From: A Lie about My Father by John Burnside - review by Hilary Mantel
. . . my father was almost never actually violent. At some instinctual level he understood that a threat is much more potent than an actual blow . . .
My father was one of those men who sit in a room, and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose and do something terrible. . . .
For my father, and for whole generations of working-class men, cruelty was an ideology. It was important, for the boy’s sake, to bring a son up tough: men had to be hard to get through life, there was no room for weakness or sentiment . . .
What he wanted was to warn me against hope, against any expectation of someone from my background being treated as a human being in the big hard world. He wanted to kill off my finer – and so, weaker – self.
Art. Music. Books. Imagination. Signs of weakness, all. A man was defined, in my father’s circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself.
