I’ve never been backward in talking about my strange upbringing. Indeed, some of it has been documented in print! However, for me, there remain unanswered questions, even to this day.
When Pol Pot hit the headlines in the late 1970s, I’d just left home. As the tales of his atrocities were unveiled to the Western world, I couldn’t help wonder if he’d ever found himself in an Irish pub in Kilburn and ended up sitting next my old man. Why? Because Pol Pot pretty much imitated the regime my father imposed ever since I first met him in the early 1960s.
Now, to be fair, to my father, he wasn’t a communist. A dictator? Yes. A communist? No. In truth, he was an apolitical animal. He didn’t care for your ideology, your beliefs, your race or your gender. As far as he was concerned, people were all (with the exception of him and a few of his friends) cunts. In truth, if he had met Pol Pot, he’d have thought he was a cunt as well.
So, why do I think my father influence Pol Pot? Allow me to elucidate…
I’ve already given some background to father’s attitude to life when I was young. Naturally, I failed to live up to his high standards, and was often called to the garage. He’d stand amongst his tools and off-cuts of wood, and demand I explain my slovenly behaviour.
One day, after some henious crime such watching cartoons when I should have been mowing his fucking lawn, I received the summons to present myself in the garage. I knew it wasn’t good news. I smothered the urge to run away, to hide, to crawl into a dark place and weep bitter tears. The foreboding gnawed at my guts, it crawled over my skin like angry ants and I shrank in the face of such a powerful foe. I could have thrown myself to the ground, screamed, cried out, kicked my feet and torn out my hair but it would have done me no good. So I went.
The garage presented a hideous judgemental face: the brickwork looked like calloused weather-beaten skin, the two black windows like emotionless eyes glaring at my disgrace, the open door a toothless mouth mocking my misery. To most people it was just a garage, but on that day it was my accuser. From inside I heard the father’s voice, as coarse as a corroded saw blade tearing its way through a rusty corrugated metal roof, but with a depth and resonance as if the sound was belching from the very underbelly of Hades.
‘Get yourself in here, now, you useless cunt.’
I obeyed and walked inside. After the summer sunshine, I couldn’t see a thing. White dots danced in the darkness. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and opened them to no avail. Blinking rapidly, I stood facing a sea of tiny bright sparks dancing their jig of sadistic torment.
‘Put them on,’ he growled.
I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, the temporary blindness still upon me. I reached out my hands but touched nothing. The bright specks slowly receded, and I started to make out some shapes: an old fridge, a set of step ladders, and the father pointing towards a pile of boxes which was topped with some old rags.
‘I said, put them on,’ he repeated.
‘What?’
‘The work clothes.’
I edged over carefully; my eyes hadn’t fully adjusted and I knew the floor was strewn with tool boxes, car parts, and other spiteful objects which would bark my shins.
The work clothes turned out to be a pair of his old pyjamas. Ragged and thin, the top had a creosote stain on it. As my eyes struggled to adjust, I realised the stain was a crude representation of his face. That hadn’t happened by accident.
I pulled it on, followed by the trousers. Where once there had been a drawstring was now a frayed length of twine.
I was a rather small and thin child, and stood there in the gloom of the garage with his old pyjamas hanging off me, I appeared even smaller. It was a look I saw once again, later in life. During a trip to Cambodia I visited the site of Tuol Sleung, and the photographs of the young peasant victims, clothes hanging off their emaciated frames like rags on a wire fence, took me back to the garage.
I stood before him, and I saw his arm raised, a hammer in his hand. He brought it down on the workbench with a resounding thud and declared the proceedings open. The trial had started.
I didn’t get a chance to defend myself. I didn’t even speak. It was an open and shut case. I was found guilty of being a worthless and lazy son who had brought shame upon his family name. It was, he declared, a shock that such a fine and upstanding father, one who had toiled barefoot for many years with nothing but stale bread for sustenance, could have reared such an ungrateful whelp.
I was forced to attend ‘re-education’ lectures. These amounted to him telling me he was an excellent father, and I was a lazy and ungrateful son. Once the lectures were over, I was sent out to toil in his vegetable patch; the killing patch is what I would have called it if, at the time, I’d had any concept of Khymer atrocities he was soon to inspire.
I was sentenced to gardening duties for the fullness of my days, until, aged 16, I escaped.
I moved into a bedsit above a launderette. It had no garden. I realised my perpetual misery had been caused by his Year Zero attitude. I sought escape in alcohol and drugs and the company of young ladies with spiky hair and fishnet stockings. I almost forgot about his utter insanity … until I found myself in Phnom Penh!
Now, some might disagree, but as I wandered around S-21 and the Killing Fields, in my head I heard my father’s voice. No; he wasn’t there, predominantly because he was dead at that point, but even so, I could visualise Pol Pot, sat in Biddy Mulligans, nursing a pint of Guinness, while my father lectured him on all he’d ever need to know about fucking mental bullshit!