Tony Parsons: Man and Boy

I wrote Man and Boy when my mum was dying and that is why it is full of raw emotion. Although much of it is about fathers and sons and the gaps between them, it is my mother’s love and spirit that gives life to every line. She smiled when I told her the book was going to be dedicated to her. “Then I must be on the way out!” Em said. And we laughed with tears in our eyes because it was true – she really was on her way out of this life.

My mum’s illness made me think long and hard about my father and how different it had been when the old man – always my hero – was dying.

With my mum, I was by her side for every doctor’s appointment, for every blood test and x-ray, all those dates marked by slowly diminishing hope. My father had died of the same disease – lung cancer, for my folks were from the generation who believed in the glamour of Bogart and Bacall’s languidly-held cigarettes – without telling anyone that he was dying. Because my dad – and more than thirty years later, I still find this hard to believe – decided not to tell anyone that he had terminal cancer. As the bewildered characters in Man and Boy reflect, perhaps he was trying to protect the people he loved. Or perhaps he could not find the words. Or perhaps it was some strange combination of pride and vulnerability, and a reluctance to admit to human weakness. But memories of my singular old man gave the book its shape and its central theme. “A love letter to a son from his father, and to a father from his son,” said an early review, one of those rare reviews that help an author better understand their own book. Harry Silver, the protagonist of Man and Boy , is poised between the generations in a way that we are all at some point in our lives. I wrote Man and Boy when my last surviving parent was dying and my first-born child was growing up fast. As the twentieth century ran out and I banged away at Man and Boy , I never felt so much like somebody’s son and somebody’s father. I was never so aware of the generation that came before me and the generation that would eventually replace me. The cycle of life was no longer theoretical – the evidence was all around me, in my blood and in my bones and in my dreams, and in the changing faces of my dying mother and my growing son.

Man and Boy is a book that was written from the heart. I had something I needed to say about the most ordinary things in the world – family and feelings, fathers and sons, our mothers and their love, growing children and dying parents – that are also the most momentous things we ever know.

The simple tale I told is, as they say, based on a true story. Yes, I had been a young single father with a beautiful four-year-old son who helped me meet girls. And it’s true that my father was a suburban working class man on a modest income who was also a war hero with a torso covered in scar tissue and a Distinguished Service Medal shoved at the back of some dusty drawer. But fiction sets you free to mould the raw messy, material of real life into something that makes much more sense. So, although my father was a lot like the dying dad in Man and Boy , somehow it is still not quite my old man. One of the most vivid memories of my childhood is going into the garage of our house in Billericay and seeing a handgun on the back seat of my father’s car. Now my dad was a greengrocer – why did he have a handgun on the backseat of his car? I never asked, and so I never knew. But that colourful vignette never made it into Man and Boy because it simply did not fit the story. In real life, people remain a mystery. Even people we love; especially people we love. But in fiction, everything is a slave to the story.

Writers make sense of their world by telling stories about it. That’s really all I was doing with Man and Boy – trying to understand a world that I never expected to live in. A world without my mum and dad. A world where I was a single parent. My son – all grown up now – once asked me if it was true that he had split open his head in an empty swimming pool, as Pat – Harry’s young son – does in Man and Boy . I had to think about that one. And it turned out that, no, in real life my boy split his head open using a bed as a trampoline. But every parent in the world knows the sick fear that never leaves the parental heart, the dread that real harm is coming for your child.

Like Harry in Man and Boy , I took my small son to see his grandfather when he was on his death bed because I thought it would be good for both of them. Like Harry, I was dead wrong – it was painful, confusing and heartbreaking for both of them. The scene made it to the book because often fiction can improve on real life but sometimes it really can’t.

Man and Boy was published in July 1999. A few weeks earlier, just before dawn of a lovely spring day, my mum died in the home where I had grown up, the semi-detached house in Billericay where she had been a young wife and mother, and for twelve years a widow. She died in the home where she had built a life – and a life for her tough old husband, her wayward son, and her beloved grandson whose parents divorced before he started school.

The prospect of death had not scared my mother. In a family full of hard men – she had six brothers who all served in the armed forces during the war and a husband who had been a Royal Naval Commando – she was by some distance the bravest of the lot. The only thing she was afraid of was being made to leave her home to die in a hospital or a hospice. She got her wish to die at home.

And while I was still reeling from that fact – although I think we reel from it forever, I think we never really get over the feeling of being orphaned, no matter how old we get – Man and Boy went out into the world. And slowly, steadily, driven by word-of-mouth from readers and a passionate publisher and not least by a beautiful iconic cover, it went on to sell millions.

In the course of a career that lasts for a lifetime, a novelist writes all kind of books. Runaway bestsellers and commercial flops. Critical successes and their widely-derided opposite. Books that are talked about and, far more often, books that are ignored. If he or she is blessed – or in possession of some dumb luck – once in a lifetime they might write a book that is loved. That is what happened to me with Man and Boy .

I will be forever grateful to the book, and to the readers who took it to their hearts, and to the family who inspired it.

TONY PARSONS

London, 2019

It’s a boy, it’s a boy!

It’s a little boy.

I look at this baby – as bald, wrinkled and scrunched up as an old man – and something chemical happens inside me.

It – I mean he – looks like the most beautiful baby in the history of the world. Is it – he – really the most beautiful baby in the history of the world? Or is that just my biological programming kicking in? Does everyone feel this way? Even people with plain babies? Is our baby really so beautiful?

I honestly can’t tell.

The baby is sleeping in the arms of the woman I love. I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the pair of them, feeling like I belong in this room with this woman and this baby in a way that I have never belonged anywhere.

After all the excitement of the last twenty-four hours, I am suddenly overwhelmed, feeling something – gratitude, happiness, love – well up inside me and threaten to spill out.

I am afraid that I am going to disgrace myself – spoil everything, smudge the moment – with tears. But then the baby wakes up and starts squawking for food and we – me and the woman I love – laugh out loud, laugh with shock and wonder.