My dad, the perfect mum
To the outside world, JG Ballard, was a literary giant; to his children he was an indulgent single father. His daughter Bea Ballard reveals the man who filled their lives with love
When my father wrote his autobiography two years ago, he dedicated it to me, my brother Jim and sister Fay, describing us as Miracles of Life. But really he was the miracle - as writer, as visionary, as a man and, above all, as a father. Or do I mean father and mother combined? He became both and more.
He was widowed suddenly: my mother fell ill while on a family holiday in Spain and died of pneumonia within a few days. Until then it had been the kind of holiday in which the biggest excitement was Daddy falling off the pedalo. We buried her in the Protestant cemetery in Alicante and made our way home to Shepperton, a modest house in a London suburb chosen by our parents as a peaceful place to raise a family. The year was 1964, he was a writer in his thirties, alone with three small children - Jim, 9, Fay, 7, and me, 5.
Few of my parents' friends thought he would manage, for it was extremely rare at the time to find single fathers bringing up children on their own. But my father was determined to do it. He felt that as long as the surviving parent was loving and remained close to the children, they would thrive. He was right. We not only thrived; we had the most idyllic childhood I can imagine.
He had already survived a great deal in his life - interned by the Japanese in a prisoner-of-war camp between the ages of 12 and 14, an experience that inspired his great novel Empire of the Sun, he had witnessed appalling acts of cruelty and brutality and yet come through unscathed. After the death of his young wife the same survival instinct seemed to kick in.
His job meant he could work from home and be with us all the time. He was determined to do everything himself: there was no question of a nanny, even if he'd had the money to pay one. He took us to and from school, cooked our meals - sausages and mashed potato, generally - ironed our school ties, supervised our homework. He put us before everything - including his work. If we wanted to watch Blue Peter, he watched with us and the typing-out of a short story would have to wait.
He later said: "Some fathers make good mothers and I hope I was one of them, though most of the women who know me would say that I made a very slatternly mother . . . too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. In short, the kind of mother of whom the social services deeply disapprove." He has described alcohol as "a close friend and confidant in the early days". This sounds shocking now but the truth is, as children, we did not really notice his drinking.
We lived in what we came to think of as a very happy nest - there was a sense of warm chaos that was hugely liberating. He did not care about bourgeois concerns such as keeping the house tidy - as he once said: "You can do all the housework in five minutes if you don't make a fetish of it." He later speculated that the compulsive cleaning of a family home "might be an attempt to erase those repressed emotions that threaten to break through into the daylight" and certainly I remember finding the grander homes of some of my school chums eerily silent and stultifying in their neatness compared with our wonderful home, where old plastic flippers discarded from a beach holiday were used as doorstops.
My father loved art, surrealism in particular, and often said he wished he could have been a painter. He got hold of some giant silver palm trees that he set up in the study where he wrote. He put a sun-lounger beneath them and would sit there thinking and reading. Perhaps he imagined he was on some sort of exotic beach: he adored beaches and once described them as his "spiritual home". In one of his best known stories, the entire population of Europe just gives up work and heads to the beach for ever. Anchored to Shepperton by us, he couldn't. So the beach came to him instead.
While he worked, we played next door in our nursery. By day we had a pact and would leave him alone for a few hours, but we could not resist slipping through his door to ask questions. He would be in the middle of composing a sentence, mouthing out the words as he wrote. Sometimes he would tell us about the book he was writing and ask us to name the characters, handing us the telephone directory with the instruction: "Think of a good name for a doctor . . ."
We lived very modestly, with few of the toys and gadgets that children these days (including my own) take for granted, but that did not seem to matter. We were encouraged to live and play using our imaginations - be it inventing a whole society for our set of troll dolls, with elaborate characters - a mini soap opera in its own right - or playing in our tree house in the garden. He often took us fishing to a nearby river, where we caught small shrimps. We came home together, boots full of water, buckets full of fish.
He involved us in many of the everyday domestic decisions. We had a weekly grocery order delivered and he would give us the order book and tell us to choose any cake we wanted. When we were old enough, we all helped to cook our evening meal: I was on baked beans, my sister on toast and eggs and my brother sorted the bacon. To this day I have no time for people who say they cannot cook.
My father loved animals and was delighted to indulge our enthusiasm for pets. We worked our way through a whole menagerie of small rodents - from mice to gerbils, hamsters, rabbits, guinea pigs and, finally, triumphantly, my pet rat - which I had taken for a gerbil at the pet shop. Ratty George became one of the great characters of the family: scampering up my arm or over obstacle courses in return for scraps of liver sausage. My father enjoyed George's fierce intelligence.
The highlight of our year was our annual summer holiday - usually to Spain. My father would pile us into the car and we would head to Dover and the ferry. We drove down through France, where my father introduced us to a world of new smells, sights and sensations. From the stained glass in Chartres cathedral to snails and framboise sorbet, he let us try everything.
Remarkably, nothing was ever booked ahead. Late afternoon, as we meandered along some beautiful French road, he would turn to my sister and me - then aged about 8 and 10 - and announce that we would be stopping half an hour later and should stick a pin in the map to mark where we would be. We were allowed to look for two or three-star hotels - four stars if we were lucky and the others were full. He frequently put us in charge - great training, as he often said, for our future lives.
My father once described us as the "beatnik" family of Shepperton and I was certainly aware that we were unusual among the other families within this benevolent suburb on the Thames. My father's close friends - writers and artists such as Michael Moorcock and Eduardo Paolozzi - mostly lived in London. We often assembled at the Moorcocks' house in Ladbroke Grove. The Sixties were in full swing and it was not unusual to find my father immersed in a smoke-filled room, playing and listening to music, discussing excitedly the latest literary or art project.
Back in the quiet of Shepperton, my father would astonish the neighbours by painting his shoes silver or constructing sculptures in the garden. After the success of the Steven Spielberg film of Empire of the Sun, he could have moved from Shepperton to a bigger house somewhere smarter. But he stayed there to the end because he'd been happy there and because the place was fertile for his writing: he felt the suburbs were much more significant as an indicator of contemporary society than some smart dining room in Notting Hill or Hampstead.
As I grew older and became interested in music, I took up reading the NME and found my father held up as a hero by many of the musicians and bands that I was excited by. I felt proud that he was a cultural trail-blazer and that we could share an interest in new ideas and culture. My father had cottoned on to punk and its social significance while I was still wearing starry loons; when I reached my punk phase and dyed my hair pink, he thought it fun rather than condemning it.
He always encouraged my sister and me to believe we could do anything in our lives and careers and that we should not see our futures defined only by marriage and children. His attitude to sex was unusual, too. In his memoir he writes: "As a father who collected his children from school, I spent a great deal of time by the school gates and soon recognised the fierce maternal tension that made adolescence a hell for many of my daughters' friends. Some mothers simply could not cope with the growing evidence that their daughters were younger, more womanly and more sexually attractive than they were. Sex, I'm glad to say, never worried me. I was far more concerned about what might happen to my daughters in a car rather than in a bed."
So he steered us towards the local family planning clinic and allowed us to see our boyfriends freely, but warned us sternly of the dangers of drinking and driving. He recognised that women with talents need to use them and that a life of pure domesticity could be stifling. He frequently told us we were as entitled to opportunity and success as any man and should never allow ourselves to be patronised or exploited.
Alongside my brother, our father encouraged all of us to follow our dreams and fulfil our vocations. I followed my great interest in television and forged a successful career in that industry, while my sister pursued a successful career in the arts, before becoming a full-time painter. He wanted us to choose careers that fired our imaginations.
As a visionary ahead of his time, my father recognised the increasing role that television would play in the future. Liberal by nature, he never tried to check the amount that we watched. The media landscape was changing at an explosive rate and shaping the way we interpreted our lives. He realised this and embraced it and took us along with him on that wave.
He was fascinated by reality television and predicted programmes like Big Brother long before they hit the air. One day, he said, every home would be turned into a TV studio, where we would all be simultaneously actor, director and screen-writer in our own soap operas. People would start screening themselves, becoming their own TV programmes. That conversation took place 20 years before YouTube.
My father wrote in Miracles of Life: "I still think that my children brought me up, perhaps as an inci-dental activity to rearing themselves. We emerged confident from their childhood together, they as happy and confident teenagers, and I into a kind of second adulthood enriched by the experience of watching them grow from infancy into fully formed human beings."
Certainly his work benefited greatly from this rich family life. As he has said, the pram in the hall was not a brake on creativity but his greatest ally. His extraordinary novels - startling for their force and imagination - germinated in a very settled and happy family existence. Anyone who thinks single parents have an impossible task should study his life.
Indeed I found myself taking comfort and inspiration from his in a strange twist of Ballardian fate when I was widowed five years ago. My husband died suddenly of heart failure: my two daughters, Alice and Pandora, were 5 and 7, the very ages that I and my sister Fay had been when our mother died. Like my father, I found my settled and happy family life suddenly shattered. All my hopes for the future were snuffed out the instant I came home to find my husband dead on the sitting room floor. My father was the first person I rang, for he, of all people, would know exactly what this meant. "Darling, I'm so, so sorry," he said, and came immediately, sitting with me as we waited for my husband's body to be taken away.
With my father as inspiration, I knew that like him I could survive and bring up the children on my own. Armed with that knowledge and his love, I found the courage to forge on alone.
When my father fell ill it was a very difficult period for my family. He fought his cancer for three years, almost always without complaint. He had enormous respect for the medical team treating him. As his children, I know we found it difficult to see him in pain and he would always try to protect us from the worst. When the chemotherapy made him vomit, he would apologise as we sat before him. He did not want his suffering to upset us - ever the father and protector.
For me, he was my great mentor, inspiration and wise counsel, and life will be so much poorer and emptier without him. I will miss our conversations about the future and hearing his predictions for not only what he called the next five minutes, but also the next 10 or 20 years. As many have already noted, he got it right again and again. From predicting a Hollywood actor in the White House, to the media circus surrounding the car-crash death of Diana, Princess of Wales, to the environmental disasters we face, he saw it all coming.
I write this piece to acknowledge publicly his brilliance and unique-ness as a father. For it is this role that mattered the most to this very private and intensely modest man - as he said: "The years I spent as the parent of my young children were the richest and happiest I have ever known." As long as we were happy, nothing else mattered, and success or failure as a writer was a minor concern. That he became one of the most admired and extraordinary authors of the 20th century is something we are hugely proud of. But to us three children, who knew the man himself rather than the "writer", he will be for ever our beloved Daddy. We mourn his loss more deeply than words can express.
On the day of his death I sat with my sister in her garden, sharing stories from our childhood. In Miracles of Life, my father wrote very movingly about the loss he felt when we three children had all left home: "But memory is the greatest gallery in the world and I can play an endless archive of images of the happy time."
We, too, have those memories of our wonderful time with my father, and that will be a gallery we will visit and enjoy and wonder at every day.
Miracles of Life - Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography by J G Ballard is published by Fourth Estate
Source: thetimes.co.uk