Your story – Heather Scott

Describe your father and write one favourite memory about him.

My dad was typically Welsh/Celt like me short and dumpy though not fat, he was about 5′ 7/8″ tall with gingery blond/fair hair and a ruddy colour to his skin. As a farm worker he spent most of his life out doors but he never tanned, again like me, his skin would turn red in the sun over the years it turned more of a ruddy colour but never tanning properly.

When I was a young child my mum worked in the evenings as a cook and waitress in the village pub so my dad would look after my sister and myself, so although he very often worked weekends and bank holidays, including Christmas, we saw quite a lot of him, I remember him carrying me up to bed on his shoulders. When he did have a day off he would often spend it working on my grandfather’s farm and my sister and I would go down there with him, I remember him taking us down there on his push bike, he would pedal standing up, Sue would sit on the seat and I would be seated on a pillow on the handlebars, luckily they were country roads which, back in those days, had very few if any cars on them and certainly no big lorries.

I got on really well with my dad, I was probably more of a daddies girl than a mummies girl. When we move to live in the cottage near the farm one of his jobs was to go down at night and shut the chickens in safely, I would go down with him to help get them in if need be and always enjoyed our walk down and back together.

One thing I remember as embarrassing, when I was a teenager if dad had taken any animals to the local cattle market he would have to drive back past my school and if I was outside waiting for the school bus he would stop the tractor and pick me up to save waiting for the bus which was good as it meant I got home much quicker than I usually would but, as you can imagine, for a teenage girl it was really most embarrassing in front of all my school friends climbing onto the tractor.