Here is Pat O'Toole:
O’Toole is an exceptionally accomplished woman. If you go and read her CV and her qualifications, as I have just done, you’ll be staring in awe - the awe that one person can fit so much into one life. (Mine would be a back-of-an-envelope job by comparison.) And she said those wise words at the beginning, which are totally true and something, I think, which we all need to remind ourselves of.
But what makes them more poignant and piquant is the fact that you won’t find anywhere on her website or her curriculum vitae and that is the fact that she was born to very, very famous parents. Her mother is Siân Phillips and her father was Peter O’Toole, at one time easily the most beautiful film actor in the world. (See him riding out of the desert in Lawrence of Arabia, his impossible blue eyes flashing with that faint mania that men like Lawrence always seemed to carry.)
How often must she have been measured by the scale of her celebrated parents? Was that lovely, or was it crushing? (Possibly a bit of both.) I have some very, very faint idea of it, because my dad’s name was quite known, when I was a teenager and a young woman. Taxi drivers knew him, which was always a bit of a benchmark for me. Whenever I was in a black cab, I would always chatter away, and quite often the driver would ask me a question about my family and the moment I said who Dad was, they’d smile, almost nostalgically, and nod their heads. They’d quite often have won money on him, because he rode over fences as an amateur.
I loved that. I loved that people would say, ‘Oh, I met your father once in 1964 and he lit up the room.’ Their own faces would light up as they said it, and they would smile at the distant memory which, somehow had remained vivid.
But then I grew up and realised that trying to be as loved as my dad was loved was a terrible way to live a life.
Then I grew up and realised that he could light up a room but he could never heal his own wounds. (And they ran very, very deep. He had two intense tragedies he never spoke about - his sister dying at fourteen and his brother being killed instantly in a car crash at the age of twenty-one. My father had to drive up the bleak, empty motorway in the pre-dawn dark, with his loyal friend Bill, to identify the body.)
Not that long ago, I realised that I didn’t have to carry my father’s pain with me any longer. I could put that burden down. And I no longer had to try to rise to his levels of charisma, wild eccentricity, and extreme physical courage.
Pat O’Toole is right: we are what we practise, what we do, what we think. We don’t have to be our parents, or to live in their shadow.
But I will take the good parts, with gratitude. I’ll carry with me Dad’s lovely ability to laugh at himself. (Any tease against his own absurdity was always his favourite source of merriment.) I’ll hold on to his total authenticity, his inability to play by the rules, his resistance to convention. (Although I’m not sure he even knew what convention was.) I’ll take his funniness and his ability to make people smile and his tendency to burst into song at the drop of a hat. (Sometimes literally. Hats loomed very large in my childhood.)
Isn’t it funny, where thoughts go? I had not at all expected to have this train of thought this morning. But I saw a picture of Sian Philips and Peter O’Toole in their high glamour days and then I could not remember whether they had children, so I looked up their daughter, and I found her words of wisdom, and the rest unspooled from there.
This is why I never, ever refuse a tangent. Who knows where it will take you?