A letter to my Dad....

Dear Dad,

I have such clear and vivid memories of you from when I was a child, I can play each and very one of them in my mind like a film reel and recapture the sight, sense and sound from those times.

Some of my first memories are of our trip to Poland when I was 3, we went with Grandma and Granddad and spent a month driving there and back. I remember being car sick in an orange bucket; the red squirrels dropping nutshells in my dinner; the huge frog we saw that I named Kermit and the crayfish we caught (in the same orange bucket!!); constantly calling "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!!"....

Back home I remember "helping" you in the garden; you pretending a woodpecker lived in the hole in the tree; Halloween when you came down the stairs with a sheet on your head and your glasses over the top being a "ghost"; being taken to your work and allowed to play on the electric typewriters; you building a rabbit hutch and a sand pit....

Holidays in cottages in Wales with you fishing and us having days out in the rain; picnics we ended up eating in the car; you and Mum surprising me with riding lessons (which I had begged for for years)....

Being woken up to watch shooting stars with you; spending the day making fruity mocktails, homemade toffee, barley sugar and other goodies.

I felt so loved.

But it was a childhood of two halves and this letter would not be honest without acknowledging that - it was a wonderful, simple, loving and demonstrative early childhood followed by a much more reserved and complicated teenage hood and beyond.


When I was 15 we moved down south and that's when things changed - I lost you for the first time when you and Mum sadly separated.

It felt like I had a new Dad, someone different from the loving, open one I had known - it was a gradual process but one I have never quite gotten over.

But I never stopped loving you.

I have regrets and unfulfilled wishes - I regret not spending more time with you before you got sick.

I fear that we were at cross purposes, with you not wanting to pressure us to visit and me thinking you didn't want us to.

I regret that I didn't feel so loved in those later years.

I wish I had felt that you were proud of me.

I wish the Stepmum and little brother also left behind lived nearer so I could be closer to them....

It was three years ago today that I lost you for what felt like the second time when you lost your 18 month long battle with lung cancer.

I hope that wherever you are you know how much we all loved you, despite sometimes difficult circumstances and that we miss you every day....


With love always,

Sarah xxxx