A valuable life

On this day in 1917, ninety years ago, my beautiful grandmother gave birth to her only child, a son Frederick Harry, who would become my late father.

Louisa had married my grandfather, Thomas, almost exactly a year before. It was a hurried wartime wedding, as my grandfather had to return to the appalling battlegrounds of World War One to fight with his regiment, the East Surreys.

I have some of Thomas’s letters to Louisa from the Front. Written in pencil on flimsy paper, they speak of his love for her and his hopes for peace. After Freddy’s birth, he writes longingly of his wish to return home on leave to see his son, and his beloved wife with whom he had spent so little time. Each letter ends “Kiss the darling boy for me”.

Ten months later, Thomas was dead, killed during heavy shelling at Ypres in Belgium. They never found his remains. He never saw his darling boy.

It was with this background that my father grew up, in a home without much money, with a lonely mother who over-indulged him because he was all she had. He used to speak later of how much he had missed knowing his father. She remarried but it was never happy, and my father refused to call the new husband “Dad”. (Years later, Louisa and her second husband separated, and she lived with us until her death.)

With all the attention from his mother, Dad could have become a selfish, spoiled person. In addition, he grew into a handsome man with a great deal of charm, very attractive to women. But he lived with integrity. He had a long and happy marriage with my mother, and together they raised five of us with love and understanding.

One of my brothers has Down’s Syndrome, and 50 years ago it was commonplace to institutionalise such babies and forget about them. Not in our family. Mum and Dad insisted on raising Philip at home, against medical advice. Dad became very active with local charitable groups working around issues to do with mental handicap (as we called it then).

After an early career as a professional photographer (see picture right), Dad retrained as a teacher after World War Two. He loved children and turned out to be an extroardinarily gifted teacher. It thrills me to think how many kids he has had a positive influence on over the years. Eventually he became Headmaster of a local school, and to this day I occasionally meet people when I return to the district who tell me anecdotes about him.

Dad converted to Catholicism during WWII, and was a thoughtfully faithful Christian throughout his life.

He died in 1984 at the age of 67. We miss him terribly, of course, but I have a sense that his life was complete when he died. He was ready. He had lived what I can only describe as an honourable life, of service and of value, and has left his legacy in the lives of so many children and adults he has taught and helped.

He was not a saint, of course, but he was a warm, loving and wonderful father and on what would have been his 90th birthday, I raise a virtual glass and say “Happy birthday Dad”.