‘Dear Darling Daughter’: letters, sore knees, chicken legs

Amongst some of my most treasured possessions are the small number of letters that my dad wrote me the summer before his death in January 1979. I was 19 years old and spent July and August in London which my boyfriend (who I married a year later). Whilst I was away dad wrote to me every week in between his kitchen porter duties at the hotel in Coverack, Cornwall where my mum worked also. His personality and humour, and, I think, his love for me, shines through every word. Here is one example, which includes a gentle reminder of my need to keep in touch with my parents during my time away:  

My Dear Darling Daughter,

Each week you really ‘oughter,

Send a letter or a card,

Which can’t be very hard,

To Mum and Dad the Waitress and the Porter.

Latest Financial Report:

A further £10 deposited to day which makes £40 deposited in all. This consists of £20 pocket money and £20 . . . which your Nan gave us. . . .

I had hoped to put the travel money from the grant people into your account . . . but nothing has come yet. I’m beginning to wonder if the college sent on the form.

Will you let us know how you stand for money later on when this £30 has been deposited and we will try to keep sending some so that you will be ok for ice-cream and sweets.

After some detail about their week he concluded:

That’s about all for now, keep well and look after yourself; a big kiss for M.

Dad

P.S. Don’t forget to send your Nan a birthday card –August 9^th.

The identity of mother has always been closely identified with caring and nurturing but historically fatherhood has been primarily linked to the biological: the father as the ‘provider of seed’ and significant in terms of genetic ties and family lines. Fathers, in the past and, many would argue, to date, are also associated with power, authority and status and ‘good fathers’ are ‘good providers’.

Research about and other accounts of fathers and fatherhood in the West in the 1950s and 1960s suggests that many men at this time often held an authoritarian role within the family and even the more benevolent ones were more likely than not to be distant from, rather than intimate with, their children.  As a young child in the 1960s my experience was very different from this. I remember my father as a very hands-on dad. Indeed I was so secure of his child-centred focus and expertise that when a friend fell and scuffed his knees I insisted in taking him back to my house for my dad to administer first aid even though the tumble had taken place in my friend’s own garden. My other memories of this time - of days out, of playing in the garden, of family meal time and evening entertainment - more often than not include my dad. I recall him patiently explaining to me the difference between boys and girls when having recently started school I asked him if he too had a stick in his trousers and remember begging him to stop tickling me when the urge to wee got too much.

I have written before about how as a family we left Liverpool, the home of all our births, in the late 1960s and spent four years travelling around the UK and to the Bahamas before settling in the South West of England in 1971. We were in Sheffield and I had just started secondary school when my mum suffered her second bout of pleurisy and it became clear to my parents that they needed to move from the damp rented cottage we were living in. Cornwall had always been on their list of places to visit, with Coverack, a small fishing visit on the Lizard Peninsula being a preferred location. Worried about the distance from the nearest secondary school they decided to move instead to a Cornish town and it was a pin in the map that led to our move to Falmouth. We lived there for eight happy years before moving to Coverack just nine months before my dad’s death. In our early years in the seaside town my dad walked me to school. Later on in my late teenagehood he waited for me outside Desdemona’s after, for me, an evening spent dancing. On the occasions that I came out of the nightclub with a boy we had an agreement that dad would discreetly look away whilst my date and I said our goodnights or wander on ahead if the boy wanted to walk me home. Even now 38 years after his death my oldest friends speak of his, and my mum’s, patience when prior to the night-out we took over our small flat, banishing my parents to the kitchen whilst we chatted and giggled, used up all the hot water and dirtied every towel in the cupboard.  

The beginnings of our travels had been funded by the sale of a house my grandfather, unusually for a working class man at that time, had bought towards the end of his life in the mid-1950s.  When the money ran out my parents worked at whatever was available. I remember my dad working as a decorator, a handyman, a packer in a toilet roll factory, a bank messenger, and in hotels as a kitchen and a night porter. My mum’s jobs included shop work, waitressing and laundry work. Whilst in Falmouth my parents ran a restaurant together for two years which might seem like social mobility but they worked hard, long hours for little monetary reward. I have a vivid memory of my dad frying fish whilst holding an umbrella over his head as the lean-to that housed the fat-fryer had a leak. However, busy or tired they were my parents never denied me their time and my memories of us playing games together around the kitchen table warm me as much as those of a two-week stay in Bermuda (a stop-off on the way to Nassau) where I learnt to swim. There were lots of times when money was short, including times in Cornwall when work was scarce. Sometimes this led to hardship which on the face of it challenged my father’s expected masculine role. If this bothered him he bore it well.  When I was 14 I suffered a daffodil milk rash and aching back for the whole of the spring half-term break to earn £30 which I spent on new jeans and a chicken and all the trimmings for Sunday lunch. Mum and dad were both in low paid work at the time and meat was a treat. My dad ate his leg with relish.

Gayle Letherby (nee Thornton)