Oft in the Stilly Night

I don't really believe that the two worlds, the supernatural and the natural, can meet; yet there have been times when that belief has been challenged.

My mother died in 1964 and my father then spent three months in turn with me in Hertfordshire, with my aunt in London, my sister in London, and finally, my brother in Lincoln. He hadn't been an easy man to get on with. He was a wonderful father to us when we were young, but he just couldn't cope with teenagers and he made it clear later that he resented our spouses. As I had crossed the religious divide in my marriage, I was the most alienated. Throughout his life he had suffered many accidents and illnesses and once our mother died he was lost without her.

Early in December 1966 it was my brother's turn to have him, so my husband and I drove him to Lincoln. Two incidents should have warned me that he knew he hadn't long more to live. I cooked him a full Christmas dinner and he really enjoyed it and said, 'At least I have had my Christmas'. Then he bought a special Christmas card and posted it to my sister in NZ. He seemed reluctant to leave me, which puzzled me, given his bitterness towards me.

A few days later I had a phone call from my brother to say our father had moved a heavy piano to retrieve something that had fallen down behind and he had gripped his chest in pain. He had been taken to hospital, so at the weekend we drove up to visit him and we found him very despondent. Somehow, I suddenly wanted to make my peace with him, but he was a bitter old man and it wasn't easy. We promised we would be there again the following weekend and he asked us to stay overnight. I was planning to have a serious talk with him and tell him we really loved him and appreciated everything he had always done for us.

Two nights later in my sleep I heard him call out to me and I was telling him I was coming. I woke in a sweat and realised it was a dream but it was one of the most vivid dreams I have ever had. To this day, I wish I had switched on the light to look at the time. It was so real that I still find myself wondering if there is some telepathy that can send out messages through the air. At six o'clock that morning I woke to hear the phone ringing. It was my sister-in-law. I said, 'You needn't tell me. I know. He called out to me during the night.' He had died alone at about 2.15am. I was convinced he had called to me. Had he, too, wanted to set the records straight? He had begun in those final years to tell us about the past but we didn't have the time or the interest to sit down and listen to him.

During the recent storm a memory suddenly flashed before my eyes. It would have been about 1937 when we were living in a little town in the Irish Midlands, five and a half miles from Abbeyleix (where both my parents were born). My father answered a knock on the door. A young man whose family owned a general store had come to chat with my father. They talked for over two hours. Next night John, the young man, was driving home in a gale-force wind when a tree fell on his lorry and killed him instantly. That affected my father very deeply; he said they had been discussing death the previous night and he was wondering if John had had a premonition of his death. Generally, he was a practical man but at times like that he wondered about the supernatural, as I did when he died.

One of his five brothers survived him by 16 years and I learned a lot from him about my father which made me wish more and more that I could have healed the rift. Uncle Charlie told me that shortly before my father died, he had asked if there was truly to be a Resurrection and my uncle had convincingly replied 'yes'.

Everything my father possessed when he left his home in Abbeyleix was contained in a suitcase that my brother stored away in his attic, unopened. When he died in 1982, his sons went through their grandfather's belongings and shared them out among the different members of the family.

I wept to see he had keep photographs of me and newspaper cuttings and letters that showed he was secretly proud of me and made me long afresh to have had the chance to hear that from him in person. A grand-nephew sent me my father's dog-disc from when he served in the RFC and the RAF in World War One and with the information on the disc my sister and I were able to locate his records in the Public Records Office. It was then my turn to be proud of him, as I held the disintegrating pages of parchment in my hand and read the fading entries written in old-style pen and ink.

Recently, I visited the sites of the battlefields of the Somme. Driving along the roads in France and Belgium, I thought of him travelling by army truck in the opposite direction. I felt his spirit there.

He was a master-carpenter, having served his time under his own father on Lord de Vesci's estate in Abbeyleix. I was born in the hunting-lodge of Lord Bessborough'’s Irish estate where my father was the resident carpenter till 1935, when he set up in business as an ecclesiastical woodworker, carving beautiful church furniture in Japanese oak for Anglican churches in Ireland. I have been back to see much of his work. Here, too, his spirit lives on. I remember how proud he was when he received an invitation to the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral, as a tribute to his workmanship. Due to ill-health and lack of money he couldn't attend. He loved chatting with Lord de Vesci and shortly before he died he visited the widow of the last lord he knew and she was so pleased to see him. She had a pedigree herd of cattle in Lincolnshire.

Another member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, Miss FitzHerbert, invited me to lunch after he died and she told me many things. Her father and my grandfather had helped Princess May of Tec down from the train when the future Queen Mary arrived in Abbeyleix on a visit to the then Lady de Vesci. These are the moments that my father loved to speak of.

Miss Fitzherbert and me outside my granddad's cottage

My daughter has asked me to record everything I know of that past for her. I think she and my father would have got on well. She is an explorer and adventurer and he loved to talk about the explorers from the time of his youth - Shackleton and Scott and Oates. In the first picture, below, he is standing outside Ballytarsna. The second was his passport photo and in the third, the West doors of Kilkenny Cathedral, which he made.

My father wrote his reminiscences from those far-off days for Miss FitzHerbert and her English family. He spoke of how his father made a bookcase for Princess May and sent it to Sandringham, and of his brief friendship with Lady Beatrice Thynne when she was on a visit to her grandmother, Lady de Vesci, and he spoke of his father having helped make the doll's house that is on display in Longleat and that is a copy of the house that my grandfather used as his office. I wonder if Lady Beatrice recognised it as the model for the doll's house that her grandmother had sent to Longleat. These memories are a joy to have. The old man from whom I was so alienated in later years was once a charming young man.

He spoke proudly of the time he won a prize for singing Oft in the Stilly Night at a concert for the survivors of the Titanic disaster. At the age of 21 he left his quiet homeland to travel to Kenley, in Surrey (the camp where his brother Charlie was working) to join the RFC. I am still making amazing discoveries and I am still asking myself if he really called across the miles to me on the 15th December, 1966 at 2.15am. Did my answer that I was coming reach him?

At 87 years of age, I am 17 years older than he was when he died. He lies at rest with my mother in the quiet churchyard of Abbeyleix Anglican Church where I have many times kept my promise to re-visit him.

The buildings shown straight ahead in this image were outbuildings and to the left was the barn where my father had his workshop between 1938 and 1940.