Dum Spiro Spero

 

I started this project on Hitrecord just over a month ago but it’s something I’ve been building towards most of my life. I am writing a book and making a documentary about fatherless fathers, using my own irregular history as a sort of case study.

My mother was adopted and had me when she was little more than a child herself. In-fact my eldest daughter is now only a few years shy of how old my mother was when she had me.

My mother left me to be raised by my grandmother when I was barely a year old. By the time I turned two my mother married a Moroccan man, but it was a sham marriage in order for him to get a British passport.

He wanted to stay married and take on the responsibility of fatherhood, but my mother felt otherwise, and they went through a quick but bitter divorce.

Despite the divorce, despite the fact he had no reason to, he decided to stay in my life and became the only father I ever knew. He would visit me in Ireland and the few times I ever visited my mother in London, I would spend half the time with him.

He used to drive the no.51 Bus from Woolwich to Orpington, and I used to ride on the top deck, just hanging out with him at work. He took me on the London Eye back when it was still the Millennium Wheel and to Madame Tussauds, he took me to all the tourist traps, and we’d taken loads of photos, but the big dope forgot to put film in the camera.

We’d planned to take more photos next time. Planned for me to move over to London at sixteen and start college. But unfortunately, life had other plans. Mostafa died when I was twelve and it’s taken me a lifetime to even come close to dealing with that loss.

At twelve, I was already a pretty messed up kid. I’d initially been brought up to believe that my grandmother was my mother, and my mother was my sister. It wasn’t until I started school that I noticed that my family dynamic was different to that of other children.

When I was old enough to start asking questions my grandmother told me that my biological father had gone for a DNA test in Dublin but had sent a friend in his place, so the test inevitably came back negative, and his family moved away soon after.

Mostafa was the only father I ever knew, but he wasn’t around in my daily life. He was just an infrequent voice on the phone for most of my childhood. My grandmother and I lived a hand-to-mouth existence.

It’s only now as a parent myself do I realise how tough things were for us back then. I’ll never forget our cooker breaking at Christmas and having to boil everything over the fireplace and have leftover airline meals given by a local charity for Christmas dinner.

My grandmother worked as a cleaner and took in lodgers just for us to get by. Over the years, I’d look up to some of these lodgers as surrogate father figures. I’d taken a particular shine to one from a neighbouring county when I was about eight years old.

Our local sports team was set to play the lodgers county’s team and my class at school was tasked with painting our team winning. But I wanted to paint the other team winning. I didn’t care that my painting wouldn’t be displayed along with all the others. I’d only wanted to take it home and show the lodger.

For refusing to compromise what an adult might define as their artistic integrity I was sent to the principals’ office. I was terrified, but I still refused to paint anything other than what I wanted to paint and for that I got struck across the face.

My grandmother threatened the principal, told him that if he ever laid a finger on me again, she’d stick a hurly up his backside. But the damage had already been done. The principal had his own kids in the school, and nobody wanted to believe what happened. It was easier to cast me out to be a liar and a troublemaker.

From that point on, I spent most of my time truant. I’d spend whole days alone in the forest or catch the bus into Limerick city by myself and hang out at the cinema or the library all day.

By the time Mostafa died, I was kind of just getting settled. I was in my first year of high school. I was actually attending the same school that Frank McCourt from Angela’s Ashes had been rejected. McCourt’s voice was one that filled a void my mind as a child. I was to young or perhaps just to undisciplined to read the books, but I got them all on tape from the library, read by the author.

First year of high school was strange. I suppose it’s the same for everyone, but for me I was in the care system at the time, it’s also the year my (non-biological) father died, and it’s also same year 9/11 happened. So, yeah, I guess it’s fair to say that it was a very strange and life defining year for many people.

I’d been elected class president, but my year head interceded and excluded my candidacy. It wasn’t the first time I’d be denied the same opportunities as my peers. Not being allowed to be one of the crossing guards in primary school when it was my turn. It just felt like every time I tried to participate, I’d end up feeling more isolated.

I remember being put on report for some minor uniform violation. I had to have a sheet of paper filled out by each teacher at the end of class. My reports were good as I was making a genuine effort in class and was for the most part settling in and making friends. But I was awful at keeping hold of that piece of paper.

It got tattered, torn, and lost so many times that I was on repeatedly put on report for about a month straight. It got to a point when my history teacher went and scolded my year head on my behalf, insisting that I was one of the brightest students in his class.

I’d never seen a teacher stick up for me like that before. I was already in awe of the man because he literally wrote the textbook we used for English. He taught us Latin and introduced me to Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et decorum est, which profoundly changed my life.

After Mostafa died, I refused to make my confirmation to the church. I totally rejected the notion of continuing with catholic school and drifted through about nine different schools before eventually enrolling in college.

I did move to London by the age of sixteen, just like Mostafa and I had planned, only I was on my own and living on the streets. I’d gone to live with my mother, but after a breakdown in an already fragile relationship, I was placed in same position my mother placed herself in when she left Ireland and became a homeless teen prior to her meeting and marrying Mostafa.

I was a messed-up kid, but I was way out of my depth in London. I was meant to enter year 11 but no school would take me in fear I would jeopardise their precious league tables. So, I was sent to the Education Support Centre in Peckham. It was a Georgian townhouse converted into a ghetto school for kids the system didn’t care about.

Being sent there wasn’t a reflection on me or my ability or willingness to learn, rather it was a reflection of what society expected of me and that wasn’t much at all. I had my issues, but I was never rude. The kids I was placed with had severe behavioural problems, often lashing out by hurling tables and chairs around the room.

It wasn’t exactly what you’d call an ideal environment but again I found inspiration in a good teacher. The guy exuded this sense of zen like calmness. Nothing ever seemed to bother him, he’d just disarm every situation with humour. I never even once saw him raise his voice.

By the time I was meant to be studying for my GCSE’s I was homeless and going though the hostel system. The homeless people’s unit in Peckham was next level crazy and set the tone for the next few years of my life.

The first thing I saw when I approached this government building was a guy stood outside. He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than me. It was a warm day, but he was wearing a big coat with his hood up.

As I approached the door, I heard a whooshing sound which prompted me to pause and see where the sound was coming from. The guy with the big coat had a can of lighter gas up his sleeve and was huffing away in plain view of the security guards and cameras. Nobody did anything because nobody cared.

The place was worse than a nightmare. You’d sit there all day waiting for your ticket to get called only for them to try and fob you off and refer you to another department. Whilst in the waiting room I met a couple. Dylan was an alcoholic who dabbled in crack and Maggie was just a bit mad, but in a good way and is undoubtedly one of the most kind-hearted people I ever met. The amount of street kids that owe her an unspeakable debt of gratitude is unfathomable. She’d told me that she had sons my age. I was just glad of someone halfway normal to talk to.

 I was given a string of one-night stays in temporary accommodation on the other side of the city. As luck would have it, I ended up striking up a friendship with Maggie’s eldest Nick who had just come out of a young offender’s institute and we’d just happened to have been placed in the same temporary accommodation.

I was dumped with alcoholics, drug addicts, career criminals and asylum seekers when I should have been living a normal life and going to school. But no, I was smoking what I was told was opium but now suspect was actually heroin with a bunch of Iranian asylum seekers.

That first temporary accommodation was a bonkers place. The back overlooked Freddy Mercury’s house. Tourists would often want to come in just to have a look through our windows. Never mind the hardcore drugs going on in the little kitchenettes.

Everyone used to congregate in the lobby and drink until the early hours of the morning. One night, these eastern European guys where there visiting this Russian guy who was staying at the hostel. I was drinking vodka, shot for shot with these grown men. Bearing in mind I wasn’t eating much and had in-fact been surviving off individual packets of jam and sugar because my first social security payment hadn’t been processed yet.

I panned out on one of the sofas in the lobby. I just wanted to close my eyes to stop the room spinning. That’s when I felt this guy’s hands on me. I wanted to struggle; my head was screaming to fight but I couldn’t move. I was incredibly lucky that Nick came back when he did and literally saved my ass. He pulled the guy off me and got me out of there. We laughed about it later, but it actually took me over a decade before I spoke about what had happened let alone realised the impact the incident had on my life.

I eventually got moved into semi-permanent accommodation and was due to get my first social security payment. A back dated giro for £226.03, only I never got a penny of that money. I was informed that the giro had been cashed. I was dumbfounded because, a giro could only be cashed at a nominated post office and any payment over £50 required ID to cash. So, I went to the police station and filed and report, I went to the post office and demanded to see the CCTV, to see the forgery of my signature. It turned out that it was the manager of the hostel stealing peoples’ giros, but nobody did anything because nobody cared, I got a small bit of retribution after I found out but couldn’t prove anything, so I pissed in the heartless bastards kettle and often wondered what his face looked like when he thought his tea tasted funny.  

Eventually I signed a tenancy agreement for my own place and enrolled in college to train as a chef. Maggie’s younger son Chris and I had grown close, and he joined me on the course. I had my own place; it was only a room in a shared house, but it had a lock and key, and it was mine.

One night after college, I went out to the local pub with one of the guys from the house. I wanted to get on with my new neighbours and he was Irish too, but he just so happened to be gay and kept touching my leg under the table which after what happened to me made me feel very uncomfortable. I pushed his hand away a few times and moved further away, making it clear that I wasn’t interested but he still tried to kiss me on the way home.

Instead of having a grown-up conversation about it, I just stopped going back to my own house. I went back on the street and crashed out with Chris at Maggies. But with me & Chris living together and going to college, the relationship strained and we both ended up dropping out of college altogether.

It was at this point that my grandmother stepped in and sold our family home to give me my inheritance at seventeen which I then spent in ten months before even turning eighteen. I’d gone from abject poverty to absolute excess almost overnight.

When the money was all gone, so where most of the friends I thought I had. The ones that stuck by when I had nothing left to give were true friends. Jason was one of them, one of the few that was there with me through thick and thin.

Although he was only a few months older than me, he was already a father. We started off in college and became a double act for the most part. We worked on building sites together, we started our own business, a clothes shop down a little side street. We weren’t seeking any investment or loans, but no bank would let us open an account despite trading as a limited company. It’s neigh on impossible to run a business nowadays without banking facilities.

We hobbled on as best we could but in the end, it was the icy weather that killed off what passing trade had been keeping us afloat. It’s a tough thing watching your dreams die and being powerless to do anything about it.

Jason was an aspiring rapper and producer. He was incredibly talented and so full of energy, but success never came quickly or easily enough. He had a father shaped chip on his shoulder just like I did. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons we grew so close.

His father had killed himself when he was a child and I know through my own experiences that history has a habit of repeating itself in twisted ways if we’re not wise enough to break the cycle. Jason and I had fallen out a few months before his death. I’d been late to shoot a video for him and he’d taken it way to seriously.

It was a really trivial argument but he escalated things by trying to blank me in the street and pretty much just being a petty arsehole, which wasn’t entirely out of character for him, he’d just taken his arsehole-ness to a whole new level. He’d already started going down roads I didn’t want to go down. He was fucking around with anabolic steroids which I told him was a bad idea with his mental health history.

I heard that through a mutual acquaintance Jason had taken a shipment of drugs on tick. To any non-street folk reading this, that means he took the drugs without paying cash-up front, under the condition that he return at a set time with cash plus bit extra for the loan. The problem was that Jason had ticked drugs from someone who’d already been ticked by someone else.

Jason did a bunk with the money and went to somewhere in England and lived it up for a few days. When he came back, he was a paranoid wreck. I don’t even think it was over that much money, maybe a few hundred pounds, but to him it was the end of the world and people were going to get him for sure.

All that definitely contributed to the deterioration in his mental health. In the weeks before he died, there was this fake Facebook account that had been set up, apparently to harass Jason. I had a message from this phoney account, asking for dirt on Jason. But from how it was written, I knew it was Jason himself that was writing it.

I didn’t respond and got a phone call a day or so later from Jason, asking about the account. I said as little as possible and hung up the phone. On some level I knew it was his way of trying to mend fences, because he was never able to apologise. Just because my pride was hurt, I acted like I didn’t care.

A few days later, I got the call that he was dead. I was devastated to say the least, and in many ways I still am and in many more ways I always will be. I’d talked him back from the brink a few times over the years, if I hadn’t let my wounded pride get in the way, he might still be alive today and that’s a weight I’ll carry with me for the rest of my days.

Jason was like a brother to me. He was there when my first child was born. My grandmother whom I’d been caring for even liked him and she didn’t like many of my friends. My grandmother died a year or so after Jason.

I was a wreck for a long time. It was by chance that I found my way to the Centre for Widening Social Participation & Social Inclusion. Through them I undertook a summer access course to higher education and have since graduated twice over despite not having any GCSE’s.

I was lucky enough to make a Stephen King film whilst doing my masters and that film had its world premiere at an international film festival barely a week ago. It was an incredible experience and easily one of the highlights of my life to date but given half the chance, I’d trade it all for just a single photo of #TheManFromCasablanca

My grandmother used to have a photo of him that hung above the mantlepiece, but I could never bear to look at it. I felt ashamed, I didn’t think I was capable of living up to his expectations. Now, it’s approaching the twentieth anniversary of his death and I don’t have a single photo of him.

It’s taken me a lifetime to realise that moving on means being able to celebrate what you had instead of mourning what you lost. Trying to find someone that can help me find some photos is like searching for a needle in an endless haystack. But, if I could utilise social media like a magnet, perhaps I could draw out the information I seek.

At this point, I’m doubtful of my chances of getting enough people to notice or care enough to help me make enough noise to hopefully find what I’m looking for, but even if I don’t succeed, I will hopefully have at least honoured the man who was one of the foundations I’ve built my life around. I often feel like I grew up like Forrest Gump just with emotional leg braces instead of actual leg braces and that I’ve become a Frankenstein, patchwork of personalities I’ve encountered over the years.

This project for me is about analysing how the absence of one man, (biological father) and presence of another man/men helped form my own sense of self and understanding of fatherhood and masculinity.

I have no control over how this project will end. Just like life, positive results are never guaranteed. All I can do is to continue applying my best efforts and documenting my results before drawing any final conclusions.