Dad

I don’t claim to have given a comprehensive picture of my father in these pages My memories of him are confused with the things that were going on in my life when I had these memories. Sometimes the things got so mixed up with them they coloured them just like litmus paper assumes the colour of what’s put into it. He had a court case once that concerned a car crash. There were three eye witnesses to it. All three of them had different versions of what happened. ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘if that accident was the dawn of creation. How many people would have seen it in a different way?’ Whenever I look at the photograph of him that I keep on my mantelpiece I think of how he started life as one kind of person and then became another, the cavalier student of the twenties morphing into his philosophical side as the thirties came in.