{"id":2085,"date":"2016-06-02T19:57:01","date_gmt":"2016-06-02T19:57:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/?p=2085"},"modified":"2016-06-02T19:57:01","modified_gmt":"2016-06-02T19:57:01","slug":"the-odd-things-we-leave-behind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/the-odd-things-we-leave-behind\/","title":{"rendered":"The (Odd) Things We Leave Behind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most of us have had a father at one time or another. Life sort of works like that. I was fortunate that I knew my father, but unfortunate in that he died not long after I left college, in the early eighties, so I never knew him as well as I should have done. He was a liberal, eccentric man, and leaked money on a regular basis, so there was no eager waiting at the solicitors. No chance of any \u201cAnd to my valet of twenty seven years devoted service, I leave the Island of Guernsey\u201d moments.<\/p>\n

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my father the poser<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I think that my mother and I were mostly relieved that he hadn’t gone bankrupt on the quiet and that the tortoises weren’t going to be repossessed. My material inheritance included a loaded .455 Colt revolver under the bed (not that common in eighties Yorkshire) and an attic full of ammunition. He had been a gun-dealer at one time, so this wasn’t quite as unusual as it seems.<\/p>\n

I was brought up firing weapons (tea-times could get very dangerous in our house), and I already had his scoped Remington rifle and a Spanish revolver, so the Colt had to go. So did the others, eventually, although I miss the Astra. It was a short-barrelled revolver which was utterly inaccurate, so if you pointed at the centre of the target you got a lovely spread of bullet holes all round the edges. Very arty.<\/p>\n

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Additional heirlooms included his lighthouse-keeper uniforms, boxes full of family memorabilia and a lot of books. Oh, and instructions that a farming friend of his was to destroy all his ‘Scandinavian’ magazines. Somehow I don’t think that those were about Viking history.<\/p>\n

I had wanted something really intimate by which to remember him, such as a prized collection of twenty pound notes, but books were better than nothing. He wasn’t exactly a reader of Greek classics. He loved westerns and adventures – Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Hammond Innes<\/strong> and so on \u2013 and crime novels by people such as Georges Simenon, Ngaio Marsh<\/strong> and John Creasey<\/strong>. We had all the Lesley Charteris<\/strong> ‘Saint’ novels, and a lot of oddities, ranging from a leather bound set of Lord Roberts’ ‘Forty One Years in India’ to Frank Yerby<\/strong> adventure-romances.<\/p>\n

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And he had obviously been a real ‘boy’ in his day, reading all the comics and short books they used to publish, including the Greyfriars School stories (best known now probably for the Billy Bunter character), and copies of The Boys’ Friend Library<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Some of the latter he bound himself into little compendiums. I have in front of me right now what he called \u201cAdventure \u2013 Volume 3, which contains:<\/p>\n