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My first book – writing about my father

 

Richard Hughes (from insidestory.org.au)

When my writer-father died in 1976, of leukaemia, it was the first death I had experienced within my close family. I had not been very close to either of my grandmothers, I had never even met my grandfathers. But I had been very close to my father, and missing him was like having a perpetual toothache gnawing away in the background. A priest friend of my brother’s, a woman, said quietly to me at his memorial service in St. Martin’s in the Fields:  “One thing I did find, losing my own father – I knew him a lot better a year after his death than I had really known him when he was alive.”  

So I set about trying to piece together the fragments that were a clue to his life – letters my mother had hoarded, early autobiographical references in newspaper articles, even old cheque-stubs. He was most famous for his book about a family of children, The Innocent Voyage, also known as A High Wind in Jamaica. So I set myself the aim of looking at the child-watcher from the viewpoint of the watching child, writing under my maiden name Penelope Hughes. It was not a very good memoir, there was too much of myself and my own upbringing in the book, Richard Hughes, Author, Father (Alan Sutton, 1984) But it was an idyllic childhood, an extraordinary tale of “benign neglect”. We were free from the age of only 11 or 12 to roam the Snowdonia hills and sail the estuary that lies between Ynys Llanfihangel and Porthmadog.

2 Comments

  1. Phil Butcher on June 13, 2020 at 9:17 am

    Hi,
    Is there a fair use photo of your father that can be included in his Wikipedia entry?

    Phil Butcher

    • Tom Minney on August 18, 2020 at 10:25 pm

      Hi Phil Butcher, sorry for long delay to reply to your request. I manage the site for mum (and the estate of my grandfather for the family). I will see if I can track down permission on some of the photos from mum (I used one without permission on http://www.richardhughesauthor.com) or ask someone that owns some great photos such as National Library of Wales. Thanks for looking into updating the Wikipedia page.

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