Mark Blackburn on the challenges of writing about his father’s obsession with success, wealth and personal pleasure

I hadn’t originally intended my book Final Approach: My Father and Other Turbulence to be so much about my father and my relationship with him. Indeed, the original title had been Final Approach: My Book of Airports. But my publisher Claret Press realised more than I did that the paternal relationship was the central tenet of the book. I changed the title to reflect this (as well as clarify it wasn’t just a tome for aircraft enthusiasts!). Then I worked with Katie and Alex, my editors at Claret, to beef up some of the passages involving my father and cut down on some of the material which had now become extraneous.

*Image credit: Mark Blackburn, family archive*

The book has been very well received and has had great reviews – “Excellent – moving, engaging and really original; there’s nothing like this” (Lara Feigel, writer and professor), “A riveting read” (Psychogeographic Review). Its current Amazon rating is 4.7 out of 5 – compare this with Yellowface’s 3.9 out of 5 or last year’s Booker Winner, Prophet Song at 4.2.

Nonetheless I am aware now that there is possibly something lacking in the book.

Indeed, a couple of the more astute reviewers have pointed out the omission. Because the book is now so much about my father, and how he was a pretty terrible father in many respects, probably it begs the question – what made him like that? I don’t deal with this in the book; with the benefit of hindsight, maybe I should have. If there’s a second edition, possibly this could be done in postscript, or I could write something entirely new as a stand-alone piece.

For the record, and without telling you everything in Final Approach, my father was an extremely rich and successful car importer. He was also a bigamist (we didn’t know this for about twenty years, until we found out courtesy of the Daily Mail), he tried to get me to make my mother divorce him because it would have been simpler and cheaper than him suing her for divorce and he eventually disinherited me when I wouldn’t subsume to his immoral demands. In his paranoid final years, he even decided I was stealing from him so sent someone to investigate me.

David Cyril Blackburn was born in September 1931 and died in September 2017. Nearly seven years ago already, but it doesn’t feel like it. Maybe that’s because he left his affairs in such a mess it’s taken us all this time to sort it all out; a deathly comet with a very long tale. There doesn’t seem to be anything untoward in his early life. Father a reasonably successful businessman dealing in white goods, mother at home and three sisters, one older, two younger.

But World War II started round his eighth birthday; he had to contend with both his family being evacuated from Wembley on the outskirts of the metropolis to rural Shropshire, and being sent away to boarding school. I do know he was bullied there – he was small and ‘weedy’. There’s a picture of him in the school play – he was playing the Pot Boy in a Shakespeare production. I think the part might have been created specifically for him as I can’t recall any of the plays having a character called ‘Pot Boy’. He certainly looked like a boy who would be bullied, with his skinny frame and his Vulcan ears. Was this what set him on his sociopathic way? Was he after revenge?

Or maybe it was the death of his mother from cancer when he was nineteen. He wasn’t a child any more, granted, but by all accounts the loss affected him badly. Her only son, they had been very close. His relationship with his father had been good at this stage, which is reflected in friendly and intimate letters between them, although this deteriorated later as my father’s behaviour became worse, with his abandonment of his family (he was in the UK for only a few days each year) and the increasing levels of deceit. My grandfather particularly disapproved of my father's unfaithfulness to my mother, of whom he was very fond. Around about this time during his National Service my father also got run over by a tank; although the accident left him deaf in one year, there was not supposed to have been any brain damage, but who knows?

As an adult he was quite anti-establishment despite his success and increasing wealth; he never voted Tory and dressed unconventionally; I remember the loud suits and even the Russian fur coat. He was definitely kicking back against something. When he began importing German and Japanese cars not that long after the war he didn’t care that this made many see him as unpatriotic, even within his own family. I think he always had an issue with class, and ‘society’, aware that his father had been a lower-middle class salesman, whatever his aspirations. But all that didn’t stop him aspiring to a knighthood.

I think part of my father, an inner self, knew he was a shit, if you’ll excuse the business jargon. But he’d never admit it; well, just the once. We were at a car event – he had cornered the market in an obscure pre-war marque called British Salmson, and it became post-Ursula family tradition for the extended family to gather for their rally. I was sat across the same big round table from him at dinner. Next to him was my nephew, and my father didn’t realise it, but I could hear their conversation. Grandfather was telling grandson how he knew he’d been a bad person, a bad father. (He was a bad grandfather too, most of the time.) I wish I’d noted it all down afterwards – I was so shocked that all I can remember are the headlines. As I’d done so often before, I hoped things might get better, we could maybe be a united family after all this time at war.

But this wasn’t any attempt to seek redemption. The next morning all was forgotten, and he just came back afterwards even more defensive, paranoid and vicious – that’s when the threats began.

Was there ever any rapprochement? Did we even ever speak again? You’ll have to read the book to find out. And though I feel I’ve come out the other side just about intact, I do feel I need to do more work to understand just how September spawned a monster.

It’s difficult to see your own work objectively when in creating it you’ve spent years delving into the deepest recesses of your own mind and memory, and then handling the tumble-dryer turmoil of the editing and publishing process. But next time I will endeavour to take one last thorough review of my penultimate draft, and endeavour to put myself into the position of a hungry reader who is devouring it for the first time.

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