Love & Death

My Dad died recently. Nothing else to say here really but this is the eulogy I gave at the funeral:

Few of those gathered here today would have considered Cliff Lake, my Dad, to be a man much given to contemplating the big philosophical conundrums of our day. And yet the Lake household would regularly be gathered together to be informed that my Dad had found THE ANSWER. This was the answer to a question that had consumed him for most of his adult life. His search took him from his back garden to the windswept hills of Derbyshire and the wide horizons of Suffolk. He devoted hours to the study of books, videos and DVDs, building a body of research to rival Crick & Watson’s work on the structure of DNA.

The question? Why wouldn’t his golf ball go in the direction he bloody well wanted it to? Snap hooks, pulled irons, fluffed chips, overhit puts – the countless frustrations that blighted his relationship with this most infuriating of games.

He never did find the answer. The revelation of a Wednesday evening in the back garden would always turn to dust in the course of a Sunday morning fourball.

Perversely, if he had found the answer and turned into the player he wanted to be I think it would have caused him to fall out of love with the game. It was the struggle, the challenge, the love/hate relationship familiar to many golfers that sustained him.

He was never a man to shirk a challenge. Born in 1930 to a working class family of West Ham supporters he pursued his dream of flying with such single-minded determination that neither a disrupted war-time education nor his questionable choice of football team would stand in his way. Filling the academic gaps at night-school, he completed his social education by observing the behaviour of his “betters”, absorbing just enough to make him one of the chaps while retaining a healthy disregard for the fripperies of social convention.

A glittering career in the Royal Air Force gave way to a no less challenging role setting up and running the private aviation arm of JCB. Reporting to a bunch of hard-nosed businessmen with no background in aviation his time at JCB was a constant juggling act of short-notice trips, awkward passengers, last minute destination changes and the eternal challenge of keeping his job while informing the boss’s wife that boarding the aircraft with half a ton of personal shopping was not conducive to successful powered flight.

As with his choice of sport, so with his choice of career. Not for him the safe option, the easy option, the secure option. Not when there was something more interesting, something more challenging to do instead.

The full extent of his tussles with JCB came home to me quite recently when I was going through some boxes looking for material for my 7 year old son Ben’s school project. Asked to write something on a family member who had an interesting life Ben wisely bypassed his parents before settling on the man he, his brother and all his cousins called their ‘Grumps’.

In one of these boxes was a folder containing correspondence on the many battles he fought on behalf of his fellow pilots. They reveal a man who was stubborn, headstrong, principled, confident, with a clear sense of right and wrong and an even clearer sense that he was on the side that was right.

Dad was an admirer of Brian Clough, manager at both Derby County and Notts Forest during our time in the Midlands and one of Clough’s famous quotes comes to mind. When asked what happened when a player disagreed with him Clough replied:

“Well, I ask him which way he thinks it should be done….then we talk about it for twenty minutes and then we decide I was right.”

This sense of his own rectitude didn’t always make for harmonious family relations, not least due to the fact that all 3 of his children seem to have inherited his stubborn streak. His death has sadly denied me the opportunity of cross-examining him on his extraordinary decision to vote UKIP in the recent local elections.

He was never short of advice and his briefing notes were the stuff of legend. When his four oldest grandchildren – all of whom are here today – first learnt to drive he prepared notes for the straightforward journey from Ipswich to Ufford that resembled the battle plans for Operation Barbarossa.

But while we laughed at the excesses we all knew that behind the gruff exterior lay a deeply caring man. He wanted nothing more than for those he loved to be happy. He may have felt that the best way to contribute to our happiness was to persuade us not to make decisions that would make us unhappy – a thankless task much of the time – but he also brought great joy and a sense of almost childlike fun into the lives of those who knew him.

Dive-bombing a meeting of top JCB executives in the company jet – breaking an entire rule book of aviation regulations in the process – before strafing them with toilet rolls wedged under the aircraft’s flaps was one memorable moment; watching from an upstairs window as he crept commando style through the neighbours garden on Xmas Eve to cover their TV aerial in tin foil, his presence marked only by his festive paper crown bobbing up over the hedge, another.

When I was about 13 I was wearing out a new patch of lawn as I pretended that the back wall of the house was an implacable opponent standing between me and my inevitable triumph at Wimbledon or Lords or Wembley when an ambulance went past, sirens wailing. Dad asked me what this made me think of. It was a rather clumsy attempt to get me to appreciate how lucky I was by contrasting my health and happiness with the unfortunate soul being rushed to hospital - a sentiment that died on the stony ground of a 13 year old boy’s total indifference. But at the time all I could think of saying was ‘the doplar effect’ – the change in frequency of a sound wave for an observer moving relative to its source that causes the strange audio effect when a siren passes by at speed. His face registered a mixture of irritation that I’d not got the more important point he was trying to make and astonishment that something he’d explained to me years ago – and which I’d clearly shown no interest in – had lodged in my brain.

And that was the thing about Dad. The constant barrage of friendly advice could sometimes make those of us on the receiving end a tad defensive. We’d shrug and look bored. But we always listened. And we always learned.

His knowledge, wisdom, kindness and love are no longer there for us. But I find great solace and hope in the fact that those qualities live on in those who had the privilege of knowing him.

I started by saying that my Dad was rarely associated with the big philosophical questions of our time. But he did have one overriding principle that will be familiar to many of us here. And that was the sense that life worked according to a set of odds and that those odds, for him, were 6-4 against. So in any given situation there was a greater chance of things going wrong than going right. Looking back over his life during the writing of this piece I’m forced to disagree with the old man one final time. 3 children, 6 grandchildren and in Peggy a wife, mother and grandmother whose love and support never wavered. This was a life that by anyone’s standards was 6-4 on.