The brutal dad I'm terrified of turning into: As a boy, Paul Connolly was mocked, bullied and beaten up by his father. Now he has twins of his own...



As a child, Paul adored his father Colm Connolly... until he turned ten

Then he began to beat and belittle his son, competing with him despite being a full-grown man

Colm seemed to take pleasure in his brutish background and enjoy suffering



Now that he is a grown man, Paul can see that his father's life was a failure

And he vowed to resist the familiar flashes of rage raising his two daughters



My father is not a good man. He is not kind or gentle. He is not wise or funny. He is not cultured, sensitive, accepting or loving. He is not brave or adventurous, inspiring or supportive.



Rather, he hates laughter and revels in the misfortunes of others - even those suffered by his own children.



He is not burdened with even one quality that might have proved handy in fatherhood. My father, unfortunately, is a bad dad.



Before the beatings: A young Paul with his father Colm Connolly on holiday in Majorca

You might expect me to offer a qualification: ‘Hey, but I still love him’ or ‘But he’s still my dad.’ No. The man used to beat me. I have no love for him. But neither do I feel hatred.



I have every reason to hate him. Why would I not hate a man who punched and kicked me? A man who - when I turned ten and developed a mind of my own - saw me as a threat rather than his much-longed-for only son?

A man who has never expressed any interest or curiosity in my life, other than what reflected, unearned glory it might provide for him?

Unsurprisingly, I see my father rarely. Colm Connolly, a former stonemason, is 89 and lives in Spain, while I live with my family in Britain and France. I see him only every two years or so - when we pretend to be normal - and that’s plenty, but I didn’t always feel this way.



I adored my father when I was a child. In the early Seventies, we used to watch the wrestling on TV on Saturday afternoons, me with a glass of orange squash, him with a pack of 20 Benson & Hedges cigarettes.

We were enthralled by the dramatic feud between Jackie Pallo and his arch-nemesis, baddie opponent, Mick McManus. I cheered on the lovable Pallo, but I could tell my father rooted for McManus.



Neither of us, the eight-year-old boy or the 47-year-old man, realised that it was all a set-up, that the rivalry was as fake as Jackie Pallo’s peroxide hair.

Afterwards, we’d re-enact the fight, me playing Pallo, my dad grunting like the saturnine McManus. He often let me win. I couldn’t have been happier.

Innocent: A happy young Paul, who adored his father as a child

I clearly remember the moment everything changed, just after my tenth birthday.



My father and I had been playing football in the park opposite our house in North London, as we did most nights in the early summer. When we returned home, I started to talk about my new favourite football team, Manchester City.



My father grew a little cross. Why didn’t I support the same team as him, Manchester United? I said that everyone supported Manchester United and I wanted my own team. He said I had started to support City to spite him.



He couldn’t have been more wrong. Growing up in London and being a child, I had no concept of the rivalry between United and City. Or between any other clubs. I just knew I wanted my own team.



So I said: ‘Don’t be so silly, I just like...’ And then, out of nowhere, came this flashing, stinging pain across my cheek.



‘Don’t answer me back,’ he growled after he slapped me. ‘Never answer me back.’ And he walked off, leaving me with a handprint on my cheek and astonished tears springing up in my eyes. I couldn’t comprehend the betrayal. How could he do that?



It wasn’t until I saw my father in later years with my sister’s children that I was able to understand. He simply could not deal with children once they reached an age when they could reason for themselves, when they didn’t just accept everything he told them as the truth.



One month a grandson would be riding on my dad’s back, whooping joyously; the next, my dad would ignore him and complain that the child ‘talked too much’ or had ‘a big mouth’.



I wish I’d known that as a child. I might have kept my mouth shut and avoided the beatings. He banged my head against a wall when I was 11 and punched me as I rebounded back.

On a long car journey when I was 12, I corrected his wrong directions when my mother was driving and he punched me in the face from the front seat.



At the same age, he told me I had made a mistake in my algebra homework. When I told him it was his calculation that was wrong, he punched me twice in the face.

I ran towards the hallway, but he tripped me as I passed him and then kicked me twice as I lay at his feet.





'He banged my head against a wall and then punched me'

I remember looking up at him as he kicked me. Almost the worst thing about the beating was the expression on his face. He didn’t look angry. He just looked determined, as if he was trying to kill a bug.



It wasn’t just physical abuse. My father took every opportunity to whittle away at my confidence. If I did something well, he’d just say: ‘It’s about time you got that right’ or ‘You were just lucky.’



If I got something wrong, he’d wallow in my incompetence. It was as if he was in competition with me, a grown man testing his mettle against a 12-year-old. Looking back, I can’t believe how pathetic he was.



My father came from a brutish background. He was born into poverty in the West of Ireland - he and his nine brothers and sisters were raised in a tiny thatched cottage.

By all accounts, his parents weren’t shy of brandishing the belt, or worse, if their children misbehaved or stepped out of line.



My father seems to take perverse pleasure in the barbarity of his childhood. One story in particular seems to greatly amuse him.



One spring day, his parents and siblings were working on their land. His mother had given birth to his younger brother, Michael, just a few days before and was carrying him in a makeshift sling across her chest as she worked.



Happier days: Paul's father did not start beating him until he was able to reason and question for himself

Michael grew restless and started to cry. His mother couldn’t calm the baby and became irritated. Then, in a flash of the phosphorescent temper she so generously passed on to my father and me, she angrily plucked the howling infant out of the sling and hurled him into a nearby patch of nettles.



When my father tells this story, he chuckles with nostalgia, barely registering the horrified faces of his audience. I’m still not sure if our horror is more to do with him finding the story comical or the cruelty of his mother.



That’s my father’s fundamental problem. He has absolutely no self-awareness. He can’t see he’s unthinkingly repeated the mistakes of his parents.



I’m sure it’s an oft-repeated pattern. You instinctively fall back on models of child-rearing absorbed from your parents - being conscious of it is the first step to forging your own path.



Why don’t I hate my father? There are two reasons. The first one is simple - his life has been a failure.



He’s a coward, a lily-livered husk of a man. His three children are his only achievement. But I for one feel nothing for him. It’s hard to hate a man who has so signally wasted his life.



Despite his great age, he’s done very little. He’s never taken a risk, never gambled on life, never tried something new.



'Every day, I tell myself: "I will not be like him"'

Any change he had to make was forced upon him by circumstance. He doesn’t even like leaving his house. It’s not fear of the unknown — it’s a complete lack of intellectual curiosity.



The second reason I do not hate him is because he’s a role model for me. A role model for how not to live a life.

When an opportunity for change or betterment confronted him, he froze, unable to galvanise himself. And each time the moment for change passed, he’d grumble about how it hadn’t been the right time.



I share that conservative gene - I, too, instinctively distrust change. But my father’s example compels me to embrace risk, to push forward.

My life so far has been rich. I’ve done things I would never have achieved without the impetus of my father’s abject cowardice to drive me.



He’s also made me more open to new ideas, to pursue knowledge.



My father is a stupid man. On a visit to where I live in heavily forested northern France, he said: ‘I hate trees - they say they suck all the oxygen out of the air.’



He has an almost preternatural ability to be wrong. Whatever the debate, it’s a good rule to plump for whichever side my father disagrees with. It’s never failed me.



Part of this is down to his innate dimness. Much of it, though, is due to his parroting of whatever bilge he reads in downmarket newspapers.



Today: Unlike his father, Paul, pictured now, had decided he will fight his instinctive anger and be a better man than his father

He’s never questioned a populist opinion, however ridiculous. As a result, he’s a racist, even once banning me from dating a half-Egyptian girl because of her colour.



But his unceasing boneheadedness has at least ensured I’m a ravenous reader, and his slack-jawed credulousness almost certainly dictated that I’ve become a contrarian, a quality from which I’ve been able to eke a living as a writer.



Now I, too, am a father. My five-month-old twin daughters were born seven weeks prematurely in difficult circumstances. In testing times, I became aware of my father’s malevolent genes.



When one of my girls cried for three hours and I couldn’t quieten her, I fought the same urge that coursed through my grandmother all those years ago before she hurled her newborn baby into a clump of nettles. I experienced that same intense, unreasoning flash of temper.



‘Why won’t she shut up?’ I thought. But I battled it. As I felt the burn of anger rising, I thought of my father and how he must have felt the same burst of rage each time just before he punched me.



And I thought of how he was too stupid, too senseless to fight that impulse and how I had to be better than him.



I had to break the cycle of violence because if I didn’t, my children would grow up to regard me with the same scorn I reserve for my father. And I couldn’t bear that. Not for them and not for me.



So I simply refused to capitulate to the malice and instead I try to love my girls unconditionally, to not see their understandable fractiousness as being a personal affront, to not be a narcissistic idiot who thinks it’s all about him.



Because it’s not: it’s about these two precious girls.



I’m winning the fight to not be like my father, but only just. Every day I begin with just one thought - I will not be like him.

