Let me tell you a story once told to me by a novelist friend. It is set in the remote northern part of his native Sweden several years ago. Winter, a desolate, snow-bound road, sub-zero temperatures; and his car breaks down a hundred miles from the city he is returning to with his family, writes Dermot Bolger.
Whatever brief light exists begins to fade as he trudges to the nearest village with his wife and two small children. Naturally there isn't a garage. Real men fix their own cars up here, he is told. There isn't a bus or a hotel either. Eventually he is told that if he can find a certain barn in the woods somebody there might take pity on him.
He goes on alone and finds the barn. It is where the local hard men hang out, souping up their jeeps, spending the long winter tinkering with pistons and spark plugs. They observe him in silence as he tells of the broken-down car, enjoying his discomfort. Shaved heads, arms as thick as the walls of a jail, hard eyes like boiled sweets that would break your teeth.
The rural-urban animosity is the same the world over. Nothing much happens up there in winter, but, by God, the night when this city slicker got stranded, unable to fix his own car, will be a story they plan to savour on many evenings to come. They let him know in no uncertain terms that it is his problem, not theirs. If he is man enough to drive a car, then he should be man enough to fix it.
He opens the barn door to leave, muttering something about getting back to his children. Children? What children? Why the hell didn't he mention children before? The hard men suddenly surround him, concerned now. What age is his little girl? Is she frightened and cold? From his wallet one man produces a photograph of his daughter, who is the same age. Other men reach for their coats, a hubbub of male voices laughing companionably as they jostle him out the door, grabbing their tools, demanding directions to the car.
He walks among them, looking at their open faces. They have ceased to be just men, he realises; suddenly they have become fathers.
I think about that incident a lot when I am surrounded by other men. Maybe masonic lodges are like this, with their secret codes and handshakes, but fatherhood is a strange invisible bond which links the most unlikely of people.
When people look back at society 30 and 40 years ago they say it was a man's world. On almost every practical level they are right. In Ireland 40 years ago men certainly held all the cards, with property rights, women forced to leave many jobs when they married, biased inheritance laws and the unwritten law that women were meant to suffer in silence behind closed doors while authority turned a blind eye.
The poet Michael Hartnett, chillingly described Christmas Eve in that era as being a night when "in the pubs the men filled up with drink and in the homes the women filled up with apprehension".
And yet, for all that, men were prisoners too, trapped within the hard circle of their own maleness, Perpetually in fear of the public ridicule summed up by The Citizen in the pub in Joyce's Ulysses. Upon hearing that Bloom was once seen buying baby food for his son that died, he snorts and remarks scornfully, "Call that a man?"
The hidden world of women has been much explored in novels over the past few decades, and I found it a fascinating experience to try to enter the head of a married woman in one recent novel, Temptation. But on Father's Day three years ago I remembered the story of my friend in Sweden and I sat down to write The Valparaiso Voyage, a novel about three different generations of males - a father, a son and a grandson - to explore what men at different times are capable of saying to each other and what must always remain unsaid between them.
For me this was a voyage into the heart of the male psyche, the eternal blend of conflict and love and misunderstanding between fathers and sons, who struggle to break away from the bonds that hold them and then - if they are lucky - to come back together again, later in life, almost as equals.
Often now on summer evenings in playgrounds, or on wet mornings in adventure centres, I see other fathers my age - clambering down narrow slides after their laughing children, pushing prams proudly, rocking teething infants on their knees, immersed totally in the second glimpse at wonder that is given to them by being fully a part of their children's childhood.
Sometimes our eyes meet for a second and I think we are thinking the same thing: wondering about just how much of this short-lived (never to be repeated) wonder did our fathers miss out on, in that cage of manhood which society trapped them into.
My own father was at sea for all my childhood. His homecomings were joyous events. But too often the coming home of a father was something for children to be threatened with.
Fathers were the bread-winners, the rule enforcers, the tough men out in their barn in the woods waiting for that one chance to let the hard mask slip and produce the photographs of their children which they carried so close to their breasts.