Never forget to ask, ....... reflections on missed opportunities

Dad in 1962

It was the closing remark on a short film I watched on Friday evening where a celebratory revisits the home of his youth.

In this case it was Robert Winston, professor, medical doctor, scientist, television presenter and politician.

The pattern is much the same.  In the course of a wander around the house and garden the celebratory shares memories of the place and growing up there.

And it was the final comment Mr Winston made with his back to camera walking away from the property that has stayed with me.

His father had died when he was just nine and as so often happens that had made for a very quick growing up as he shared the responsibility for looking after his siblings.

And the comment was about his father and how it was only as an adult that he really came to miss him.

Dad circa 1918

It was a feeling that I too share about my father and I suppose a regret that I never took the time to really explore his early life with him.  Nor if I am honest was it just my dad that I took for granted.  There are whole acres of years for which I know so little about my mum or my grandparents.

This I freely accept is the way it is.  We all take our parents for granted while we are growing up and why should it be otherwise?  They are there, the providers of a warm caring home, the tellers of awful jokes and on occasion an acute source of embarrassment.  Not that I have ever shown current partners or girlfriends photos of the boys when they were young.  There are some things you just do not do.

But the serious point especially for a historian is the way that much of our family history and the lives of our loved ones are lost, and the task of filling in the gaps becomes at times difficult and frustrating.

Ah I hear you mutter there are some stories, some bits of their lives which should remain in the shadows and I agree but there is much also that I wish I knew.

Dad in the uniform of Glentours circa 1959

So for all young readers of the blog, get asking those questions now, piecing together the clues from Ancestry, old letters and photographs is no substitute to having the living tales presented in all that wonderful mix of exaggeration, modesty and just surprise.

So I leave you all with the tale of my dad on a thick pea souper of night wandering around the bombed out remains of the local church trying to find his way off the traffic island and across the road home to his family sometime in the mid 1950s.

Is it true?  I don’t know.  I remember the same thick days and nights of fog and smog, did my turn around the traffic island and treasure the story well.  I only wish I had written it down properly when he told me it back in 1963.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson