Previous convictions

I have recently had one of the most important second thoughts of my life. I decided to stop hating my stepfather.

 

I had hated him for some 40 years. I had hated him for insinuating himself into the home where I was being brought up by my mother and grandparents: for his awkwardness and weakness in front of my mother; for his narrowness, his distrustfulness, for his greed and meanness, for the state of tension in which he held himself and all about him. I knew that he a Pole had been through Nazi invasion, Soviet prison camps, the war, postwar labour in coal mines and on road gangs. It made no difference.

 

I don't believe I resented him for marrying my mother but I hated him for failing to be a father to me. I carried a memory of him transforming the shabby little idyll of my first years, growing up in East Fife with my mother and grandparents, into a battleground of all against all. I had a version of my upbringing within me in which the stratagems, hypocrisies and treacheries to which I resorted in the family became second nature and were his doing. When I wasn't blaming or hating him, I. would pity him—in an abstract and scornful way.

 

We had full cause of tension. Unable to be the master in his house because the house was my mother's and she was the mistress of it, he fell back on self?pity. Much of their life seemed like a grisly gavotte in which each would seek to manoeuvre himself or herself into a position of blamelessness. She was unable to conceive again, and had a hysterectomy. He had no stake in anything. Neither I nor, I think, my mother had any inkling of what that meant. He saw himself as bereft of the attributes of manhood. My mother thought she had given him everything. I thought they fucked me up—and unlike Philip Larkin's "mum and dad," I thought he had meant to. They divorced when they were in their early 70s, splitting the little property in Dundee so that they both lived in tiny flats. I scarcely saw him—although he loved my son.

 

My mother's death two years ago did nothing to dissolve this knot of hatred for my stepfather. Though we embraced at the funeral, we quarrelled furiously after it—I erupting in a roaring rage, tossing a table across the living room of his flat. Willy?nilly, in life she had put me into a position where to love her was to renounce him: yet her death seemed to change nothing.

 

Then, last year, a letter from him arrived for me in Moscow. It contained a wedding invitation. In his careful English he said he had met a woman—also Polish—and they were to get married. Would I come to Dundee for the ceremony?

 

I went. Walking up to the chapel I was as nervous as I had been for years. A pretty, middle?aged woman was standing on the steps with an older man, posing for a photographer. I stopped: she looked at me, and ran to kiss me warmly. She said—"You are John. I am your new step?stepmother."

 

My stepfather had struck it lucky in his 75th year. The wedding was delightful and happy. His new wife, in her 50s, was charming, intelligent and comfortably off, following the death of her husband some years before. They were clearly very affectionate towards each other. He had some friends of his own. Life is not a modern film—it seems that it can have a happy ending.

 

And—it seems—I decided to stop hating him. I think that it was .a decision?although one made easier, or perhaps possible, by the removal of the burden of him in my life. Where before I had only abstractly and hypocritically sympathised with him as an immigrant in a strange country, I could now really feel his difficulties, with neither impatience nor guilt.

 

I have indeed had second thoughts about him. The first thought lasting decades, was of a man who could be no more than a repellent stranger with whom I was forced to live. The second thought is freer: I may or may not find in him a friend, but I no longer assume an enemy. My first was closed: it knew him in an absolute sense, because it defined him as existing only in relation to the harm and hurt done to me. My second sees a new man in him, capable of affection, warmth, dignity in truth, traits which were there before, but which were buried by either him or me.

 

The grace of my step?stepmother was the intercession—above all her steady determination to cut through the hatreds which bound us, to create a new little "family" of three people with no blood tie, permitting a lifting of the grudge, a dissolving of the self?pity; stowing away the reflex of enmity and defensiveness which defined my stepfather and me. I had to rethink him. I did it with the aid of bright primary concepts I had once found mawkish—or worse, religious: forgiveness and humility.

 

My stepfather was my first and longest hate. We came near to blows several times. I consciously delighted in his discomfiture. I lied to him and about him. I spoke ill of him to everyone and I thought myself right in doing so. Having new thoughts about him gave me hope that a Godless life can still have, if not meaning, then at least some moral content and even a moral victory over man's vileness.