15 September: a day for good memories

There comes a time when, however young someone dies, it starts to become far-fetched to keep asking, “what if he’d lived till today?”

Leonard, my father,  in his forties

My father died when he was 61. It meant that he only met one of his four grandchildren, my son Michael, and even him only briefly. My last vivid memory of him was of his giving Michael, then aged around three months, his finger to suck  in the back seat of our car. Each seemed delighted with the other.

That ease with kids was one of the characteristics I most admired about him. So naturally I regret that he wasn’t around to watch his grandchildren growing up. As they went to school, as they achieved their successes or needed comfort for their failures, as they launched themselves into university or work, as they met their partners. He could have seen many of those things within the scope of a normal lifetime, and all of them without having to grow exceptionally old.

It’s true that he might have had to be exceedingly old to pick up the one-year old granddaughter of ours, his great granddaughter, Matilda, who came to visit us just a few weeks ago. And yet I couldn’t help thinking what a pity it was he couldn’t be there. He would have loved her as she would have loved him. 

Strangely, Matilda’s father, my son, has the same warmth of intimacy with his daughter that I’m sure my father would have had. It rather skipped me. I’m not a lot of good with very young children. That, to tell the truth, made it both surprising and a delight to find myself getting on so well with her while she was here. Somehow she and I hit it off, for all my clumsiness with small kids. Another thing I’m sure my father would have loved to see.

Denied the pleasure of seeing him with his grandkids, let alone his great grandchildren (there are four now), I’m left remembering only, but with pleasure, how he was with his own children.

He was an extraordinary father. He wasn’t the intellectual. That was my mother, a woman who I think could have been an excellent academic, but never got the chance – the relative poverty of her background, her gender, and the Second World War, all got in the way. What he had though, in bagsful, and far more than she did, was empathy. He knew what was on a child’s mind and what would make him happy. And he took as much pleasure providing it as the child receiving it.

For fifteen years, he worked in a job which gave him a great deal of bitter frustration. His bosses didn’t appreciate his qualities and he simply never had a promotion for over a decade. But he put up with that for the sake of the family, biting his tongue and accepting the treatment he was handed.

That’s not to say he was forever bored. Working for a United Nations agency meant he got to see a lot of the world, and that fascinated him, as well as giving him the pleasure of knowing it was in his power to do some good. In 1960, when fighting broke out in the recently independent former Belgian Congo, and the UN declared an emergency, he was just one of three volunteers to go and serve there for nine months, out of the 5000 in the offices where he worked.

With a new-found friend in the Congo

And finally, in the mid 1960s, he decided he’d had enough. He applied for and got a more senior position in another UN agency, at which point the bosses who’d treated him with such contempt for so long, came rushing at him with offers of significant promotion to try to persuade him to stay after all.

His first posting was, ironically, back in the Congo. My brother and I were sent to boarding school in England, which looking back I think was a pity. But up to then, and in holidays when he returned to the family, he was always a wonderful Dad it was a joy to be with.

A great pity my sons, my nephew and my niece were deprived of the joy of knowing him. And, of course, it would have been astonishing had he lived long enough to meet Matilda. It may, indeed, be time to stop saying “what if he’d lived till today?”

After all, on 15 September, he would have turned 99.

Doesn’t stop me wishing he were still around. As it won’t stop me raising a glass to his memory. A very good memory.