Sometimes we worked in welcome shed shade
racking onions, picking over spuds, bagging pumpkins
and maybe kidding him to tell us a few old yarns,
taking us on a verbal tour of dour Depression days,
wending our way through rationing and the war
and bouncing on horseback to dances in barns.

His simple lunchtime fare, meat and triple veg,
was sandwiched between his paper and his nap
against the soundtrack of a usual wireless sally
into vegetable market reports and daily news
topped up with another episode of Blue Hills
like those always watching from up the valley.

In later life he would limp in from a day’s work,
survey his aching limbs and pronounce approval
of the legs which had “trod many an honest mile”.
Mum would mould for him a vanilla skyscraper
out of multiple scoops of shining ice cream in a cone
which he devoured with the relish of a spoiled child.

I remember the secure sensation when I was little
of him sweeping me up from where I dozed on a couch
or under the seats at a dance at the Blenheim hall.
And then decades later watching at his bedside
as he faded and shrank and battled for his last breath
and I felt large and strong, and he looked incredibly small.