I had a habit of nicking his clothes – I wore his suit jacket as a coat and his threadbare checked shirt as nightclothes. I felt great in them, like a chip off the old block
I
loved Dad’s old suede jacket. He’d had it for as long as I could remember, an artefact from his more rock’n’roll days, and it had been worn into buttery softness. When the lining finally disintegrated, and the suede thinned to imminent oblivion, he decided to retire it. But I couldn’t bear to see it go.
I tried it on and felt great – like a chip off the old block. It wasn’t at all heavy and the softness extended to the buttons that were covered in matching suede material. Sure, it had a patina of London grime and smelled of Old Holborn tobacco, but I thought it was cool. I was about 13 and couldn’t afford to buy a suede jacket in a million years, so I claimed it as my own, and set about bringing it back to life, like the singing mending mice in Bagpuss.
Mum and I picked out some blue fabric, which was incongruously bright, in hindsight. After she relined the jacket for me (a woman of many talents, she papered that wall behind me in the picture, too) it felt as good as new, if not better. What had been part of my dad’s identity became mine and I wore it until sections of suede had broken free and started dangling skankily into my tea – at which point it was unquestionably deceased.
