My earliest memories of my Dad’s hands are of tremendous strength. They hold a power that gives comfort, a sense of safety, and a deep feeling of security. Athlete’s hands, simmering with lightning speed and determination. Artist’s hands, creative, expressive and delicate. Wondrous things spring from those hands.
I was quite young when I first realized that my Dad’s hands were very different from other Dad’s hands. In fact it was clear to me that no one else had hands like that. I often asked him if they hurt and he always replied that they did once, but not any more. Eventually he told us the the full story.
World War II erupted into his life when he was nine years old and so he learnt to dutifully carry his gas mask with him at all times, and after whistles had sounded the “All Clear”, to scavenge in the rubble heaps that had been neighbourhood shops and homes for treasures. As bombings intensified on the key targets in England, he was evacuated along with most school aged children. By the age of ten he found himself waiting with his classmates in a train station in Wales, trying to look strong and brave, hoping to not be the last to be chosen by one of the local villagers pacing up and down in front of him.
That time of loneliness and confusion ended and he was reunited with his family back in Liverpool where the war raged on with never ending bombing raids, and never ending fear and uncertainty. They lost their home when their neighbour’s house took a direct hit and eventually settled in a tiny village in the mountains of North Wales.
By the time Dad was 12 he had decided that enough was enough. He made plans to build the biggest bomb the world had ever seen, drop it on Adolf Hitler, and end the war. No more air raid sirens, no more fear, no more hunger, no more loneliness. Dad drew up his plans and sitting in the back row of the classroom with his lessons done, he worked away at his bomb with his hands tucked on the shelf beneath his desk. Using a safety pin, he carefully picked the explosive powder out of detonator caps that his friend had stolen from his father, the foreman at the local quarry. There was a spark, a thunderous noise, and the next he remembered was a heavy silence while they all dutifully filed out of the classroom. A girl started screaming, but it wasn’t until his teacher threw her cardigan over his hands and hugged him to her body that he realized what had happened.
The story becomes vague at that point, but somehow he was taken to a hospital. I don’t know how long it took for the news to get to his parents as there was no phone, so the decisions about his hands and ultimately his future fell on the shoulders of his school teacher. She refused when the surgeon suggested amputation at the elbows, and she refused when he suggested at the wrists as a compromise. She dug in her heels and declaring that Dad would be a great artist one day, insisted that they put those shattered bones and ribboned flesh back together again.
Following several surgeries, and weeks of healing, he had a pair of working hands that became the hands of a light heavyweight champion, an adventurous mountaineer, a cartoonist, an artist and my Dad. He had those most beautiful of hands that I have known and loved all my life.