7 JULY, 2021

Good morning, Harry! 

 I woke in the middle of the night last night thinking about your hands. 

They were fine hands, strong, supple, skillful, and they were prominent in so many of the daily actions of your life. 

 I think of your hands in the Rectory dining room, where you took such pride in your carving skills, reducing a beef or pork roast to precise, thin slices (this was wartime, there was meat rationing!) to be passed around the always crowded table; or separating the wings, legs, thighs of a bird—chicken, goose, or duck, or turkey at Christmas time—and slicing the breast on either side with the same precision for an admiring audience of house guests. 

I think of your right hand raised to bless the food at grace time. I think of your hands in the workshop where you practiced the carpentry skills you learned, at your father’s insistence, as a pattern-maker’s apprentice as a young man. Those hands could turns plain lengths of wood, like magic, into the toys you made for your children every Christmas: an actual train that was big enough for me to actually ride, an airfield, complete with windsock and a fleet of Hurricanes and Spitfires, a walk-in doll’s house for Flora and, when she was older, a kidney-shaped dressing table she could actually use. I used to watch in wonder as your hands created—not these things, because they were made in secret; the workshop was strictly off limits in the days before Christmas—but many other objects of household utility. 

 In your later years you discovered the lathe, and used the wood from a hewn walnut tree to create bowls, vases, candlesticks. Your hands became the hands not merely of a great craftsman, but an artist. 

 I think of your hands on the gear shift and the steering wheels of your cars. Your favorite of all times, I think, was the long, sleep, elegant Armstrong Siddley coupé with “pre-selection” gearshift—an early forerunner of today’s automatic. You were an expert driver, proud of that expertise. (When you taught me to drive, remember—I was seventeen years old—you were critical of my own hands for grasping the wheel too tightly in the ten-to, ten-past position you insisted on.) 

 I think your hands, perhaps most vividly, lastingly, and with such profound clarity, in church. I see them in the vestry as you robe ready for the service, or disrobe afterwards; at the altar (I was an altar boy) as I passed you the bread and wine for consecration, as you turned to the congregation as they etched a blessing with the sign of the cross, as you offered communicants, in turn, the paten with white wafers and the silver chalice at the altar rail. My mother would bring us, Flora and myself, to the communion rail and your would pause along your way to give us, instead or the eucharist, your blessing. Still today I feel your hands on my head and hear the murmured words above me. 

 I remembered those moments many years later, when you were on your deathbed, and was moved to ask for your blessing—even though I had long since abandoned belief in your religion. I bowed my head at your bedside and took your hand in mine to bring it to rest on the top of my head, only to realize that by this time you had forgotten the words. But I received your blessing anyway, without them. 

With loving memories from your son, Peter