A Father's Love

A little boy of eight is so surprised to see his father at the gate of the school. His father hands him half a crown and says he is leaving town immeditaly. Warns.."Do not follow me." The little boy returns from school that day to witness a bonfire in his backyard. His step sister had been ordered to burn every item of his father's belongings. Whose name is never mentioned again. A teenage boy is away at boarding school when a message arrives from his long lost father. "Please visit me, I am ill with T.B. in the sanitorium." Ten minutes walk from the teenager's college. He declines the invitation. A teenage daughter listens to her aged father, tell this story about his own father. How loyalty to his mother prevented him from ever meeting again his only kin. Who had died at age forty four. Now this daughter's Dad is dead twenty years. She herself has three daughters and knows too well the pain her father must have been in. Thinking of that missed oppertuinity to see himself reflected in eyes full of love. 14/08/2017