Hobbies and relaxation
I don’t think my father had a hobby as such. Each of his
various houses had a garden – he and mum knew the names of flowers and shrubs,
and of the birds to which these various back yards played host – but gardening
itself I think he found a chore. At West Avenue, though nowhere else that I can
recall, he grew some vegetables for the table.
Towards the end of his working life, he took up golf,
joining Lanark Golf Club. He continued
to play in retirement until he moved north, but he normally played on his own
and I think persevered more for the sake of the exercise than for any deep
passion for the game. But he enjoyed watching golf, and (more surprisingly)
football on television until the end of his life. And in the early years of
dad’s retirement, my parents joined in the weekly Carpet Bowls session at
Crossford village hall.
I remember when I was a young child he bought a kit
for growing miniature cacti – I presume from seed. The little pots he filled on
the flat, fold-down writing surface of his bureau, and then secreted in the
bottom drawer presumably until they germinated a stage which I don’t recall
them reaching. After my father purchased our first record player in around 1963
he bought Jim Reeve’s two gospel records from Pickering and Inglis the
Christian store in Bothwell Street, Glasgow. He found the simple melodies, the
faith-centred lyrics, and the warmth of Reeves’s voice therapeutic and after a
stressful day he would lie back, close his eyes and immerse himself in healing
soundscapes.
He was not a great television viewer – as a teenager
I found watching TV with him discomfiting, fearing his reaction if something of
which he disapproved came on screen. One Christmas when I was 12 or 13, he
decided to watch a film set in war-time Rangoon because of his personal
experience there. But regrettably I protested in my foolish ignorance ‘That’s a feature film dad! You shouldn’t be
watching it.’ He turned it off, and I don’t recall him ever watching another
film, other than My fair lady which I
made bold to give my parents as a present one Christmas.
I have mentioned my father’s friends. I don’t know
how close he was to colleagues such as Robert Walker in the workplace, but out
of the office he didn’t seem to spend much time with these friends, other than at
fairly formal dinner parties which he and mum hosted and attended. It was the
same with those he knew at church – he very rarely saw them out-with a church
context. I suppose he and my mother were content to be for the most part relationally
self-sufficient, and the lack of close friends in the Inverness area certainly
contributed to the loneliness he felt after my mother’s death.
But even then he remained interested in knew things –
experimenting with email and with the internet. And until the very end of his
life, my father’s zest for living, and appreciation of beauty remained.
Occasionally, on his better days, he would drive down to Dores and linger on
the shores of Loch Ness touched and restored by the loveliness of it, the
loveliness he had long known in birds and flowers and gardens and the rolling South
Lanarkshire countryside.
Fathering
I am in the bathroom with my father at our house in
Maxwell Avenue sometime in the 1950s. We are both peeing (although the
acceptable phrase I have been taught to describe this procedure is ‘doing a
streamie.’) My father stands facing the cistern, I am to his right. My flow
duals with his as I swivel its direction back and forwards. ‘Streamies
fighting!’ I announce gleefully.
I have many memories of my father’s kindness. I remember
the first day I experimented with my new tricyle. He is walking beside me as I
turn out of our drive and on to the pavement, ensuring that I know how to brake
as I head downhill. I remember the day I walked home from school in Primary 2
to find my father in the back garden, chest bare, wearing khaki shorts with a hammer
and nails and chicken wire and an old bed base making a run for my new rabbit,
Reggie.
I remember my father’s cheerful complicity in my
playing when, inspired by characters in a children’s book a created an
imaginary company called Dempster Enterprises Limited, which operated from a
base situated (by analogy with the RAF) at DEL Delderton. My father duly signed
the form I had prepared, inviting him to serve as a DEL doctor. The companion
form, on which it was intended that my mother would express her willingness to
release him for this role, remained unsigned.
The night before I am due to start at Carluke Primary
School he comes into my bedroom, and sits on the edge of my bed talking quietly
and reassuringly. I remember when I was being bullied in Primary 5 or 6, my
father giving me lessons in self-defence, and wincing when I entered into this
with more enthusiasm than he had anticipated, and landed my right fist in his
left eye.
I read that you can make an electromagnet by getting
a 5” nail, and baking it in the fire and then wrapping round it wires connected
to a battery. Dad takes me to the ironmongers where we buy a nail and (to my
embarrassment) he proudly tells the shopkeeper what it’s required for. Somehow,
the nail is never placed in the grate, the electromagnet never made.
A few years later my father sits gently trying to
help me master O Level Chemistry. Before important exams he takes time to
instill confidence in me. I remember the time I was having difficulty getting
to sleep. Each night for a week or so my father takes me out for a walk along
calm, midsummer evening streets before I go to bed.
He drives me down to Wishaw High School from home on
exam days when normally I would have taken the ‘bus to make the morning as easy
for me as possible. He drives me all the way to Glasgow University on exam days
when normally I would have taken the train to make the morning as easy for me
as possible.
When I am on the St Andrews Scripture Union Seaside
Mission team in 1974, and my parents are holidaying in the vicinity and the
team is affected by a tummy bug my father provides sulphaguanidine. He and mum
drop into the church where we are staying with fruit and food.
When I am depressed and anxious in 1989 he arranges
for me to see a psychiatrist privately at Ross Hall Hospital.
In his final years, he checks his will with me,
frequently, to ensure that I agree with his proposed bequests and that my wife
and daughters and I will be left enough ‘to enjoy.’
He was, in other words, an exceptionally good father.
In general in childhood and beyond I was not a rebel, and was willing to
conform. Occasionally as a child my bottom was smacked. ‘Your father will take
your trousers down!’ my mother would announce severely. My worst actions as a
child were knocking a plate of food out of my mother’s hand when I was
indignant about something and, in a similar fit of temper pulling off a
baby-sitter’s hairnet. I instantly felt the wrongness of these deeds, but in general
my childish indiscretions were trivial, and taking a hand to a bare buttock
seems a disproportionate response. But it was typical of parenting at that
time, especially in evangelical Christian circles.
As I teenager, I found life difficult, and there were
times when, in my insecurity there was a blustering arrogance about me. It must
have been difficult for my father knowing how to react to this awkward son when
he was also supporting my mother during her times of depression.
If there was one key failure in our relationship as
father and son it was in poor communication on both our sides.
When I was 11 dad purchased two booklets in Pickering
and Inglis giving basic sex education in a Christian context. The first of
these – I suppose it would have covered the on-set of puberty – he went through
with me shortly after acquiring the booklets. The second was designed for 15
year olds. ‘Let’s do it now dad,’ I
said. Four years seemed a long time to
wait for whatever mysteries were to be revealed. We never had that later
conversation, and my early knowledge of sex was picked up in the playground. At
some point my father did describe to me the process of foetal growth, but the
picture in his mind – of the encounter of sperm and ovum – failed to transfer accurately,
so that I envisaged, grotesquely the foetus growing in two halves until at some
point during gestation these fused together. I was disabused of this erroneous
picture (after protesting ‘My father told me so it must be true!’) by a very
perplexed medical student friend when I was about 18.
On much broader issues, too, our communication was
poor. I feel my father could have done more to help me understand how as a
Christian one should relate to society as a whole. The conception I absorbed in
childhood was that Christians should be entirely separate from what was
described as ‘the world’, and I could have used more help in negotiating
relationships with popular culture and with people who were not Christian
believers. When an eleven-year-old slides under the breakfast table in dismay
because you have suggested a visit to the circus as a treat, when a young
teenager admonishes you for watching a movie on TV because it ‘isn’t true’ then
clearly some guidance is called for. My father was silent, perhaps because at
that time he bought into the rigorous sacred/secular dichotomy of mid-century
evangelicalism. The circus tickets remained unused; the television was turned
off. And I remained without much help in negotiating my way in the world.
I feel my father could have done more to explore my
understanding of faith. Years of perplexity, when I worried about why I was
unable to engage with Christian faith in the way which seemed normative in our
circle were followed by years of guilt and deception as I lied about having had
a conversion experience, was baptised and joined my parent’s church. I felt
that if only I had the courage to confess this deception my parents would help
me resolve my faith-related issues, and yet when I did share this I was told
that of course I was a Christian, and left in desperation: I had not been
believed, and my agony was still unresolved. Through all this, I don’t remember
my father making any attempt to sit down and gently and empathically explore
with me what I was feeling. Given that my turbulent, questioning faith was so
different from his calm, relatively untroubled, circumscribed Christianity
perhaps he simply was unable to understand.
I remember a particular hurt in 1983 when I was 31,
and still living at home. My parents were on holiday at St Andrews, while I
remained in the house in Airdrie, and they kindly invited me to spend the
weekend with them. By this time I was making friends at Airdrie Baptist Church
and was just about confident enough to get a place of my own, and had a new job
which paid enough to cover a mortgage. I was very happy as I headed north
across the Forth Road Bridge. That week I had been to see Macbeth with folk from the church and in their company felt
positive and affirmed.
I thought the weekend would provide a good, relaxed
opportunity to share with my parents the fact that I was planning to move away.
It was not easy for me to tell them this, but I spoke as honestly and gently as
I could with no intention of criticising. But my father was desperately upset;
my mother glowered at me, angry that I had disturbed him. I sat beside them at
the morning service at St Andrews Baptist Church conscious of the heavy cloud
of their disapproval. Afterwards we ate lunch, silently in the Pancake Place
across the road. My parents hardly spoke to me for the rest of the weekend and
I sat in my hotel bedroom next to theirs close to tears. In the following
months I arranged a mortgage and found and bought a flat without a further word
to them.
There were times when I wanted to understand how problems
had occurred – not to recriminate, but simply to acknowledge the mis-communication,
to bring it into the open, to hear my parents describe how they had felt, and
be listened to as I explained my perspective, but neither of them was prepared to talk. It
was as though my father felt that the past could be forgotten, and buried
unaddressed. That did not work for me. This to me was the one serious flaw in
my father’s parenting – had we only been able to discuss openly, I could have
forgiven in an instant all the hurt, all the mis-communication, rather than painfully struggling to let go of
it over the years.
I remember a few years later staying with my parents
at Crossford for Christmas. We’d had a relaxed Christmas day, and in the
evening I sought to be open, to share openly about the past, without judging,
in order to move forward. But my parents refused to engage in this conversation.
For me, that was the end. The next morning, after breakfast, I fled.
There were times subsequently when I tried to unpack
with my parents particular new issues as they arose, but in general I erected a
defensive barrier between my soul and theirs. No doubt this was immature, but
it was an instinctive attempt at self-protection. Afraid of their criticism and
disapproval, I told them little about what was in my heart.
I do not know that my father would ever have
understood – I saw a comment about something I had written about my teenage
years which he sent in an email which I was copied into (I think) in error – ‘See what a hard time we had
then,’ he wrote.
When Lorna and I were planning to be married we
didn’t involve my parents as much as they would have wished because of these
relational issues. And yet at the ceremony my father graciously gave us his
blessing:
We are all
grateful today to John and Lorna for providing this very pleasant reception and
for allowing us all to share in it. We accord to them our very sincere thanks
and also good wishes for their future together.
He concluded by quoting Numbers 6:25 :
May the Lord
bless and keep you, may the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious
to you, the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you joy and peace.
In his closing years I was able to tell my father
that I loved him, and I believe he was proud of me although this sentiment was
seldom articulated. But because of these unresolved communication issues, there
was less ‘joy and peace’ in our encounters than there would have been otherwise
I was never as close to my father as I would have wished. I never achieved a fully
adult relationship with him.
Death of Helen
Dempster
My father concluded his talk at our wedding with a
short reflection on the theology of Christian marriage. The Bible, he said
compares marriage with God’s covenant with His people and Jesus’ relationship
with His Church. These comparisons, dad said inspire self-giving love in
Christian marriage, ‘an environment for mutual enrichment’, which then reflects
the grace and love of God.
My parents’ commitment to one another was total. My
father loved and served my mother unwaveringly though there were times when he
would perhaps have served her better had he challenged her more. Both the
loving service and the lack of challenge were evident in my mother’s final
years. As early as 1996 when mum and dad moved north to Inverness there was
some evidence of mental confusion and growing eccentricity.
She was unwilling to acknowledge this, which meant
that there could be no early diagnosis and intervention, and my father, wisely
or unwisely as may be, accepted this and committed himself to care and provide
for her.
‘The year 2004,’ said dad in his annual letter to
friends
has been quite
a momentous one for us but one also in which we have been conscious of God’s
very real guiding and protection. In late 2003 Helen was not too well and in
May 2004 she was admitted to Hospital in Inverness for further investigation
and is still a patient there with what, recently, has become a very common condition
in older people, Alzheimer’s. She has been remarkably uncomplaining.
Early in 2005, mum was moved to Kingsmills Nursing
Home in Inverness. My father constantly endeavoured to obtain the very best
care and treatment for mum, both during her time in hospital and in the nursing
home. There would be meetings with staff and social workers, of which dad would
write painstaking minutes afterwards, involving himself in every aspect of her
care.
After mum’s death, dad described to her GP his level of engagement:
I was visiting
twice daily, then for most of the time five days out of seven and finally two
to three times daily at all times for two to three hours which obviously contributed
a considerable stress level. I was happy to do it and was able latterly to
spoon feed her and maintain fluids with a straw.
Mum died in the early hours of 31st May 2005. Dad was
not there – the Nursing Home staff had not been able to reach him by phone, but
this didn’t concern him as, aware that she was dying, he had already said
farewell to her.
Dad described his bereavement in writing to friends
at the end of the year, his letter headed with words from 2 Timothy 4:17 - ‘But
the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength.’
It was just a
little over a month after our 54th Wedding Anniversary, a union
which was blessed with love, caring and spiritual fellowship. Towards her final
days here, her mind was not always clear but one day as I entered her Nursing
Home room she threw up her arms and said ‘Oh my darling husband. I have just
been waiting for you to come.’ This is indeed a precious memory and there are
many of these.
There followed a list of mum’s achievements in life,
before dad concluded ‘Her life was given to serving others.’
From time to time another family friend or I would
take dad to the cemetery. We’d help him put flowers on the grave, and wash down
the headstone. Before getting back in the car, dad would stand to attention at
the foot of the grave facing the stone. He would salute stiffly but smartly,
and then turn quickly and walk away, face inscrutable.
Final years
A decade’s caring for mum, culminating in the months
of intensive support at the end of her life, the sadness of seeing her unwell
and the pain of losing her all took a toll on dad.
In general his health throughout his life had been
good. He had a heart issue in the mid-1980s, and a couple of hernia operations.
But in the last few years of his life, he had to undergo a series of operations
for skin lesions, some of which were cancerous. It was unclear whether the
cause of these lesions was exposure to intense sunlight during his months of
National Service, or to radiation absorbed during several decades of work in
the X-Ray Department. When as early as 1990 he had the first of these
operations, the surgeon wrote ‘clearly you have a fairly unstable type of
skin.’ These lesions increased in number
during the decade from 2001 on, and my father underwent several operations. He
used to tell people how many had been removed – we used to smile at the wide
fluctuations in the number of these he reported - his recollections varied from
in the region of 80 to close on 200. One
operation left him with a deep trench in his skull, and recovery was slow.
Another included grafting of skin from his leg to cover the area from which the
lesions had been removed. The leg did not heal and became infected, and dad was
moved to the Scottish plastic surgery specialist ward at St John’s Hospital in
Livingston – while there he felt so unwell one night that he thought he was on
the verge of death. After many of these skin operations, many trips to the GPs
surgery were required as dressings were replaced.
Dad also had problems with intense pain in one of his
legs – he suspected this was caused by operating a foot switch while conducting
X-Ray examinations during his long career – he joked about writing a paper
about this for one of the medical journals. The result was that he had a wear a
support stocking which was a struggle to put on.
He was lonely following mum’s death. He had few
interests out-with the house, and by then was too old to develop them. He felt
neglected by his church, and perhaps by me too, although his church elder kept
in touch, and I phoned dad daily, had lunch with him once a week, and he came
to our house every Sunday for lunch.
He appreciated kindness wherever he found it. At the hospital where they measured him for
surgical stockings made by a specialist firm in Germany. At the surgery in
Southside Road – he never failed to send a Christmas gift to the staff there. At
the Lochardil Hotel where he lunched every week-day at a little table in a
corner of the bar. At Scissor Edge hairdressers in Hilton, where they were
gentle with him, and gave him tea and a biscuit. One day he was impressed by
the reception he’d had when collecting a prescription. ‘Very caring in the chemists,’ he said.
He watched a little television, and phoned friends
and emailed missionaries, and enjoyed seeing the grandchildren. He was
delighted to receive the HM Armed Forces Veterans badge, which he wore with
pride.
He worried about many, many, small things, but until
the autumn of 2010 he retained his zest for life, his inquisitiveness, his
sense of wonder.
2011
‘I didn’t know life could be so hard,’ he said one
day in the early months of 2011. He was 88.
‘If the Lord spares me,’ had always been one of his phrases when talking
about events in the future. He was, he told me now, ready to die. There was
perhaps a hint that the Lord had spared him for rather longer than he would
have wished.
He acknowledged that he should no longer be driving,
and sold his Vauxhall Omega, horrified at the speed at which the car dealer
drove when test-driving it. He was deeply anxious when a relative’s email
account was hacked and he received a mail suggesting that someone he knew was
stranded in London and in need of money. From that day he stopped using his
computer.
In May, he had a fall outside his back door. We went
with him to A&E, and I stayed over with him that night at his home. The next
morning I saw him through the open bedroom door sitting painfully on the edge
of his bed, praying faithfully. He insisted on helping me organise breakfast.
For many weeks he had been suffering intense pain in
his leg, and the Surgery decided to have him admitted to the Royal Northern
Infirmary close to the river in the centre of Inverness for physiotherapy. A
bed became free on Friday 10th June and dad was admitted. He had one physiotherapy
sessions, but was suffering lingering infection and pain, and wasn’t really
responding to treatment. Father’s day, Sunday 19th June was the last
day of clarity. Thereafter he was unable to communicate, although he acknowledged
your presence with a squeeze of the hand. The quality of care he received was
excellent.
We were often with him. I read Daily Light with dad, and prayed, conscious that he could hear me, though
he made no response. I was unsure whether there was any genuineness in my fine
words and whether they would in any way connect with him.
I remember one day rearranging dad’s bed covers when
he was restless, and having this extraordinary sense that my grandmother,
Euphemia Dempster was somehow with me, or closer than that - in me - comforting
her son through me just as decades before she had stood beside a small fidgety child’s
bed in Wiston Schoolhouse.
His last day on earth was Sunday 3rd July. I had to
work for two hours in the early afternoon, on a project which involved many
other people and from which I could not escape. I saw dad in the morning, and
then Lorna sat with him while I was at the office. The Hospital Chaplain Iain
Macritchie visited, and prayed for dad, not for healing, said Lorna, but for
safe journeying through death. Lorna was moved by this prayer. ‘Iain prayed dad
into heaven,’ she told me afterwards.
I walked briskly through Inverness city centre in
bright sunshine through crowds of tourists, along Ness Walk past the Cathedral
and the Hospice, up the hospital drive and into dad’s room. Lorna left for a time.
I sat and held my father’s hand. I told him I loved him, I prayed, and crazily
I sang not some affirming Christian song, but Ten green bottles, though why I should want to take him back to
childhood rather than forward to heaven, I don’t know. I sang the whole song,
until the last bottle had gone.
Dad was buried beside mum at Kilvean Cemetary in
Inverness on 8th July 2011 At the service in the undertakers we listened to
one of the Jim Reeves tracks dad loved so much, and sang Thine be the glory, risen conquering king. I began my tribute to my
father by noting how many people had used the word ‘gentleman’ to describe him,
and concluded with these words:
In dad’s Daily Light reading a week ago
today, and which I read to him by his bedside, the verse was quoted where Jesus
promises to come in and eat with those who open the door. In all aspects of his life, my father opened
the door to the Spirit of Jesus, making room for him at the table.
And his was a life well lived, a live lived
with courage despite the sorrows. A life to which dad could happily apply the
Apostle Paul’s words ‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I
have kept the faith.’
On Sunday at teatime as the birds sang over
the Royal Northern Infirmary and the Ness flowed down to the Firth as it flowed
on the day of dad’s birth, and dishes clattered cheerfully in the day room and
he lay dying, there were no last words of triumph, no radiant eyes seeing a
vision of the beyond. Simply shallow,
faltering breaths, and then, silence.
So does he live now only in the good he did,
and in the memories of those of us left behind? Well, he put his faith in the
risen conquering King, death’s victor, who promises life beyond the
shadowlands. Those of us who knew my father saw in his grace, in his love, in
his courage glimpses of the dimension beyond, piercing the shadows. And on
Sunday at teatime I believe a door was opened, and a voice whispered ‘Come in, sit down, eat.’
Christians believe that as well as being a
place of rest and homecoming, the dimension beyond is a place of challenge and
opportunity, a place where we become fully ourselves, where there is no
darkness, no shadow, where our creative gifts flourish as we build God’s
kingdom in partnership with the King.
And there, even now bearing the memories of his years with us, stands
William Hodge Dempster, still rubbing his eyes at the unaccustomed wonder of
it, more gentleman than ever.
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