embrace was what kept him alive in the abyss of death. There were days he had to remain camouflaged in a position as he lay among corpses to escape the enemy.
After three years, dad said he returned home. It was an early morning like he had pictured many times in the battle field. The door was unlocked so he let himself in. What he saw broke his heart forever.
Lying in bed with his wife, both of them asleep, was one of his friends who had for one reason or the other declined to enlist in the army.
He quietly left them and that damaged him.
John (for that was my father's name) said he didn't want me to judge my mum as it must have been difficult for her not knowing what might have happened to him. But that he told me because he felt I was now old enough to understand. "A man needed his father and his father's tales wisdom" He would often tell me.
I went back home that day shattered and battered. That day, I saw another face underneath the face of my Angel.
"Now, I know that no man can be trusted"
