Phil Gillam: Riverside walks bring back Dad's glory days

Plunging my hand into his jacket pocket I’d experience what felt like a mysterious waxy creature wrapping its tentacles around my fingers, but this was simply a spaghetti of string, rubber bands and loose tobacco that had been in that pocket since Adam was a lad.

Finding the familiar little card box – the roughness of the striking strip down the one edge, a surface of red phosphorus and powdered glass – I’d lift it out of the stringy-rubbery mass, taking a moment to admire the bright red England’s Glory label with, at its centre, a lovely image of a steam ship powering across the ocean.

“Ah. Ta, Mon,” he’d say as you presented him with the matches.

And he’d use up three or four or five matches, attempting to get that pipe lit.

If he was in one of his silly moods he’d engage you in nonsensical conversation. “I’ve told you this before, I dare say, but I was born a very long time ago in eighteen-fast-asleep. I was born at a very young age. And I was a lovely little girl.”

And if Mum was in earshot she’d say: “Oh, Jim. You are a fool.”

To which he’d respond by singing the Norman Wisdom song: "Don’t laugh at me 'cause I’m a fool.”

Dad could be really good fun back in the day.

It can be easy to forget that – because now I tend more readily to think of him in his later years, as his health failed (and his sense of humour with it).

He passed away at the age of 84 in January 2007. I find it quite incredible that that’s a full 12 years ago; where did those years go?

These days, whenever I’m walking or cycling around our old stomping ground of Castlefields, my mind skips back to those times when we kids were growing up in North Street.

Character

Mum and Dad – just like all of us – were far from perfect. We would have our family rows just like everyone does. But I had a great childhood, and I can see now that Mum and Dad tried their best in very difficult circumstances.

And, for the record, Dad (Ernest James Gillam but known simply as Jim) was – take it from me – one of Shrewsbury’s great old characters. He liked his dominoes, he liked a pint and he loved a laugh.

Dad was a proud holder of the Burma Star defence medal. He had served with the Royal Army Medical Corps and had taken part in both the D-Day Normandy Landings on June 6, 1944, and the Invasion of Rangoon in Burma on May 2, 1945.

In between the two invasions he was home on leave to marry his wife, Eileen, who was serving with the Auxiliary Territorial Service. Our mum died in 1992.

After the war, Dad took on an extraordinary range of jobs from an orderly at the Royal Salop Infirmary to a gravedigger for WRR Pugh the funeral directors, from a lorry driver for Tanners the wine merchants, to a window cleaner.

He also worked at various times for the United Friendly Insurance Company, Southams Brewery, Shrewsbury Motors, and as a very smartly dressed commissionaire at the wonderful old Empire Cinema in Mardol where he’d sneak his sons in for free to watch the latest James Bond.

Born in Frankwell in 1922, Dad went on to work as a driver for Vincent Greenhous, then a cleaner at Shrewsbury Market Hall and then at British Telecom.

Dad was Shrewsbury through and through, and I can’t walk along the riverside at Castlefields – or see a box of matches – without thinking of him.