A Loose-leaf Soul

Some people are lucky enough to be born to rich parents. I’m even luckier: I was born to a rich life.

My parents enriched the lives of all their children whenever they could. My dad had a thirst for knowledge and a great appreciation for the natural world. I think it is because of him that I still love woodlands and mountains to this day, remembering not only his running commentary on wild species and bird calls but also the marvellous watercolours that he captured with his brush, as if to ensnare and concentrate all the world of beauty onto paper to re-live it over and over.

When Dad passed away on September 29th 2024 he had been unable to paint or play the piano for several years, being confined to one room – the wrong room – due to a fall, a broken hip, frailty… a motley assemblage, I’m afraid, of some of the usual submerged hazards that lie in wait for all us unwary life surfers.

Had there been more elbow room in the cramped quarters, had there been a bigger budget for gadgets, perhaps we could have enabled him at least to paint while in his bed. That sort of thing is harder than it sounds – especially when dealing with watercolours, which require a fair amount of space, jars of water, paints, brushes, boxes… in short, all manner of encumbrances to visiting carers. In any case, his hands were nowhere near as strong as they had once been and I doubt his ink lines would have been anywhere near as steady, either.

A couple of weeks after we lost him I began sorting through his plan chest and portfolios, intending to photograph everything he painted. I was not quite prepared for the emotional impact of this task: it was like opening a door upon the light of his soul, still shining brightly. I’d admired his paintings before, but in ones and twos, or framed on a wall. Never had I encountered the sheer quantity of them; the lifelong devotion and commitment to developing skill; the obvious need to paint which lay within this kind man so busy with the minutiae of life, love and family. Had he painted as a vocation I’m certain he would have produced thousands of works. What I photographed over those two days of tearful time travel was like a mature garden full of wonderful blooms, each sprung from the seemingly bottomless well of his heart. Indeed there were many flowers rendered on paper, and twigs, leaves and berries… often in amazing meticulous detail: nature studies in ink and paint.

But the real stars of his show were the trees. In his recent journals he had written of his love of woodlands, and especially oaks. Painting after painting paid tribute to the woods – branches seemed to fascinate him and he had taken pains to ink their outlines in great detail, a maze of ancient fingers stretching over cloudwashed skies, that seemed ironically to enclose the viewer in a safe but slightly mysterious cage of Great Outdoors.

I was heartbroken to see all this beauty, much of which was never shared widely with others. I want my father to be remembered as he truly was: a spirit of the woods whose core motive was to express his joy at breathing the life around him.

Of course, he was many other things to all of us as well.

In the 1970s there were repeats of The Goon show on the radio, and as a family we often listened while doing household tasks. Dad would quote the jokes, often invent new ones, do the voices, and – like his twin brother Ron – loved to pull goofy faces. Being silly is a fine family tradition to grow up with! I’m still silly today, and proud of it.

One random memory of the silliness is the time Dad was up in the loft looking through our fine collection of “old toot” (another family tradition) and suddenly his face appeared in the trapdoor and he was holding a piece from a jigsaw puzzle. “Oh no,” he lamented. “There’s 499 pieces missing!”

Nearly nine decades… that’s a pretty long life, and obviously there is far more I could say. But there’s one very important thing I still have to add.

I think the greatest debt I owe Dad is that he inspired in me a love of music, something that has become as indispensible to me as the air I breathe. He was head of music in a primary school, and, as well as housing a piano, our home was always full of the latest school cantatas and vinyl recordings of orchestral wonders like Vaughan Williams’s “Sinfonia Antartica” or Brahms’s Hungarian Dances. He also taught classical guitar, built his own dulcimer, and collected various random school instruments such as recorders, melodicas and percussive shakers and castanets.

We all took singing lessons, I learned piano and double bass, one of my sisters learned the violin, and, just as in some Edwardian drama, we would actually stand around the piano and sing four part choral music. At Christmas we used to go out with a group of carol singers around a local village, rendering carols in full harmony and occasionally being asked into big houses to be plied with mince pies and mulled wine. What a way to live! Absolutely wonderful.

And as a pianist myself, I think my best memory will always be falling asleep, about the age of seven, while Dad played the piano downstairs. The piece I remember most vividly is Debussy’s Arabesque Number One. I like to play it now too, and it will always remind me of my dad, whose creativity, kindness, humour and love live on within all who knew him.

Goodbye, Ken Torr, you lovely, lovely man.