Happy Birthday, Dad!

Happy 118th birthday, Dad! Sadly, I don't have any pictures of you as a baby so this one - you're second from right - of you are home in Wanstead with one of your father's models will have to do. I don't know much about your early life except what Mum wrote in the biography you dictated to her. You were born on the 26th November, 1902, at home in Leytonstone, and the story goes you were one of twins, the other being lost when your mother fell down stairs soon after she became pregnant.

This is how I most like to remember you, in our days in Mombasa and, in particular, at our lovely house in Cliff Avenue, Mombasa, which overlooked the entrance to Kilindini harbour. You were in your late fifties in this picture. You're smoking your pipe and look very relaxed, but still very smart, in a pair of shorts, a sign that it's a weekend. 

I don't mind remembering you later in the various pubs in England where we had a pint or two together. This was probably your favourite pub, the Cinq Ports in Old Town Hastings, sitting next to your great friend Gordon Faulkner. You were able to relax in a good pub. It was a place where you were happy. However, I have the feeling that the retirement you had so looked forward to when working all those years along the east coast of Africa wasn't what you had dreamed of.

This is how I least want to remember you, in the last few years of your life when you were living in Fambridge Road, near us in Maldon. In some ways it was good, in that our family saw more of you than we had ever done before - for example, I used to pop along for a beer on Friday evenings after school - and the three children we then had came to know you better. But you didn't have many friends in Maldon and, although the bar staff in your local, the Blue Boar, were very good to you, it wasn't a wonderful pub.

It would have been so good if you had been alive today, so I could have asked you the many questions to which, now, there will never be answers. I would have liked to have had the chance to thank you for rearing me and to have told you that, now I am approaching the age you were in this picture, I see so much in myself which is just like you, mainly characteristics of which I am proud. I do hope that some of them, at least, have been passed on to my children.