Father’s Day

I was not planning to write anything today [written sometime in 2008], but when I opened my online UK newspaper I discovered that it was Father’s Day. Eight people were telling the story of their relationships with their fathers, and their collective efforts inspired me to do the same. I am also prompted to do so by my memory of his funeral service at which a minister who barely knew him gave a eulogy that I thought was under-informed and uninspiring.

I kept quiet because at British funerals it is still not that common for people who knew the deceased to stand up and pay tribute. However, I resolved that I would put down my own thoughts on his life, and today, almost eight years later, it seems to be the day to do it.

Michael Godman was born in Swanage, Dorset, England, in 1923. His father, Herbert, was a Methodist minister who had apparently started his career, before the First World War, as a wandering preacher in the wilds of Canada, travelling on horseback from one mining camp to another, conducting revivalist meetings. I can imagine him doing that and thoroughly enjoying it. When I knew him late on in his life, he was a life-loving extrovert with a singing voice that was still louder than anyone in his congregation. If he had a particular liking for any of the hymns that he had just been singing in church, he would refuse to stop at the end. Instead, he would pick out his favourite verses and sing them again in his booming voice. His listeners, one by one, would feel compelled to join in and share his bubbly enthusiasm for whatever verse had struck his fancy that day. I never met his wife, my grandmother, because she passed away in the mid-1950s. Herbert remarried in the 1960s, when he was well into his seventies, to a woman who was decades younger than he was.

I remember asking him, in all innocence, when I was about eleven, ‘Granddad, how did you manage to persuade that woman to marry you? You’re old, sick, and you’ve got no money.’

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