Memories of Max - A Father's Story

Chapter 7 - Max

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After working on the fish farm I worked for a year for a company which was researching and intending to raise gold and silver from sunken wrecks. The company consisted of a close friend, a secretary and me as the actual employees. There were also a number of strange characters in the background. I never actually worked out whether this was some sort of tax scam or whether the backers were serious. Despite this, I found my time there great fun. This was Treasure Island in the twentieth century. With so few prospects I used to dream about what we might be able to recover. Unfortunately reality had her way and we recovered nothing. I left the company one month before Max was born because I had not been paid my previous month's wages. The company folded soon afterwards.

I was unemployed with my first and new-born child. Suddenly out of the blue I received a job offer in London in the IT industry. It had taken two years to reach this stage and Sara and I realised that I had to take it or I would be consigned to menial jobs for the rest of my life.

Max in the meantime grew with his shock of red hair. It was not the ginger that I disliked but was a beautiful mix of sandy blond and light shades of red.

Like many young children he had a fascination with anything loud and mechanical. When we went to Wales he would yelp with joy if he saw an tractor, a muck spreader or his favourite machine, the combine harvester. While we lived in the city, it was motorbikes which excited him.

Like Sara and me, Max had a fierce imagination. As a toddler this gave rise to a number of imaginary friends. There was Jack, who was always the one who had spilt the milk or broken a cup. We loved listening to Max talking to his best friend Jack. There was also Bear-Me but I cannot remember much about this character.

Max had a deep seated fear of wolves and lions. I do not know where this originated but they embodied his fears of the world around him. If there was a dark room then it was filled with wolves. If he was frightened to go somewhere it was because the lion might get him. I will never forget him looking into a cave in West Wales and telling me that the lion lived there. He growled at the cave, emulating the lion, and then promptly burst into tears because he had frightened himself so much. I tried to calm him down but all he could say was that the lion had growled at him. I cuddled him and he quietened.

Max was a shy child and often felt intimidated by other children. He used his imaginary wolves to full effect when he felt threatened and after he started at nursery school we had the problem that he started growling at the other children who ran away and burst into tears.

Before Max became ill we had two occasions that made us think deep and hard about the vulnerability of our child.

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