Losing a Father in a Demolished Landscape in an Ex-Industrial Textile Community

My story of a familial connection on the move was part of the research process of an ethnographic project about a demolished ex-industrial village. Growing up there in the 1970s, my fatherless childhood was silently lived out in its spatial geography. My proximate, unknown father was a potent figure I would glimpse in the street spaces but was never allowed to acknowledge. Twentieth century accounts of working-class life have little to say on the personal stories of families where ‘father’ was rarely present (Steedman, 1986). Here I offer a daughter’s emotional geography of fatherlessness. To sketch a socio-cultural backcloth to the personal subplot I explore, I draw on scholarship about fatherhood, fatherlessness and lone motherhood as a way to discuss men’s involvement in fathering in relation to my own experience of living without a father in a paternalistic company village. Turning to my return in 2015 as a researcher, I use autoethnography to explore the personal familial subplot bubbling underneath the main project. I chart how the methodologies I used held affordances which offered a process of coming to terms with the inter-connections of spatial and familial absence and loss: the loss of my home-village where memories of an absent father were played out and the revelation of the loss of an already absent father through a DNA test. In this way, it traces the shifting movements of a familial (dis)-connection through memories, photographs and mobile research encounters against the backcloth of the absent spaces of an ex-industrial community.