Parental influence

I was thinking of my Dad after  I had composed the Betwixed and Between response to a claim that I don't like women.
We owe so much to our parents both the good and the bad and we would do well to reflect more often on them as we make our ponderous way through this life. We have such a composite part of our character tied up in theirs and our memory of both our Mother and Father should be consecrated, defined as special.
The inherent good my Dad showed to everyone he knew and his ability to see the best in everyone came from a hard but defined upbringing. My Grandmother was a women who knew her own mind, honed on living a life of relative hardship she and was not afraid of speaking it.
It clearly gave my Dad, growing up under her wing, the right incubation to recognise right from wrong from an early stage without the need to intellectualise it, "do onto others what you would have done to yourself"
He always had a calming, sensible influence on people who knew him and was the first to consider the other persons position in an attempt to understand any conflict. His smile was one of warmth and friendship and I think he would have been unable to contrive harm or speak ill of others.
This is not to say he did not have strong political opinions and was very involved, intellectually, with the politics of his day. He hated the divisions in society and felt the birthright which gave a selected few a ticket to ride was wrong. He was very well read and used his education to evolve opinions that took in his fellow man and refined and developed a humanity  tinged with humility which many valued.
As always, we need the maturity of our own experience to see the strength in others and as a young person his refusal to be more forceful was in my mind a sign of weakness but given his torrid upbringing and having lived his creative years through the 'Depression' with the stultifying effect it must have had on his own opportunity, one can only marvel at the fact that he always kept his equanimity in tact.
The fifties and sixties were as chalk to cheese to his formative and productive years and yet he developed a consistent set of values on which to build his life, to be who he was, to who ever he came into contact with for them to know they had met someone of substance.

The influence of my Mother was of a different dimension to that of my Dad. 

Having given her hell at childbirth she never held it against me !!

Her love was boundless and in some ways embarrassing to a young lad growing up and determined to do things his own way. Over protective but countered by my Dads insistence that risk taking was part of the growing process. He must have born the brunt of much accusation as I lay in a short term coma having gone through the windscreen of a car head first but all was forgiven as I regained consciousness.

Mums presence was the basic stock in the household ferment. Always there when arriving from school or play she survived the inevitable indifference that a growing boy shows to his parents, they were purely islands of security in between episodes of glamour and excitement. 

Mums love and commitment covered the whole family in its concern and protection. I, other than once, can not remember a bad word passing between my Mom and Dad. There were no rows, no fights, no animosity. The only occasion I witnessed any disharmony was when my Grandmother (on Dad side) came with us on a caravan holiday and friction between the women broke my Dads unflappable nature and they had a spectacular verbal fight which to this day I remember as if it were yesterday.

Mom outlived Dad but was inconsolable when he died. Her prop demolished in one foul blow, her communication gone she had nowhere to turn and the world was a bare pitiless place in which to pass her final unhappy years.