“Bow Ties and Poetry: Father’s Day,” by Tamasin Day-Lewis, was originally published in the January 2006 issue of Vogue.

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“The past is a foreign country,” L. P. Hartley wrote at the beginning of his great novel, The Go-Between. And that is what strikes me each time I look at this photograph of my father, the man I knew in some ways so well, in other ways not at all, for he had already lived the major part of his life before I was a gleam in his eye and his past was something I would only hear about in the edited-down, romantic way that parents have of telling you about their childhood. Like his early memory of being a young boy in turn-of-the-century Ireland on a bus in Dublin with his aunt Knos. “How to develop a beautiful bust,” the advertisement ran in the magazine she was reading, and my father, unaware of its meaning or impact on his fellow travelers from the most zealously imprurient nation on earth, is said to have started chanting the line rhythmically, the first signs that there was poetry running through his veins.

This same aunt had stepped in when my father was four and his mother died tragically young. His father was so heartbroken that he left Ireland, taking his young son to England with Aunt Knos, who devoted herself to his upbringing. By the time my brother, Daniel, and I went back to Ireland with our parents for childhood summer holidays, Knos was in her 90s, languishing in a nursing home in Rathmines in Dublin, paid for by my father. It was our first stop as we ended the rolling misery of the ferry crossing the Irish Sea from Liverpool.

As for the loss of his mother and the effect it had on him, it was not something our father ever talked about, and nor, as children, did we think to ask. Any more than we thought, in early childhood, that we would be fatherless by our mid-teens. Perhaps if we’d known how short a time we’d have with him, we would have delved more deeply into his trunk of memories and gotten closer to his heart, though back then the sort of openness our generation has with our children hadn’t been invented.

In this portrait taken of my father by the great Irving Penn, for American Vogue in 1951, my father is resplendent in his bow tie, a sartorial stroke that on the wrong neck could appear an epicene affectation, but never on him: He saw the joke in it, the potential dandification; he loved clothes but knew where to stop, when elegance became uncomfortably theatrical and shouted “Look at me.” And I can see now, although at the time I would not have been conscious of it, that he always looked the part, looked like the distinguished man of letters that he was. He was comfortable in his beautifully tailored suits and the shirts he bought from Turnbull & Asser—whom he referred to as Turnbull and Arsehole throughout our childhood. The curious angle of the black brolly swinging jauntily at his side makes me sure that when Papa walked into Penn’s studio Penn must have been arrested, like everyone else who crossed my father’s path, by the completeness of his image; by his not just being absurdly handsome and charismatic, but by the way he could only be what he was, an Irish poet.

The dark side is there, too, the fact that the portrait casts a shadow over one side of his face, at once accentuating the strength and refinement of his profile while suggesting the unknowable. He is looking away from the camera, and Penn has caught something of the stare into the middle distance that Papa used to have when he would seem to leave the conversation as though some poetic abstraction, thought, or line was playing in his head and had to be attended to, and we knew then not to interrupt. We had to knock on the door before we entered my father’s study, too, knowing from an early age that the Muse might flee if we barged in when Papa was writing, breaking the invisible line from head to pen, since imagination and inspiration were as ephemeral and unpredictable as the Irish sunshine.

I have looked at this photograph of Papa many times over the years, and it has always been the one, like a great novel, that I’ve returned to again and again. Perhaps it is seeing him in his prime, at 47 and brimming with life, already successful, a well-known poet, publisher, and writer of crime novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, that has helped me retain an image of him in good health rather than as he was during the final eighteen months of illness, when cancer was grappling him to the ground. The only thing that the black-and-white photograph keeps from us is his improbably penetrating, Aegean-blue eyes.

His study was wood-paneled, with books from floor to ceiling and a handwritten manuscript of a Wilfred Owen poem on the wall alongside the last drawing of my father’s hero Thomas Hardy, with whom he kept up a correspondence when Hardy was a very old man. It is after one of Hardy’s heroines I was named, Thomasin Yeobright from The Return of the Native. After lunch, always the same bowl of cornflakes and a Penguin biscuit for my father, Dan and I would climb onto him, a knee each, and he would read to us—the complete canon of E. Nesbit, A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Andrew Lang’s fairy stories, Alice in Wonderland, C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, or my father’s brilliant children’s novel The Otterbury Incident. When we climbed the stairs back up to the nursery, it is not surprising that we inhabited a land of the imagination, that we invented plays and wrote stories, drew, acted, wrote poems and never begged for the company, the activities, the passive pleasures of computers and television that our children are brought up with.

It was always difficult showing my father what I’d written; there was a sense of inadequacy and embarrassment even when I wrote a novel at the age of nine, which my English teacher clearly thought an indication of future talent. And it got worse as I got older and more self-conscious. Poems I did my best to keep to myself. Yet he was my sternest and best critic when, in my mid-teens, I started writing essays about other poets and novelists and asking for his advice.

He may have appeared serious and unapproachable to my friends on first acquaintance, but my father had two tricks that immediately reduced us to tearful hysteria and put everyone at ease. The first was his “King Edward potato face,” which involved the near-impossible feat of squinting, sticking out his tongue, and blowing his cheeks out all at once. There is one photograph I have of him doing this behind a sand dune in the west of Ireland, the rest of the assembled company looking po-faced at the camera. The other involved pulling his red-and-white-spotted bandanna handkerchief from his pocket, furling it up, holding it to the side of his nose, and winding it like you would crank a windup gramophone, uttering a shrill “kkkkkkkkkkkkkkk” noise as he did it until he went apoplectically red in the face and looked like he was going to expire.

My father died when I was eighteen and brother, Daniel, was fifteen, and if there is a worst period of your life to lose a parent, I can put up a pretty good defense for this being the time, during the painful transition from childhood to adulthood when adolescence is wreaking its well-known havoc. Not knowing a parent as an adult, his not seeing your achievements and catastrophes, your falling in love and having children, is a truncation of a sort that never quite leaves you; life, after all, is not really a series of chapters, it is a continuum. After the early missing and grieving come the questions you wish you had asked, the anger that the greatest and most important person in your childhood story has left the plot too early, the sense that you will never again have an adviser who will act wholly and unconditionally in your interests.

So this is the man who still makes me ask the imponderable: If you had lived longer would your influence have been strong enough to deflect and deter me from the rapids my life took me swirling down through my remaining teenage years and my turbulent 20s? The years when a father’s opinions, however rebelled against and uncalled for, can at least reel you in when things are spinning out of control?

I am lucky I have the poetry, particularly the poems he dedicated to me and the one that was first published posthumously that he wrote to me and Daniel: “Children Leaving Home.” One stanza in particular stands out and has always made my brother angry, sensing that our father was putting us at fault and blaming us for not getting to know him properly.

I don’t read it like that; I see it more as a valedictory, a blessing, an understanding of the places a child’s mind cannot reach but shouldn’t feel guilty about. It stands, with this photograph, as the way I wish to remember the most influential man in my life, my father:

Forgive my coldnesses, now past recall,/Angers, injustice, moods contrary, mean or blind;/And best, my dears, forgive/Yourselves, when I am gone, for all/Love-signals you ignored and for the fugitive/Openings you never took into my mind.