Peter Emmerson

Herbert Edwin Emmerson, my father, was born 90 years ago today.  He is an enigma to me, probably because I have so little knowledge of him.  He was born and brought up in Middlesbrough, Hartlepool and Darlington.  Granddad worked on the railway as a guard.  Both technically and culturally they were a respectable working class family.  As a boy he collected cigarette cards of aeroplanes and racing cars: Grandma told me about the models he made of aircraft.  When Dad left school I am fairly sure he joined the railway as a fireman, which was effectively an apprenticeship to be an engine driver.

During the early part of the war as a fireman, I guess he was essential to the war effort, because he did not join the RAF till March 1942.  He wanted to be a flyer and the war offered the opportunity.  His training took him to Canada which he loved: I have a feeling that I would have been a Canadian if he’d had his way.  Nonetheless, the process of gaining his wings (September 1944) was frustrated by rheumatic fever which Mam reckoned was the reason he flew bombers rather than fighters.  Whatever the explanation, it delayed his entry into the war and may well have saved his life, unlike so many of his heroic comrades.

The RAF record shows a last entry for September 1946.  By the time I was born in October 1948 he had been demobbed, got married and was a policeman.  A question that has always bothered me is why after achieving his great ambition of becoming a pilot he abandoned it so quickly for a career that was not even second best.  There is one thing for sure, he was remarkably unsuccessful at policing: after leaving the RAF as a Flight Sergeant it took him a further 18 years to make Sergeant in the police – what a waste of a brave and brilliant man who achieved what most people from his background did not and could not, i.e. learned the skills needed to fly a war plane and become a pilot!

He wasn’t a father in the hands-on way some fathers are.  But my mother loved him – nothing says more.  I loved him and love him.  He was just there and I knew happiness.  His life was too short for me to know him – hence, so many questions.  Tragically he died of cancer at 44 in September 1966.  The devastation for me was catastrophic – no more happiness in the wreckage that is my adulthood.  He knew the answers to everything and made me feel safe.  He shared his love of music and films, especially westerns.  He was incredibly creative and had joyous enthusiasm.  I am so fortunate to be his son.