Daddy's Girl

I have talked at length about my mother in an earlier post and i have discussed my three boys, Dad seems to have been left behind although he is someone that i miss dreadfully even after 15 years.

In Singapore 1964

i guess Dad and i had no choice but to become closer Mum would often make no sense and often put me in the position of being the adult when she was in the midst of her depression and i was to find out a few years ago that she was sent home from Singapore where we lived for a year or so without me when she became ill over there. Being the only child i was often left on my own with her when dad was working or out in the evening at the Buffs for example.....an army thing a lot like the masons....Royal antediluvian order of Buffaloes.....yes don't ask, i have a few medals of Dad's associated with it but my only memories are dinner and dance evenings and Dad being out on a Monday night....oh and at his funeral a guard of honour that Mum and i passed through on the way into the church with the coffin! Being on my own with Mum could be a trial especially if she was on the down side of her Manic Depression, now known as Bi polar. As a teenager i resented her and relished the time with Dad even more especially on our own.
Dad was the middle of three brothers, his oldest Brother Gerald was a handsome blond haired blue eyed boy. He left England in the 1940's when at the end of the war in the RAF he went into Paris and met Annie a Parisian woman who he later married and moved to Paris to be with, they had one daughter my cousin Katherine. He was a mechanic and did well from the move as once he learnt French he was used to translate new mechanical information for Leyland and it gave him great opportunities to travel the world.

Dad's parents and two brothers.

The youngest brother John worked as a farm labourer he fell in love with Winnie who was tied in to the family her mothers father being Johns granddad's brother. They married and had three children Stephen , Keith and Helen....she did me a favour and got Helen first which is how i ended up Hazel. In the mid 60's they saw the ads for people to emigrate to Australia and decided that this was what they needed to do. Unfortunately just as they should have left Helen was hurt badly in a car accident and it delayed their move, when she finally recovered they left as one of the last to go in 69. It caused a huge rift between them and My father and Gerald as they didn't tell anyone that they were going, although we lived not too far away when they left Dad refused to see them off. He didn't get to see John again until three months before he died when John came back for the first time to see him. Which is when we found out that he couldn't tell anyone that they were leaving because Winnie's dad had beaten him so badly for taking his only child away that they had to do it without his knowledge.
Dad was the brother who went to college his cousin told me that she remembered him spending a lot of time in his grandparents attic with his science set. He did well at school and decided to go into the army and this became his career, he went into the royal army medical cour so that he would have a job when he came out. He travelled around the world, and later met mum at a night class, when he was living in West Norwood,  she lived in Wandsworth and was working at St Georges as a lab tech, she asked him to accompany her home and that was it. He drove a Norton motor bike and they would hare around London on it. They married on 23rd Sept 1961 and i arrived in Oct 62 i would later also get married on the 23rd Sept in 1988.
Dad aspired to get on and worked hard to get a house and security, he was very determined that i would speak properly and would often say what!!!? if i said bu er instead of buTTer for example and yeh instead of YES! he would also chastise friends visiting if they did the same. As a consequence i do the same with the boys he taught me that mis pronunciation jarrs, whether right or wrong as accents are great things too.
I got on well with Uncle John when he came over in 1996 when Dad became ill he was different to dad and this was highlighted further when the three brothers came together for the first time in 30 years for his last birthday on May 12th 1996 when i went up with John and Adam who was only a month old then and Joe 4 to mum and dad's in Thirsk North Yorks and uncle Gerald and Aunt Annie came over from Paris. Dad was clearly the odd one out of the three and on occasion became exasperated with their banter, but this was also due to his illness Cancer on the pelvic bone which had been diagnosed in the October previously.
The night in October 95 when mum phoned to say that Dad had been diagnosed with cancer i have to say was the single worst night of my life, it was the start of things changing, i think it was probably worse than losing him in a way, just such a bolt from the blue.

Me and Dad around 1973

Dad had always been the solid one and the reliable one growing up. He had his moments though, a quick temper and a big hand! there was one occasion where he lost it completely. I was watching Abigails Party i remember in the 70's and i had bought some silly coke can radio which for some reason he decided i shouldn't have done and and just went for me big time. To this day can see his face contorted with rage as he hit me, Dad was 6ft 4! I wasn't one for just taking it and hit back and as i did manged to get away and ran out of the house. I remember walking around the village, we lived near Gt Yarmouth in Norfolk then...looking for my dad's car to come and find me, i really thought he would have calmed down and looked for me. I have never really addressed this before or told anyone but it is a piece of my life that i never forgot, and i think i never forgot it because he never came to look. I ended up at one of the phone boxes in the village and called the Samaritans, only time i ever have done so. I ended up going home and climbing through my bedroom window {it was a bungalow} in order to avoid mum who i saw sitting in the kitchen in the dark, Dad had gone to bed, i don't think i ever really forgave him for that. As it was being a petulant teenager i refused to talk to him for a week which resulted in him coming to my bedroom one evening in tears and apologising profusely which was worse than the beating!
So that makes him sound awful but he wasn't, i think for both of them i was the child they thought they might never have and i was the only one they could have, Dad had already had prostrate cancer when i was 6 months old ensuring i would never have siblings and mum miscarried before she had me and had me at age 40, i literally made it by the skin of my teeth!
Dad would do anything really, he was a great taxi service and when i had the infamous parties at the school hall he would come for the evening as the appropriate adult but would let us get on with having fun. He taught me how to master the basics in driving before paying for lessons until i passed. He bought a cheap car during my lessons so that if i damaged it....which i did! it wasn't too much of a problem, he laughed when i swung in through the gates left handed and jammed the passenger side on the gate post.
He paid for music lessons and school trips, he joined the PTA and was chair during the transition from Grammar to Secondary which happened the year that i left. He would take me to work when he was on call and i would play with the centrifuge and he would point out what he was looking for on a film when looking through the microscope {he was a haematologist}. My early memories are of him coming home at lunchtime in his Army uniform and seeing him taking blood in a tent for charity at the annual tattoo so that people could find out what blood group they were, my goodness wouldn't get away with that now!
After i left home i would return for weekends and on occasion we would go out for a drink together, he told me once that should he go after mum {he never really believed that he wouldn't} that he would move into a smaller place and i would have to make the decision on whether he was coping or not, later he was to tell my aunt that he would have moved in with us if we wanted to help with childcare. He saw Joe for 4 years and adored him. He would take him to the shops for toys when we visited and bounce him on his knee, but if he was naughty his voice would get serious and Joe would know that he couldn't push things any further.

Mum and Dad 1993

One of the things that people remembered him for was his booming laugh. I remember doing the make up for Under Milk Wood at school, the first night the audience weren't really getting the humour in the play  but on the second night dad was there and suddenly you could hear him laughing heartily at all the right places and the rest of the audience duly followed, a lot of cast members were coming back stage commenting on it.
Dad loved reading, Dickens especially, his favourite being bleak House and we would go to the library every Saturday together, he always had a book in his hand to read. He also loved classical music and had quite a collection, i initially professed not to like it but then in music lessons was introduced to Holst and came home raving about it and gradually listened to more, and now have a collection of my own, however less than dad.  He also was a great gardener, as a child i don't remember mum buying vegetables. Dad had an allotment and on occasion i would wander down there to help and have a chat. He had a greenhouse at home and would wander down each night for a cigarette, you could see the tip of it burning in the dark, he grew tomatoes in the green house and would bring me the first crop especially, as they were and have always been my absolute favourite veg, there is nothing to compare with the taste of home grown tomatoes.
When we bought the flat in London he helped with the deposit and when we had the chance to buy the freehold he financed that. He and mum would visit every month or so driving down from Thirsk where they moved to in 89 and he would always bring some cuttings and plants for the garden. He never got to see the house and the big garden we have here, mum came once after he died.

Dad and Adam 

It is one great regret that he never got to see the boys grow up and be more of a grandad. Mum did have that opportunity but didn't really relish it like he would have done. Adam was three months old when he died.
I feel that he and mum have been around since their passing and odd things happen which would take me so long to write here that make me believe that there is more than this.
There was something going on around his death too....... for ages during his illness i had thought that i would want to write to him to let him know how much i loved him and how much i appreciated all he had done for me, we were never so physically demonstrative that i could feel comfortable doing that in person. The last time i spoke to him he phoned and asked if i could get him into hospital for a rest, however much mum was doing for him at home he actually wanted the security of being in the local cottage hospital ten minutes walk into town.
In the end the district nurse came in over the weekend and he went in. I decided that whilst he was in for a bit of respite i would write to him it would bypass mum and just be between him and me.
On the day that Uncle John had returned to Australia after seeing dad, his father in law died! poor uncle John had to return with Winnie the following week to get her mum sorted into a home and sell the property. It took a good while and when they knew they were going to have it all sorted they booked to go and see dad a couple of weeks before the date of travel as it was cheaper. Auntie phoned and asked if they could come to me for a few hours as the connections from Kent to Yorkshire were a few hours apart, as i was on maternity leave i said that i would come down and collect them from Lamberhurst and take them directly to Victoria. Dad was admitted into hospital a week before i was due to collect them.

Last pic of me and Dad he died a month later.

So the night before i was due to get them i wrote Dad's letter...in the morning i called the Cottage Hospital to get their address, the receptionist asked if mum had been in touch and i said no i had written dad a letter and wanted to send it to him and could i have the address, she said yes but talk to sister. So i waited and sister came on the phone, had my mum been in touch?.....no, so she said i really think i need to tell you that your dad has deteriorated and we don't think he will last out the day. It was such a shock and suddenly getting the letter to him became vitally important, i confirmed that they had a fax and the sister said that if i got it to them she would read it to him. I re wrote some of it then as a goodbye letter, and remember saying that although i wish that he could stay that i understood if it was time for him to go. I told him that if i had another boy his middle name would be Willard, Dad's surname Joe already had his first name Peter...Zaki does indeed have Willard as a middle name it meant a lot to me that Dad at least had some knowledge of him. Cousin Stephen had asked me to source a book of war poems for him and send them back with uncle John, in there i found a couple of poems about the security of hospital and one on dying, i put them in for him too. Next i had to fax it, i couldn't from home and i knew Vince who lived in the flat above worked from home and so i landed in tears on his doorstep. He managed to get it there for me and sister read it to him as requested in the afternoon before Mum visited......he died 10 hours later at 2am the following morning.
I then went down to collect John and Winnie, in tears at times whilst i was driving but pulled it together before i arrived. I told them i had news assuming that they didn't know....but mum had already told them!! I never really got to the bottom of why she never told me, because she didn't until she phoned on Tuesday morning to say he had gone 30.7.96 but something intervened anyway to ensure i got to say goodbye.