My Dad Was A Sweet & Tender Hooligan...

 

Dad (Right), with Derek Beackon campaigning on the Isle of Dogs, 1993.

... A Failed Fascist & Father.

There is so much confusion around exactly who I am. 

A Romani woman who was a child of a Neo-Nazi father. A Neo-Nazi father who, despite all my philosophical protestations otherwise, probably has been the most impactful influence on me. An anti-racist activist whose voice shakes in the guilty shadow of childhood memories of pride performing adult encouraged Sieg Heil salute. 

Yet, I owe a debt to my father. I am who I am, whatever that is, because he was who he was. Not that I think he knew who he was either. Adopted by a Birmingham Catholic family and no traceable adoption records must have have him an existential void that he tried to fill with fascism. Finding a family in West Ham football hooligan gangs, singing his rage out to Screwdriver, finding a uniform to wear in the worse sides of the Skinhead movement. The only stories I heard about this childhood was a bravado covered laugh about how he was made to sleep in a rabbit hutch if his room wasn't cleaned. There were deep wounds in my father, that he chose to bandage with a swastika. 

Yet in my younger years, my dad was just dad. I was definitely a 'daddy's girl'. I worshiped my father, in a weird pre-adolescent way, I was proud of my father and the pseudo respect he seemed to get from his friends. Friends who had each been given a different story of my dad's life, experience and despite obvious mathematic impossibilities for a man born in the 60's, his supposed service in the Falklands. Through child's eyes, my dad was my hero. Through adult eyes, my dad was at best an insecure, alcoholic lost boy and at worst - and probably the truth when the biological emotion is removed - a vile fascist who truly believed in Aryan supremacy. In honesty, I think my dad moved in-between these things throughout his life. After all his childhood best friend who he kept contact with, was a black man who had no idea of his secret fascist life in London.

I often ask myself, why am I a communist? Am I so enraged by injustice and fascism, because I want to heal the cuts made by my father when he went 'Paki-Bashing*' or am I so enraged that the White Power movement stole the best parts of my father from me? Or is it a hatred as legitimate as my comrades' who I admire and stand side by side with. I know I would like to think it's the latter - but years of a university psychology degree has only shook at these foundations with Freudian anxieties. 

I write this today, the anniversary of my father's death, on advice from my dear Irish friend who I have had many, many drunken/hungover muses with. Advice that I feel like I should heed on many things not just on the complexities of mourning a man who created me, not in his image, but in the antithesis of it: 

"When you can't speak, write."

Of course, there's an irony of some of my favourite people in my life, are Irish. Whilst we never discussed it, my dad would definitely not have shared my love of Kneecap and the support for the 32. That said, he was a massive Clash fan, and I have to, once again, credit him with my taste in music. Even if he didn't quite get the irony of White Riot.

Yet, removing myself from this existential recollection of my father, was he a good father? I remember as a child feeling protected by him, but then I remember bricks being thrown at us on the way to school, people having recognised my dad standing in place next to Derek Beackon on TV and Election Specials. I saw him as a protector, yet his politics put me in danger. Indeed, school records labeled me as a racist for years because of my dad's notoriety - I don't remember as a young child, ever being racist, but I'm sure since it was all I knew, there may have been some micro-aggressions.

I remember birthday trips to Upton Park, but I also remember the last time we spoke. Around 7 years ago, when he had promised to come over to mine for Christmas dinner, a dinner which would be our first together since my parent's divorce when I was 11. He didn't turn up, he didn't answer his calls. I found out later he had chosen to go to the West Ham match. He was a man who I'm not sure knew how to love, and would always choose football over family, because football was family to him. It never abandoned him like his birth mother did, like his wife and children did post-divorce. It was always the safest option. 

I have no photos of my father. The one above was a result of a google search of his name and the BNP election in 1993, yet, he is here in the mirror with me always, I look just like him, a Roma-ised version. There's a poetry somewhere in how my maternal Roma genes fought with his in creating me and at the very least came out with a stalemate. 

Despite my conflicted feelings, the ironic thing is, I have never regretted not seeing him on his death bed. In an odd way, I respected him too much, to appear at his side in pity. When he reached out to my mother to ask her to let me know he was dying, it weighed on me, but never once did I feel an overpowering compulsion to rush to him. I wish I could say this was because of my antifascist principles, that I was indifferent to the death of someone who would harm those who I sought to protect, but I think it was because I felt I owed him the dignity of disinterest. There would be no death bed repentance, nor would I expect there to be, that was not him, he was a man of conviction, no matter how wrong and damaging those convictions were. 

I have oddly been comforted by the fact I feel he would have respect for me, for not betraying myself in that way. I can't explain it exactly, only that I felt on the deepest level, we understood each other in a way no one else could understand us.

...And I suppose it is only that understanding I grieve for today. 

*I have not censored this because I feel like such a vile subject should be felt with the full punch effect, by censoring this, I feel like I am sanitising it which, especially in the current political climate, would only add to the passive reaction to the rise of fascism.