3 years ago, on this day, I began to write a blog.

This has been a way of keeping a “modern diary” with photographs and at the end of each month or two I turn the blogs into a book.  We are then able to look up dates.  Dates when the cows calved, when the sheep were shorn, when the first outdoor tomatoes ripened and who came to visit The Gables – and much more besides.  The date was significant for me and my family.  November 13th was my father’s birth date and today he would have been 89.  He passed away two and a half years ago after 65 years of marriage to the woman he loved.  They had both come from poor homes and dad was brought up in the tenements of the old East End of London.

He left school aged 13 during the second World War and began work as an office boy and, after meeting mum, when on holiday at the seaside with their respective friends, he realized that he had to get an education.  They married when he was studying, first for his matriculation  and then to become an accountant – working by day and poring over his books at night all the while enjoying a full social life which included playing football and cricket with teams full of friends, many of whom remained lifelong mates.

Dad was blessed to know and love two great grandchildren and our grandson, his first great grandchild, still talks of “Jops” (as grandson called Dad).  Dad’s four grandchildren were blessed to have a grandfather who was involved with their lives, drove all of them around London so that they could play in their football teams, hockey teams and even took them on holidays.  They miss him and often wish they could tell him of their sporting and other achievements.  Devoted to his children and grandchildren he was also a wonderful husband, dutiful son and loving son in law. He squeezed every ounce of fun out of life playing sport until nearly 80, hearing all the great musicians of his day and all the plays, films and shows that he and mum wanted to see until, in their 80’s, they decided to devote their spare time to pursuits closer to home.  Then he volunteered with a cancer charity, taking patients to hospital for their appointments, talking to newly diagnosed people and telling them how he had dealt with his own disease and sitting with the terminally ill to give their loved ones a few hours respite.  He was, like all of us, a rounded and flawed human being but one who did his very best to care for and support his wife and family and we miss him and talk of him very, very often.  On this Remembrance Sunday I want to mention my Grandpa Sam, dad’s father, who fought in the First World War.  Sam was born in Odessa and came to England as a babe in arms at the turn of the last century.  His family were running from persecution, pogroms and poverty and they arrived on these shores with nothing and lived in the East End where they eked out a living in the sweat shops, tailors and cigarette making factories.  Sam was a good looking man who had been married and divorced before he met my grandmother.  This was a family secret that my brother and I were not supposed to know but our parents divulged when we were teenagers.  My father had a half sister who he met once but she died young and, as far as we know, childless leaving my dad the only child to Sam and Kate.  When we were young my brother and I loved to hear about “the old days” and some of these oral history stories included our grandfather’s accounts of his time as a soldier at The Battle of the Somme.  Sleeping in the trenches with rats running over him as he slept.  I don’t think that we understood, then, the full significance of what he had seen and suffered and now it is too late to find out more or to commiserate with his experiences.

My other grandfather, Charles, was called up and kitted out with a uniform but by then the war was at an end and he did not have to fight.   Today I salute my grandfathers and all those who fought and lived and those who died in the horror of the First World War.