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This Father I Never Knew
by Richard Cox
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 2nd June, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-907179-01-3
Price: €15
Winner of the ‘ORIGINAL WRITING’ Memoir Competition at the 2008 Listowel Writers’ Week.
Neither nostalgic celebration of past times nor misery memoir, This Father I Never Knew follows the author’s quest to learn something more of his late father, a man who had always been taciturn in regard to anything personal – and curiously reticent about his early life.
Photographs from the family collection, or from cousins the other side of the world. Official documents, filed away in manila envelopes, or simply left forgotten at the back of drawers. Census returns, birth, marriage and death certificates. Poems he wrote as a young man, preserved into retirement together with mementoes from a student holiday. Fading and sometimes contradictory memories from elderly relatives. From such scraps the author reconstructs the life of the man who was to become his father.
The child of strict but ambitious parents of artisan stock in early twentieth-century Oxford, he became graduate, teacher and preacher, but under the pressures of war and religious conviction found himself working first as hospital orderly then as farm labourer. But was there some earlier hurt of which he would not speak?
Winner of the ‘ORIGINAL WRITING’ Memoir Competition at the 2008 Listowel Writers’ Week.
