‘What does metamorphosis mean, Dad?’ I’d earholed him as soon as he’d come back from refereeing a football match. I must have been reading a natural history book.

‘Wow,’ he chuckled, clearly impressed with my beyond primary school vocabulary. I’m not sure he answered my question as he often went off on amusing tangents but he did always share his enthusiasm for words, language and books. 
 
Dad was also the parent on hand with antiseptic and dressings and chocolate whenever we kids injured ourselves, and I recall one summer’s day in the garden when I sat on a bee. Thinking it might help, he dropped ice down inside my knickers. 
‘Why did you DO that!?’ I was cross but over time I absorbed tips from him on wound care: his Second World War experiences made him an impressively confident first-aider and teaching school PE made him expert in judging whether bones had been broken. 
 
He grew up in Northern Ireland where religion was and is important. His mother banned playing cards from the house because they came from the devil. Each Sunday swings in the park were chained to encourage everyone to attend church, his mother refused to cook and Dad had to go to church five times. 
 
Dad was the eldest of four and when his young sister was incarcerated in Greymount TB Sanitorium where school went on in the open air but she was expected to die because treatments were yet to be developed. He wasn’t allowed to visit until he achieved the age of majority at 14, when he kidnapped her from the institution. Perhaps after the Great War many young sons had to step up into their father’s shoes. He was already a fitness enthusiast – he trained using weights – and he put his wee sister through a programme of exercise therapy and open-air activities. He thought swimming cured everything. The result: my Auntie May lived into her seventies, albeit with a dodgy ‘TB hip’. I have no idea what their parents thought about all this and whether the sanitorium ever attempted to take May back into their care, but I wonder now how much his Protestant work ethic, and his habit of standing up for the poor and downtrodden steered me towards a career in care.
 
There probably was much communication within the family but there was a culture of duty and hard work. His father, Sam, was a Cavalryman who survived First World War but, forever hiding behind his newspaper, seemed absent from the family. Sam did nothing to discourage his son from volunteering to fight in the Second World War. And when May decided to redecorate the sitting room, he didn’t move so May draped him in dustsheets. 
 
Dad was from a clan of swimmers. He played water polo in Belfast Lough when he had to look to see whether the ball he’d caught was still in his hand: he was too numb with cold to feel it. Fired by Dad’s passion for swimming though, I acquired various certificates in Survival and Life Saving drills. Any such small achievement earned praise from him yet he must have been disappointed that my dyslexia made me a reluctant reader – especially of fiction. He did though instil in me, a habit of letter-writing: our Sunday chore was to write to Nanna-across-the-Water.
 
He was the parent who encouraged my adventurous spirit, never more so than when I set off in my twenties on my first big quest – an overland trip to South Asia. He was proud that the other members of our little expedition judged me best qualified to be the first-aider, even if my only qualifications were that, as a small child, I’d dissected road-kill and experimented with taxidermy so blood didn’t spook me, and I knew CPR! 
 
Even as early as on the Cross Channel Ferry at the beginning of our Himalayan Expedition, I began writing to Dad and thus began a serious correspondence. I found tiny Post Offices in remote villages and mailed him accounts, sharing the excitement of the trip and describing all the exotic things I’d seen. He wrote of his serene predictable life in tranquil Surrey, still savouring – so many years after the end of the War – that, unlike so many of his Irish Guards compatriots, he'd survived, and survive intact. He wrote to me via various Poste Restante addresses, including – to his amusement and delight – the Yak and Yeti Hotel in Kathmandu. He was a talented letter-writer. His prose was fluent and evocative of life back home. He included detail he knew would entertain me including on the wildlife of our garden pond. I wrote of my attempts to master Arabic numbers and decipher Devanagari. I shared conversations and quotes from newspapers containing Indian Englishisms like thrice, opined, chit, your goodself, nativeplace, mish-mash, pukka, palaver, thug, tiffin, chota peg and bundook. When I arrived home after six months travel, he said, ‘I’ll miss writing to you, Jane.’ 
The only thing Dad seriously disapproved of in my writing was any reference to getting groped or of people using bad language. He’d underline such a word and scrawl CRUDE beside it. I guess his strategy for getting through any bad patches in his life was to ignore them.
 
Maybe my writing about exotic language made him think about his own linguistic heritage, as he started compiling an Ulster dialect dictionary. Then when he discovered a journalist working for the Belfast Telegraphwas also compiling a dictionary of Ulsterisms, self-effacing Joe sent this stranger his entire labours; much of Dad’s work was subsequently used in newspaper articles without acknowledgement, but he didn’t seem to mind.
 
He'd instilled my habit of letter writing so I guess it wasn’t much more of a leap for me to aspire to writing a book about my second expedition, a trip to that paradise for wildlife enthusiasts, Madagascar. I was so enthralled that I wrote a zoological thesis, a Tarzan-in-the-Jungle-style derring-do adventure story and an anthropological exposition. It was a mess, a mish-mash of three different books. As ever Dad was encouraging but he was only being polite. Then I realised that I shouldn’t write a clever, learned book; instead I’d write a book that Dad that would enjoy. Only then did it come together and become something readable. Finally I had learnt the meaning of metamorphosis.
 
Dad guided me for the first 50 years of my life and although he passed on 15 years ago, I still miss him. I miss his banter, I miss writing to him and I mourn that he will never again read my letters and my prose. I know my sons miss his story-telling and terrible jokes and his [almost] unfailing good humour too. He was a role model for us all.