My dear old Pop would have been 77 today. He was one of the most naturally funny people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, not in a “ba-boom, I thang you” kind of way, but in an incredibly witty, dry, understated manner. He was the best storyteller I’ve ever known – he’d use just the right number of words, never too many nor too few, and always left his enchanted audience wanting more.
I’m not sure he dreamed that his son would one day become a TEFL teacher, but amid my overlong career as a unbearably vainglorious adolescent upstart he never questioned my right to make my own choices, that often later proved to be mistakes.
He used to tell me about a writer he loved, who in his opinion was one of the greatest of the English language. I never paid much attention. One day, years later, I asked him if he’d ever read H L Mencken. To my shame, he replied yes, and repeated his opinion that he was one of the greatest writers of the English language. Mark Twain summed it up: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” I included that in my tribute for his funeral, but when the time came I was in no state to read it, which is something I will always regret.
As a procrastinator, I could have wished for no finer model. Eyes burning, he would regularly reveal stunningly imaginative schemes that caught the imagination and carried us off to a distant, exotic land – from putting oak panelling in the living room to building a log cabin at the bottom of the garden; from buying a Mirror sailing dinghy to trading in our sixteen year old Ford Escort for a classier model. Within minutes he'd be gently snoozing in an armchair as we tried in vain to catch his dreams as they vanished into thin air like cigarette smoke. It was his winsome way of dealing with a job he hated (high street banking), and it engendered in me a healthy acceptance of disappointment - I soon learned to curb my enthusiasm.
I think about him every time I watch a funny TV show, read a pleasing blog post or tuck into one of Giovanni Guareschi’s peerlessly brilliant tales from The Don Camillo Omnibus, which I can remember him enthusing over when he discovered it in a secondhand bookshop, and which my mother erroneously brought to Brazil after I asked for my copy of Don Quixote.
So thanks, D J Ward, for all the laughs, the unrealised plans, and the innumerable perfect stories.
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