Daddy Dearest: As the 100th Fathers Day is celebrated around the world, four writers pay affectionate tributes to their dads

EWAN MORRISON

My father hates Fathers' Day – "Another bloody American invention to make us waste more money", he once declared. David Morrison, 72, of Wick, Caithness – poet; librarian; nationalist; romantic; drinker; friend of tinkers, drunks and passing strangers; painter of abstract landscapes; survivor of a dead rebellion.

Growing up with a hippy idealist as a father posed strange problems for me in childhood. Most kids get to rebel against their boring, reactionary fathers, but how can you rebel against a rebel?

In the 1970's it was not an uncommon to see 'big Dave' marching round the quiet insular town of Wick, with long hair and beard, in sandals, handing out flyers for his home-grown festival of Poetry Folk and Jazz. He once got into trouble with the Kirk for going round with a megaphone on the sabbath, shouting "come and meet the poets in the pub!"

Our home was a haven for escapees; for women who looked like Joan Baez and men who ranted like Ginsberg. There were banjos and squeezeboxes, whiskeys and weeds, and strange mornings when I would wake to find the living room floor covered in sleeping bodies.

In this, my father's heyday, people exhausted themselves in celebrating their own idealistic hand-made culture. My father believed in something which thirty years later seems almost impossible to grasp – that Scotland could, through faith in its own culture, gain pride enough to grow and become independent. He believed this could be achieved in a battle against the homogenising forces of the British Empire and American Capitalism. He believed that Scottish poetry could overthrow Elvis Presley.

I say 'believed', because the story of my father's life after the 70s is one of a heroic but failing struggle to keep alive an ideal, that in hindsight was doomed. My father failed at this life-project but succeeded in small ways. His energy has had a lasting effect on all he met, even, his sceptical son.

One of the things that disturbs me about the world now is how banal it has become in its victory over rebels like my dad, and how very few people of conviction we come across these days. And I have learned something from the old hippy – its better to believe in the struggle, even if it seems hopeless, than it is to sit back and passively accept this mass-produced monotonous culture that stretches round the globe. Scottish poetry is actually, it turns out, better than Elvis.

So will I be purchasing a Father's Day card this year? Will I hell. Here's to you, big Dave.

Ewan Morrison's latest short stories can be watched as short films at www.youtube.com/user/mormor39

ALI SMITH

My father left school at thirteen; his family needed the money. When I asked him what he'd like me to say in this piece, he said, "Tell them I was in the Navy from 1942 to 1947, in four different invasions, in North Africa, France, Italy and I forget the other one. Tell them I'm eighty-four and a half. Tell them I'm a good salmon fisherman and so's my daughter, who caught the third biggest fish of the year last month at Delphi in Ireland." No I didn't, I said. It was the gillie. I just held the rod a bit. He laughed. "Aye, but don't tell them that."

My father put all five of us, my brothers and sisters and me, through university with a passion and foresight it took me decades to appreciate.

My father is English. Whenever people in the Highlands, where he's lived since he married my mother in 1949 (she died in 1990), comment on his Lincolnshire accent, he says, "I came up to work on the Hydro dams and never had the train fare back again." He was the main electrical contractor in Inverness and the Highlands in the Sixties and Seventies, until the coming of Thatcher, Dixons, Currys. "Tell them I'm still Conservative after all these years," he said. There's no way I'm telling them that, I said.

My father, one afternoon, sat at the dinette table, unscrewed my talking bear whose cord had broken, and screwed it back together. It worked. "When people are dead, graves aren't where to find them. They're in the wind, the grass." That's the kind of thing he said. When I asked him what you do if you see something in the dark that frightens you, he said, "What you do is, you go up to it, and touch it." When things went wrong in the neighbourhood, people would come to my father for help. When we went to visit an old neighbour last autumn, in her eighties too, she called him Mr Smith. "Call me Donald, now, Chrissie," he said. She shook her head. "You'll have another biscuit with your tea, Mr Smith," she said.

My father, as a boy, was a champion footballer, boxer, ping-pong player. His handsomeness, as a young man, is legendary. Every time I left for university, he tucked twenty pounds and a folded sheet of stamps into my pocket. "Write to your mother," he said.

KEI MILLER

My father called recently. It is a recent thing this – him calling. We used to leave the business of staying in touch to my mother. She called on Sundays and would eventually pass the phone to him. But she has been gone a year now, so we've had to start doing this ourselves – calling each other. Last Sunday my father asked, so what is the next book going to be? He didn't mean the two books that are almost out. He knew about those already; he had lent me his Jeep to drive around Jamaica while while I was researching them. He wanted to know instead what was next. I acted hurt. I asked, aren't these next books enough for now? But my father expects me to be prolific. So I finally told him what I had only just begun to know myself – it's going to be a collection of essays.

Great! That's exactly what I was thinking! This reaction surprised me. My father never exclaims. He is the kind of man for whom everything is measured, especially emotions. When my mother died, he didn't cry. He seemed surprised, hurt, and there was about him a sense of defeat. But there were no tears. Fair enough; I didn't cry either. My father and I share not only a name, but this inability to cry publicly, or conversely, to enthuse over anything easily. I realised, with some dread, what my father's enthusiasm was really about. He thought I was going to write a 'serious' book. At last, the boy would say something important, hopefully about the Caribbean, and the sorry state of things, and how it could all be better. He thought I was going to write the book he should be writing himself – filled with ideas he thinks through and campaigns for and works out on a daily basis, usually into the early hours of morning when everyone is asleep. I've learnt that from him too.

I thought despairingly about the essays I had written: a farcical eulogy for a pet; a reflection on the curse-words my mother used. Hardly weighty. I wondered if this future book would disappoint him, for this is one of the ways we measure our lives – against our fathers' expectations. I don't dare measure my actual life against his – my Dad who has had little time for fiction or poetry; who until recently had stood patiently in lines each day waiting for prescriptions for my mother; my Dad who then ran off to meetings where he argued and argued for more rights for Jamaican citizens and community groups; who writes until 2am, very serious things – proposals, papers, laws – that affect real people; my strange, measured father who has in fact measured out a space in which I am allowed to be less serious.

Kei Miller teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. His novel The Last Warner Woman is published on 1 July.

JENNY COLGAN

Like a lot of anxious new mums, with my first child Wallace I was very strict about what he was allowed to eat and do (now I have three of course, I just hose them down for Christmas). One of my abiding memories is leaving him with my dad for the first time with very firm instructions re chopped fruit, constructive play, etc. Twenty minutes later, I was heading into town when I saw them both cruise past me in the car – Wallace in his booster seat in the FRONT SEAT, sucking a gigantic milkshake through a straw, both of them with huge beaming grins on their faces as they went off on their favourite adventure (a trip to the pet shop, followed by a car wash).

Being able to take your dad for granted is a huge privilege, but I am beginning to suspect that getting him as a grampa is even better (my mother would agree: she sniffs that in his first six months with Wallace he changed more nappies than he did in total for me and my three brothers). I haven't cut any of my children's nails in five years. Despite the fact that he lives two countries away, nail-cutting is officially Grampa's job, as are: handkerchief provisioning, ice lolly making, duck-feeding and repeatedly telling the children they are going to row for Scotland, despite the fact that they have only the haziest of notions as to what that might involve.

My dad is under the not uncommon delusion that by some amazing statistical improbability, his (current) five and a half grandchildren just happen to be the most talented and beautiful ever born. They have absolutely no idea how lucky they are, that there is someone else out there just as interested in the minutiae of their lives as their own parents are. I had one granddad, with about 70 grandchildren, who lived a long way away. On the other hand of course, I also had my dad, who let me pick out our puppy; who took me to my first Nik Kershaw and Paul Young concerts (as a talented folk guitarist and singer, both of which must have been the utmost torture); shoved me off on my first two wheeled bicycle and came home at 6pm every night of my life.

The older I get, the more precious these quotidian things are. And I wonder too what will come out in my own children that we share: a taste for Gary Larson; David Lynch; that nose, that has popped up from far distant Jewish Italian ancestors, the bane of my teenage existence, though my husband loves it, and forbade me, when I could finally afford to, to do anything about it (just as well some people like it, as my daughter has it too). Mostly, though, I just hope we get it as right as he did.