George Hayward

George Watehouse Hayward

My father was an alcoholic. He voluntarily left our house in 1951. He would come on weekends to take me to the movies. I missed those days when we would be on the bed and we would sing together My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean and Onward Christian Soldiers. Sometimes when he came for a visit he was drunk while I was playing with my friends in our garden. I felt ashamed.

But I loved my father immensely and my mother would say, “Alex I don’t understand why you love him.” That she often told me, “Alex, you will never understand because you will never be a mother,” I never did retort as it was many years later that I knew I could have answered, “Mother, you will never understand because you will never be a father.”

My grandmother, mother and I left Buenos Aires for Mexico City in 1952 without telling my father that we were gone. In1965 I returned to Buenos Aires to do my military conscription in the Argentine Navy. I had an underhanded secondary reason which was to find my father. I did.

There is not one day that I do not think about my father since like him, I believe I am a good writer. For quite a few years I wrote for magazines and newspapers in Vancouver and elsewhere. I believe I may have inherited my father’s talent for journalism. In the 40s and early 50s he wrote for The Buenos Aires Standard and for the Buenos Aires Herald.

My mother told me the story that the publisher of the Herald offered my father the position of editor but my father threw an inkwell at him.

I find it sad that the only example of my father’s writing is half his signature in his King James Bible.

In the late 90s I went to Buenos Aires with the mission of going to the Herald to locate samples of what my father had written. He had not been all that kind in writing about Juan Domingo Perón. My father would disappear for weeks and my mother would tell me that he had written something about Perón  that Perón had not liked so he was sent to the Villa Devoto Prison as punishment.

The youngish editor of the Herald, had a melancholic disposition. He told me, “I will soon be returning home (England!). He also pointed out that in the 40s the Herald writers were not given by-lines so I would not find anything in the microfiche files. I did not.

Looking at the editor I instantly thought of my favourite English writer Graham Greene’s novel The Honorary Consul. I left the Herald saddened. To this day I have no memory of the chats I had with my father before he died in 1966.

My almost uncle Leo Mahdjubian (an Armenian who had worn a kilt in the Black Watch I WWI) called me one morning at my office at the Senior US Naval Advisory Group where  I had been seconded by the Argentine Navy to be aid and translator for Captain USN Onofrio Salvia.

Uncle Leo told me, “Alexander, your father kicked the bucket yesterday on the street. He had a heart attack. He was taken, already dead by a police sergeant to the Hospital Pirovano on Monroe. Because of the policeman’s intervention you will have to go to the Belgrano R Police Station to sign some documents.

This I did but the policeman at the desk told me, “This is strange as the dead man’s son has already been here and signed all the documents.” I had been warned by my mother that I had a half-brother. But it was still a surprise.

That evening I received a call at my pension from a police sergeant who told me, “I was your father’s friend. I am the one who took him to the hospital. I believe that the hospital staff would have kept his pocket contents. He carried a large sum of money that he was saving to bribe a general to get you off the navy and send you back to your mother in Veracruz. So I emptied his pockets.”

With the money that the sergeant gave me my father paid for a modest funeral at La Chacarita Cemetery. In his pocket he had his universal document called cédula de identidad. I was much too stupid to realize that his full signature and his date of birth was in it. I returned it to the police station.

Every time I go to our visitor’s bathroom by the kitchen I cannot avoid seeing what must be the first portrait of my father and next to it that last portrait that I took on Avenida Carabobo.

The car a Morris Oxford was built in Argentina and it was called a Siam di Tella.

My father was a superb cook. He told me, "Alexander if you ever cook you first have to learn to make sauces." Because my Rosemary hated cooking I became a good one just like my father,

There is a lesson in my life that I have sorely learned much too late. This is that when you become curious to ask that question, the person who can answer it is dead. I used to be sent by my father's visitor friend, Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, to buy him a pack of Argentine Arizona cigarettes. I never did ask my father why they were friends.

On my daily walks with my cat Niño around the block there is a laneway garden that has a large lavender. I pull some of it and smell it. It conjures my memory of my father - lavender, gin and his Harris Tweed jacket. 

On a final note. My father was born George Hayward. His parents Harry Waterhouse Hayward and Ellen Carter moved from Manchester to Buenos Aires sometime in the late 19th century. Judging from the photograph of my father as a baby he was born in Buenos Aires at about that time. My father years later found an Argentine marriage certificate and deduced that his older brother Harry had been a bastard when he came to Argentina with his parents. It was the custom in the family that the firstborn male had the middle name Waterhouse. My father adopted it.

When I was born the Argentine authorities did not permit names that could not be translated into Spanish. I became Jorge Alejandro (my godfather was called Alejandro Ariosa). When my father tried to include Waterhouse in my name he was refused. He slipped a coima (bribe) under the table explaining that Waterhouse was part of my surname.That is how I became  Jorge Alejandro Waterhouse-Hayward (with a hyphen!). My eldest daughter Alexandra Elizabeth Waterhouse-Hayward, as she never married will be the last of us.