My Dad (1)

 (I wrote this in March 2006)

  My dad was a clever man. He was witty and intelligent and he loved to play games. As long ago as I can remember he used to play postal chess. Each player would send their moves and on receipt the chessboard would be set up and all the moves so far would be played out. Then the recipient would add the extra move, decide on his response and send that move back to his opponent. It was a simple set up and most players had several games on the go at any one time. I know my dad seemed to have letters galore pouring through the door every morning. But although the chess was a big part of his life his real love was draughts (chequers) and one time he won the Essex championship and earned himself a medal. But draughts wasn’t half as popular as chess and so most of his games were of chess.

   When my dad sent his chess moves on to his opponents he wouldn’t just write his moves, he would add a friendly letter and he made many friends that way. Eventually, the chess club grew and soon there were annual meetings and tournaments etc. They also produced a magazine. The magazine would show the latest league tables and add a few lines of interest. And then, one day, they added a letters page. Well, this was right up my dad’s street and he contributed regularly to those pages. Eventually, he was asked to be editor of the mag and, with the help of my mum, who acted as club secretary, ran it quite successfully for many years.

   Many more years later, although he still played the postal chess, he took up some other postal games. There was one called Football manager whereby you have to buy and manage your own team. He even started his own league and a magazine to go with it which, again, met with a fair amount of success. He also liked to play Dungeons and Dragons. So why am I telling you all this? Well, you see, it’s my opinion that although he loved to play these games, half of the fun for him was in writing about it, either for the accompanying magazines or simply swapping letters with other players. In the game of dungeons and dragons you have to pick a team of adventurers to go into the caves to find gold and rescue princesses and also, presumably, kill dragons. The team might consist of a dwarf, a cleric, a magician, and elf etc. Each had specific talents and powers so it was important to get the balance right to make a good team. A dungeon master would preside over the teams and each player would send instructions to the dungeon master telling him what actions the team would take. For most people ,this would be a simple list such as: “The dwarf throws his magic axe at the head of the dragon and whist it’s distracted the rest of the team sneak by and rescue the princess”. The dungeon master would then throw his multi-sided dice to decide the fate of the team.

   But here’s where it all got interesting for my dad. He didn’t just have a dwarf and/or an elf, he had real characters. He gave them daft names such as Tuffus Le Custard and Thickus De Shortplanks. He didn’t just tell the dungeon master his moves he created a whole story around it all. He even gave his characters different traits. One might be a bit of a coward and let everyone else do the fighting. Another might be a grump and moan at every opportunity. So you see, it wasn’t just the games that appealed to him it was the whole shebang. This was my dads world and he loved nothing better than to sit at his typewriter for hours on end making up stories and situations for the various games magazines he was involved with. He wasn’t content with just taking part in the games. Usually he would end up running a show of his own and having the players all writing to him. And he would always try to produce a magazine with all the league tables in it along with some amusing anecdotes.

  That was why, when he eventually retired from work (thirty years in the Romford brewery) we bought him a copying machine. My dad was over the moon with it, despite the fact that it was a huge old monster of a machine that survived on vast amounts of ink, a lot of stencils and much noise. For the next few days he dabbled and clanked and swore his way through the manual and the various controls and then, just three days later, surprised us all. As a thank you to us all, his first production from this beast was a modest four page magazine called Spanner. (So named because it was widely thought that my dad was a bit of a nut.) In this magazine he wrote about the day of his retirement, the surprise party we held for him and how overwhelming it all had been. To this he added a few more anecdotes, and a joke or two.

  Well, the family all loved it and encouraged him to do another. This he did and then a third. But by this time he had other plans. He wrote in the third edition that it needed the help of other writers otherwise this happy little venture wouldn’t survive. Imagine his surprise when he got several pages through the post within the next week, all for inclusion in the next edition. When the fourth edition rolled off the press it had been renamed ‘The family magazine’ and consisted of no less than twelve pages, only half of which were written by my dad. And that is how the family magazine began. (That was way back in August 1984 and here we are in 2006 and I've just produced the 64th edition.)

 

  Since those early days we have progressed greatly. No more the whump, whump of the big cylinder spinning round on the printing machine. No more the messy ink covered stencils that stank the house out and seemed to stain every piece of clothing my dad possessed. From those humble beginnings the mag was transferred first to a word processor and then, later, onto a real computer. These days the work is carried out on my own pc (dad died in the year 2000 and I have since taken up the roll of editor) which sits neatly on my desk in my den. No noise to speak of, (apart from that darn noisy fan that I still haven’t sorted yet!) No more bottles of ink to be messed around with and no more stencils. I use desktop publishing software that allows me to move text and images freely on the page with the minimum of fuss, and a good quality printer that makes little noise and produces good quality pages every time.

 

  But I have my dad to thank for my writing. His own writing was an inspiration to me, it was open, honest and usually dead funny and his character, with all it’s flaws, shone through in almost everything he wrote. If it hadn’t been for his encouragement I would never have written anything for the family magazine, would never have learned to goof things up and, in all probability, would never have had the nerve to write this online journal.

 

  So now you know who to blame.

Wednesday 28th October 2026

  Twenty years ago, I wrote that! But, of course, it's still as true today as it was back then.  This was only one side of my dad and when I wrote it all those years ago, people left comments after they read it. Most of theose comments said things like: 'He sounds like a wonderful dad', and. 'You must be so proud of him' or 'You obviously loved him and it shows in your writing'.

  When I read those comments I was very confused because I had never once considered myself to be proud of him,I guess I loved him, but I wasn't really aware of it until I read those comments. For a long time I didn't even think I liked him. The point is, those comments hit home a little and stirred me into writing a second entry about my dad just a few weeks later. I'm not going to include that entry here but I will have to post it  at some stage, the image of him wouldn't be complete without it.

For now though, 

Toodlepip.

B. x