My Father - In Memoriam

You can read about some of my unhappy memories on my Lensography. Here I want to remember the happy times with my father.

I am the eldest child and there is just 2 years and 6 months between me and my next brother, 9 years and 6 months between me and the youngest brother. Here you can see my middle brother and me when we were about 8 and 6 years old - I'm guessing, I don't remember.

At this age, one of my strongest memories is playing 'cricket' in the garden with my father. Of course, two children and one adult can't play proper cricket but we used to have such a lot of fun. Then we'd play piggy in the middle where two of us would stand about 12ft apart and the third person stood in the middle and tried to get the ball as the other two threw it between each other. Of course, Daddy quickly got the ball when he was piggy in the middle.

He'd play Monopoly and other games with us. He taught us card games and how to keep track of cards as they came out of the pack. He wasn't a real gambler at all but he did like to play cards, usually bridge and whist. He was a sore loser and his motto was "It's not how you play the game, it's winning that counts" which neatly reverses the real quotation. He was good humoured about it, though, and he'd play to the gallery when he lost by putting on an act of being upset.

On Saturday afternoons, there would be horse racing on television and we'd all sit there and put pretend bets on horses in the different races. We'd keep track of how much we won or lost as well. You might think this is a bad thing to do with children and would turn them into gambling addicts. In fact, none of us have ever gambled or only in the most minor and inconsequential way.

Sometimes he'd give us a playful smack (one which didn't hurt at all) and we'd say, "What's that for?" His answer was, "It's in case you do something." If we were being naughty, he'd say, "How old are you?" and we'd tell him, say "six" for example. His response was, "Do you want to live to be seven? If you do, stop doing that." Perhaps you think that's a terrible thing to say to children. We thought it was hilarious and always laughed.

As a little girl, I thought my father was wonderful and that he could do anything. One of the most poignant moments was when he and I were on the way to my wedding in church. He said to me, "It's not too late to change your mind, I'll tell them." I was eighteen and scared, perhaps having second thoughts but I reassured him. In retrospect, I should have said, "Yes, I have changed my mind." Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but not very useful.

He had a few activities he loved: fishing, watching cricket, horse racing and other sports, and gardening.

The photograph shows my Daddy returning home from fishing with his rod and equipment. He nearly always fished from the beach and he was usually after bass - this was long before it became such a fashionable fish as it is now. He'd look at the weather when it was a little stormy and he'd say, "The bass will be running today." He'd be out of the house at 5.30 to 6am to fish. He'd also go to the beach as the tide was going out to dig for lugworms for bait.

When we lived in Devon when I was a young teenager, he won a trophy from the local fishing club for the largest conger eel to be caught on a rod and line in the area.

Sport was his other great passion, particularly cricket. In fact, he loved it so much, he got me interested and now I follow it too. He would get so angry every time the English Cricket Team got beaten which seemed to happen a lot. I so wish he could have seen England win the Ashes in 2005. He would have been ecstatic with joy.

In the last 20 years of his life he became a keen gardener and concentrated on growing vegetables. This was great, up to a point. It wasn't so great when I visited and he had a glut of runner (stick) beans and insisted I return home with a huge carrier bag full. I hate runner beans but he'd never let me leave without them.

He once got a load of horse manure for the garden which arrived on his birthday and that pleased him more than any of the real birthday gifts he received that day.

Daddy was an expert in the art of the 'wind-up'. This is where you tell somebody something which is untrue and then work hard to get them to believe it. I don't know if this is an exclusively English or British form of humour but it's popular here.

One of his best wind-ups was in the 1980s when he and Sylvie went to their local pub where they knew a lot of people. These people were staunch Labour supporters and hated Margaret Thatcher. One evening when somebody started on a tirade against Thatcher, my father said, "You can't say that about our leader." They looked at him to see if he was joking but he'd got a completely straight face. Daddy carried on with this for quite some time while his friends were almost spitting with fury. They kept saying to Sylvie, "He's joking, isn't he? This is a wind-up, isn't it?" She tried to keep a straight face and deny any knowledge. In the end it was Sylvie who gave the game away because she burst out laughing.

Yes, it sounds odd and even a little mean but we love that kind of thing over here. People do it all the time.

In August 1987 I visited my Father and Sylvie for a long weekend, arriving Friday and returning home on Monday. On the last afternoon, Sylvie and I were in the kitchen preparing dinner and Daddy was in the living room watching TV. Unusually, he came out and sat in the kitchen with us. He'd been complaining that he had a bit of a pain in his side or his back but said it wasn't bad. He sat and chatted to us instead of watching cricket which we thought was odd.

The next evening, he and Sylvie sat on the settee watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on television which was one of their favourite films. Daddy held Sylvie's hand throughout the movie.

He had a heart attack in the early hours of the morning and was rushed to hospital where he died. We think he knew that the end was close because his behaviour in the last two days was so out of character. He had had his 65th birthday just two months earlier and was taken too soon.

My brother phoned me at 7am in the morning with the news. He had to tell me three times because my brain refused to understand the words. In theory, we all knew he could go at any time but we weren't expecting it. I phoned Sylvie and promised I'd be there in a couple of hours. I caught the first available train and was there before lunchtime.

Sylvie was in pieces as was my sister who was just fourteen years old. My brothers and their wives came too. It was a very sad time for everyone.

The funeral was well attended and we sang Abide With Me which is traditional but also Onward Christian Soldiers, Daddy's favourite hymn, he used to love roaring it out, totally off-key, of course. My poor sister completely lost it at the interment and became pretty hysterical which was probably good for her as she'd been bottling up her emotions in the preceding days.

None of us have ever forgotten or stopped loving my father. We talk about him a lot and imagine how he would react to things that have happened. Thinking about the day he died and the weeks following can still reduce me to tears. He truly was a lovely man and we still miss him after all these years. In 2003, my sister got married and she kept saying how much she wished our father was there to give her away. She spoke about him at the wedding reception too. She didn't throw her bouquet, as is traditional, instead it was put on our father's grave as you can see in the picture below.