My Dad, Myghal, was unfairly taken from us when he was just 51. But, in the time we had together, I learned so much from him. He was a writer and an artist. And he was a countryman. In most of the early photos I have of him he can be seen with a shotgun or proudly displaying a fish he'd caught for his supper. In some of the earliest photos of me I seem to be surrounded by dead things.
I also have a few lovely old photos of life on the farm - the final image is of my mother as a little girl. She's now in her eighties.
The other man in the photo is my maternal grandfather, Fred. He was a farmer by trade, as was his father and his father before him and my Mum and her brother grew up on his farm in Cornwall. I have one extraordinary photo that shows me, as a baby, with my Mum, her father and his father. Four generations in one image.
I learned a huge amount of country lore from my Dad and my grandfather. They taught me to hunt and to forage. They taught me how to identify the trees and the birds and to recognise patterns in the weather.
My other grandad, Ted, was a sailor. Originally from Belfast he joined the Navy as a young man and, post-war, settled first in Looe in Cornwall and then in Plymouth. He was a poet and diarist and I heard many wonderful stories from him about his travels.
Fred had plenty of war stories too. As a farmer he was in a reserved occupation so he joined the local Home Guard. His job was to stop the Germans getting into England, if they landed in Cornwall and vice versa. This included guarding the famous Brunel railway bridge that crosses the Tamar between Devon and Cornwall.
He also claimed, until his dying day, that he shot down a German bomber with his shotgun. The planes used to fly in low over his farm en route to bomb the shipyards across the river. He loosed off two barrels from his 12 bore and the plane began to trail smoke. This was corroborated by Vic Cummings, one of three evacuee brothers that my grandparents fostered throughout the war. Vic, from Dagenham would go on to write his Cornish childhood memoirs and it's a joy to read.
I could write for hours about these wonderful men. I'm glad I pumped them for information while they were still alive. But there is so much more I wish I could still ask them.
Happy Fathers' Day.
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