Record 1:

Dedication in a book about Japanese technology

To my son, who was also made in Japan

Shelf C8. Box 3d

He wears a hat that makes him look like a Smurf, and hiking boots (which took him seven eyeball-gouging minutes to lace) and my yellow longline puffa because he forgot his coat and because he’s smaller now than he was.

We scale the slope, slowly, in silence, then join the road which coils past the Garden Centre, up to Alexandra Palace. He recovers his breath and I know that he’s itching to talk about his Memoirs, so I point to distract him at the glass turtle-dome of the Palm Court, feeding him a rapid stream of facts about the Palace and the fires, the launch of the televised BBC and the Open University. My father is easily distracted these days. He likes Big History: science, development, human achievement. I prefer the dance between the everyday and deeper time, from inter-war children who foraged cress in the run-off on this hill, back to when this hill was a glacial seabed, fossilised traces of diatom and mollusc, now tiny shells my son loves to collect. But my father is a migrant and was, once, an activist, so we find common ground in the political – the refugees and interned enemy aliens, the ethno-tourism, Nubians, Laplanders, Japanese.

“Do you know, this carpark used to be a Japanese village exhibit” I say as we turn off the road to The Grove

My father is also a Japanophile. Back in the ‘80s we spent a year in Tokyo where he worked at the university while I attended the local school and learnt I was a dirty foreigner who smelled of cheese, and where my brother (now a lawyer) was conceived and awarded his own dedication in my father’s book, whereas I’d had to share with my sister. Being named in a book was almost as good, then, as writing your own. But writing books took lots of time and my father flew so often to Japan that I wondered if he had another family there.

Now his study is full of mementos – a white, impassive Noh mask, tantō dagger, lacquerware inlaid with mother-of-peal, kintsugi-veined pottery and Hokusai prints depicting scenes from a memory game of matching shells.

I used to think the patterns on the covers of his books were shells. Now I see them as they were intended. Big things like satellites, embellished globes, spiral-helix-nodes of information systems.

Record 2:

Framed Award from a learned society

In recognition of exceptional and outstanding accomplishments

Shelf E2. Box 1b

At the migrant centre on the council estate in the shadows of The People’s Palace, our local history group meets weekly. We bundle together under cracked paint and dripping pipes, on tatty blue-foam chairs around a laminate desk, a motley mix of body types, skin colour, hair styles, accents, visa status, housing tenancies, incomes and benefit packages. But we are mostly parents with kids together at the school across the road, and we are all migrants or the children of migrants.

There is funding from a university, a partnership with the local archives and historical society. But this is resident-led research and we search for stories that matter to us, that fall through the cracks of the formal collections: first impressions of new arrivals, the group of Black mothers who fought the fascists and got this centre built, the intricate fabric of gang-culture and gossip, rumours, myths like the werewolf who terrorised the estate in the ‘80s and reported sightings of Rod Stewart.

There are interviews, a digital map and workshops, but the stuff of this research is a weak neap tide, easily diverted by surge and rip of crisis and casework, by undertow and drift of mundane chat about family, work, TV shows and beauty regimes. Here I unlearn all my academic training. I learn to relinquish control and tolerate rage, but also how to exorcise a home and administer Botox and bake cake in a kettle. It is stumbling, gummy, consuming work, undeterred by project timelines or deliverables, but often surprising and always invigorating, like a deep-tissue massage. Here revelations come not from formal findings but in throw-away comments, flawed assumptions, logistical conundrums. Often they arrive in an maelstrom of conflict. Often they come long after the work is done, the funding gone.

We work at the level of the shell, chipping away at protective layers, exposing the fragile membrane of this place and community, of each other and ourselves, each minute exposure brimming with insight and risk. It works because we are here together, and because we stay.

Once, at the end of a call to my parents, when dad thought he’d hung up (but the line was still connected) I overheard him saying to mum She might have been a professor by now. She could have done so well. It’s really very sad. She could have gone so far.

Record 3:

Notice of retirement and Emeritus appointment

With the enthusiastic support of his wife and children, he sees retirement as a wonderful opportunity to devote, in more relaxed circumstances, even greater time to his intellectual interests and to ‘give something back’ to the society that has nurtured him.

Shelf F6. Box 1

He tells a story he’s told before a hundred times. We were in Sri Lanka. I was three or four.  He’d booked a famous restaurant for our special father-daughter date, but when the food arrived I needed a poo, and then promptly fell asleep.

Only this time, he mixes up the punchline with another story about my daughter at a similar age: “It’s too HOT and too SPICEY, you said” he chuckles, and I catch a flash of fear in my mother’s eyes, then a warning glare, shelled in my direction.

The glare is because I’ve been pushing for tests. I have friends with parents who are further down this road, who tell me drugs can slow the decline. But my mother is resistant to a formal diagnosis. She thinks he’ll lose confidence and that will make it worse.

We speak in hushed snatches, over the phone.

“He’s still consulting,” my mum insists. “He can’t be that bad. He’s working on his Memoirs. We need to encourage that, support him.”

“But we could do something now,” I say. “If we bury our heads it will just get worse.”

I think of dad’s account of losing his own father. The cancer reduced him to a shrivelled balloon. It horrified my dad. The suffering, but also the difference in his stature, his presence. He was a shell, my father said.

“We can slow this down,” I tell mum now. “Don’t you want him to stay himself for as long as he possibly can?”

“You’re a bloody human sledgehammer!” my mother hisses and hangs up the phone.

She calls me back a minute later.

“I’m sorry,” she says, with a benevolent sigh. “It’s just that dad needs us on his side. He needs our love and gentle care.”

I try to care gently, most of the time. But sometimes it is hard to tell where the illness ends and dad begins. He has always been forgetful when it comes to other people. He’s never had to cook or care, even for himself. Once, when mum had to travel, he tried to make himself a boiled egg in the microwave, on an uncovered plate.

But this was just him, our Absentminded Prof, oblivious to the family chaos beyond his study door, like that Jewish joke, when on the occasion of their Golden Anniversary, Sara and Moishe relay the key to their marital bliss: It’s simple, says Sara. Moishe makes all the big decisions and I make all the small ones. What sort of small decisions? You know, how to raise the kids, run the household, how we spend and save, where we go on holiday – small things. Small things?! So what are the big things?! Oh, well Moishe, he decides who’s going to win the election, how to fix the economy, whether the country will go to war…

I wouldn’t have minded if my parents hadn’t called themselves feminists. I wouldn’t have minded if their early commitment to my political education hadn’t lifted the veil on social reproduction and our so-called meritocracy. I wouldn’t have minded if I wasn’t now myself embroiled in vicious negotiations of precious time; childcare, chores, fulltime work, community commitments, and lately this bloody-gentle-bloody-care of my bloody dad who gets to sit on his bloody tush and write his bloody Memoirs.

I am starting to realise that my whole career, my politics, values, sense of self has come to be defined both by and against my father. He is literally The Man.

Record 4:

Deeds to 3 x London Properties

(Share of the freehold)

Shelf C8. Box 3d

He asks about my community work and I want to tell him of the overcrowding and children sick from mould and temporary accommodation, no-fault evictions, unaffordable rent. But I can’t, because the housing crisis is one of our no-go topics, along with academia, childcare, my brother, and the Labour Party. Politics in general is a slippery slope. It may start with an innocent tribute to Mamdani, but before you know it, you’re deep within the No Man’s Land of centrist logic, dodging shells packed with efficiency and innovation and the weaponisation of antisemitism.

My father likes to think he is progressive, but The Great Betrayal happened while I was still a teen. Upward mobility, property acquisition, resistance to any kind of action from striking to recycling, and worst of all, his refusal to recognise the links between his own life-choices and broader social inequalities.

We are staying with my parents while work is done on our flat, and one night he shakes me awake in an agitated state to ask me how I plan to buy my children properties. I look at him, softer with sleep but not enough to dull my irritation.

   “We won’t buy them properties,” I croak. “No one will be able to buy their children properties. They’ll live with us forever, or leave London. Anyway, we’ll have more pressing concerns by then. Like the destruction of the planet.”

He stares at me, wild eyed. “Well don’t come to me” he shouts, fractious, defeated.

You should be grateful, my mother says later. He’s worked his ass off for this family. You wouldn’t have your flat if it wasn’t for him. It’s true, of course, but that just makes it worse.

Record 5:

His Memoirs

Volumes I-III (243012 words, so far)

Shelf A1. Box 1

Fardin says: “I came here and became nothing. All my education, my reputation back home, shredded, picked clean from my bones. I was a hollow carcass. I had to build himself again.”

   He has recently lost a friend to suicide and wants to research the impact of migration on male mental health. There’s a link, he thinks, to domestic violence too, an eerie echo of the archival accounts we’ve discovered from the families of shell-shocked soldiers returning from the First World War.

My father did not fight in a war or cross the Mediterranean by boat. He brought with him his English mother-tongue, transferable qualifications, cultural capital. But even so, he carries the trace of Pogrom and Holocaust, the violence of Apartheid; torture and assassination of friends. This alongside a more mundane migrant drive, the need to prove yourself, to make it in a foreign land.

I try to hold this in my mind as I force myself to skim his memoirs. Amidst the narrative of self-made success, I glimpse a truth in the white space of the page, a crippling terror of the fissures and the fragments with a corresponding need to present himself as whole. The story starts with his first formal job, there is no account of his childhood at all.

Scanning my own early memories, I settle on a recurring one: searching for shells on various beaches. The quest was always for the prettiest, most perfect shell. Perhaps I had an ideal in mind, a striking tiger cowrie or pink queen conch like those adorning bathtubs in my posher friends’ homes or Botticelli’s scallop or O’Keeffe’s nautilus. Or maybe I was searching for something more personal, a special shell meant just for me, to represent my very essence. I never found it, of course. Instead I returned to my parents, bucket crammed with flawed specimens, like the limbless dolls I liked to liberate from car-boot sales, infuriating my mum, because I felt so sorry for them.

Record 6:

Power of Attorney

with authority to give or refuse consent to life-sustaining treatment on my behalf.

Shelf A1. Box 1

“I won’t dement, because I’ll kill myself first!” My dad says, as he has a hundred times.

And because the contours of our well-rehearsed script have smoothed into a protective veneer, I find myself objecting as I always do, to the ableist assumption that certain lives are not worth living, to the unacknowledged tension between rational choice and cognitive decline.

My dad has joined a secret society, which provides thanatic solutions. He mentions this whenever he wishes to end the conversation and I usually oblige. But this time, irked perhaps by his ersatz Memoirs, I deviate from cue and ask him what exactly these solutions are.

“I don’t know yet,” he mutters “I haven’t read the handbook. The point is I can choose to know, when the time is right.”

“And when will that time be?” I press him. “How will you know when you’re no longer you?”

“Leave me alone,” he says.

For as long as I remember, my parents have fêted their ability to talk about death, especially their own. They’ve lined up their coffins, planned their funerals, appended most greetings, leave-takings, small talk with the suffix “…since-we-won’t-be-here-much-longer.” But I’m starting to see this performance as an act of avoidance, deflecting from the messier stuff of aging and care, of slow, uncertain decline, of the simple terror of being left alone. Just as a Samuri might chose hara-kiri over unbearable feelings of shame, dishonour, the unknowns of capture, so my father’s thanatic solutions offer the illusion of control. Provided he doesn’t think about the morbid detail.

Our community work is full of morbid detail. We recently concluded a project on care, an arts based initiative with carers, paid and informal. One of our exhibits was a bookshelf of things: facemasks, prescriptions, pill-boxes, dressing, syringes, a bed-pan, hand-cream; but also teabags, a jigsaw puzzle, plant-pot, sewing kit, freedom-pass, umbrella. Each object had a plaque which told a personal story. But taken together, the objects offered something more distributed, a shared experience of bodies laid bare, the shattering relentlessness of routine tasks, isolation but also connection, mutual support and learning and love.

I’m starting to think of our community archives not as a showcase of ornamental shells but as a midden, like Japanese kaizuka shell-mounds dating back over 7,000 years. These are more than mere garbage stacks, intentional markers of people in place, layered over generations.

There is something calming, stabilising in this distributed sense of value, so different to the frantic pursuit of external validation – titles, prizes, estates, net-worth. But to let that go is a privilege too. You need be secure enough to weather the precarity. You need to have unwavering support, perhaps from a father who has worked his tush off to afford his sledgehammer-of-a-daughter the luxury of thinking like a midden.

I look at him now, my dad, exposed like an evicted hermit crab, and I realise I can allow him his ornamental shells and still keep my kaizuka.

“How about a walk?” I say. “I’ll take you on a community history tour of Ally Pally and then we can talk about your Memoirs. I’ll even let you wear my yellow coat.”

His face lights up, and that is enough.

Records, uncategorised:

2 eggcups: one wooden, made by grandad; one ceramic, shaped like Noddy’s little car.

When I’d finished my egg I’d transfer the shell, cracked-edge-down into daddy’s wooden cup and giggle my head off as he tapped with his teaspoon and the structure collapsed.

The view from his shoulders

at a protest march against Thatcher’s poll-tax, cocooned by the crowd, clutching at his beardy jowls, my cheek against his balding head while the sun shone down.

The green Pentel Ball pen

that would spark an FBI-raid if he ever found it missing from his desk

The airplane smell on the collar of his shirt

as I gripped him in fury and breathed in the terrifying, tantalising scent of foreign lands

The joke with the punchline: Mr Rabb-it is here with the shit

that makes him laugh so hard that tears come out his nose, almost as much as he laughs at the beans scene from Blazing Saddles

The books we read together – Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies

and the walks we took, critiquing the world, imaging alternatives

His duck sweater

he wore without irony

The 30-page haiku-poem he read out at my wedding

which made me die inside at the time, but now makes me cry

His unconscious body

like a wax-work on the gurney after open-heart surgery

The hug after Covid,

when I couldn’t let him go

By Vashti Katz

archives caregiving class family grief Identity inheritance intimacy memory