Everything He Never Said. A true tale of tears, laughter and family.
He was a “Fen Tiger”, salt of the earth, fearless and invincible.
Oh, we can hear him chuckling at the first line already. Don’t be daft, he would say, I’m just an ordinary chap. But he was our dad and we beg to differ.
In poverty, hard work, mischief and happiness, Charlie sprouted up from the rural farmland of East Anglia. Give him a horse, he could shoe it; give him a dog, he could train it to hunt rabbits; give him a gun, he could shoot two holes in an apple at fifty yards; give him a little brother, he could teach it to ride a bike with no saddle and no brakes. There was nothing Charlie couldn’t do.
And then he was left a widower with three little girls to raise. When his young wife was suddenly diagnosed with cancer and died five weeks later, how did he keep going?
Perhaps, the secret lies in how he got that far.
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Our dad was a man of very few words. We knew little about his childhood and the family in which he grew up. And we knew virtually nothing about his struggles. But finally, only six years before he died, he sat down and wrote about his life: all the laughter and all the tears. It was everything he had never been able to say to us, his daughters.
In the end, his memoir was the most we ever heard him talk about himself, in all the years we knew him. Or thought we knew him.
Now, left with the priceless gift of his memories set down on paper, we collaborated on a special project, using his words and our own; something we thought, just maybe, the rest of the world might like to read.
Be warned: this story doesn’t have a lot of remarkable insight into the human condition. It has some farting, some crying and quite a bit of horse manure. Like our dad, it’s nothing fancy, but it’s all true.
This is Charlie’s story. And it’s ours.
Our dad was a man not easily startled, or shocked, and after all that he’d been through, was it any wonder? He often tut-tutted and said that nothing the three of us could do would surprise him. I don’t suppose he meant that in a good way.
But perhaps, here at last, we have.
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