Gail shares one last anecdote with us about her father from her childhood…
"On one occasion I asked Dad if I could go birdwatching with him, and I would have been in my late teens, and he said, “Oh, I don’t know, you have to be very quiet. You have to sit there for quite a long time as it takes a while for the birds to trust you.” So I said, “No, no that’s fine. Can I go with you?” Then he obviously got a bit excited about this, and we’d agreed to go the next day and he bounced through the kitchen and he said, “Come on Gail, I’ve got supplies!” So I had no idea what ‘supplies’ meant, but he had his binoculars round his neck, and off we went.
I kid you not, we literally walked up our drive, turned left, walked about 20 yards, turned left again, walked about another 30 yards, and onto the golf course which is right at the back of our house, and found a hedgerow that we sat in, and then he produced from his pocket - jelly cubes! He’d been in the larder and the cubes you make jelly from, he’d broken them off and taken them out of the wrapper and they were just loose in his pocket, but his pockets were full of tobacco! So he pulls out these very tobacco-y, fluffy jelly cubes – and we ate those. And then he said, “That’s enough we’ll go back now.” And I swear to you that’s what happened. I don’t remember seeing any feathered anything! And we were out for all of 20 minutes. Who can explain it! And his idea of supplies was sneaking Mum’s jelly cubes out of the larder!"