Fathers… natural, step and grand

I last saw my father in 1950, when I was six. Over the last couple of years I have found out that he lived most of his life since then in southern Ontario and that I have six half-siblings, some of whom I have now had the pleasure of meeting.

Also in 1950 my grandfather — my mother’s father — died in Plymouth, England, where our family home was. We had not seen him in three years, not since my parents had taken me to Canada, where they were serving in Pembroke, Ontario, as Salvation Army officers at the time of his death.

My father had been away at war, and then went back to Canada to try to make a home for mother and me, so my earliest recollections of a “father-figure” in my boyhood are of my grandfather. It was he who took me for walks to Beaumont Park and Tothill Park, where he bowled. One magical day, I remember, we stopped to see Chipperfield’s Circus arrive at Friary Station, watching from the limestone parapets of the Tothill Road bridge as the circus train disgorged its wonders before they paraded through Plymouth town.

My mother, Edna, had always had an excellent singing voice. When she received news of her father’s death, she decided to make a recording to send to her mother. She chose two gospel songs: “Down from his glory”, set to the tune “O Sole Mio”, and “Beyond the Sunset”. I remember her singing to the accompaniment of her concertina in the kitchen of our house in Pembroke, with Captain Stewart’s not-very-portable acetate recording equipment taking up the whole of the large wooden table. The lacquer disk is so worn it is barely playable now, but this recording is very precious to me.

So here is Edna Cornie, née Jewell, singing “Beyond the Sunset” in memory of her father, Edwin Jewell. I post it in my grandfather’s memory, while also thinking about my late father, whom I never really got to know, and my stepfather, Ted Fellows, who was such a fine influence to me as a young man and such a loving husband to my mother. They are all now “beyond the sunset”.