25 YEARS ON

It’s twenty-five years ago today since I got the telephone call that told me my Dad had died. I remember quite vividly that it was a Thursday. I was in my final year at art school and, as they had to do in those pre-post-it, pre-mobile-phone days, if the administration office got a personal message for a student, they tended to write it on a piece of paper and tape it up outside the office door and hope that you would notice it.

So after about half an hour or so someone - I can’t for the life of me remember who it was now - found me in the corridor or the canteen or somewhere and told me there was a message for me. Something about “phoning home immediately…”

“Not again!” I remember muttering before stomping rather angrily off towards the office to get an explanation.

This probably wasn’t the most obvious reaction, you might have thought, but there had been a curious coincidence that I never really got to the bottom of. Exactly two weeks earlier, a similar message had been posted on a Thursday morning at roughly the same time. My father had not been a well man all his life, having grown up in relative poverty in the Welsh valleys in the 1930s, and he’d been rather more seriously ill for quite some time and indeed he’d had to retire due to this ill health about seven years earlier at the grand old age of 54. That’s an age that’s starting to feel horribly imminent to me these days. So, that call had rather shaken me, and I’d dutifully rung home only to be told by my Dad that he was fine and no, they hadn’t rung me, there must have just been some kind of a mix up. We had a short chat until the pips went and, being an art student, I ran out of small change and we said our goodbyes.

I was a tad annoyed at this series of events, not least because I’d been rather worried and in a bit of a panic and just because someone had got their wires crossed. The administrator I spoke to apologised and I went off to get on with slapping paint and ink around for a couple more weeks and forgot all about it.

So, when it happened again, I felt I was rather justified in going into the office and rather testily asking what was going on. I started to explain that this had happened before and they were very patient and kind and told me they really thought I should call home.

So I did... and my sister answered and, well… he’d gone.

My sister told me later that my Mum thought it might be best if they lied to me, and told me that he was still alive so that I wouldn’t be too upset to drive back. Sanity prevailed however, and I was told the truth, and whilst my journey back up from South Wales wasn’t the happiest I’ve ever made, at least I wasn’t hammering the pedals of my rusty old Mk3 Cortina through the floor on the off chance that I might get back in time.

That journey remains more vivid in my memory than the events at home during the subsequent week. I remember crying occasionally, shouting angrily at the world in general (but - for once - not at any other motorists) and having the sun setting rather beautifully off to my left hand side as I headed further North. I hadn’t been dawdling. After making the phone call home, and the subsequent support from my friends who’d looked after me and calmed me down, I’d had to go back to my room on another site and pack a bag before setting off for home. It was late October and the sun started setting relatively early, but it seemed very strange, like I’d never really noticed it setting before, and so did the trees in the streets around the family home which had never seemed quite so vivid and alive to me as they did that week.

It was an odd week altogether if I’m honest. I remember having the odd supportive drink with an old friend, and the visit to register the death being lightened by one of the wedding announcements that were posted on the wall being a “Mr. Plant” marrying a “Miss Pott”. The only really strong memory I have, because I don’t really remember the actual funeral at all, is of one of my father’s old friends visiting the house and seeming to find it very inappropriate when my sister and I were mulling, in the amused way that youngsters do, over the fact that the Funeral Directors hadn’t requested any clothing and we had this image of our dear old Dad, a Methodist Lay Preacher no less and God-fearing son of the chapel for all of his life, being stark naked in the church during his own funeral. Apparently they dressed them in some kind of towelling robe I was later told, which I still think is a rather dull answer to a rather interesting question.

So a week later, I returned to college. My lecturers were very supportive. One asked me how old my father had been and seemed generally troubled when it turned out they had been the same age, but things got back to normal pretty soon after that, and my final year as a student passed by much as you’d expect, and after that I returned home and life unfolded as it does.

Every Wednesday morning during term time whilst I was a student, though, right until the day he died, my Dad had sat himself down and written me a letter, keeping me up to date with news from home, and the last one had been waiting for me in the mailroom pigeonhole when I returned to college. I still have it somewhere. I really must dig it out and have another read. It won’t say much of interest, just the usual bits and pieces of the humdrum of life, but as a piece of my Dad’s last full day of life, I guess it’s kind of priceless.

In the years before he died, my father gathered together all his photos and cuttings and what-not into some albums and scrapbooks because I guess he kind of knew we were never likely to get the chance to have any proper little chats or go to the pub so I could buy him a pint and talk about the old days as I got older. I look through them from time to time and the photo attached to the top of this page, taken when he was just 21 and the same age I happened to be when all this happened, is the one that came to mind when I was on holiday in Egypt earlier this year. It was just very pleasant to be able to stand in more-or-less the same spot as he had done himself some 65 years earlier and share a memory of a place.