Geoff

Just the other day, the Fox commented that we were doing better this year - no deaths yet. Needless to say, that was tempting fate. Last night the phone went. It was the daughter of a friend to let us know that her father had died last week & how much he'd appreciated our letters in his last years.

Geoff moved over to Yorkshire to join his family not long before we moved here. Even then he was in his late 80s & had accepted the time had come when he needed help in his daily life. By now he must have been nearer 100, a good age. For some time his health had been deteriorating so his death did not come as a surprise. For the last few years he has not been able to write, though he did say in his last letter that he would appreciate continuing to receive letters which his family could read to him even though he couldn't reply. I have continued to write.

Geoff was in many ways a remarkable man. He was a christian spiritualist, which often brought him problems with priests in the church. It also frightened most people if he talked about his experiences. He found us some of the few people whom he could talk to, confident of not being dismissed as totally mad, nor people who would go away with nightmares. He accepted our scepticism & we, for our part, accepted the genuineness of his belief, even though we could not bring ourselves to believe in the spiritual world he believed in.

During the World War II he refused to take up arms, much as he detested Nazism & all it stood for. Instead he ended up spending the years as a Bevin boy down the mines, as a stretcher-bearer on the battleground & as a bomb disposal officer. In all those roles he felt he was helping to save life rather than to take it.

Later on he ran a large family engineering firm for many years. He also did much to promote the work of Age Concern in the north of England, both in his native Yorkshire, and later in the South Lakes/North Lancashire area.

He had wide interests - theology, psychology, wildlife & plant life, economics, art, music (his second wife was a semi-professional pianist), food, wine, to name but a few. He read & wrote books & articles of criticism on theology & psychology. Indeed he worked on these until he was well in his 90s.

All in all, he was a remarkable man.

Once he spoke about the part of Yorkshire his family now lives in. "It's near a small village called Burton Agnes. You won't know it", he said.

He was amazed when I said that I did. Burton Agnes was the place the Fox & I went on our first real date, all those years ago. We went to see the "Screaming Skull" but when we got there we found the hall was closed for winter & wouldn't be open again until the summer. Instead we stopped a while at the village pub before getting the train back to Hull & university. That evening the Fox told me he was going to marry me some time. I poo pooed the idea. After all it was only our first date. The rest is history, as they say.