birthday

My dad died in 1996 after a heroic, uncomplaining battle with cancer, but if he'd survived it would have been his 80th birthday yesterday. I sent my mother some flowers and we talked on the phone about him for a while and afterwards I couldn't get him out of my mind.

He had a tough life, and most of his troubles, in terms of his continuing unhappiness, stemmed from a childhood with a mentally ill mother, who shut him in cupboards and hit him with heavy objects and so on. As a friend of mine says, "this stuff stays with you" (though in fact we were talking about bullying at school).

This is dad's watch. He didn't even get a card from his mother on his 21st (my grandfather was in hospital, having lost his legs and much of his sanity in the first world war). So he went to a jeweller's and bought himself the best watch he could afford; he was a Navy diver at the time and not, I imagine, terribly flush with cash. That was in 1950 and the watch is still ticking.

Before he died he gave the watch to me, having no sons, and asked if I could hand it on in turn to Chad, my boy, then a baby. ("At least I got to see him before I died" my dad said). I've worn it every day since then, and sometimes, when I'm missing him, I open the links on the wristband a little and inhale, and get a whiff of tobacco.