Dad

I think my father was goodlooking when he was young. I'm not sure. He looks quite smart in this photo. To judge my father's looks is to judge my own, for I resemble him. Though not as much as Judy, his second daughter, does.

My father's family must have thought him fine-looking; they felt he had chosen beneath himself when he became engaged to my mother. My mother told me this. She remained angry about it all of her life. She told me that on her first visit to her future family in law she overheard my father's mother and sister discussing her. "John could have done better than that," one of them said. He was the only son and his sisters made a fuss of him I think. His father, my grandfather, Oscar (I think), died when my father was XX. He died in a fire at the Kempthorne and Prosser fertiliser works in Brunswick, Wanganui. Family legend has it that he died a futile but heroic death, running back into the smoke and fumes to rescue a mate and falling into a vat of acid. (Look up newspaper archives for this period.)