In My Father’s Footsteps

My earliest memories of my father are inextricably linked with his identity as a writer. Our games all had language at their core – limericks and wordplay, reciting poetry, composing songs and recording interviews with one another for hours on his Dictaphone. My mother has boxes of tiny unlabelled tapes that summon these moments – aged two and a half, whenever I entered my father’s office, no matter what he had been doing when I arrived, he would raise a small black Dictaphone to my lips and ask, ‘Miss Segal. Any comments?’ He was a sage and focused interviewer, probing my thoughts on nursery school, on the weather, on my plans for the afternoon, on the well-being of my imaginary friend, Latty. I was striving to emulate my father long before I was old enough to write – Latty was a secretary whose predominant responsibility was to take my dictation. I knew nothing else. He was always in his office, always writing, and when he wasn’t in his office he was reading to me.

He chose our reading material from the canon, but dismissed squadrons of poets for being ‘boring’ – no one ever made me recite ‘On Westminster Bridge’. My bedtime stories were Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, Ogden Nash, e e cummings. From cummings he taught me that children are apt to forget to remember; from Poe the word ‘tintinnabulation’ and the magical concept of onomatopoeia. From Nash he taught me that ever-useful adage that candy is dandy but liquor is almost always quicker. These recitations would make my mother laugh, as did the dirty limericks he taught me, relishing my glee at the rude words, but most of all relishing my engagement with rhyme and rhythm. Writing was the centre of our family, the language we spoke, and the love between my parents. Identical ring binders open on their knees, they were often together on the sofa, arguing about sentences, exchanging strings of synonyms as if they were endearments. My father the writer, my mother the editor – theirs are the only skills to which I’ve ever aspired.