In Memoriam

Joe Farrar

1913 – Sept 9^th, 1968

As befitted, my father died at the time of night most streets are empty. He’d driven past Withington hospital (an old workhouse), parked his car at the side of the road, just outside a pub, and dropped dead of a coronary thrombosis.

I was thirteen at the time, and just starting my second year at secondary school. If he had lived I am sure I would have had a very different life – but the combination of late nights, alcohol, cigarette smoke (although he never smoked himself, he spent a lot of time in pubs playing darts – the doctor had told him to give up smoking only a few weeks before – he had been amused at the suggestion he give up something he didn’t do) had worn through the tubes already weakened by a hard war and did for him.

Although I can’t remember his birthday, I remember his death day … this year it is the 40^th anniversary.

We had a good funeral – my brother, mother and I sitting in the car which followed the coffin – having a good laugh at the thought of the old man sitting on the coffin, childhood-rickets bowed legs (wide enough to let a pig through) dangling over the edge, contemptuous of all the fuss and desperate for a pint.

The body was cremated and although his name (not, as it turned out, his baptismal ‘official’ name – all his life though, he’d been called Joe) was entered in the ‘roll of honour’ no memorial marks where his ashes were scattered. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the place – and someone else, a brother-in-law I think, did the same office, in the same place, for my mother when she died 30 years after.

There are fewer and fewer memories now – like the final ripples on a river after a fish has jumped and sunk back in to the deep flowing stream.