Comrades in ink

In May of this year my father was taken seriously ill and given hours or days, not weeks, to live. After 10 days at his bedside, with all of us getting used to the idea that any breath might be his last, he began to recover. It seems that sometimes, when you stop all of someone's existing medication and just give them pain relief, their body can just get on with getting better. The word a palliative care doctor used was poly-pharmacy ....

By the middle of June he was well enough to be discharged into a care home. Stuck down the end of a blind corridor in a rambling old building this clearly wasn't the best place for him to be, but it was close enough to home for my elderly mother to be able to get in to see him.

Looking around for alternatives we found two other homes that looked much better and that would be able to cope when, as we knew it would, his condition deteriorated. The first was an expensive, purpose built home on the edge of town. We got most of the way through an application and were just waiting for the company that ran it to have a board meeting where they'd decide if we had enough money to admit him. I suspected that we didn't, but the *******s didn't even give me the pleasure of listening to them explain that we weren't rich enough; they just kept it to themselves and never got back.

Meanwhile, we'd also applied to Lister House in Ripon. Run by the British Legion, entry is restricted to people who've served in the British military or their families. Now my father was hardly what you'd call a military man but he did do his National Service after the Second World War, was therefore eligible and, once we'd got over a few bureaucratic hurdles, was admitted to their nursing wing at the start of August. 

None of us can think of anywhere better for him to have been. The care was exemplary and extended to us, his family, as well. All in all, a dignified place to spend the last days of your life.

Shortly after he was admitted I was approached by the editor of his local parish magazine and asked if I could provide a few words to go with an article in the next edition. There's an awful lot that could be said about his life but I simply wrote a few words about his brief military experience .....

"After a period of severe illness Roy Sharp, a long term resident of Galphay, has just been admitted to Lister House in Ripon (a nursing and retirement home for ex-military personnel and their families). Not a natural military man, Roy probably wasn't to be trusted with a gun, for his own safety as much as others, but even then he had a handy way with words and found himself part of a Public Relations team in post-war Germany."

Roy Sharp, on the left, and his comrades in ink in post war Berlin

He finally died in the early hours of the 1st of September and I have to admit that my main feeling was one of relief. For four months he'd made it very clear that he didn't want to be here, was annoyed that they couldn't just give him a pill to take his life away, and was frustrated that the words no longer came to him as once they had. Besides, he'd got to "two fat ladies" (88) and that was as old as anyone else in his immediate family including his mother, a keen bingo player.

Postscript. Although he'd had humble beginnings, living with his entire family in a one roomed basement flat in West London, he was evacuated as a child to the West Country. For a few years he stayed with a wealthy family where he learnt the important lesson, in class ridden England, that just because you were posh didn't mean you were clever. After those few years he was joined by the rest of his family when his father's engineering firm was also evacuated from London down to Bridgwater in Somerset. There he attended the local School of Navigation but left at 14 to work in a local printing works (it turns out that his father took him out of school because he feared that at 16 he'd be conscripted into the Navy) Well spoken, having learnt from the posh folk, he was initially considered for officer training. However, in one exercise they were obliged to stab a straw dummy with a bayonet whilst shouting "we will kill all enemy, we will take no prisoners". At which request he turned to the commanding officer and said "But surely that's against the Geneva Convention Sir"  You can guess the rest...