My dad, John Archibald Frew, originally of Musselburgh, Scotland died thirty years ago this New Year’s Day, just after midnight on January 1st, 1984, shortly after I’d celebrated the bells with him.
Consequently, this time of year is never easy – even after all these years. In those early years afterwards it haunted me.
There’s never a day passes when I don’t think of him, all he imparted to his son, the lessons he taught me. I can still hear the soft tones of his voice any time I care to listen in my mind. That last night we were together during the celebrations I kissed him during the celebrations, the first time since being a little boy.
John was the product of a very hard background. Poverty meant that he often went without shoes on his feet as a bairn. As infants in Musselburgh he and his brother slept in makeshift beds made from the drawers of an old chest. The wee boy’s mammy, Elizabeth, died when he was just four years old. Those early life experiences toughened him as hard as teak for the trials he would go through subsequently. Let it not be ignored though that he could show rare wisdom and at times be a very funny man indeed. People told me he was a most popular and loved man in the town we lived. Wherever he walked he would speak to all and greet them cheerily as an old friend.
As a youngster he had a roaming spirit and attempted to ‘run away’ from home on many occasions. Later on he was to steadily save the money on returned ‘jeely jars’ and acquire himself a ramshackle bicycle with which he cycled from Lanarkshire to Doncaster in England before falling off the bike during the monumental journey and sleeping, exhausted, in a deep ditch for the night. A passing policeman helped him out of there in the morning when he woke.
He strived for a living in the pits of Scotland as a young boy of just fourteen, working all day long on his hands and knees in water. He then worked on the Scapa Flow naval base on Orkney with his dear brother Alex ‘Sandy’, before travelling the world as a proud Merchant Seaman. The German U-Boats tried their best on those horrific runs but couldn’t kill him in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.
For the year coming, he would have been proud, I know, to think that the country he loved so, could have the opportunity to stand alone and look after itself.
My dad was my rock and his memory remains that to this day. I owe him much.
Fond memories.
John Archibald Frew 1921-1984 ‘Life’s work well done’.
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Source:
http://stuartfrew.wordpress.com/2014/01/02/john-archibald-frew/
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