Our dad died 40 years ago today. All my family were there the night before he passed away except me. I returned to university in the January. I don’t know why I did that now. It's something I still regret.
The night he died, family myth has it that, as he moved in and out of consciousness, he recognised my eldest brother Dave and gave him one of his affectionate looks which said, ‘You silly young fool!’ They left him at the hospital asleep at 9 pm. Early the next morning, on 6 February 1985, just after 1 am, he died in a bed that was not his own, alone, aged just 57 years. I was in York, 260 miles away.
Looking back, I have been so damned fortunate, in so many ways. My university education gave me a choice about how I lived my life. I chose to be a teacher, something I have never regretted, for a second. Teaching for 33 years, I was a round peg in a round hole. Apart from wishing I was Seve Ballesteros, I've never wanted to do anything else! My dad, on the other hand, had little choice of job. He had left school at 14 to be a messenger boy, the prelude to becoming a lifelong postman. He could read but rarely wrote. He excelled at gardening and golf.
When I'm at home, writing at my desk, I often look at my dad's alarm clock that woke him at an unthinkably early hour every working day of his life. I wrote this sonnet about his Baby Ben a few years ago.
On reaching the same age as my dad when he died
At 4 a.m. each working day you rose,
Awoken by your Baby Ben’s alarm
Whose tyrant-ring the grind of work imposed
And clanged you out into the breaking dawn.
A life dictated by that jarring note,
Your thirties schooling meant no choice for you;
Though you could read quite well, you barely wrote –
The collar of your Postman’s shirt was blue.
Your clock sits on a shelf above my desk,
Its bell long stilled, arms stuck at five past three.
And as I write or chat or sit and think
I feel its presence frowning over me.
The oval face looks down and seems to ask,
What granted you such untold liberty?
The sonnet is about my uncertainties, not my dad's. I know he was delighted I made it to university. He taught me and my siblings that relationships matter above everything else, that kindness always wins out in the end and that you should treat people as you find them, without prejudice and without exception. And dad loved a whisky, a trait of his I'm glad to have inherited!