I remember being delighted one Christmas morning to be gifted the most splendid stuffed toy pig by my Dad. It was a soft bundle of joy, with a plump, pale pink body, and squishy balls for legs. A little curly tail at the back and floppy ears falling over its felt face. Dad just smiled when I squealed and named it Porky but I’m guessing he felt a lot more than he showed. A swelling happiness in his heart, a rush of love and the satisfaction of knowing he had not just hit the mark but scored a bullseye. Dad was never one for articulating his emotions, but I was left with the impression of them, nonetheless.
Hunting for presents can be stressful but nothing quite beats the feeling of getting it just right. For years I tried to give Dad a present that was as perfect as Porky the Pig, somehow expressing everything he meant to me in one small parcel. Sometime during my university years, I managed it.
He’d spent a weekend visiting me in Birmingham and on Saturday we went for our usual country walk, hunting out a slice of rural headspace in the built-up city. We ended up in the chocolate box village of Henley-in-Arden, buying second-hand books and a big pub lunch before browsing a large antiques shop.
Gazing past the vast array of shiny Toby jugs gurning at us, Dad’s eyes fell upon a tiny, framed watercolour painting. A grey, morose man looking sadly at his gold pocket watch outside a pawn shop, saying goodbye with a downturned moustache before passing it to the overeager pawnbroker inside. It spoke to Dad in a way I’d never seen art communicate with him before. Dad never went into detail, but I knew he’d lost a lot during his formative years and understood the sadness of having to part with precious things. He saw the complete tragicomedy in this one simple sketch.
Maybe he even saw his father’s watch, the sole possession he’d inherited when he was orphaned as a child. There was talk of relatives somehow plundering the rest. I never knew if the watch had been lost to a pawn shop or the sands of time. Perhaps he’d had to resort to some desperate measures during his "lost years" in London. The only things to survive that period were a few funny anecdotes and a very overdue book from Putney Library.
Unsurprisingly, life experience had made Dad very frugal with money, especially towards himself. This would become more of a problem in later years, when the prospect of paying for cleaning or care filled him with horror, but at this point it presented itself in minor acts of self-denial. Although the painting was reasonably priced and he so obviously taken with it, he could not be persuaded to grant himself the joy of owning it. Inevitably, he travelled back home empty-handed.
But as luck would have it, his visit fell shortly before his birthday, so during the next week I rang the antique shop, reserved the painting, and collected it shortly afterwards. I could barely contain my excitement at the pub lunch to celebrate his birthday during my next visit home. I almost burst when he said he’d open it after our meal and not before.
Dad’s reaction was understated, much like he was. An 'Oh!' of happy surprise, recognition, and appreciation. This was fine, I didn’t need loud delight and certainly wasn’t expecting it. I knew from that 'Oh!' that I’d nailed it and felt even better than when I’d gotten Porky the Pig. Giving really is better than receiving.
A word of advice: Don’t ever try to recreate that feeling of giving the perfect present, it’s one of those things that’s never as good as the first time. Not that I stopped giving Dad gifts. If anything, as he got sadder and sicker over his final years, I got him more things that I hoped would bring him some moments of happiness. Daffodils, books, fish and chips, days out and simply being present in his ever-shrinking world. But his illness made me realise that once certain joys are lost, they can’t be rediscovered.
After Dad died, I got the painting back. Boxed up with the rest of his belongings and left on the driveway of his care home for my husband to collect, to comply with social distancing. We left the boxes in the car for a week to prevent any lingering Covid germs from his last, lonely days contaminating the house. Much of what we unpacked was thrown or given away, but the painting has stayed with us. It hangs in the living room of our new Orkney home, which has more rural headspace than Dad and I could have hoped for. A memorial to Dad and my giving him a matchless gift.