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Illustration by Nijah Smith
I was going through some old computer hard drives recently, looking for an archived file. I didn’t find it, but I found something much, much better: my father’s lost voice.
It was a conversation with my parents that I had recorded a decade ago. I was certain it had been lost in my careless mismanagement of digital detritus. If the inside of my house looked like the file management of my hard drives, I’d be considered a hoarder.
I’m an only child. When my parents die, I have nobody to share memories with. No brother to laugh with about the time mum got mad at me for adding tiger stripes to the dog with a felt marker. No sister to cry with when we recall dad’s last words: “Good night. Talk to you tomorrow.”
The three of us sat down at their dining room table on Family Day of 2015 and recorded our chat. I knew the outlines of our family history, but this was the only time we gathered with the sole intent of colouring in the details of their personal stories and our shared past.
At the time, my dad was 79 and my mum was 76. Their health was fine. They were, as they always had been, active and engaged. They danced. They hiked. They spent half the year pulling a fifth wheel around North America, still thirsty for adventure in their seventh decade.
We started at the beginning. They were born in Scotland. Mum in Edinburgh in 1939, Dad in Aberdeen in 1936. Both of their earliest memories were of the Second World War. Mum recalled one of her sisters being born in an air-raid shelter. Dad talked about the time my grandfather was able to send home some peanut butter he bought on the military base. Peanut butter is ubiquitous for most of us today, but dad got to try it only once before his 10th birthday.
We had a good laugh over the story about him and his pal selling pilfered Christmas trees when he was 18. The bobbies were summoned and they decided to make a run for it on his motorbike. They had a good enough lead on the police that they were able to cross a small bridge, hang a hard right and hide under the bridge as the police sped over and continued down the road. Dad and his friend waited for a minute and then came out from under the bridge and headed back in the direction they came from. It was a Keystone Cops moment.
When they eventually got caught, my grandfather told Dad he could either go to jail (a scare tactic) or join the armed forces. That’s how he ended up in the Royal Air Force. If that hadn’t happened, he’d never have met my mum at a dance on the air force base, and I wouldn’t be here. Three cheers for Christmas tree pilfering.
There was a sombre moment when mum talked about finding her dad in the kitchen after he’d taken his own life. She was 18. He was a decorated war hero. He’d drawn enemy fire to allow his squadron to escape from being pinned down. He had what we now call severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Even at 76, nearly 60 years later, she choked up as she told the story.
In the two hours we sat together, I found out how they met each other, how dad proposed, how their pre-me years were. They told me why they decided to emigrate to Canada in 1967: there were plenty of jobs available, not so many in the UK.
I hadn’t heard my dad’s voice in years. Dad died on Christmas Eve in 2021, at the age of 85. The day I rediscovered the recording, I heard him come back to life. I had tears of grief and joy streaming down my face.
I urge everyone to sit down with your loved ones and record a long conversation. Please. You don’t need fancy recording equipment. Put your phone in the middle of a table and press record. We all have countless photographs of our families. It’s easy to remember what they looked like. But the voice… the voice.
I cannot fathom losing track of this again. I have duplicated the master recording half-a-dozen times and backed it up in multiple locations. I’ll be able to listen to my mum and dad until it’s my turn to not wake up.
Iain Godsman lives in Calgary.
