A year ago today my father died. He'd been in hospital for three weeks while doctors tried to find out what was wrong with him and why he was declining day on day. He contracted a bug and was too ill to withstand its effects on his weakened body. When we were told that his organs were failing we asked him if he wanted to be revived if things came to crisis. He said no. Today last year I was woken at 4.10 to be told that he'd gone.
In the year since we have all been much affected by his leaving. It was only in February that an inquest was held into his death, and despite all we were told about his state and his treatment, the verdict of the coroner was that he died of natural causes. Natural causes, my arse. However, anger serves no purpose now. We will never know what it was that so attacked his body that he declined from a healthy happy 75 year old in June 2004 to the man whose body, wracked with all sorts of ailments, succumbed to who knows what in April 2005. We don't have an underlying cause and we don't have an immediate cause. The implication is that he just faded away. It's a very, very hard thing to take.
However, we also have the memory of a wonderful man who grabbed life by the lapels and forced it to take notice of him. A man who never sat back and let himself be led through life but continually questioned what, who and where he was, he embraced new challenges and learned throughout his life. As a boy he was enquiring, achieving and adventurous. As a teenager he toured war-torn Europe on a bike in the years immediately after the war with his friend Ken, a man we still know and adore. On one occasion they were awoken by an irate French farmer on whose land they had overnighted, and accused at gunpoint of being Nazi sympathisers. In his adulthood Dad was a forester, a potter, a paratrooper, a British Council officer, a smallholder, a calf-rearer, a military historian, an art historian, an author and a bloody fantastic husband and father. He was intellectual and profoundly musical (partly a bequest from his parents, a cellist and an internationally renowned violinist). He could be reduced to tears by a beautiful piece of music or by a story I'd recount about what my child had done.
At his funeral, which typically he had drawn up plans for, he was remembered with fondness and with laughter. My brother read a short story to the assembly (standing room only) by PG Wodehouse, one of his favourite authors. Among others, I spoke too. It is impossible to bring to life someone who means so much to you in a few words, so I concentrated on he tenderness of the man, a quality not many would have observed. And this is what I said.
"To me, Daddy was a Renaissance man. He was very disciplined and very driven. There was always another mountain to be climbed, another challenge to be met, current affairs to be analysed and discussed over the dinner table. But he was also an active, hands-on father, ready when I was little to build a stable for my toy horse, or to construct an enclosure-cum-bed thing for the eight puppies who arrived to Cindy, our beagle. (BARKERS, the name emblazoned upon it, meant dog kennel to him long before it meant the family of the artist.) Daddy was always engaged on some project, be it a trout farm idea, the smallholding, WW1 shells, Maxims, Barkers. He tried so, SO hard to encourage me at sport, and was immensely frustrated that I’d inherited Mummy’s sporting genes. Luckily Justin was there triumphing in everything all over the place. Daddy was also very wise. I only recognised recently how often I start a sentence “My father always says…” Among Daddy’s aphorisms: “Don’t trust any group who salute over their heads”, “Don’t thump things when you’re angry – that’s what swearing was invented for”, “You should always rise from the table feeling you could eat a little more” are ones that spring immediately to mind. He was, as you will all know, the consummate gentleman and scholar - disciplined, wise and tender.
It’s his tenderness I want to talk about, because it was that which struck me most as his adult child, and that which, I suspect, was less obvious to others. I was grown up before I realised that Daddy was a man always on the edge of being engulfed by his own feelings. He would tell me that sentiment was a good thing; sentimentality a bad one - another aphorism. On the whole his emotions were controlled, but only just. When I recounted some anecdote about what the children had done, or some inspiring story I’d heard or read, Daddy’s eyes would struggle with the weight of feeling behind them and there would be a fair amount of throat-clearing.
When Martin and I were getting married and the wedding day was approaching, I wondered what Daddy was going to do about a speech. How was he going to talk about me without weeping in front of our friends and family, which he’d HATE? Simple. He didn’t talk about me. He told Martin that I was difficult, which has proved to be true, and then recounted a bit of McCallum history - the legend of the 60 fools, about 30 each of two wings of the McCallum clan who met in a clearing, took mutual umbrage about something and killed each other. Much safer territory. Knowing Daddy couldn’t talk about me made me feel very tender towards him.
But my strongest memory of Daddy is a letter he wrote when I was at boarding school in England and he and Mum were in Singapore. It was usually Mum who wrote the weekly letter that I awaited eagerly. On this occasion I had complained that I was going through a tough time with someone. Mummy must have been away somewhere, because the letter that came back was in Daddy’s handwriting. He wrote, “Dear Frances, I have always found this a good recipe for life.” And he quoted the whole of Polonius’ speech to Laertes from Hamlet, underlining the passage which reads “This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” And when he’d put the inverted commas at the end he simply wrote, “love, Daddy.”
I will miss him."
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