Twenty Years On

On 5^th November 2017 it will be twenty years since my Dad died.  He died very suddenly in his sleep at the age of only 74.  He had for a few years been suffering with heart problems but there was no sense that he was particularly unwell, and because he was an older father, nearly 50 when I was born, I hadn’t really realised that he was getting old – after all he had always had a shock of white hair and been considerably older than the fathers of my friends. He was ageless, he would always be as he had been – in a jocular conversation with me when I was about ten (conversations with Pa were often fantastically jocular) he had promised me that he was going to live until he was 97 and I am still quite cross that he didn’t keep to that.  I was twenty four at the time and in my second year of teaching, living a new and happy life in the South West. I rang my parents a couple of times a week, but that evening, on 4^th November, I was tired, I had just come in from a busy day, I wanted to have a bath, lie on my bed and read my new book. I could ring home tomorrow.

Woken from sleep in the early hours by Paul arriving in my flat – my Mum hadn’t wanted me to be alone when I heard the news and had rung him to ask him to come to tell me – I learnt that such a phone call was never going to be possible (I have never picked up that book since). I am still so sorry that Paul had to do that but will always be unutterably grateful that he did, for at those points of loss you realise what a difference it is to be held in the love of those who are most important to you.

I have discussed the loss of parents with many people since then and I am still deeply conscious of the fact that in such a situation, with the loss of someone who formed you into who you are, you truly feel that part of you has gone. And yet the corollary of that is that you also discover all the more strikingly what there is of that person in you and how much of them you carry on into the rest of your life. I miss my Dad every day – sometimes the pain is still raw – but I know more and more as I get older that some of the ways in which I see the world; some of the ways I respond to the people and situations I encounter; and the things that I really value are framed by the things I learnt, inherited from and loved in him.

As this anniversary approached I have been struck by a number of things that he ‘gave’ me that still are powerful and moving elements of my life and here are twenty such; remembering and reflecting on them have been another gift to me from the man who was the most extraordinary father and truly lovely man.

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Bach

The people who know me best (and some of those who only know me a little) know that I cry very easily, and this in some ways I inherited from Pa. That’s not to say he was overly or overtly emotional, but when genuinely moved he wept. He wept particularly over things that he found very beautiful and I witnessed this most frequently with music, and it is one of my own most sensitive triggers too (much to Olivia’s frequent embarrassment). Bach was certainly a composer who frequently and profoundly moved him. 

The first major piece of Bach I sang was the Magnificat and I look back now with much greater understanding at his excitement when I told him that the choir I was in were going to be performing this. Paul and I were much the same when Olivia had the same opportunity only this summer: imagine the excitement of discovering the amazing experience of singing Bach for the first time – now that would be an experience fully worth reliving. Pa rushed to do what he often did when a musical enthusiasm hit me, or him on my behalf, and made a cassette for me to listen to. Over the years I came to realise – not through direct or in any way didactic conversation, but just through the littering of references that the music of Bach was something extraordinary to him.  The Mass in B Minor was a particular high water mark (well, as is only right...) and he told me once that he thought the Sanctus must truly be the song of the angels – I hope he is revelling in it now.

Bach - Mass in B Minor - Sanctus

Leeds

My Dad was born in Leeds on 29^th September 1923, in a very typical brick terraced house, 3 Quarry Mount Terrace, on the edge of central Leeds. He loved the city always, and whilst a curious traveller – he lived in India for five years in the 60s, and later being content to live in range of different places on both sides of the Pennines – he maintained an abiding sense of belonging and love for the place of his birth.  He was full of stories – I still can’t drive down a particular road coming out of town without seeing in my mind a twelve year old lad being pursued with murderous intent by two older boys who he had somehow enraged and who were baying for his blood. He loved the back streets and the architectural oddities, and the grand civic ambitions of the Victorian burghers.  As a child I used to greatly envy the fact that he had seen the Art Deco owls on the top of the Civic Hall, when they had been displayed at ground level before the building was completed and they were hoisted to the top of the towers. (There are now replicas at ground level too, so I have now at least seen these nearer to). The central library whose books and records he borrowed in great quantities, and in whose reading rooms he spent many hours, and the Town Hall, where he and my Mum (and for a couple of very happy years with a young me) regularly attended the concert season, are buildings I especially associate with him. Waiting in our seats before the concert and during intervals he would animate the surroundings – the frieze that runs around the top of the central hall is a worthy Latin inscription of patriotism and civic pride interspersed with another of the city’s symbols, relief rams’ heads (which featured ill-disguised pipes coming out of their mouths), Pa selected two contiguous words ‘regi patris’  to be a name. I learnt all about hilarious exploits of ‘regi’ and his herd of pea-shooting rams, and remember laughing to the point of tears and eagerly begging to know more. He would also happily come with me to the performers room door where I would collect autographs. Somewhere in boxes I have, amongst others, those of a young Simon Rattle, Sarah Walker, and George Bolet (who came to the door smoking a cigar and wearing a tan dust coat – I recall being rather taken aback by this… he certainly did not appear to me then to have the style of my Daddy, who was resplendent in a tweedyish three piece suit and light blue paisley bowtie – his only commonly worn non-clerical outfit of the early 80s).

He loved the city on his own account and for the stories he knew of his family life there. He told me animated stories of his own father, George ‘Dan’ Thacker, whom he adored and who had died when he was only thirteen, and he was fascinated by the life of his grandfather – Samuel Thacker, a Japaner and enameller, who was every inch the dramatically bearded patriarch in the photos that we still have of him, and who published a slim volume of hymns (words and music of his own composition).   I loved the fact that we lived in so many different places when I was a child and I loved that fact that he could make anywhere home, and help you to know and love new places, but I equally love that we both share that rootedness in the city I am proud to think of, and share with him, as my hometown.

Byrd

Music recurs, so huge a part it is of the man he was and what he gave to me. Renaissance polyphony in general was something he loved, and I know that that fundamental exposure to it as I was growing up, without real conscious awareness, is part of the way it became so important to me.  My Mum will often relate how he was going through a phase of obsessively listening to Victoria whilst she was pregnant with me which I like to think is why I have so easily loved his music. Byrd, however, was something truly special – again whilst I got to know it for myself through singing, he helped me to discover a greater variety of his music; understand the man and the world he lived in; and to appreciate his lens of faith and the attendant complexities that created. 

Every inch the jazzman too, my Dad was a great fan of Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker, but it was not the slogan ‘Bird Lives’ (graffiti-ed liberally around New York, and across the world, by his mourning fans) that Pa chose to emblazon on his speakers, but rather his own tribute to an earlier but equally powerful and dynamic musician who challenged the authority of his time:  ‘Byrd Liveth’

Randy Newman

A different type of music that he introduced me to was that of Randy Newman.  He loved his music, the wry irony of some of his songs, and yet the often deeply moving sincerity of other. The distinctiveness of not only Newman’s voice, but of his rhythms, harmonies, and often melancholy fall of his melodies, was something I grew up with. It was in fact listening to Randy Newman on the radio last month that gave me the idea for writing this, because whenever I hear anything by him, it is as if Dad is there, a palpable presence, and it can happen when you least expect it: taking a seven year old Olivia to see the latest Disney film and finding myself utterly overpowered by that feeling when The Princess and the Frog starts up with Newman singing its theme tune ‘Down in New Orleans’, weeping through her last concert when they were singing songs from Toy Story 2, for goodness sake…

Three Randy Newman songs for Pa:

The joy of dancing 

Simon Smith and his Amazing Dancing Bear

One he sang so very often sitting at the piano that is now in our study (as a small child I believed he had written himself…, so I still think of ‘the missus and me’ as my Mum and Dad )

Dayton Ohio 1903

And finally one that I loved deeply from the day he gave me a recording of the albums Sail Away and Little Criminals, which in those days was pretty good teenage wallowing music, but which now pretty much encapsulates for me the joy and sadness of writing this

Texas Girl at the Funeral of her Father

Stones

He loved stones and he would often pause with a keen eye on river banks and beaches, fields and hillsides looking for interesting shapes and colours that happened to catch his eye.  Sometimes he inscribed them with their place of finding in his inimitable italic. He plastered some into the wall of his study, others were stashed in pockets and balanced on the lip of bookshelves. I am glad my home too is littered with stones from innumerable holidays, day trips, important moments and fleeting prosaic walks. 

He was also an arch stone skimmer – I was so impressed by this arcane skill when I was a child. I am sure he would have been delighted that after a childhood of abject failure to emulate him I finally mastered the skill on my honeymoon, with the other essential man in my life, but in a place Dad loved very much too.

Stones anchor you to the places you have been and the experiences you had there.  He knew all about the power of place and the power of memory and the formative power of the extraordinary physical world we have been given and that we can so easily take for granted. He recognized the powerful poetry of colour, shape, and mysterious ancientness of time that you can discover when you look beyond the superficial grey and hardness of a stone.

T.S. Eliot

When as a Sixth Former I was hugely impressed by the intensity of The Waste Land I remember being rather put out by Dad’s comment that he was not really very sure about a poem where the poet felt they had to add explanatory notes. It was as near as I ever got to a typically adolescent feeling of ‘what does he know about anything’ when it came to Pa.  Later on I learnt how greatly he admired much of Eliot’s works, in particular the Four Quartets, which I did discuss with him when studying Eliot for my degree.  They were some parts that I knew he often went back to and I remember a particular conversation when he was struck by the power of the section in The Dry Salvages where the passengers on a train are addressed and the transformative nature of travel in time and space creates a different reality, which he associated very strongly with the image of pilgrimage.

‘You are not the same people who left that station

Or who will arrive at any terminus’

After he died I inherited his literature collection which is all very precious to me but one very battered book has become one of my absolute greatest treasures. It is his copy of the Four Quartets – a first edition, but eighth impression published in 1950, which I think he must have bought second hand because the inscription in the front is 1958. It is battered with out-of-shape covers, a tattered spine, water stains and the legacy of actual bookworms, but not only is it his copy which I know was much used but it also contains a special link to his lifetime’s relationship with these poems. Scattered though the pages are numerous annotations – some are links to other writers, connections he has made, ciritcal comments, and questions of Dad’s own, and what makes them all the more telling is the way you see his handwriting change over time from the flamboyance of the style he was trying out in the 50s, to a sparer italic which I know from other letters that he was using in the mid and later 60s, to the ordered and elegant, Gill inspired traditional italic using a square cut nib, that those who knew him will remember at once - handwriting that in itself is like coming face to face with him.

To follow his journey through the poems and through time, is so powerful especially given the very fact that these poems so fundamentally confront the predicament of man coming to terms with time, and ultimately how that might be understood in faith.

At the start of the year, not thinking about this anniversary at all but prompted by the importance these poems have had for me. I had set myself the challenge of learning them by heart over the year, as I type I am on course to have learnt all four before Christmas – which has been a tremendous experience in itself but accompanied by this very special edition has been all the more significant for me.

Second-hand Bookshops

There were always thousands of books in the house. All of Pa’s many expertises and enthusiasms were developed and deepened by his incredibly wide reading. He was rarely without a book in his hand and his armchair and bed would be permanently augmented with more or less precipitous piles of reading matter. As for the study – not only lined but piled deep.  Yet it was also always an organic collection, and from my earliest childhood the experience of spending time in second hand bookshops with him was always one of wonderful potential and fascination.

As someone who hated shopping in any other form, as long as a bookshop could be found he could be comfortably left for almost whole days, reading and combing the shelves  - an almost meditative process. 

There is definitively something magical about old books in themselves and the unpredictability and serendipity of searching through the random collections, with their essential bookish smell, is something I still seek out. I always wish that I might bump into him around the corner; I am fairly certain that he is mostly only a bookshelf away.

Burnt Toast

It was a strongly established fact in my preschool mind that Daddy only really like toast when it was consistently black. He also liked it very liberally buttered (did I mention that he died of a heart condition…) and whilst I was equally certain that I never wanted my toast more than very light brown, the ‘buttery bits’ on his always looked incredibly inviting. Sitting on his lap or hanging around his knee at the breakfast table I could usually persuade him to let me eat these and not being able to see the carbon beneath the yellow I enjoyed them enormously.  Even now when I eat a piece of toast that has been rather overdone I am powerfully transported back. It can now sometimes be a very deliberate nostalgic choice.

Scott Joplin

Pa’s musical enthusiasms would permeate the house. His study door was usually open and he played music at all hours as an early riser and late retirer.  When I was very small he was going through a period of interest in ragtime and particularly the music of Scott Joplin, and it is music which immediately links me to the very secure feelings of my early childhood.  He always referred to the composer to me as ‘Uncle Scott’ and it was a long time before I realised he was not genuinely a distant relative.

Scott Joplin was an old favourite to which he regularly returned. When I was in my late teens we watched the film of E.L.Doctorow’s Ragtime together, and were both deeply moved by it. This sparked in him another phase of regular listening and led once again to a tape, which he produced for me, of comforting old favourites and introductions to a wider range of his pieces.

Difficult to chose one, but here is the Maple Leaf Rag which was a definite favourite of my three year old self, trying to dance around the heaps of books and paper on his study floor. 

Maple Leaf Rag

Yorkshire Rocks

Small stones have one place in life and enormous crags of Yorkshire millstone grit definitely have another.  The Cow and Calf at Ilkley, Armscliff Crag, and the surrealist paradise that is Brimham Rocks are still places of wonder and wild beauty and the inspiration for imaginings and adventure.  I have many memories of day trips, picnics and, most wonderfully, spontaneous summer evening drives, when a sudden desire caught him to seek out the wild freedom and excitement of these tremendous places. Clambering over these rocks, learning the joy of scouring the glorious Pennine views in silence, or accompanied by chatter and laughter, and often crazy and magical stories, Dad inspired my imagination, taught me to love the contrasts of fascinating detail and wide vistas, and gave me a sense of ageless rootedness in the county of our birth.

Cathedrals

Not surprisingly, perhaps, for a clergyman, (come to that, not surprisingly as a human being with any modicum of artistic or historical sensibility) Dad loved Cathedrals and I particularly associate him with two of the most extraordinary buildings – York Minster and Durham Cathedral.  He loved the tremendous act of faith that was the extraordinary statement of Romanesque and Gothic ecclesiastical architecture: the combination of design, craftsmanship, and above all the direction of this to the greater glory of God and with the purpose or raising minds, hearts and souls to the eternal reality of God’s love.

It also comes back to his deep sense of the importance of place; the intersection of day to day life with history, and additionally to the connection with the faith of those who had gone before him. Durham he loved deeply – and there the spiritual, historic and aesthetic came alive for him. I remember him once sitting down on the grass by the door to Durham Cathedral and announcing that he wasn’t going to move until it was given back to the Catholics, but then he realised it was lunchtime – he was an idealist but no fool.

Handwriting

As I mentioned in the T.S.Eliot section, Pa’s handwriting was utterly distinctive.  He had a great interest in calligraphy and the art of lettering, and it was one of his more frequent occupations – he labelled his study (in inimitably beautiful writing, of course) as the Scriptorium. He spent hours creating exquisite individual pieces which combined his writing with his wider artistic skills and draftsmanship – there numerous of them on the walls of our home and I can’t imagine a world not illustrated with them (miniature copies of a couple of them are even on the walls of Olivia’s doll’s house). But beyond the consciously crafted art he made his own day to day handwriting a thing of striking beauty. Seeing the history of his own development of his writing style in my Four Quartets has been like seeing how he grew up.  By the time I was on the scene he had confidently developed his characteristic italic script. It was something that I took for granted because it was everywhere – growing up in house with Dad meant that envelopes, scraps of paper and innumerable notebooks scattered with musings in black inked calligraphy, were pretty much to be found in every room. I have birthday cards with long narrative poems, of his own compostition, inscribed with effortless beauty. Yet even as a child I remember the gasps of shop assistants as he handed over hurriedly written cheques, which looked like works of art (and written in ink in the biro age of the 70s unusually had also to be wafted dry, adding an extra element of theatre), and then later came the comments of College porters, who sorted the post into our pigeon-holes, after the arrival of his regular communications to me as student, where even the writing of a name and address were a joy to look at. He was an artist of wide skill, but for me his script encompassed not only his artistic skill, but something intrinsic is his personality: art becomes fundamentally linked with his love of words and fascination with language. I said it before but it is like coming back into physical contact with him when I come across his writing, and that is joyful.

Ella Fitzgerald

That Dad loved Jazz and was a prolific reviewer and writer was something that I also took for granted. I enjoyed the music that he played but didn’t consciously engage with it. From my earliest experiences jazz was just something that was always there; in some ways I regret now not taking more interest for myself, but do I like the way it is something that feels part of my experience but not something I need to know or think about consciously – I will still listen quite regularly to jazz but rather vaguely. Ella is a bit different: I like to think I discovered Ella for myself, and the Cole Porter Songbook, which was my ‘entrance’ recording, was definitely an independent discovery, but I know that she was someone my Dad listened to (and at one point for several years her biography was to be found lying about the house, moved from pile to pile, before finding a home on a shelf). When he knew that I was enjoying her music he gave me a cassette of her recordings with the pianist Ellis Larkins, which he told me (and I have found no reason to doubt him) were her finest. It is absolutely one of my favourite musical things and I would never have known it without him.  This recording of Ella, however, is not from that but from another of the songbooks – this time Rogers and Hart – chosen not only because of her usual glorious vocals, but because this was a song Pa loved to sit at the piano and sing, and I certainly knew his version first. I like to imagine that somewhere they are duetting it now….

You Took Advantage Of Me

Notebooks

It was generally accepted in our family that it was extremely difficult to chose a present for Dad. He wasn’t particularly interested in owning ‘things’ and no-one would ever really know what books he had or really what books he would like at any given time – that web was already so very complicated.  There were however three staple gifts that you knew would always be fully appreciated – chocolate, blank cassettes and notebooks.

I am sure that many people can identify with that deep emotion of notebook love. Stationery generally can inspire great feelings of satisfaction and creativity.  Pa’s love of the notebook was a much purer form than most – I accept that mine is in many respects frivolous and superficial – what I am looking for is a beautiful notebook of gorgeous patterns, or simple elegance. He more sincerely just loved the purpose of the notebook and was not swayed by its exterior.  I am so glad still to have several of his which are in many cases half empty and which may have served a variety of purpose – they may have begun as work on a narrative or sermons, poems, jazz reviews, prayers and then might end up being employed for any of the others, for practice pages for types of script, cartoons, or often just apparently random words or phrases which had taken his fancy. The notebook as a point of record, a repository of information, a place for practice was of great value to him, but also as a playground for ideas and creativity – and he did sometimes like ones that looks really interesting too...

Birds

Looking back I realise what an extraordinary polymath he really was. Having left school at thirteen to start work, following the death of his father, his formal education had been extremely basic, and given that he was a notable dreamer back then,  I don’t think his teachers felt he had any even vaguely academic abilities. Yet he was one of the most intelligent and insightful people I ever expect to meet, and educated himself with breadth and depth, out of sheer love for what he was learning (with some later theological training of various types, although both as a Methodist and an Anglican student he was already steeped in his subject more deeply than some of those who taught him).  His areas of interest ran from the more predictable theology, history, ancient languages, art and design, music to other areas that happened to catch his fascination – one of which was the natural world, and, in an area I came to share with him especially, birds.   As a child, encouraged by a one of my Primary School teachers, Mrs Marjoram, I had become an avid birdwatcher and so came to know some of his enthusiasm in shared excitement over spotting birds, and looking together at pictures. I still remember the look of wild excitement in his eyes as he once described to me the mystery and majesty of flocks of egrets in India. I think it was artistic representations of birds that fascinated him as much as the real thing, although I know he could be elated by the sight of a bird in flight.  He also was intrigued by the way they were perceived and responded to in myth, literature, art and folk cultures. The poetry of the language used around birds was something he was fascinated by too. When I went through a phase of particular obsession with the kestrel, he not only drew me pictures and found me sections of books to look at, but also penned a list of twenty-three different names used for the kestrel around the British Isles (a different and definite labour of love in the pre-internet age).  Poetry, wild beauty and fascinating details to explore made them a typical strand of his many fascinations.

Northumberland

Sixteen when the war broke out, and fundamentally pacifist by underlying nature, Pa never actively wanted to joining the armed forces. (When I asked him enthusiastically about this as a child, fired briefly by the patriotic black and white films of the war period that were still in those days regular feature of Saturday afternoon on BBC2, he simply and rather sadly said that he had not wanted to volunteer to be in a position to kill someone). Conscripted then in the early 40s he expressed no preference as to regiment, or even service, and he was sent for an initial (and clearly unsuccessful) stint in the RAF and then moved to be a member of the Durham Light Infantry.  Training took place in Northumberland and was followed by a very distant tour of service in India, Singapore and what was then known as Burma. I have always suspected that the prospect of the potential chaos that might be about to be unleashed on them in the form of Private Thacker might have been an additional factor in the thinking of the Japanese military, because the war in the east ended two weeks after he arrived.  Some of the experiences of this more far flung adventure were hugely influential on him, but so too was that period of initial training.  Based in a camp in the Cheviots above Rothbury, much as he loathed military life, he was enchanted by the place; the countryside, the history, the wildlife and the music of the area became lifelong passions.  He and my Mum spent their honeymoon in Rothbury and they would return to the area frequently. As a result I have many very happy childhood holiday memories and it a place I have come to love too.  I was more taken with the coast with its ruined castles, wide skies and views of distant hills, and for Paul and me Lindisfarne and the surrounding areas have been from our honeymoon, through hugely important early holidays with our own small person, and with special and lovely friends, a place of very great happiness. 

Interesting words

On a shelf some feet away from where I am typing is Pa’s copy of the OED, in the ‘complete text micrographically reproduced’ format, which allows it to be contained within two volumes, and which can only be read using a magnifying glass. Each volume is well over two thousand pages long. But what the spine and corners tell is of the great use it was put to, and the cracks and wearing tell of the great joy he had from very regular consultation. Pa loved interesting words – he loved learning new words, finding interesting variants, particularly fascinated by dialect words and how things changed and developed. It was not unknown for him to leave a meal and collect the revelvant volume and look something up, or regale the other diners with etymological details.  A poet himself, he loved the weight and texture of words and the impact they could have differently on their own and in combination – he would write down individual words and parts of quotations on backs of envelopes and scraps of paper; dramatic power and poetry sat easily for him in the ordinary everyday world for were they not all part of the same thing?  A poem that he introduced me to, and that I know was great favourite of his, was Wallace Stevens’ ‘An Idea of Order at Key West’ which is itself, at least in part, a reflection on art and the desire to express the inexpressible. I have the strongest recollection of seeing its final four words on numerous papers and in the leaves of notebooks, words themselves that try to show us the mystery of our verbal reality

Words of the distant portals dimly starred

And of ourselves and of our origins

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

York

In Spring 1997 when I was visiting home, having begun my teaching career in Somerset, and what might be thought of as the beginning of my ‘proper’ ‘adult’ life, Pa and I went out for the day together. This was relatively unusual.  I spent a great deal of time with him both at home and on trips out, but it was a great treat to have whole day together just the two of us, and we chose to go to York.  York was somewhere I had always loved to visit, from being very young, with trips to the Minster, wandering the ancient streets with their magical names, facing the aggressive delight of Spring in the wild yellow of the thousands upon thousands on daffodils that surround the base of the city walls when Spring arrives. That day in York stands out as one of the most notable of my life, not for any dramatic reason or moments of great individual importance, but because it encapsulated so much of what was utterly wonderful about being with him. We walked around the Minster, talked of big things and small things, people and books and music and silly things that had made us laugh. We trawled second hand bookshops on Fossgate, had lunch in a pub where he enjoyed his customary draught Guinness, ate fish and chips, and talked about his new found admiration for Disraeli’s prose style. He was slower than he used to be, I had driven us there as a series of mini stroke-like attacks meant that he had given up driving himself by that stage, but we walked arm-in-arm as we would have done for years, and perhaps that slower pace is what helps to make so many features of that day stand out in my mind so clearly.  It was a truly blessed day.

As a child at Womersley village School we had gone each year to the pantomime at the Theatre Royal in York, and Dad, as both the Vicar and a parent who was able to be free during the School day, joined the excursion.  We both loved the pantomimes, and I particularly remember Pa’s hilarity at the Dame, a Geordie comic actor called Berwick Kayler, who each year stole the show. When we eventually bought a house in York almost twenty years since I had last been at the Theatre Royal for such an event, I was both amazed and delighted to find that Berwick Kayler still is the pantomime king of York and writes and stars in the now famous annual production – being able to share this with Paul and Olivia has been something I have hugely treasured (must get this year’s tickets booked….).

Storytelling

Dad loved telling stories – at any time you could find yourself experiencing one of his flights of fancy, inventing outlandish and hilarious characters, but also often moving and beautiful - this could happen at the dinner table, on a moorland walk, sitting waiting in a multi-storey carpark – and they could take you anywhere.

There are so many that were never recorded but others that we still have to enjoy. A particular favourite of mine has always been one that he wrote to deliver in installments in his regular assemblies as the vicar, at my primary school. This was the story of Brother Indigo and the Whip-ma-whop-ma: the tale of a rather feckless young monk (travelling in search of adventure, on his mechanical piano Upright Casey with a particular desire to slay a dragon in the style of St George). He learns that the people of York are being plagued by a fearsome monster called the Whip-ma-whop-ma (a name Pa took from the shortest and most strikingly named of York’s many strikingly named streets, Whip-ma-whop-ma Gate). He goes with the aim of battle but finds this needs a rather different approach. It is a beautifully structured and written tale, and was accompanied for us by large poster style illustrations, and by a songs which we all sang together. I think one of my greatest regrets is that I haven’t done more about trying to get this published – perhaps this is something I should focus on again.

In his later years he worked at great length on another fabulous, and much more detailed, story 'Misty Lanterns' which was a world he became deeply immersed in.  He sent me installments week by week over several years and that it was unfinished at his death has, I now realise, haunted me for a long time – I think I have been putting off facing this.  I don’t know definitely how it was going to end, although I know I am the only person who has read most of it and to whom he talked about his ideas.  The time may becoming for this to be another important story to go back to.

Gargoyles and Gobbuts

Pa love Oxford and was so delighted for me when I studied there. I know he was very proud of my having the opportunity for an education in such a historical place – the city for him particularly of Hopkins and Newman. Unsurprisingly he loved the architecture, and with his love of the ridiculous and surreal detail it was also unsurprising that he developed a fondness for some of the gargoyles, and so shortly after arriving there I sent him a postcard bearing the picture of a few.

Previously over a number of family meals he had entertained me and my younger cousins with tales of some creatures who lived in his  study called the Gobbuts – they were mischievous and comical commentators on what was happening in his life. In the Gargoyle postcard he quickly proclaimed he had found pictures of three of the four Gobbuts (Athelstan Proudlock-Tombs, Austin Van Horne and Prince Jersey Button – the other, Peedle Roggit, has never been captured in sculpture because he always keeps a pudding basin over his head). From this point on his letters were peppered with interruptions from the Gobbuts, who talked their own kind of madness and reflected on the things that Pa was interested in at the time.

Oh such letters! When I started to write this, I had in mind that it should be something that would tell Olivia more about what was so important to me about my Dad, but revisiting his letters to me at university, I can see how they will do that so much more eloquently than I ever could.  They are funny, loving, combining wry commentary on domestic details, with thoughts on what he was reading (often accompanied by photocopies of articles or newspaper cuttings). What has just hit me so strongly though even in a mere quick half hour reread of some of them is, how very precisely they cover the themes I have been writing about here, as well as so much more, incorporating poems, jokes, cartoons, that bring him back in such a vibrant and delightful way. I am so lucky to have these connections with him and such a precious legacy to pass on.

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I knew I wanted to write this – I knew it would be a wonderful way to return to the details of my relationship with my Dad – and it has been much more than I hoped. I have deliberately not focused on the huge things – his faith, his love for my mother, the wonder of his paternal love as I experienced it – they are too much for my words, but they are equally for me integral to all that I have written here.  Pa – I love you so much, I miss you every day but I carry you with me in ways that are more precious and more real than so much that has happened to me since, and your love for me and what you have given to me enable me to be the person I am. I have the most wonderful family – a husband and a daughter who enrich my life again beyond my power to say – I am so sorry that you have not been a material presence in our family but you are so very much a part of our lives that I can only continue to rejoice.