Baghdad 1953

It’s our last day in Portugal, off on a morning flight tomorrow from Faro, Bristol-bound. By chance today is the fortieth anniversary of my father’s death in their house in Mansel Lacy, Herefordshire. He was only 57 when he died, but his generation of expatriates smoked and drank quite a bit. That house was the first that they had owned, having lived in quarters all their married lives and only buying the house in preparation for retirement to the UK.  He didn’t enjoy it for long. 

My parents married in Baghdad, where my grandfather worked with Iraqi railways and my father with the Eastern Bank (now the Standard Chartered Bank). This photo, from one of my maternal grandfather's albums, was printed in Crieff, where my father was born and brought up.  Perhaps the negatives were taken to Scotland for my father's family – I doubt that they would have been able to get to Iraq for the occasion. 

And the major achievement of today is that my mother has started looking through the albums again; perhaps they are long enough ago for her to remember faces.