The summer of 1979 was significant in the history of my immediate family. Things of consequence happened before my father died at the age of sixty five on September 14th. He had been retired for just one year.
He had suffered from angina for a couple of years and took prescribed blood thinning tablets but otherwise he enjoyed good health. The number one worry in his life was my brother Simon and how things were turning out for him. He was often nasty and aggressive to both of my parents and some of his behaviour was just plain weird.
In July, the day after my second teaching year finished in South Yorkshire, I headed home to East Yorkshire. My father kindly came to Paragon Station in Hull to pick me up. He was looking pasty and sad and he said he had something he wanted to talk to me about. We stopped at "The Duke of York" pub in the village of Skirlaugh and bought two beers.
Dad said that Simon had been arrested in a pub in Bridlington the night before and was still in police custody. Someone had seen him rolling up a joint at the bar and them smoking it. They had in effect shopped him. Dad was suffering from a range of conflicting emotions including increased worry about where Simon's life was leading and self-recrimination for somehow failing his youngest son. In truth, the arrest did come as a surprise to any of us.
That night Dad suffered his first major heart attack and was whisked by ambulance to a hospital in Hull. Luckily he survived. The following Monday the magistrates court in Bridlington "sectioned" Simon - putting him in a local mental hospital for I believe two weeks for assessments.
I went to visit both of them in their separate hospitals.
Dad came home after a few days with more heavy duty medication while Simon still languished in an austere Victorian building that had once been called a lunatic asylum.
My other two brothers were now around to give practical support and so with my father's blessing I headed off to the island of Rhodes for a delayed two week holiday. I was supposed to go the day after the heart attack but had cancelled my flight.
One Sunday while I was away and Dad was recuperating, a bare-chested and wild-eyed Simon arrived back at the family home with his face and torso deliberately smeared with mud and bird feathers in his hair. He had been in touch with God and had visited places in North Yorkshire that he believed to be associated with family ancestors.
It was a very disturbing episode as witnessed by my mother and father, my older brother and his former wife and two of my parents' best friends who happened to be visiting that day.
Two weeks later we were into September and I received a phone message through my school to say that Dad had had another heart attack and was once again in hospital. It was a Friday and after arriving in Hull by train but before carrying on to the family home, I went to the hospital to see him. He was heavily medicated but it was clear that this second attack had taken a lot out of him. He just wasn't himself.
He died the following morning and I drove my mother to the hospital to see him. Behind the green hospital bed curtains she fell apart and I left her with him for a few minutes believing that my presence might be an intrusion. They had been through a lot together and were in love till the end.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/HF9hY0j