On Father’s Day last month, my thoughts turned to my own father.

Born into social housing in the industrial city of Bradford, he ended his days in a bungalow near the beach in Yorkshire. A working man, holding down two jobs and fixing up our first house, he still found time to spend with my kid sister and me and walked three miles to visit his widowed mother twice a week. He was a true “working-class hero.”

He shipped out to the Far East and was at the fall of Singapore in 1942. The British heavy artillery was aimed at the ocean against a seaborne invasion.

The Japanese arrived by land.

Clever military planning!!

All troops were ordered to surrender to the Japanese. An Australian officer said, “The hell with that” (or similar) and led a few soldiers to the docks, where they caught the last ship out of Singapore. Again, he avoided a high risk of early death. The POWs who surrendered were forced to build the strategic Burma railroad under terrible conditions, which resulted in 850 deaths and long-term debilitation for many others. (See “A Bridge Too Far.”)

On arrival in Australia, all the troops were arrested for desertion.

Desertion!

Almost immediately, fears of a Japanese attack on Sydney Harbour forced all “deserters” to be released, armed, and sent back on duty. (It was lucky for the army that some troops did disobey orders!)

There was no attack. Dad survived again.

At the end of the war, he returned via the Suez Canal. He saw the coast of Israel-to-be and longed to set foot on the Holy Land.

You see, Dad was a history buff, somehow finding time to visit the city library often. In his day, no working-class kid could make it to University. He should have gone. He would have become a history teacher. Oh, could he tell a story and make it come alive!

But that was way back then. No chance.

He encouraged my sister and me to get to Uni and move into the middle class. When I joined British Airways, I arranged a trip to Israel. He visited all the key places mentioned in the Bible. He never traveled abroad again, saying that trip was all he ever needed.

His other lifetime ambition was to live by the ocean. He achieved his goal.

Six months later, he was lost to us.

Father’s Day. An important day for us all, for the whole of our lives.