I'm camping near Gippsland from Thursday to Sunday. We're here for a wedding so it's a campsite affair, and the wife needs a shower. For the benefit of others, so do I. I'm sitting in an uncomfortable chair looking out at the bushland longing to be in there instead of out here in the sanitised, trimmed-grass, 'safety first' version of The Great Outdoors, sleeping in a tent that's meant for the outback and is an only marginally less convenient but equally appointed version of a house.
When I was a boy, somewhere around seven to nine, my father took me camping in the Lake District. We differ in many ways but share one belief, at least, as grown men, and it's that wild camping - burrowing down in the heather on a moor, drinking from streams and being fear-jerked awake in the night by the human-like cough of a sheep - is camping. Campsites are where people go to listen to strangers snore. But this time, presumably because I was young and it was winter, we stayed at a campsite. The one and only time.
This place reminds me of that campsite. I am there. I can feel the savage cold of the stone shower block through my socks. I can hear the spatter of the bacon my father cooked for me, the sizzle echoing in the cavernous, empty kitchen block. I can see the clouds hovering over Helvellyn, unable to move forward. I can smell the damp winter air. But above all I can feel the uncomfortable silence. Of being in the company of a man so unflinchingly sad, so desperate to change his life, but so unequipped to do so. Like clouds stuck on Helvellyn he could see where he wanted to be, but invisible downward currents kept him where he was. I realise now that I've hated campsites since that trip.
I was a defiant child. Intensely, exhaustingly defiant. Practically a disorder. A sneaky kind of defiance, where I'd smile and agree and yes sir no sir and then do whatever it was I was going to do anyway. And defiance was the thing he couldn't handle. The thing that flicked the switch in him. The voice would rise, louder each time and less effective, repeating itself into impotence.
My eldest is nearly five. And he is defiant. Of course he is.
I'll be in the kitchen, or the hallway, or crouched at his eye level trying to be the kind of father the books tell me I'm supposed to be, and the defiance will come — that flat, immovable refusal that children do with their whole body — and the switch flicks. Hyde comes out. My voice rises. I repeat myself. I berate. Each repetition more impotent than the last, and I can hear it failing even as it's happening. I can hear him. The same voice, the same pitch, the same flaccid escalation. The shame arrives while I'm still in it, not after. I am standing in my home on the other side of the world hearing my father's voice come out of my mouth and I cannot stop it.
Physically we are two peas from a pod. Tall, broad, strong and imposing when we want to be. I don't have my father's mind, but I do have his body. And the body is what moves through the house. It's what the boys see first. It's what loses its temper in a menacing volley that sounds exactly like his.
Temper still hot, shame still rising, a cold shiver of fear kicks in. I drop to my knees and put my arms out. My dear son walks into them, and it's over. If I play my cards wrong I'll find myself an old man with no one left to hold my arms out to.
I'm still sitting in the uncomfortable chair, looking out at the unreachable bush. I'm sitting still, looking out at where I want to be, unable to get there. I am afraid of being stuck. Of looking at where my life could be and being unable to reach it. Of becoming a man so defeated by the gap between where he is and where he wants to be that he stops moving. But I'm not stuck. The workshop exists: I built it. The furniture is real. The bread is real. I left the weightless world and made something heavy enough to hold. The fear isn't in the mind, it's in the body, and the body remembers things the mind has decided to leave behind. The switch is in the wiring, not the will, and every time it flicks I have to choose the knees again.
I'm still sitting in the uncomfortable chair. The bush is still out there. My wife is beside me and my boys are at my feet.
And I get down on my knees, and play.